The Shadow Men hc-4

by Christopher Golden

  “But that one was based on my dream,” he said. “I’ve done others after talking to you, but that one was…” He trailed off, shaking his head. “Last night.”

  “That can’t be,” Trix said, but those words seemed weak and ineffectual in the light of what had happened. “Maybe you should go and look, see if-”

  “No!” he said. “I’ve finished with that place for tonight.” He glanced sidelong at her. “Can we go to your apartment, talk this through? Try and decide what the fuck is going on?”

  “My place?” She’d been trying on a blouse in the changing room of her favorite clothes shop, Francine’s, when the faint had washed over her. Something’s gone, she’d thought as she leaned against the mirror, closing her eyes and then snapping them open again when something had twisted through her. That was the best way she could think of describing it-there had been no actual pain, but it felt as if every part of her body flexed and shifted, just for an instant. And as her breath faded from the mirror’s surface, a stranger stared back at her.

  Somehow, Trix had managed not to scream. She’d smiled in apology -something’s broken the mirror, and I’m looking into the next changing cubicle at a cute-looking woman with pink spiky hair and a designer torn top that I like but would never have the guts to wear- and then when the woman returned her smile she’d taken a step back -I don’t know her, she looks harmless enough, but there’s no telling just how -and then the realization as her hands traveled up over her unfamiliar body, her eyes went wide, and every move she made was imitated by the woman in the mirror. Thinner, more athletic; just as she glimpsed the unknown tattoo peering from beneath her sleeve, her palm passed across her breast and felt the piercing in her nipple. “No!” she had gasped, leaning forward and misting the mirror again.

  The next few moments were a blur. Fleeing the changing rooms, the browsers and shoppers not staring even though something was terribly wrong, somehow remembering to pay for the new clothes she wore, the clothes she’d never have been daring enough to wear before. And then in the street outside, the instant decision-she was much closer to Jenny’s than her own apartment.

  She had wandered at first, freaking out, trying to find some proof that she was hallucinating. In a bar near Kenmore Square, she had stopped and had a shot of rum, and then another, but the woman looking back at her from the mirror behind the bar remained the same punky chick she’d first encountered in that dressing room.

  At last, not knowing what else to do and needing someone to hold her, to tell her she was still herself, she had gone to Jim and Jenny’s. Finding no one at home, she’d waited in Tallulah’s for them to return.

  “I haven’t been back home,” she whispered. “Not since…”

  “Trix,” Jim said. He was trying to comfort her, but there was desperation in his voice, too. She reached out and took his hand, and they sat silently for a few moments. He knows I’m me, Trix thought.

  “I don’t know what I’ll find there,” she said.

  “Maybe an answer,” Jim said. He’d leaned in sideways so that he was almost resting his head on her shoulder. Trix felt the drip of a tear, and she squeezed her eyes closed and pressed her lips together. He’s lost his wife and daughter, she thought. She’d already phoned her father and brother, several friends, and they all knew her. So far as she could tell, the only number missing from her mobile phone was Jenny’s.

  “Okay,” she said. “Have you called the cops?”

  “And said what?”

  “That Jenny and Holly-”

  “Jenny and Holly who no one else remembers?”

  “I remember, Jim,” she said softly. “If it was just you, then yeah, you’d have to admit that you might have a bit of a problem. But there’s two of us. And we can’t both have been hallucinating the same thing for… however long.”

  Some people emerged from Tallulah’s and came around the corner, laughing and joking as they passed the parked car. One of them glanced inside and looked away again, a nervous smile playing at her lips. They think we’re lovers, Trix thought.

  “Jonathan’s dying,” Jim said into the darkness.

  “What?” Trix knew Jonathan. They weren’t the best of friends-there’d always been something between them that made them not quite fit together, as if their personalities abraded each other in all the wrong places-but she knew how much Jim and Jenny loved the guy.

  “Remember he was ill a few years back?”

  “When he had his scare?”

