The Shadow Men (18 page)

“Those things from the bar,” she said. “The ones that killed O’Brien.”

“Wraiths,” Jim said.

“You’ve seen them before?” she asked, misunderstanding.

“No. I just … that’s how I thought of them. They were there and not there, all at the same time.” He didn’t see any of them now, but somehow that was no comfort. He feared they might be there, whether he could see them or not.

“During the quake … they were watching us,” Trix said, a brittle edge to her voice.

“I know,” Jim said as he led her into the alley. He glanced around again, but not for the wraiths this time. What he had to say was not something he wanted anyone to overhear.

“The two Bostons,” Trix said, searching his eyes for answers. “The two that splintered off … they, like,
crashed
back together.”

Yeah
, Jim thought.
That’s the word
.

From what Veronica had told them, he’d had the impression that when McGee caused the schism it had been seamless, unnoticed by the people who had been duplicated in the process. A parting of realities in an otherwise straight, orderly world, like a bubble of possibilities on a single two-dimensional string. But now that the parallel cities and their citizens had been duplicated, they couldn’t be erased. Forcing them back together had caused terrible destruction. Buildings that predated the schism—that still existed in both cities—had changed but somehow been merged. But where there were different structures in the two cities, like the cathedral and the tripod building—catastrophe. Metal merged with stone, glass with wood, in an explosive amalgamation.

“I’m afraid, Trix.”

Her eyes went wider. “No shit. What if it happens again? What if our Boston … Jesus, I can’t even think about it. How do we find Jenny and Holly now? How do we get out of here?”

She started back into the street, but he grabbed her and pulled her back. She spun around to stare at him, her face lit with anger.

“You don’t get it,” he said.

He reached into his back pocket and pulled out the sealed envelope that Veronica had given them to deliver to the Oracle of the Brahmin Boston. He held his breath a second, afraid to open it.

“Wait …,” she said.

Jim stared at her, ice clutching at his insides. “We crossed over. We went to the Oracle, and then those wraiths came for him.”

Her grief contorted her face, shattering her beauty. “You don’t think …? No.” She shook her head, then threw out a hand to indicate the devastated city. “You think we caused this?”

“Not us, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence. How can it be? It’s got to be related.”

They both stared at the envelope, the name and address of the Oracle of Brahmin Boston scrawled on the front. They had promised they would not open it. Veronica had warned them that disaster could result. But they had not opened the one addressed to Peter O’Brien, and disaster had come just the same.

“Veronica,” Trix whispered.

Jim tore it open, careful to preserve the address on the envelope. He pulled out the letter inside—a single sheet of paper—and quickly unfolded it. “Shit,” he whispered.

The page was blank apart from a single deep-black spot at its center.

“Oh, no,” Trix said, snatching it from him and staring at it. She looked up at him. “It’s nothing. No message. Jesus, the wraiths
were
the message. She must have had them following us … and we led them right to him.”

“But she
knew
his address!”

“Yeah, but …” Trix trailed off.

“A message,” Jim said. “A … something else. I don’t know. I think maybe he knew the moment he opened it.”

“She used us,” Trix said. “Somehow.”

“Yeah.” Jim looked around at the crying, bleeding, broken people and the ruin of two Bostons. If they were right, it meant that not only had Veronica betrayed and used them, not only had she arranged for the murder of Peter O’Brien—and the third Oracle as well, if they hadn’t figured it out—but it meant that the old bitch had wanted this to happen. She had
planned
for this destruction.

He folded the envelope and almost blank page and stuffed them into his pocket. Then he took Trix’s hand. “Come on.”

“Why? We’ve got nowhere to go.”

Coughing on the dust of ruined buildings and the smoke from a hundred fires, with cries and sirens still ringing out, he pulled her close. “Jenny and Holly are still out there somewhere.”

Trix bit her lip, nodded, and wiped tears from her eyes.

Whistles the Wind

A
S THEY
ran, what had happened impressed itself upon Trix with every step. The dislocation she felt should have been aggravated by the earthquake—an event beyond her experience, shoving her farther away from safety and the life she knew so well—but in fact the disaster seemed to have jarred her toward sense and understanding. Maybe it was the sight of her city in ruins, though it was not quite the city she knew. But more likely it was the excruciating sight of human suffering. These people, whichever version of Boston they might have come from, were just like her.

East Broadway was in ruins. The road had been flipped like a giant sheet, coming to rest with bulges and bumps that gaped open to the night sky. Street lamps leaned drunkenly over the undulating road or back against cracked and shattered buildings. The power was out, and the only light came from the half-moon peering between intermittent clouds, car headlamps, and the occasional fires that had sprung up in the ruins. To the north the sky glowed yellow, and Trix could hear the barely audible roar of a massive fire, perhaps as far away as the airport. Already, sparking embers were drifting up from the glow, like fireflies evading the cataclysm. A breeze whispered along the street, like the city gasping in pain.

“How many do you think are dead?” she asked Jim.

