The Shadow Men

by Christopher Golden

  “She’d have figured out something was badly amiss,” Trix said. “Felt something wrong. Maybe she saw something that scared her away from familiar places.”

  “But your place? She would have gone looking for you.”

  “And she wouldn’t have found me. The odds of us finding her and Holly standing on the sidewalk in front of my building when we got there are about a kabillion to one.” Trix tugged his hand a little, forcing him to meet her gaze. “You heard what Mr. O’Brien said. He’s going to find them. But there are preparations to be made, and one of those is for us to rest a little so we can focus.”

  “You think I can sleep?”

  Trix cocked her head. “You think I can? Listen, we’ll go crazy if we just pace the room while we’re waiting for our Irish Oracle friend to get his shit together. It’s not doing Jenny and Holly any good. Just lie down with me for a little while. Rest your eyes. Seriously. It’s dusty, but it feels good to lie down.”

  Still, Jim seemed reluctant.

  “Show me what you were sketching,” Trix said, pointing at the notepad he’d left on his chair.

  Finally, given a task to perform, Jim seemed to step back from the frantic edge he had been teetering on. He snatched up the pad and brought it to her, sitting on the edge of the mattress.

  Trix stared at the shaded pencil drawing of the view from that window, the row houses across the street from O’Brien’s Bar and the taller buildings in the distance, the church steeples, the old stone contrasting strangely with the sleekly modern buildings that the Irish-influenced Boston must have built only in the past decade or two.

  Jim kicked off his shoes and slid into bed beside her, sighing as he propped himself up on his elbow to study the drawing with her. “Look familiar?” he asked.

  Trix tried to ignore the cold knot forming in her stomach. “You know it does.”

  She had dreamed this city dozens of times. In her disturbed dreams, she had walked its dark streets. If she went out right now, she thought she might be able to find her way almost anywhere without a map or directions. Those strange journeys had always felt like more to her, as though she had actually traveled, truly explored the intimidating city and learned its secret ways and corners.

  “To me, too,” Jim said.

  Though his dreams were never as clear or memorable as hers, Jim had done his own sleepwalking, taken journeys to this Irish-hued Boston, as well as another. Now, though, he didn’t need to paint from the memories of dreams.

  Trix stared at the sketch. “Crazy.”

  “Yeah,” Jim agreed.

  Trix set the pad on the nightstand and slid farther under the bedclothes, nestling her head on the soft pillow. “Rest,” she said.

  “What do we have, an hour or so before O’Brien said he’d come get us?”

  “About that.”

  Relenting at last, Jim put his head on the pillow, but he lay on his back and stared at the ceiling. Trix scooted closer to him and put a hand on his chest, closing her eyes, exhaustion a blanket wrapped warmly around her. Fear and hope chased each other’s tails in the back of her mind, but she tried to block them out.

  “Do you think—” Jim began.

  “Hush,” Trix said. “Rest. We’ll find them. I promise.”

  That seemed to mollify him, if only for the moment. She felt him take a deep breath, and when he exhaled he seemed to relax somewhat. The window was open and a cool breeze drifted through, rustling the curtains and carrying the sounds of distant engines. The Banks clan were like a family to her. Holly might as well have been her niece. Trix and Jim were in this together. Lying there with him, she felt closer to him than she ever had before. She could feel his heart pounding in his chest as he tried to calm himself.

  “Not exactly the member of the family I would’ve thought I’d end up sleeping with,” Trix mumbled into her pillow.

  Jim laughed softly, then a little louder, and then he leaned over to kiss her forehead and pulled her closer. Sharing their warmth—and their hope and fear—they lay together and began to surrender to weariness.

  Trix glanced over at the night-darkened window. Somewhere out there, in this foreign Boston, Jenny and Holly were scared and alone. Or were they? The one thing she and Jim had not yet discussed was the possibility that his girls weren’t in this Boston at all, but in the other—the third, Brahmin Boston. Trix couldn’t even consider it. They were here. They had to be, because though Veronica had shown them the trick to seeing the thin places between cities, she wasn’t sure they would really be able to cross over when the need arose.

