by L. J. Smith
“We’re gonna drag you through that door by your hair, if we have to, Sunshine,” Dee said, just in case this wasn’t sufficiently clear.
“There are times when you can be too good, and this is one of them,” Audrey added.
They all started for the door—but they never got there.
The mist was different from the fog that had risen around Jenny on the bridge. It was thick, interspersed with dark tendrils, and it moved fast.
Ice and shadows. A whirling, seething mixture of white and black.
Jenny remembered it very well—she’d seen it twice before. Once when she was five years old, in a memory so terrible that she had repressed it completely, giving herself amnesia. And once a month ago, when she’d relived the memory in Julian’s paper house.
Tom was turning, enraged, to shout at Julian. Jenny slid from his arms. She could see by Julian’s face that he had nothing to do with this.
Looking around was like being plunged into a nightmare—a recurring nightmare. Frost was forming on every surface. It was creeping up the wooden poles with rusty lanterns that stood throughout the golf course. It was coating the barrels labeled XXX and the boxes labeled BLACK POWDER. Icicles were growing on the tarred ropes linking the wharf pillars.
Freezing wind blew Jenny’s hair straight back from her face, then whipped it stingingly across her cheeks.
“What’s happening?” Audrey screamed. “What’s happening?” Summer was just screaming.
It was so cold—as cold as the water that had drowned her in the mine shaft. So cold that it hurt. It hurt to breathe and it hurt to stand still.
Tom was shouting in her ear, trying to lift her and stagger toward the door. He’d made it through the fire. . . .
But not now. The ice storm was blinding. The white light was painfully brilliant, and the dark tendrils lashed through it like whips, like supple reaching arms.
They were holding Tom still. They were trapping everyone.
Slowly the wind died down. The blinding brightness faded. Jenny could see again, and she saw that the dark mist was gathering itself, coalescing. Forming figures.
Figures with malevolent, ancient eyes.
The other Shadow Men had come.
“Oh, God,” Audrey whispered. She drew in closer to Jenny. There were ice crystals in her spiky copper bangs. “Oh, God—I didn’t know. . . .”
Jenny hadn’t known, either. She didn’t understand. She recognized the cruel and ravenous eyes—she couldn’t be wrong about them. But the forms that went with the eyes . . .
Michael wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, placing himself in front of Audrey. Summer was making small clotted sounds of fear. Zach’s eyes glazed, then he shook his head and pulled Summer nearer to the group.
Those—things—can’t be Shadow Men, Jenny thought. The Shadow Men are beautiful. Heartbreakingly beautiful.
These creatures were terrible.
They were hideously twisted and deformed. It would have been easier if they hadn’t looked at all like humans, but they did. They were like dreadful, obscene parodies of human people.
Some of them had skin like leather—real leather, like something that had been smoked and cured. Yellowish-brown, so hard that their faces could never change expression. Others had skin like toadstool flesh—corpse-white and frilled, with dangling wattles.
It wasn’t just the skin. Their bodies were distorted and maimed, and their faces were terrible. One had no nose, just an empty black hole. Another had no facial orifices of any kind. Nothing—only blank, stretched skin where eyes and nose and mouth should be. Another had a horn growing out of the back of its head.
And the smell—they smelled like decay, and like brimstone. Jenny’s nostrils stung, and she felt bile rise in her throat.
Beside her, Tom was breathing hard. She looked at him, saw the open horror in his green-flecked eyes. Dee’s nostrils were flared, and she was holding herself ready for an attack.
It came suddenly—one of the creatures scuttling across the tiled floor, to stop right in front of Jenny. Jenny gasped—and recognized it. It was the gray and withered fetus they’d seen in the park, the one that had scampered into the Whip. Now that she saw it more closely, it didn’t look young like a fetus at all. It looked old, impossibly old, so old that it had shrunk and caved in on itself.
“Oh, God . . .” Audrey whispered again. Summer was keening.
Dee had fallen into the Cat stance, perfectly balanced, ready to initiate any action.
“Should I do it?” she said through clenched teeth.
