Shadowboxer

by Tricia Sullivan

  The wild ones had knocked Fuller to the ground. They were all around him, standing on him, growling. Hungry.

  ‘No!’ I cried suddenly. ‘Stop!’

  And for a second, they did. They stopped and turned their attention to me. Fuller took advantage of the break in the action to reach back and grab Mya by the hair, still holding the smoking vial of medicine in one hand.

  ‘Listen, you guys,’ I said. ‘I’m dead now. I can’t beat up this scuzzbag or believe me, there’s nothing I’d like more. But it doesn’t take a genius to see that if you gobble him up, he’ll be inside you. That’s how eating works. The old man is poison. Walk away.’

  I know, it’s rich coming from me, right? I don’t usually do noble. But I’d been wrong about my moment. My moment hadn’t happened in the cage against Gretchen. It was happening now. I was gonna find a way of taking care of this situation without fighting. I had no choice.

  ‘Come on, Mya,’ I said. ‘You have a chance for another life. You don’t have to stay with him. And violence ain’t gonna solve it.’

  My social worker would have peed herself laughing if she could hear me say that. But I didn’t care. Mya’s sister was listening.

  ‘You must run, Thiri,’ Mya said. ‘Go now. As long as you are here, Mr. Richard has power. That’s because the power is you.’

  Fuller held Mya’s hand with one hand and the other was preoccupied with the vial of medicine. He couldn’t stop the younger child escaping.

  After she was gone he set the vial down and wrapped both arms tightly around Mya. Shaking with fear, he took in the snarling mouths of the animals that surrounded him.

  ‘Ploy!’ he called in a loud voice. ‘Come up here, please, and bring a sedative for the child.’

  Below, there was a noise of people moving in the house. Someone was coming up the stairs.

  ‘You give me no choice,’ the old man said in Mya’s ear. ‘Ploy will give you an injection. When you wake, you will be mine and there will be no more of this nonsense.’

  I found that I had drifted up into the trees without meaning to. There was an invisible current pulling me away from the earth and towards the sky. Below, animal eyes gleamed and tails lashed. I could see the flanks of the immortal creatures moving as they breathed. They were still hungry.

  It was a terrible feeling. I knew how they felt. No forgiveness was possible, and they’d choke on Fuller’s flesh even if it meant they doomed themselves. I’d have done the same thing in their position. I couldn’t pretend otherwise.

  As one, they converged on Richard Fuller to tear him limb from limb.

  Darkness was taking my sight.

  I couldn’t feel my heart beat, and I wasn’t breathing. I was removed from all the usual things my body would have done at a time like this. I was diffused through both worlds, like I had this giant consciousness.

  Darkness was coming.

  It moved through the forest, and as it came I was starting to break down. I could feel a presence in the rainy trees, in the spaces between the leaves and under the roots. The presence of some unseeable being came rising up through holes in the world like black ink into a sponge. As it grew more, I grew less, until my own consciousness was more of a rumor than a reality.

  I heard the bead curtain move and a woman said, ‘It’s all right, Mya. It will be over soon.’

  Mya screamed.

  Then the bead curtain chattered again as it parted, and somebody crashed into the room.

  ‘Jade!’ Shea shouted. ‘Jade, where are you?’

  My sight came swimming back to me. From above, I saw the animals scatter as if Shea were some huge threat, dangerous far beyond the powers of his pacifist bean-sprout-eating frame. Although, I have to say, he was doing a pretty good job of putting the pacifism to one side.

  Shea scanned the room and fixated on Richard Fuller. In two strides he was on Fuller and pushing him up against the wall that had so recently been forest. Ploy scurried back into the house and collided with another woman; then the two of them disappeared down the stairs. Mya darted under the shadow of the forest where it met the edge of the porch.

  ‘What a joke,’ gasped Fuller as Shea collided with him. ‘Not you again. Should have killed you. So ungrateful. Leave before I get tough on you.’

  In my abstracted, presumed-dead state I couldn’t help noticing what an absurd attacker Shea made. He was taller than Fuller, but he’d obviously never been anywhere near a fight in his life. The way he moved was hilarious. Strangely, I found this endearing. Even though he was a total geek, he was prepared to try.

