The Shadow Men hc-4

by Christopher Golden

  “Shadow Men,” the girl said, voice broken with grief. “You brought them.”

  Trix felt her heart flutter. The girl was right, but what choice had she had? “I didn’t know where else to go. You’re the Oracle! I didn’t know you were a little girl.”

  Sally laughed softly but without any trace of humor. Trix noticed that one of her sneakers was untied. The girl shook her braided hair back and knelt on the floor. “It isn’t just little girls who get frightened,” Sally said.

  Trix heard glass shatter upstairs, but the screaming had nearly ceased. The door to the basement shook in its frame. They didn’t even need to open the door to pass through it, at least she didn’t think so. The wraiths-the things Sally had named Shadow Men-might be mindless things, programmed for this task, but if so, part of their job must be to make themselves terrible. To not merely kill the Oracles, but to destroy everything around them.

  “I know! I’m a grown-up, and I’m terrified,” Trix said.

  The woman who’d backed into the corner of the basement sobbed loudly.

  Sally put her palms down on the stone floor of the basement. Her eyes were closed and she breathed deeply and evenly, as though trying to meditate with chaos erupting above her. “The No-Face Men,” Sally said.

  “Yes,” Trix quickly replied. “It has to be them. They killed Peter O’Brien, and we saw them after the earthquake, out on the street.”

  But Sally seemed not to hear her, and Trix realized that the girl had not been speaking to her. For a second she flashed back to the moment in the bookstore, when she and Jim had watched Veronica testing the edges of reality, her senses touching upon facets of the world around her that others could never reach. Whatever you’re doing, Trix thought, staring at the girl, you’d better be quick about it.

  The power went out, plunging the basement into darkness. For several long seconds, Trix could hear nothing but her own heart beating in her ears and the quick, whimpering sobs of the woman in the corner. Then a warm draft of air whipped through the basement and up the stairs, and from above there came an inhuman murmuring, as though the wraiths had finally scented their true prey.

  An electric buzz filled the basement, followed by a crackling noise, and the lights flickered back on.

  Sally stood in the center of the room, wearing a triumphant grin-a little girl who had just gotten her way. Blood streamed from her nostrils, and she wiped it away with the back of her hand. “Little girl, my ass,” she said.

  Trix would have replied, but in a moment she was rendered speechless. Arms began to rise up from the floor, ethereal things passing through stone and mortar. They were gray and vague, and Trix opened her mouth to scream a warning before she noticed that they were not attacking Sally. Their faces were weird silver mesh, like fencers’ masks, but there were dark ghost faces there as well, things with ancient, hollow eyes, flickering like an old TV trying to lock on to a signal.

  These weren’t Veronica’s Shadow Men. What had Sally whispered? “No-Face Men”? They kept rising, taller than humans, thinner, limbs longer. The wails from the woman in the corner altered in tone, rising and falling in a keening song of distress.

  Sally pointed toward the stairs. “Go,” she said, the triumphant smile gone from her face, leaving only grim determination behind.

  The No-Face Men flowed toward the stairs as if driven by storm winds. Trix saw them coming at her and could not help letting out a cry as she threw herself to one side. They flashed past her, buzzing with their own static, and up the stairs. Trix expected more sounds of destruction from above, more cries of fear and despair, but instead there was only silence.

  “Martha?” Sally said gently to the wailing woman in the corner, who quieted at once. “Come with me. The friend whose house your son was sleeping at tonight… the building collapsed in the quake. Both boys are trapped there, but they’re still alive. The city’s reacting now. Rescue workers are searching for survivors in the buildings that fell. You need to get over there.”

  The woman stared at the young Oracle in shock. Sally took her hand and tugged her along toward the stairs. Trix felt frozen-she’d gone tharn herself, listening to the nothing from upstairs.

  “You coming, Trix?” the girl asked, looking sweetly innocent.

