Christopher Golden - The Shadow Men

Jim exhaled loudly and dropped his hands. He came to sit on the side of the bed and took her hand. “If I didn’t have you with me, I’d already have totally lost it. I mean… if we hadn’t caught up with each other-”

“-we’d both still be thinking we were going crazy, and that maybe there had never been a Jenny to begin with.”

Jim nodded. “I keep thinking we should have looked longer. I know they had hours on us, and they could be anywhere, but she would’ve tried the familiar places first, and we didn’t cover all of them. We should’ve gone to her parents’ restaurant.”

“She’d have figured out something was badly amiss,” Trix said. “Felt something wrong. Maybe she saw something that scared her away from familiar places.”

“But your place? She would have gone looking for you.”

“And she wouldn’t have found me. The odds of us finding her and Holly standing on the sidewalk in front of my building when we got there are about a kabillion to one.” Trix tugged his hand a little, forcing him to meet her gaze. “You heard what Mr. O’Brien said. He’s going to find them. But there are preparations to be made, and one of those is for us to rest a little so we can focus.”

“You think I can sleep?”

Trix cocked her head. “You think I can? Listen, we’ll go crazy if we just pace the room while we’re waiting for our Irish Oracle friend to get his shit together. It’s not doing Jenny and Holly any good. Just lie down with me for a little while. Rest your eyes. Seriously. It’s dusty, but it feels good to lie down.”

Still, Jim seemed reluctant.

“Show me what you were sketching,” Trix said, pointing at the notepad he’d left on his chair.

Finally, given a task to perform, Jim seemed to step back from the frantic edge he had been teetering on. He snatched up the pad and brought it to her, sitting on the edge of the mattress.

Trix stared at the shaded pencil drawing of the view from that window, the row houses across the street from O’Brien’s Bar and the taller buildings in the distance, the church steeples, the old stone contrasting strangely with the sleekly modern buildings that the Irish-influenced Boston must have built only in the past decade or two.

Jim kicked off his shoes and slid into bed beside her, sighing as he propped himself up on his elbow to study the drawing with her. “Look familiar?” he asked.

Trix tried to ignore the cold knot forming in her stomach. “You know it does.”

She had dreamed this city dozens of times. In her disturbed dreams, she had walked its dark streets. If she went out right now, she thought she might be able to find her way almost anywhere without a map or directions. Those strange journeys had always felt like more to her, as though she had actually traveled, truly explored the intimidating city and learned its secret ways and corners.

“To me, too,” Jim said.

Though his dreams were never as clear or memorable as hers, Jim had done his own sleepwalking, taken journeys to this Irish-hued Boston, as well as another. Now, though, he didn’t need to paint from the memories of dreams.

Trix stared at the sketch. “Crazy.”

“Yeah,” Jim agreed.

Trix set the pad on the nightstand and slid farther under the bedclothes, nestling her head on the soft pillow. “Rest,” she said.

“What do we have, an hour or so before O’Brien said he’d come get us?”

“About that.”

Relenting at last, Jim put his head on the pillow, but he lay on his back and stared at the ceiling. Trix scooted closer to him and put a hand on his chest, closing her eyes, exhaustion a blanket wrapped warmly around her. Fear and hope chased each other’s tails in the back of her mind, but she tried to block them out.

“Do you think-” Jim began.

“Hush,” Trix said. “Rest. We’ll find them. I promise.”

That seemed to mollify him, if only for the moment. She felt him take a deep breath, and when he exhaled he seemed to relax somewhat. The window was open and a cool breeze drifted through, rustling the curtains and carrying the sounds of distant engines. The Banks clan were like a family to her. Holly might as well have been her niece. Trix and Jim were in this together. Lying there with him, she felt closer to him than she ever had before. She could feel his heart pounding in his chest as he tried to calm himself.

“Not exactly the member of the family I would’ve thought I’d end up sleeping with,” Trix mumbled into her pillow.

Jim laughed softly, then a little louder, and then he leaned over to kiss her forehead and pulled her closer. Sharing their warmth-and their hope and fear-they lay together and began to surrender to weariness.

Trix glanced over at the night-darkened window. Somewhere out there, in this foreign Boston, Jenny and Holly were scared and alone. Or were they? The one thing she and Jim had not yet discussed was the possibility that his girls weren’t in this Boston at all, but in the other-the third, Brahmin Boston. Trix couldn’t even consider it. They were here. They had to be, because though Veronica had shown them the trick to seeing the thin places between cities, she wasn’t sure they would really be able to cross over when the need arose.

We’re coming, Trix thought, her cheek resting on Jim’s chest. Help is on the way.

As sleep claimed her, she smiled sadly at the irony.

Jim woke to the sound of shattering glass. The room seemed to tilt for a moment as he battled the dislocation of waking in a strange place. He looked around wildly, saw that the windows were intact, the door still closed, nothing at all out of the ordinary except that he was in a strange bed in a strange room with a half-naked lesbian who happened to be one of his dearest friends.

“What just happened?” Trix murmured sleepily, propping herself up.

Jim shook his head, wondering the same thing. If it had woken her as well, then it hadn’t been a dream, which meant the sound had come from nearby. Outside? Maybe. Downstairs? Also maybe.

He crawled out of bed, gesturing for her to remain, and to be quiet.

“Fuck that,” Trix whispered. Of course she did. It was Trix. Jim should have known better.

As he slipped his shoes on and Trix dragged on her pants, they heard a muffled shout coming from the bar downstairs. O’Brien’s voice, raised in fury. A pounding noise began, like the fist of God knocking on the front door, and the whole building shook in time to that awful rhythm. A crack appeared in the wall, running from the upper edge of the door frame to the corner of the room.

“What the hell is that?” Jim whispered, not sure if Trix would hear him over the noise-not really sure if he was even talking to her.

Trix had one shoe on and the other one in her right hand as she hurried past him to the door.

“Wait,” Jim said.

“For what?” Trix asked, spinning on him, eyes wide with fear.

More glass shattered downstairs, and Jim pictured the shelves of hard liquor behind the bar being smashed to the floor. There’d been a big mirror there as well. He glanced at the window, wishing there was a fire escape out there so they could go down and survey the fracas from outside.

“Weapons,” he said. “We’re not going down there empty-handed.”

Trix put on her other shoe. “There’s an iron on the top shelf in the bathroom.”

Jim picked up the heavy crystal lamp from the bedside table, pulled off the shade, and yanked the cord out of the wall. He glanced at Trix and nodded for her to go ahead, and she turned the knob and swung the door inward.

Out in the corridor, Jim went for the door that led downstairs to the bar. Trix raced into the bathroom and emerged holding the iron Peter O’Brien had probably used for years to take the wrinkles out of his clothes. It seemed all too mundane a detail to exist in the same reality as the shouting and the noises of destruction from below.