Shadow Walkers

by Brent Hartinger

  I heard car tires on gravel down below us. Headlights shone on the cabin—a car had pulled into the driveway.

  They’re back, I thought.

  I swooped back down to the cabin.

  But it wasn’t Gilbert and his kidnappers—it was a police car. They were coming to check out the cabin, following up on the tip Emory and I had reported. That was something, at least.

  It was two male officers, one skinny, one fat. That was all I could make out in the veiled moonlight.

  “Where are we again?” the fat one said. “The meth lab or the missing kid?”

  “The missing kid,” the skinny one said. “They had a couple reports that someone saw him here.”

  “Doesn’t look like there’s anyone home.”

  “Yeah, they’re gone,” I said to the cops. “But there might be a clue inside. And you can also look to see who owns this cabin. They’re the ones who have my brother.”

  Emory had followed me down. “Zach,” he said, “they can’t hear you.”

  I didn’t know that for sure. I didn’t see how it hurt to try talking to them.

  “Let’s check it out,” the skinny cop said to the fat one.

  They left their headlights on, bathing the front of the cabin in light, then walked up to the front door and knocked. When no one answered, the skinny cop knocked again, louder, and called, “Hello? Is anyone home?”

  Finally the skinny cop said, “This is the police! If there’s anyone in there, we’d like to talk to you, please!”

  Still no one came to the door.

  “Just go inside!” I shouted at them, but of course they ignored me.

  Instead, they started walking around the house, shining their flashlights into the windows. There were no curtains in the kitchen, so they were able to poke their beams inside.

  “I don’t think there’s anyone here,” the fat cop said.

  “Looks that way,” the skinny cop said.

  “I’ll call it in.”

  Then they started back toward the car.

  “Wait!” I said. “You’re not done, are you?” I looked over at Emory. “They’re not done, are they? They need to look for evidence—search for fingerprints.”

  “I don’t think they can,” Emory said. “Not without a warrant. They need some kind of probable cause, and all they have is two anonymous tips.”

  I ignored him and spoke directly to the police. “Wait! Stop!”

  But they just kept walking. Then they climbed into their car and drove away.

  “Well, they’re still going to look and see who owns the cabin, right? They’ll trace them that way, right?”

  “Zach, I don’t know.”

  “Well, we can wait,” I said. “Conrad and Evelyn probably just went to get groceries or something. We can wait here until they get back, and then we can call the police again.”

  But that didn’t make sense; they wouldn’t have both gone to get groceries, not with a kidnapped kid. He could scream in the supermarket. And even as I thought this through, I remembered how Conrad had been talking on his cell phone and had said something about meeting someone. I told Emory this.

  “That’s where they must’ve taken Gilbert,” he said. “To meet a plane or boat?”

  I didn’t like the sound of that—there had to be dozens of private airports in the Puget Sound area, and hundreds of marinas. Still, it made sense.

  “We need to listen for him again,” I said.

  We listened. But I still didn’t hear anything.

  “Emory?” I asked hopefully.

  He shook his head.

  “What does that mean?” I said. “I heard him before. Why can’t I hear him now?”

  “Zach, he’s fine. I’m sure of it. They wouldn’t have kidnapped him in the first place if they were just going to kill him.”

  I hadn’t expected him to say the word “kill”. My head started to swim. For a second, I thought I was going to throw up. Without a body, I didn’t know how that was even possible.

  “Conrad and Evelyn, then,” I said. “We need to listen for them.” It was as if by pretending I hadn’t already tried this, I might get a completely different result.

  But I didn’t get a different result. I still couldn’t hear them, and neither could Emory.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “We can’t hear them, either? What happened?” I thought back on that book Voyage Beyond the Rainbow, but of course she hadn’t said anything about any of this.

  “Maybe it’s because you know Gilbert,” Emory said. “He’s your brother. But we only heard Conrad and Evelyn that one single time.”

  This made a kind of sense. But it still made me angry.

  “What is going on?” I shouted. “Not just the astral stuff—how could they’ve taken him in the first place? Gilbert knows not to talk to strangers. If someone he didn’t know had tried to grab him, he would’ve screamed bloody murder.”

  “So maybe Conrad and Evelyn weren’t strangers,” Emory said.

  I shook my head so hard it made my whole body sway. “I told you, I’ve never seen them before.”

  “Okay, so maybe it wasn’t Conrad and Evelyn who grabbed him. Maybe it was someone else who handed him off to them. Someone he trusted. Someone dressed like a policeman.”

  What Emory was saying made sense. The person who did the kidnapping wasn’t always the person the kid ended up with. I’d read this online. Kids got traded off all the time—which is what made it that much harder to trace them.

  “But there are no policemen on Hinder Island,” I said. “Just two sheriffs. There are no strangers either. Everyone is—”

  I stopped mid-word. An idea was dawning on me like the moon breaking through clouds.

  Emory looked at me. “What is it?”

