Chasing Shadows

by Jamel Cato

  Her alien face gave me what was unquestionably a smile.

  “Deuces,” she whispered into my mind.

  I located an aluminum staircase that descended to the floor of the eighty-foot deep construction crater that marred the earth beyond the fencing.

  After a short search, I found the wave receiver hidden behind the base of a huge foundation pylon. It was at least ten times bigger than the receiver at Pat’s house and powerful enough to produce an event horizon visible to human eyes. When I briefly viewed the boundary without my glasses, I saw a shimmering wall of Astral energy that stretched horizontally beyond the crater walls and vertically into the sky.

  I stepped past the boundary, entering a realm that was neither fully Earth nor fully Wruvia. I was alarmed by what I saw. A vast army of Wruvians marched toward the Earth side of the boundary. There were thousands upon thousands of evenly spaced rows of Xantu, Krykin wolves and other species I could not identify. The sky was dotted by low-hanging alien stars and hundreds of flying insectile creatures the size of cars. Their rear guard stretched beyond the horizon.

  In the center of this hellacious army was an arachnid the size of a jumbo jet with eight eye palps, twelve legs and an armored carapace. It was Jaaru the Devourer. The Wruvian possessor of minds was encased in a glittering, semi-translucent sphere that had to be the shield protecting him from Kulara.

  I was allowed a few moments to behold the might of my enemy before a crushing force pounded into my consciousness like Thor’s hammer. My will was pushed aside like a leaf caught in a strong wind as Jaaru took control of me. I felt a momentary pause in this psychological torching when his telepathic claws reached the part of my consciousness that housed my gift.

  “Kulara’s champion,” he said mockingly inside my head. “I consumed your pathetic will with such ease I could hardly distinguish you from the other humans I have devoured. Where is the seer of weaknesses that Naaru whispered about to his unbound wolves? Where may I find the defender of dimensions Kulara promised? I shall torment you for denying me the joy of a worthy opponent.”

  My mind was bombarded with my worst fears and deepest regrets. I drowned in shallow waters I had never learned to swim in. I whispered the family secret that had gotten my parents killed to a boyhood friend. I learned anew that Hell was not just a fiery pit but the look of realization in the dying eyes of the people I had failed to save from the otherworldly. I dropped off Vanessa at a house occupied by a killer. These traumatizing encounters were so palpable my mind could not discern them from reality.

  Jaaru was indeed a devourer. But he was also a mortal bound by the universal laws of physics that underlay all the physical planes of existence. The extra-reality quantum pathways which granted him ingress into other minds allowed egress as well. The fragment of my consciousness still protected by my gift, which I now know is itself an extra-reality quantum phenomenon, traveled along one such pathway into his mind.

  The things I found there disturbed me beyond words. Jaaru’s indomitable will spread itself across countless souls, always hungering for countless more. I saw the moment when Kulara had infected him with such a hunger in the hope of protecting her body from the ravages of a Wruvia dominated by Xantu, whom she fearfully viewed as a reincarnation of the humans who were decimating Gaia. I felt the instance when she realized this had been a grave mistake. I witnessed the innumerable horrors that Jaaru had wrought and the mindless slaves that all of humanity would become under his dominion.

  But the most important thing I discovered was the interior of the shield protecting him from attack. Unlike the telepathic fishnet he used to capture minds, it had been created by mortals. It had a weakness. In hindsight, I believe this flaw had been intentionally engineered by Naaru. The shield was like an ingenious water wheel which constantly spilled and filled its buckets with black matter from the Astral Plane. All I had to do was tip one of these subatomic buckets upside down so it would return from the stream empty, creating a chink in Jaaru’s armor. The problem was that the inconsequential fragment of my consciousness that had slipped into his mind was too weak to exploit the vulnerability.

  Luckily, the same could not be said of a full blood Norwalk Witch.

  “It burns! It burns!”

  It took me a moment to realize the voice of suffering I heard was Jaaru’s instead of my own. He was responding in a primal way to experiencing physical pain for the first time.

  I looked up to see that a gash the width of a pool table had been torn into the flesh of Jaaru’s head, precisely in the spot I had opened in his astral shield. The wound was brightly demarcated by a ring of sizzling embers glowing with purple light.

  I turned in the opposite direction and saw Darlene in a glorious battle stance with wisps of purple steam swirling around her hands.

  “No one gets to torment my ex-husband but me,” she said.

  I had met Darlene in Richmond, where she was a young and powerful witch in a coven ruled by a Grand Mistress named Candace. The missing man I had rescued from a warlock was her younger brother. That’s why she still took my calls and showed up whenever I needed her.

  Towering behind Darlene was Xavier Osiris Hill, primed for battle in his Anubian form with a gleaming Egyptian Khopesh clutched in his right claw. Next to him stood the Hindu warrior princess named Riva, all four of her hands twirling ancient blades. The group was rounded out by a deadly quintet of women from the Sisters of Ceto, including Marianna. Each of Medusa’s descendants wore her Branusian Necklace upside down, which alchemically converted their mystical locks of hair into ranged weapons that could puncture or strangle an opponent from ten strides away.

