He waved his left arm over the flames, as if she could overlook a mound of burning books in the middle of her library. In a flash, her concern and confusion turned into anger and outrage. The young man looked at her again and smiled briefly, opening his mouth again in another attempt to speak. First a strained croaking sound came out, but another shaking, furrowed-brow attempt to speak produced a single word, “Re-remember!”
Remember what? Was it a threat? That he’d come back and burn down the whole building. Unless she—?
She gasped as he lowered his hand into the flame. Above the scent of burning books, she smelled the pungent aroma of burning flesh. Suddenly, he flung his body backward, away from the flames—
—and the fluorescent lights overhead crackled and flickered, creating a surge and retreat of harsh shadows. From his supine position, another shadow rose, like an inkblot stain. It hung motionless in the air above the unconscious man. Between the whorls of rising smoke and the motionless black shape, she blinked rapidly to clear her eyesight. Acrid smoke triggered a raw cough, prompting her to back up before it became an uncontrollable spasm.
Tears welled up in her eyes, blurring her vision.
Abruptly, the inkblot stain darted away. She imagined a frightened animal fleeing a forest fire.
With a sudden burst, the sprinkler head directly above the fire activated, spraying water across the floor and quenching the fire before it could spread. She hurried to the counter, grabbed the phone and dialed 911.
TWENTY-THREE
When his five-year-old sister screamed, Ethan had been in his bedroom, drawing dogs on a sketch pad his father bought for him. He’d decided to draw a different animal each day, but he soon learned a day wasn’t long enough. He wanted them to look real, not like stick figures with blobs for their heads and bodies. “Practice makes perfect,” his father had told him. But how much practice would it take for them to look good? “Because nobody’s perfect,” he muttered.
A sudden crash downstairs startled him, making him break the point off his pencil. Seconds later, Addie screamed. Pushing aside his drawing supplies, he jumped back, knocking over his desk chair, and froze.
The boogeymen flowed across his room, in through the windows, out through the doorway. Sometimes, if he really focused on an activity, he could tune out their presence. They never completely abandoned his house. They acted like they owned the place and Ethan and his family were the intruders. But his friend Barry had assured him multiple times the others would not hurt Ethan or his family.
“Addie!” he called. “Mom! Dad!”
Nobody answered. But he heard Addie sobbing downstairs.
The queasy feeling had returned. Ethan trusted Barry, but not the rest of them.
“Barry!” he called frantically. “Where are you?”
Barry had left the house earlier and hadn’t returned. What if something happened to Barry? What if it already happened? Would the others keep their promise?
He ran into the hallway and down the stairs. Everywhere he looked, a shadow seemed to dart by. They moved around so much and looked so similar he had trouble counting them all. Were there five or ten—or twenty?
At the bottom of the stairs, he stopped and looked across the dining room. The table had been shoved from its normal location. Next to an overturned chair, his father lay sprawled on his back, eyes closed, one knee raised, a frying pan near his head and a bloody butcher knife a few inches from his open palm.
In shock, Ethan passed through the archway into the dining room. He saw his mother slumped against the unfinished wall. Blood oozed from a knife wound in her shoulder. At least he assumed the wound came from the bloody knife near his father’s hand. Face pale, his mother fought to stay awake, her eyelids fluttering rapidly, occasionally revealing nothing but the whites of her eyes.
Sitting in a ball in the near corner, arms wrapped around her knees, head lowered to shield her own eyes, Addie sobbed, pausing only to wipe her runny nose on the sleeve of her white blouse.
“Addie,” he whispered, but she refused to look up or answer him. “Addie!”
Nothing.
A dark shape entered the dining room, circled the table and left again.
Hugging the wall, Ethan scrambled over to his sister and tried to lift her face in his hands, but she fought him. Instead, he sat beside her and hugged her shoulders. Between the sobs and the sniffles, she released her own knees and wrapped her arms around him, burying her face against his chest.
Once again, he looked at his father and the knife by his hand, frying pan by his head. “Addie, what happened?”
“Dad—and then Mom…”
He wasn’t dumb, but he was confused. Had his father stabbed his mother? Had his mother then hit him over the head with a frying pan to stop him? His parents had argued in the past, usually about something broken in one of the houses they stayed in before his father finished the repairs and they moved into another crappy house. But his father had never hit his mother. At least, he’d never seen him hit her. He had a thought that they finally saw the boogeymen and it drove them crazy. Somehow, he knew it was their fault. Maybe they scared his parents or made them fight. Since the living shadows first appeared in the house, Ethan wondered how they could hurt anyone. They couldn’t open doors or windows, or lift anything. Not a knife or a gun. But he’d heard his parents talking about the news, about people in town hurting each other.
And now it had happened in his own home.
“You said you wouldn’t hurt us!” Ethan yelled. “You promised!”
With his whole family in one room, more of the shadows entered and lingered nearby. More than six of them, he decided, almost ten. At first, he couldn’t tell them apart, but the longer they stayed in the room, the easier it was to spot differences. Some of the smaller shadows were blurry with wispy arms and legs. They stayed far away from him, almost as if they were afraid of him or his display of anger. But the bigger ones had sharp edges, no blurry borders, and they hovered over him, trying to scare him, like the bigger kids on the playground who were bullies.
