The Shadow Men

by Christopher Golden

  Trix slowed to a fast walk, glancing back one more time and wondering if everyone could see the wraiths. Why not? Why should only I be able to see them? She had no clue, and not knowing was always more frightening than the truth.

  “What the fuck’s up with your hair?” a voice said. The kid was taller than her, maybe fourteen years old, pimply skin darkened by a line of tattoo ants crawling around his neck and up one cheek. There were several other youths standing behind him, feigning attitude but exuding fear. Some were Asian.

  Here we go, she thought, saying, “Got a problem with pink, Ant Man?”

  He scoffed, bristling when a couple of his compatriots chuckled. “Got a mouth on you, bitch!”

  “Bitch?” It was Trix’s turn to bristle. “Your mother know you talk to women like that?” She took a step forward, the boy’s fear apparent, and for a couple of seconds she enjoyed it. “People are dead in Boston tonight, kid. You want to give me shit when a thousand people are buried under rubble?”

  He stood taller, glancing left and right—Can he see them, can he?—then looked down at his feet.

  “Your families all okay?” Trix asked.

  “Yeah,” Ant Man said. “We just dunno what to do.”

  “Looks like you got off easy,” she said, “but you could help me. I’m looking for Sally Bennet.”

  “You an’ everyone else,” the boy said. He turned and pointed along the street.

  Trix had assumed they were just another milling group. But half a dozen buildings ahead, a line of people snaked down the steps from a front door and twenty feet along the street. There must have been thirty people there.

  “They’re all seeing Sally?”

  “Yeah. Few from round here, some people I’ve never seen before.”

  “You give them shit, too?” The boy looked ashamed, and Trix smiled to put him at ease. “Take it easy, kid,” she said.

  “Name’s Marcus.”

  “It’s a good name.” She passed them by and hurried along the street, and as she approached the queue she made out the people standing there in more detail. Black, white, Hispanic, men, women, and several children, they stood in silence, shuffling forward slowly as a huge woman exited the building and hurried down the steps.

  The number of people here surprised her. Had they all gone through some ritual to find Sally, as she and Jim had done at the traffic island and then the restaurant back in their Boston? She doubted that, given the short time since the quake. And she wondered what that said about Veronica—that she had a greater distance between her and the people and city she was there to protect.

  So many missing people, Trix thought. She stopped in the middle of the road, and several people glanced at her. One pointed farther along the sidewalk. “There’s a line,” the man said.

  “Yeah.” Trix looked back the way she had come. Ant Man and his hangers-on were walking briskly along the street, and none of them seemed to notice the pale figure crouched atop a two-story house at the far corner. Another hid in shadows across the street. Just waiting, she thought. Watching. At least Jim took one of them with him. She pressed her hand to her jeans pocket, pretending to touch the letter she did not have, and then stormed up the steps and into the run-down building.

  A few voices of protest followed her in, and she heard shock at her lack of respect. But she’d apologize later. If they knew why she was here, they’d say nothing. If they were aware of what had happened, and that their Oracle’s life was in danger, they’d have piled in behind her and protected her all the way. Inside the building she smelled cooking vegetables and heard loud, pulsing music, and the line of people led behind the staircase and into a low doorway beneath. She’s in the basement as if she’s hiding away. Hands clasped at Trix as she pushed by, and a few more voices rose in anger, but she forced herself down the darkened staircase. She stumbled, missed a step, and was helped on her way by a shove in the back. She twisted as she fell and saw the angry man glaring down at her. “Wait your turn!” he whispered as she slid down the wooden stairs on her back.

  She grunted as she hit the cellar floor, pulling herself to her feet and quickly sensing the different atmosphere down here. She looked sidelong at the walls, expecting to see a thin place, but this was something else.

  This was humanity in need, in the presence of a power that might give aid.

  “Impatient for bad news?” a voice said. Trix turned slowly and looked to the far end of the basement room.