Jenny opened her mouth, but before she could say anything, the withered fetus spoke.
“Can we take you? We can carry you,” it said, looking at Jenny with eyes that glowed like a tiger’s.
Then it giggled, wildly and obscenely, and scuttled away.
I never asked Julian what the little creatures were, Jenny remembered. She had been certain they weren’t Shadow Men because they were so hideous. Now she looked toward him, hoping that he would have some explanation, that he would tell her what she was thinking was wrong.
He had stepped forward. There was a dusting of ice on his black jacket, and his hair glimmered as if it were made from frost. His beautifully sculpted face and mouth had never looked more perfect.
“What are they?” Jenny whispered.
“My ancestors,” he said, introducing them to her, and destroying her last hope.
“Those—things?” She still couldn’t connect them to Julian.
Without any emotion that she could discern he said, “That’s what we become. That’s what I’ll become. It’s inevitable.”
Jenny shook her head.
“How?” Zach said sharply. He was probably the least repulsed, Jenny thought vaguely—that photographer’s mind of his. He found grotesque things interesting.
But Jenny didn’t. Not things like this, oh, never things like this.
“Is that—what they really look like? Or is it to scare us?” she heard her own voice saying.
Julian’s strangely veiled gaze met hers. “Those are their true forms.” He looked them over expressionlessly. “We’re born in perfection,” he said, without either modesty or arrogance—without any feeling that Jenny could see. “But as we age, we become grotesque. It’s inevitable—the outer form changes to reflect our inner nature.” He shrugged. “We become monsters.”
The poem. The poem on her grandfather’s desk, Jenny thought. She understood it at last, the line about them fingering old bones. These were the kind of creatures who would sit in a pit and do that. From Julian’s beauty she would never have guessed, could never have pictured him that way.
Now she tried to keep it out of her mind, the picture of Julian looking like them, so distorted, so debased. It couldn’t happen to him—but he’d said it was inevitable.
“But I don’t know what they’re doing here now,” Julian continued, as if unaware of her reaction. “This isn’t their Game; they have nothing to do with it.”
“You’re wrong,” a tall Shadow Man said. It had the eyes of a crocodile. Its voice, though, was shockingly beautiful, distant and lonely as wind chimes of ice.
“It became our Game when she stole our prey,” said another one, this one in the voice of somebody who’d eaten ground glass and fishhooks.
“Who stole your prey?” Tom shouted. But Jenny felt as if the floor had suddenly dropped away beneath her.
Her little fingers and the sides of her hands were prickling as if small shocks were going through them. She looked at Julian.
Julian had frozen, hands in pockets, staring hard at the other Shadow Men. Then his eyebrows lifted minutely and his head tilted back slightly. He’d got it.
His eyes, still expressionless, shifted to Jenny.
“She took the old man,” a third Shadow Man explained, in a whispering voice like snow blowing. “And the two boys, those were our prey, too. We hunted them. They belonged to us.”
Suddenly voices joine
d in from all around Jenny.
“The old man was ours by right,” a voice like a brass gong said.
“Blood right,” a thick and muddy voice croaked.
“He made the bargain—his life was ours,” a voice like a cat-o’-nine-tails added.
Julian looked the way Audrey’s mother had once, when she had suggested Michael give his filthy sneakers to Goodwill. “But you were done with the old man—surely,” he said fastidiously.
“We hadn’t finished enjoying him.”
“He was ours—forever.”
“And the boys,” a voice like cold wind put in, “we’d just started with the boys.”
“Never got a tooth in them. . . .”
I’m glad, Jenny thought fiercely. She was glad she’d saved her grandfather, too, saved him from an eternity with these monsters. But she was still frightened.
The tall Shadow Man was moving forward. It looked down at Jenny with its crocodile eyes: ancient, pitiless, and endlessly malevolent.
“She stole their souls from us,” it said formally, making the claim. “And now her life is forfeit. She is our rightful prey.”