“Hundreds. Maybe thousands.”

“I wish we could stop and help—”

“We can’t,” he interrupted. “I’m sorry, Trix, but you know we can’t. The only thing keeping me from breaking down here is the thought of finding Holly and Jenny. We know what’s going on—about the different Bostons—but they don’t. Imagine how terrified they must be. Christ, Trix, I’ve got to find them. I’m going to lose my
mind
!”

“But which Bostons collided?” she asked, gazing around.

“My guess is the Irish and Brahmin. Veronica said those were the weaker, because they were splintered from the original.”

“And you believe her?”

Jim shrugged.

“Well, then,” Trix said. “If the Irish Boston and the Brahmin Boston just … merged, then there’s another Oracle in the city now.”

Jim whipped the envelope from his pocket. “Her address is on Harrison Avenue. Sally Bennet. Maybe she’ll know. Maybe
she’ll
be able to find them!”

Jim’s eyes were filled with the desperate knowledge that this was no longer only about them. And Trix understood how heavy that knowledge weighed on him, because she felt it, too. Jenny and Holly’s disappearance had led indirectly to this. And what about those things in the bar, those wraiths?
Those things followed us there
, she thought, shivering as she remembered the faceless things standing motionless as the earthquake struck. Watching.

In the distance came the grumbling, earthshaking impact of a building’s collapse, and Trix couldn’t help thinking,
I’m listening to people die
. She remembered watching the Twin Towers struck by hijacked aircraft, and each time the impact was shown on the news that day—again and again, the blossoming explosions as regular as the country’s panicked heartbeat—she’d thought,
I’m seeing hundreds of people die, in that single moment
. It had been unbearable, and hypnotic.

“Those things,” Jim said. He pushed her gently into a shop doorway, feet crunching over shattered glass. Mannequins wearing expensive clothing had toppled into the street, and behind them the ceiling had come down, broken water pipes spraying the shop’s interior. “They followed us to O’Brien, then killed him while we were asleep. They needed us to come through—it’s like they were waiting for us—and we both felt spooked on our way to O’Brien’s. It was them, watching.”

“Yeah.” Trix nodded.

“So, what if they follow us to Sally Bennet, too? If they kill her, maybe this will happen again.”

Trix closed her eyes. Frowned. Opened them again. “Jim, Veronica
gave
you their addresses. She knew where they lived.”

“But something in that envelope, or on that note … I heard O’Brien’s reaction when he opened it.” He took the folded sheet from his pocket.

“Just a black dot,” Trix said.

“Maybe not to an Oracle.”

“Something to let them attack him,” Trix said.

“Maybe,” Jim said. “She talked about McGee’s magicks. Maybe this is some of her own.”

“But all this destruction,” Trix said. “Could she possibly
want
this?”

Jim shivered. “I think we have to at least consider it.

The timing is too fucking convenient otherwise, don’t you think?”

He turned pale, and Trix held his arms and pulled him close. Over his shoulder she saw a family walking along the opposite sidewalk, mother and father on either side of a little girl. They all held hands, and were dressed in smart, dust-covered clothes. The only signs that they had acknowledged the earthquake were the father’s coughing and the little girl looking around with eyes wide open. Trix wondered what they’d been doing out so late, or whether they’d dressed and gone for a walk after the quake had struck.

“We have to warn the Oracle,” he said. He stepped out into the street and looked around for more of the wraiths, scanning street level, then up at the broken windows and the buildings that should not be there. “I can’t see them!” he said to Trix. “Maybe they’ve gone already.”

Trix looked for herself. There was no sign of the wraith-things, but the air was filled with smoke and dust, making a blur of anything more than a hundred steps away.

“Come on,” she said. “We might not have much time.” So they ran. With a destination in mind, and an aim, she tried in vain to distract herself from some of the sights surrounding them. Because the terrible was merged with the impossible, and that did nothing to detract from the awful reality.

Some of the buildings’ façades had tipped outward into the road, exposing the floors and rooms within. Many had collapsed altogether, and the broken roofs of three-story buildings now sat a story above the roadway. Most windows were shattered, and the street was carpeted with glinting glass, smashed tiles, dust, and other debris such as drifting papers, broken bricks, and personal possessions that looked so out of place.
I shouldn’t be seeing shoes
, Trix thought.
I shouldn’t be seeing someone’s bloody nightgown, or a kid’s toy gun, or a music system’s speaker
.

Beyond the earthquake destruction was the more unlikely damage. Trix could see the difference between the two, and she was sure that Jim did as well, but to other people on the street it must present a bewildering mystery among the chaos. A car showroom had seemingly appeared, straddling one corner of an old market hall and the narrow parking lot beside it, its walls buckled, forecourt cracked, as if dropped from a height. The cars were familiar models, all of them thrown around as though stirred by some angry god. Inside the showroom, where the finest models were kept, two cars were ablaze. The flames spewed across the ceiling and fingered their way up the showroom’s front façade, plastic sign bubbling. The only words still visible on the sign were
BOSTON’S BEST
. Around one edge of the incongruous showroom the older, more attractive market had collapsed, and an avalanche of goods was slewed across the street.

