by Alyc Helms
I headed for the private banquet room that Doris only opened for New Year’s and family birthdays. Two more agents stood at the doorway, but I didn’t need Johnny’s help getting past them. Doris was personally setting out dishes in front of a lone figure. He spotted me and sent the agents and Doris away with a softly spoken command.
Johnny waylaid a confused Doris and led her back toward the kitchen, closing the doors to give my son and me some privacy.
Mian Zi stood at the far side of a large, round banquet table, the sort that usually got crammed with people at weddings. He’d eschewed the Mao suit he’d worn in Shanghai in favor of a more Western style, like his uncle, but his hair was still long like his father’s. I’d grown used to Mei Shen’s blunt-cut bob and skinny jeans. The juxtaposition of inhumanly long hair and a western tailored suit sat oddly on Mian Zi.
“Where’s Mei Shen?” I blurted.
“She is safe.” My question had been in English, but Mian Zi answered me in Mandarin. I couldn’t tell if he meant it as a reprimand or if it was simply a product of his ethnic bias. Whatever the case, the reassurance chased away the worst of my fears. No matter their ideological differences, Mian Zi wouldn’t be taking time out for dim sum if his sister was in danger. I relaxed and sank into one of the empty chairs, sparing him my urge to hug him close. Mian Zi hated PDA even when he wasn’t upset with me.
“What happened? Last night, I mean.”
Mian Zi sat. Neither of us touched the food, even though he’d presumably ordered it and my stomach was rumbling. “I delivered a warning to Lady Basingstoke. Too late, as it turned out. I convinced Mei Shen to leave with me before either of us could be implicated, but she wasn’t inclined to stay beyond this morning. I do not know where she went. I presume Tsung is with her.”
“Why didn’t you deliver your warning to me?” I leaned forward, placing my hand on the edge of the table – the closest I dared come to touching him.
Mian Zi leaned away, ostensibly to serve us both pork buns. “What happened in Shanghai is my fault. I didn’t see my uncle’s distraction for what it was. If I had allowed David Tsung to enter Lung Di’s sanctum, you would not have had to dishonor yourself.” He pushed the pork bun around his plate with his chopsticks, but he didn’t eat. I don’t think either of us was in the mood for eating. “I didn’t want to make the mistake of involving you again.”
I strangled my napkin to keep from strangling my son. “So your solution is to leave me in the dark? Literally?” I’d been ready to follow Johnny’s advice to let Mian Zi be pissed at me, but I hadn’t expected him to blame himself. And I wasn’t ready to touch the queasiness that washed through me at the words dishonored yourself. It made me feel unclean. “If your uncle is up to some new evil plan, maybe it might be a good idea for us to, oh, I don’t know, work together to stop him? I mean, who needs a nemesis when we’ve got each other? That’s the lesson I took away from Shanghai.”
“But now you’re his champion,” Mian Zi said. “You can’t risk working against him.”
“Just watch me…”
He touched the back of my hand, much like Johnny had tapped out the agent, and drew my strangled napkin from my lap. “I can’t risk letting you,” he said.
It didn’t quite sound like a threat, but that was because Mian Zi didn’t threaten. He played the game without investing in the pieces. I might be his mother, but I was also a piece. Mei Shen might not be willing to sacrifice me to get at Lung Di. I wondered if Mian Zi was.
I pushed away from the table. Stood. I’d changed his nappies. I wasn’t as easily intimidated by him as the rest of the people around him. “Are you going to stop me?”
“From involving yourself in this? No. I don’t think my uncle is behind it. It was inelegant. The sigils used were rudimentary. The shadows have been dispersed or fled back to their masters. Let Mei Shen and Tsung chase what they’re chasing. I need to make sure that China is not blamed, but that is as far as my interest goes.”
He stood. He was taller than me now, almost as tall as his father and uncle, and yet he still carried the beanpole thinness of youth. So young-looking. I wondered if he’d look this young for eternity. I wondered if all parents thought their kids stopped aging at seventeen.
