Shadowboxer (30 page)

I was mad as hell but I couldn’t do Fuck All.

That’s when this weird fogginess came over my vision. I was so angry that at first I thought I couldn’t see straight, but it wasn’t that. The room was distorting, just like that time in New York when the buildings changed to trees. In my peripheral vision the masks and statues began to shift a little. To breathe. The other forest was close by. Flowers, vines, bark. I could feel the rain and the Himalayan snows and the bottom of the river where nagas swam. I could feel it just as if the forest was inside of
me
.

Richard Fuller opened a cupboard and took out a bottle and something that looked like a Bunsen burner from high school. He moved into the middle of the covered porch, moving slowly and with an air of great concentration.

‘I have completed my work on the medicine,’ he told her. ‘We will do this tonight. I will enter you as a smoke. All of my knowledge will be yours. All of my ambitions. We will join forces. I will lead you high in the world. You need never fear for your family, not after this. Together, you and I will be powerful and untraceable.’

I saw her eyes. I couldn’t read her. Did she believe him?

‘I am not afraid,’ he said softly. ‘My life as I know it will end. My body will die—and I will escape any investigation that would put me in prison. But you, Mya. You will gain immeasurably.’

He said he wasn’t afraid, but his hand shook as he struck a light.

‘Stay back, Thiri,’ Mya said to the other girl.

Mr. Richard began mixing his medicines. He heated a liquid over a flame, and it began to smoke. With my altered eyes I could see his body beginning to break down like a digital image. Where the smoke touched him, he was pixillating, turning into light...

‘Mya, don’t do this. Take your sister and run for it!’

She ignored me. Her eyes were closed. Her lips didn’t move, but she held her hands in the pose for meditation, or prayer. I hoped she was praying for the same thing I was.

The trees were full of life. The night moved.

I could feel it. The forest was here, and it was bringing its own consciousness. Eyes like jewels formed tiny windows looking out from the jungle. Ghosts.

Richard Fuller’s spirit body surrounded him like a rainbow. It began to drift towards Mya, a hungry cloud. She kept her eyes shut.

‘Mya, please...’

‘Jade, you must have
jai yen
,’ she whispered.

Jai yen,
my ass. I needed some kind of weapon. Where was Kala Sriha now?

Mr. Richard’s spirit surrounded Mya now. Light coruscated off her as though the surface of her were made of moving water. His body sagged, his eyes flickering white as they rolled up in his head. I could see the outlines of his bones.

‘Kala Sriha,’ I prayed. ‘We got this far together. I’m asking you, please don’t abandon Mya now.’

A living thing was coming out of the forest. The creature was forming out of light and shadow that solidified as it passed out of the forest and into the porch. Trailing vines and moths, the shadow took the shape of a dog. I could see its bottleglass green eyes and I could feel its ribs move as it barked. When it entered the porch its head burst open, turning inside out like a piece of popcorn until it had changed into an elephant’s head before our eyes.

Richard Fuller saw the dog-elephant and let out a startled yelp. The old dude’s concentration was broken, and the rainbow light around Mya began to disperse. The dog had changed fully into an elephant and took up most of the porch. Other animals were coming now, shifting forms as they arrived.

‘Now, children,’ he said to the strange creatures, licking his lips. ‘You know you are not permitted to come to this world.’

Yeah, right. Like he could do anything about it. More creatures burst out of the forest. A winged snake wound down from the branches above. I saw its head become a unicorn’s head; then it seemed to change its mind and went back to being something like a dragon with no legs.

The animals were all familiar from paintings and statues I’d seen in Thailand—creatures that were a mix of parts of different animals. It never occurred to me until now that the artwork might not be meant to show an elephant-headed dog, but instead a dog that could become an elephant. Or vice versa.

Because that’s what I was seeing now. Animals that could become other animals. And when they changed shape, I could feel their freedom like blood running in my veins all over again.

I looked up and saw that the ceiling was gone. Trees stretched into sky.

The animals crowded around Richard Fuller, driving him back across the polished wood floor. He gripped Mya by the hair, holding her up in front of him so that she was between his body and the immortal animals. They forced him back toward the house until he bumped into the apothecary table and knocked over the stuffed monkey. In mid-fall the monkey came to life. It leaped screaming at Fuller’s face, scratching and drawing blood.

