The Shadow Men

by Christopher Golden

  In place of those listings there were new contacts, names that were unfamiliar to him, and it chilled Jim to wonder who they were and how their information had gotten into his cell phone. If he phoned them and introduced himself, what would they say to him? How well would they know him, these people whose names he did not know?

  But not all of his familiar contacts were gone—only the ones he had known through, or because of, Jenny.

  A car braked too fast in front of him, and he stopped fast enough for the tires to skid, cutting the wheel and slewing to the right. Another night he would have shot the guy the finger or at least muttered some curse under his breath, but his focus was on the phone instead of the road. The car drove on and Jim accelerated. He had driven this route to Jonathan’s apartment hundreds of times. One hand on the wheel, he navigated on autopilot, scanning the list, finding Steve Menken, and hitting CALL.

  Menken answered on the third ring. “Jimbo! To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  “I need to ask you a question,” Jim said.

  “Oooh. Sounds ominous.”

  “It is.”

  A hesitation on the line. Jim could practically see the smile fading from Menken’s face. They had known each other for more than a decade, running in the same circles in Boston’s artistic community. Menken worked at Hiram Davis Press in Cambridge, editing nonfiction from biographies to art books. He and Jim had become friends without ever managing to work on a project together—Hiram Davis couldn’t afford Jim Banks. They had bonded over a mutual love of beer, old science-fiction movies, and Boston sports teams—common enough interests for men in the city, but not in their line of work.

  “You can ask me anything, Jim,” Menken said. “What’s going on? You sound awful.”

  “This is … this may sound weird. Do you remember Jenny and Holly?”

  Menken paused in thought before replying. “I don’t think I know anyone named Holly. Are you talking about Jenny Garza?”

  Jim went numb. “No. Not Jenny Garza.”

  “You’re gonna have to give me something more to go on,” Menken said.

  “Never mind, I’ll talk to you later,” Jim said, ending the call.

  He tossed the phone onto the seat beside him. There were other people still in his contacts list—friends and colleagues who knew him well enough to know his wife and daughter—but he no longer had any desire to call them. Another conversation like the one he’d just had with Menken, and he might completely fall apart.

  Instead, he drove in silence. No talk radio. No music. No phone. Several times he encountered snarled traffic, but he knew these streets well enough by now to avoid most of it, and soon he was pulling up to Jonathan’s Marlborough Street brownstone. He cruised another block before noticing an aging BMW pulling out, and he slid into the vacated parking space.

  As Jim climbed out of the car, an unseasonably icy breeze swept along the street and seemed to eddy around him. He looked toward Jonathan’s apartment, and a coil of fear encircled him. He could almost picture Marlborough Street as the road to Oz, and he felt a terrible trepidation at the prospect of approaching the wizard. Jonathan had been the last to see Jenny and Holly.

  Hollybaby, he thought, missing his daughter so much that he nearly fell to his knees. He practically flung himself across the street, picking up his pace as he hurried toward Jonathan’s brownstone, so that by the time he reached the front door he was running. With a quick glance at the intercom, he pressed the bottom-most button. It made a sound less like a buzzer than an old-fashioned school bell. Seconds ticked by, each one an eternity, and he hit the button again.

  Crackle. “Who is it?”

  “It’s Jim. I need to—”

  “What are you doing here?” Jonathan asked sharply, the intercom crackling.

  “We have to talk,” Jim said, hearing the pleading in his own voice and hating it. “I really … I’m at my wit’s end here, Jonathan. I need a reality check, man. I need a friend.”

  For several seconds the intercom did not even crackle. And then the door buzzed.

  Jim hauled it open, then made sure the heavy door latched behind him. The foyer of the building smelled of disinfectant. He headed past the stairs toward the door at the rear of the foyer. Jonathan lived on the ground floor. He could have easily afforded the view from the top-floor apartment, but he didn’t like heights.