  “I didn’t tell you my name,” Trix said. She wanted to tie the laces on the Oracle’s left sneaker. She felt distant, as though her spirit held on to her flesh only by the slimmest tether. But as Sally and Martha hurried past her, she snapped back into the world as though coming awake from a nightmare. She reached out and grabbed Sally’s wrist. “Stop. You can’t…” She forced the whirlwind of her thoughts to be still. “All of this happened because they killed O’Brien. If they kill you, too, the third Boston might collide with this one… these two… you know what I’m saying. I won’t let that happen.”

  Sally rolled her eyes. “Duh. Neither will I. You think I wanna die? First thing we do is get our butts out of here.”

  “But the wraiths… the Shadow Men-”

  “Can’t kill me quite so easily,” Sally said. “O’Brien’s guard must have been down if they took him without a fight.”

  “Veronica gave us-”

  “Trix!” Sally snapped. “Do you want to find what you came looking for, or not?” With that, she went up the stairs, Martha following behind her.

  Trix stared after them for several seconds, then hustled to catch up. They emerged in a corridor, but half a dozen steps took them into the front of the house, where a silent battle raged in the front rooms and through the open door.

  The Shadow Men-the horrible wraiths who had paced her through the devastated city-were locked in combat with the spindle-limbed No-Face Men Sally had summoned. The two sides were at war, grappling in utter silence, tearing at one another with ghostly claws. Their flesh, flayed and ripped, seemed like gray cotton batting but dissipated like smoke in the air. They throttled one another, sailing across the rooms, crashing through walls as though they themselves were solid and the twin collided cities were some haunted ghostland.

  Trix faltered, astonished by the scene unfolding around her, but then fear and good sense got her moving and she hurried, praying that she would not be noticed. As thought caught in Sally’s wake, several of Veronica’s wraiths turned to pursue her, only to be snagged by the long talons of their enemies, whose flickering static faces were brutally blank. One of the No-Face Men opened its mouth-a gaping, saw-toothed maw of oil-black nothing that looked like a hole torn in the curtain of the world, on the other side of which anything might be lurking. It swallowed the Shadow Man’s head, biting it off with a silent snap of its jaws. The Shadow Man turned to smoke, drifting and fading in seconds.

  There were several dead people on the floor, heads caved in from being smashed against walls or floors, limbs broken. Despair filled the hollow places inside Trix. These people had come to the Oracle for help in making sense of the collision of the cities, or to find those they had lost in the madness. The others who had come to Sally were gone now, scattered by the bloodshed and the sight of the wraiths. They had run for their lives. But others would come, just as Trix had gone to find Veronica when Jenny and Holly had gone missing. They would be in danger.

  Another Shadow Man reached for Sally, and a No-Face Man latched on to it from behind, tearing away strips of its flesh as if it were made of cotton candy.

  Sally ran out the door and into the street, pulling Martha behind her. Trix ran out after them, realizing that she had been holding her breath since the basement. She exhaled, turning around in fright. There were Shadow Men and No-Face Men in the street, too, but only a few.

  “Go,” Sally told Martha, giving her a little shove. “Donnie will be all right if they find him soon. But you’ve got to hurry.”

  “Thank you,” Martha said, backing away. “Oh, my God, thank you.” She fled then, and for a moment Trix wished she could follow.

  Sally turned and glared at Trix, one hip cocked. In her sneakers and jeans and
Miley Cyrus T-shirt, the little girl would have looked almost adorably precocious, impossible to take seriously, were it not for the pain and wisdom in her eyes. “Now, you,” she said. “Come with me. Don’t stop for anything.”

  Sally turned and started to run. Several people who had obviously come looking for her tried to stop her, calling to her, but she ignored them and ran on. Trix kept up, avoiding places where the pavement was cracked or broken, lamenting that she could not stop to help a group of people frantically moving rubble away from a collapsed synagogue.

  “Where are we going?” Trix asked, panting, as they rounded a corner, jumping onto the sidewalk to avoid the water that gushed from a broken hydrant and the wreckage of half a dozen cars that were mashed together in the street.

  Sally shot her a hard look. “Somewhere they won’t be able to follow you.”

  “Me?” Trix asked. “They’re after you.”