That made him let go of Mya, and she scrambled away between legs and under wings. The old man began to gabble and bark in fear. Words failed him as claws came out and teeth glittered. Mya waved her sister back into the house, but Mya herself crouched in the doorway, fascinated and horrified.

Richard Fuller was about to become a snack for the wild things. He fully deserved it, too. I hoped they ripped his head off. I hoped...

Whoa, Jade. Slow down.

Through the brightly-colored, wild bodies of the immortals I could see something else. I could see another side of them, flickering like an old movie reel. Under the feathers and fur, slipped into the half-beats between moments, I could see
children
.

There were human beings mixed in with these divine animals. Their human potential was still there. It hadn’t been destroyed. Now I understood why Mya had been feeding them—they had a chance to come back,
if
they could remember the human world.

I thought about Shea and how he’d been willing to sacrifice his life to expose Richard Fuller’s involvement in human trade. My life was already over, but theirs could be just beginning. They had a second chance. They could eat human food, learn human ways again. They could return with their spirits intact, kept alive all these years by the animal guardians of the great forest. That was the way to defeat Richard Fuller.

Not by killing him, but by the children reclaiming their stolen lives. And they were about to throw that potential away.

The wild ones had knocked Fuller to the ground. They were all around him, standing on him, growling. Hungry.

‘No!’ I cried suddenly. ‘Stop!’

And for a second, they did. They stopped and turned their attention to me. Fuller took advantage of the break in the action to reach back and grab Mya by the hair, still holding the smoking vial of medicine in one hand.

‘Listen, you guys,’ I said. ‘I’m dead now. I can’t beat up this scuzzbag or believe me, there’s nothing I’d like more. But it doesn’t take a genius to see that if you gobble him up, he’ll be inside you. That’s how eating works. The old man is poison. Walk away.’

I know, it’s rich coming from me, right? I don’t usually do
noble
. But I’d been wrong about my moment. My moment hadn’t happened in the cage against Gretchen. It was happening
now
. I was gonna find a way of taking care of this situation without fighting. I had no choice.

‘Come on, Mya,’ I said. ‘You have a chance for another life. You don’t have to stay with him. And violence ain’t gonna solve it.’

My social worker would have peed herself laughing if she could hear me say that. But I didn’t care. Mya’s sister was listening.

‘You must run, Thiri,’ Mya said. ‘Go now. As long as you are here, Mr. Richard has power. That’s because the power is
you
.’

Fuller held Mya’s hand with one hand and the other was preoccupied with the vial of medicine. He couldn’t stop the younger child escaping.

After she was gone he set the vial down and wrapped both arms tightly around Mya. Shaking with fear, he took in the snarling mouths of the animals that surrounded him.

‘Ploy!’ he called in a loud voice. ‘Come up here, please, and bring a sedative for the child.’

Below, there was a noise of people moving in the house. Someone was coming up the stairs.

‘You give me no choice,’ the old man said in Mya’s ear. ‘Ploy will give you an injection. When you wake, you will be mine and there will be no more of this nonsense.’

I found that I had drifted up into the trees without meaning to. There was an invisible current pulling me away from the earth and towards the sky. Below, animal eyes gleamed and tails lashed. I could see the flanks of the immortal creatures moving as they breathed. They were still hungry.

It was a terrible feeling. I knew how they felt. No forgiveness was possible, and they’d choke on Fuller’s flesh even if it meant they doomed themselves. I’d have done the same thing in their position. I couldn’t pretend otherwise.

As one, they converged on Richard Fuller to tear him limb from limb.

Darkness was taking my sight.

I couldn’t feel my heart beat, and I wasn’t breathing. I was removed from all the usual things my body would have done at a time like this. I was diffused through both worlds, like I had this giant consciousness.

Darkness was coming.

It moved through the forest, and as it came I was starting to break down. I could feel a presence in the rainy trees, in the spaces between the leaves and under the roots. The presence of some unseeable being came rising up through holes in the world like black ink into a sponge. As it grew more, I grew less, until my own consciousness was more of a rumor than a reality.

I heard the bead curtain move and a woman said, ‘It’s all right, Mya. It will be over soon.’

Mya screamed.