  “Yeah,” Jim said. “Scare. It was Jenny who persuaded him to go see the doctor.” He sat up again, wiping his face with his hands and drawing his cheeks down, as if to see more clearly. “He’d been having dizzy spells, headaches. Put them down to age, or booze. Jenny talked to him and said he should get it checked out. He did, they did a scan, found the tumor, removed it. Benign. He got better.” Jim laughed. “We were drunk a couple of years ago, and he told me he’d once gotten a blow job after showing some guy the scar across his scalp.”

  “Ew,” Trix said.

  “I saw him today, Trix. And he’s dying. Brain cancer, he said. And he acted… angry, as if I’d forgotten on purpose. Months to live. Because-”

  “Because Jenny never told him.”

  Jim nodded. “She wasn’t here to tell him.”

  “I’m dreaming,” she said, and that was the only alternative, wasn’t it? She was dreaming, because this was impossible. If she spent some time and started thinking back, she’d reach the moment when she’d fallen asleep, and perhaps that would wake her again. She’d snap back into the world she knew and feel her hair with one hand, blond and cut short, not pink and spiked up. And with the other hand she’d clasp her unpierced breast, and then lift her sleeve to see the smooth, non-tattooed skin of her upper arm. But she could not think back to that moment because it did not exist. Even if she was dreaming, she might well be here forever.

  “Look,” she said, turning the car’s interior light on and lifting her sleeve. It was a Celtic band, intricate and beautifully wrought.

  “But you hate needles nearly as much as I do,” he said softly. He didn’t sound surprised.

  “Tell me about it,” she said. It had been a constant joke between them-one that Jenny always found a little weird-that she’d never liked pricks. She glanced around quickly and lifted her T-shirt. She was braless, something else she’d rarely done before. The light glinted from the ring in her nipple.

  “Shit, Trix,” Jim said, startled and embarrassed for a moment. Then he saw the piercing and looked up at her as she lowered the top again.

  “Fucking hate needles,” she said. She nodded down at his lap. “Think you should be checking?”

  Jim smiled. It was good to see. The surreal, gentle moment of humor amid such trauma lasted only for a second, but that second seemed to clear her head a little, and in that space an idea began to form.

  “Okay, my place,” she said again. “We can’t stay sitting in the car forever.”

  “Right,” Jim said, and he placed both hands on the wheel.

  “Er… best to start the motor.”

  “Yeah.” But he made no move to turn the key, just staring ahead at the building before them. A couple passed along the sidewalk arm in arm, and Trix watched Jim’s eyes follow them. He and Jenny had a strong, safe marriage, and she knew that even though she was sitting here with him right now-the only person he’d found to acknowledge the impossible thing that had happened-he must be feeling very alone.

  “It’s okay,” Trix said, and she felt tears burning behind her eyes. But she had to keep them in, because Jim was suffering more. He’d lost his entire family.

  “That’s our home,” he said.

  “And it will be tomorrow. But maybe for tonight it will be best to stay at mine.”

  “What if they come back?” he said. “What if they find their way home and I’m not there, Trix?”

  Trix had no real answer for that, though she thought: Wherever we are, Jenny and Holly have never be
en here. It was an odd idea, and it shocked her to think that maybe she and Jim had gone somewhere else instead of the other way around. But in some respects it seemed to fit. This was not the exact world she had known a few hours ago-there were differences close to her and Jim, and those changes must stretch farther afield-and she dreaded what she would discover when she arrived home. “Losing it won’t help them,” she said. “We need to recharge. Think it through. And maybe find someone who can help.”

  “Someone?” he asked. Trix just shrugged. She remembered everything they had to do, and where they had to go. That is, if the Trix she was now would even consider such things.

  “I’ll come back later,” he said, nodding at the apartment. “Tomorrow. I’ll come back.”

  “Good plan,” she said.

  Jim started the car and drove them across the city, and Trix watched from the windows. She searched frantically for signs of something being as wrong out there as it felt inside, but the shop names were the same. Dunkin’ Donuts wasn’t spelled differently, and the mix of old and new Boston architecture presented familiar facades. They passed Monument Square, and the Bunker Hill Monument looked exactly the same as before. But Trix couldn’t tell how high it was, nor could she read the inscriptions or identify the face on the statue standing before it.