  As Jim approached the door he heard the dead bolt slide back, and then the door swung open. Jonathan stood outlined in the doorway, the wan light from the hall casting shadows on the lines and hollows of his face. The sight of him startled Jim so much he came to an abrupt halt. At fifty, Jonathan had perfected the aura of a 1940s movie idol trying to hold on to his looks. Always tan, his silver hair always neatly trimmed, he was a man with expensive tastes.

  But this was not the Jonathan that Jim knew. This man was a withered husk, his clothes hanging on his thinning frame, his silver hair gone dull and gray, his skin jaundiced and sagging. “Jesus,” Jim whispered. “What the hell’s happened to you?”

  Jonathan’s eyes flashed with anger, and he straightened himself up. “What kind of question is that? First that crap on the phone, and now you show up here with your eyes wide like it’s your first fucking day on Earth? What’s so goddamned important?”

  Jim shook himself and took a step forward, frowning. “Sorry. You caught me by surprise.”

  “I caught you?”

  But Jim barely registered the sarcasm. He took another step nearer, the sadness that already enveloped him growing heavier. “Are you sick?” he asked. Then he shook his head. “I mean, obviously you are. But what is it? How did it happen so fast? Christ, Jonathan, you never said anything.”

  Jonathan cocked his head, regarding Jim anew. His eyes narrowed. “You’re really asking that,” Jonathan said, almost to himself. When he spoke again, he had softened. “What’s wrong with you? You really forgot I have cancer?”

  Jim closed his eyes, shaking his head, wishing it all away. “Cancer?”

  “In my brain. I … hell, Jim, you know all this. I’ve got eight, maybe nine months.”

  They stood in the hallway, those two old friends, and stared at each other.

  “So you can’t have been at my place this morning,” Jim said.

  “I haven’t been over to your place since Labor Day,” Jonathan replied. Then he stepped back into his apartment. “Come in, Jim. Call your shrink. I’m serious. I don’t know what that stuff was on the phone before about Julie or whatever—”

  “Jenny.”

  “—but you’re having an episode or something. Are you on any medication?”

  Jim stood paralyzed in the hall, bathed in that hideous yellow light.

  “Hey,” Jonathan said, coming out into the hall and reaching for his arm. “Please, don’t. I’ve had enough tears.”

  Only when Jim tasted salt on his lips did he understand that he had started to cry. Instantly he shut off the tears, wiping them from his cheeks. He pulled away from Jonathan. “I have to go.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Jonathan said. “Come in. Please. Sit with me. I’ll make tea and you can clear your mind, talk to me about what’s going on in your head right now.”

  Jim backed away from him, toward the foyer. “I’m sorry. I have to go.”

  This isn’t my Jonathan. This isn’t my life. Somehow, the world he knew had been stolen from him while he slept. Or maybe this is my life, and the rest was just me inventing one that isn’t so fucking ugly. Maybe I’m meant to be alone.

  But he rejected that instantly. Even with all the hours that had passed, his lips could still remember Jenny’s kiss. He could close his eyes and picture her, recall her smell, the perfect way her body cleaved to his when they slid into bed at night. He knew Holly’s laugh, the dimple in her left cheek, the silly way she would dance to make him smile whenever he grew too serious for her liking.

  They were his wife and his little girl. They weren’t inventions.

&n
bsp; “Call Dr. Lebowitz,” Jonathan said, starting to follow him into the hall but too weary to chase him.

  “First thing in the morning,” Jim muttered.

  “Promise?”

  “I’ve got to go.”

  Then he was out the door and running for his car, wondering what else would be taken from him today … and then realizing that he had nothing else in his life that really mattered.

  Jim felt invisible to the world. He drove home in a fog, trying to figure out what to do next. Memories of Jenny and Holly kept crowding into his thoughts. He found himself singing softly in the silence of the car—all those songs he had used as lullabies on nights when Holly had trouble falling asleep as a toddler. No one remembered them. If he called the police, they would probably think he was crazy. He might even end up on some psych ward for evaluation. But what other choice did he have? He couldn’t just do nothing. Prayer wasn’t going to bring them back. He knew a private detective—a poker buddy of Menken’s—who would at least listen without calling him crazy.

