Shadow Walkers (11 page)

Then, without warning, he came away in my arms.

It was like I’d been playing a game of tug-of-war and the other side had just given up. I fell back from the vortex, pulling Emory with me. Thankfully his astral body was all intact.

I was all set to pull him even farther away, but the second we were free, the cyclone began one long, final swirl, sucking in on itself.

And then it was gone. The vortex had disappeared.

Still a little stunned, Emory and I stared at the space where the vortex had been. The glow was gone, so darkness had reclaimed the yard. There wasn’t even a wisp of astral smoke as evidence that there had been anything there at all. The grinding of the vortex was gone now, too, and the relative silence, the mere moan of the astral dimension, was strange.

“What happened?” I said.

“I don’t know,” Emory said. “He finally let me go.”

“Where were you? What did you see?”

“Nothing. It was too dark. For the record, I could hear the old man screaming. Then I felt a hard jerk on his body. Like something … grabbed him. Then he let go.”

I was still holding onto Emory’s astral body—I still had my arms wrapped tightly around his legs. I could feel the same electrical connection I’d felt before, only it was stronger now with more of our bodies touching. Our silver cords had also somehow become entwined, at least for a few feet, and it seemed like I could feel that, too. The touch of Emory’s cord against mine felt like someone stroking my hair.

“Thank God you’re okay,” I said.

“Thanks to you,” he said.

“What?”

He pulled away and levitated upright. Our astral bodies weren’t touching anymore, but our cords were, so it felt like we were still connected.

“You didn’t let go of me,” he said. “Even when it looked like I was going to pull you in.”

“You tried to save me, too,” I said. “You tried to get me to let go of you.” His brown eyes were warm and open—the opposite of that creature in the garage in every way. But they were also now openly sad.

Emory looked away as he let himself drift farther from me. I was surprised how easily our astral cords separated. Either they hadn’t been as entwined as I’d thought, or they’d passed right through each other.

“Gilbert,” he said.

“What about him?” Instinctively, I listened again, but I still couldn’t hear him.

“You should see if he’s back.”

I didn’t want to go back to my body now. It sounds strange given all that had happened in the last few minutes—seeing that creature in the garage and then almost being sucked into some alien dimension. Something about Emory’s touch had grounded me—made me less afraid. Besides, the shadow creature had
looked
scary, but it had also darted away as soon as it had seen us. Maybe it was even more afraid of us than we were of it, like monsters always are in children’s books.

“Let’s go together,” I said. “My grandparents’ house isn’t that far from here.”

———

It seemed like a bad sign that there was no police car parked outside the house. The police wouldn’t bring Gilbert home, drop him off, and immediately leave again. Then again, the ferries had stopped running for the night. They could’ve found Gilbert and kept him on the other side of the water, waiting until morning to return him.

Emory and I sank down through the roof.

I hadn’t intended to pass through my room, but we did. The light on the nightstand was still on, and I saw my body lying in bed.

It was fully dressed and completely motionless. My breathing was so shallow that I had to stare in order to see it. It was hard not to be reminded of a corpse.

I’d been in the astral dimension so long now that I’d kind of started to think of it as normal. This was a reminder of just how much it wasn’t.

Emory followed me through the wall to Gilbert’s room. The lights were off, and for a moment, I thought I saw someone sleeping in his bed. But it was just lumps in the comforter.

I led Emory down to the kitchen where my grandparents were still waiting by the phone. I expected them to be pacing anxiously, but they were both motionless again, sitting at the kitchen table, cups of coffee, probably stone cold, in mugs in front of them. As long as I’d known them, my grandparents had never looked young. But they both looked positively ancient now, so old that they didn’t even look human—more like mummies propped upright, brittle and unmoving.

“I’ll find him,” I said to them softly. “I will.”

But they didn’t look up, didn’t even know I was there.

As I was watching my grandparents, I sensed Emory watching me.

“Zach,” he said at last. “I need to tell you something.”

I turned his way.

“It’s the real reason I’m here in the astral dimension,” he said. “I don’t have any of the special incense that you use. I don’t need it. I just need to meditate. For the record, I have been here before, quite a few times.”

“Really? That’s great.” I confess I was a little jealous. “Have you, like, seen the whole world? Have you been to other planets? Could we travel to Jupiter?”

“I’ve never thought about going to another planet. And I haven’t seen the whole world. But I’ve seen those gates before. That’s how I knew what they were, not
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
.”

