The Shadow Men

by Christopher Golden

  “Trix,” he said.

  She blinked, focusing on him like she’d forgotten he was there.

  “What the hell are we doing here?” Jim asked. “How is this helping, and what was that crazy shit about your grandmother?”

  Trix took a swig from her Heineken and gave him the Cheshire cat grin that he had seen before, whenever she felt stupid or embarrassed. “Do you know the story of the Oracle of Delphi?” she asked.

  Jim stared at her. “Sure. The Athenians went to her for guidance. She communed with the gods or something and could give them answers, see the future. That kind of thing.”

  Trix stared at her beer. Someone came in, and she looked up hopefully, then turned again to Jim, dejected. “I don’t know about seeing the future.”

  “What does this have to do with—”

  She cut him off with a glare. “Just listen.”

  “I’m trying,” he said sharply. “You’re not saying anything.”

  Trix sighed. “All right. So, you know my father took off for L.A. when I was little and that after my mother died, my grandparents raised me.”

  “Yeah.”

  She started to strip the label from her beer bottle. “When I was maybe nine or ten my grandfather started to slip. Dementia. Alzheimer’s. He went downhill fast, and he died the day before my twelfth birthday.

  “When I was in the fifth grade, I came home from school one day and my grandmother was a wreck. She totally flipped out. By then there were times when my grandfather had no idea who we were or where we were. He would think it was, like, the fifties again and that my grandmother was his sister Paulette. The neighbors all sort of kept an eye on him during those times. But this one day he’d been doing pretty well. My grandmother had been ironing in her bedroom, watching television, and when she went to look in on him, he’d disappeared.”

  Jim felt a sick twist in his gut. “Vanished? You mean like Jenny and Holly? You’ve been through something like this before?”

  But Trix shook her head. “No. Nothing like this. He just … he wandered off because he didn’t know where he was. He barely knew who he was. Well, how far can an old man get, right? But by the time I got home from school, six hours had passed with no sign of him and my grandmother had started to freak out completely. She said there was only one person she knew of who could really help, and we got on the bus—she didn’t have a car and couldn’t afford a cab—and she brought me to the Old State House, to that same spot.”

  Jim frowned. “But what is it?”

  “I’m surprised you don’t know. You’ve lived in Boston your whole life, and you’ve never followed the Freedom Trail?”

  “Maybe when I was a kid. What does—”

  “The Boston Massacre. That’s the spot, right there in front of the Old State House, within spitting distance of the balcony.”

  He knew the story well enough—colonials throwing snowballs at British soldiers posted in the city, taunting them until the situation became so tense that there was musket fire, killing five men. It had been one of the events that fed the growing anti-British sentiment that led to the Revolution. “You’ve totally lost me,” he said.

  Now when Trix glanced at the front door of Abruzzi’s, Jim looked as well.

  “What are you waiting for?” he asked.

  Trix smiled nervously. “I’m getting to that.”

  “Fine. So your grandmother took you to that spot?”

  “And she asked for help—”

  “Why would she—”

  “Just fucking listen!” Trix hissed, eyes full of pain.

  The dad at the next table gave them a nasty look, but Jim stared him down and he finally turned away.

  “I’m sorry,” Trix said, taking a swig of her beer.

  The waitress came and slid a basket of bread between them. Jim waited for her to walk away, then he took a piece and tore off a chunk. “Go on,” he said.

  Trix hesitated, looked at the door, and then squeezed her eyes shut again. “All right. Short version. I’m sorry, it’s just so … Jenny’s the only person I’ve ever told this story, and now when it matters, it’s hard to figure out how to explain.”

  Jim said nothing, just listening. From a speaker set into the ceiling above them, Sinatra sang about coffee. He chewed the bread and found it too dry to swallow, so he chased it down with a sip of water, then more whiskey.

