Christopher Golden - The Shadow Men

Trix leaped on the Half Shadow’s back, its ghostly Shadow Twin cold where she passed through it. She wrapped one arm around the woman’s neck and, with her free hand, clawed at her eyes. Trix felt her fingers sink into the woman’s left eye socket, felt something wet and syrupy spurt onto her hand, and then both the woman’s human mouth and the dark void that was the mouth of her Shadow Twin opened in a scream. “Let go of her, you bitch!” Trix shouted, digging her fingers in deeper.

A hand shot out and gripped Trix by the throat. Her eyes bulged as her airway was cut off and the pressure on her windpipe closed like a vise. She stared in astonishment at the wispy gray nothing of the arm that had emerged from the Half Shadow’s back. The creature’s Shadow Twin had begun to separate from her, at least enough to stop Trix from hurting it any further. Enough to kill Trix if it could.

The shadow hand hoisted her off the ground, her feet dangling above the marble tiles. She battered the wrist, where the dark mist of the thing had turned solid enough to hold her, but could not break its grip. Her vision began to dim, spots dancing at the corners of her eyes as the lack of oxygen made her spasm and kick.

In that moment, it occurred to her that she was going to die. The concept seemed distant. She felt herself jostled as the thing walked forward, still headed for the wall, dragging Anne across the room behind it. The wall was its destination, that much was clear. Trix had thought it meant to take Anne through the door into the Reflection Room, but it did not approach the doorway. Its aim was the ornately carved oak wall that had been put up to bisect the Abbey Room.

Blood rushing to her face, Trix beat the shadowy arm. The Half Shadow turned and glanced at her, one eye ruined, blood and gore smeared on its cheek. It held Anne in its hands, and now it lifted her up and held her out toward the wall. Anne caught Trix’s gaze and held it, a terrible sorrow passing between the two women, terror wrought by this moment mixed with grief over moments that might have been.

Then the Half Shadow took a step forward, pushing Anne against the wall.

Through the wall.

Trix began to slip away from consciousness, her brain deprived of oxygen. But her eyes widened as she saw Anne flailing, passing through the wall as if it wasn’t even there.

Dark shapes flashed past Trix, filling the edges of her vision, and at first she thought they were in her mind. But they struck the Half Shadow, attacking her viciously, beating at her face and body. One of Sally’s No-Face Men slashed through the shadow arm holding Trix, and Trix collapsed to the ground drawing in huge lungfuls of air, her throat raw and ragged with pain. “Anne!” she rasped, scuttling forward on the marble.

But the No-Face Men were there before her. They dragged Anne back through the insubstantial wall, leaving her wide-eyed and shivering as though she had just woken from a nightmare of some frozen hell.

The things fell on the Half Shadow and began stripping the gray shadow stuff from her. In what seemed only seconds they had torn the bits of the In-Between out of her, leaving only that plump woman. She lay on her side and wept and laughed, though whether she was horrified or elated at her rebirth, Trix couldn’t tell.

“Anne,” Trix said as she knelt by her and laid a hand on her shoulder.

Shuddering, trying to calm herself, Anne looked up at her with wide, searching eyes. Trix blinked in surprise. For just a moment, she had let herself forget that this was the Jenny of another world. In the space of a few hours Anne had become someone real and vital to Trix, not just some doppelganger.

“You’re all right,” Trix told her.

Anne reached up, slid a hand behind Trix’s head, and pulled her down for a kiss. Trix didn’t fight it. Though it lasted only a few seconds, it soothed her heart. When she pulled away, she saw that some of the blood from her damaged nose and bleeding mouth had smeared on Anne’s face and lips, and she reached out to wipe it away.

“Trix?” Jim ventured, dropping to his knees beside them. “You okay?”

“Not hardly,” Trix said, her voice a rasp from being choked almost to death. She helped Anne to stand.

“What did you see on the other side of the wall?” Jennifer asked, coming up to join them.

Anne shuddered and hugged herself. “Gray mist. Rooms that weren’t really there.”

Trix saw Jim stiffen and turn on Sally. “Is that what’s in the Reflection Room?”

“No,” Sally said, her child’s eyes innocent. “I told you. Where the worlds don’t overlap, they’re separated by the In-Between. That’s what she saw. The nothing that fills the void between the parallel Bostons. The library is in all three, but here-in both my Boston and O’Brien’s-half of this room was destroyed by a terrorist’s bomb. The Reflection Room exists because of that.”

Sally walked to the wall and pounded on it. Trix flinched, thinking her hand would pass through, but it struck solid wood.

“The Shadow Men can pass through. I know other ways to slip into the In-Between, but it’s moving sideways into nothing, which is not the same as going through the door into the next room.”

Jim turned and looked at the door to the Reflection Room, where Holly was supposed to be waiting. Trix realized that he no longer saw the rest of them. He had forgotten all about the corpses, not to mention the heavyset black woman who even now climbed to her feet and staggered away. The No-Face Men hovered at the edges of the room, waiting for Sally’s instructions.

There were at least two others dead, people who had been Half Shadows but who did not survive the violent removal of the shadow stuff from the In-Between that had infected them. The bloodied redhead still lived. He moaned and put a hand to his temple, frowning in pain, but did not try to rise.

“Are there more inside, Sally?” Trix asked.

Sally glanced at the redhead. “There must be.”

“Then you should send your No-Face guys in first,” Trix told her.

“Fuck that,” Jim said, and he reached for the knob.

Jim pushed open the door into the Reflection Room. The recessed lights were dim, illuminating the many displays on the walls and in glass cases that were meant to educate about the value of human life and the horror of terrorist ideology. In a raised section of the floor the designer had put a Zen rock garden surrounded by a kidney-shaped pool of water with a small burbling fountain. There were comfortable chairs arranged at strange intervals around the thirty-foot-square room. On the opposite side of the Zen garden, one chair had been turned to face the door.

His daughter sat in that chair, her hair a tangled mess, her dirty face streaked with tear stains. “Daddy!” Holly shouted as she spotted him.

She tried to rise, but the Half Shadow who knelt beside the chair held her back. A weasel of a man with oily hair and tiny eyes, he forced her to remain in the chair, his grip on her arm making her wince with pain. Jim wanted to kill him… would kill him, he vowed.

But there was the other Half Shadow to worry about, the grandmotherly woman with her pearl necklace and wide hips and eyeglasses. She held a knife to Holly’s throat.

“Let her go,” Jim said, a terrible chill racing through him. “You can’t think you’ll get away from us.” He gestured toward Sally and the three No-Face Men who hovered just behind her as the Oracle came through the door.

The weasel sneered. “This isn’t about getting away. The job isn’t to beat you. That’s not how Veronica wins.”

“So, how does she win?” Trix demanded, coming into the dimly lit room with Jennifer and Anne trailing behind her.

“The little girl dies, and Veronica wins,” the weasel said.