  Sally turned right to avoid the road ahead, where an office building and an old music hall had tried and failed to co-exist, and debris blocked the street. “Yeah, they’re after me. But they’re following you. Veronica marked you with something her Shadow Men can always find, and whatever it is, it broke down the wards and safeguards I’d put on my house. It must have done the same to Peter O’Brien’s bar, if they were able to get in there after him. But there must have been more. Did you hand him anything from her?”

  “A letter.”

  Sally nodded. “Hobbling hex. Easily done, if you know how.”

  “Enabling those things to attack him?”

  “O’Brien would have been slowed, his ability to fight back reduced. And he’d have known what was happening.”

  “So it is our fault,” Trix said softly, and Sally said nothing to disabuse her of that notion.

  Trix’s legs hurt from running. Her chest burned from effort and her mind whirled as she tried to make the pieces of the puzzle fit together. She thought of O’Brien opening the envelope, swearing when he found the black-spotted page. He must have known in that moment that danger was approaching.

  Trix felt herself swept along in Sally’s wake. What could she do now? How was she supposed to find Jenny and Holly? And what about Jim? They were moving farther and farther away from Jenny’s parents’ restaurant. If Jim went looking for her at Sally Bennet’s address, he would find nothing but dead people.

  “My friend-”

  “Later,” Sally said. “First, we get somewhere they can’t find us. Then we get that mark off of you.”

  Trix gasped. “Mark on me?”

  “The Shadow Men are following you somehow.”

  “But she never touched me,” Trix said, thinking back to her brief time with Veronica, wondering.

  “Doesn’t matter. Did it somehow, and it needs removing. Then I have to stop that bitch from doing to your Boston what she’s done to mine!”

  “And killing you,” Trix said.

  Sally slowed down, out of breath, getting her bearings. She looked at Trix. “That, too,” she agreed. She glanced back and Trix followed her gaze. There was no sign of the Shadow Men, but if Trix was really marked, they would find her again as soon as they got away from Sally’s No-Face Men.

  Her heart ached, but not from exertion. In all of this madness, with the stakes so high, how would she ever find Jenny and Holly?

  “Hey,” Sally said, reaching out to touch her. “I’ll find them. Whoever you and your friend are looking for, I’ll find them, and get you out of here. We’ll all be safer with you back where you belong.”

  Trix felt relief wash through her, but then she frowned. She didn’t understand why Sally would bother to help her in the midst of all this.

  An angry sneer lifted one corner of the little girl’s mouth, and suddenly Sally seemed much older, almost cruel. “I’m going to send you back with my own mark on you,” she said. “And with my No-Faces on your trail. I won’t let them kill Veronica, but they can punish her. Imprison her. Keep her from trying this fucking shit again.”

  Trix stared at her in wonder. Ten or eleven years old, but so much older than her years, Sally Bennet had it all figured out. She might not be able to turn back time and prevent the horror and devastation that had hit two Bostons tonight, but she knew how to stop Veronica from making it any worse. And Trix and Jim would get Jenny and Holly back in the bargain.

  “Just tell me what I need to do,” Trix said, hopes soaring.

  “For now?” Sally said, grim and dark-eyed. “Just keep up.”

  She started running again. Trix took a deep breath and ran after her, putting her fate and the fate of those she loved in the hands of a little girl. But she knew she had no choice. Jenny and Holly were out there, somewhere, in the ruin of two cities. The survivors of those two Bostons, and the people of Trix’s own city… they were all now depending on Sally Bennet.

  When he saw Jenny shrink away from him, all of Jim’s strength fled. For an instant, hope had raced through him like adrenaline fire, but then he had seen the lack of recognition in her eyes and knew that when she looked at him, she saw a stranger. This wasn’t his Jenny.

  Exhaustion weighed him down. Thus far, determination had driven him on. He loved his family, but he needed them even more, and that need propelled him through despair and past weariness. But all along, hopelessness had whispered in the back of his mind like some tiny devil seated on his shoulder, and now at last he surrendered to it.

