Shade and the Skinwalkers

by Marilyn Peake

  She was about to reply when the doorbell rang.

  Kai and I quickly jumped up and headed off for Bottomless Lakes.

  In our hurry, we’d forgotten to change out of our costumes. So apparently, it was going to be the Pink Power Ranger and Nightmare-Before-Christmas Sally to the rescue.

  As we made our way through the crowd of trick-or-treaters to answer the call to help a lost spirit, it really sank in that this was the final year of my childhood, the last year in which I would ever go trick-or-treating. Next year, would be college. It sucked that this was the way I’d be spending Halloween.

  A few of the houses had turned off their lights. That meant either they were out of candy or they were simply done for the night. Well, at least we’d gone out trick-or-treating early.

  After making our way through witches, ghosts, superheroes, Ninjas, mummies, Pokémon, outer space aliens (of course) and a bunch of other characters, we reached Kai’s truck. We hopped in and headed off to Bottomless Lakes Park.

  Away from the glimmering jack-o’-lanterns and Halloween bags holding burning candles, the night was exceptionally dark. Until we reached the main road with streetlamps, the headlights on Kai’s truck were the only thing illuminating our way.

  The crying kept getting louder. I thought I’d go insane. I asked Kai to put the radio on as loud as she could and still hear car horns.

  She asked if I wanted to hear a recorded talk or music.

  I said, “I don’t care, Kai. Anything. I just need to quiet the crying inside my skull or I’m going to lose it.”

  She said, “No problem. I get it.” She put on some heavy metal music. Not my usual cup of tea, but it did the trick.

  Rocking to music about death and dying, we finally arrived at Bottomless Lakes Park. The crying became real. It was definitely there. It pulled me in, made me feel empathy and an urgency to help.

  Kai reached into the back of her truck and grabbed two flashlights and a thick beach towel. She handed me one of the flashlights and clicked the other one on. She commented, “Jeez, it’s dark out here.”

  I listened for sounds. Nothing other than crying. I led the way, following the wailing like one would follow string to find their way out of a cave.

  It led us to the lake where Kai’s aunt had been murdered by the boyfriend of Kai’s mom, where the cougar had killed Kai’s Aunt Doli in her cat form.

  I said, “It’s the little boy, isn’t it?”

  Kai said, “I’m pretty sure it is. I’ve been sensing that our whole drive here.”

  Sitting down on the bank, I glanced up at the pitch-black sky. Stars twinkled like embers against charcoal. As I swung my flashlight beam across the rippled water, I felt the desert breezes stirring. It was going to be chilly when I emerged from that water.

  Taking off my pink cape and boots, I readied myself for the shock of frigid water. I said, “OK, Kai. I’m going in.”

  Diving forward, I used my arms to propel me down to where I’d last seen the Navajo boy. As I got closer, I once again discovered his glowing face. It was a light guiding me to him.

  His brown hair still floated around his head like a halo. Opening his mouth, he seemed more determined than ever to communicate with me. His mouth had been cleared of weeds, no discoloration of his face from choking this time. His message was longer. He said, “I’m lost. Please help me! I was murdered by some kids at my school. I was here getting ready to go swimming with my friends when they came along and said this place was theirs. One of the bigger kids pushed me into the water and I hit my head on a rock. I heard them all screaming and running around. But it was too late. One of my friends jumped in, but they couldn’t see me. I never moved on anywhere, though. I’m just here...”

  I reached out a hand to touch his face. I tried not to react visibly. He felt slimy. Some of his skin sloughed off from my touch.

  I experienced my normal reaction to horrifying, disgusting things. Nausea swam in my stomach like a nest of snakes. I tried to keep my face void of all expression other than concern, to keep from making the ghost boy feel rejected by my sense of horror at his condition.

  As I touched his cheek with my fingertips, I said, “There, there, it will be OK. I’m here to help.” I expected my message to come out only as wordless bubbles, but it wasn’t that way at all. My message was loud and clear, magnified by the cold rock walls around us.

  He returned to sobbing.