“What about other people? Have you run into any of those?”

He thought for a second. “The weird thing is, in all the time I’ve been coming here, you’re the only other person I’ve ever seen.”

I wondered what this meant—if the woman in the New Age shop had been right and people like Celestia Moonglow weren’t really coming here at all, but were just dreaming or imagining the whole thing. And yet Emory had been able to do it for real, without the incense.

“How long did it take you to get this good?” I said.

“My whole life,” he said.

I looked at him, confused.

“I’m paraplegic.” He said this last part without any warning, so I hadn’t expected it, didn’t know what to make of it.

I looked down at his legs, at his whole body hanging solidly in the middle of my grandparents’ kitchen.

“Not here,” he said. “Back in the real world. I use a wheelchair.”

I thought about this. It did explain a few things: not just Emory’s exaggerated movements in the astral dimension, but his bravado and the vulnerability it masked. And this must’ve been why he hadn’t been willing to drive back to the cabin on Silver Lake for me; maybe he couldn’t drive.

“It happened was when I was a kid,” he said. “Viral infection. I’m paralyzed from the waist down.”

I thought about what he was saying, tried to make sense of it, even as I waited for my own emotional reaction. It unfolded like a paper snowflake in my mind, slowly, and even I was curious to see the end result.

“My parents don’t understand … anything,” he said. “They’re really religious. They control everything: what I read, what I watch, what friends I see. If I were anyone else, I think people would think it’s strange how controlling they are—even relatives of ours. But with a paraplegic kid, people think it’s normal, that I’m helpless, that my parents
should
control everything about my life. For the record, my parents sometimes let me go the library, and I read about astral projection in this book, years ago. I really wanted to come here. It sounded like a place where I could be … free.”

Like I’d been drawn to the Internet because I was trapped on an island. Emory and I weren’t so different at all.

“So I started meditating,” he went on. “It didn’t work for a long time—so long that I didn’t even really remember why I’d started meditating in the first place. But about two months ago, I finally did it.”

I thought about everything he’d said. “None of this changes anything,” I said at last. “But why didn’t you tell me before?”

He scoffed. “Like anyone would be interested in a boyfriend who can’t walk.”

A boyfriend
. So Emory and I were alike in more ways than one. Was that what he thought we might become—boyfriends?

I glanced nervously over at my grandparents sitting at the kitchen table, but they still hadn’t moved. They didn’t even know we were there.

“It makes no difference to me,” I said to Emory. This was the absolute truth. “You could’ve told me before.”

“When?” he said. “We were so caught up in looking for your brother.”

My brother.

“But mostly I think I was ashamed,” he went on. “Not that I’m paraplegic—I’m not ashamed about that. It’s that when I ended up in the astral dimension, I turned up without my wheelchair.”

I didn’t understand.

Emory saw the confusion in my eyes. “This is how we see ourselves.” He gestured at his body, lean and athletic. “I mean, these clothes don’t really exist, right? It’s all some kind of illusion from our minds, some projection of our ideal self—it has to be. But my ideal self … can walk. There’s no wheelchair! What does that say about me, about the way I see myself? I feel like such a traitor to the cause. That probably sounds funny to you, and maybe you can’t understand. But us gimps—people in wheelchairs—we’re not supposed to think of ourselves as broken, you know? And it makes sense. I mean, who wants to go through life like that, feeling like they’re fundamentally flawed? And I don’t, I really don’t. Except maybe some part of me does, because I like it here. I like feeling whole again. And that makes me feel guilty.”

With all that had happened in the last day, Gilbert missing and meeting Emory and now learning all this about him, I couldn’t remember my heart ever being open so wide, so full of both love and pain, not even when my parents died.

“Emory,” I said. “You don’t have anything to feel bad about.” I searched for the words. I wanted to tell him I understood, that I could relate, even if I probably couldn’t, not really. “We both had our reasons for coming here. Maybe they weren’t always the purest of reasons, but we are who we are. We don’t have anything to apologize for. I’m just glad we—”

In the middle of my sentence, the shadow creature with the tentacle-like legs leapt out at me—from the spot in the real world where the refrigerator was—and landed right on top of my head.

It all happened so fast.

I saw movement coming at me from one side, but before I could move, the shadow creature had wrapped itself around my head like a hood. Before I could even think, the thing’s finger-like tentacles were stuck to my face.

It wasn’t like a monster in some children’s book; it wasn’t more afraid of us than we were of it.