Then the bead curtain chattered again as it parted, and somebody crashed into the room.

‘Jade!’ Shea shouted. ‘Jade, where are you?’

My sight came swimming back to me. From above, I saw the animals scatter as if Shea were some huge threat, dangerous far beyond the powers of his pacifist bean-sprout-eating frame. Although, I have to say, he was doing a pretty good job of putting the pacifism to one side.

Shea scanned the room and fixated on Richard Fuller. In two strides he was on Fuller and pushing him up against the wall that had so recently been forest. Ploy scurried back into the house and collided with another woman; then the two of them disappeared down the stairs. Mya darted under the shadow of the forest where it met the edge of the porch.

‘What a joke,’ gasped Fuller as Shea collided with him. ‘Not you again. Should have killed you. So ungrateful. Leave before I get tough on you.’

In my abstracted, presumed-dead state I couldn’t help noticing what an absurd attacker Shea made. He was taller than Fuller, but he’d obviously never been anywhere near a fight in his life. The way he moved was hilarious. Strangely, I found this endearing. Even though he was a total geek, he was prepared to try.

‘Leave you?’ Shea snorted, attempting to pin Fuller to a wall. ‘You’ve got to be joking, mate. The police are here.’

‘Let them come,’ Fuller panted, jamming an elbow into Shea’s gut. ‘I own the police.’

‘Not this time,’ Shea said. ‘Where is Jade? She called me from here. I’m sure it was her.’

So I
had
gotten through to him! My dead heart tried to leap.

Fuller had wriggled along the wall pursued by Shea until he was jammed into a corner, his back up to the wall.

I sensed what Fuller was up to before he did it. With one hand behind his back, Richard Fuller was reaching inside a drawer. He was pulling out a syringe. I screamed at Shea, but I couldn’t get through to him.

‘What have you done to them?’ Shea grunted with the effort of holding Fuller in place, but he didn’t do anything to control Fuller’s left hand. ‘So help me, if they’ve been harmed I’ll kill you myself, you—’

The needle went into Shea’s neck. Shea’s eyes rolled back. His body went rigid. He hit the floor with an awful sound, eyes open.

It was the worst thing I’d ever seen.

Richard Fuller was shaking like a crackhead as he stepped away from Shea’s body. He wiped spit from the corner of his mouth.

‘I don’t know how you got out of the forest, but you can’t come back from this. You’re a dead man.’

Fuller looked at the syringe like it was his best friend. Then, with an effort, he rolled Shea’s body across the floor. The roots of otherworldly trees stretched across the porch.

A lion-shaped shadow loomed beyond Shea. Kala Sriha was there, a heavy darkness just beyond the realm of sight.

Shea couldn’t be dead. He couldn’t. Why had he taken on Fuller as a wimpy journalist? Why hadn’t he turned into the lion? Kala Sriha was
right here
. It wasn’t fair. Everything was wrong.

Weird cries came from the jungle. They were high-pitched, repetitive, and also somehow familiar. Too mechanical to be animals. Lights flashed in my eyes, very bright. The windows lit up blue and red. I thought it was my brain shutting down, but the old man reacted, too.

Sirens. Police.

Voices sounded from the stairwell. Fuller looked down at his dishevelled clothes and brushed feebly at himself, like he was preparing to entertain guests.

This time when the bead curtain parted, it admitted four police officers in riot gear. One of them was a slim, middle-aged woman.

‘Shea? Are you there?’ she called, peering into the shadowy forest as if sensing something strange was going on. Shea’s body was wreathed in leaf-shadow on the edge of the porch.

‘Has there been a misunderstanding?’ Fuller said in Thai. ‘I didn’t call the police. I—’

‘Don’t talk,’ one of the other officers said. ‘Down on the floor!’

Weak and miserable, the old man complied.

I looked down on the scene from above. The female officer knelt down by Shea. She was half in the forest but didn’t seem to notice. She picked up Shea’s hand and felt for a pulse.

‘Call the coroner,’ she said.

No Goodbye

I
HUNG AROUND
Shea, frustrated and sad. I was disoriented. Everything looked green and complicated, but I couldn’t tell up from down. His body still lay in the leaf litter, eyes open. Then his spirit form rose up and his ghost caught sight of me. We stared at each other in shock.