  ‘Leave you?’ Shea snorted, attempting to pin Fuller to a wall. ‘You’ve got to be joking, mate. The police are here.’

  ‘Let them come,’ Fuller panted, jamming an elbow into Shea’s gut. ‘I own the police.’

  ‘Not this time,’ Shea said. ‘Where is Jade? She called me from here. I’m sure it was her.’

  So I had gotten through to him! My dead heart tried to leap.

  Fuller had wriggled along the wall pursued by Shea until he was jammed into a corner, his back up to the wall.

  I sensed what Fuller was up to before he did it. With one hand behind his back, Richard Fuller was reaching inside a drawer. He was pulling out a syringe. I screamed at Shea, but I couldn’t get through to him.

  ‘What have you done to them?’ Shea grunted with the effort of holding Fuller in place, but he didn’t do anything to control Fuller’s left hand. ‘So help me, if they’ve been harmed I’ll kill you myself, you—’

  The needle went into Shea’s neck. Shea’s eyes rolled back. His body went rigid. He hit the floor with an awful sound, eyes open.

  It was the worst thing I’d ever seen.

  Richard Fuller was shaking like a crackhead as he stepped away from Shea’s body. He wiped spit from the corner of his mouth.

  ‘I don’t know how you got out of the forest, but you can’t come back from this. You’re a dead man.’

  Fuller looked at the syringe like it was his best friend. Then, with an effort, he rolled Shea’s body across the floor. The roots of otherworldly trees stretched across the porch.

  A lion-shaped shadow loomed beyond Shea. Kala Sriha was there, a heavy darkness just beyond the realm of sight.

  Shea couldn’t be dead. He couldn’t. Why had he taken on Fuller as a wimpy journalist? Why hadn’t he turned into the lion? Kala Sriha was right here. It wasn’t fair. Everything was wrong.

  Weird cries came from the jungle. They were high-pitched, repetitive, and also somehow familiar. Too mechanical to be animals. Lights flashed in my eyes, very bright. The windows lit up blue and red. I thought it was my brain shutting down, but the old man reacted, too.

  Sirens. Police.

  Voices sounded from the stairwell. Fuller looked down at his dishevelled clothes and brushed feebly at himself, like he was preparing to entertain guests.

  This time when the bead curtain parted, it admitted four police officers in riot gear. One of them was a slim, middle-aged woman.

  ‘Shea? Are you there?’ she called, peering into the shadowy forest as if sensing something strange was going on. Shea’s body was wreathed in leaf-shadow on the edge of the porch.

  ‘Has there been a misunderstanding?’ Fuller said in Thai. ‘I didn’t call the police. I—’

  ‘Don’t talk,’ one of the other officers said. ‘Down on the floor!’

  Weak and miserable, the old man complied.

  I looked down on the scene from above. The female officer knelt down by Shea. She was half in the forest but didn’t seem to notice. She picked up Shea’s hand and felt for a pulse.

  ‘Call the coroner,’ she said.

  No Goodbye

  I HUNG AROUND Shea, frustrated and sad. I was disoriented. Everything looked green and complicated, but I couldn’t tell up from down. His body still lay in the leaf litter, eyes open. Then his spirit form rose up and his ghost caught sight of me. We stared at each other in shock.

  ‘I was an idiot,
’ he said. ‘Mya tried to tell me.’

  ‘Are you sure? I was kind of hoping none of this was real,’ I said.

  ‘Jade. You don’t belong here.’

  ‘I could say the same to you.’

  We stared into each other’s unearthly eyes. It was happening again. Just like that night we’d spent together. I’d seen through the surface of him and glimpsed something on the other side of Shea. Something that I knew, something that knew me.

  I was looking at that Shea now. It was a beautiful feeling, the best feeling ever. And for a second I felt like myself again. The old Jade. The real me, just for a moment.

  Just long enough for my heart to break.

  Below, the great black lion prowled. It was huge, even bigger than it had been that morning I’d woken up with it in my bed. As big as a horse, at least. It had long legs and huge paws, and an elegant tail with a tuft at the end. Its eyes blinked slowly. It sniffed Shea’s body. Oh, no. No, no, no...

