Sam Weller - Shadow Show

“No.”

“Yes,” the young man said.

“I don’t want to leave my wife.”

“We understand,” Alexander said. “We had people we didn’t want to leave either.”

Snow fell on Debby, covering her coat as she sobbed next to Frank’s body. Bystanders gathered around her.

“Ice under the snow?” Frank asked. “I died because of a crazy accident?”

“Everything in life is an accident.”

“But you lured me toward it. You distracted me so I’d walk faster than I should have in the snow. I told Debby you were guarding us, but she didn’t believe me.”

“She was right. We’re not your guardians.”

“Then what are you?”

“Your companions. We stopped you from dying when you weren’t supposed to, and we helped you to die when it was your time,” Alexander said.

“We died as you drove past our wrecked car on the highway, going to the opera,” Brother Richard continued. “The rule is, you bond to someone in the vicinity of where you die. Then you help that person die when he or she is supposed to, and you stop it from happening sooner than it’s supposed to. Everything in its time.”

“The opera?”

“You weren’t supposed to be there. The storms, the difficulty of flying home from Los Angeles, they were supposed to make you stay away. When you went to such extreme efforts to come back to Santa Fe and go to the opera, we had to convince you to leave early.”

“You’re saying Debby and I would have been killed in a car accident if we stayed until the opera was finished?”

“Yes. In a crash in the storm. But only you. Your wife would have survived.”

“And at the farmers’ market?”

“You’d have been killed when the truck swerved to avoid the bicyclist.”

“Only me?”

“Yes. Again your wife would have survived.”

“I don’t want to leave her,” Frank said.

“Everybody dies. But in this case, you won’t be leaving her. She was so near you when you died that you’re now her companion.”

Frank slowly absorbed this information. “I can be with her until she dies?”

“Until you make sure that she dies when she’s supposed to,” Brother Richard said. “Eight months from now, she will die falling from a stepladder. Unless you stop her. Because that’s not her time. Six years from now, she will die in a fire. Unless you stop her from going to a particular hotel. Because, again, that’s not her time.”

“When will she die?”

“Twelve years from now. From cancer. That will take its natural course. You won’t need to assist her.”

Frank’s heart felt broken.

“She’ll have remarried by then. She and her new husband will adopt a little boy. Because you love her, you’ll share her happiness. Afterward, she, too, will become someone’s companion.”

“And after we fulfill our duty?” Frank asked.

“We’re allowed to find peace.”

Frank gazed at his sobbing wife as she kneeled beside his body. Blood flowed from his skull, congealing in the cold.

“One day I’ll be allowed to talk to her as you and I are talking?”

“Yes.”

“But in the meantime, she’ll eventually love someone else and adopt a child?”

“Yes.”

“For fifteen years, I was her companion. All I want is for her to be happy. Even if it means not sharing her happiness…”

Frank at last felt something: the sting of tears on his cheeks.

“I’ll be glad to be a different sort of companion to her for the rest of her life.”

I intended “The Companions” as a reverse take on Ray Bradbury’s “The Crowd.” The story is very personal. Everything that occurs in the first part of the story, all the events at the opera, actually happened to my wife and me. It was one of the eeriest evenings of my life, hurrying from L.A. to go to the opera, battling storms, meeting the old and young man (the younger man from Christ in the Desert) at the dinner, then sitting next to them at the opera, and then leaving the opera because of them, only to find that their car was parked next to ours. I began to think that perhaps my wife and I had guardian angels, that we were meant to leave the opera early to escape the storms, that I was in the land of Ray Bradbury.

Jim Holloway was on fire.

Burning with the inexhaustible fuel of youth, fired by the bellows of imagination. Actor, writer, magician, inventor—his ambitions and his dreams as scattered as the stars in a midnight sky. At the advanced age of fifteen, he’d somehow managed to drag the sense of wonder about the world from his earliest years into adolescence, and he attacked each morning with a need to do something special—that day, and every other to follow. Something new and different before nightfall.

Every day.

The kids in his high school mostly thought he was an odd duck, but he didn’t care. His sun-bright blond hair and thick horn-rimmed glasses gave him a striking, memorable appearance, but it was when he spoke that people tended to pay closer attention. Jim had a… a reverence in his voice when he talked about the world he perceived. His curiosity stretched from the magic life in a drop of water to the mysteries of Mars.

He’d realized that life was an endless quest, full of discovery and adventure, if he would only allow it to be so.

Alone in an unfamiliar city, he walked its avenues in search of the shop of none other than Maestro the Magician. Ads in the back pages of Amazing Stories promised miracles of illusion from an address in Providence, Rhode Island, and from that arcane location, Jim had received “The Secret of the Oriental Rings.” Because of a family trip, he now had the chance of a lifetime—to actually roam the shop’s shadowy aisles, to uncover its treasures firsthand.

Other than a January wind to drive him through the streets, he had no idea where he was going. The cold air cut through him like an assassin’s blade, but he didn’t care. It was 1937 and Jim Holloway was on an adventure!

Turning a corner, pulling the collar of his coat closer to his neck, he encountered a palace of dreams—the Majestic Theater on Washington Street. A massive statement of stone, like a temple from a forgotten age, its marquee spoke to Jim: THINGS TO COME. He’d seen the film when it premiered in Los Angeles, but encountering it here in this cold New England town made his pulse jump. Yes, he thought with a smile, there are certainly things to come—good things, wondrous and full of magic. He surged past the box office empowered by his endless optimism.

But things changed when he spotted the thin man.

At the far corner, a willowy figure struggled to step up onto the curb, then collapsed like a wind-beaten scarecrow. It happened so quickly, James reacted without thinking. He rushed along the sidewalk to where the man lay motionless, his pipe-stem legs folded beneath him at alarming angles.

“Are you all right?” said James, leaning down to touch the man’s bony shoulder.

“I… don’t know if that’s a valid question.” The man looked up with a dour expression. He could have been thirty or sixty—there was no way to tell under the shadowing brim of his fedora.

“Let me help you up.” Jim extended his hand, grabbed the man’s, and gently pulled, surprised at the lack of resistance. So light and frail he seemed, as if his bones were bird-hollow.

Slowly, the man rose, pausing to gather up a package he’d dropped.

“I’ll get that,” said Jim as he scooped up the brown-paper parcel secured with tape and string. One corner had torn open to reveal a sheaf of stationery full of tight penmanship.