  Opening her eyes, Trix seemed to have come to a decision. “I’ll tell you what my grandmother told me. She said Boston had an Oracle, like in ancient Greece. This woman knew everything about the city.” Trix shook her head. “No, it was more than that. It was like … I don’t remember the words my grandmother used, but it’s like she shares a soul with the city. She knows every brick, right? Every corner. Something happens in Boston, she knows, whether it’s a secret or not. You know that saying about when a tree falls in a forest when there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a noise? The Oracle would hear. So people go to her. If your kid runs away and is still in the city, the Oracle can find him. If someone stole your car and dumped it, she can tell you where they left it. She knows where all the bodies are buried, literally.”

  Jim pushed back into the red vinyl seat. “So how are there still unsolved murders?”

  “You think the cops are going to ask ‘the Oracle of Boston’? Seriously?” Trix said. “It’d be like calling a psychic hot line. They wouldn’t risk their careers.”

  Jim narrowed his eyes, staring at her. “Jesus. And you really believe in this?”

  Trix sipped her beer, glaring at him. “I have to. It’s our only hope. And it worked once before.”

  “It did?”

  “Just listen. My grandmother took me to that spot, and we asked for help finding my grandfather. Then she brought me here. Her friend Celia had told her this was the place—that you asked for help and then you waited at De Pasquale Brothers, which was the name of this place back then. I cried a lot that afternoon, waiting here. Not my grandmother. Her eyes were red but she didn’t cry. The woman looked like her face had turned to stone.” Trix shook her head, gazing at the wall as though she could see through it, back across the years.

  “And?” Jim said. “Did she come? The Oracle?”

  Trix reached up and pushed a matted lock of pink hair from her eyes. “Do you think we’d be sitting here if she didn’t?”

  The waitress arrived and slid the metal pizza tray onto the table. Jim and Trix stared at each other, both drinking, as the woman served them each a slice and then asked if there was anything else she could get them. They both muttered noncommittally, and the waitress hurried off to her next customer.

  “You found your grandfather?”

  Trix took a swig that drained the remains of her Heineken. “He’d been a tailor in Chinatown in his thirties and forties. He was walking up and down Harrison Avenue trying to figure out why the business wasn’t there anymore. He thought he was late for work and had gotten turned around.”

  “And that was where this Oracle woman had told you he would be?”

  Trix glanced at the door. That was answer enough for Jim.

  “This is nuts,” he said.

  She bit into her pizza, chewed, and swallowed that first bite. “If you have a better idea … if you have the first clue what the fuck we should do about this …” She laughed a little crazily and touched her hair. “Please share. Because I don’t think calling Missing Persons is going to bring Jenny and Holly back.”

  As Trix ate, Jim stared at the pizza cooling on his plate. Perhaps two full minutes passed before he picked it up and started to eat, feeling with every bite like he was somehow betraying his wife and daughter by feeding himself. He should have been out on the street, visiting every place they had ever been, or back at home waiting for them to return. But inside, he knew that was foolish.

  Trix caught him staring at her. “What?” she demanded.

  “Just trying to adjust to your new look.”

  Trix shook her hair back. “Me,
too. You know, I’m not the only one who looks different.”

  “What, me?”

  She tapped her eyebrow. “Your scar, from the night you and Jenny went to the U2 concert? It’s gone.”

  Jim reached up and ran his finger across the place where the scar ought to be, but he couldn’t muster shock or even surprise. He’d earned the scar in a quick exchange of fists with an asshole who’d groped Jenny’s ass at the concert. There had been blood in his eyes—the guy wore a ring with a Celtic design—and by the time he’d wiped it away they were all being thrown out. But that had never happened, so there was no scar.

  “You’re in better shape, too,” Trix told him. “Leaner, maybe a little better built. In the car, when you hugged me, I could tell.”

  Now that she mentioned it, he did feel different. For several seconds he studied her again, then he flagged the waitress as she went by. “Another whiskey, please.”

  “Do you want another Heineken, honey?” the waitress asked Trix.

  Trix laughed uneasily. “Damn right.”

  And so they ate and drank and waited, talking very little. There was nothing they could have said that would not have seemed either redundant or ridiculously trivial.

