by J. S. Morin
“Judy, I need to talk to you.”
“Matt? It’s… it’s 12:15. I’ve got work in the morning. Can’t it wait?”
Oh, wasn’t that a trap question? Sure, I could wait. I could stay up half the night arguing with my shadow.
Or I could panic, call the number on Kang’s card, and be gone from Judy’s life before she woke up. Without question Judy wouldn’t want that. She’d at least need a goodbye, which would involve waking her up either way.
“No.”
She muttered something that sounded vulgar, but I heard a rustle of blankets followed by the creaking of the apartment’s old floorboards. The door opened. “Fine. What is it?”
I backed toward the bag of Chinese food. “I’ve got something I need you to see.”
Judy retreated into the bedroom and came back with her glasses on. She was wearing pale yellow pajamas with white dots, and her feet were bare. With a quick check of the table, she scowled at me. “You brought back food? I had dinner hours ago.”
“Bear with me here.” I opened the bag. The staples holding it shut pulled through. The scent of beggar’s chicken assailed my nostrils, demanding foremost attention over the package I withdrew and handed to Judy.
“What’s all this?”
“Open it.”
Judy unzipped the baggy and took the contents over to the lamp, sitting down at the end of the couch to study them. I watched for a reaction. “You can get in a lot of trouble for this, Matt. I could lose my security clearance for even handling this stuff.” She shoved it back at me. “I don’t know who you bought it from or where you got it, but get rid of it—and not in the trash around here.”
I pressed it back into her hands. “Look at it. It’s real. Authentic. You’re the one who made the phone call. This is my dad’s idea of help.”
“They do good work. They found your last driver’s license photo and the one for your passport is from our ski trip to Killington. They photoshopped out the fireplace and Tim’s head.”
Joining her on the couch, I looked at the photos under the lamp. “I’ll be damned.” There was no point asking how she’d known or questioning her accuracy.
“Is this goodbye?” she asked out of the blue.
Most of the time, I didn’t know what to make of Judy. At times like this, I had even less of a clue. She looked at me with eyes poised for tears. This morning she’d been ready to ship me off to her shrink.
“That’s what I need your help with. Read the list.”
Judy’s eyes flicked back and forth behind her glasses. She was finished in a few seconds. “Looks thorough.”
“The guy who gave me that whole package said I could bring someone with me. I guess it was to hedge against me refusing to go because of love.”
“Matt, you’re not thinking…?”
I forced a nervous smile. “No. That’s not it. I’m just saying: my dad is serious about this. He wants me out of the country for my own safety.”
“You would do that? Drop everything and run?”
Some part of me wanted to grab her by the shoulders and scream, “What life have I got here?” but that wasn’t fair to her.
She and Tim did a lot for me. Without them, I’d be bunking in some shithole with strangers or an even tinier shithole all to myself.
I didn’t do well by myself. Judy didn’t need to be reminded of that. Instead, I talked her language. “Think this all boils down to one simple question: am I going crazy, or is the world?”
Judy sighed, lifting her glasses to rub her eyes. “Matt, the world’s been going crazy since it cooled from molted rock 4.5 billion years ago. It’s just a little worse than normal lately, what with Patricia Martinez getting murdered, you getting arrested, and strange cars driving by the apartment.”
“I need you to answer the other part of that question for me. The part about me being crazy. I need to show you something, to see if you see it too.”
“Matt, is this going to get weird?”
It was a fair question. I headed for the kitchen, where we kept the candles. “That depends. If I’m utterly bat-shit insane, then no more than usual around here. If I’m not… well, yeah.”
I set up the ritual candles we used while watching Shadowblood, lighting them with a grill lighter we kept around just for that purpose. Then I shut off the lamp.
Judy sat back on the couch with her arms crossed. “If Tim walked through that door right now…”
Pausing, I looked around. OK, it was a little on the romantic side.
But if Tim did come through that door, Judy in her glasses and pajamas and me babbling and reeking of stale sweat probably constituted a plausible alibi.