I stiffened in surprise. It had covered my eyes, and even though I wasn’t necessarily “seeing” through them in the astral dimension, I suddenly couldn’t see at all. Still, I could definitely
feel
the creature. It was everything I’d felt that afternoon out at Trumble Point—that terrible
chill
, the deep sense of menace—and more. It was the opposite of Emory’s touch. Rather than that gentle, electric connection, I felt its cold, heavy presence bearing down on me, overpowering me. I felt no mouth—it was like the whole creature was a mouth, opening to consume me. And yet, somehow I also knew that it didn’t want to merely eat me. It wanted to destroy me, to replace me, to somehow
become
me.

It was all too much. One second I’d been slowly drifting on the ethereal breeze across my grandparents’ kitchen, having a heart-to-heart with Emory. The next second I’d been attacked, and my soul was about to be swallowed by some vile shadow creature. I could hear Emory’s muffled screams from outside my helmet of shadows, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying.

I had to fight back. Even now, I sensed a change in the thing, a gathering of purpose. It was shifting even as it clutched my head, starting some kind of weird metamorphosis. I couldn’t see its eyes, those dark, hateful things I’d seen in the garage, but I could somehow
feel
them—above me, looking down
at
me, greedy and determined, boring into me. But at the same time, I couldn’t move—like I’d somehow been drugged or anesthetized. I wanted to fight back, but I couldn’t. My mind wanted something, but my astral body wouldn’t or couldn’t react. How was that possible in a place where my mind
was
my body? Maybe I didn’t want it after all. As I floated there, the will to fight back was dripping off me like sap down the trunk of a pierced maple. After a second, I didn’t even feel the cold chill in my soul anymore.

“Get off me,” I said to the thing on my head, but it was half-hearted at best. I wasn’t sure I had actually even spoken the words.

I reached limply up and tried to grab the thing. It was elusive—trying to touch it was like trying to grab a cloud of smoke. In the end, though, there was definitely something there. It was squishy and slick, like an oily cushion.

It was clutching my head like a starfish about to feast on the tender innards of a clam. There was no way I was going to tear it off, not as tired as I felt.

But as my astral hands fumbled for this evil, alien thing, I happened to brush something unexpected—something small and orb-like near the top of its head. It was much more solid than the rest of its body, hard, like a large marble.

I’d touched one of its eyes. Ironically, while the rest of its body was soft, its eyes were hard—the opposite of a human body. Its eyes had somehow migrated to the top of its head.

But it hadn’t expected me to touch its eye, and doing so meant that I somehow had access to its mind. It was as if, in preparing to invade my mind, the creature had accidentally left its own psyche wide open. And so, just by touching one of its eyes, I found myself slipping deep into the recesses of its mind.

It all happened in an instant—my touch and a resulting flood of what seemed like … memories. As I glimpsed these memories, it was like I transported back into the past—someone else’s past—experiencing it as if for the first time.

———

I am missing a heart. There are only four of them on the bloody table in front of me. How is that possible? Why is it so easy to lose things in this basement? Then again, I did buy the place for the extra space, not to mention the privacy. “Like a dungeon,” the real estate agent had said. If only she knew.

No matter, I think. The missing organ is bound to turn up eventually. In the meantime, there’s still more work to do.

I turn to the man chained to the basement’s far wall. “This may hurt a little,” I say, but I know he can’t hear me over the sound of the chainsaw.

———

I wasn’t disgusted by the memory—not yet anyway—because I was the one experiencing it, not just witnessing it. But at the same time, the part of me that was still me thought,
Why does the shadow creature have human memories? And why the memories of some kind of mass murderer?

But even as I thought that, I touched a different, deeper memory inside the mind of the shadow-being, and was suddenly transported to an earlier place and time.

———

I stare at the carnage in the bedroom in front of me. The mattress is a giant sponge; it’s almost completely soaked with blood. I’m reminded again how much of the stuff there is inside the human body. I look down at the bloodless corpses lying atop the bed. It’s always very unsatisfying when my victims don’t struggle, and these two barely let out a scream. They put up far too brave a face.

Perhaps I’ll have better luck with their children, tied up in the chair next to the bed, especially now that they’ve seen what I’ve done to their parents.

———

These were different men, the one who was separating body parts in his basement, and the one who was torturing and killing that family—I knew that for a fact. I just wasn’t sure how the mind of the shadow creature could hold the memories of two different people. Maybe the creature had eaten the souls of both these men and somehow collected both their memories inside itself. If so, both had gotten what they deserved.