He was scared, but angry too. They’d lied. They’d hurt his parents.
Addie continued to sob quietly in his arms. Maybe she’d seen the free shadows, the boogeymen, and that explained why she refused to look up. You couldn’t hear them or smell them or feel them. You only knew they were present when you saw them. If she didn’t look up, she could pretend they were gone or that she had only imagined them.
Emboldened, he stared at the big one leaning over him, and shouted, “You said we were safe!”
Glancing across the room, he checked that his father was still unconscious. What would happen if he woke up? Would he try to kill Ethan’s mother again? Would he attack Addie or Ethan next?
His mother’s head lolled to the side, her hand fumbling toward the stab wound high on her left side, just below her shoulder.
“Mom?” he called. “Mom, can you hear me?”
She muttered something he couldn’t understand.
A few of the shadows left the dining room. The big one who had tried to bully him, backed away without leaving the room.
“This is your fault!” Ethan said. “I’ll tell Barry you broke your promise!”
Though he knew the threat was pointless, because Barry had no power over the others, Ethan sensed the need to put on a brave face, to not look weak in front of the bad shadows. But he had other concerns. Unlike the shadows, his father could hurt all of them if he woke up and decided he really liked stabbing people. Or, if it wasn’t his fault, if the shadows had somehow made him do it, what would stop them from controlling him all over again, from forcing him to kill his entire family.
While he worried about what his father might do next, the blood stain on his mother’s dress continued to spread. If Ethan sat there holding Addie and did nothing else, their mother could bleed to death.
A few shadows lingered in the room, floating around in no real hurry. Meanwhile, Ethan’s heart pounded so hard he thought it
might explode. And his growing panic made him tremble uncontrollably.
So that the shadows wouldn’t hear, he leaned down and whispered into Addie’s ear, “We need to get help!”
TWENTY-FOUR
Dean jumped from one browser tab to the next, checking the lore for information on shadow people, peripherally aware of sirens coming and going through town. He had a good idea the wave of vandalism and assaults continued to disrupt everyday life in Moyer. Gruber hadn’t contacted them since they left the police station with Maurice, so Dean assumed he had his hands full.
They had to get ahead of the cycle of weird behavior and escalating violence and stop the reign of terror before Moyer became a ghost town.
The thought of ghosts triggered a quick glance at the activated EMF detector by the door, the best they could do for an early warning system. One thing at least that the shadow people had in common with ghosts. Dean wondered if salt-loaded shotgun shells could temporarily disrupt shadow people the way they worked on ghosts. Not a permanent solution, but maybe enough to buy them time to regroup.
Regular light had no effect on the shadow people, yet black light changed their consistency and prevented them from possessing humans. Of course, black light also gave the shadows the ability to physically harm humans. “Double-edged light sword,” Dean said as he skimmed sections of lore.
Exhausted, Sam slept through the rising and falling wail of the sirens.
Based upon lore, shadow people were most often seen in the periphery of human vision or during periods of sleep paralysis. They stayed near humans but preferred to remain unseen. Some were considered harmless while others seemed malevolent and induced feelings of dread. The physical descriptions and movement patterns matched what Dean had witnessed in the last two days. Unfortunately, the lore included little in the way of weaknesses or vulnerabilities.
“How do you gank a shadow?” Dean wondered.
He glanced toward Sam, who hadn’t stirred since his head hit the pillow.
With a sigh, Dean reviewed his notes. The lore described the ineffectiveness of regular light against shadow people, but black light seemed to hamper them. Maybe that presented an opening.
He thought back to his encounter at Gyrations. That shadow had possessed a man and wanted to slice and dice a bunch of EDM aficionados. Yet it stopped before the assault began. Dean didn’t flatter himself to think his presence had been a deterrent to the shadow knifer. So, something in the club had been an obstacle.
On the bedside table, Sam’s cell phone rang.
Dean walked over and picked it up before it woke Sam. Checked the caller ID. Gruber. “Yeah?”
“Blair?”
“Tench,” Dean said. “What’s up?”
“Several things,” Gruber said. “None good. Luther Broady hanged himself in his cell.”
“Damn,” Dean whispered.
“Guess he couldn’t handle the guilt over what he’d done.”
Dean pressed a hand to his face. Though Luther hadn’t been responsible for the murder, all the evidence pointed to his culpability. Probably assumed he’d had some kind of psychotic break.
“Chief Hardigan is on the warpath,” Gruber said. “‘How could this happen?’ And all that, but we are stretched very thin, even with Bakersburg helping out.”
“I hear non-stop sirens out there.”
“Yeah,” Gruber said grimly. His voice dropped as he continued, “So, I watched some of the surveillance footage again…”
“And?”
“And… something’s there. Something I don’t understand,” Gruber said. “If it was one camera or one location, I’d chalk it up to an equipment malfunction or a trick of the light. But it’s something else, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Dean said. Gruber had taken the first step. “Something else.”
“Are they… Are they shadows?”