  Jonathan had been afraid for him. Jim had seen it in his eyes, the sympathy for the artist who had finally lost his mind. But he refused to believe that insanity could summon up the vivid details and the heartbreaking emotions that filled him now. Maybe schizophrenia could produce such delusions, but didn’t the very fact that he could so coolly examine the possibility make that unlikely?

  “Oh, Jesus,” he whispered, gripping the steering wheel tighter as though holding on for his life. Perhaps, in spite of himself, he was praying without even realizing it.

  He would search the apartment top to bottom, and much more meticulously this time. If any trace of them remained, he would find it. And if he found no trace, then what? It had all happened while he was sleeping. Maybe if he went back to sleep, he would wake up in the morning and the world would have returned to normal, and it would seem like it really had been a dream.

  A little bit of madness had crept into him. Jim knew that, and he welcomed it. He thought he would need it to survive.

  Adrift in his own mind, he parked in his space behind his building. His sense of dislocation made even those most familiar surroundings feel surreal. He hurried along the sidewalk beside Tallulah’s and turned right at the corner, keys clutched in his hand, thinking of the nooks and hidden corners of the apartment where some evidence might still be found that he did not live there alone.

  Music came from the café, acoustic guitars and voices raised in song. He heard it only vaguely, like elevator Muzak, too focused on the task ahead. But a few steps past Tallulah’s he heard the music grow louder as someone opened the door, and a voice called his name. Hope flickered and died within him as, for half a second, he thought it could be Jenny. But it wasn’t her voice.

  The woman had lovely, anguished features and bright pink hair. Everything about her spoke of desperation, from her black clothing to the imploring look in her eyes. “Jim, please say you know me,” she whispered.

  He blinked in surprise and studied her. “Trix?”

  Something burst within her. She let out a sob and rushed to him, threw her arms around him, and held on tight. Trix Newcomb. Jenny’s best friend. Thinner than he remembered, her pink, jagged-cut hair such a radical departure from her usual look, she was barely recognizable at first. Now she wept into his shoulder, trying to talk but unable to get words out past the sobs.

  “Trix,” he said again, in wonder. With some effort, he pried her away from him, staring into her face. “You remember.”

  Eyes wide, she caught her breath. “I just …” She gestured at her clothes, then grabbed fistfuls of her hair. “I changed. In, like, a millisecond. I totally freaked. I didn’t know if someone had slipped me something or, shit, I just didn’t know. I went to call Jenny and her number wasn’t in my cell. Yours, either. I was already online, and I went to find it on her Facebook page, but it’s gone, so I looked for her blog, only that’s gone, too. So I called information and your number is unlisted and there’s nothing for her and then I started calling around and …”

  Her voice stopped working. Her mouth opened and closed, but her lower lip quivered and fresh tears slid down her cheeks.

  Jim hugged her again, so relieved to see her, to have her know him. He wasn’t alone. And if Trix remembered Jenny and Holly, then that meant that Jim wasn’t crazy. They had existed. Somehow they had vanished, and who- or whatever had taken them had managed to eliminate them from the minds of anyone who had known them, except for Jim. And now Trix.

  “Holly’s gone, too,” he said. The hardest words he’d ever spoken.

  “Where … where are they?” Trix pleaded with him.

  Jim didn’t let her go. Trix had become his anchor. “I don’t know,” he said. “But we’ll find them. I swear we’ll find them both.”

  You Won’t Make a Fool Out of Me

  ONCE, TRIX had dreamed that Jenny loved her. More than that, she had dreamed that they were in love, and so fiercely that when she had woken from that dream, it had broken her heart to realize it wasn’t real. It hardly seemed fair. She had loved Jenny since college, constantly fighting not to be the love-struck lesbian her friends had warned her she might become, mooning over the straight girl she could never have.

  Over the years she had forged her love for Jenny into something sweet and mostly selfless. In the beginning, Trix had wanted to hate Jim, but she’d found herself unable to do it. They had too much in common. They had Jenny in common. And over time, Trix had come to realize that she cared for Jim nearly as much as she did Jenny, though in a very different way.

