by J. S. Morin
My only real option was taking my medicine and finding out what was still left to discuss.
While I waited on the couch, I checked the news. The local papers hadn’t picked up the story of a break-in at Harvard, but The Harvard Crimson had. But it was a one-paragraph piece disguised with eight paragraphs worth of words. I could boil it down to two sentences: “Local nutjob breaks into crime scene. Police bow to political pressure and release suspect.”
Nothing in the article was half so concise.
By the time Judy was dressed and ready to go, I was convinced that I’d gotten away with my little adventure—at least as far as the public was concerned. Whether I stayed in the clear on the home front depended a lot on how these next few minutes went.
Judy jangled Tim’s keys. “Let’s go.”
I led the way without explaining where we were heading. It was a clear morning, with the first of the trees losing their colored leaves. The bite in the air must have been hell on Judy’s wet hair, but she didn’t complain.
When we headed into Davis Station, I hesitated but only briefly. Something told me that even though it was dark below ground, the T was safe for me in the daylight hours.
I hadn’t heard a peep out of my shadow since falling asleep in jail.
Judy was too busy fishing in her purse for her Charlie Card to notice. The herd of commuters around us lent an air of anonymity, of safety in numbers. Nothing was going to happen with this many witnesses.
A part of me wished my shadow would move though, just so Judy could see it and confirm it wasn’t all in my head. I’d rather the world go mad than find out it was me.
As the doors closed behind us, all I could think was that going insane sucked.
Chapter Twelve
The train started moving.
Judy took a seat in the back of a car. I held one of the leather loops and stood in front of her.
“Where are we getting off?” she asked.
“Harvard Square.” I tried to make it sound noncommittal. She knew where I’d been. Soon enough, she’d see just how close I’d parked to the crime scene.
Something in the look she gave me said she was worried about me. But what did I know? What went on behind those eyes was a mystery to me. I mean, all women were a mystery but more in the general sense of bewildering decision-making and inscrutable motives.
With Judy, she could have been staring through me, thinking about some obscure cryptography problem at work, running through a grocery list, or weighing whether I was fixated on something that required professional help.
I used to pop questions at her to find out what she was thinking at any given moment, and she humored me by answering honestly—as far as I could tell. I gave it up after hearing a few things I didn’t want to know about her family’s health issues and stuff she and Tim had done in bed. So when I say I had no idea what she was thinking, I had good grounds for my ignorance.
Rather than watch her stare at me like a buggy piece of code, I looked around the train car.
There was the usual mix of commuters with laptop bags and backpacks, college kids, and old people. I read and re-read the ads running above the windows on both sides of the car: local dot-com startups delivering groceries, community colleges looking for students, ambulance-chasing lawyers getting lazy and letting the victims come to them, not to mention the usual fast food and cell phone ads that you couldn’t escape without going off grid.
The lights in the car flickered briefly. Everything was old; electrical problems didn’t faze anyone except maybe the guy who appeared between the door and me.
Black trench coat. Black Stetson hat. The guy even had the beard-and-sunglasses ZZ Top look going—though with a less wizard-length beard. On top of that, the guy had to be Tim’s size, which was to say he was a polar bear walking on hind legs.
I could not have missed this guy, but he wasn’t on the train when it left Davis Station.
Catching Judy’s eye, I glanced urgently over to where the black-clad behemoth stood with hands in pockets as the train rocked.
“What?” Judy mouthed, frowning from her seat. She glanced past me and gave a puzzled shrug.
I looked back, and the guy was gone.
No, not gone. He’d moved.
Slowly raising a finger to his lips, the Black-Hatted Stranger nodded toward Judy. He stood at the far end of the train car. As I watched, he simply melted into the shadowed recesses of the poorly lit front of the train and was gone.
I swallowed, staring at the spot even as the train stopped at Porter Square. Passengers got on or off, but I didn’t budge. I was the cat watching the dot of the laser pointer wink out, wondering, “didn’t anyone else just see that guy disappear?”
The train moved again. I might not have blinked the whole ride.
When we pulled into Harvard Square, Judy shouldered her purse and grabbed me by the arm on her way out of the train. “Come on, Matt. I’ve got work today, too, you know.”
She preceded me out the station. I snapped myself out of the daze and followed. Hallucination. There had to have been something about the surreal lighting underground that made me more susceptible.
Topside, Judy stepped out of the stream of foot traffic and waited for me to catch up. “Matt, what’s going on with you?”
I rubbed my hand over my mouth. If I stood there stoically as I wrestled with how to answer, she was likely to storm off and tap the panic button on Tim’s key chain until she got close enough to set it off. She needed to see me conflicted.
She was slow to pick up on stuff like that, but I wasn’t making anything up. I was conflicted as hell. Without Judy and Tim floating me once in a while, my pizza delivery gig might not be enough to pay rent for my own place. Depending how this went, I might need new roommates.
I guided Judy to a short stonewall that doubled as seating. Judy sat beside me, a look of expect concern etched into her frown.
“To preface, this is going to make me sound crazy.”
Judy set her purse down, settling in for a story. “Crazy I can deal with.”
