Christopher Golden - The Shadow Men

“I would have sensed that,” Sally said. “They needed her alive as bait.”

“Bait,” Jim echoed, and the idea of anyone using his precious little girl like that only increased his fury.

“Like in fishing, Daddy?”

“Yes, honey.” He hugged Holly and felt her familiar warmth, and could not avoid imagining that bleeding away.

“Her Shadow Men have been thinking on their own,” Sally said. “She must have imbued them with more intelligence than I thought.”

“But they didn’t figure on us,” Anne said. She was nursing her bruised and bleeding head, but her defiance was unmistakable.

“As if we made much difference,” Jennifer said. She was kneeling close to Jim and Holly but not quite close enough to touch. He knew that this must be so difficult for her.

“You made every difference,” Sally said. Her eyes were closed. She looked reduced, even smaller than the child she was.

“How?” Trix asked.

“You gave them something more to fight. Bought us time to react.”

Trix and Anne pulled several of the heavy chairs across to the wide entrance. With the doors closed and chairs propped beneath the handles, it would take a concerted effort to enter the room from that way. And today, they hoped, few people would have browsing works of art on their minds. Art was a luxury, and these were desperate times.

“Honey,” Jim whispered into his daughter’s ear, and she pulled back slightly and looked up at him.

“I know,” she said. “It’s time for you to help Mommy.”

“And you’re going to stay here, be my good little girl.” He glanced at Sally, watching him talk to his daughter. “And look after Sally for me. She’s very tired, and a little sad.”

Holly looked at the Oracle, then sighed. “Daddy,” she said, “don’t be silly. She’s like… magic. She’ll be looking after me. ”

He laughed, and Jennifer smiled at him. “Clever little girl you’ve got there,” she said.

“You don’t know the half of it.” He wondered what Jennifer must think, knowing that this girl shared her DNA yet was not her daughter. And he realized that after this, nothing would ever be the same again. From this day forward, the merged city of Boston would become the focus of every media outlet, and every scientist. It would be the most famous, most heavily scrutinized place in the world, and thousands of people’s lives would be changed. Some of the changes would be obvious and immediately apparent-there would be lots of people vying for the same property, existing in the same space. But many more changes would be hidden away, perhaps forever. There were plenty of bodies in the streets and buried under collapsed buildings, but yesterday’s collision must have wiped out many people from reality. Bloodlines had ended, without ever having existed at all.

Across the world, ripples from this incredible, terrible event had changed situations beyond counting.

“You have to go now,” Sally said. Her eyes were still closed and she remained seated, but something about her had hardened. Perhaps it was her stronger voice, or the squaring of her shoulders.

Jim stood, still grasping his daughter’s hand. The idea of Jenny fading away was terrible, and the thought of her becoming one of those faceless shadow-things was beyond comprehension.

“Are you ready?” Sally asked.

“Are you?” She looked wasted to Jim; he was afraid for her, and of her.

“I can do what I need to do,” Sally said. “It’s all of you who matter. If you don’t get back and stop Veronica, what happened here will be only the beginning. This won’t be”-she stood, pushing herself up the wall and shrugging her shoulders-“pleasant.”

Jim and Jennifer stood near Holly, and Trix and Anne came to stand with them, facing away from the bodies that Trix and Anne had dragged across to one wall. Smears of blood glistened on the floor. Holly had her back resolutely to the corpses as well, and Jim’s heart broke for her. Even if this all ends well, she’s changed forever, he thought, and his little girl smiled up at him sadly.

“You know what you’ve gotta do,” Sally said, standing before them. “The only way to hide you from the In-Between is to fool it into thinking you’re already a part of it. Being turned into a shadow would weaken you pretty badly, even at the beginning. And you’ll need all your strength in there. So I’m going to lend you souls not yet born.”

“So Jenny, now?” Jim asked.

“After this time, I suspect she’s in a sort of coma,” Sally said. “Which is good, because it will protect her. A little.”

Trix exhaled loudly. “Okay. I’m ready. But I’ve gotta say, it’s freaking me out something huge.”

Jim nodded. He felt the same way. Sally wanted to merge them with her No-Face Men, masking their humanity with those wraiths’ potential existence. Hopefully like that, the In-Between would not affect them. At least, not right away. “Are you sure this is going to work?” he asked Sally.

The young Oracle shrugged. “I guess. I mean, it’s been done before, but not by me. You should be able to stay merged with them for a little while without it affecting you too much. I’m not sure for how long, but long enough for you to…” She waved at the expanse of wall through which the Shadow Men had tried to pull Anne.

“What’s ‘too much’?” Trix asked.

“I don’t know,” Sally said. “ I’ve never done this before.”

“Will we be able to lose them afterward?” Jim asked.

“You will,” Sally said. “I’ll tell you how. Show you.” She was vague, and quiet.

“All right,” Trix said. She looked at Anne and they squeezed each other’s hands. “If we’re going, let’s get going. Me first.”

Sally shifted her hand by her side, and a No-Face Man came forward, a shadow floating through pools of artificial light. “Try and keep still,” Sally said. “And don’t fight it.”

Trix nodded, then let go of Anne’s hand and crossed her arms on her chest.

Jim’s first impulse was to shout out and help his friend because he could see that she was in pain. Her face screwed up-but she uttered no sound-as Sally grasped at the amorphous No-Face Man and pressed him to Trix’s side. Trix did not move or flinch, but her expression betrayed the discomfort she was feeling as Sally kneaded and pressed, clasping handfuls of shadow and pressing it against her clothing, her skin. The little girl’s face was set in concentration, and her lips moved as she muttered some unheard incantation, eyes fluttering, cheeks flushing. She grasped and pushed, and it was almost as if she was trying to mold Trix and the No-Face Man together. As the wraith reduced, so Trix’s discomfort seemed to grow.

“You’re hurting her,” Jim said, but it was Holly’s hand squeezing his that silenced him. My little girl’s giving me comfort, he thought, and a darkness opened in him because of things she had already seen. He hated the idea of Holly becoming as unnaturally precocious as Sally.

Perhaps something about what she was doing became easier, because Sally seemed to speed up. Her hands grasped and pressed, her arms windmilled, and soon she was snatching at the air to retrieve the few dregs of the No-Face Man that remained. At last she stood back, breathing heavily and yet seemingly invigorated by what she had done-eyes glinting, skin flushed and shining.

Trix opened her eyes and looked around. Her pupils were darker than Jim had ever seen them, like pits into nothing.

“Trix?” he asked. She blinked a few times, gathering her personality back to her, finding herself again.

“Fucking hell,” she said.

“Okay,” Sally said, waving her hand and calling forth another. “Who’s next?”

Trix watched Anne, Jennifer, and then Jim go through the process, and all the time she was coming to terms with what she had become. Memories flitted at her like vague recollections of long-ago dreams, and even this distant there was a terrifying alienness to them. She often could not remember what she had dreamed the night before, but a nightmare from when she was four years old-falling from a cliff with her mother, Trix flying, her mother striking the ground and dying-was etched on her memory. These memories felt like secondhand dreams remembered by someone else. They were not only memories that did not belong, but the way they were remembered was all wrong as well. She was recalling someone else’s life, long lost to the In-Between.