  Then Holly had come along, and that had caused a metamorphosis in Trix. All the romance and lustful thoughts she had harbored for her best friend over the years had receded as her dedication to Jenny became a love for and loyalty to this family. Jenny, Holly, and even Jim … they were as much her family as anyone related to her by blood.

  But sometimes she remembered that dream, and the love she felt so deeply that waking had broken her heart, and she let herself fantasize about making her way up to the apartment and entering to find Jenny alone. She toyed with the scenario in her mind, a conversation that would finally set fire to the spark between them. They would make love, Jenny discovering a part of herself she had never acknowledged. They would hold each other afterward, and it would feel so natural.

  Trix never relayed these dreams to Jenny and Jim, not even in jest. After eight years of joyful marriage, Jenny might not understand.

  Now Trix stood outside the door to Jim and Jenny’s apartment. She was shaking. Anticipation was part of it—she had found the one person who seemed to accept what had happened to her, and now was the time to see just how much he had changed as well—but the climb up the stairs had shaken her. She never took the elevator, always kept in shape, and three flights of stairs were more beneficial than standing in a moving box held up by a few wires. But since she’d changed, even the way she moved felt strange. She was thinner than before, more wiry, stronger, and the effort she needed to do things was different. Before, she would have walked up the stairs and been breathing a little heavy. Now she had run up and wasn’t even breathless. Her heart thumped in her chest, and she could see her T-shirt rippling beneath the leather jacket. When she closed her eyes the whole sense of herself was different—her awareness of limbs, the space her body occupied, and her personal space surrounding her. It was as if she had been removed and replaced, and the world around her refused to adapt.

  It’s not the world, chick, she thought. It’s you who’s not adapting. There was an unbearable truth in that—the world was ambivalent, at best—but she couldn’t face it right now. She had to believe that she was still Trix Newcomb, and that perception of herself had changed because of quirks in the world around her. There was the pink hair and the sleeker body, yes … but inside, she was still her.

  Remembering Jenny and Holly proved that. She and Jim couldn’t both be crazy, could they?

  “Can we?” she whispered,
and she slid Jim’s key into the lock.

  He’d remained down in the parking lot, sitting in his locked, darkened car. No, she’d confirmed, she’d never seen him in the Mercedes, either. He drove a six-year-old Audi. He couldn’t face coming up here again, not right now, but he’d asked her to look for a few things.

  Entering Jim and Jenny’s home, Trix thought of how much her own place might have changed. She hadn’t returned there yet. When she had felt this impossible change while out shopping, she had wanted the company of friends, not the silence of her lonely apartment.

  Even the smells were different. She pushed the door closed behind her and heard it snick shut, then stood there with her eyes closed for a few seconds. The apartment felt different, smelled different, and when she opened her eyes and took a few steps into the hallway, it sounded wrong as well. She looked around. The large leather sofa looked the same as before, but it was newer, unscuffed, and not smothered with the usual mountain of scatter cushions. She was sure that the big flat-screen TV was a different make, and the Wii game console was gone, along with the slew of game boxes usually piled beneath it.

  It could have been a different apartment entirely, but Trix didn’t believe that for a second. All the spaces were right, it was just what those spaces contained that seemed so wrong.

  “What the fuck is this?” she said aloud, and the apartment swallowed her voice. She’d always been careful not to swear here in case Holly heard. She walked past the living room and gasped as something moved to her left. She stumbled back against the wall, bringing her fists up, shock surging through her until she realized it was herself. The mirror was a new addition to the hallway as well, perhaps there to make the space look larger. She stared into the mirror and only just recognized herself. Her sporty, urban chic style was gone. Her hair was more spiked and punky than she’d ever worn it, even as a rebellious teenager. Her face was thin and delicate, body hard and lithe instead of curvy. She knew her eyes—the pain and shock there, as well as the subtle green color that had always been her most distinctive feature.