The stone was cold, making me wish I’d brought a coffee to at least warm me inside. But this hadn’t been a morning for detours. “I’m hearing whispers. Sometimes I see shadows that move.”
“And?”
I blinked. “What do you mean, ‘and’? I’m seeing and hearing things.”
Judy rested a hand on my shoulder. “You need to take more time for yourself. De-stress. Giving in to impulses isn’t going to get you back in control.”
They were all English words, but she’d lost me along the way. “Is that what your astrologer would say?”
Judy raised an eyebrow. “She’s a therapist. And she’s got a degree in psychiatry to prove it.”
I’d always had this picture in my head of Judy’s therapist, even though I’d never seen a picture of her. Dress slacks, bleached-white button-down blouse, and wire-rim glasses on a chain. She hadn’t worn baggy jeans and a Vision of Escaflowne t-shirt. But Judy was all the therapist I could handle. I’m not sure I could have said this to anyone else.
“I’m not having impulse control issues. I’m hearing voices. Not inside my head, like right behind me. Like someone whispering. And I’m not imagining seeing things, I’m seeing them.”
“Like what?”
I kept my voice low on the off chance anyone might take a break from rushing to work to eavesdrop on us. “Like shadows that move on their own, that don’t get interrupted by objects, that try to communicate.”
Judy’s mouth grew tight and small. “Oh.”
Time to go all in. Either Judy was my oldest friend, or I was going to have to find someplace else to live.
“I saw a man on the T just now. Dressed all in black—hat, sunglasses, trench coat—the whole deal. He just appeared by one of the doors.”
“Is that what you were trying to show me?” Judy asked. I had to give her credit for playing along with my delusions.
“Yeah. But he di
sappeared and popped up at the other end of the car.”
“Oooooookaaaay.”
“And then, I looked away, and he disappeared. I watched him dissolve into the shadows like a shadowblood from the show.”
Judy put an arm around my shoulders. “You want my advice? As a friend?”
I nodded. Right then I couldn’t look her in the eye.
“Talk to my therapist and let her help you. This thing of yours has gone over my pay grade. I’ll call her as soon as I get to work. We’ll figure something out with the money—money’s not important right now. Until then, just bottle this up.”
“How?”
If she had a plan for keeping talking shadows and imaginary men in black from plaguing me, I was all ears.
“Just… don’t act on any of it. You know it’s all in your head, or you’d be insisting it was real, not asking questions. Whenever something you know isn’t real tries to interact with you, just ignore it. Do what you’re doing, and keep a laser focus on it.”
She stiffened a finger and flew it toward my chest. Leave it to Judy to pantomime a beam of coherent light.
I gazed down the road in the direction of Harvard. “I don’t think I should get any closer to campus, just in case. Tim’s car is straight down that way. When you get to the Barker Center, it’s on the next block.”
Still with one arm over my shoulders, Judy wrapped the other around me in a hug. “I won’t tell Tim. Aside from Dr. Grace, no one else needs to know about any of this.”
I swallowed, then nodded instead of saying what I wanted to. But what if it’s not my imagination?
Chapter Thirteen
I grabbed a coffee at the Dunk’s just outside the station and pondered my dilemma.
Judy was off to work. Any minute she’d be on the phone setting up a therapy session for me.
That was a fight for another day. Today I was stranded in Boston. My only ways home were a couple hours on foot or another subway ride.
Who was in charge of Matthew Standford Lee? Me or some creepy-ass voice whispering and making shadows appear to move?
Commuters continued to filter out of the station. None of them looked any worse for wear. I mean, if there really were shadow monsters down there, someone would be screaming, and screaming tended to be contagious.
Draining the last of my coffee, I tossed the cup in the nearest bin and marched myself down the steps to the station.
The light from the streets above vanished, replaced by the grimy fluorescent panels lining the tunnels beneath Boston.
I thought back to a famous line from The Dark Hearth Fire. “Day and night we contest the lands beneath the skies; but the realm where no light enters is solely ours.”
Shadowblood Krayne hadn’t been talking about torches or candles or the glow from a sorcerer’s crystal. He referred to the sun. That was what had everyone in Corondia so terrified.
That the MBTA was Boston’s equivalent of the shadowlord’s ever-growing realm was something I used to consider funny. Everyone around the city liked to poke fun at the city’s subway system from time to time, and that was my contribution.
It didn’t seem so funny anymore.
The outbound Red Line was a ghost train in the post-commute hour. It arrived right on time with a squeal of old brakes and a rush of stagnant air bulldozed in front of it.
I hung back as a scattering of passengers exited. Only three other passengers boarded along with me.
The emptiest car was near the back with only one elderly Chinese woman aboard, balancing a cane across her lap. I headed for a seat at the far end from her.
Doors closed. The train pulled away from the station before I took my seat, making me stumble. I caught one of the poles to swing myself into my seat, hoping the old lady wasn’t watching.
A man sat down next to me, completely ignoring subway etiquette by not spreading out to the greatest extent possible on an underfilled car.
The Black-Hatted Stranger.