Elsewhere on the street, other buildings had collided in the impact of two worlds coming together. A couple were aflame, some had collapsed, but here and there were structures that remained surprisingly undamaged.

To the south, beyond the ragged outline of collapsed rooftops, Trix could make out the ghostly presence of taller buildings that had not been there before. There was the tripod-like building that had burst from the giant cathedral, but closer to them were other structures. She had the sense that these, too, were new, and that before the cataclysm she would have been able to see open sky where they now stood, and that the buildings’ presence here was as invasive as her own. They shimmered through the smoke and reflected firelight from their broken glass and steel façades, giving them the impression of having their own apocalyptic glow.
Like giant faces
, she thought, and the image sent a cold chill through her.

She’d once spent days walking a certain street in Boston and feeling disconcerted for no reason that she could identify. She’d been convinced that something had changed, but the more she walked that street, the more certain she’d become that something within her had altered, not something without. When she’d finally searched the Internet for images and found photos of the same view, she’d realized that an old clock tower in the distance had been taken down. It was the fresh spread of sky that had disturbed her, a space where there should have been no space, and realization had banished the feeling immediately.

Now it was not something missing that made her so unsettled, but something added. They walked through blocks of houses and residential buildings, many of which had been ruined by the clash between the upscale neighborhood of Irish Boston and the forgotten Southie of Brahmin Boston. Others in the street stared in horror and awe at these invading structures. The sense of panic was palpable, its incidental music the screams and cries of those injured or bereaved.

For long blocks they walked, attempting to reach Harrison Avenue, with no chance of any taxi picking them up now. When they reached the intersection at West Fourth Street and Dorchester Avenue, they saw the aftermath of a horrible accident. At least seven cars were involved, and people swarmed over the carnage pulling survivors from the wrecks. Several people sat along the curbside nursing injuries, and in the distance sirens screamed.

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” Jim said, and for a moment Trix panicked.
He saw Jenny in one of the cars, she’s one of those bodies hanging from that station wagon’s windows, and if she’s there, then where is Holly?

But he had not seen his dead wife. When he grabbed her hand and nodded across the road, what they witnessed was altogether more surreal.

Two women stood staring at each other. One must have just emerged from one of the less damaged cars, her right foot still in the footwell, right hand curled around the door frame. She had long blond hair tied in a ponytail and wore a tight-fitting dress and knee-length boots. The other woman stood a dozen paces away, close to the overturned truck that the first woman had crumped into. She, too, had long blond hair, though she wore jeans and a light jacket. Her boots were of slightly darker leather. Her hair was slightly longer.

The women must have been identical twins. Looking from one to the other caused a strange tingling sensation at the nape of Trix’s neck. They were equally attractive, but something seemed to draw the beauty from their faces. Something like terror. “They don’t know each other,” Trix whispered, and Jim’s hold on her arm strengthened.

The women stared, utterly motionless while the rescue went on around them. No one else seemed to have noticed this frozen tableau. The woman by the car went to speak; the other woman lifted her arm to point.

“Come on,” Jim said.

“Wait, we need to see—”

“Come on.” And his voice was so heavy that she could not help but look at him. His eyes were haunted, and she suddenly knew how, and why. Somewhere in the ruins of this city were his wife and child. And somewhere else … Jenny’s other, her echo, her alter ego.

They moved off, bypassing the accident and the injured people, and Trix kept glancing back at the blond women. Before a drift of smoke hazed them from view, she saw that still neither of them moved. They simply stared.

There were three bodies laid on the pavement outside a collapsed seafood restaurant on Dorchester Avenue. They were lined up as if sleeping side by side, but as they closed on the corpses, Jim saw blood. Before today the only dead body he had ever seen was his mother in the funeral home.

As he approached the bodies, Trix grabbed his shoulder. “Jim?”

“There’s something about …,” he started, trailing off as they drew closer. One body was covered in a thin net curtain, blurring its features and molding to its skin with blood. For a moment he’d feared it was one of
them
. “Maybe the ghost guys are already ahead of us,” he said.

“There’s nothing we can do about that,” Trix said. “Here.” She moved past the bodies and through the restaurant’s collapsed façade. Rooting around in the rubble, she pulled out two bottles of water and handed one to Jim.

“That’s looting,” he said.

“Yeah.” She blinked at him a couple of times, then pulled a five-dollar note from her back pocket. She used a small chunk of broken brick to weight it down on the sidewalk before the slumped restaurant. For some reason, that brought tears to Jim’s eyes.

“We’ve got to run,” he said. “We can’t let anything distract us. Anything like that.” He gestured over his shoulder back the way they’d come.
Those women are
the same person
, he thought, and he could only think of what would become of Jenny if she met herself. The results could be devastating. What would that do to a person?

Tonight in this city, it must be happening all over.