Shadow Walkers

by Brent Hartinger

  “What about Gilbert?” Emory said.

  Gilbert, I thought. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my silver cord buckle and writhe.

  “The creature thinks we’re weak, but it still needs us to be distracted in order to take possession of us, right?” Emory said. “It needs certain … conditions.”

  “I … I’m not sure,” I said. Nothing was crystal clear. My glimpse into its mind had happened so fast.

  “It must. Otherwise it would’ve attacked me the first time it saw me here.”

  Emory had kind of a point, but the fact was, the creature hadn’t attacked him right away because it had sensed he was stronger mentally, more prepared for the astral dimension. It knew I wasn’t.

  “We can still look for Gilbert,” he said. “We can go to the airports and marinas. It’s a long shot, but at least it’s a shot.”

  I thought about all this. It was tempting, but then I remembered the blood.

  “You don’t understand,” I said. “You didn’t see what I saw, how evil it is, the things it’s done. It can’t get control of our bodies. The police can still find Gilbert. I know the kidnappers’ names, like you said. I’ll just have to find a way to make the police understand that.”

  But there was no point in going to visit the woman from the New Age shop. I had no interest in coming back to the astral dimension ever again.

  “We won’t be able to see each other,” Emory said softly. “I wasn’t kidding when I said my parents won’t allow that.”

  I’d forgotten about this. Emory’s parents wouldn’t let us meet in person, and he had almost no access to the Internet. Which meant this relationship was over before it had even begun.

  “That makes me really sad,” I said. “But there’s no other way.”

  Emory nodded. This time it was his silver cord that tensed.

  “Goodbye,” he said. The night reflected in his eyes grew darker still.

  “Goodbye,” I said. Looking down, I saw that the breeze had already blown us hundreds of feet from my grandparents’ house.

  I leaned back, trying to relax, ready to let my silver cord pull me back home. Emory did the same.

  At that very moment, I heard the sound of a little boy crying.

  “Emory!” I said. “Wait!”

  “Huh?” Like me, he’d been on the verge of slipping away, back to his physical body across the water.

  “It’s Gilbert!” I said. “I can hear him again.” I hadn’t even been listening, but I could suddenly hear him loud and clear. It was different than before, not the sniffle I’d first heard or the outright bawling out at the cabin, but a slight whimpering—the sound of a boy who had been crying for a long time with no hope in sight.

  Emory listened for a second. “Wait. I hear it, too.”

  This was strange. It contradicted what we’d said before, that you had to know a person well before you were able to focus on them from the astral dimension.

  I listened more closely. It definitely sounded different, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on how.

  “It sounds like it’s coming from nearby,” Emory said. “Like it’s coming from your grandparents’ house.”

  So this wasn’t the sound of Gilbert resounding across the astral dimension. Is that why Emory could hear him—because he was nearby? But Gilbert had been taken off-island hours ago, and the ferries were no longer running. He couldn’t be back yet.

  Unless the police brought him back in a boat. This was a perfectly logical explanation.

  “Something isn’t right,” Emory said. “He sounds upset. If the police found him and brought him home, would he sound upset?”

  “Let’s find out,” I said, already turning and heading back toward the house.

  “But Zach!” he called after me. “What about the creature?”

  “What about it?” I said, annoyed. I’d said everything I said before when I’d thought finding Gilbert was a complete long shot—not when it sounded like he was crying 100 feet away.

  “It’s still down there,” Emory said. “It can still attack us. Or what if it’s the one making those sounds? Maybe this is a trap.”

  I hadn’t thought about this. I knew for a fact that the creature wanted me, and that it was smart.

  “Listen to it,” I said, meaning the cry. “It’s got that echo. It’s not coming from the astral dimension. It’s coming from the real world.”

  The whimpering faded away.

  “It’s stopping!” I said. If Gilbert wasn’t home and safe, if Gilbert hadn’t been found by the police, there’d be no way to investigate this sound if I went back to my body now. And maybe Emory was right about the creature not attacking unless the conditions were absolutely perfect. If I stayed vigilant, I wouldn’t be giving it an opportunity to strike.

  The crying started again.

  “You go home,” I said to Emory. “I just need to check this out, but I’ll be really, really careful.”

  “You know I’m not leaving you alone,” he said as he followed me down.

  ———

  The sound wasn’t coming from my grandparents’ house. It was coming from the house across the street—Billy’s place. I couldn’t figure out why Gilbert would be over there.

  There was a blond boy sitting, sniffling, on the porch swing of Billy’s mom’s house.

  “Gilbert!” I said, zooming toward my brother.

  But halfway there, I slowed.

  It wasn’t Gilbert—it was Billy. He was up late into the night, waiting for some news about his kidnapped best friend. He was the one who had been crying.

  As this realization sunk in, I slowed to a stop. I hung limply in the air.

  Emory came up behind me. “Zach?”

  “It’s the wrong kid,” I said. “It’s his friend Billy. I mistook him for Gilbert. It wasn’t Gilbert we heard.”

  Emory didn’t say anything, just reached over and took my hand. The electrical touch was back, but I barely noticed. I was too disappointed by what had happened.

