Shadow Stations: Unseen (2 page)

Then I lost the feeling of the attic floor altogether and floated behind the man as if I were a ghost. My heartbeat was so loud I thought it would make him turn around, but he didn’t seem to realize I was there. I couldn’t see his face and couldn’t move past him. A small silver box between his shoulder blades seemed to link us together. For a terrifying moment I wondered what would happen if the link broke. Maybe I would float up into the hard blue sky and drift away forever.

The slender man wore a short-sleeved gray jumpsuit with a black cloth hood and held his sunburned arms behind his back. His wrists were tied. A prisoner.

Someone behind us gave him a rough prod with a stick.

“
Go on,” a man’s calm voice said with mock politeness. My heart leaped again. Did he see me? Another man laughed and said something about a race to the finish line. They spoke English, but their voices were distorted, as if they were underwater or talking from a tremendous distance. I tried to turn to see their faces, but couldn’t, and they didn’t seem to see me, either.

The prisoner began to cross a black lava field covered with fissures. As I floated after him, trailed by his tormentors, I wondered what he’d done. Maybe he was a murderer, or this was the bad end of a drug deal gone south, or perhaps he was a political prisoner about to pay the price for speaking up. He stumbled several times, trying to balance himself without the use of his hands, and hesitated before a wide fissure.

One of his tormentors struck him in the shoulder with the stick.

The prisoner drew a sharp breath, lost his footing, and fell on his knees and side. I braced myself to hit the rocks, but my phantom face passed through his shoulder and the lava field and came up again. When he rolled, I rolled with him, still attached to his back. Then he caught himself and, breathing hard, struggled up in mute dignity.

“
Oh, he’s dancing,” the man with the calm voice said.

The other man laughed. Their shadows lengthened as we went on. For a while one man carried the stick behind his head with his elbows up and his hands casually looped over it. Then he lowered the stick, pretended to strike the prisoner, and laughed again.

The sun had moved down the sky to our backs, so we had to be walking to the east. Which told me nothing, but I was determined to identify the place.

Hills covered with rainforest began to rise beside the lava field. A huge stone wall emerged from under the green tangle of trees to wind unsteadily into the horizon. The wall grew higher as we went on. Loud insects chirred in a lazy crescendo and vines with blood red flowers snaked up the trunks of the towering trees.

The shadows lengthened again. We were heading downhill now. The lava field opened up to reveal waves crashing over a rough shore. I expected to breathe in salty sea air, but couldn’t smell anything. Just as I had no sense of touch, I had no sense of smell, either.

Steam rose from the water, which meant the lava was still flowing. So we were on an active volcanic island. Where were islands like that? In Hawaii? Indonesia?

The lava field sloped downhill. A small crowd of people with brown legs and bare feet had gathered on the beach as if they were waiting for the prisoner to arrive. I strained to see their faces, but the prisoner’s head blocked my view.

The wall seemed impossibly high here. Finally we came to a recessed gate that someone unlocked and dragged open, revealing an overgrown trail that disappeared into green gloom. An unseen bird shrieked behind primordial ferns that overshadowed more blood red flowers.

“
One last time, who did you tell?” the calm tormentor asked.

The prisoner shook his head.

“
Not too smart.” The tormentor’s voice rose. “Give me the name.”

When the prisoner held his head high, the second tormentor squealed with laughter.

“
Go on, then, go in.” The first tormentor struck the prisoner on the shoulder with the stick again. I floated behind, helpless to intervene. They were forcing him through the gate with his hands tied and no food, no water, no weapons, nothing. He was going to some terrible fate, just as I’d dreaded.

Someone on the beach began to chatter in an excited voice. Thick fingers grabbed at the device on the prisoner’s back. More fingers shot in.

“
Don’t touch that,” the first tormentor said, and pressed a symbol.

He had six fingers.

* * *

I came to in the dark attic, gasping on the floor. Freezing air blew through the window I’d opened ages ago. My legs were so stiff from sitting that it hurt to stand. My body had remained in the same position the whole time while my consciousness had been elsewhere.

Another six-fingered man. His calm voice filled my mind like a dirty membrane.

Nausea hit me. Struggling to hold myself together, I pried the monstrous device off my wrist, slammed the window shut, and somehow made it downstairs. The house was as dark as the attic. When I crashed into a table and turned on the lamp, poor Nikki was standing there, wagging her tail with joy to see me. I buried my face in her fur. Normal. Back in a normal house with my normal dog. Luna snuffled against us, grinning.

Still nauseated, I examined my skin under the lamp. My right wrist had a thin red mark where the probe had wound around it.

The kitchen clock said seven hours had passed. The coffee was long cold. No messages on the house phone, but a string of texts from Mike and my sister and two voicemails showed on my cell.

“
It’s me.” Karin, my twin, also my roommate at my own house. Her light voice sounded so wholesome it seemed unreal. “Turn on your phone. The jeweler called. Mom’s watch is ready—my checking account’s really low right now, so is there any way you can pick it up and I’ll pay you back?” We were going in together on the watch for Christmas, and of course Karin had blown all her money again, but for the first time in my life I wasn’t ticked off at her.

Second message. Mike. “Hey, I haven’t heard from you all day. You okay out there in the sticks? Give me a call, okay?”

I texted them back. I couldn’t handle talking to them. Then I took the dogs outside and watched them run along the fence. The lights from Ski Liberty and the houses beyond its slopes shone in the darkness. Normal and safe. All my senses had returned. I breathed in the icy air and crunched up the gravel driveway all the way to the road to take in the night sky.

Ben was up there somewhere among the glittering constellations. I knew it. I picked out the brightest star over the woods.

“
That must be your star because it’s the best one,” I whispered. “I miss you, sweetheart.”