I held up a hand. “Just bear with me.”
Watching the wall, I waggled my fingers, adjusting the distance from hand to flame until my shadow was a comfortable size for shadow puppetry.
“Matt… what are you doing?”
I ignored the question. “Shadow. It’s time to honor your side of the bargain. Prove to Judy that you exist, or consider yourself as good as vaporized.”
I felt the hand on my shoulder. “Um, Matt…”
“Just wait,” I snapped. “Shadow, you’ve got until the count of five. One… two… three…”
The shadow on the wall moved.
“See?” I shouted.
“You’re moving your hand. Matt, enough of this.”
She had a point.
In my excitement, I hadn’t held still, which had been a key element in my theory on how to prove its independent motion. But before I could steady my hand to make my case, the shadow took matters upon itself. Separating from the wall entirely, it slithered across the floor and came up, disembodied, between Judy and the candle flame.
“Does she believe now?” it asked in a snide whisper. Then it vanished.
Judy pushed her glasses farther up her nose. “Oh.”
“That’s it? ‘Oh?’ All I get is an ‘oh.’”
Judy nodded slowly, eyes unfocused. She sighed. “This is making much more sense now that I know I’m asleep. Matt doesn’t have any Chinese passports, the shadows aren’t talking to me, and I’m fast asleep.”
“You’re not asleep. I woke you up.”
“I nodded off here on the couch, then.”
“You aren’t asleep. You saw that shadow.”
Judy shook her head. “I’ll need more proof than that. Easily consistent with a dream state.”
I kissed her.
Freud probably would have had volumes to say on what prompted that as my first reaction. But I moved in and put my lips to hers before she formed a coherent response. To my surprise, she responded. It was no Hollywood kiss, but I felt the tip of Judy’s tongue against my lips just before she pushed me away.
She wiped her lips with the back of her hand, not looking at me. “Well, OK then…”
“Sorry, you just—”
“No. I asked for proof, and you provided it. I’m convinced.”
“Mind me asking how you can tell you’re not dreaming? I mean, I just acted on impulse. I’m not sure why, but I—”
“That’s not the way you kiss when I’m dreaming.”
I raised an eyebrow.
Standing from the couch, Judy stood up straight. “What? A girl isn’t responsible for subconscious clutter. I could just… tell the difference. Besides, my dreams don’t usually include taste sensation.”
“So… I’m not crazy.”
Judy placed her hands on her hips. “Oh, you’re crazy. You just happen to also be right. The world’s got a shadowblood infestation, and you’re a part of it.”
“So what do we do now?” As much as anything, this was why I wanted Judy in on the secret. Sure, knowing I wasn’t alone in my madness was a huge relief, but I needed to know we had a plan.
“I think we both need some sleep.” She scowled at me. “Separately.”
Was it something in my reaction? Usually Judy was better at guessing my thoughts. I chalked it up to fat
igue and being emotionally off-balance. “As long as you promise to remember in the morning that shadows move.”
We left it at that and bid each other goodnight.
Alone in my room, my shadow and I talked over ground rules. I practiced directing it, and it practiced obeying. A flashlight was my candle. If I agreed to use the shadow powers, I wasn’t going to seek permission for every trifling matter. As long as I was willing to open myself to that otherworldly influence, the shadow didn’t seem to mind subservience.
By the time dawn crept in to ruin the contrast, I didn’t even need to speak to it aloud.
Chapter Twenty-One
Judy called in sick.
Tim rolled home from work around 10, looking for a shower and a change of clothes before heading back. We ambushed him at the door.
“You need to see something,” Judy blurted. “Why weren’t you answering your texts?”
Tim pulled out his phone and fought back a yawn. “Battery died. Didn’t notice until a couple hours ago. Figured might be better uninterrupted for the home stretch. So I just—”
Judy cut him off and pressed a cup of coffee into Tim’s hands. “I sent you fifteen messages.”