Or
were
these two different people? They’d inhabited different bodies, but somehow they
felt
the same, as if the shadow creature had lived more than one life. How was
that
possible?

I’d seen enough. I hadn’t intended to touch the eyes or the mind of this creature in the first place. I’d said before that if being one with the universe meant being connected to this creature, I didn’t want any of part of it, and here I was, connected to it in a more personal, intimate way than I’d ever thought possible. I had literally
become
it.

I tried to pull my hand away, but I was in too deep. More lives passed before me, each somehow seen from the same set of eyes. I couldn’t stop the memories from coming, one after the other, each one older than the last.

———

I am determined to ignore the pipe organ of the Ferris wheel outside my office window. Then someone screams in the room behind me, and all thoughts of the Ferris wheel are forgotten. My latest victim has finally woken up. I smile as she begins to shriek in panic, as if she somehow instinctively knows that the vault is airtight and she will soon suffocate. Alas, then I’ll have to deal with the sound of that insufferable Ferris wheel again.

———

I stare at the huddle of dark-skinned bodies in the bottom of the pit. They’re clinging to each other in the mud. “Now shoot them all,” I say to the soldiers at my side, and the sergeant pretends to be shocked by his general’s orders. But the lieutenant isn’t shocked; he’s been waiting eagerly for this. The first of the shots ring out. There are those who say that it makes more sense to kill the Indian braves first, so they can’t fight back, but I know better; kill the women and children, and the braves have nothing left to fight for.

———

It’s mid-October, and an early winter has descended on the forest, but I don’t fear the cold. I have the makings of a campfire to keep me warm this night, and a new cache of supplies to see me through the hard months ahead. I light the kindling, and pitch begins to snap and pop in the flames. It lights as quickly as I thought it would, and soon a conflagration illuminates the night. It warms me, but not as much as the screams of the old fool I had tied to the stake in the middle of the blaze.

———

I managed to stop the flood of memories at last. I hadn’t been disgusted by the memories while I had been experiencing them, but now that I’d stopped them, now that I had some distance, a feeling of revulsion washed over me like a cold mist. My grandparents had always been worried about evil in the world, about all the bad things that happened over on the mainland—and
only
there, they thought. But they had no
idea
just how evil people could be, what bad things did happen in the world—even on islands, unfortunately.

I hadn’t had any idea either.

And while it was bad enough that I’d had to watch them, I’d also been forced to experience them, to actually be the one who did these terrible things without remorse. It was a different kind of horror, so ghastly that it had even managed to penetrate the dullness that the creature had somehow created in my brain.

“What
are
you?” I shouted at the shadow creature in my hands.

Suddenly another vision, the earliest memory in a long stream of them, flashed before my eyes. Now I did know exactly what—or, rather,
who—
the being was, and exactly what it wanted.

The creature chose this moment to fight back.

First, despite having no lids, it somehow closed its eyes. In that instant, I was locked out of its mind.

Then the creature wiggled forward, to the back of my head, out of my awkward, exhausted reach. Once again, the tentacle-like legs gripped me, and its body began to metamorphose again—into what, I wasn’t sure, but it was clearly intent on consuming the soul it had been so close to winning before.

At least I could see again.

But this time, I had no defenses. This time, I was just too tired, overwhelmed by the creature’s anesthesia and by what I had seen in its mind. I couldn’t even raise a finger against it. My mind reeled. Since the start of its attack, the whole encounter had only been a couple of seconds.

I felt the creature quiver in anticipation.

And I saw Emory reach out and grab the creature with both hands. Somehow he twisted it from the top of my head and threw it roughly to one side.
It looks so black
, I thought dully as the creature flew, undulating, into the shadows.
Like a void, like a blind spot moving across my vision.

But at least it was gone—for the moment at least. Already my sense of self was coming back to me.

Emory didn’t wait for it to attack again. Instead he grabbed me and pulled me with him up through the darkened rooms of my grandparents’ house, high into the sky. When we were a couple hundred feet up, Emory released me and let me float free as he stared down into the shadows below, a night watchman on the highest of alert. For a second I thought I was going to plunge right back to the ground, but somehow I steadied myself.

“The thing,” he said, watching me carefully. “What was it doing? Why was it after you?”

“It wasn’t after me, at least not at first,” I said. I had so much to tell him, but I didn’t know where to begin. “It was after you.”