“Honey,” Jim whispered into his daughter’s ear, and she pulled back slightly and looked up at him.
“I know,” she said. “It’s time for you to help Mommy.”
“And you’re going to stay here, be my good little girl.” He glanced at Sally, watching him talk to his daughter. “And look after Sally for me. She’s very tired, and a little sad.”
Holly looked at the Oracle, then sighed. “Daddy,” she said, “don’t be silly. She’s like … magic. She’ll be looking after me.”
He laughed, and Jennifer smiled at him. “Clever little girl you’ve got there,” she said.
“You don’t know the half of it.” He wondered what Jennifer must think, knowing that this girl shared her DNA yet was not her daughter. And he realized that after this, nothing would ever be the same again. From this day forward, the merged city of Boston would become the focus of every media outlet, and every scientist. It would be the most famous, most heavily scrutinized place in the world, and thousands of people’s lives would be changed. Some of the changes would be obvious and immediately apparent—there would be lots of people vying for the same property, existing in the same space. But many more changes would be hidden away, perhaps forever. There were plenty of bodies in the streets and buried under collapsed buildings, but yesterday’s collision must have wiped out many people from reality. Bloodlines had ended, without ever having existed at all.
Across the world, ripples from this incredible, terrible event had changed situations beyond counting.
“You have to go now,” Sally said. Her eyes were still closed and she remained seated, but something about her had hardened. Perhaps it was her stronger voice, or the squaring of her shoulders.
Jim stood, still grasping his daughter’s hand. The idea of Jenny fading away was terrible, and the thought of her becoming one of those faceless shadow-things was beyond comprehension.
“Are you ready?” Sally asked.
“Are you?” She looked wasted to Jim; he was afraid for her, and of her.
“I can do what I need to do,” Sally said. “It’s all of you who matter. If you don’t get back and stop Veronica, what happened here will be only the beginning. This won’t be”—she stood, pushing herself up the wall and shrugging her shoulders—“pleasant.”
Jim and Jennifer stood near Holly, and Trix and Anne came to stand with them, facing away from the bodies that Trix and Anne had dragged across to one wall. Smears of blood glistened on the floor. Holly had her back resolutely to the corpses as well, and Jim’s heart broke for her. Even if this all ends well, she’s changed forever, he thought, and his little girl smiled up at him sadly.
“You know what you’ve gotta do,” Sally said, standing before them. “The only way to hide you from the In-Between is to fool it into thinking you’re already a part of it. Being turned into a shadow would weaken you pretty badly, even at the beginning. And you’ll need all your strength in there. So I’m going to lend you souls not yet born.”
“So Jenny, now?” Jim asked.
“After this time, I suspect she’s in a sort of coma,” Sally said. “Which is good, because it will protect her. A little.”
Trix exhaled loudly. “Okay. I’m ready. But I’ve gotta say, it’s freaking me out something huge.”
Jim nodded. He felt the same way. Sally wanted to merge them with her No-Face Men, masking their humanity with those wraiths’ potential existence. Hopefully like that, the In-Between would not affect them. At least, not right away. “Are you sure this is going to work?” he asked Sally.
The young Oracle shrugged. “I guess. I mean, it’s been done before, but not by me. You should be able to stay merged with them for a little while without it affecting you too much. I’m not sure for how long, but long enough for you to …” She waved at the expanse of wall through which the Shadow Men had tried to pull Anne.
“What’s ‘too much’?” Trix asked.
“I don’t know,” Sally said. “I’ve never done this before.”
“Will we be able to lose them afterward?” Jim asked.
“You will,” Sally said. “I’ll tell you how. Show you.” She was vague, and quiet.
“All right,” Trix said. She looked at Anne and they squeezed each other’s hands. “If we’re going, let’s get going. Me first.”
Sally shifted her hand by her side, and a No-Face Man came forward, a shadow floating through pools of artificial light. “Try and keep still,” Sally said. “And don’t fight it.”