With a weary glance around the apartment, Tim took a sip. “Place doesn’t look like it’s on fire.” Stepping past us, Tim dumped his laptop bag and backpack by the couch.
Judy trailed after him. “Matt’s got something to show you.”
Zombified as he was, Tim managed a sporting smile. “Hey, buddy, you get a book deal or something?”
“Not exactly…”
I shot a worried look to Judy. Tim didn’t look braced for the kind of shock he was about to receive. But she pursed her lips and gave a military nod.
“Well,” Tim blundered on. “Keep going, big guy. You’ll get there—HOLY SHIT!”
Coffee flew. The mug crashed against the living room wall, shattering.
Tim scrambled back on the couch as if he could climb his way over the seat.
My shadow stood interposed between Tim and me, looming over the burly programmer like a Halloween ghoul. Its fingers waggled in slow motion, a caricature of cartoon menace. If I hadn’t gotten to know the damn thing, the hammy performance might have scared me shitless, too.
When the initial shock faded, Tim rubbed at his eyes. “Sorry, Jude. I’m totally burnt. I’ll clean it up. I’m just… not with it right now.”
“I see it too,” Judy said with her arms crossed. It was her Evangelion mug Tim had just wrecked.
The way I saw it, she should have seen this coming.
Reaching out a tentative hand, Tim glanced from one of us to the other and back. As his fingers threatened to pass into my shadow, the cagey phantasm danced aside.
“He didn’t even buy me dinner,” the shadow jested. By their lack of reaction, neither Judy nor Tim heard the snide remark.
“Matt, how are you doing this?” Tim asked. “Or am I just blitzed? I don’t remember taking anything.”
“Apparently I’m shadow haunted,” I admitted. It sounded stupid in real life, like I was claiming to be a Jedi or know how to do the Vulcan nerve pinch.
“Like on TV?” Tim asked warily.
I could have gone on a dissertation about the differences from both the televised adaptations and the novels. For one, my shadow wasn’t some malevolent entity trying to convince me to serve the Shadowlord. Nor was it suave and seductive, offering me tastes of power in return for favors. Mine was a pain-in-the-ass passenger and devotee of parlor tricks.
Maybe it was just that in the show and books, the shadow-haunted were always dark-souled and teetering on the brink of unadulterated villainy, if not already well down that path. Even Muin, my favorite character from the show, was driven by vengeance.
However, Tim was operating on zero sleep, and my shadow had just squeezed his adrenal glands empty. This wasn’t a time to split hairs.
“Yeah. Pretty much.”
“So… you can manifest shadow weapons, see in pitch blackness, and travel in shadows?”
“Nope,” I replied with a sigh. “Well, the darkness thing a little. But mostly, so far, I argue with it, and it sort of obeys commands.”
“I ‘sort of’ do what I please,” my shadow corrected. “I agreed to this nonsense for a reason. Remember? We had a deal.”
Tim yawned and pinched the bridge of his nose. “OK. This is kinda awesome. If it’s still true when I wake up, we can have some fun with it. Unless you guys wanna play Incredible Realms. Patch 0.5.2 went live like half an hour ago.”
Judy and I shared a glance. She sighed and shook her head.
I told Tim anyway. “When you wake up, we plan a heist. My shadow has an idea where to find the invisible scroll Patricia Martinez left behind.”
I had them believing—Tim at least partially. Judy would draw the same conclusion I had, once she had time to process. Getting Tim to fall into line wouldn’t be hard with both of us working together. If the shadows were real and the murder had been foretold, the rest must be true as well.
The world was being invaded by agents of a shadowy realm bent on conquest. We knew because we’d seen it on TV.
Chapter Twenty-Two
I got to listen to Tim and Judy having sex. I’m not sure if this was my punishment for kissing her, for telling Tim about my insane plan to break into Harvard a second time, or just because this was the first time in weeks she managed to get his mind of software bugs.
Laptop out, television on, I Googled heist movies and brought them up on Netflix for inspiration. If I hadn’t needed the speakers on the TV to tell what was going on, I’d have used headphones.
