Christopher Golden - The Shadow Men

But then she saw the two teenaged girls coming giggling down the stairs, and she thought maybe it would be fine after all.

“You two again!” one of the girls said.

“You know these people?” the other girl asked.

“Sure. Well. Not really. But they were in our house, and Dad scared them off.”

“I like your hair,” the other girl said.

“Thanks,” Trix said. “Er…” This was becoming more surreal by the moment, and when the women started berating their daughters, that only increased.

“Really,” Holly said, “we need to do what Auntie Trix says. Otherwise my daddy says it might all happen again, and then there might be three of you. Or maybe there won’t be any.”

“You need to what?” the man said.

“Upstairs,” Jim said over Trix’s shoulder.

“Why?” the other man said.

“There’s…” Trix gave what she hoped was her best smile, unsure how her grubby, bruised face would present it.

“It’s something to do with the ghost, isn’t it?” the man asked. He nodded wisely. “I knew it the first time I saw you. The ghost.”

“What ghost?” Trix asked.

“We’ve never used the room,” he said. He turned to his longer-haired twin. “Have you?”

The man shook his head slowly. “Never liked it. Always felt weird. And smelled.”

“Cotton candy,” Trix said, and everyone facing her-the four adults, the two girls-knew what she was saying.

The man stood back from the doorway, his motion inviting them to enter. Trix went first, then Holly, and Jim and Jenny followed. “What’s happening?” he asked softly as Trix passed. She saw in his eyes the doubt and fear that he had been trying to hide from his family.

“It’s okay to be afraid, Conor. But everything’s going to work out fine.”

They climbed the stairs, reached the landing, and gathered outside the door. There was nothing to indicate that the room beyond was unused, but Trix had the very real sense that it was not part of the house. In my world, this place belongs to an evil woman, she thought, looking around the landing at family pictures showing smiling people and holidays gone by.

“When we go in, hold on to our hands,” Jim said to Holly. “We’re Uniques, and crossing should be easy for us. But Jenny… it might be different for you.”

“Different how?” Jenny asked, drawing Holly close to her.

“I don’t know,” Jim said truthfully.

“You have Sally’s No-Face Man still inside you,” Trix said. “It might provide a buffer.”

“So let’s go,” Jim said. He reached for the handle and opened the door.

Inside, the room was as they had seen it on their arrival in the Irish Boston. Yellow wallpaper, an antiquestyle bed, clothes hanging in the closet. But on their arrival they’d believed the room was lived-in. Now they knew otherwise, and Trix saw the signs they’d missed before. The bedroom was like a movie set rather than a real room, arranged to look genuine yet somehow tainted with falseness.

Beyond the bed was the door that led into McGee’s terrible room.

She led the way and they all went through. The stench of ash and age hit them as they passed into the ruined room, and she wondered what the family that lived here thought of this place. Perhaps they didn’t even know it existed. Maybe this was a ghost room to that family, and that would mean that Trix and the others were now ghosts as well.

She knew that wasn’t true, but still it gave her the shivers.

“What now?” Jenny asked.

“I can see,” Holly said, her little voice filled with wonder.

“What?” Jenny asked.

“Don’t be scared,” Trix said. “Jenny, please don’t be scared.” She held her friend and hugged her tight, and when she breathed in Jenny’s hair it was Anne smiling in her mind’s eye.

“Come here,” Jim said, welcoming them into his embrace. “And you, too, sweetie.”

Holly came, too, hugging their waists, stretching as far as she could to embrace the three adults and giggling as she said, “Group hug!”

“You think we need to do the…?” Trix said, swirling her eyes around to imitate the first time they’d perceived the weirdness of this room. But she already knew the answer to that. The thing she carried inside her was already urging her to cross the room. They stood on undamaged flooring right now, and when they crossed they would also pivot around reality-a pivot around which Thomas McGee had twisted Boston. He had created splinter cities primed with the potential for tragedy, but it had taken Veronica to realize that potential.

Jim stared at her grimly, and she tried to smile back. Sure, she wanted to say, I’m ready to kill. Sure I am. For everything she’s done, and everything else she’d do. But she had no wish to speak those words aloud.

It was Jenny who urged them to walk. As a group they crossed the room, and Jenny cried out as they pierced the skin between worlds.

Trix’s No-Face Man shivered at the change, a disturbingly sexual sensation.

For just an instant, the whole world seemed to flex outward, and a wave of dizziness swept over Trix. Jenny nearly collapsed with the sudden loss of equilibrium, staggering as though drunk, but her family kept her from falling. For several seconds, the four of them only stood and breathed, waiting for the world to right itself again.

When it did, Trix knew that they were through.

The door stood before them, closed where they had left it open. Beyond, in the depths of the house they had just left-a different version of that house, in which families no longer lived-a voice rose up in fury.

“Veronica’s home,” Jim said.

“And so are we,” Jenny said. “Let’s get this finished. I want my life back.”

And the things inside them craved release.

Veronica was in the living room, waiting for them in the chair where she’d told them about McGee and the In-Between, setting up the story she wanted them to know rather than the tale that was true. There was a tea service on the table before her, a plate of cookies, and several cups steaming with recently poured liquid. Her back was straight, her hands on her knees. She was every image the lady, apart from her face.

She had the face of a killer.

Her lips were drawn, her teeth bared, her eyes narrowed and cruel. Her skin was lined now, projecting every year of her age, and she glared at them with an anger Jim thought verged on madness. She made him want to draw back, grab his family, and run, but that would do them no good. It would do no one any good. Because while she was alive, Sally and the Bostons were still in danger.

“Murderer,” Jim said, and Veronica’s rage exploded.

“How?” she screamed, standing and knocking the small coffee table with her leg. Tea spilled, a cup broke. “How did you…?” She stormed at them and Jim grabbed Holly, pulling her behind him.

Veronica sneered. “You think you can protect her behind flesh and blood?” She waved her hands at the air and screamed, an incoherent outburst that darkened the corners of the room. Shapes parted from the walls-Shadow Men that screamed as they were dragged from the In-Between at Veronica’s behest. They swayed a little, and then solidified as they walked to the room’s two doors and single window. They were guarding the exits.

“All those people,” Jim said. “All those dead people I’ve seen, and every one of them because of you.”

“You don’t think she gives a shit, do you, Jim?” Trix asked. He glanced her way, saw her left hand bunched in her pocket. What did she have in there-a knife? A weapon?

“I think maybe once she would have,” he said. Sally had told them to offer her Holly, confuse her, then attack, but this Veronica was beyond confusion. Her madness and fury were driving her now.