  “I think I know who might’ve taken Gilbert off the island.”

  I told Emory about the woman at the New Age store, the one who’d sold me the special incense. “She knew all about Gilbert—his name and everything!” I said.

  “But I thought you said everyone knew everyone on the island,” he said.

  “They do, but Gilbert wasn’t even with me at the time. And that’s not even the weird part. She had this really big purse, like a carpet bag—that’s where she kept the ‘special’ incense. A couple of weeks earlier, Gilbert and I were out at this park, and I saw he had this candy, and I asked who had given it to him, and he told me the lady with the really big purse. It had to be her. Plus, she was just kinda weird.”

  I didn’t tell Emory this, but she had also been willing to sell me that incense, something pretty obviously illegal or illicit. It was clear she wasn’t the most ethical person.

  “A strange woman gives a kid candy, and a couple of weeks later, he turns up missing?” Emory said. “I’d say that’s a definite lead. You should go back and tell the police. Everyone knows adults aren’t supposed to give candy to kids they don’t know.”

  “Yeah! No, wait.” I thought for a second. “I don’t have any more incense.”

  “So?”

  “So what if I’m wrong? What if it wasn’t her? I wouldn’t be able to get back in the astral dimension again.” The woman in the New Age shop wasn’t going to give me more of that special incense, not if I reported her to the police. And even if she was willing, where was I going to get $100 cash?

  “What are you saying?” Emory asked.

  “I’m saying I want to check her out first, see if she really did have any connection to the kidnapping—check her out from the astral dimension, I mean. If I find anything, then I can call the police.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure!” I snapped at him. I stopped myself. I had one friend in the astral realm—did I really want to piss him off? “Sorry. Look, i
s there any chance you’d be willing to come with me?”

  “I guess.” He glanced at the shadows around us. “The truth is, something about this place is kinda creeping me out.”

  I wasn’t sure if he meant the cabin or the whole astral dimension. But I was focused on other things, so I didn’t bother to ask.

  ———

  We started flying back to Hinder Island together. I didn’t dare do that whole weird silver cord thing again. For one thing, Emory and I couldn’t do it together. But more importantly, I didn’t see how I could let it draw me back to my body and not have it end with me suddenly waking up.

  We reached Puget Sound sooner than I expected. It’s a long, narrow body of water that runs deep into the state. We must have cut directly across the mainland and caught up with it south of Hinder Island. But Puget Sound has lots of islands and peninsulas, and in the astral dark, they all looked more or less the same. I was starting to think I’d never get home.

  Then I caught sight of a soft glow of light farther up the Sound—the lighthouse at Trumble Point. I’d never been so happy to see anything to do with Hinder Island.

  With the lighthouse in sight, I started to pick up speed. By this point, I could fly pretty fast, but I wasn’t as fast as Emory. I’d been like a wobbly Peter Pan before, and even now I was barely managing a serviceable hang glide, while he looked like Superman, confident and a little exaggerated.

  He seemed to sense me watching him. “Do you know where she lives?” he said, slowing down to my speed. “The woman in the New Age shop?”

  I thought back to the New Age shop. I was pretty sure there was an apartment in the back of the store.

  “I think so,” I said.

  ———

  We landed in the street in front of the store. I hadn’t been looking, and suddenly a car, headlights looming, swept right through us.

  I flinched, surprised. But Emory didn’t. Now I was almost certain he’d been in the astral dimension more than once or twice before.

  I was still a little disoriented from the car, but I turned and looked at the New Age shop.

  Emory reached over and touched me on the shoulder with a finger.

  I jumped, startled again. Just that small push made me slide sideways a few inches in the frictionless astral dimension, until I stopped myself with my mind. He had only touched me for a second, and he hadn’t touched me on bare “skin,” but on my “shirt.” But I’d felt him anyway, clearly, and in a way that was much more intimate than just touching bare skin. It was like he’d brushed against something deeper, something inside me, and it made me tingle.

  “Why’d you do that?” I said.

  Emory thought about it. “To see if I could feel you,” he said at last. “I’d been wondering. I mean, I know we’re just spirits or whatever. But I can feel my own body. So I was wondering if I could feel you, too, or if my hand would pass right through.”

  Feel me? Maybe he hadn’t been lying about only coming to the astral dimension once or twice before.

  “For the record, I could,” he said, even as he looked away, embarrassed. “Feel you.”

  I could feel you, too, I thought, just as embarrassed. It wasn’t just the touch itself, but the little tingle of electricity, of energy. I’d never felt anything quite like it in my life.

  “So this is the New Age shop, huh?” he said, changing the subject.

  “Yeah,” I said. The lights were off.

  As he peered in through the darkened windows, I snuck another look at him. For the first time since meeting him, I realized how cute he was. But as I watched him now, I thought I saw the confident mask slip a little, revealing a layer of sadness underneath.

  I couldn’t help but wonder, Is he like me?

  Suddenly he flinched.