I could hardly stand to think about the prisoner and his fate. He’d witnessed something, but whatever it was, he’d chosen to go into that nightmare jungle rather than give up a name. I called the dogs while the uneasy questions kept coming.

The six-fingered man on the island had to be related to John Savenue. They had the same mutation in their hands and the same mockery in their voices. Maybe they were brothers in a cartel or an international crime family. Who the hell else would tie a guy up and throw him behind a wall?

The dogs emerged from the woods with gleaming eyes and followed me toward the house. Whatever the answers were, John Savenue had to know about the prisoner. The device between the man’s shoulder blades was identical to the one I held in my hand. I closed my fingers over the cool metal and felt certain about one thing. I wasn’t going to give it back.

Chapter 3

I hid the device in the shadows under the bed, then behind the mirror on my dresser, and then inside a coat of mine that I shoved in back of all the other coats in the downstairs closet. No place seemed secure enough, even though I argued with myself that John Savenue couldn’t possibly know I had it.

No word from Mike and Karin. They were probably asleep by now.

For the next hour, I sat cross-legged on the couch with my laptop and waded through exotic botanical photos. The blood-red flowers had almost looked like bougainvillea, only larger and heavier. Tropical, but where? If I could identify them, maybe I could pinpoint the island, or at least the region.

Nikki nuzzled my feet and lay down beside Luna.

I rubbed the red line on my wrist. My hand ached, one more thing to worry about. Maybe I’d banged it against something when I was stumbling around in the dark.

At one in the morning, I struck out with the flowers and turned my attention to the islands. I was right about Hawaii. Kilauea and other volcanoes in the Hawaiian chain had been erupting for decades. Some of the volcanoes were tourist attractions, but the place I’d seen was too remote to stay hidden near a popular location.

I skimmed dozens of websites about obscure islands with beautiful names. One website said the Pacific had 789 habitable islands out of 25,000. Indonesia included thousands of islands and dozens of active volcanoes along three tectonic plates.

The two men who’d forced the prisoner across the lava field had spoken English, but the crowd on the beach had chattered in an unrecognizable language. If I’d glimpsed a street sign or a hotel marquee, even a license plate, maybe I could get somewhere.

The wind rattled the tree branches against the house. Frustrated with everything, I turned off the laptop, pulled up an afghan, and said goodnight to Ben’s photo on the coffee table. When I finally fell asleep, though, I dreamed about the prisoner heading under those strange flowers.

In the morning everything looked different, safe and sound, but the memory of the sinister island still lingered. I took the dogs out for a walk in the woods and caught myself staring along Meade Road, half-expecting to see John Savenue striding over the hill toward the house. Heavy gray clouds hung over the empty road.

“
Come on, Nikki, let’s go home,” I told her.

Her face lit up. She jumped in the Jeep (blue, my favorite color) and settled her lean body on the back seat. As we pulled away, I reminded myself to pick up another pair of jeans and my good boots. We left the long driveway and began to pass miles of isolated countryside.

I turned my right hand on the steering wheel. The thin red mark on my wrist should have disappeared by now. In the daylight it almost looked like a rash.

A hawk sailed out of nowhere across the road in front of us. When the huge bird turned toward a line of juniper trees, I felt a sudden urge to turn around myself, just to make sure the device was still safe in the closet, but I shook off the impulse.

The technology was incredible, the ability to track somebody thousands of miles away without detection, but how could my mind travel to another location while my body stayed here? Had the experience even been real? Maybe it had been some gruesome form of entertainment. I shot that last thought down. The prisoner’s ordeal, the lava field, and the blood red flowers had been too vivid to be a simulation.

Nikki sat up to look out the window. Farms appeared, followed by Civil War tee-shirt and souvenir stores that had closed for the season. We drove into Gettysburg, passed the tree-lined historic part of town, and swung up our street. My roommates and I had been lucky to find our house, even though it looked like Dracula’s castle with a turret and overgrown yew bushes. We were a five minute walk to the college.

Karin’s Suzuki was gone, but Mike’s Toyota pickup sat by the curb with the seats jam-packed with canned food.

Mike Miller was into saving the world. The cans were a sign that he was collecting for something again. He volunteered for the soup kitchen, swung a hammer for Habitat for Humanity, and did countless other things he never talked about. He was the kind of guy you wanted to fall in love with… except he was just so damned
nice
.

I didn’t see anybody when I opened the front door, but Nikki sniffed at a jumble of shopping bags by the couch. Incredulous, I wondered if Karin had pleaded poverty about the watch because she’d blown all her money on clothes, but the bags turned out to be full of dog food. Her rescue group. So she was planning to foster another dog. I hoped Nikki would tolerate this one. She’d nipped the last dog in the face, but had loved the one before that.

Upstairs, my bedroom had a closed up feel after a week away. Everything looked the same, the white silk shirt I’d tossed on my bed, the pile of books on the floor. I had just started to throw socks and bras in a suitcase when somebody cleared his throat behind me. Heart pounding, I dropped everything and spun around.

Mike was smiling in the doorway.

“
Sneaky.” I punched him on the arm.

He ruffled Nikki’s fur, sat his wide receiver frame down in my chair, and crossed his legs. He was wearing the clothes he lived in: faded jeans and a navy blue Gettysburg College sweatshirt that barely fit his oversized neck. He’d buzzed his hair since the last time I saw him and looked like a cop.

“
You sure are jumpy,” he said. “Long time no see.”

“
You know you can come out anytime.”

“
I called you a couple of times yesterday.”

“
I’ve been leaving my phone off. I texted you last night.” I stuffed a black sweater in the suitcase and avoided his gaze. I wasn’t going to get him involved.