Anne Ursu - The Shadow Thieves

If any of these guards, people, staff, or officials were to try to open that door, he or she would find it very much locked. But no one ever tried. Whenever anyone wandered down that corridor, he found himself possessed of a strange incuriousness and, for added measure, an overwhelming urge to go to the food court and buy a nice jumbo pretzel.

Now, let's leave the door for a moment. Let's leave the corridor and the jumbo pretzels, the cheese store and the dine-u-tainment. Let's leave the Mall altogether and travel about ten minutes away, over the interlocking freeways and the bright rows of suburban houses, to the home of a man we'll call Frank. This Frank was not a pleasant sort. He had a black heart, and black teeth to match. He scowled and grumbled at every man, woman, girl, boy, baby, dog, and kitten that he saw. All Frank loved on Earth were his tomato plants, to which he murmured and sang like he had just given birth to them.

Now, Frank had very nice tomato plants, and they made lovely tomatoes, juicy and plump, but really… isn't there more in life? Should one really devote every morsel of one's love, to the exclusion of the rest of the world, to something that can't even decide if it's a vegetable or a fruit?

No matter. Frank will not trouble us for long. One day-just two days after Zee arrived at the Mielswetzskis'- Frank went out in his yard as usual to sit among his babies and talk of their hopes and fears, only to find some bugs had eaten away at his plants overnight.

Frank let out a high-pitched shriek. Flocks of birds from several neighborhoods away flew from their perches. Shaking his hand at the sky, Frank swore vengeance then and there, not just against those bugs, but all bugs. He began to stomp wildly around the yard, looking for mosquitoes, flies, ants, and yes, even ladybugs, and he slapped at (flying bugs) or stepped on (crawling bugs) every single one. Frank saw a particularly large grasshopper and lifted his foot high in the air, ready for a particularly crushing stomp, when he felt a strange pain in his chest.

Ouch.

The pain grew and soon became unbearable. To Frank, it felt like his heart was getting ready to explode, and he had a pretty good idea that it actually might.

Frank knew. He knew what was about to happen, and he still used all his might to stomp his foot down on the grasshopper with a great thwap. If he hadn't, perhaps he could have been saved-but he did. So, then and there Frank died, killing himself through his own meanness.

No one, not even the tomatoes, would mourn.

A few moments after Frank's death the door in the Mall opened. A form slipped through, a messenger of sorts, with winged sandals and a winged hat, and he moved so quickly through the air that no one saw him at all. People in the Mall saw a flash, maybe, felt a small breeze, a mere tickle of the air, but as soon as it was there, it was gone again and thus forgotten. Oh, nothing, they say. Let's go to the food court. Those jumbo pretzels are so good, aren't they?

The Messenger whizzed through the Mall, out the doors, and up to the sky. He arrived at Frank's house in moments, where he found the dead man sprawled in his garden.

Nice plants, thought the Messenger.

He opened Frank's mouth to check for a coin and shook his head. He didn't know what was wrong with people these days. He buzzed right through the walls of the house, circled around, found an old, stained sofa in the living room, checked between the cushions, and pulled out a quarter. Then he flew back to Frank, stuck the coin under his tongue, and knocked on his forehead three times.

A few minutes later Frank and the Messenger were zipping toward the sliding glass doors of the Mall. When Frank saw where they were headed, he muttered, "I should have known." Frank had never much liked the Mall.

And in the blink of an eye Frank and the Messenger were standing in front of the nondescript door.

There are doors like this door all over the world. Their locations change as civilizations change, old ones simply fade away and new ones pop up all the time. They tend to be hidden in plain sight, where vast crowds of people congregate, where the air fills with the cacophony of life. There are doors like this door all over the world, but this particular door at this particular time was unique because there was a man waiting on the other side of it. Or something very like a man.

This man-like man was quite tall, perhaps seven feet tall, and extremely thin, with hollow cheeks and deep-set eyes. His face was white-not Caucasian white, but white white-his lips were gray and cracked, and his eyes were a sickly shade of yellow. He stood stiffly in the shadows with a strange kind of grace, and he wore an old-fashioned tuxedo with tails and a white tie.

He had followed the Messenger up through the long, winding caves when Frank's time had come; he had been too late to make it through then, so he waited in the shadows behind the door for it to open once more. He would not miss this chance-who knew when the call would come again?

And when the door did open, he pressed himself against the stone wall of the cave, as he did every time, while the Messenger and the dead man (that would be Frank) sped through. He waited while the large door slowly swung shut, then, at the last second, when the Messenger was well out of sight, the tuxedoed man caught the door and slipped through into the bright expanse of the day.

CHARLOTTE AND ZEE ARRIVED AT SCHOOL A HALF HOUR early on Monday so she could give him the grand tour. It had already been determined that Zee would share Charlotte's classes for the year, since she could help him catch up. Which sounded like a great deal of extra work to Charlotte, but nobody had asked her.

As her mother kept reminding her, Charlotte was supposed to introduce Zee to her friends. This would not take long. With Caitlin gone, that only left Maddy. The threesome had become a duo. It was okay. Maddy was cool, when she wasn't worrying about school.

Charlotte always said that Maddy cared so much about school that Charlotte didn't have to; Maddy worried enough for two people. But Charlotte liked her because she had no patience for twits or jerks either-though for Maddy it was probably because they interfered with her studies.

There were girls Charlotte was friendly with Elizabeth-who-never-talked, and Molly-the-ballerina, and Gretchen-the-goth-girl, who didn't like anyone. But as for tell-all-your-secrets-to, three-hour-long-phonecall, maid-of-honor-at-each-other's-wedding, bestfriends-forever friends, Charlotte was distinctly lacking. Someday, when she hopped on a bus for Brazil, that might change.

She didn't really explain any of this to Zee. In some seismic departure from her norm she introduced him to absolutely everyone, even people she didn't like (she wouldn't have been able to tell you why) and absolutely everyone seemed to size Zee up as someone they might like to have on their side. His accent, his clothes, his countenance, and some ineffable je ne sais quoi seemed to mark Zee as one of those cool but accessible kids that everyone likes. It was incredibly annoying; Zee was clearly drinking some sort of weird potion that made him perfect in every way. Even Gretchen-the-goth-girl seemed impressed with him and immediately started to ask Zee about bands Charlotte had never heard of. His Zee-like reticence was taken as an alluring mysteriousness, and he was immediately marked as a babe by Audrey, Angie, Andrea, and both Ashleys, who indeed had all gained more shape and definition at the sight of him. He ran circles around everyone during the soccer game in gym and was quickly deemed the man by Chris and Brad and their ilk. Even the teachers seemed charmed by his politeness and formality- qualities that, for any other new kid, would have earned him a serious wedgie, but not Zee. After an entire day of being asked which one of them was adopted, Charlotte began to wonder if the question had more to do with respective coolness than any confusion over ethnicity. It was all very typical of her life.