  Up on the porch of the house, the front door opened, and Billy’s mother joined him on the porch.

  “How ya doin’?” she asked him quietly.

  The porch swing squeaked. “Okay,” Billy said.

  Billy’s mother sat down next to him on the swing. “They’ll find him. He’ll be just fine. You wait and see.”

  “But what if they don’t?”

  “They will. I promise.”

  Billy fell silent. The promise of Billy’s mom was the kind of thing parents always say to kids—basically, a worthless lie.

  “It’s not Gilbert,” I said. Then, to no one in particular, I shouted, “It’s not Gilbert!” But voices didn’t echo in the astral dimension, even at night. There was nothing to echo against.

  “Zach,” Emory said. “Don’t … ”

  I immediately felt stupid. Here I’d said I was going to be so careful, and what’s the first thing I do? Shriek into the ether, probably attracting the attention of the shadow creature—not to mention all the other astral nasties that might be lurking in the shadows around us.

  But I was suddenly consumed with rage. We still weren’t any closer to finding Gilbert! It was funny that Emory saw the astral dimension as a place of freedom and possibility. For me, it had been like Hinder Island: nothing but dead ends.

  Before Emory could say another word, or tell me we needed to get out of the shadows, I leapt up into the sky. I cleared the treetops in seconds, but was still so angry—at my own stupidity, and at my powerlessness in the face of everything that had happened.

  So I didn’t stop. I just kept rising, higher and faster into the night. It was as if I thought I could outrun my anger, leave it in the air below me. Or maybe I just wanted to do something—anything!—since helping Gilbert was app
arently out of the question.

  “Zach!” Emory called from underneath me, following after.

  I ignored him, just kept barreling higher into the sky. I wasn’t screaming, or making any noise at all. I put all the emotion into my furious upward flight.

  I wasn’t sure how long I flew like that, but when I finally stopped and looked around, I was confused. For a second, the vast dark dome below me didn’t make any sense.

  It was the Earth I was seeing rising up underneath me. I had actually cleared the atmosphere. It was mostly dark on the side of the planet below, the side of night. I could still make out the continents, North and South America, but only because of the glowing pinpricks of light from the cities, mostly along the edges of the land. I wasn’t in orbit around the Earth exactly, because I still had no physical presence and wasn’t affected by gravity. But I was moving across the heavens, probably on the ethereal breeze, or maybe I was just seeing the turning of the Earth below me.

  Even after all I’d experienced, it was almost too much to take in. I wasn’t scared. I knew I didn’t need to breathe, that I was protected from the radiation of the sun and the vacuum of space. I looked at my silver cord spiraling down underneath me, thinner than I’d ever seen it, like twine. It looked like the smoky trail to a skyrocket, but frozen, as if in some photograph, yet to explode. I now knew they could stretch pretty far without breaking—maybe it could stretch forever.

  A second later, another form materialized nearby. Emory hung, suspended in the ether opposite me, not fifteen feet away.

  I watched the confusion on his face turn to wonder as he, too, realized where we were.

  Finally he looked over at me and smiled. “Feel better?”

  “No,” I said. But the truth was I did feel better. It’s not that I’d left my emotions behind. It’s just that looking down at the vast expanse of the Earth at night, it was impossible not to put them into perspective, to have a handle on them again. My anger was gone at last. If I had been a skyrocket, I wouldn’t have wanted to explode—I would’ve wanted to keep burning. It even felt like I’d finally left the oppressive shadows of the astral dimension behind. Sure, most of the surface of the Earth was dark, and we were surrounded by the great, glittering void of space. But those shadows were suddenly so far away from us. It was as if, here in the heavens above the Earth, all individual shadows had been banished.

  “Emory, what am I going to do?” I asked him. Here I was, suspended high above the Earth at night—probably one of the most astounding sights I would ever see—but all I could think about was Gilbert.

  “We’ll keep looking if you want,” Emory said. “We’ll keep listening. And sooner or later, we’ll find him again.”

  To my surprise, our voices didn’t sound small in the infinity of the heavens. On the contrary, we’d never sounded so clear.

  “You know how they say that an only child is supposed to be so independent, so self-sufficient?” I said.

  Emory nodded.

  “That wasn’t true for me,” I said. “I remember when I was a boy, before Gilbert was born, I was afraid of everything. I guess when I was five and had to go to kindergarten, I bawled for a week. But with most kids when their parents tell that story, it ends with the parents saying, ‘But then he stopped crying and he had the time of his life!’ I didn’t. I mean, it got better, I guess. But I didn’t really change, not until Gilbert was born.

  “I remember the day my parents brought him home. I looked at him, and I felt this connection, you know? Like he was somehow a part of me, like I wasn’t alone in the world any more. It’s not like I was never lonely after that. I was. But I never felt completely alone.

  “And then when our parents died? I tell myself that it’s my Internet friends that kept me sane, but that’s not really true. It was Gilbert. It wasn’t anything he said or did. It’s that he was there. And that he depended on me. I carried on, because I had to carry on, for him.”