He wasn’t on the platform, and I hadn’t seen anyone come through the doors behind me before they closed. Sitting right next to me, he seemed even larger, like he should be playing linebacker or working as a bouncer instead of wearing a Neo-Goth getup and messing with pizza delivery guys.
“Better with fewer people around,” the Black-Hatted Stranger muttered.
I wanted to edge away. Maybe I could take another seat without him following. But instead, I took Judy’s advice and ignored him.
“Fine. You don’t wanna talk? Just listen,” the stranger said. He had a gravelly voice and a hint of the local accent. “We don’t want any trouble. But if you found anything in that office, we want to know what it was.”
We? How many more like him were there?
“Hey,” the stranger snapped, still managing to keep his voice down. He nudged me in the side with an elbow. “You hear me, you little bitch?”
Either my hallucinations had gained a physical component or there was a person talking to me from the next seat over.
Worst case, I was just talking, not breaking and entering. “I don’t want any trouble.”
The Black-Hatted Stranger shoved me again. “Should’ve thought of that before getting your dumb ass arrested. Your bosses so short on manpower that they sent you to ransack the place?”
“Listen,” I said with a tremble in my voice. “I don’t know who you think I am, but you’ve got the wrong guy.”
A meaty arm settled across my shoulders like a sack of cement. “Snuck into the sanctum of the prophetess. Cops pick you up on B&E and disturbing an active crime scene. Ringing any bells?”
“Um.”
“Listen. You look like a smart guy. Book smart, not life smart. Don’t play me. Whoever’s pulling your strings cut you a bad deal. Hand over whatever you found, and we can take care of you.”
I swallowed past a lump in my throat. “But I didn’t find anything. I mean, I barely got a chance to look.”
With his free hand, the Black-Hatted Stranger mussed my hair. “Well, that’s just a shame, huh? Now you got nothing for nobody. Tell you what. I’m gonna keep tabs on you and your eerie-ass girlfriend.”
“She’s not my girlfriend. Leave her out of this.” Twice my size or not, I was gearing up to punch this guy.
With a laugh, the Black-Hatted Stranger took his arm off me and shoved me away. “Fine, buddy. Just tell your bosses that we’re watching. Anything in that office is ours.”
I felt something, or at least, a lack of something. I’d never been a big believer in the feeling of being watched, but I just noticed its absence. Whoever or whatever the Black-Hatted Stranger had been, he was gone.
The elderly woman at the far end of the train was fixated on her cell phone. On impulse, I called out. “Did you see a guy in black here a minute ago?”
She looked up briefly and returned her attention to the phone.
I tried again in Mandarin.
She shook her head, glancing at me out of the corner of her eye.
When the train stopped at Davis Station, I offered to help her onto the platform. She declined. I couldn’t blame her. After all, who wanted the help of the crazy guy who saw imaginary people on the T?
I got away from her before she maced me or called the cops, and I scurried back to the apartment.
Chapter Fourteen
Back at the apartment, I didn’t even try to write. Television waves poured from the screen into my eyeballs, numbing my brain like whiskey.
“He was a nobody,” the whisper cooed.
I ignored it.
“Try writing. I’d love to see what you come up with.”
Without the physical presence to back it up, the voice lacked any real power over me. I turned up the television volume.
My phone buzzed.
A text from Judy mentioned discreetly that she’d set up a session with her shrink for a week from tomorrow. Nice. Maybe in eight days I’d be on something that would shut up Mr. Shadow and the Black-Hatted Stranger once and
for all.
“You shouldn’t go,” the whisper wheedled. “We’ll make a wonderful team.”
The few Clozapine pills left called out to me, but theirs was a voice only in the figurative sense. Temptation tickled and teased me to chase one down with a beer and be done with the day. With no idea how long that gunk stayed in my system, I didn’t want to chance it interfering with the drugs Judy’s shrink would surely supply.
“Fuck off,” I muttered. There was no one else around to hear me talking to myself.
My phone buzzed again. This time it was an email notification. When I saw who sent it, my mind went blank.
From: Li Zhujiu
Subject: Call me. Now.
I’ve been known to play dumb now and then. Sometimes I’d let calls go to voicemail with my phone in hand or conveniently forget to reply to an email I didn’t want to deal with.
But not with my father.
Li Zhujiu was a guy who commanded respect. He’d never laid a hand on me in my life; he never had to. From as early as I remember, the idea of disobeying him just seemed unthinkable.
I’d never been good with numbers, but one Shanghai phone number had been etched into my brain for as long as I could remember.
Dad’s secretary answered in crisp, polite Mandarin, then asked me to hold when I told him who I was. Lucky for me, it was a short wait, because my stomach practiced macramé the whole time.
My father came on the line. “Son, you are in danger.”
No preamble. No greeting unless you wanted to count calling me ‘son.’ Whether he spoke Mandarin because of habit or to make a point, I couldn’t tell. His English was at least as good as mine—he’d graduated from Stanford.
While my Chinese is pretty good, it’s not my first language. I kept my replies in English, hoping he would take the hint. “What kind of danger?”