Mian Zi hesitated, and then pulled me into a stiff hug. I made it doubly awkward by clinging to him a little too hard and burying my nose into his lapel. There might have been a tear or two.
“Stay safe, mother. And try not to make more enemies than you already have.”
I sniffled something like a laugh. “Well, where’s the fun in that?”
* * *
I didn’t have Mian Zi’s aura of importance to protect me from Doris Han’s curiosity. He managed to make his escape without delay, but it took me a good hour to answer her questions about how I merited a private audience with Mr Long. At least I got a good meal with my mouthful of lies. And a show, because the expressions of disbelief Johnny kept shooting my way were comedy gold.
After extracting a promise from Johnny that he’d let me know if he heard from Mei Shen, I headed out. Abby hadn’t responded to my text. I sent another, this one with a little more detail. You owe me an explanation.
With Mian Zi exhausted as a lead and Mei Shen and David Tsung AWOL, I was fast running out of ways to find out what the hell was going on. I considered heading back to the Academy, but I suspected it would be cordoned off as a crime scene, and I wanted to keep Missy Masters as far away from that mess as I could manage.
I spent the walk home scanning useless news articles and Twitter debates on the subject and deleting the social awareness spam that was already piling up in my junk account. I switched over to my Mr Mystic account as I was letting myself in through the back of the house.
And only then remembered that I’d asked Jack to forward Sadakat’s pictures.
“Shimizu?” I called as I entered our bottom floor in-law. Echoes answered. I sent a quick text and got an almost immediate Date=Late followed by a string of emojis: scissors, a thumbs up, and a winky face.
“Kids today,” I muttered and fired up my laptop.
The afternoon light faded and darkness shrouded the apartment, only broken by the light of my computer screen as I paged through the pictures, taking notes on placement, figure patterns, sigil repetition, variation. A few of the sigils looked familiar, and it was only when I got up to pull down my grandfather’s journals for comparison that I realized how dark it had gotten. Shimizu was always after me to turn on lights. That Midwest accent of hers made her sound like a crotchety grandma, warning me I’d lose my eyesight if I kept reading in the dark.
But Shimizu wasn’t home to tut at me. I made tea by the light of the Google homepage and went back to trying to decipher the sigils that had been used at the Academy.
My grandfather’s journal provided one key. The symbols were ideographic, modified by diacriticals to indicate function and relation. I supposed that made sense. I’d picked up the rudiments of Shadow speech growing up with Mitchell – not that I knew that’s what he was teaching me – and I’d improved my grasp of it during my years with Jian Huo. It was a language almost entirely composed of proper noun-verbs. No pronouns. No adverbs. It had confused the hell out of me until Jian Huo hauled out Plato and had me read up on the Realm of Forms.
I suppose it followed that the written language, such as it was, would be comprised of sigils that could be marked as actor, action, or object: Dancer, Dancing, Dance.
I came up for air when my phone dinged with a reply from Abby. Just a time and an address on Berkeley’s campus, but that was fine. I could sort out the rest with her tomorrow. I rubbed my eyes. The sigils were starting to dance as well from a combination of exhaustion and bad lighting. I couldn’t do anything more with them, not in this format.
“Time to William S. Burroughs this shit,” I told the empty apartment. I fired up the printer, checked paper and ink levels, and set the pictures to print while I hunted down a pair of scissors.
Sometimes, it makes absolute sense.
I hesitated in the hallway. There was no light there, and I’d shut off the bathroom light after I’d finished my rummaging. The living room switch for the lamps was all the way across the room next to the entry alcove. My bedroom door yawned open behind me, another potential danger unless I could reach my bedside lamp. That was the problem with century-old Victorians and questionably legal in-laws. Neither were known for their robust overhead lighting.
