Christopher Golden - The Shadow Men

“There’s something…,” she said, standing at the cemetery gates.

“Come on,” Sally said, and grabbed her hand. It elicited a gasp of surprise from Trix, and Sally grinned as she walked them both through the gate.

“I’ve been here before,” Trix said, aware as she spoke that this might not be the exact cemetery she had walked around that day several years before.

“Safe,” Sally whispered, and she let go of Trix’s hand, sank slowly to her knees, and leaned forward until her forehead rested against the ground.

“Sally?” Trix said, and for the first time she was worried for the Oracle. The girl seemed smaller than she had before, and the cemetery seemed to hold its breath at their predicament. From all around came the sounds of chaos-sirens, shouting, and the musical tinkle of falling glass-but the cemetery was quiet, and timeless.

Trix knelt by her side but did not quite touch her. The girl took deep breaths. Trix felt as if they were being watched. Hulking shadows shifted slightly as lights moved out on the road, shivering as if unsure of themselves. “I’ve been here before,” Trix said again, and then she saw movement from the corner of her eye.

“Don’t be afraid,” Sally said, a curious statement from a girl hugging herself into a ball. But as Trix stood and spun left and right-following shadows that always seemed just behind her, just out of sight-the girl’s words settled and gave her peace.

“The air is thin here,” she said. Though Veronica had lied and deceived them, Trix understood the truth of what she’d told her and Jim about thin places, and their ability to perceive them. This was one such place. At first glance she could see no earthquake damage, and she thought she knew why-this cemetery existed in all three Bostons and was the same in each reality. But then along the path from where they’d entered, below the weak glow of a lamp, she saw a bench that had been upended, and below it, an old grave. If she’d seen it any other time, she’d have suspected vandals of uprooting the bench from elsewhere and propping it against the gravestone, some pointless amusement that they would have forgotten by the end of the night. But not here, and not today. This was something more.

“Thin enough to see through,” Sally said. She was standing slowly now, and she seemed calmer than she had since Trix had first laid eyes on her. A tension had gone from her face, and her pose seemed more relaxed. “So she told you about the crossing points?”

“Veronica? Yeah. She said there were places where Uniques could cross between Bostons. The thin places worried her. Thought they meant the Bostons were reintegrating.”

“Just what she wants,” Sally said.

“She said it was easy for us to see, and she told us how.” Trix looked from the corner of her eye, turning in a slow circle, but then shook her head in confusion.

“You won’t see the three Bostons here,” Sally said. “Well, mostly not. Walk with me, and I’ll tell you where we are.”

“You said we’re safe here?” Trix asked.

Sally smiled, with little humor. “Walk with me.”

They moved through the cemetery, away from the entrance gate and the fence lining the boundary wall. It grew darker as they walked, but never so dark that Trix couldn’t see their surroundings. She looked left and right, still trying to catch those shadows that seemed to dance in her peripheral vision. She remembered entering this Boston through Thomas McGee’s ruined room, and how she and Jim had seen the three versions of Boston co-existing, once Veronica had told them how.

But this was something different.

“Special place,” Sally said, waving her hand to indicate the whole cemetery. “You’ll find this cemetery in each Boston, looking the same, with the same people buried here. It’s one of the oldest untouched places in all three Bostons-well, in two now. The Shadow Men from your Boston won’t be able to track you here. Whatever mark Veronica put on you-and I’ll work out exactly what that was soon enough-will be confused. There’s static between worlds, and it bleeds through here. It’ll confuse them.”

“They didn’t seem easily confused,” Trix said.

“In this form they’re drones, that’s all, dancing to Veronica’s song, but here they won’t hear it. I doubt they’ll wander within half a mile of here. The cemetery is unique.”

“Like me?” Trix asked.

“Not quite,” Sally said after a slight pause.

“What do you mean, ‘in this form’?”

“Let’s save the Q amp; A until we get you clear of her influence,” Sally said, and Trix didn’t argue. There was nothing she wanted more.

They passed rows of graves and tombs that cast uncertain shadows. The city was more alive than ever around them as rescue and recovery operations got under way, and that made the silence in the cemetery even more haunting. And when they approached a grave in the center of a path-the tombstone sprouting somewhere it should not have been-Trix felt a chill pass through her, and she asked, “What have you brought me here to see?”

But Sally did not answer that, and as they drew close enough to read the name on the stone, Trix found she could no longer swallow.

“Not you,” Sally said quietly. “This place is much older than that.” She stopped, hesitated, and then turned to Trix and grasped her hands. “This is the grave of a dead Oracle,” Sally said. “A Unique, of course, because we have to be. And it’s the only grave in the cemetery that doesn’t exist in each Boston.” She waved a hand at the bench, then walked past, dismissing the scene.

“So if Oracles can die, why haven’t the Bostons collided before today? You haven’t been Oracle for long, and there must be more who’ve died, in this Boston and the others.”

“An Oracle always knows when his or her time is coming, and so does the city. They both have time to prepare, look for a replacement.”

“But Peter O’Brien was murdered,” Trix said, understanding perhaps a little.

“Not only that. Those things Veronica sent…” Sally actually shivered, and Trix saw it in the darkness. She remembered the girl summoning her No-Face Men from the basement floor of her home, and her triumphant cry, and she wondered how much that had cost her. “They ripped out his soul and dragged it into the In-Between. Tore out the heart of the city. That was enough.”

They hurried on, and Trix wished there was some way she could reach Jim. She needed to talk to him, hear his voice, and tell him what was happening. Her cell phone had been smashed in the quake, and if they hadn’t had the sense knocked out of them by events, they would have bought new phones. But shopping had been the last thing on their minds. Besides, she suspected that tonight of all nights, the networks would be jammed. She hoped that he’d found Jenny and Holly by now. Hoped that they were safe, and uninjured by the cataclysm, and untouched by Veronica’s wraiths.

“We’re here,” the little girl said.

“Where?” Trix glanced around. They were at a corner of the cemetery, bounded by two tall buildings. There was a square paved area with several benches spaced around the edges and a small water fountain at the center. The fountain was not working. Small trees grew here, their shadows cast across the paving stones from weak floodlights fixed to the walls of one of the buildings.

“A focus point,” Sally said. “A place where the city’s power is at its greatest. It’ll help me do what I need to do to you.”

“Veronica’s mark.” Sally nodded. “Will it hurt?”

“I hope not,” the girl said, and Trix thought, You and me both.

She didn’t understand any of this. She’d been made aware of her Boston’s Oracle by her grandmother, but that didn’t mean that she’d even come close to understanding anything about her. Perhaps understanding would come later.