  Jim turned his back on the restaurant-on not-his-Jenny and not-his-Jenny’s mother-and tried to walk away. He managed three steps before his legs went out from under him and he fell to his knees on the cracked pavement. No tears came. Numb, he felt his whole body sag.

  In a moment he would get up. In a moment he would continue his search. In a moment he would catch up with Trix and they would pretend that two cities hadn’t just smashed together, that people weren’t dead and dying around them, that Bostonians weren’t facing their doppelgangers, their reality falling apart. In a moment-

  “Do you know me?”

  Her voice froze him in place. For a moment he could not breathe, and his chest clenched so tightly that he thought his heart had paused as well. Then she touched him gently on the shoulder and spoke again. “Hey,” she said. “Anybody home in there?”

  Jim shuddered and smiled at the same time. How many times had she said the same words to him? When he was lost in thought, painting in his mind, she would try to talk to him and it would be like her voice-her presence-was muffled conversation from another room. And then she would touch him, and ask him that same question, in those same words, though rarely with the same sadness.

  If he just kept his eyes closed, if he didn’t answer, maybe he could pretend for just a little while that she was his Jenny after all.

  But he couldn’t do that. The sounds of chaos and crisis filled the city, and closing his eyes did not make them go away. There could be no pretending.

  Jim turned to look at this woman who was not his wife. She wore a confused and troubled expression, and he wondered what she was seeing on his face-surprise or love or madness, or some combination of all three? “I’m sorry,” Jim said, unable to keep himself from searching her eyes for some sign of recognition. “I keep wishing I could wake up and find out it’s all a nightmare.”

  Not-his-Jenny nodded. “Me, too. I think there’s going to be a lot of that going around.”

  Her mother stood on the restaurant’s front stoop, gazing worriedly at the two of them. But then something inside the restaurant drew her attention, and after a quick glance, she set aside her broom and went in.

  “So, are you going to tell me who you are?” she asked.

  Before he could answer, a fire engine roared down the street without its siren, a grim-faced man behind the wheel. They both watched it pass, and Jim saw that a number of people had come out onto the stoops of the apartment buildings on the block. A van pulled up and two burly men got out, staring at the damage to the facade of a music store across the street that had s
pecialized in antique vinyl records. The owners, he figured. The store existed in his Boston, too, and somehow that reassured him.

  She was still waiting for an answer.

  “I’m Jim,” he said, feeling foolish, as though she ought to know. But of course she didn’t. “Jim Banks.”

  “Why don’t you come inside, Jim?” she said.

  He looked at her, amazed at her tenderness, as he always had been. “You don’t even know me.”

  “No, but I can see you know me. Or you think you do.”

  “Jenny-” he began.

  “Jennifer,” she corrected. “No one’s called me Jenny since my grandfather died.”

  Jim nodded, studying her. Jennifer. That would make it easier-at least a little. She had an old scar on her chin that his Jenny had never had and she wore her hair pulled back into a ponytail, revealing three studs in each ear. She was thinner than his Jenny, too, by at least ten pounds. More time at the gym.

  “Jennifer,” he echoed, finally climbing to his feet. “Why doesn’t it freak you out? I mean, yes, I know you, but you’re not afraid of me. Why aren’t you calling the cops right now, reporting me as a stalker or something?”

  “The cops have bigger troubles tonight,” she said. “Besides, you showing up here, calling my name, looking at me like that? It’s not the weirdest thing to happen to me tonight.”

  A tremor of excitement went through him, and he could feel his face flush. He glanced at the shattered windows of the restaurant, but from this angle he could only see the ceiling fans and the old tin ceiling. “She came here, didn’t she?” he asked, nodding at Jennifer. He smiled. “Is that what you’re talking about? You must have thought you were going crazy. And your parents-”

  “Who are you talking about?” Jennifer asked.

  Jim had to laugh at her tone, and the crinkle of her eyes, and the way one corner of her mouth lifted higher than the other. All so familiar to him. All parts of his Jenny. “The other you,” he said. “My Jenny. Your double, or whatever.”