Trix nodded, then let go of Anne’s hand and crossed her arms on her chest.
Jim’s first impulse was to shout out and help his friend because he could see that she was in pain. Her face screwed up—but she uttered no sound—as Sally grasped at the amorphous No-Face Man and pressed him to Trix’s side. Trix did not move or flinch, but her expression betrayed the discomfort she was feeling as Sally kneaded and pressed, clasping handfuls of shadow and pressing it against her clothing, her skin. The little girl’s face was set in concentration, and her lips moved as she muttered some unheard incantation, eyes fluttering, cheeks flushing. She grasped and pushed, and it was almost as if she was trying to mold Trix and the No-Face Man together. As the wraith reduced, so Trix’s discomfort seemed to grow.
“You’re hurting her,” Jim said, but it was Holly’s hand squeezing his that silenced him. My little girl’s giving me comfort, he thought, and a darkness opened in him because of things she had already seen. He hated the idea of Holly becoming as unnaturally precocious as Sally.
Perhaps something about what she was doing became easier, because Sally seemed to speed up. Her hands grasped and pressed, her arms windmilled, and soon she was snatching at the air to retrieve the few dregs of the No-Face Man that remained. At last she stood back, breathing heavily and yet seemingly invigorated by what she had done—eyes glinting, skin flushed and shining.
Trix opened her eyes and looked around. Her pupils were darker than Jim had ever seen them, like pits into nothing.
“Trix?” he asked. She blinked a few times, gathering her personality back to her, finding herself again.
“Fucking hell,” she said.
“Okay,” Sally said, waving her hand and calling forth another. “Who’s next?”
Trix watched Anne, Jennifer, and then Jim go through the process, and all the time she was coming to terms with what she had become. Memories flitted at her like vague recollections of long-ago dreams, and even this distant there was a terrifying alienness to them. She often could not remember what she had dreamed the night before, but a nightmare from when she was four years old—falling from a cliff with her mother, Trix flying, her mother striking the ground and dying—was etched on her memory. These memories felt like secondhand dreams remembered by someone else. They were not only memories that did not belong, but the way they were remembered was all wrong as well. She was recalling someone else’s life, long lost to the In-Between.
Trix supposed she should have felt pity, but she was too scared for that. And too determined.
As each of the other three were merged with a No-Face Man, she witnessed them going through the same strange, disconcerting experience. Jennifer cried, reaching for Jim’s hand. Anne stood strong, her gaze never diverting from Trix’s eyes. And Jim barely seemed to flinch. He’d go through hell to get his Jenny back, Trix thought, and she glanced at Anne, thinking that fate had changed everything.
Finally they stood there, altered and yet the same.
“I still see Jim,” Trix said. “And Jennifer, and Anne. I see that they’re different, but—”
“The In-Between needs no eyes,” Sally said. “I can see …” She closed her eyes, frowned, and opened them again, muttering under her breath. “I see you all faded away.”
Trix shivered and looked down at her hands, turning them over. She knew the backs of her hands, and yet the nails now seemed to seep something blank, like an invisible mist that wiped shreds of reality from view. She blew, but the mist did not
disperse.
“Trust me,” Sally said. “Don’t concern yourself with what’s happened, or how different you might be or feel. It’s worked, and it’ll protect you. And you’ll be too busy in there to try to understand.”
“Bugs the crap out of me,” Anne said, wringing her hands together and then pulling them slowly apart. Trix smiled, her heart quickening.
“Go fast,” Holly said. She was holding on to Jim and looking at the other three. “Please go fast.”
“We’ll be faster than fast,” Trix said.
“One more thing,” Sally said. “Pass by me; I can do this while you go.” She held on to Holly’s other hand, and they looked nothing like two little girls.
Jim went first, and Sally muttered strange words as she reached up and touched his face with her free hand. Jennifer and Anne followed, and then Trix grasped the Oracle’s hand and gasped softly. For a moment Holly was a part of her—laughing in her mind, giggling as they walked together through Boston, hugged together on a sofa watching her favorite movie, Lilo & Stitch. And as Sally let go and her eyes widened just a little, Trix smiled at Holly. “Our bond is already strong,” she said. “I’ll never let you down, Holly.”
