Trix blinked at the sudden, shocking change. The tears were gone, Sally’s eyes dry as though they had never been wet, and her face was stern once again. Hard, grim, an expression that only an adult should ever wear.
“We should go,” Sally said. “I’ve been wrong once; I won’t be again. I’ll be precise this time.”
“Go where?”
“Just outside, down to the road. I’ll find Holly and Jenny, and take you to them.”
“What about …?” Trix walked to the kitchen door and looked through the gap into the room beyond. Anne lay where Sally had sung her down, one hand waving slowly at the air before her face, orchestrating her dreams.
“She’s under a calming spell, for now. I can strengthen it, leave her so that she wakes up in the morning. That’ll be for the best.”
“No!” Trix said, remembering Anne’s lips against hers. “That’s not for the best.”
“Trix,” Sally said, painfully adult, “you’re a ghost to her.”
“Jenny’s stronger than that. She wouldn’t want us to leave, not after this. She’d want to understand.”
“That’s not Jenny.”
“Yes,” Trix said. “Yes, it is.” And she meant it. It might not be the Jenny she knew, not quite, and she might be using her middle name. But Anne was a facet of Jenny, and Trix could not bear treating her as anything else.
“You don’t want to leave her.”
“I think she’ll want to come.”
“Why?”
“Because she’s strong. Imagine if we leave, and she wakes, and for the rest of her life she’ll doubt her own sanity. I can’t curse her with that. She’s had a glimpse of what’s going on, and I couldn’t live with myself if we didn’t show her everything else.”
“And she kissed you.”
“That’s got nothing to do with it,” Trix said, but she glanced away. Maybe it’s me who needs to understand as well.
“Come on, then,” the girl said. “I’ve wasted enough time.”
“You’re sure you’re okay?” Trix asked.
“Of course,” Sally said. Her tone was dismissive, but Trix saw that flicker of gratitude once again.
They went back out to Anne, and Trix knelt by her side. Sally started singing softly again, stroking the woman’s hair and touching her cheek, and Trix began to explain. Anne did not look at her until she had finished. And then she sat up, holding on to Trix’s proffered hand and looking back and forth between her and Sally.
“My bedroom,” Anne said. “You’re in there.” She nodded to what Trix knew was the bedroom door. “You are. Go and see.”
Trix went to see. She saw herself right away, because the photograph was large, the centerpiece of a wall display of at least fifty other framed photos of all shapes and sizes. She smiled back at the camera, this face that was hers, and she and Anne sat close together on a park bench, comfortable with each other and so obviously together. In the photo she was wearing a T-shirt that said, WHO THE HELL IS MICHAEL JACKSON? and she laughed. She might not be quite herself, but so much was the same.
The other photos weren’t all of her. She saw her mother in a couple, and her cousins, but it was so obvious who was missing—Jim and Jenny. Of course. Because in this world, Trix and Jenny had been a couple, and Jim was long gone.
“I’m so sorry I died,” she whispered, staring back at herself for so long that she forgot for a moment which Trix she was, and on which side of the glass she stood.
Back in the living room, shaken and sad, she found Anne sitting on the sofa. She sat beside her.
“I’ve seen some things since the quake,” Anne said. “And maybe they explain this. But it’s still …”
“Unbelievable,” Trix said.
“Yeah. Fucking unbelievable.” Anne grinned, and Trix fell in love just a little bit more.
“Jenny!” Jim said, but of course this was not Jenny, either, and he was attuned now to the differences.
“Okay,” Jennifer said beside him. “Okay … okay …” She was looking at the woman who had emerged from the apartment building with Trix and the girl, and Jim saw her legs shaking.
“Jennifer?”
“That’s me,” she said. “Oh, wait till my folks hear about this.”
The strange non-man had slipped from view a block away. Even so, Jim felt them still around, those phantoms following out of sight. He supposed they were still protecting him, though they only made him feel unsettled.