The conversation in the room roused Sam, who opened his eyes wide and pushed himself up into a sitting position on the bed, mouthing, “Gruber?”
Dean nodded and switched the call to speaker, so Sam could listen. “They only look like shadows,” Sam said, raising his voice. “It’s a mistake to assume that’s all they are.”
“Had a feeling you’d say that,” Gruber replied with a sigh. “Somehow, those things are responsible for this—chaos, aren’t they?”
“Almost all of it,” Dean said.
“How is that possible?”
“The shadow people—”
“That what you’re calling them?” Gruber asked. “Shadow people?”
“Good a name as any,” Dean said, as if the name was a convenient label, rather than something recorded in the lore. “The shadow people poss—”
Sam reached for the cell phone. Dean frowned but handed it to him. Of the two of them, Sam had a better understanding of Gruber. Sam held the phone up and said, “These shadow people have the ability to… alter behavior.”
“But how?”
“Like a drug,” Sam said, holding up a hand to forestall Dean’s vocal protest. “We know alcohol and narcotics can lower inhibitions, make people more compliant or angry, confused or depressed.”
“Sure,” Gruber said.
Good idea, Dean thought. Give Gruber something he can wrap his head around.
“Well, the shadow people have a more direct effect on people,” Sam said. He took a deep, silent breath before proceeding. “Shadow people have the ability to control their actions.”
“Again, how is that possible?”
“We don’t know,” Sam said.
Technically true, Dean thought. We know they possess people but exactly how the possession works is something only they know.
“More important question,” Gruber said, having taken the supernatural aspect in stride. “How do we stop them?”
“We’re working on it,” Dean said, loud enough to be heard from across the room.
“While you’re doing that, I have a favor to ask.”
“Sure,” Sam said, looking at Dean, who shrugged.
“Local librarian reported a book burning.”
“Not that I approve of book burning, but—”
“Gets better,” Gruber said. “Or worse, depending on how you look at it. She reported a strange shadow coming out of the guy who torched the books. And she insisted the burning books included a message of some kind. Maybe it relates to censorship, but these days, who knows?”
“We’re on it,” Sam said.
* * *
By the time the Winchesters arrived at the Moyer Public Library, a fire engine crew had determined the fire no longer presented a threat. They left behind an ambulance with two EMTs, one of whom bandaged the hand and forearm of the accused book burner, Robert Secord, by the front desk of the library.
They found the librarian, Bonnie Lassiter, a conservatively dressed woman in her late fifties or early sixties, standing over a charred mound of books at the center of a broad puddle of water. Around her, they heard a steady drip of water falling from soaked books and wet metal shelves. Judging by the covers and titles, twentieth-century American history had taken the biggest hit. Only one sprinkler head had been triggered, so most of the library had been spared water damage.
“Everything okay?” Sam asked.
“Oh! Hello,” she said, almost startled to see them standing beside her. “Are you with the police department?”
“FBI,” Dean said. “Special Agents Tench and Blair.”
“FBI? Wouldn’t have thought this crime deserved Federal attention.”
“Long story,” Sam said. “Were you injured?”
“No,” she said. “I came over here to start cleaning up. But my mind wandered. Happens more often these days.”
Dean peered up at the sprinkler head, then down to the floor and back up again. A bead of water dangled from the sprinkler for a moment until it finally fell, splashing right between the two soggy mounds of charred books. Dead center.
That’s not a coincidence.
“We understand you saw a strange shadow,” Sam said.
“Strange, yes,” she said. “Everything about this was strange.”
“Tell us what happened. From the beginning?”
“I was stacking returned books,” she said. “Alone at first. Then Bob over there entered.” She nodded toward the young man in the care of the EMT.
“You know him?” Dean asked.
“Never met him,” she said. “Anyway, I heard books falling and came over to investigate…” She explained how she’d found Secord sitting on the floor, the books arranged neatly in front of him but doused in lighter fluid. Then the fire, his initial inability to speak followed by the utterance of one word before shoving his hand in the flame and passing out.
“‘Remember’?” Sam asked. “Remember what?”
“I have no idea,” she said with a shrug. “And it took him a long time to get out that one word. When he first tried to speak, he looked like a fish plucked from the water, mouth opening and closing.”
“When you called the police, you mentioned a message of some sort,” Dean prompted.
“The books,” she said, pointing.
Dean and Sam looked at the books, too charred to read any titles or even make out what had been on the covers. “What were they?” Dean finally asked.
“I was too stunned to notice,” she said. “American history, I imagine. That’s the section he raided.”
“So, what was the message?” Sam asked.
“The message wasn’t the books themselves,” she said. “But the way he arranged them. A number. Eighty-eight.”
“Eighty-eight?” Dean asked.
“Look,” she said. “You can still see it.”
“Does that number mean something to you?” Sam asked.
“No,” she said. “Sorry.”
“He said ‘remember’ so there must be a connection to you,” Sam said. “Was it a year—1988? Did something happen to you in 1988? Or here in Moyer?”
“Maybe a sports jersey number,” Dean suggested. “Any famous sports figures from Moyer?”
“Not ringing any bells,” she said.
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