  “What is it?” I said, looking to see if there was another car coming. But this late at night, the street was dark.

  Emory glanced at the shadows around us. It was like he shivered. “I don’t know. It just feels like it did out at the cabin. Like we’re being watched.”

  Watched? He hadn’t said anything before about being watched. By who?

  I remembered that familiar chill I’d felt out at the cabin on Silver Lake, right before I’d seen what had looked like some kind of black tentacle. But that had just been a trick of the shadows.

  “I thought I saw something out there,” I said. In all the excitement, I’d forgotten to mention this to Emory.

  The whites of his eyes looked unnaturally bright in the astral dark. “Something? Like what?”

  If you’d seen it too, you’d know what I mean, I thought.

  “Forget it,” I said. “Let’s just go inside.”

  ———

  The front door was glass with a sign taped to it that displayed the hours of the store. I floated right through them, into the area inside.

  It looked very different in the dark—none of the bright colors from before, everything shades of grey—and the ceiling seemed lower than I remembered. There had been lots of different smells before, too, but of course I couldn’t smell anything now.

  “Let’s see if there’s an apartment in the back like you thought,” Emory said, pressing forward, wafting through the counters and shelves.

  I followed him and suddenly found myself passing right through the hexagonal glass case with the crystal figurines. The light had been out before, making the figurines look drab, but ironically, they were catching the moonlight now and even sparkling. Gliding forward, I was impaled by the crystal unicorn.

  I shivered, suddenly cold again.

  I kept moving forward, all the way to the back of the store. The beaded curtain to the back room was tightly closed. I scanned the wall in front of me.

  Eyes stared back at me.

  I jerked back in surprise. I had no pulse to pound, no heart to catch in my throat, but I couldn’t remember ever being so startled.

  Swaying unsteadily, I looked again.

  It was a mirror—one of the colorful African ones I’d seen covering the wall all those weeks before. I must have caught sight of my own my face in its reflection. I had glimpsed my own eyes.

  But as I looked more closely at the mirrors, I didn’t see my own face or eyes reflected in any of them now. And I take back what I said about seeing my own eyes; I couldn’t have. I was in the astral dimension, but the mirror was in the physical dimension. Even if I’d happened to look into the mirror, it wouldn’t have reflected anything.

  So what had I seen? Was this what Emory had been talking about when he said it felt like he was being watched? But by who?

  It’s nothing, I thought. Another trick of the moonlight. I hadn’t really seen anything.

  I looked for Emory, but he’d already disappeared through the back wall.

  “Emory?” I said, still uneasy.

  He immediately floated back out into the store. “What is it?”

  “Oh,” I said, startled again. “I, um, just wondered where you went.”

  “For the record,” he said, “there is an apartment back here.” He turned back toward it.

  Emory was still there with me. I wasn’t alone. Everything was fine.

  I followed him through the wall with the mirrors, but I made a point not to touch any of them with my astral body.

  The light in the room beyond the wall caught me by surprise. I can’t say it was bright—from the astral dimension, it was still like I was wearing dark glasses. But it had come so suddenly, and I’d been in the darkness for so long, that I found myself disoriented.

  The apartment was small—a kitchenette and a front room with what looked like a single bedroom to one side—and it definitely wasn’t glamorous, with none of the fountains or Himalayan rugs from the store in front. But it was neat.

  Someone was lying on the
couch watching television—a crime procedural.

  “Is that her?” Emory said.

  “Yeah,” I said. Even now, I expected her to look up at us and scream. She was wearing a bathrobe with socks, not slippers, and her hair was wet from the shower.

  “I gotta say,” he said, “she doesn’t look like a kidnapper.”

  I didn’t say anything, but I couldn’t disagree.

  Emory looked around the apartment, but I couldn’t stop looking at the woman from the store. Had she really kidnapped my little brother and handed him off to Conrad and Evelyn?

  She picked her ear.

  “What exactly are we looking for?” Emory said at last.

  “Some evidence that ties her to the kidnapping.” But now I saw the problem: even if she was involved, it’s not like she was going to have a lock of Gilbert’s hair stuck to her refrigerator.

  “I’m going to check the bedroom—and see if there’s a garage,” Emory said. “Maybe she left something in her car.”

  I nodded, and he disappeared through one of the walls. I kept staring at the woman from the store. For some reason, I couldn’t look away. I’d made it all the way to this astral dimension where I’d also been able to “hear” my brother from dozens of miles away. Who’s to say I couldn’t also read this woman’s mind?

  I decided just to ask her. “Did you take him?” I said. “Did you kidnap my little brother?” If anyone could hear me, it would be a woman who worked in a New Age store.

  She yawned and just kept watching television.

  This wasn’t getting me anywhere.

  I was just about to join Emory in the other room when her cell phone rang. I froze. This wasn’t reading her mind exactly, but it could still be valuable information, depending on who was on the other end of the line. Maybe it was Conrad and Evelyn calling.