  I said, “I know how to help you...”

  He stopped crying and waited, his eyes wide and shiny in the light surrounding him.

  I said, “I think you just need a promise from me that I’ll report your murder. You should be free to move on into the afterlife after that. Who was it that pushed you into the water?”

  The boy looked around, studying the walls or the debris floating in the water or something. He avoided looking at me. Seriously, was he afraid of being a tattletale even in death? I broached the subject with him. “You don’t want to tell me?”

  He said, “Yeah. I’m afraid he’ll go after my little brothers if I do.”

  I said, “How would they ever know it was you who reported them? They killed you. They’d never suspect you were able to report them. Ghost stories are never believed.”

  He started sobbing again. Mashing his fists into his eyes, he loosened more skin. Finally, he blurted out, “Jason Huffman!”

  Huffman? Was this another kid in Bobby Huffman’s family? It certainly made sense. The guy claiming to be Bobby’s uncle was certainly intimidating and weird.

  I said, “Can you tell me anything else about him? Maybe his school and grade, so the police can find him?”

  He tugged at his hair. A clump came out and floated around in front of his eyes. Batting it away, he said, “He’s homeschooled, but he lives two houses down from a playground. He’s sixteen years old. He has brown hair and brown eyes. Please report him. I want to be free of this prison I’m in.”

  I said, “Sure. I can do that. What’s your name? The police will need that.”

  He said, “Sam Nakei. I live with my dad ... I mean, I lived with my dad ... in an apartment upstairs from Sam’s Comics. My dad’s name is Sam, too, and he owns the store.” I thought he was going to cry again when he made the correction to lived. He obviously only half-believed he was dead.

  Then he vanished. Just like last time, the light that had been coming from him disappeared, leaving me in suffocating darkness. I swam up to the surface, feeling freaked out by everything that bumped into me: sticks and leaves and slithering things.

  When I burst through the surface, I drank in the dry desert air.

  Kai reached out her hand and pulled me up onto land. She wrapped the beach towel around my shivering body.

  Clutching the towel around my shoulders, I shared everything the little boy had told me. As I finished, I noticed the dark shape of a woman at the top of the cliff wall suddenly turn and disappear from view. The twirling motion of her long skirt had caught my eye. I mentioned this to Kai. She said, “It might be a living woman. It might be a ghost. It’s entirely possible it’s a deceased relative of the boy watching over him, making sure his case gets reported to the police.”

  We debated how to report the murder to the police. I did not want to do it. I’d grown allergic to fame. I did much better without it. Kai liked the attention, but she worried the police might start wondering how she knew so much about homicide victims.

  In the end, we decided to sleep on it. The boy had been dead for a while. It would no doubt bring resolution to his family to know what had happened to him, but then again it would crush all hope that he might still be alive. As far as the boy himself went, we weren’t sure what time felt like in the afterlife. We just hoped that each day we delayed didn’t feel like an eternity to him. We needed time to think.

  CHAPTER 18

  When we walked in the front door, my mom jumped up from the couch where she’d been watching TV. She looked horrified. She said, “Oh my God, Shade! What h
appened to you?”

  I tried brushing off her concerns. “Nothing much. I got pushed into a pool at a kid’s house.”

  She said, “A pool? What kind of pool? You’re covered in mud!” She stood up and walked over to me. Covering her nose and mouth with her hand, she added, “And you stink! It smells like you fell into a cesspool!”

  Kai thought quickly. She was getting as good at fabricating white lies as I was. “I told her she stinks, but she didn’t believe me. That pool was disgusting! It looked like no one’s used it for years. It was all green and slimy...”

  Furrows formed in my mom’s forehead. She said, “You need to take a shower right away. You don’t want to get an infection or some kind of nasty skin rash. Maybe I should make an appointment with a doctor...”

  I said, “Let’s just see if I have a problem. I’m sure I’ll be fine.”