  Eve stepped out from behind Xavier and tossed me Felipe’s enchanted battle axe before scurrying back through the boundary.

  The showdown was about to go down.

  The crater rumbled as an incensed Jaaru audibly spoke through the mouths of all the Wruvians. “I will crush you into the bedrock and defecate the dust of your bones from the anus of your ruined world!”

  “You will have to come through me first,” Gaia’s disembodied voice said from all around us. A colossal manifestation of Earth’s nature spirit emerged from the wave receiver’s boundary. This version took the form of a human woman clothed in a garment of lush green leaves and gravity-defying bodies of water. I saw no signs of the ill health she had shown during my visit to Patni.

  “That is my intention, Whore of the Dirt,” Jaaru bellowed.

  “Here I stand.”

  “There you stand a fool, prepared to defend the cancer devouring you from within. I am not dissuaded by the distortion of light you are projecting now. I know you are weak.”

  “Sticks and stones, little spider.”

  Jaaru sent forth a titanic wave of psychokinetic energy that was strong enough to extinguish the sanity of billions.

  Gaia emitted a different force which counterbalanced it.

  Frustrated by his inability to possess new minds, Jaaru issued a simple commandment to the army he already controlled. He would overwhelm his opponent physically.

  The great horde of Wruvians swarmed toward the boundary with their weapons raised and fangs exposed.

  My lethal group of friends rushed forward to meet them.

  Xavier struck first. His Anubis swirled and slashed a blinding ballet of violence that sent a hundred decapitated heads and dismembered limbs bouncing back toward their arachnid Puppet Master. Spear points and canine teeth that contacted his magically hardened skin crumpled into useless shards.

  Riva dispatched at least four Wruvians with every meticulous swing of her quartet of arms. She teleported in and out of harm’s way, a sword-thrusting geyser that seem to erupt in a dozen places at once.

  Darlene scorched enemies by the hundreds with purple blasts of Norwalk fire.

  Scores of Wruvians lost eyes and tracheas to flashing Medusa locks.

  I spilled my own fair share of Wruvian ichor with a mysterious axe that supernaturally enhanced my movemen
ts and seemed to have a bloodlust all its own. I wondered if the weapon would continue killing if I released it from my hand.

  The sliver of my consciousness that was still in Jaaru’s mind observed a tiny seed of doubt germinate as he watched a small band of unusual humans push his great horde back. It was quickly uprooted by confidence in his logistical advantage.

  “They will tire,” he said to Gaia.

  Avatars of the Earth’s elements, Gaia’s children, suddenly appeared on the battlefield and reinforced us. The Fire elemental incinerated fifty thousand Wruvians. Another twenty thousand were frozen in place by the Water elemental’s ice. A wide swath of the canyon floor was cleared of Wruvian bodies by the gale force might of the Wind elemental. The Soil elemental opened pits in the canyon floor that swallowed tens of thousands.

  “I will not,” she replied.

  But from my vantage below, I saw one foot of Gaia’s giant avatar slip backward. When it did, all the elementals momentarily disappeared. She was weakening.

  Jaaru, who was still present in my mind just as I was in his, saw this slippage through my body’s eyes. He increased the pressure on Gaia with his mental battering ram while more fighters streamed onto the battlefield from the Wruvian side of the boundary.

  As I ducked under a whip strike from a Xantu warrior, I realized what had to be done. I pierced my opponent’s calf and then transmuted to the Astral Plane.

  Abruptly shifting from the deafening cacophony of battle to the quietude of this ethereal dimension was jarring. It took me a hundred breaths to gather myself. I withdrew the coin Margouix had given me and focused on it with all my mental strength. I was soon dragged by an unseen force through portions of the Astral Plane I had never visited. After a nauseating trip through spacetime that functioned differently than the physical world, my body ungraciously flopped down before a glistening wall of energy that I instinctively knew was the entry point to yet a third dimension.

  I hesitated. My gift allowed me to travel between the Astral Plane and the physical world, but any other dimension was a danger zone. Living souls were specifically warned away from the permanent planes of existence. I was not aware of a single case of someone returning to the physical world after entering one. But I reasoned I had little to lose since Jaaru seemed on the verge of sending my dead spirit to such a plane.

  I stepped through the wall and found myself standing in an Eden of natural beauty. I was atop a verdant green plateau with a breathtaking view of a waterfall. Strange birds chirped songs so calming I felt a powerful urge to relax. The air had an intoxicating quality that drew impurities from my lungs and imbued me with a sense of profound peace.

  I never wanted to leave this place.

  “The waterfall glows with bioluminescence after the sun sets,” Naaru said to my right. “It is remarkable and grows more dazzling each evening.”

  I turned in that direction and saw the small arachnid, his shell fully intact, resting upon a hammock made of shimmering spider silk. Blue Streak lounged nearby, also uninjured, wagging his tail and contentedly watching a red insect germinate a blooming yellow flower.

  “It is beautiful,” I said. “So beautiful.”

  I felt compelled to recline in the lush grass and behold the perfection of the sky.

  “Why have you come?” Naaru asked, snapping me out of my entrancement.