“Thanks, Auntie Trix,” the girl said.
They stood at the wall, and Trix looked back at the two girls in the center of the ruined room, with blood spattered all about and bodies against the far wall. But she knew more than to ask if they would be all right. “See you soon,” she said to both of them, and she was the first to reach for the door handle.
As the door opened, there was a gasp. Trix thought it had come from the other three, but then a waft of air passed her, seemingly drifting both ways, and for a moment she became utterly disoriented. She smelled something old and base, her ears sang with unknown whispers, and she was not sure whether her eyes were open or closed.
At first glance, the room around her—the Reflection Room beyond the door—looked quite normal, not part of another world at all. And then she realized that there was something strange about it. She stared, closed her eyes and smelled, then tried to just listen, and it took a while to identify what was wrong. This room is dead, she thought, and the idea chilled her. Even the wood in the floor had never been part of a living thing. The room was paused, not frozen like a picture, but caught in a gap between moments. It was nowhere a living thing could feel at home.
She walked quickly toward the opposite wall, and before she reached it her surroundings misted away to nothing. As she took several more steps, the floor beneath her changed to something softer. She looked down and saw an uncertain surface, her feet suspended on a vaporous layer. Stamping, she felt no reverberation, and very little impact.
“We’re in the In-Between,” she said, and though it was muffled, she was pleased that she could hear her own voice. She turned around to see the others coming through the door, and the wall behind her had vanished.
Everything behind her had vanished.
There was mist. Up and down were dictated only by the way she stood, but there was little else to distinguish it. And yet there must have been a firm ground, and some rule of three-dimensional order, because she could see Anne, Jennifer, and Jim, all of them standing in the same plane. They were shadows in the mist, vague shapes that she saw better when she looked to their left or right.
“Trix?” she heard, unsure who was calling.
“Here!” She waved her arms. It felt like someone else waved with her, a shadow echoing her movements. A shape came closer, and Jim emerged from the mist, moisture speckling his unshaven face. Jennifer came next, then Anne hurried to them, footfalls silent, her fearful expression shocking as she emerged into view.
“What is this?” Anne asked.
“The In-Between,” Jim said. “The space between worlds.”
“How the hell are we supposed to find her in here?” Jennifer asked.
Jim closed the distance between him and Jennifer, standing so close that their arms touched. Trix wasn’t sure it was even a conscious movement. “We walk,” Jim said. He turned away from them all and looked back the way they had come. Trix knew it was that direction, because she could feel Holly’s influence there, like a beacon in the darkness.
“We walk,” Trix repeated. “But can you feel …?”
They all nodded, because they knew what she meant. The air of this place was awash with malevolence, and as she inhaled and exhaled, she sensed the shadow inside her settling as it became one with the In-Between again. It smelled of stale cotton candy, and tasted of something rotten.
Without the shadow, the air would be harmful to her. It would start to bleed her of spirit and turn her into one of them, and she’d seen enough to know that their existence was not something to relish. Perhaps there would be no pain, but an unconscious limbo seemed worse than anything she could imagine. In the In-Between, possessing a mind—thoughts, desires, history—seemed the most important thing of all.
“Come on!” Trix said, suddenly desperate for Jenny and fearing that they might already be too late. “We don’t walk, we run! Hope you’ve all been keeping in shape.” She started running, and the others followed.
There was no concept of distance, other than by counting paces, but from the beginning Trix was certain they were going the right way. Jennifer and Anne passed her and subtly adjusted their direction. Jim followed with Trix, and the two facets of Jenny started moving faster, loping through the mists as something drew them on.