  We’re coming, Trix thought, her cheek resting on Jim’s chest. Help is on the way.

  As sleep claimed her, she smiled sadly at the irony.

  Jim woke to the sound of shattering glass. The room seemed to tilt for a moment as he battled the dislocation of waking in a strange place. He looked around wildly, saw that the windows were intact, the door still closed, nothing at all out of the ordinary except that he was in a strange bed in a strange room with a half-naked lesbian who happened to be one of his dearest friends.

  “What just happened?” Trix murmured sleepily, propping herself up.

  Jim shook his head, wondering the same thing. If it had woken her as well, then it hadn’t been a dream, which meant the sound had come from nearby. Outside? Maybe. Downstairs? Also maybe.

  He crawled out of bed, gesturing for her to remain, and to be quiet.

  “Fuck that,” Trix whispered. Of course she did. It was Trix. Jim should have known better.

  As he slipped his shoes on and Trix dragged on her pants, they heard a muffled shout coming from the bar downstairs. O’Brien’s voice, raised in fury. A pounding noise began, like the fist of God knocking on the front door, and the whole building shook in time to that awful rhythm. A crack appeared in the wall, running from the upper edge of the door frame to the corner of the room.

  “What the hell is that?” Jim whispered, not sure if Trix would hear him over the noise—not really sure if he was even talking to her.

  Trix had one shoe on and the other one in her right hand as she hurried past him to the door.

  “Wait,” Jim said.

  “For what?” Trix asked, spinning on him, eyes wide with fear.

  More glass shattered downstairs, and Jim pictured the shelves of hard liquor behind the bar being smashed to the floor. There’d been a big mirror there as well. He glanced at the window, wishing there was a fire escape out there so they could go down and survey the fracas from outside.

  “Weapons,” he said. “We’re not going down there empty-handed.”

  Trix put on her other shoe. “There’s an iron on the top shelf in the bathroom.”

  Jim picked up the heavy crystal lamp from the bedside table, pulled off the shade, and yanked the cord out of the wall. He glanced at Trix and nodded for her to go ahead, and she turned the knob and swung the door inward.

  Out in the corridor, Jim went for the door that led downstairs to the bar. Trix raced into the bathroom and emerged holding the iron Peter O’Brien had probably used for years to take the wrinkles out of his clothes. It seemed all too mundane a detail to exist in the same reality as the shouting and the noises of destruction from below.

  A roar of pain rose from the bar, becoming a scream. The pounding stopped in a violent splintering of wood, and Peter O’Brien’s voice fell silent.

  Trix slipped up beside Jim, reaching out to stop him from opening the door. “What the hell are we doing?” she whispered.

  She didn’t need to explain. Jim wondered the same thing. From the sound of it, whatever was going on downstairs wasn’t some simple bar fight.

  “He’s our best chance of finding them!” Jim whispered back.

  Trix nervously licked her lips, then nodded.

  Jim tore the door open and burst through it, running down the stairs, wielding the crystal lamp like a club. Trix came right behind him. He had a moment to wonder if she was thinking what he was thinking—that they w
ere batshit crazy, that these were piss-poor weapons—and then the silence in the bar was broken by a human voice. It might have been O’Brien’s, but the big Irishman sounded very small now. “Don’t,” the voice pleaded. “You’ll destroy it all.”

  As they hit the curve in the stairwell, the words were punctuated with a terrible crash. Jim leaped the last few steps—there was no door, only an archway leading into the bar—and as he stepped into O’Brien’s, music started to play. Flogging Molly’s “Cruel Mistress.” He knew it well.

  “Jesus,” Trix whispered as she stepped into the bar behind him.

  The place was a ruin of overturned tables, broken chairs, and shattered glass, but Jim only got a glimpse of the wreckage—and the blood on the brass bar rail—before he noticed something shift near the huge square saw-toothed space where the plate-glass front window had once been. A figure stood amid the shattered glass, the puzzle of partially painted fragments that had once spelled out O’BRIEN’S in green and gold among them. Taller than a man, it was nevertheless shaped like one. A silver shadow, it seemed to have simply appeared there, standing atop the debris.