  ‘You got my call?’ I said, trying to lighten things up. I wanted to cry but it’s hard to cry without a body. It was getting harder to hold on to myself. Parts of my smoky cartoon self were starting to drift away and blend with the trees.

  He tilted his head and his brown eyes softened. ‘I just got here. Parawat, my contact in the police, has been watching the house. Nothing seemed to be happening, but when I got that call I just knew. She told me to wait until she could put together her team, but I didn’t listen to her. Guess I cocked it up, eh?’

  He touched the pinprick mark in his neck where the needle had gone in.

  ‘You came just in time,’ I said. ‘If you had waited even a minute longer, it would have been too late. But how did you convince the police?’

  ‘I gave them the information Mya gave me, about the safe. They’ll be going through that evidence right now.’

  ‘So can they prosecute him, or not?’

  ‘Because it’s international, it’s complicated. He’s part of a larger ring. They have evidence for kidnapping of children, but they can’t get him for murder when they have no bodies.’

  His frown lifted as he thought of something.

  ‘Of course, there’s my murder now, I suppose...’

  Like that was supposed to be a good thing.

  ‘Jade, listen. Mya needs help,’ Shea said. ‘You have to look out for her and her sister.’

  I didn’t even know where Mya was. The police hadn’t spotted her. The strangest thing about this scene was how the police were talking on their radios and securing the building even as Shea and I hovered in the trees. The woman called Ploy had come in the room and was now berating the handcuffed old man, accusing him of perversity and drug use and bribery and cheating on his taxes.

  ‘You have to go back, Jade,’ Shea said.

  ‘We both have to go back.’ But even as I said it I knew I was too feeble to go anywhere. I saw Kala Sriha lie down beside Shea’s body. More police were here. They were taking photographs and writing down notes while Shea lay there, not breathing.

  This couldn’t be happening, but it was. The darkness was coming at me like the end of time.

  I heard Mya’s voice. Where had she gone? The sound was very faint.

  ‘Jade! Jade, where are you? Come back!’

  I watched as Kala Sriha covered Shea’s body entirely in shadow.

  ‘How am I supposed to help Mya? She isn’t like a regular kid. Shea, tell Kala Sriha to help her.’

  His image smiled a little in that dry British way.

  ‘Kala Sriha is a god, Jade. I don’t give orders to Kala Sriha.’

  ‘But Shea... what’s happening? Where are you going?’

  He was starting to fade. He was slipping back to his body, into the great blackness of Kala Sriha with his golden cat eyes, and I could hear an ominous rumbling sound. Purring.

  ‘I’m supposed to be here now,’ Shea whispered. I couldn’t see him, but I could feel his breath in my ear. ‘Kala Sriha saved me the first time for a reason. Mya was the reason. I have to go now.’

  ‘Shea, wait! Kala Sriha has to make you live! Because I can’t hold on, and without you and me she’s alone.’

  I couldn’t see him anymore.

  ‘Jade? Jade!’ Mya was calling me. ‘Jade, come back to your body now.’

  No. It was too far to travel. Shea’s ghost was gone, and Kala Sriha’s great warm shadow moved away from his corpse. The corpse was empty, but now the lion’s black pelt sparkled with the light of a thousand stars.

  My thinking was starting to melt, like when you fall asleep. Everything was running together making its own kind of untraceable sense, as if I were breaking into pieces and drifting away from myself. And if I’d been hoping for a real goodbye—some final moment to bring closure to my life—it didn’t happen. I couldn’t even hear Mya’s voice anymore. I was disintegrating and there could be no going back. The sky was pulling me up and away.

  Where is the Love?

  SOMETHING HAD BITTEN me in the stomach. No, stung me. A needle as long as a screwdriver had gone in and stayed there much too long. Then came the burn as venom slid into my blood.

  My body convulsed. The pain was back, wringing and grinding and pulling at me no matter how I moved or didn’t move. I writhed uncontrollably and that made it worse. I tried to lie still and every breath felt like getting hit by a bus.

  But I was breathing.

  My eyes were open.

  The locker room got bigger and smaller. I was lying on a physical therapy table in one of the side rooms.

  Mya was holding my hand. The forest was there, in the smell and the flowers and the green light, and my bed seemed to be tilting downhill. I glimpsed the giant baby face of Lek; then the huge naga’s body was sliding past me like a moving wall.