  “Jaaru prepares to devour my world.”

  “What will you do?”

  “I will stop him.”

  “How will you accomplish this?”

  “I do not know. I was hoping you would tell me.”

  We listened to the pitch perfect birds for a few breaths.

  “You should see the waterfall at night,” he said. “It shines as bright as the stars of Jaaru’s sky.”

  Yes, the stars that weren’t really stars. That was how.

  I made my way back to the part of the Astral Plane that was directly above the battle. It had been difficult to locate because the force of Jaaru’s quantum push was breaking down the barriers between the dimensions. The sky above was not that of Earth’s nor the sky of the Astral Plane. It was the dark panoply of too-close stars native to Wruvia.

  Gaia had abandoned her camouflage and was using one of her crutches as a brace against Jaaru’s power, which had pushed her right up against the boundary with Earth. My friends were still battling the Wruvian masses, but as predicted, they were tiring.

  I turned away from the fighting and toward Tammy, who was gleefully riding a swing being pushed aloft by a joyful Emala.

  Jaaru, intercepting my thoughts, redirected a spike of debilitating mental energy toward me. Resisting it was like trying to bench press the Empire State Building. It pushed me to my knees, then into a prone position in the sand of the ghostly playground, all the while blocking the neurons that allowed me to compose speech.

  I used the last iota of my mental stamina to send a short telepathic message to Tammy over one of Jaaru’s co-opted pathways.

  Grab a star.

  Upon receiving my message, the little ghost of Tammy Balzano squeezed her eyes in determination. She kicked her legs for all they were worth, rising higher and higher. Emala pushed harder and harder.

  The last thing I recalled before passing out was seeing Tammy fly up out of her swing seat and clasp her fist around the biggest star in the sky, which was not really a star but one of the external neural clusters that Wruvians use to carry out telepathic communication.

  Jaaru screamed in agony.

  Chapter 34

  When I came to, Xavier and Darlene were carefully lifting me into a seated position.

  The smell and carnage of the battle were all around me, but the sky above looked like the one I was used to.

  Through my gifted sight I saw hundred-foot-tall versions of Kulara and Gaia standing on either side of a huge Seshen glyph that was floating in midair. The glyph was what made the wave receivers work.

  They each clutched one end of the unfathomable symbol.

  “May your health return,” Kulara said to Gaia.

  “It will.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I am going to intervene more, like you do.”

  “What about your rules?”

  Mother Nature shrugged. “I’m dying. What more can He do to me?”

  Kulara looked down at me. “I healed the scratches on your back.”

  Gaia raised an eyebrow.

  I was going to explain how that sounded way more scandalous than it was, but instead I popped my collar and said, “Full Mandingo.”

  Kulara laughed and snapped the glyph in half, forever closing the gateway between our worlds.

  EPILOGUE

  It started to rain, so I left the public funeral that the Balzano family was holding for Tammy. At my request, Pat had anonymously sent the Police the video recording that showed Keith Bullard snatching Tammy from her swing. The footage had been captured by the security system in Christine Riles’s home. Christine and Kit Harrington had been using it to blackmail Bullard into performing unspeakable acts that threatened EnviroTech’s business interests. I had Emala pilfer the only copy of the footage from a lanyard around Christine’s neck while the fat former educator slept and the wave receiver allowed Emala’s ghost to temporarily interact with the physical world.

  Detective Fahrbach was waiting just outside the cemetery gate. “Hey there, Mr. Tiptree.”

  “You always hang out at graveyards spying on people?” I asked him.

  “Probably not as much as you do.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “The text file we received along with the Bullard recording had a great line from one of my favorite Denzel Washington movies: King Kong ain’t got nothing on me. It made me stay up for two nights racking my brain over the last person I had discussed that movie with. Do you know who that turned out to be?”

  I flipped up the collar of my raincoat. “Have a good life, Detective.”

  He held out a bus
iness card with his personal cell phone number written on the back.

  “What’s this?”

  “Something for you to use when you get in trouble with the cops somewhere in America where your uncle and your cousin can’t help you.”

  * * *

  I sat in my home office reading Alan’s handwritten editorial notes on the research paper he had agreed to co-author with me. The paper was about the quantum properties of energy from the Astral Plane. The moment that paper was published anywhere, Alan would lose his scientific credibility and probably his job as well. He knew that and was willing to attach his name to it anyway.

  I dropped the paper in the shredder then twirled toward my computer, where I typed the front matter of The Piercer of Shrouds, the personal memoirs I had decided to publish instead. When I came to the book’s dedication page, I thought about Danny Lin’s internal conflict over his partnership with Kit Harrington, Alan waiting until now to be the big brother Pat needed then, Bobby Hollenbeck’s longing for more prestige, Elizabeth Minton’s worry that she had never met her father’s expectations, Kulara’s fear of Xantu thumbs and, most of all, how my yearning to help people was largely an overcompensation for my failure to help Darnell Bataille. I typed:

  For Vanessa, who showed me that the ghosts we never catch aren’t ghosts at all, but reflections of our own shadows, chasing us with truths we’d rather not face.”

  THE END

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