There was a burst of noise, rising and swelling from every corner of the room. It got louder and louder. It was composed of beautiful sounds and strident ones intermixed, wailing and yelping and pure tones like music.
The Shadow Men were laughing.
“Get out of here, you crazy bastards! Go away!” Dee shouted over the cacophony. She ran toward the assembled monsters, punching straight out from the shoulder, snapping her arm forward to hit with a flattened hand. She kicked, her legs flashing out too fast for the eye to follow, striking with devastating force.
“No!” Jenny screamed, plunging after her. “Dee!”
She did it without thinking, and Tom was beside her, ready to stop Dee or help her fight, depending on what the Shadow Men did.
Jenny was afraid they’d kill Dee. Julian had been able to throw Dee across the room without effort. But the Shadow Men just laughed more and more uproariously—and faded wherever Dee kicked. Dee’s hands and feet never struck anything solid; the monsters melted like shadows whenever she touched them.
She was panting and exhausted when Jenny and Tom reached her.
The action had cleared Jenny’s head. She glanced at Julian, who was still standing where he had been, apparently unaffected by the sight of Dee going crazy. He looked—remote. Not tired, as he had before, but—disconnected. As if this were all a moderately interesting play. Maybe he was sympathizing with the other Shadow Men.
Jenny looked at the one with the crocodile eyes. She nerved herself to speak to it.
“You’re saying that because I released my grandfather’s soul, you have some right to me.”
“By law, you’re now ours,” the tall Shadow Man said. “We can take you—embrace you—do what we like with you.” Unexpectedly it looked at Julian. “The law can’t be changed.”
“I know the law can’t be changed,” Julian said flatly.
“She cheated us ten years ago—kept us from tasting her flesh—but now she belongs to us,” the chilling, musical voice said.
And then, as quickly as that, it was happening. The dark mist was closing around Jenny, separating her from Tom and Dee. She heard Tom cry out. The mist was like cold hands touching her body. The freezing wind was howling in her ears. She was being dragged away, just as they had dragged her grandfather into the closet years ago.
CHAPTER 15
What came next was not a verbal shout—if it had been, Jenny would have thought it was Tom. It wasn’t even a word exactly, more a wave of energy. And the energy was sheer negation, opposition. No! No!
Stop.
The mist uncoiled. Jenny’s vision unblurred. She was standing, gasping, a little closer to one of the cave entrances. Tom and Dee were shaking their heads, wiping their faces, as if to get rid of some blinding haze. They were panting, too. Everyone seemed on the verge of hysteria. But the shout had come from Julian.
He was standing in the middle of the room. Desperate hope leaped inside Jenny—maybe there was something he could do. But the next moment the hope folded and collapsed.
“You know the law,” the tall Shadow Man repeated blandly.
And Julian’s eyes fell.
They’re playing with us, Jenny realized dimly. With Julian, too; they like to see anybody suffer. They didn’t stop because he yelled at them, they stopped so they could draw it out a little longer.
Another Shadow Man spoke. This one had liver-colored skin, with splotches here and there as if he’d been burned by acid. The white of one of his eyes wasn’t white at all, it was red, red as rubies, red as blood.
“Nothing can stop us from taking her—unless someone else is willing to go in her place.”
It took Jenny several heartbeats to get her mind around that. She wasn’t thinking properly anymore. Then she remembered—her grandfather. They’d said exactly the same thing to him. A life for a life. Someone must go in her place. And her grandfather had, and now Jenny had rescued him and broken the bargain, and brought everything back to the starting place.
And meanwhile the terrible silence went on and on and on.
Then she heard a voice, a voice that was quite calm and devil-may-care—and human.
“I’ll go.”
Tom had stepped forward. His dark brown hair was neat and short and his smile was rakish. He said it as if he were offering to go out and get pizza for the baseball team.
And he looked wonderful. Somehow he managed to make his rumpled and frost-touched clothes look like the latest fashion. He stood casually, and there wasn’t a trace of fear in his expression.
