Christopher Golden - The Shadow Men

“You should be dead!” she said, pointing her manicured finger at Holly. “You will be dead.”

The girl whimpered and hid behind Jim, grasping his right arm. He could never offer his daughter, as bait or otherwise. She was far too precious. He had always loved her with an honest devotion, but perhaps it took losing someone and finding her again to make you realize just how powerful love could be. Holly was a vital part of him, more solid and precious than his own heart and soul. He would die for her.

He would kill for her.

Jim stepped forward, ignoring Jenny’s gasp of surprise and Holly’s hands trying to pull him back.

“What?” Veronica said, mocking. “Going to paint me to death, Mr. Artist?”

“In my dreams, I’m sure,” Jim said. As he dropped to the floor and reached for a small side table-the only piece of furniture that could be a weapon, and his only hope-he sensed Trix leaping past him to his right, and heard Jenny telling Holly to run.

And then everything froze.

Jim saw the small table before him but could not touch it. Past the table were Veronica’s legs, their shadows confused by those of her moving arms and flexing fingers. He could hear the strange words she muttered but could not move his head-or even his eyes-to look up and see what she was doing.

Trapped, he thought, and he could feel the No-Face Man trapped inside him writhing against its confines. No. God, no. They carried Sally’s mark upon them, enough to allow the No-Face Men into the home that had once belonged to Thomas McGee. The No-Face Men had been the backup plan. If Jim and his family couldn’t get to Veronica, then Sally’s echo creatures were there to help, to kill her the way the Shadow Men had murdered Peter O’Brien. But the No-Face Man inside Jim was just as paralyzed, just as trapped and helpless, as Jim himself.

From the corner of his eye he could make out Trix, her form impossibly unbalanced where she had been halted in the act of diving at Veronica.

“Stupid people,” Veronica said, voice rank with disgust. “You think that defying me bought you the right to come back to attack me. Kill me? Is that what the bitch-girl told you to do?”

Happily, Jim thought, but he could not speak. His blood flowed, his heart thudded in his ears, but his muscles felt like they were made of glass, a fragile skeleton conjured by this woman’s mad magic.

“There’s only one killing happening here today,” the woman said. Jim heard more of those language-less words, and then a shadow passed him by. A small shadow. Holly, dragging her feet as something drew her forward. Her hand brushed against Jim’s cheek as she passed, and he thought, Is that the last time I’ll feel my daughter’s warmth?

Jim struggled and fought and raged, his eyes burning as he defied the spell to lift them. They burned more than when he and Trix had first attempted to see the alternate Bostons, up in that room where Thomas McGee, in his greed and hubris, had split the world asunder. They burned, but he did it, only to see a reality he wished he could instantly forget.

Holly knelt before Veronica, her knees awash in spilled tea. The old woman grinned in delight, reveling in victory, and from behind him Jim heard a faint, desperate whine coming from his wife.

If only we could close our eyes, he thought, because there was nothing he wanted to see less than his daughter’s death.

“I’ll always be here,” Veronica said, “and each Boston will be my Boston.” She held up one hand and pointed a finger at Holly. A blue light gathered on the end of her finger, dancing like a faraway star. And at one word from Veronica, it leaped forward and struck Holly’s face.

“Nnnnn…,” was all Jim could say, but he felt his heart crushed and broken, chewed up and spat out, as Holly’s head flipped back and her arms went wide, and he saw that terrible light burning from her ears and eyes, nose and mouth. It spilled down her body like the In-Between’s mist given form, leaving slick, luminous trails in her hair and on her skin.

“Now, then,” Veronica said, turning around as if to deal with the day’s next order of business.

“You stupid, stupid bitch,” Holly said. It was her voice, but the words… the words were Sally’s. And suddenly Jim understood that the girl Oracle had never shared with them her true plan.

“What?” Veronica turned back, amazed, to see Holly shake her head slowly, then stand.

“You think a mark is sophisticated?” Holly said. “In my Boston, that type of witchery has gone the way of the street-corner card trick. In my Boston, I’m so at one with the city that sometimes it loses itself in me, and I have its magic and its history, its soul, at hand. My Boston gives me real magic.”

“You should be dead,” Veronica whispered.

“This?” Holly picked a dreg of the terrible light from her arm and waved it like a string of spit. Then she breathed on it, and it turned into a blade of grass. “How pretty.” She dropped the grass, and it fluttered to the ground.

Veronica gathered herself quickly, hissing three words that sent her Shadow Men streaking across the room.

What happened next was so fast that Jim could not make it out. Later, he would put events together from what little he saw, and Holly’s few comments about that afternoon, and then the picture would be clear.

He felt a wrench as something inside him burst out. It winded him, shattering Veronica’s strange hold over him and jerking him to his feet, and as he gasped he heard Trix and Jenny doing the same. The darkness moved away from him, and he saw, gathering Veronica in its arms, a No-Face Man-not a prisoner after all, now that Sally’s real mark, the spells she had hidden inside Holly, had been released.

Veronica screamed, but though her Shadow Men heard, they could do nothing. They were being ripped and shredded by the other two No-Face Men, the violence sudden and intense. And when they had finished, they turned their attentions to Veronica.

“No,” Holly said, and Jim could not tell who spoke. Was this his daughter telling those shades not to kill the Oracle? Or was it Sally, through his daughter?

He would never know, and Holly would never say.

Instead, the No-Face Men dragged Veronica from the room and up the stairs. She screamed and railed against them, muttering spells that did not work, incantations that dispersed to the air. And none of them worked because Holly was this Boston’s next chosen Oracle, and such violence against her could not be allowed. That was why Veronica had needed the little girl out of her Boston-the soul of the city, in this reality, would not allow one Oracle to kill the next.

Jim wanted to watch what happened to the old woman, but Jenny hugged him and held him there, and Trix quietly closed the door. Still, they heard the heavy footsteps upstairs as Veronica was dragged across the small bedroom, and then lighter impacts as her feet fell in the farther room. After that, one long scream, fading, growing distant in space and time, until it was finally cut off by a shattering silence.

Jim turned to his daughter. She was still facing away from them, but her head turned ever so slightly to the left and right, left and right. It was as if she was reading something from the air before her.

Without turning, and in a tone that told Jim he might never hear his daughter’s innocent voice again, Holly spoke three words.

“I know everything.”

Jim stood in the doorway of their new kitchen, watching Holly coloring at the table. Delicious aromas filled every room. Jenny had decided to make jambalaya, and Holly loved nothing more than to help her mom cook. Sometimes she helped cut vegetables or stir eggs or perform some other task appropriate for a girl who was not quite eight. But most of the time she was content just to be with Jenny. If anything, that inclination had only increased in the six weeks since their ordeal in the other Bostons.