  The girl sitting on a ratty wicker chair couldn’t have been much more than eleven years old. She was black, wearing jeans and a grubby Miley Cyrus T-shirt, and holding the hand of a woman kneeling by her side. Trix had never seen a child so haunted and devoid of hope.

  “Sally?” she asked. The girl nodded. “Sally, I have something terrible to tell you. I think Veronica wants you dead.”

  The girl sighed. “I thought as much. C’mere, lady. You better tell me everything.”

  “First …” Trix started shaking. “There are men without faces.”

  Sally’s eyes opened wide. And then, in the building above, people began to scream.

  Where four streets met at odd angles, and the traffic island was home to a statue that Jim did not recognize, Jenny’s parents’ restaurant sat at one prominent corner. Back in Boston it was called Junction 58, and he was thrilled—and a little chilled—to see that it had the same name here. Its ornate glass frontage had shattered to the street, spilling the outdoor tables and chairs that were stacked overnight beneath the awning, but he was still looking at a sight familiar and well loved, and he felt something right itself in his mind. It’s not all madness, he thought, and then his brief fantasy was blown away.

  Jenny’s mother stepped out from the restaurant. They lived in the three-story apartment upstairs, and their first reaction after the earthquake must have been to come down to the street, checking the damage on the way. She was waving a menu before her face as if hot, and she was almost the woman Jim had known for so long. Almost, but not quite. Slighter than he remembered, hair longer and darker, face a little more weathered-looking, this was Jenny’s mother as she might be five or ten years down the road.

  I wonder if Jenny is married, he thought, because he was Unique, and long dead here. A burst of jealousy—of anger—swelled through him, and he started across the street. Jenny’s other mother saw him and frowned slightly, then looked away.

  “Excuse me,” Jim said, and then he froze in the middle of the street. What could he possibly say?

  “You okay, hon?” the woman asked, and Jim’s blood ran cold. She calls me hon, he thought, and he searched for any signs of recognition. But there were none. “Hey, mister, anything wrong?”

  “Wrong?” Jim asked.

  “Aside from the whole world shaking itself apart,” she said, looking past him at the glowing horizon and smoke clouds starting to obscure the moonlight.

  “I was just wondering …,” he started again. But there was no easy way for him to ask about Jenny, and suddenly he hoped that she had not come this way at all. He remembered the two blond women staring at each other back at the traffic pileup—one blond woman, really, facets of her existent in two different worlds—and he tried to imagine the terror Jenny and Holly might have felt arriving here and seeing someone who was not quite their mother, not quite their grandmother.

  “Wondering what?” she asked, on her guard at last.

  “Nothing,” Jim said, shaking his head and backing away. I should have gone with Trix … the Oracle, Sally, she’ll be able to help, she’ll know what to—

  And then someone else emerged from the restaurant’s smashed façade.

  “Jenny,” Jim said. “Jenny!”

  And the woman frowned and took one step back, because she did not know him.

  Don’t Let Me Die Still Wondering

  CAGED LIGHTBULBS flickered, throwing zoetrope shadows into the basement corners. Trix stared at the young Oracle—her wide eyes, her well-worn sneakers, her faded concer
t T-shirt, and her skittish body language so reminiscent of an animal used to being beaten. Sally had frozen, half crouched, listening to the screams and running feet from above, as those who had come to her for help were attacked or driven in terror out of the building.

  Going tharn, Trix thought. In Watership Down, that was what the rabbits called the paralysis they experienced when pinned by the lights of an oncoming car. Sally Bennet had gone tharn.

  “Do something!” Trix shouted at the girl.

  Sally glanced at her. The power flickered on and off again, and in the moments of darkness, somehow the girl’s face was the only thing that Trix could see, despite the dark coffee hue of her skin.

  The middle-aged woman who’d been asking for Sally’s help when Trix had entered the basement staggered backward toward a corner farther from the stairs, looking around as though for another way out. When Trix glanced at Sally again, she found the girl staring at her.