“Trix!” Jim called. Trix saw him and grinned, waiting for a car to pass then dashing across the street. She slowed when she saw Jennifer, blinked a few times, and then her face fell a little.
She hugged him tight. Jim felt her fear and excitement, and something else—a burgeoning sadness. She was still determined, but something subtle had changed.
“Trix, meet Jennifer.”
“Hi.” Trix shook Jennifer’s hand. “And that’s Anne,” she said, nodding toward where the girl and woman stood on the sidewalk.
“The little girl’s the Oracle?” Jim asked.
“Don’t let her size and age deceive you,” Trix said, chuckling softly. “She’s mean as they come when she wants to be, and when the Shadow Men came she conjured up her own version—she calls them No-Face Men—and they fought and—”
“Men with no faces,” Jennifer said.
“You’ve seen them?”
“One of them led us here,” Jim said. “And they saved us at the Oracle’s house. We got there, some of those wraiths—the Shadow Men—were waiting.”
“Just weird,” Jennifer said, shivering.
“Sally will need to remove your mark,” Trix said. “She’s a little … strained at the moment, but she’s strong as hell.”
“Mark?”
“Veronica. As well as what she sent in the envelopes, she sent something with us, too. So those things of hers could follow.”
“How?” Jim asked.
“Cookies.”
“Damn. Cookies.”
“Oh, I don’t like the sound of that,” Jennifer said.
Trix smiled and hugged Jim again. It felt good to Jim—she was someone he knew, something he could understand, while everyone else around them right now was either a child Oracle or a facsimile of his lost wife. He needed Trix—brash, dependable, wild Trix. She was his rock, and his connection to the Boston they had left behind. “Oh, this is just all so fucking weird,” she said into his neck.
“Tell me about it.”
“I don’t know where to start!” She pulled back and tried to laugh, but it came out strained and tense.
“Trix?” Something had happened. He waited for her to tell him, but she glanced at Jennifer and turned around.
“Come on. Sally’s sure she can find them now.”
“Has she said anything about them?” Jim was desperate for news, and his anxiety had been growing by the minute since losing touch with Trix.
“She’s promised to find them, that’s all,” Trix said. And again, there was something she wanted to tell him.
“Trix, I’m here,” Jim said. She nodded, her eyes haunted by ghosts he had yet to meet.
They crossed the street, and Jennifer and Anne stood facing each other a dozen steps apart. Trix introduced Jim to Sally, and the girl nodded and looked him up and down. Her gaze was shockingly adult, aged and knowing, and he felt distinctly uncomfortable.
“You can find my wife and daughter?” he asked.
“I can,” she said. A shadow passed across her face—exhaustion, he thought, and perhaps a glimmer of fear. But she gathered herself quickly, then looked at the two women who might have been Jenny. “No time for hanging around. We need to get to the street junction, and there I’ll trace them. But I’m not so sure it’ll be that easy.”
“Veronica,” Jim said.
The girl nodded. “The bitch had this planned.”
“But according to her plan, you should be dead now,” Trix said.
“I should. But she’ll have backup pla
ns, and other ways to do the deed. You can bet on it.”
“How can you know that?” Jim asked.
“Because I would.” The girl set off along the street, leading the four adults behind her. They walked in a loaded silence, and people parted to let them through. Perhaps some of them knew Sally, or felt the power carried by the girl. But Jim thought it more likely that they were picking up on the strange tension between the two women. Jennifer and Anne, Jenny and Jenny, they walked with Trix and Jim between them but stole frequent glances at each other. They were not the only two people in this tragic city meeting like this, Jim knew. There would be hundreds more, maybe thousands, doppelgängers thrown together through geography, circumstance, or tragedy. But for Jim, these were the only ones who mattered.
They reached the intersection, and Sally paused at the corner, leaning against a garbage can and watching vehicles rumble past. Traffic lights above the road were out of action, and the building on the opposite corner had sustained damage, one wall slumping to the ground to display the tumbled wreck of the rooms within. A man sat on the rubble, drinking steadily from a bottle of whiskey.