  But when the glasses were empty and they’d eaten their fill—and even after they had ordered coffee and the dregs were cooling—no one had come over to talk to them, and no one Trix recognized had come through the front door. The restaurant had a bar that ran its length, right across from the booth where they sat, and from what Jim could tell there weren’t even any single women there.

  The waitress had brought the check, but they weren’t in a hurry to pay, though they could feel her silently willing them to give up the table. He had to fight the urge to be up and out of there, to be doing something—anything—to find out what had happened to Jenny and Holly. What would he do, Google “vanishing people”? He would get crazy Bermuda Triangle stories and Amelia Earhart.

  Are you sure? he wondered, and realized he wasn’t.

  Another twenty minutes went by, and the waitress had obviously become uncomfortable. If he and Trix had been talking, they wouldn’t have drawn any real attention, but even the bartender kept glancing at them uneasily because they just sat there, waiting.

  “Are you two sure I can’t get you another cup of coffee or another drink?” the waitress asked.

  Jim looked at Trix, who shook her head. “We’re good, thanks,” he told the waitress.

  But this time the woman didn’t go away. She hesitated before speaking.

  “Are you waiting for someone? It’s just, you keep looking at the door.”

  Jim stared at Trix a minute, running his forefinger over the rim of his coffee cup. Then he started to stand. “We’re going,” he said. “I’m sorry we took up the table so long.”

  “No, no,” the waitress said. “No one’s waiting. I just wondered if you needed anything.”

  “Jim,” Trix said, staring at him. “Let’s … please let’s just get another cup of coffee. A little while longer, okay?”

  He glanced at her and then the waitress. “All right,” he said, sitting down. “Decaf.”

  Trix asked for a cappuccino, and when the waitress left them alone, she slid back her chair. “I’ve got to use the bathroom,” she said.

  “Hey,” he said as she started to walk away. “One more cup and then we go.”

  Trix froze, looking back at him. “And then what?”

  Jim stared at his empty cup. “Maybe we wake up in the morning and it’s all back to normal.”

  “Like Scrooge?” Trix said, and it was obvious she did not believe it for a second. “Yeah. Maybe.”

  She headed off toward the back of the restaurant, where a sign painted on the wall pointed the way to the restrooms. Jim fiddled with his cup until the waitress came and refilled it with decaf. As she walked away he poured a little cream and took a sip, flinching at the burn of the hot liquid.

  “May I sit?”

  Jim glanced up, startled to find an old woman standing beside the table.

  She smiled. “I’m sorry. I’m always doing that. My friends tell me I walk on cat feet. I didn’t mean to make you jump.”

  “No, no, I’m fine,” he said, studying her.

  Once she would have been considered tall for a woman—especially in her youth, which must have been sixty years gone, at least—but now age had stooped her so badly that she had lost several inches. Deep wrinkles lined her face with the gentle scars of time. And yet her eyes were a kaleidoscope, hazel flecked with gold, bright and alert and full of humor. She wore her white hair to her shoulders, unlike so many women of advanced age.

  “Can I help you with something?” he asked.

  She smiled. “Quite the contrary, Mr. Banks. May I sit?”

  Jim frowned and glanced toward the bathroom, then focused on the woman again. He was unsettled now. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Now she looked … cross. The perfect word for the disgruntled expression on the old woman’s face. “You’re being quite impolite, James. Or is it Jim? Yes, I suspect it is. Didn’t your mother teach you any manners? It’s rude not to offer an old lady a seat, Jim, especially when she’s already asked for the courtesy.”

  He shook himself and half stood, nodding. “Yes. I’m sorry, please sit down.”

  Quite the contrary. Did that mean she meant to help him? He stared at her as she settled into the spot Trix had vacated in the booth.

  She laughed softly. “Ah, yes. Now you’re thinking, ‘The old hag doesn’t look especially magical.’ Or something like that. Though perhaps not ‘hag.’ Not from you.”

  He started to protest and glanced toward the back of the restaurant again.