  No. It was there, he thought. You just didn’t see it at first.

  “What are they?” Trix asked, her voice a fearful rasp.

  Jim blinked, and he saw that she was right. Beyond the demolished front of the bar, two more of the wraiths stood out in the street, faceless silhouettes who seemed somehow still to be looking at him and Trix. Shadows fell upon the smooth slopes of their faces, suggesting eyes and mouth where there were none, only minor ridges that hinted at noses. They were the memories of men, all personality torn away.

  Fear clenched at his gut, but Jim took two steps toward the thing still inside the bar, feeling the weight of the crystal lamp in his hand. “Who the hell are you?” he asked, though he thought that Trix’s what was indeed a better question.

  In the distance, sirens wailed, coming nearer. Jim held his breath. For the first time since he had fled a high school keg party where weed and coke had been in plentiful supply, he feared the arrival of the police. In this world, he and Trix didn’t even exist. They were the ultimate illegal aliens.

  “Why did you do this?” Trix shouted at them.

  The music from the jukebox changed to the Von Bondies’ “C’mon, C’mon,” and Jim glanced toward the source and nearly retched. Peter O’Brien’s lower torso and legs stuck out from beneath the heavy machinery, its glass case spiderwebbed with cracks but somehow not caved in.

  “Jim!” Trix cried.

  He turned, raising the lamp, thinking he had to defend himself, but she hadn’t shouted because they were under attack. She’d yelled in surprise.

  The wraiths were gone.

  “Did you see which way they went?” Jim asked, taking a few steps toward the front of the bar, glass crunching underfoot.

  Trix didn’t move. “I’m not sure they went anywhere.”

  Jim glanced over his shoulder at her. “What?”

  She gestured with the iron. “They just … moved. First the one inside. Like it took a step and just … walked out of the world. Then the others went, too. How the hell do we know they’re really gone?”

  Jim stared at the spot on the partially painted glass fragments where the first wraith had been standing. He moved to the left, trying to look at the space from different angles, but saw nothing. His heart pounded in his chest, full of fear of something he couldn’t see.

  The sirens grew louder. A dog barked. Inside the bar, liquor dripped from broken bottles and beer from busted taps. The smell of it filled the place. A cold weight settled on his heart. This might not be his Boston, but it was not make-believe. This was a real city, with ordinary people who lived ordinary lives. He would have given anything to be one of them again—anything but the family he had lost. They were worth any sacrifice. “Screw it,” he said, dropping the crystal lamp, which broke apart when it hit the floor.

  He walked toward O’Brien’s broken body. The racks of liquor bottles behind the bar had been decimated. Half of the mirror had fallen away, and the rest clung to the wall like the blade of a guillotine. The brass bar rail was bent and smeared with O’Brien’s blood, and red splashes of his life dotted the wooden floor.

  “What now?” Trix said, and he heard a thunk behind him as she cast aside the iron. The optimism she had been trying so hard to project had been forgotten. “Jim, we’ve got to get out of here. We can’t afford to be questioned by the cops.”

  “We’re going,” Jim said. But he made no move to leave. Instead, he moved closer to the Oracle of this Irish Boston, picturing Peter O’Brien’s face, still hearing the amiable bear of a man’s voice in his head. A couple of hours, that was all he had said he needed, and then he would have tracked down Jenny and Holly. How many years, even decades, had this man been the Oracle? And then within an hour or two of them showing up he was dead.

  Oh, you bitch, Jim had heard him say, and he looked around for the letter, keen to see what it had contained.

  O’Brien’s legs shifted.

  “Jesus!” Jim shouted, staggering backward.

  “Did he just move?” Trix asked, freaking out.

  “Definitely,” Jim said.

  O’Brien shifted again. His skull and upper chest had been crushed beneath the jukebox. No way could he survive that. Almost as if Jim had wished him dead, O’Brien’s legs settled and went still, and he knew that what they had just seen had been the man’s final throes.