For a moment, without thinking of anything else, Jenny was simply proud of him. Fiercely, passionately proud that a human, a seventeen-year-old who hadn’t even heard of the Shadow Men until a month ago, could stand up to them like this. Could conceal his terror and smile that way and offer to die.
That’s how I want to die, Jenny thought, and a strange serenity came over her. I want to do it well—since it has to be done. And I hope I have the courage, and I think—I really do think—that I just might. We’ll see.
Because of course there was no possibility of letting them take Tom. She would never allow that.
Before she could say so, though, there was a short, wild laugh. Dee was beside Tom, her head thrown back, her eyes flashing like a jaguar’s. She was as beautiful as some goddess of the night—some warrior goddess who’d just sprung up to defend her people. And she was grinning, the old barbaric grin that contrasted so oddly with her delicate features. The grin that Jenny hadn’t seen since Audrey had gotten hurt.
“No,” she said to Tom. “You won’t go. I will.” She was breathing very quickly, and laughing—she seemed almost exuberant. “Jenny needs you, you jerk. She’d never let you do it. I’ll go.”
“Just back off, Dee,” Tom said softly. His eyes were oddly tranquil, even dreamy, but there was something frightening in his voice. At any other time, Jenny thought, Dee would have backed off.
Now she just laughed. She looked like Dee—reckless, warlike, and unconditionally loyal—but she looked like more than herself, too. A greater Dee.
“It’s my choice,” she said. “I know what I’m getting into.”
And then, as Jenny listened in disbelief, other voices joined in.
“She’s my cousin,” Zach said. His face was sharp as a blade, and there was an intense, clear light in his gray eyes. He moved to stand sword-straight beside Dee. “I’m her blood relative. If anyone goes, it should be me.”
Audrey and Michael had been whispering hastily together, now they stepped forward. Audrey’s burnished copper hair was loose on her shoulders, and with her white clothing she looked like some kind of virgin sacrifice. Not elegant but exquisite, and holding herself with pride. Her skin was camellia-pale, and her voice was cool and steady.
“If everybody else is going to be a hero, then we can, too,” she said
. “The truth is that Jenny’s worth more than any of us, and we all know it. So, now. You can take your pick.” She looked at the Shadow Men. She very nearly, Jenny thought, tossed her head.
“Yeah,” Michael said. “The only thing is, we figure we’ll go together, her and me. You know, for company, right?” He gave a No Big Deal shrug, and then his mouth trembled violently, and he grabbed for Audrey’s hand. He looked for a moment as if he were going to be sick, but then he wiped his mouth and stood facing the Shadow Men squarely. There was a curious dignity about his stocky little figure.
Jenny’s throat was so swollen that she could barely breathe. She was opening her mouth, though, when something like a small blue thunderbolt shot into the clear space in the middle of the room.
“Oh, please don’t take Jenny,” Summer gasped. She was looking utterly terrified and as fragile as spun glass, and there was a wild blankness in her eyes. Her words came in an incoherent rush. “Please—please—you can’t take her. I’m not brave or smart—I should have been dead in the paper house. I—”
That was as far as she got. She collapsed like a bird shot out of the sky, and lay in a pool of blue until Zach picked her up. He held her—Zach, who never paid attention to any girl.
The Shadow Men were pleased. Jenny could tell. This was probably turning out to be a much better game than they ever could have hoped—much better sport. They had seven mice to play with, and they were clearly loving it.
“Are you sure you know what you’re offering?” the one with the crocodile eyes asked gravely.
“We could explain to them,” the one with the bloodred eye suggested.
“Tell them exactly what they’re in for.”
“How we mean to enjoy them.” Other voices joined in, and the Shadow Men moved in closer. A wave of revulsion went through Jenny at the sight of them, as if she were seeing them for the first time. They were old as spiders, old as stone. They were—abominations. And the thought of them touching any of her friends was insufferable.
It was time somebody put a stop to this.
“That’s enough,” she said in a voice as sharp and dictatorial as Audrey’s. “You’ve had your fun, but the game’s over. I’m the one you want, the one that cheated you. So forget everybody else. Let’s go.”