Hollywood wasn’t giving me a lot to go on, so my sketched outline of a Harvard break-in was mostly from scratch. Keith Damon was more of a detective than a burglar. He didn’t even take cases that involved heists. It was mostly vampire and demon crimes. Given my last foray into real-life crime, I was short on credentials as a mastermind.
Eventually Judy ventured out of the bedroom for a shower. Tim’s snores reverberated through the walls.
I’d hoped that when Judy was awake and dressed, she’d lend a hand with the masterminding. After all, if anyone around here was qualified, she was.
Instead, Judy exited the bathroom with her hair up in a damp ponytail and headed straight for her car keys.
“Where you going?” I asked plaintively.
“I need some air,” she answered.
Given the prevalence of air in the general vicinity of Earth, that response didn’t quite narrow things down.
“Like, where? I mean… I thought…” I held a hand toward my laptop.
She didn’t even look. “I’ve got a lot to think about.”
With that, Judy ducked out the door.
I was on my own until Tim woke up.
Lucky for me, the big lug had adapted to a minimalist sleep schedule. Without any help from an alarm, he was up just after noontime. He grunted a greeting on the way to the shower, and I didn’t bug him until he’d gotten a chance to wake up a bit.
“Wanna see what I’ve got so far?” I called out as Tim searched the fridge.
The telltale sound of a beer cracking open was my reply.
With a jerk of my head, I sent my shadow over to retrieve him.
Seconds later, a manic chuckle rumbled. “Oh, man. This is fucking coooool.”
“It can get even cooler if we figure out what Martinez hid in her office,” I called out. “Get over here and take a look at this plan I’ve drawn up.”
Tim plopped down on the couch and hunched over, his beer dangerously close to spilling onto my laptop. I gave him time to read what I’d put together so far.
“And you wanna write for a living? This is shit.”
“Oh yea, QA-meister? Why don’t you debug it for me?”
I spent ten minutes explaining my version of the plan. At Tim’s request, I’d left my shadow untethered and floating around the room. I guess he wanted the reminder that this
was all real. Or he just thought it was cool.
Either way, I was getting a little weirded out by it. Prior to last night, I’d been just as convinced that it was all in my head.
“First off, look on Street View, and tell me that office window is going to get covered up by the truck? It’s too high. You’d be able to unload onto the roof, maybe. But anyone on the street will see you doing it. And your plan for the getaway is shit. Sure, you report the truck stolen. The police might buy that for all of five minutes before they dig around and find out you’ve got no alibi for the break-in. Plus, we’ve got nothing to stop a cop from just pulling across in front of us while we’re loading it up. One complaint of suspicious activity and it’d be all over. Not to mention that your carpet-bombing ‘grab everything and search it later’ plan doesn’t take into account where we’re going to dump it all. You can’t bring it here, because you’re going to report the truck stolen, so you’re giving them the first clue that you might be involved. Anyplace you might rent for storage would have cameras. They’d see you entering and leaving. We can’t bring it to Hidden Rhino because there are people there 24/7, and we can’t bring it to the Seldon Institute because they’re tighter than the Pentagon.”
“Anything else?” There comes a time during a haranguing where you just get numb to further criticism. Thanks to my mom, I was used to that feeling.
Tim tipped back the can, draining the last of his beer. “Short on manpower, but that’s OK. We’re scrapping it and starting over.”
“Don’t you have work?”
“I’ve put in 120 hours this week,” Tim replied with a chuckle. “If anyone says shit, I’ll tell them I fell asleep in the shower.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
By the time Judy got home from work, Tim and I had hashed out something plausible.
I was three beers in, and I’d lost track of the number Tim put away. He kept clearing his empties when he went to the fridge. Somewhere along the line we switched from everyday beer to Tim’s supply of “the good stuff.”
Despite my blood alcohol content going up like a gas pump readout, I was pretty sure this version was better than my original plan.