  Boston looks just the same, she thought. It’s just us who are different. But that wasn’t quite true, either. Jim’s agent, Jonathan, was dying. The brain cancer that had been cured due to Jenny’s involvement years before had run riot, and soon it would take him. “Because Jenny’s not here, and never has been,” she whispered.

  “What?” It had started raining, and Jim turned on the wipers. They whispered left and screeched right, a rhythmic gasp and moan.

  “Jenny and Holly,” she said. “I was just thinking aloud. It’s not just that they’re gone now, but that they’ve been gone…” Forever, she almost said. But that was too final. “Their past has been stolen, as well as their present.”

  “And their future?” he asked, voice breaking on the last word.

  “I’m going to help you,” Trix said. She eyed Jim in the car’s dark interior, wondering how much he had changed and where. He seemed a little thinner than before, perhaps a bit more heavily muscled, facial structure more defined. He’s a bachelor; he’ll want to take care of himself more so that the women flock to him. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, and something about the familiar smells of Boston-wet streets, car fumes, coffee, and a suggestion of Italian food-calmed her. At least the city smelled the same.

  As they neared the old townhouse on St. Botolph Street-not far from Symphony Hall-where she had her apartment, Trix sat up and clasped her hands in her lap. She checked out the cars parked along the sidewalks and recognized some of them. She saw a tall, thin woman walking her standard poodle along the street and went to wave. But would Mrs. Wilkinson recognize her with her pink hair and punky gear? In this world, yeah, Trix thought. It’s only me who doesn’t recognize myself. She lowered her window and leaned out to put that to the test, but by then they’d passed Mrs. Wilkinson and Jim was pulling up at the curb.

  “I’ll come with you,” he said.

  “No, Jim, it’s okay, I’ll-”

  “I’m coming with you!” His tone invited no dispute. She tried to smile, and he reached out and squeezed her hand. “Trix,” he said. “Whatever we find…” He looked past her at the building.

  “I know,” she said. “Whatever we find, I’m still me.” She opened the car door, got out, and stood waiting on the sidewalk, staring at her apartment’s drawn curtains. They did not look familiar. And when she ran up the three steps and checked the nameplate beside her buzzer, she groaned and leaned against the wall.

  “It doesn’t mean…,” Jim began.

  Trix went to try her key in the front door, but it had been left unlocked and drifted open as she leaned against it. Inside, she heard music emanating from her apartment. The harsh, thrashy guitars, drums, and growling lyrics of the Dropkick Murphys. You couldn’t be young and living in Boston and not know the Dropkicks, but they had always been a bit too brash for her taste. “Jim,” she said, “I always open my curtains in the morning.”

  “Maybe not this morning.”

  This morning I was someone else, she thought, and she swayed as unreality washed over her. She felt Jim’s hand steadying her and leaned into him, and then a horrible sense of anticipation lit inside her chest. Who am I going to find in there? she wondered. In her real life in the real world she hadn’t had a girlfriend for over a year, since her last long-term relationship had ended badly. And as Jim’s hand rested against her upper arm, a startling, electrifying certainty hit her.

  This was a world with different rules. Perhaps here Jenny loved her as much as she loved Jenny.

  She headed for the apartment door, already knowing that her thinking was skewed. No one knows Jenny, she thought. But no one knew the Jenny she and Jim remembered. Maybe here she was someone else entirely.

  She tried her key, and it did not fit.

  “Doesn’t mean anything,” Jim said.

  Trix’s heart was thumping as she reached for the buzzer, but she held back, kneeling instead and lifting the letter flap. It had a draft shield on the inside, and as she pushed her finger through and lifted it, she closed her eyes, because everything was already strange. That music’s not mine, my key doesn’t fit, I smell Chinese and I hate Chinese, and…

  She looked into the apartment. “That’s not my home,” she said. The decor was different, the furniture, and as she watched, a strikingly tall black woman walked naked from the bathroom, across the hallway, and into the living room.