  “Shadow Men,” the girl said, voice broken with grief. “You brought them.”

  Trix felt her heart flutter. The girl was right, but what choice had she had? “I didn’t know where else to go. You’re the Oracle! I didn’t know you were a little girl.”

  Sally laughed softly but without any trace of humor. Trix noticed that one of her sneakers was untied. The girl shook her braided hair back and knelt on the floor. “It isn’t just little girls who get frightened,” Sally said.

  Trix heard glass shatter upstairs, but the screaming had nearly ceased. The door to the basement shook in its frame. They didn’t even need to open the door to pass through it, at least she didn’t think so. The wraiths—the things Sally had named Shadow Men—might be mindless things, programmed for this task, but if so, part of their job must be to make themselves terrible. To not merely kill the Oracles, but to destroy everything around them.

  “I know! I’m a grown-up, and I’m terrified,” Trix said.

  The woman who’d backed into the corner of the basement sobbed loudly.

  Sally put her palms down on the stone floor of the basement. Her eyes were closed and she breathed deeply and evenly, as though trying to meditate with chaos erupting above her. “The No-Face Men,” Sally said.

  “Yes,” Trix quickly replied. “It has to be them. They killed Peter O’Brien, and we saw them after the earthquake, out on the street.”

  But Sally seemed not to hear her, and Trix realized that the girl had not been speaking to her. For a second she flashed back to the moment in the bookstore, when she and Jim had watched Veronica testing the edges of reality, her senses touching upon facets of the world around her that others could never reach. Whatever you’re doing, Trix thought, staring at the girl, you’d better be quick about it.

  The power went out, plunging the basement into darkness. For several long seconds, Trix could hear nothing but her own heart beating in her ears and the quick, whimpering sobs of the woman in the corner. Then a warm draft of air whipped through the basement and up the stairs, and from above there came an inhuman murmuring, as though the wraiths had finally scented their true prey.

  An electric buzz filled the basement, followed by a crackling noise, and the lights flickered back on.

  Sally stood in the center of the room, wearing a triumphant grin—a little girl who had just gotten her way. Blood streamed from her nostrils, and she wiped it away with the back of her hand. “Little girl, my ass,” she said.

  Trix would have replied, but in a moment she was rendered speechless. Arms began to rise up from the floor, ethereal things passing through stone and mortar. They were gray and vague, and Trix opened her mouth to scream a warning before she noticed that they were not attacking Sally. Their faces were weird silver mesh, like fencers’ masks, but there were dark ghost faces there as well, things with ancient, hollow eyes, flickering like an old TV trying to lock on to a signal.

  These weren’t Veronica’s Shadow Men. What had Sally whispered? “No-Face Men”? They kept rising, taller than humans, thinner, limbs longer. The wails from the woman in the corner altered in tone, rising and falling in a keening song of distress.

  Sally pointed toward the stairs. “Go,” she said, the triumphant smile gone from her face, leaving only grim determination behind.

  The No-Face Men flowed toward the stairs as if driven by storm winds. Trix saw them coming at her and could not help letting out a cry as she threw herself to one side. They flashed past her, buzzing with their own static, and up the stairs. Trix expected more sounds of destruction from above, more cries of fear and despair, but instead there was only silence.

  “Martha?” Sally said gently to the wailing woman in the corner, who quieted at once. “Come with me. The friend whose house your son was sleeping at tonight … the building collapsed in the quake. Both boys are trapped there, but they’re still alive. The city’s reacting now. Rescue workers are searching for survivors in the buildings that fell. You need to get over there.”

  The woman stared at the young Oracle in shock. Sally took her hand and tugged her along toward the stairs. Trix felt frozen—she’d gone tharn herself, listening to the nothing from upstairs.

  “You coming, Trix?” the girl asked, looking sweetly innocent.