They saw their first Shadow Man, and it shocked Trix to the core. Outside, dragged through into one of the real worlds, these things were horrific enough. But here in the In-Between their monstrousness was more shocking because of its familiarity. In her world they were shapes that barely echoed humanity, but here they were tortured people, naked forms that twisted and writhed through the mists, limbs bending farther than they should, heads twisting and flipping so fast that they were a blur. They moved without walking, their agonies giving them a terrible momentum. And after seeing the first few, she feared that the next one they’d see would be Jenny.
I’ll know her, Trix thought, because each of these tortured souls possessed human traits and marks. Some were tattooed, others scarred, and hair color and build were distinguishable even through their pained contortions. As they saw another manifesting from the mists, she dreaded seeing Jenny’s hair, her face.
A larger shadow marred the blankness ahead of them, then emerged as a shape with square edges and features she finally recognized. It was Trinity Church, solid across this In-Between because it existed in all three Bostons.
Anne and Jennifer did not even pause. Wherever Jenny was, she drew them on.
Time lost meaning, its only evidence the urgency Trix felt. They passed another building in the distance that seemed solid, and then they entered a park whose plants were barely there, and whose small buildings seemed composed of drifting, shifting structures. Trix’s No-Face Man seemed uncomfortable in this place, and her own senses were repulsed by their surroundings. She glanced at Jim and saw that he was equally disturbed.
They did not pause to see what that place was, or why it had such an effect. As they left and entered the nowhere spaces in between, her No-Face Man settled again into the echo he had been. She could never get used to him, but at least this way she felt in control.
“Close,” Jennifer called, her voice robbed of its tone by the mist.
“Very,” Anne agreed. She looked back at Trix without breaking her stride, and with a burst of speed Trix and Jim drew closer to the two women.
And then Trix heard something in the distance. It was a soft, gentle moan, like wind gusting through an empty woodland. It rose and fell, raising a shiver like ice in her soul. Anne and Jennifer paused, and with their heads cocked they reminded Trix so much of Jenny that she let out a sob.
“We’ll save her,” Jim said, and it was ridiculous that he was comforting her.
“I know we will,” she said, because any other outcome was unthinkable.<
br />
The moaning grew in volume as they ran on again. Trix felt a tugging inside her, something that set her No-Face Man squirming, an uncomfortable sensation as if suddenly her skin could not contain her body. The tugging came from behind her, and she sent a message she hoped Holly might hear: We’re close, and soon we’ll be back with your mother.
And then they saw the lonely shape in the mists, and Trix’s heart broke. Anne and Jennifer stopped, sending shadowy ripples through the heavy air. Jim slowed, moving past them before coming to a halt. None of them could take in the pain they saw in the woman they loved, or the woman they were a part of.
“We can’t just fucking stand here,” Trix whispered, and in that silent place it seemed that her words might travel forever. She approached Jenny and saw how much had already happened. Naked, writhing, she did not twist and flex as much as the other changed people she had seen but rather seemed to swim in the air, limbs kicking and clawing at the strange misty atmosphere.
“Jenny!” Trix said, grabbing her arms and holding her still. The recognition in Jenny’s eyes was instant and shocking, because it spoke of such pain.
“H … H … H …,” Jenny said, panting.
Trix nodded, angrily wiping a sudden tear from her eye. “Holly’s fine,” she said. “She’s waiting for you.”
“Can you stand, babe?” Jim said. He was beside Trix now, touching his wife’s arms, her shoulders, wiping a slick of gray wetness from her stomach and chest.
“I … I …” Jenny’s eyes rolled, her body shook, and Trix saw shadows flickering from the corners of her mouth and ears, tendrils flowing inward rather than out.
“She’s a long way gone,” Trix said. She turned back to Jennifer and Anne. “Come on. We’re going to have to carry her.”
Jim lifted his wife beneath her arms and held her against him, taking the hug she could not give. Her body rippled and shook from the forces assaulting it, and shadows manifested from nowhere to flow into her. How long until she’s filled up? Trix wondered, and she stood beside Jim and offered help.
The Shadow Men Page 26