So, retreat, forge ahead, or accept that I was being paranoid? A sound like a whisper of silk dragged across wood decided me. A footstep. I wasn’t alone. Flipping Shimizu’s scissors underhand – better for slashing that way – I darted around the corner, going for the table we used as desk, eating surface, and occasional craft workspace. I didn’t need much light. Just enough to give me an edge over whatever shadow monster had invaded my home. All I had to do was hit a key, knock my mouse an inch.
My stocking foot hit something not-wood and slipped out from under me. I fell fully prone, with only enough wits to fling my scissors aside so I didn’t end up a cliché. I could just see my gravestone: Missy Masters. She ran with scissors.
My chin smacked hard against the wood floor, and it was only luck that I didn’t bite my tongue in half. And then something descended on me, heavier than shadow, thick as a waterlogged wetsuit. It pinned my arms to my sides, and I feared if I rolled over, it would wrap around me and cover my face. I’d seen people suffocated by living shadow before. I didn’t want to be among that number.
I crossed my arms and brought my knees up underneath me, trying to peel the shadow over my head like a latex prom dress. It got stuck halfway off, binding one arm against my head, but at least my other arm was free. And my legs. I rose to my knees, flailing with my free hand while I used my forearm to keep the shadow veil from closing over my face. Didn’t need much light… just enough to…
My hand caught the curved wood edge of the table. I grabbed it and dropped back to the floor, using my weight as counterbalance to pull the table down with me. My elbow banged hard into the floor, jamming my nails into my forehead, but my hiss of pain was lost in the louder crash of the table toppling over onto me and my attacker. Light danced crazily across the walls, my view of it half-obscured by the thing wrapped around my head. I twisted again, and this time the creature slackened enough to let me pry it off and fling it aside. I caught sight of something flapping across the room, fleeing the laptop screen’s light.
It disappeared into the darkest corner of the ceiling, right above the entry, blocking my escape route out of the apartment.
I scuttled back on my ass, fumbling for the laptop. It had fallen on its face, and the clamshell bend was the only reason it was casting any light at all. I grabbed it and turned it screen-out to the room.
Dark shapes with thick, smooth wings like manta rays cringed in every corner of the ceiling. There were so many that the black edges of their wings overlapped, creating that silken whisper as they shuffled over one another to escape the light of my laptop. It looked like something had hatched and was spreading out from the dark alcove near the front door.
“Fuck.”
Something crinkled under my hip. I flailed at it to cast it away, but it was only paper, not shadow. Paper with a clear photo print of one of the sets of sigils from the Academy.
“Fuck!” Several other sheets scattered across the floor where the printer had spit them out. I was a goddamned idiot. And now I had to get rid of the portals I’d accidentally created before something worse than creepy, cringing manta rays blundered through. But first I had to flush my flock of shadow mantas before they stopped cringing from my meager light and decided to attack. I rose to one knee, still wielding my laptop like a shield, and sidestepped to the kitchenette. The mantas shifted with my movement, shuffling across the ceiling to stay as far from my light as their overlapping mass would allow. Good. I opened the fridge door, inciting a wave of flapping and hissing. The mantas clustered in the entry alcove fled to the corner above the TV.
Even better. I darted to the entry and flipped on the main switch, illuminating the room with lamps and Christmas lights. The new illumination sparked a mad, flappy exodus into the dark hallway and through my open bedroom door.
I was never going to be able to sleep in my bedroom again. I set aside my laptop and gathered up the fallen printouts, tearing them into quarters, eighths. I put the pieces next to the laptop for burning later.
The shadow mantas didn’t like the light, but it didn’t seem to hurt them the way it did some of the weaker Shadow Realms denizens. That meant I couldn’t just turn on every light in the apartment and wait for them to sizzle out of existence. I’d have to open a portal back to the Shadow Realms and herd them through it.
Right. I grabbed a flashlight from the utility drawer. Bypassing my room, I turned on the bathroom light to make sure that room was clean and then closed the door. The door to Shimizu’s room was already closed, but I reached in, flicked on the light, and closed the door again, just in case.