  Locking myself in the bathroom, I peeled off my costume. Turning on the shower to drown out the sound, I let myself break down and cry. Seeing my Pink Ranger costume totally destroyed told me my childhood was definitely over. It was the perfect symbol. On the kids’ show, the Power Rangers fought the Hidiacs, Styxoids and Koragg—all at the same time—without a single tear in their costumes. Even their hair looked great. It was childhood fantasy, how we wished things worked.

  I looked in the mirror. My hair was plastered with mud. Weirdly, the amulet was still sparkling clean. Not a drop of mud on it, not even dirty water stains or discoloration. I unclasped it and laid it carefully on a shelf in the towel cabinet.

  Pulling off my underpants and dropping them on the floor, I felt horrified to realize they were coated with mud. Sitting on the toilet seat, I put my head in my hands and wept.

  Then I climbed into the shower to wash everything away: the mud, the stench, my horror over the way a sweet little boy like Sam Nakei, a kid who grew up in a fantastical comic book world, had been murdered.

  Welcome to the real world, Shade.

  After I’d washed myself a bazillion times with deodorant soap and scrubbed my hair at least as many times with dandruff shampoo, I stepped out of the shower. The bathroom had been transformed into a tropical jungle—warm misty fog covering up the source of something that smelled boggy and in the process of decomposing: my Pink Ranger suit and underwear.

  I dried myself off and ran a brush through my hair. Wrapping a clean towel around me—I sincerely wished we could afford a thick fluffy towel, I needed one so badly for comfort just then; but I settled instead for our least threadbare one—I ran barefoot into my room, clutching the amulet tightly in my hand. I found Kai sitting on my bed and asked if I could have a minute alone.

  I threw on some comfort clothes: an old purple sweat suit with a unicorn on the front of the shirt. I really did own a lot of hopeful relics from my childhood. The only thing that would make it more delusional is if the unicorn was farting rainbows out of its butt. I was in such a bad mood, I had half a mind to paint one in with colored markers.

  Placing the amulet around my neck and letting it slip down under my shirt, I opened the door to my room.

  Kai came in a few minutes later. She said, “Hey, I’ve been checking The Flying Saucer. There’s a comment on your Twilight post from mysticpoet.”

  Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!

  Kai offered me her cell phone, but my eyes were too bleary from the brackish lake water to read words that tiny. I wanted to make sure I saw and understood everything correctly.

  I popped open my laptop. I hurried over to the forum as fast as my trembling hands would let me. With shaking fingers, I kept hitting the wrong keys. Finally, I was in. I skimmed the topics until I found World Cruises and Other Boats, originally posted by studentwithdreams who we were thinking was the same person as mysticpoet. I ran my fingers down through more than 100 comments ... Oh, come on, come on, where is it? ... until I finally found the one left earlier by mysticpoet:

  I’d love to go to Italy. There’s a place in Italy where famous people including George Clooney, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt go for vacation: Lake Como. Google images for it. It’s gorgeous there! It could be just part of a trip, actually. You could take a cruise to France, then travel by train to Lake Como, then go anywhere else you’d like. You could even go by train all the way to Romania where the Romanian coven in Breaking Dawn is from. How cool would that be?

  I found my reply:

  mysticpoet – I’d love to visit places in the Twilight series. I actually have a friend who’s somewhere in Romania right now. Her parents took her on vacation there. I don’t think she’s too happy about it because it’s the beginning of the school year – not a great time to be out of school, right?

  And three hours ago, mysticpoet had finally replied! The comment said:

  Shade, I’m going to PM you. I have an awesome picture of Lake Como that I found on the Internet. It made me all *misty* just picturing Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt there together. How dreamily romantic!

  Jesus! My fingers kept trembling as I put in my password to look at my private messages. When I got in there, there was only a very cryptic message. It said:

  Here’s the picture of Lake Como I told you about, the one that makes me feel *Misty* every time I think about Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt staying there. And check out the beautiful door on the house across the lake, the blue one with the black metal handles. I hope you get to visit here someday!