A fire engine powered through the intersection, barely pausing. Two ambulances quickly followed. There are a thousand tragedies today, Jim thought, but he knew that his own was linked inextricably to what was happening to this city. The more he saw and the less he understood, the more determined he became to fix it all.
Sally stepped into the road. Jim gasped and reached for her, but Trix held his arm and shook her head. “She knows what she’s doing.”
Jim heard whispering behind him, and he snapped around, terrified that those things had arrived again. But the whispering came from Anne and Jennifer, still maintaining a distance yet starting to communicate in tentative tones.
“It must be so strange,” Trix said.
“And yet we’re Uniques,” Jim said. “We’re the strange ones here.”
Sally had reached the center of the intersection and placed her hands flat against the road. Cars and trucks, emergency vehicles and media vans, they all passed without lifting a strand of her hair or causing a single ripple in her loose dress. It was as if Sally was somewhere else, yet still visible to them all.
“You said I still have the mark?” Jim asked Trix.
“I have a feeling we’re being watched,” she said. Jim nodded, because he had that feeling as well, stronger than what people commonly called the sixth sense. He not only felt eyes on him, but he could sense the breeze harden across his skin, almost as if holding him in place in this world.
After a couple of minutes Sally stood and walked back to them, passing between lines of traffic that seemed not to slow or notice her at all. And she looked worried. “Need to get that mark from you,” she said.
“Tell me you’ve found them,” Jim said as she mounted the sidewalk.
“I could tell you that.”
“But?” Trix asked.
“I’ve found Holly.” She looked at Anne and Jennifer, and even this Oracle’s eyes seemed to glimmer with wonder. “The other Jenny … your Jenny … not so much.”
“No!” Jim gasped. Sally held up one hand.
“I have a sense of her, like an echo around Holly, but nothing solid. She may be with Holly and the collision of the cities is just giving me some kind of interference.” She smiled, trying to impart hope.
“What else?” Jim asked.
“Holly is afraid. She’s trapped, somehow, but I can’t sense her captors at all.”
Jim shook his head, frustrated and growing frantic. “What does that mean?”
“Only one possibility that I can think of. Veronica’s Shadow Men have her.”
“Oh, no!” Trix said. “How did they catch her?”
“I think they may have had her all along,” Sally said, and she performed a slow full circle, looking up at the broken windows surrounding them. “These aren’t the same Shadow Men who attacked us. They’re still out there, kept at bay by the No-Face Men who serve me.”
“So where is she?” Jim asked. “Where’s my little girl?”
Sally told them. And then she reached out to Jim, and he cried as she removed his mark.
From the Back of a Broken Dream
EVEN IF they’d had a car or managed to flag down one of the few taxis they saw passing by, they wouldn’t have gotten very far in a vehicle. The streets that weren’t blocked by rubble or police barricades were jammed with cars driven by people trying to reach loved ones or just get the hell out of Boston. They finally settled on St. James Avenue. Though there were buildings that had merged when the cities collided, spilling debris into the street, the road was passable.
Jim strode with purpose, wanting to break into a run but knowing that the five of them—this impossible gathering of women and him—had to stay together. Sally led the way, and they all seemed to take for granted that she would, despite the fact that she was a child. As the Oracle of Boston, she was both their best guide and their best protection. Jim followed close behind, with Jennifer a few feet to his right. They glanced at each other from time to time, the immediate intimacy they had felt before awkward for both of them. Trix and Anne—that other Jenny—hung back, and Jim felt sure it was partly because Anne and Jennifer did not know how to communicate with each other.