  Trix caught her breath. Perhaps we’re lovers, she thought, but then a man emerged from the bathroom, naked and sheened with sweat, smiling and still semi-erect.

  “Ice?” she heard the woman call, and Trix let the letter flap close softly as she rested back on her heels. Instead of being shocked or upset or disturbed, all she could wonder was how they could still make love with the city falling apart around them.

  “Trix?” Jim asked.

  “We can go now,” she said, standing and walking toward the stairs.

  “You’re sure?”

  She turned to him and was sad to see the hope fading from his eyes. “We’ll look somewhere else,” she said. “We need to go to someone who will listen.”

  “Who?”

  Trix glanced back at the familiar building one more time, glad that the rain would camouflage her tears.

  “In the car,” she said. “We need to leave here. I’ll explain then.”

  Rare Ould Times

  As Jim drove through the city, windshield wipers battling the rain, he glanced at familiar stores and landmarks. His sense of dislocation had increased, despite the absence of any obvious changes. Every detail of Boston remained the same, at least based on a cursory inventory, and yet somehow it seemed as alien to him as if a tornado had dropped him into Oz. “Seriously, Trix, where are we going?” he asked.

  “I told you. State Street. Try to get a parking space near the Old State House.”

  “Easier said than done,” he said.

  Trix nodded, peering out the rain-slicked passenger window. “I know. But we only need a few minutes. Double-park if you have to.”

  Jim jerked the steering wheel to swerve around a taxi that stopped abruptly in front of them. One wheel splashed through a pothole, and he swore. Trix reacted not at all, and he glanced at her, trying to figure her out. Her appearance had changed dramatically, even her body, but she was still Trix.

  It should have given him comfort, having a close friend beside him, going through all of this with him. Instead, it scared the shit out of him. It had been terrifying enough to think-as he had at first-that Jenny had taken Holly and vanished from his life intentionally, and then to suspect a meticulous and cruel conspiracy of abduction. And when he had begun to believe that he might be insane, his fear had bloomed into something near
enough to lunacy that he might as well have been crazy. But this… somehow, this was worse. Trix remembered the world the way Jim did-remembered Jenny and Holly-and that meant that neither of them was crazy. Instead, it meant that the world had suddenly become hideously malleable. Reality had turned fluid.

  “You’re really not going to tell me what we’re doing here?” he asked.

  She squeezed her eyes shut a moment, then opened them and turned to look at him. Her new look-the pink hair, different makeup-made her seem more intense, but her eyes were the same as ever, and glinting with unshed tears. “You know how much Jenny means to me, right?” she asked. “Jenny and Holly, I mean?”

  Trix loved Jenny almost as much as he did. In truth, he had always suspected Trix was deeply in love with his wife, though Jenny had always insisted that whatever feelings Trix might have for her were in the past. Every time Trix ended a relationship with a girlfriend and the three of them would get together and drink too much wine, he would see that old wistful sadness in Trix’s eyes, but eventually he had learned not to mention it. Things were what they were. Jenny and Trix had a powerful bond, but Jim had never felt threatened by it.

  Trix might be Jenny’s best friend, but she had become one of his closest friends as well.

  “Yeah. I know,” Jim said.

  “Then I’m going to need you to trust me for a little while. There’s someone we need to talk to-a woman named Veronica Braden-and if I find her and she can’t help us, then we’ll think of something else. We will, Jim. We’re going to figure out how this is possible, and we’ll find them.”

  He laughed darkly. “You sound so sure.”

  Trix turned to look back out at the rain. “I have to be. And you’ll have to be, too.” She lowered her voice. “Whatever this is, it can’t be the first time it’s happened to anyone. I’ve read Stephen Hawking, y’know? Parallel dimensions and black holes and all that shit. We’re going to figure this out, and we’re going to get… get your girls back.”

  Silence filled the space between them then, save for the shush of the wipers and the rumble of the road beneath his tires. He drove down Congress Street searching without luck for a parking spot. Roadwork took up two long blocks on the right, and the left had parked cars bumper to bumper. As he approached State, he took a chance and turned left onto narrow Quaker Lane, saw a spot, and pulled in.