Shadow Walkers

by Brent Hartinger

  “What is that?” said the old man. “What’s happening?”

  “Zach,” Emory said. “Get back.”

  Together we floated backward, away from the vortex.

  “Wait!” said the old man. “Where are you going? What’s happening?”

  Something exploded in the middle of the vortex. I thought I saw purple flames. The swirling continued to pick up speed. The hair and clothes of the old man began to flutter, pulled in the direction of the whirlpool, like the breeze was now trying to draw him inside.

  “Get back!” I said to the man. “Get away from the gate.”

  But the old man was barely moving. He was still trying to walk, even as the draw of the vortex grew stronger. He floundered, searching for something to hold onto, but when he reached the railing on the porch, his fingers passed right through it.

  The old man slid awkwardly back toward the whirlpool. It was spinning much faster now. The rumble sounded like a low growl.

  “Help me!” said the man. “It’s pulling me in!”

  “You have to use your mind,” Emory said. “That’s how you stop yourself.”

  But he didn’t have any idea how mind power worked. He’d just arrived here.

  “We have to help him,” Emory said.

  I nodded.

  Emory drifted tentatively toward the old man. “Hold me,” he said to me. I reached forward and placed my hands on his waist. I felt the same connection that I’d felt before, the same tingle of electricity, and I was embarrassed that I was thinking about the feel of his body at a time like this.

  Once I had a good grip on him, we floated closer to the vortex together. Our own clothes and hair fluttered. We were clearly just as susceptible to the suction as the old man.

  “Take my hand!” Emory said to him, reaching for his outstretched fingers.

  “I can’t reach!” the man said. “Come closer!”

  We levitated closer to the man in the pajamas, even as he slid backward, closer to the vortex. He was now less than five feet away from its swirling center.

  “Hold onto my ankles,” Emory said to me.

  “Emory—” I started to say.

  “Do it!”

  I crouched and gripped his ankles with both hands. Emory let himself fall forward, surrendering to the suction of the vortex. The pull held him aloft and allowed him to reach the old man. Their hands met, his fingers closing around the man’s.

  “Now!” Emory said to me. “Pull us back!”

  I slipped Emory’s ankles under my armpits, gripping him around the shins, and willed myself back away from this strange astral cyclone.

  Slowly we all started moving away.

  The vortex exploded again, now spinning faster still. Purple flames definitely shot from its center, and the growl became an impatient roar. Emory’s and my mind power weren’t the only forces at work here.

  Before I knew it, we’d been dragged right back to the place where we’d started.

  “Zach?” Emory said.

  “I’m trying,” I said. “I’m trying.” My struggle was mental, but I felt it in my entire astral body.

  I squeezed Emory’s legs more tightly. But no matter how hard I tried to will myself backward, we weren’t moving. The suction from the vortex was too strong—and growing stronger.

  The old man screamed. I could feel him squirming at the far end of Emory’s body.

  “Help me!” he said. “It’s pulling me in!”

  His feet disappeared into the center of the vortex. Emory still had him by the hand, but both he and the man were now completely horizontal against the vortex.

  My feet slipped. Not only could I not move them away from the vortex, but now it was pulling us all in.

  “Zach!” Emory said.

  “I know!” I said. “It’s too strong. It’s pulling us in.”

  “Don’t let go!” said the old man. “Don’t let me go!” By now, he was buried in the vortex up to his thighs, sinking like a man caught in quicksand.

  Emory’s hand was less than six feet from the center of the maelstrom.

  My feet slid again. More than ever, it was like the whole dimension was made of grease. If Emory didn’t let him go soon, the old man would pull them both in.

  “Emory!” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” Emory said to the man. “I can’t hold on!”

  The old man’s eyes bulged. “No! Please!”

  “Hey!” Emory said, and I felt him struggling in the old man’s arms. Emory glanced back at me. “He won’t let go.”

  The old man was now holding Emory’s hand, not the other way around.

  “Let him go!” I said to the man. “You’ll pull us all in!”

  “No!” the old man said. “Don’t let me go!”

  The old man slipped deeper inside, like a rat being swallowed by a snake. But no matter how Emory tugged and pulled at the old man’s hand, he wouldn’t let Emory go.

  “Zach?” Emory said, panicking at last.

  “I’ve got you,” I said. “I’m not letting you go.”

  The old man screamed again, a horrible wail. He was now just a head and an arm—and a hand that still had an impossibly tight grip on Emory.

  The scream stopped in mid-shriek. The vortex had claimed his head. But even now, he somehow still had a hold on Emory.

  “Zach.” Now he was on the verge of screaming, too.

  “I’ve got you,” I said. But no matter how hard I fought to stop us, we kept inching closer to the maelstrom.

  The old man was now gone completely. One part of me was certain that the cyclone would stop pulling us in now that it had taken him.

  But the sucking didn’t stop. The pinwheel just kept spinning, its roar louder than ever. Emory’s hand dipped into the vortex.

  “Zach!” Emory said. “He’s still got me. He still won’t let go.”

  “I’m not letting go either,” I said.

  Soon Emory was up to his elbow.

  Then his shoulder.

  “Zach!” he said. “Let me go!”

  “No!” I said.

  “Let me go and save yourself. Get away from here!”

  “No!” I repeated.

  “Don’t be stupid! Let me—” His head had dipped into the vortex, silencing him.

  I still had his feet, and I was determined to get him back out again.

  Emory started kicking in my arms, just as determined to get me to let him go.

  “Stop!” I shouted, but he didn’t hear me. I still didn’t let go.

  His shoulders followed his head into the vortex.

  The rest of his body began slowly to disappear, like a cucumber into a vegetable chopper.

  “NO!” I screamed.

  I told myself that the vortex wouldn’t claim one more inch of his body.

  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 d
id 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 wheelch
air.”

  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.