Again and again, they saw examples of this phenomenon as they traveled across the city. Rarely were the twins from parallel Bostons exact copies. They differed in weight and style and clothing. But given what had happened and what was transpiring all over the city, they were impossible to miss. Two old men sat on a stoop, both in gray cardigan sweaters, though one wore a distinguished gray beard and the other looked sickly and had gone nearly bald. They took turns patting the same dog, which perhaps they both now owned. A pair of olive-skinned women shouted at each other in Spanish, both in tears, on the sidewalk in front of a dress shop. One of them held a boy of about eight in front of her, arms wrapped protectively around him, and the boy looked frightened and confused as he listened to the two women—one his mother and one who, in another world, might have been—panic.
Anne reached out to hold Trix’s hand. Trix seemed hesitant for a second, then twined her fingers in Anne’s. Jim saw the shy way that Anne looked at her—the hopeful gaze in her eyes—and found himself wishing that they had both lived in a world where they could have had their heart’s desire. It felt strange but right, and he decided that in a city where reality existed in different facets, everything should be possible.
“It must be so weird for you,” Jennifer said, walking along beside him. She had seen the dynamic developing between Trix and Anne as well.
“Weird for all of us,” he said.
Jennifer smiled, but her eyes were sad, as if they held a painful secret. “That’s for sure.”
They had come to the intersection of Berkeley and St. James, where the building on the southeast corner—he thought there’d been a big insurance company headquarters there in his own Boston—had been merged with a tall, gleaming art deco hotel that had to have come from Anne’s Brahmin-influenced Boston. What had been there in Jennifer’s Boston, with its Irish roots, had been a massive retail space with a Waterford crystal store on the corner. Now broken glass and debris had spilled into the street, and they had to move carefully around it. Sally stumbled a bit, and Jim caught up to her, reaching out, but she recovered without his help.
“I want to thank you,” he said.
“For what? I haven’t gotten you back to them yet.”
“For trying. For removing Veronica’s mark from me and Trix. For coming with us now.”
The little girl glanced at him, but there were storm clouds in her eyes and her lips pulled up into a grim expression that could not have been called a smile. In that moment, she looked far older than her years—ancient. Whatever part of her was the soul of the city of Boston, that was what looked back at him. “I’m not doing it for you,” Sally said. “There are two cities full of frightened people fin
ding their lives crashed together, and now I have a responsibility to all of them. I’m not ignoring them just to help you find your family. I’m doing it because of what will happen if your Oracle gets her way. The death we’ve already seen today will just be the start.”
Jim glanced away, embarrassed without really knowing why. “I get that,” he said. “I know that, of course. But thank you anyway for helping. Not just me … all of us.”
Now it was Sally’s turn to look embarrassed, as if she was ashamed of having snapped at him. “I’m the Oracle,” she replied. “It’s what I’m for.”
Jim glanced back to make sure they were all still together. Trix and Anne, hands held tightly, helped each other over the debris. Trix’s pink hair gleamed in the city light. Jennifer gazed around at the terrified people they passed, obviously wanting to stop and help but sticking with them—with him—for the sake of yet another of her otherworldly twins, a woman who was her, though they had never met, and a daughter she had never had.
“Tell me about these Shadow Men,” Jim said. “How do we fight them?”
“They aren’t people … not anymore. I mean, they’re not solid, right? But they’re not really ghosts, either. If they’re solid enough to attack you or grab you, then you can grab them back. It’s tricky. They kind of fade in and out. It won’t help you beat them, but maybe it’ll help you get away from them if they try to take you through.”
“Through where?” Jim asked.
Sally glanced at him, a bit surprised and disturbed at the same time. “Into the In-Between, of course.”
Jim shuddered, mostly because of her tone but also because of the haunted look in her eyes. “What happens if they do?”
Sally glanced back at Trix and the Jennys, then at Jim again. They were making their way around an abandoned Volvo station wagon that had bumped up onto the curb and run over a couple of parking meters. “I know Veronica can’t have told you much, but didn’t the Irish Oracle—”
“O’Brien.”
“Didn’t O’Brien explain what she’d done to you, sending you here?”
The Shadow Men Page 22