Shadow Walkers

by Brent Hartinger

  “Who?” Emory said.

  “Billy’s father! Billy’s parents are divorced, and they’re both real jerks. But more than once, I’ve heard the father saying say how totally unfair it is that the mother got full custody and that she makes him come all the way out to the island to pick Billy up.”

  I remembered what I’d read about kids who were kidnapped being traded off to someone else—that the person they ended up with wasn’t always the person who did the actual kidnapping. I’d thought it had been the woman from the New Age store who had traded Gilbert off to Conrad and Evelyn. But what if it was Conrad and Evelyn who had kidnapped him and were trading him off to Billy’s dad? If Billy’s dad sent someone who didn’t know Billy to kidnap him, it made sense that they might get the wrong kid, especially since the two boys looked so much alike.

  The more I thought about this, the more sense it made.

  “You’re just guessing,” Emory said, and he was right. I’d already jumped to the wrong conclusions a couple of times before. “How do we find out for sure?”

  I turned myself back toward the Earth. “Well, the first thing I want to do is take another look at Billy.”

  ———

  Back on Hinder Island, we flew to the front porch where I’d watched Billy and his mother before.

  With their blond hair, Gilbert and Billy really did look alike, especially if you didn’t know them.

  “Conrad and Evelyn had probably never seen Billy before,” I said. “They’d probably just been given a picture. But Billy wasn’t in his front yard where his father said he was going to be, and Gilbert was, looking just like him.”

  “So that’s who Conrad and Evelyn are going to meet?” Emory said. “Billy’s dad? But he’ll know they got the wrong kid. He’ll have to let Gilbert go.”

  I nodded. “That’s right! So Gilbert’s going to be all right!” I so wanted these words to be true. Why didn’t I feel like they were?

  Emory looked away.

  “What?” I said.

  “Nothing,” he said quickly. Too quickly.

  And that’s when I realized what he already knew: if Gilbert recognized Billy’s father, the whole plan got exposed. They couldn’t just let him go, because Gilbert would know the truth.

  “But if they can’t send him home,” I said, “then they’ll have no choice but to … ” I couldn’t say the words out loud.

  If Gilbert recognizes Billy’s dad, they’ll have no choice but to kill him.

  “You need to call the police,” Emory said. “You’ve got a good theory now—probable cause, I bet. They’ll listen to you. You’ve got to go back to your body.”

  I nodded quickly. “You’re absolutely right. I will.” But the more I thought about this, the less sense it made.

  “What?” Emory said.

  “What can the police do? Billy’s dad is on the run now. He had to have a plan—if Evelyn and Conrad had taken the right kid, the police would already be on his trail. So they won’t know where he is. And there’s no time. Conrad and Evelyn went to meet Billy’s dad hours ago. It might already be too late.”

  “But you have to try. What choice do we have?”

  We can try to find them ourselves from the astral dimension. If nothing else, there was still the needle-in-a-haystack search of the area’s airports and marinas.

  “You can do both,” Emory said. “You can go back to your body and call the police, and then come back here and we can see if we can find Billy’s dad.”

  “I’ve already used my last stick of incense,” I said. “Maybe the woman at the New Age store has more, and maybe she’d give them to me. But maybe she won’t!” I looked at Emory. “You go. You call the police, tell them what we think, and then come back and meet me.”

  “And leave you alone here with that creature? The only reason it didn’t get you the last time was because I was here to fight it off.”

  The creature. I’d already forgotten all about it again—had already gotten distracted—even after I’d promised myself I wouldn’t. I scanned the shadows around us.

  “Zach,” Emory said. “We both need to go back. We’ve already stayed here too long. You know I’m right.”

  He was right, but I didn’t answer. Together, we drifted across Billy’s front yard in the never-ending astral breeze.

  “What can we possibly do?” he went on. “Search the airports? How would we even find the airports from the astral dimension? It’s not like we have a map. If it hadn’t been for that lighthouse, we might not even have found Hinder Island in the dark. But there are things the police can do. They can close the airports. They can track Billy’s father—maybe find the signal on his cell phone.”

  I looked over at Emory again. I suddenly had another idea.

  “What?” he said.

  “I could listen for him. For Billy’s father.”

  “But we listened before, for Conrad and Evelyn. We couldn’t hear them. What makes you think you’ll hear Billy’s father?”

  Emory had a good point. Then again, I hadn’t known Conrad and Evelyn. I didn’t really know Billy’s father either, but I had been listening to him and Billy’s mother scream at each other for almost two years now. And I’d been listening in the same dimension that they were in. Maybe that was the key—maybe I hadn’t been able to hear Conrad and Evelyn because I’d never heard them in the right dimension.

  Either way, I had to try.

  Emory was still glancing around the shadows of the front yard—the pools of darkness alongside the abandoned wagon, the swath of blackness under the porch itself. “Whatever we do,” he said, “can we at least do it up in the sky?”

  I nodded, and we shot up into the open air. Even as we rose, I was already listening for Billy’s father, trying to remember exactly what he sounded like.

  I was certain it would work. It had to.