With the rest of the apartment as brightly lit as it had ever been, I set the Maglite on the floor in the hallway and ventured down the beam into my room.
My walls and ceiling seemed to be made of shifting sheets, and the rustling sounded loud as trees in a windstorm. But close. Close enough to stir the hair on my arms. Something brushed past the top of my head. I grabbed it, twisting it like taffy, and swung it down to one side of my beam of light. Instead of hitting ground, it hit the space I’d created between darkness and light, hurtling back into its proper realm with the force of my throw.
After that first brush, every shadow in the room descended on me. Only my Maglite beam kept me from being overwhelmed. I couldn’t keep my portals open long for fear that the mantas would fly right back through them – or that something worse would follow. In my experience, most of the denizens of the Shadow Realms make up in mindless hunger what they lack in basic sense.
Each manta I slammed into floor, wall, and bed was another portal opened and closed. I was flagging, fingers slipping, grip slackening, as the effort sapped my energy. I felt a little of myself bleed away each time I connected to the Shadow Realms.
I thought maybe the crowd was thinning when three of the mantas attacked at once. I stumbled back from their combined force, my heel hitting the Maglite. It spun crazily, beam shining back down the hallway and casting my room into gloom once more.
The three on me became legion, all flapping and hissing and bearing me to the floor with their weight. I think I managed to shunt one or two back into the Shadow Realms, but I didn’t dare fling them en masse for fear I’d fall through with them and never make my way back. What was left was too much for me to beat off. A wing folded around my face. I choked for breath, but it was like trying to breathe through wet neoprene.
And then the weight was gone. The flapping ceased. I lay on my bedroom floor in the darkness, cheek pressed to cool wood. The light shifted. Someone had moved in the hallway, had picked up my Maglite and was shining it across me.
“What a fascinating device,” said a voice, a woman’s voice, except that it also echoed with howling winds and the ticking of spider legs and the rustle of bat wings high above. Every creepy sound I’d ever associated with the Shadow Realms was contained in that voice. I shivered and wished for the protection of a covering of shadow mantas.
No such luck. The mantas were gone. I lifted my cheek from the floor. The Maglite shifted to one side before the beam could catch my eyes. A woman stood in the doorw
ay, backlit by the indirect light from the living room, or so I thought at first. I reached behind me to turn on my bedside lamp, which lit up my room but did nothing to illuminate the woman. Everything about her was made of shadow. Her hair was the same as her skin was the same as the gown that swirled around her like an oil slick. Her fingers cradling the Maglite were just a bit too long, as though they had an extra joint. She held the light up, shining it into the dark blank where a face should be. Nothing reflected. Her form sucked up the light.
“May I keep it?”
“Buh…” I blinked up at the woman, trying to make sense of this new invasion. Was she threat or ally? Had she been the one commanding the mantas, or the one who sent them away? There was something else about her voice beyond the creep factor, something that reminded me of another shadow denizen I knew. Her tone held the same delight and wonder as Templeton’s, my old shadow rat friend, whenever I called him into this world. “Who are you?”
“I am the Lady. I hope you don’t mind that I sent the kraben away. They can be such a nuisance when they’re confused.”
The Lady. A lady who thought murderous shadow mantas were a “nuisance”. And one who, despite being made of nothing but shadow, did not cringe from the light as the mantas had. I rose to my feet, still wary. She was blocking the doorway. “You don’t have a name?”
“Not one that I give out so freely.” I couldn’t read any sort of expression, but enough scorn dripped from her tone that it was easy enough to read the unspoken “duh”.
“Do you mind if I…” I gestured past her to the well-lit living room. She stepped aside.
I scuttled out into the light, feeling better, safer, just for standing in its glow.
The Lady followed, which put a damper on that feeling of safety.
“How did you get here?” Stupid question. “You came through the portals?” I uprighted the table.