Christopher Golden - The Shadow Men

But as Veronica pushed the door open, Trix realized quickly that her preconceptions were about to be shot down.

The hallway was light and airy, the stairwell rising above them to an atrium window on the third floor. Moonlight flooded in, silvering the walls and dark wooden staircases. The floor was light oak and the furnishings spare: a phone table, a chair, a coatrack with a lone umbrella propped in the stand.

“Please, come in,” Veronica said. “Hang your coats. The rack’s by a radiator so they’ll dry.”

“Where are we going?” Jim asked.

Veronica closed the door behind them and smiled gently at Trix. “There’s a room upstairs,” she said. “I’ll lead you. It’s where Thomas McGee tried to cast his abominable spells, and where he probably died.”

“Probably?”

“It was his library. His study. This whole house.” She waved one hand to indicate the building around them, taking in all the rooms whose doors they could see and others they could not. “He could have used any room, but he chose that one. And every time I even walk by the closed door, I know why.”

“You sound afraid,” Trix said.

“The room… fascinates me,” she said softly, and then without further explanation she started up the staircase.

Jim followed without even sparing Trix a glance. He thinks he’s close, she thought. He must be terrified that she’s lied, or is mad, but he can’t ignore the idea that every second takes us one step closer to getting them back.

Trix climbed the stairs after Jim, and soon Veronica stood on the landing outside a closed door. She was pale, and the effect was not simply moonlight on her skin. The gentle artificial light emphasized the bags beneath her eyes, and the skin hanging on to her jawline seemed to defy gravity’s best efforts. Her eyes were wide, and there was a sheen of perspiration across her brow. “You don’t have to-” Trix began, but Veronica quickly cut her off, harsh and berating.

“Of course I do!” She reached out and opened the door. “There’s a small anteroom, then another doorway. An attempt at privacy, put in by Thomas McGee, I suspect. Just… just look for now. Look and see, and you’ll believe me. You might not understand… but you’ll believe. Then come to the living room downstairs, because I have something to give you.”

“What?”

“Two letters.” Veronica swayed past them and started down the stairs; she seemed to strengthen a little, and a smile crept over her face.

Trix suddenly felt abandoned.

Jim grabbed her hand and nodded at the open door. Inside, in the shadows, she could see a second closed door. A strange smell emerged-old, wet ash, and something less identifiable, like the scent of fallen pine needles but more sour.

“Are we doing the right thing?” she asked softly, and Jim scoffed.

“You’re the one who-” But he stopped mid-sentence, his face softening. “Trix, if there’s any clue, any chance that I can know what happened to them”-he looked at the doorway-“however crazy…”

“We have to take that chance,” she said.

“Yeah. We have to.” Holding Trix’s hand, Jim reached for the inner door.

With a Wonder and a Wild Desire

A S J IM pushed the door inward, he felt resistance, as though the air pressure was different on the other side. It opened with a sigh, a musty breath escaping from within, and he thought of Carter discovering the tomb of Tutankhamen. He entered, and Trix followed a step behind.

The only light came from behind them, providing just enough illumination to make out the ragged outline of a broken chair, and to see that the rough wooden floor seemed to have been blackened by flame. Then Trix made a murmur of discovery and clicked on a lightswitch, and a ceiling fixture on the other side of the room blazed to life.

“Holy shit,” Jim whispered.

Trix stepped up beside him, and the two of them looked around the room, unnerved. It was not merely the floor that had been blackened by fire, or at least scorched by a blast of blistering heat. Bookshelves had partially collapsed, leaving piles of books on the floor beneath them that looked like little more than ash sculptures. On the shelves that were intact, some of the books looked as though the fire had been a hungry animal, gnawing away the bindings and leaving scorched pages exposed. Others had their bindings intact, but they were only partially legible.

Jim took several steps toward the nearest shelf and saw that, beneath a sooty film, leather bindings on some of the older volumes had crinkled and tightened, but he could make out words in foreign languages he did not speak and arcane symbols he understood even less.

He turned to see that Trix had gone in the other direction. Some kind of sideboard had once abutted the wall there, only the rear legs still in evidence, fused to the wall. Jutting from the wall itself was a pattern of what he first took to be more strange designs, but then he recognized what appeared to be a copper coil, along with what might have been a sailor’s sextant and several other strange instruments. They were set into the wall as though it had once been wet cement and the objects had been pressed into the surface before it dried. Yet here the wall looked almost as though the wood had melted and run like candle wax.

The chair between them was actually only half of a chair, burnt so badly that the legs were thin and brittle sticks of charcoal. Beyond it, at the center of the room, the floor was streaked with a grayish white starburst pattern. Jim dragged the toe of his shoe through it and found it greasy and chalky at the same time, like creosote built up inside a fireplace.

Yet the most startling thing about the room had nothing to do with its ruinous state. The starburst pattern in its center was really only half of a shape. The destruction of the premises ended halfway across the room, and the other half appeared entirely untouched by whatever had occurred there.

Over Jim’s head hung a light fixture whose metal arms had been wilted by incredible heat. But on the other side of the room was an identical fixture, controlled by the switch Trix had turned on, whose only flaw was a layer of dust. A similar sheen of dust covered the wooden floorboards over there. The bookshelves remained untouched by the event that had ravaged the part of the room where Jim and Trix stood. A small writing desk stood in one corner, a pile of books upon it. One volume lay open on the desk.

Trix came over beside Jim. They stood in silence, shoulders almost touching, the tips of their shoes nearly meeting the line that separated the ruined half of the room from the part that had been preserved. “This just isn’t possible,” Trix said.

Jim glanced at her. For a moment they searched each other’s eyes, wordlessly acknowledging the obvious-that neither of them felt capable of judging what was and wasn’t possible anymore. Trix looked away first, shaking her head, then took the initial step into the unmarred side of the room. Nothing happened. The place seemed solid and ordinary except for the obvious fact of its impossible half ruin. “It’s like someone cut the room in half,” Jim said.

“No,” Trix replied, walking over to the writing desk and examining the book that lay open there. “It’s like half the room was here for… whatever did all this damage-McGee’s fuckup-and the other half of the room was somewhere else.”

She flipped a page in the book, then turned to look at him, a kind of almost panic dancing in her eyes. “Magic.”

Jim flinched at the word. Veronica’s story had sounded like some kind of bizarre fairy tale, but the room around them was tangible, the evidence of the impossible undeniable. Now he took a steadying breath and crossed the room as well, heading for the door set in the opposite wall, beside the writing desk.