  I didn’t hear anything at first, just the same dull, otherworldly roar that I’d been hearing since entering the astral dimension.

  “Zach?” Emory said.

  I was busy listening for the sound of a man I’d heard many times, but had never really paid any attention to. His arguments with Billy’s mom had mostly been an annoyance—noise pollution on an island of peaceful sounds. I’d always tried my best to tune them out.

  Still, I’d been able to hear Gilbert that one time. It was a question of focusing, of listening for a specific person, and ignoring all the others.

  So I focused.

  And suddenly an old man muttered.

  Another man laughed.

  A third man had called into talk radio and was ranting about immigration politics.

  But I knew that none of these was Billy’s father.

  Emory and I drifted on the ethereal breeze. He stared down at the gathering shadows below us, and I kept listening. As I did, I tried to picture Billy’s father. What color was his hair? How old was he? How tall? I wasn’t sure—I’d never paid that much attention. Sure, I’d overheard him plenty of times, but truthfully, I wasn’t sure I’d ever actually spoken to the man. I didn’t even know his first name. And yet I thought I could distinguish him from all the other people on the planet?

  No! I had to try, to focus.

  A man gave a scientific lecture of some kind.

  Another man tried to sell someone on cabinet refinishing.

  Some else sang in the shower.

  But I still wasn’t hearing Billy’s father.

  I glanced over at Emory. He looked up at me expectantly.

  “Nothing yet,” I said.

  I tried a different tack. I may not have talked to Billy’s father, but I’d talked to Billy plenty of times. And if Billy was his father’s biological son, that meant they shared half their genes. That had to count for something, didn’t it?

 
I concentrated on Billy—on the normally happy boy with the sweet laugh.

  I immediately heard Billy down on the porch below. The sense of him seemed quite distinctive now—really nothing at all like Gilbert, I realized. Billy was crying again, even louder than before.

  I tried blocking the sound and feel of Billy out of my mind while still keeping some sense of him. Then I tried again to tune into his father.

  I still didn’t hear anything. Emory cleared his throat impatiently.

  “I’m trying,” I said, a little irritably.

  “Just relax,” Emory said. “It’ll come.”

  “Well, if you want me to relax, why are you rushing me?”

  “Rushing you?” Emory said.

  “Forget it,” I said, concentrating again.

  But right away, Emory cleared his throat again.

  “Emory, would you please stop that? It’s distracting me.”

  “Stop what?” he said.

  I looked at him, saw the confusion on his face.

  “Didn’t you just clear your throat?” I said.

  “Why would I clear my throat? We’re in the astral dimension—no physical body, remember?”

  “Oh,” I said. “Then … ” Who was clearing his throat?

  I listened again.

  Someone was wheezing. But now when I listened more closely, it was obvious it didn’t sound like Emory at all.

  Then that same person coughed.

  I looked up at Emory. He wasn’t coughing or wheezing.

  “Zach?” he said. “What’s going on?”

  I didn’t answer, just hovered there, slowly drifting, listening some more. I could now clearly hear the ragged breathing of a heavy smoker. The wheezing sounded like it was coming from right next to me—which is why I’d thought it was Emory. But it wasn’t.

  I grinned at Emory. “Got him!”

  We had to fly a long way—miles and miles from Hinder Island, much farther south than the cabin by the lake where we’d first found Gilbert.

  But this time I wasn’t fumbling along, trying to retrace some forgotten route from earlier. This time I was back to being guided by the sound of a person, which meant we could soar across the sky. Even I felt like Superman now, invulnerable and throbbing with power.

  Somehow I knew just when to stop.

  “We’re here,” I said, suspended in the darkness.

  We were way beyond even the most rustic of country houses now. It should have been just an ocean of darkness.

  And it was mostly dark, except for a collection of other

  worldly lights. They were enormous, five feet across at least, and swaying slightly, like buoys gently rocking in a sea of thick night fog. Even stranger, each light was a slightly different color—muted shades of white, grey, red, yellow, green, blue, and orange.

  Meanwhile, strange noises also rose up from below. One sounded like the gurgle of a river, another like pancakes sizzling, one like the hissing of a freeway, and still another sort of like bubbles popping.

  What was this, some kind of circus funhouse? But not surprisingly, it was all definitely coming from within the astral realm.

  Nothing about this dimension surprised me anymore. Still, I had to know if all this had anything to do with Billy’s father.

  I knew for a fact that he was down there. I could hear him breathing.

  ———

  It wasn’t a funhouse—it was a graveyard. That’s where Emory and I found ourselves.

  It was an old graveyard, maybe even an abandoned one, given the odd angles of some of the gravestones and small monuments jutting up from the uneven ground. In the real world, there was probably nothing much unusual about the place, except maybe its remote location and its age.

  But in the astral dimension? I now had a clearer look at the colored lights that I’d seen from above. They were vortexes—like the one Emory and I had seen before back on Hinder Island, the one that had sucked down the spirit of that old man. There were nine in all, each one a different color and each one slowly sucking in on itself like a miniature galaxy. It was their movements that made them look, from above, like they were swaying.