  I’d told myself I felt so alone before, trapped on an island in Puget Sound. But I had to take that all back: I hadn’t been alone. I’d had someone with me all along, my brother Gilbert, a connection to something outside of myself that existed long before I’d ever come into the astral dimension. Only I hadn’t realized it, wasn’t realizing it, until now, after he was gone.

  I looked at Emory. At some point while we were talking, he’d floated closer to me. I don’t know if it was something he was doing, or if we’d simply drifted together, but he was less than five feet from me now. Below us, the Earth loomed, solid but separate. Could the shadow creature reach us up here? At that moment, I didn’t care.

  “Zach,” Emory said. “I’m really sorry that he’s gone. But for the record, I’m sure they’ll find him. Or we will. He’ll be back, I promise.”

  I smiled and realized for the first time that Emory said “for the record” a lot.

  I looked back down. At some point as he’d flown up into the heavens, our silver cords had become entwined again, like a braid. This time they were so entangled that I couldn’t imagine us ever getting them apart again.

  I started to cry. I couldn’t help myself, not after everything that happened—the emotion just came bubbling out of me. But it wasn’t entirely negative. It was beyond beautiful what I was doing, floating in the space hundreds of miles above the Earth’s atmosphere accompanied by my astral boyfriend.

  Boyfriend. There was that word again. I’d never even seen Emory in person or touched his physical body. Even so, I already felt so close to him. It was a little like when I’d seen Gilbert for that first time, like he was somehow a part of me, and I was a part of him. He understood what I was feeling—what it felt like to be trapped, vulnerable, how scary it was to have certain things, important things, out of your control. But it was also more than that.

  Emory’s spirit was closer now, touching me, holding me. It was as if I only existed in the places where we were actually touching, that I was living on the surface of my astral skin. That’s when I realized that his real body didn’t matter. Emory’s gentle astral touch, his tender embrace, was already more intimate than anything we could do with our physical bodies. I reached out and touched his silver cord at last, at the spot where it emerged from the back of his head. It throbbed, warm like mine, yet felt different too, softer, silkier.

  Emory was kissing me now, and I was kissing him back. I could taste him—not his physical body, but something else. He tasted clear and clean, like mountain water—pure, but with a definite taste, one that’s unique to itself. I thought about how I’d been able to see the shadow creature’s thoughts and memories just by touching its eyes. Could I “see” Emory’s innermost thoughts now that I was touching his astral body? Somehow I knew I could if I wanted to—his whole being was wide open to me, as mine was to him. But this was something different than what I’d done with the shadow creature. I wasn’t touching Emory’s mind; I was touching his soul.

  That’s when the gentle touch, the comfort we were sharing turned to something more, something urgent. It still had something to do with Gilbert, with being consoled by Emory, but now it was more passionate, as if I could somehow lose myself in this soul-kiss, spread what I was feeling out, diffuse it between our souls.

  But what I was feeling didn’t lessen. Just the opposite happened. Suddenly I was a skyrocket again, finally exploding, but in an explosion that did not end, just grew in an ever-expanding bloom of light and energy. I vaguely remembered how only a few short days ago I had felt so trapped and isolated and alone, living on Hinder Island. Now I felt the opposite of all that, like I was exploding to fill Emory, and he was exploding too—or maybe it was all just one explosion. I still existed only in the point of our kiss, the touch of our embrace, but suddenly that point of impact seemed so much bigger than just the two of us, as if we were expanding to be able touch everything around us—the planet below, the stars above.<
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  Then, without warning, the horizon underneath us began to sizzle in the burst of a sunrise halfway across the world. If this is what it looked like through the smoky lens of the astral dimension, I could only imagine how bright it must’ve looked unfiltered—literally blinding. A new day was dawning in many more ways than one. And suddenly I was completely consumed by that dazzling light and the warmth of Emory’s spirit, and together we were as bright and clean and clear as the universe itself.

  Later, as we hung entwined in the heavens, I said to Emory, “Well, I guess I know the answer to whether or not we could fly to Jupiter.”

  He looked up at me. “Hmmm?”

  “Remember?” I said. “Before? I wondered if we could visit other planets in the astral dimension?” I nodded toward a bright light out among the stars.

  Emory smiled. “Oh, right. But for the record, that’s not Jupiter. That’s Venus. The brightest natural object in the night sky. A lot of people mix ’em up.”

  For some reason, this made me think of Gilbert. Once again, I listened for him, but I still couldn’t hear anything.

  Emory pulled away. “We should get back to Earth.”

  “People mix up Jupiter and Venus,” I said, thinking out loud.

  “Sure,” Emory said. “It’s an easy mistake. They look a lot alike.”

  “Just like I mixed up Gilbert and Billy.”

  “What?”

  “Before, when we heard Billy crying, and I thought it was Gilbert.”

  “Oh, right.”

  I pulled the rest of the way apart from Emory. I felt like an amoeba separating, alone again, though not nearly as cold and alone as before.

  “I just got a crazy thought,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “What if Conrad and Evelyn meant to kidnap Billy, but they got Gilbert instead?”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “Because Billy’s dad told them to.”