  Trix grabbed his arm. “Jim. We have to go!”

  He nodded, backing away. Together they hurried to the door, only to find it locked from the inside. The wraiths had come in through the plate-glass window, with its painted letters and stylized shamrock. Jim unlocked the door and tugged it open, and he and Trix slipped out of the bar.

  Along the street, the first police car sped around the corner.

  “Don’t run,” Trix snapped.

  Taking his hand, she led him away from the bar as though they were lovers out for a stroll. But Jim saw faces at windows, and people standing on the opposite sidewalk—it must be near last call by now, but they had spilled out of Dwyer’s New Dublin Pub just up the street—and already fingers were being pointed. Some of the spectators were shouting questions at them. A couple of them, wearing Boston Celtics basketball jerseys, started crossing the street.

  “We waited too long,” Jim said, knowing that every moment they weren’t spending trying to find Jenny and Holly, the trail was getting that much colder.

  Trix squeezed his hand. “Okay. Now we run.”

  And that was when the earthquake hit.

  Trix put her hands out as if learning to surf. The street bucked hard beneath their feet, then harder still. This was no mere tremor. Panicked people flooded from Dwyer’s New Dublin, across the street. The ground lurched up and then dropped, again and again, as though some wicked toddler had made it his toy and intended to shake it until it broke. The police car skidded to a halt, slewing sideways as a rift opened in the pavement.

  Glass shattered all around them. Alarms pealed. Masonry cracked. A fire hydrant less than ten feet from Trix exploded, water spouting upward, showering around them. A piece of the hydrant flew past her head and shattered the rear windshield of a parked car. Jim grabbed her wrist and tugged her back toward O’Brien’s.

  “No!” she shouted, but her voice was drowned out by the roar and rumble of the earth.

  He tried to tell her something, but all she could make out was “… outside wall!” Still, she understood. In an earthquake, the safest place inside a building was next to an object that might be crushed—a table or bed—and not beneath it. But outside, in a built-up area, curling against a building’s outer wall might prevent them from being injured. Even if the wall fell, it would likely not collapse right down to ground level. And between the fallen wall and what was left of its base, a triangle of life.

  Jim tried to pull her toward the building. People screamed. Trix spotted a little yell
ow dog chasing its tail on the sidewalk up the street. The world continued to buck and crack, so long now that she feared it would never end. A hundred yards along the street, a traffic light toppled onto a swerving minivan, which careened through the front window of a pharmacy.

  Beyond where the light had fallen, the three faceless men who had killed O’Brien stood watching her and Jim, motionless, as though the quake could not move them. The moment she noticed them it was as though her perception changed, and she saw others—one standing in front of a hat shop, another crouched on the second-story ledge of an apartment house. The world shook, but the faceless men remained impassive, only watching as Boston tore itself apart … again.

  Shit, is that what this is? she wondered. Is it splintering again?

  When part of the street gave way, the sewer cracking open like some ravenous maw, Trix decided Jim had a point. She gave in so abruptly that it was she who pulled him back against O’Brien’s. Even the illusion of safety was better than this chaos. A fissure split the sidewalk only feet from where they’d been standing a moment before. Jim held her tight, and Trix pulled him down until they sat, leaning against each other.

  The ground heaved up beneath them. Trix struck her head on the masonry; Jim squeezed her hand. The whole world roared, and behind them the ceiling inside O’Brien’s gave way, the second-story apartment crashing down into the ruin of the bar, burying the city’s Oracle in the rubble of his life.

  The shaking eased, the ground steadied, but Trix still listed to one side, staggered by the sudden ending of the quake. The street sang to cries of anguish and the pointless blaring of alarms. Fires bloomed in the distance. She heard several dull thumps and wondered whether they were gas-main explosions.

  “Is it over?” Trix asked, standing. Jim held her hand, and they both took a shaky step away from the building.

  “Careful,” Jim said. “There could be—”

  Later, Trix would be sure the next word had been meant to be “aftershocks,” but Jim never had a chance to say it.