  They were also the source of the strange sounds—the popping, the sizzling, the gurgling, and all the rest.

  “More inter-dimensional gates,” Emory said. “What do you think? Each to a different dimension?”

  This made sense. “But whose—” I began.

  Emory pointed into the shadows among the gravestones, to something I hadn’t noticed at first.

  Strange figures stood listlessly among the graves. They were in the astral dimension along with Emory and me, not in the real world. They glowed too, like Emory and me, but dimmer. And they didn’t have silver cords.

  “Ghosts,” Emory said. “Well, I guess that makes sense since this is a graveyard.”

  “Maybe they’re like Alistair,” I said. “Somehow they’ve learned to avoid going through their gates.”

  “I don’t think so,” Emory said. “Look at their faces.”

  There were nine ghosts in all, the same as the number of vortexes. I saw an old woman in a ball gown, a hunched old man in an ill-fitting suit, even a small girl with a bow in her hair. They all wafted slowly around the graveyard. Did the different gates mean that every person went to a different dimension after they died? That was interesting.

  Emory was right that there was something wrong with their faces. Their bodies were dimmer than ours, but more or less focused. But their faces were somehow indistinct, blurred and wavering. I couldn’t make out their expressions, or even their features. It was the strangest thing. It was like the astral breeze was blowing their faces into some kind of flicking smear even as it left their bodies undisturbed. And since they didn’t have eyes, I guess it made sense that they couldn’t see us—none of the ghosts seemed to notice Emory’s and my arrival.

  “Lost souls?” I said. “But why haven’t they been sucked into their next dimensions? That’s what happened to the man at the other gate.”

  “Unfinished business?” Emory said. “Or maybe the gates are confused because there’s something wrong with their minds. So they’re stuck in some sort of limbo.”

  Emory’s theory made as much sense as anything. The gates themselves weren’t shifting locations, so maybe they were somehow anchored near the physical bodies of the dead, while their spirits were drawn to the general area, not able to move away, but not willing to move on to the next life either.

  Emory floated to the closest of the ghosts, an impossibly skinny old woman simply wrapped in a sheet. “Hello?” he said.

  The ghost didn’t answer, didn’t even turn Emory’s direction. If anything, her face got blurrier.

  “Forget the ghosts,” I said, remembering why we’d come. It had been so easy to be distracted by the figures and rotating vortexes that mesmerized like optical illusions. “We need to find Billy’s father.”

  “Let’s just stay away from the gates,” Emory said. “They may not detect the ghosts, but I bet they can detect us.”

  “Where is he?” I said, meaning Billy’s father. He was the reason we’d come, but I didn’t see him anywhere.

  “That must be his,” Emory said, pointing to a single car parked in the graveyard’s gravel parking lot. “Why don’t you listen again?”

  Duh. I listened again, and immediately sensed him in a patch of gravestones not twenty feet away. A single ember burned orange in the dark—a cigarette. The light from the inter-dimensional gates and the ghosts didn’t shine into the material plane, so I hadn’t noticed him in the night.

  I rocketed closer to him.

  Billy’s father looked dark and solid—a sharp contrast to the ashen spirits that surrounded us. Still, like those ghosts, it was hard to make out his face. He definitely had
a face—it was just hidden by the gloom of the graveyard and the dark filter of the astral dimension. All I knew for sure was that he looked more haggard than when I’d seen him last.

  I looked around. I didn’t see Gilbert anywhere.

  “Where is he?” I said to Billy’s dad. “Where’s my little brother?”

  He didn’t answer, just took another drag off his cigarette. He thought he was alone in this graveyard.

  I stared him in the eye. “Answer me!”

  Billy’s father cleared his throat, still raw. He wasn’t hearing me. Nearby, a grey vortex fizzed like churning acid.

  “Conrad and Evelyn must not have arrived yet,” Emory said, floating behind me. “This must be their meeting place—the place they talked about on the phone. Assuming you’re right that he really is the kidnapper.”

  “I have to be,” I said. “Why else would he be in a graveyard in the middle of the night?”

  “Then the fact that Gilbert’s not here yet is a good thing. Billy’s dad doesn’t know yet that they’ve got the wrong kid.” He thought for a second. “That means we can go to the police now. If they get here before Conrad and Evelyn, Gilbert will be safe.”

  Emory was right. We’d made it here in time. I let my anger at Billy’s father drain from me like water down a hole in the sand.

  “But where are we?” I said. “We don’t even know where to tell the police to go.”

  “A sign,” Emory said, already moving toward the parking lot. “We need a street sign or a cemetery sign. Something we can use to identify this place.”

  Emory was bringing me back to reality. Figuring out where we were and getting word to the police was far more important than having an astral stare-down with Billy’s dad.

  I followed Emory to the parking lot, but even as we searched for something to identify the location, I remembered again how I didn’t even know if Gilbert was still alive.

  “He’s alive,” Emory said out of the blue, as if reading my mind. “Conrad and Evelyn have no reason to kill him. They have no way of knowing they got the wrong kid.”

  “Then why couldn’t I hear him?” I said. I admit I was letting despair get the best of me.