  “I didn’t tell you my name,” Trix said. She wanted to tie the laces on the Oracle’s left sneaker. She felt distant, as though her spirit held on to her flesh only by the slimmest tether. But as Sally and Martha hurried past her, she snapped back into the world as though coming awake from a nightmare. She reached out and grabbed Sally’s wrist. “Stop. You can’t …” She forced the whirlwind of her thoughts to be still. “All of this happened because they killed O’Brien. If they kill you, too, the third Boston might collide with this one … these two … you know what I’m saying. I won’t let that happen.”

  Sally rolled her eyes. “Duh. Neither will I. You think I wanna die? First thing we do is get our butts out of here.”

  “But the wraiths … the Shadow Men—”

  “Can’t kill me quite so easily,” Sally said. “O’Brien’s guard must have been down if they took him without a fight.”

  “Veronica gave us—”

  “Trix!” Sally snapped. “Do you want to find what you came looking for, or not?” With that, she went up the stairs, Martha following behind her.

  Trix stared after them for several seconds, then hustled to catch up. They emerged in a corridor, but half a dozen steps took them into the front of the house, where a silent battle raged in the front rooms and through the open door.

  The Shadow Men—the horrible wraiths who had paced her through the devastated city—were locked in combat with the spindle-limbed No-Face Men Sally had summoned. The two sides were at war, grappling in utter silence, tearing at one another with ghostly claws. Their flesh, flayed and ripped, seemed like gray cotton batting but dissipated like smoke in the air. They throttled one another, sailing across the rooms, crashing through walls as though they themselves were solid and the twin collided cities were some haunted ghostland.

  Trix faltered, astonished by the scene unfolding around her, but then fear and good sense got her moving and she hurried, praying that she would not be noticed. As thought caught in Sally’s wake, several of Veronica’s wraiths turned to pursue her, only to be snagged by the long talons of their enemies, whose flickering static faces were brutally blank. One of the No-Face Men opened its mouth—a gaping, saw-toothed maw of oil-black nothing that looked like a hole torn in the curtain of the world, on the other side of which anything might be lurking. It swallowed the Shadow Man’s head, biting it off with a silent snap of its jaws. The Shadow Man turned to smoke, drifting and fading in seconds.

  There were several dead people on the floor, heads caved in from being smashed against walls or floors, limbs broken. Despair filled the hollow places inside Trix. These people had come to the Oracle for help in making sense of the collision of the cities, or to find those they had lost in the madness. The others who had come to Sally were gone now, scattered by the b
loodshed and the sight of the wraiths. They had run for their lives. But others would come, just as Trix had gone to find Veronica when Jenny and Holly had gone missing. They would be in danger.

  Another Shadow Man reached for Sally, and a No-Face Man latched on to it from behind, tearing away strips of its flesh as if it were made of cotton candy.

  Sally ran out the door and into the street, pulling Martha behind her. Trix ran out after them, realizing that she had been holding her breath since the basement. She exhaled, turning around in fright. There were Shadow Men and No-Face Men in the street, too, but only a few.

  “Go,” Sally told Martha, giving her a little shove. “Donnie will be all right if they find him soon. But you’ve got to hurry.”

  “Thank you,” Martha said, backing away. “Oh, my God, thank you.” She fled then, and for a moment Trix wished she could follow.

  Sally turned and glared at Trix, one hip cocked. In her sneakers and jeans and Miley Cyrus T-shirt, the little girl would have looked almost adorably precocious, impossible to take seriously, were it not for the pain and wisdom in her eyes. “Now, you,” she said. “Come with me. Don’t stop for anything.”

  Sally turned and started to run. Several people who had obviously come looking for her tried to stop her, calling to her, but she ignored them and ran on. Trix kept up, avoiding places where the pavement was cracked or broken, lamenting that she could not stop to help a group of people frantically moving rubble away from a collapsed synagogue.

  “Where are we going?” Trix asked, panting, as they rounded a corner, jumping onto the sidewalk to avoid the water that gushed from a broken hydrant and the wreckage of half a dozen cars that were mashed together in the street.