  “Don’t worry. Trix will be along in a minute or two. I’m so sorry to have kept you waiting, but it couldn’t be helped, I’m afraid. It’s been quite a busy day. A young man in Jamaica Plain needed to prove that his great-great-grandfather had never deeded a piece of property to the city that … well, never mind. I had to guide the young man to the original deed, and the hundred-year lease, which was all the city had.”

  Part of Jim wanted to laugh in her face. It was such a cliché, wasn’t it? The wise old woman, like some kind of Gypsy fortune-teller. But she wore a jacket and skirt ensemble that must have cost seven or eight hundred dollars, easily, and her haircut hadn’t come cheaply, either. This was no sideshow crystal-ball gazer.

  A scam, then? Had Trix set him up somehow?

  But the instant he had the thought, he pushed it away. Trix’s anguish was genuine, and so was her hope. Which left only one possibility.

  “Jesus,” Jim whispered, staring at the woman. “You’re for real.”

  When the Oracle of Boston smiled in delight, it took a dozen years off her face. “Oh, excellent,” she said. “It’s refreshing to meet someone who just dives right in. Saves time as well.” She held out her hand. “Veronica Braden.”

  Jim shook her hand, not at all surprised by the firmness of her grip. He took a ragged breath, only then realizing that he had stopped breathing for a moment. The hours that had passed since this afternoon when he had woken from his nap had been a long nightmare, but Trix had been right to chide him for his doubt. The impossible had turned his world upside down and ripped away all that he loved. He would waste no more time with what was possible and what was not.

  “You make it hard enough to meet you.”

  “I enjoy the … tradition of the process.”

  “So, can you find them?” Jim asked, a heavy question. “Do you know where they are?”

  “Ah,” Veronica said, arching a brow, kaleidoscope eyes alight with secret knowledge. She smiled, and Jim knew she harbored secrets. “Those are two different questions. Finding Jennifer and Holly is not the same as knowing where they are.”

  Jim put a hand over his mouth as though afraid the wrong words would come out. The waitress arrived with Trix’s cappuccino. She glanced at them oddly, but Jim gestured for he
r to put the cup down and she did, casting a curious look over her shoulder as she retreated once more. “I don’t understand,” Jim said quietly.

  “You will.” Veronica touched his hand, and her hand was cool. Then she picked up Trix’s cappuccino and drained half the cup in three long sips.

  “That was—”

  “She won’t have time to drink it,” Veronica said, sliding her chair back. “Come along.”

  As the Oracle rose, the illusion of vitality dropped away. She moved stiffly but with a kind of imperious air; perhaps she had earned it. Her hand shook as she gestured toward him. “Pay the bill, dear. And leave a nice tip for your server. New girl. Only been here a few weeks, and she needs the reassurance as much as the money. Terrible job, having to smile at people all the time.”

  Jim obeyed, sliding the cash from his wallet and tucking it into the faux-leather binder in which the bill had arrived.

  “And here she is now,” Veronica said, her voice an aged rasp.

  As Jim put his wallet back into his pocket he looked up to see that Trix had frozen in the middle of Abruzzi’s, staring at Veronica. Other diners had started to turn to watch the scene unfold. Jim noticed that some people—staff and regulars—seemed to be very studiously avoiding looking at them at all. He wondered how many times they had seen Veronica Braden arrive here to help people in need. People in pain.

  “You came,” Trix managed, fighting back a sob. Tears slid down her face, and she did not bother to wipe them away. “I wasn’t sure you were even still alive.”

  “If not me, then someone else,” Veronica said, ignoring the eyes upon her. “Now, come along, Trixie. We don’t have all night.”

  Cruel Mistress

  IN THE old days,” Veronica said, slipping into the Mercedes’ front passenger seat without asking Trix if she minded sitting in the back, “we’d have had to wait until morning. All the shops closed at a decent time then. Life was less frantic. Now people want twenty-four-hour everything. TV, takeout. Clothes shopping. Things are changing.”