  Mya whispered something in Thai to me, and it was no longer easy to understand her. I struggled.

  I think she said, ‘Don’t tell them it hurts or they’ll give you the wrong drugs.’

  Or maybe she said, ‘They put handcuffs on Mr. Richard and he couldn’t stop them.’

  Or maybe, ‘There’s a naga under your bed.’

  Then the room seemed to expand to become a vast, green hall, and Baby Lek slid under the massage table and vanished into a large tree. The room snapped back to normal and I heard the guttural noise of Khari screaming and yelling. He vaulted over the bottom of the table and stood on a bench, pointing at the floor. Spit flew as he gabbled, ‘Snake! Snakes! Snakes on a plane!’

  I licked my lips. Wanted to speak. Hurt to breathe, to blink, to squeeze blood through the heart, but these had to be done. Mustn’t show pain. Needed to know I was alive.

  Closed my eyes. Little rest. Please. Just a tiny one.

  A doctor came in with Mr Big and Tommy Zhang. The doctor asked Khari to climb down off the bench and Mr. Big confirmed that there was no snake under the massage table.

  Khari’s voice was ragged. ‘But Jade... she disappeared... how did she get here? And who’s the kid?’

  I half-opened my eyes, saw Mr Big pat Khari gently on the shoulder.

  ‘It’s OK, it’s OK,’ said Mr. B. ‘You got confused, I know, you’re fond of Jade. It’s OK, man.’

  ‘No, she was gone, like not there,’ Khari was saying as Mr. B led him away.

  Then the doctor broke out his stethoscope and I felt cold metal on my chest. Why do they have to make them things so cold?

  ‘Am I alive?’ My words didn’t sound, but I must have done something because I felt Mya’s hand squeeze mine.

  ‘Jade?’ the doctor said urgently. ‘Jade, can you hear me?’

  He was shining a light in my eyes. I started blinking, squeezing Mya’s hand. Pretty soon there were a whole bunch of people around me. I grabbed the doctor’s flashlight and shoved it away violently. Then I shut my eyes.

  ‘We think you had some kind of rare allergic reaction to the synthetic material in your opponent’s gloves,’ the doctor said. ‘The ambulance is waiting.’

  ‘Shea.
..? Mya, where’s Shea?’

  Mya held my hand in both of hers. ‘He is gone,’ she whispered in Thai.

  I shook my head.

  ‘He can’t be.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Jade.’

  She slipped a brown envelope into my hand. ‘It’s the photographs. Don’t let anyone take them. I must go now.’

  The doctor spoke right over Mya as if she wasn’t there. Maybe she wasn’t.

  ‘Are you in pain now, Jade?’

  Yeah, pain would be one word to describe it, but the word ‘pain’ wouldn’t be painful enough. Then I remembered me what Mya had said about the drugs.

  ‘It don’t hurt,’ I whispered, though it hurt worse than any person could ever hurt me. ‘Don’t give me no drugs, ’cos it don’t hurt at all.’

  I HAD A private room in the hospital, but it wasn’t private for long. Tommy Zhang came sailing in, literally smelling like success. He was probably still using Fuller’s charisma drugs.

  ‘What the hell happened to you?’ he said. ‘I thought you were gone.’

  ‘I know you did,’ I whispered. ‘I know everything.’

  His face hardened. Defensive, he talked even faster than usual.

  ‘You disappeared. The doctor tried to help you but you were gone. You weren’t even really sick. You faked everything.’

  ‘I didn’t fake beating Gretchen,’ I retorted.

  He bent down close and in my ear he said,

  ‘You got nothing on me, Jade. I made sure. You got nothing.’

  Then he straightened, but when I looked at him all I could see was scared. Scared, scared, scared.

  Man, I was so tired of having to always fight. I didn’t want to hate Tommy. Too many bad things had happened. When I thought of Shea I felt like someone had reached inside me and scooped out all the good feelings forever. I thought: where is the love?

  I reached over to the bedside cabinet and passed him the brown envelope. Scowling, he opened it. When he saw the photographs inside his eyes widened. He seriously looked like he was going to shit himself.