  Wow ... The word *Misty* totally leapt out at me. I felt like some of Luke’s analytical ability had finally rubbed off on me. I was thinking like a sleuth. The person going by mysticpoet had capitalized the word Misty, so that it looked like a name now, but they still placed it between stars like people do when mentioning emotions online. It worked. It practically jumped off the page and grabbed me by the eyes. Misty! Misty! Misty! Who cares about Angelina and Brad now? Misty was probably at Lake Como ... and, oh my God! ... probably in the house with the blue door!

  I tried explaining everything to Kai; but my voice shook so badly, I ended up pointing to Misty’s private message and explaining the connections I saw in statements that sounded more like grunts than anything coherent.

  Kai got it. She said, “Call Luke! Call Luke!” Pacing around the room, she changed her mind in seconds. “No, better yet, ask him to call a meeting. Everyone should hear about this. We might need to act quickly.”

  I texted Luke. He replied: come on over.

  It was really late by then. My mom had gone to bed, so we tried sneaking out. She obviously wasn’t asleep because she came out of her bedroom the minute we opened the front door. She yelled, “Shade!” in a tone of voice like I was leaving forever and she’d never see me again. At that moment, I wasn’t sure what felt worse: having her not care about whatever I did or wherever I went, or her worrying about me and hovering over me when I had important things to do that I wasn’t ready to share with her.

  I tried to be as insistent about going out as I possibly could. Pulling another white lie out of my weapons cache, I spoke quickly and desperately. “Mom, I just realized I have a really important homework project that’s due tomorrow! Our group’s getting together now. I gotta go...”

  She stood there at her bedroom door, watching us leave. This mother thing, her mom role, was as new to her as my daughter role was to me. She didn’t seem to know what to do.

  I wished I could explain where I was going, but I really couldn’t.

  Kai and I ran to her truck. The night was still incredibly dark, the jack-o’-lanterns and electric lights having been snuffed out long ago.

  At Luke’s place, it was so dark, it felt like being inside a cave. With the absence of starlight, the pitch-black sky could have been the roof covered in sleeping bats.

  Kai grabbed a flashlight. We used it to guide our way, so we wouldn’t trip over anything. Most of the lights in Luke’s house were off. The curtains in his room were lit and a lightbulb sputtered in a holder next to the front door, the only illumination puncturing the dark.

 
; I nearly jumped out of my skin as the howl of a coyote broke the silence. Whether he was answering the call of his wild cousin or the sound of our footsteps, Luke’s dog started barking and growling.

  My life. Seriously, sometimes I just felt like shoot me, shoot me now. My level of anxiety ratcheted up to barely tolerable. And then in that moment, I felt deeply ashamed of myself. Misty was probably somewhere in Romania having horrible things done to her, alone and afraid, desperately trying to communicate her predicament to us with vague clues on a forum. I could handle the dark and the sounds of coyotes and growling dogs. I could do this.

  Luke came to the door. He said his mom was asleep, so we should be quiet. When we went inside, I heard a dog whimpering and scratching at an inside door. As we headed toward Luke’s room, Rocky gave up trying to get out. The house went deadly silent.

  Once everyone arrived and Luke closed the door to his bedroom, we got down to business.

  I showed everyone the new forum post. I said, “I wanted to show you this in person. I’m kind of getting paranoid, I think, after seeing how easily Luke could figure out an IP address and all. I got scared that if the kidnappers hacked into my computer or cell phone and saw me emailing or messaging you about what I think is a post from Misty, they might move her or kill her.”

  Luke put a hand up, as if to dismiss what I was saying. He said, “I doubt the kidnappers are tech savvy. More likely, they’re thugs without a whole lot of computer skill. Which, by the way, is helpful. Misty or someone acting on her behalf may have been able to post in the forums simply because no one’s spying on their online activity. How they’re doing this ... if it’s really them ... I have no idea. Maybe Misty still has her cell phone. How she’s charging it, I don’t know. Also, you’d think her parents would have any of her cell phone activity tracked as part of her rescue. Maybe she’s sneaking onto someone else’s computer ... maybe a bunch of different people’s computers.”