The Shadow Men (22 page)

Jim nodded slowly, glancing away for a second and then back. “My wife, Jenny Banks.” He smiled weakly. “Jennifer Anne Garland Banks.”

Jennifer stared at him for a second, then looked around the room as though searching for something, as though she could see a million possibilities flitting in the air around her head. She strode over to the bar, picked up one of the glasses, and knocked back two fingers of whiskey before staring at him again. She wiped her lips with the back of her hand. “We have a daughter?”

Jim shook his head. “No. Not ‘we.’ ”

Wonder and curiosity and even a glint of happiness had appeared in her eyes as she’d spoken those words, as she entertained the notion of this other version of her life, but his words snuffed out that spark. He regretted them instantly, hating to see the pain of reality settling back into her expression. How could he explain to her that he didn’t exist in the Boston she knew, that they couldn’t have met? What other questions would that lead to?

“Look, I’m here because I thought Jenny and Holly—my daughter—might have come here, just to be somewhere familiar. Obviously they haven’t, or at least they didn’t let you see them if they did. I need to get out there and keep looking, so—”

Tad pointed at him but turned to the other Tad. “So this guy is married to
your
Jennifer?”

“No,” the other Tad said. “I’ve never seen him before.”

Rose gestured toward him with the Jack Daniel’s bottle. “Which means either you’re lying, Jim Banks, or you’re from the other Boston. The third one.”

“Yeah,” Jim agreed. “That’s right.”

“Well, if all this magic stuff is true—” the other Tad started.

“Gotta be,” Tad said. “How else do you explain all this shit?”

“Then we get how it is
I’m
here,” the other Tad continued. “Our two Bostons crashed, right? But if you’re from the third one, the one that’s still out there like the iceberg that hit the goddamn
Titanic
, then how did
you
get here? How did your family get here?”

Jim felt like shouting. He fidgeted, looked at Jennifer as if she might rescue him, and then remembered she didn’t know him. He couldn’t take responsibility for these people. Back in his own life, his own reality, they were his in-laws … and Jennifer was his wife. But this wasn’t his world, and he needed to find his real family. “Look, I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve got to find my wife and daughter.”

“Jim,” Jennifer said. Her tone was soft and kind, and banished any tension from the room. “You were right. If it was me … if I was the one lost … this is where I would come.”

Jim glanced at the door, wanting to run but also knowing she might be right. Jenny and Holly had been here for half a day, at least. They would have had time to come by the Junction already, and maybe they had but had been too weirded out by everything to go inside. Or maybe they’d gotten a glimpse of Jennifer and that had freaked them out even more. But now, in the aftermath of the quake, if she and Holly were still alive—and they had to be—there was a strong possibility they would come here. On the other hand, if he stayed and waited, and they didn’t come here, he might never find them.

Had coming here first been a mistake? Being so close to the restaurant, he had been unable to resist the urge to see if Jenny and Holly were there. But he had let Trix go on ahead to the Oracle’s address. He had tried to lead the wraiths away, and some of them had followed him, but they had quickly vanished, leaving him alone.

Shit
, he thought.
Trix
. He had been so caught up in the shock of seeing Jennifer and her parents, and the presence of the other Tad, that he hadn’t been thinking enough about Trix, and the Oracle, and the wraiths.

“Maybe you’re right,” he said. “I hate the idea of me leaving, only to have them show up here. But I’ve got a friend with me, helping me search. She’s gone to ask for help from someone not far from here, someone else who knows some of this magical crap. I’ve got to go and get her, and then I’ll figure out what happens next. But if Jenny and Holly do come here, and I’m not here—”

“We’ll look out for them,” Rose said. “I’ll make sure they wait.” She pushed the whiskey bottle away. Now that she had a purpose, she wasn’t interested in drinking herself into oblivion.

Jim looked at her. “Thank you.” He looked at the two Tads, and then at Jennifer. “I’ll be back.”

“Wait,” Jennifer called as he started for the door.

Jim prepared himself to argue, focused now on catching up with Trix, making sure she was all right. But Jennifer walked over and kissed her father’s cheek, took the whiskey glass he had been sipping at, and drank down the rest.

Then she looked at Jim, eyes gleaming with determination that was so very Jenny. “I’m coming with you,” she said.

And as with his Jenny, there was no arguing with her.

Float

B
ACK AT
your house, you knew my name,” Trix said, catching up. “How?”

Sally didn’t slow down or even look at her. “I’m the Oracle of Boston, honey. I’m the soul of the city. I feel every brick and beam. Every birth and death.”

Trix thought about that, about what it must have felt like for Sally when the two cities collided, people dying and buildings crumbling, other people and buildings appearing. “It must be agony,” she said.

Sally paused and caught her breath, and for a second Trix saw the pain she had been hiding all along. The girl looked at her without replying, but her eyes were troubled.

“But what about the Irish Boston?” Trix went on. “Parts of this”—she gestured around them as she ran—“it’s not your city.”

“It is now,” Sally said. “It’s like waking up with limbs I didn’t have before. But I’ll learn to use them quick enough.” She started running again, darting across an intersection and barely pausing before a tumbled façade. Three stories of the damaged building were revealed, its insides were open to view, and Trix suspected the whole city felt so exposed. She paused to look, but Sally called back over her shoulder, “There’s no one left inside.”

“Right,” Trix muttered as she followed the girl again. “You’re the Oracle.”

They ran through the shaken city. Trix half expected Sally to be stopped by every wandering, terrified person they saw, but no one seemed to recognize her. But if
everyone
knew the Oracle, the girl would never have time to sleep.

“You had so many people seeing you, so quickly after the quake,” Trix said. “With Veronica, there’s ritual, and time.”

“I don’t go with those old-style customs,” Sally replied. “If someone knows about me, why make it hard if they need my help?”

“Yeah,” Trix said, and they ran on.

A few minutes later, running past a small park where the ghostly lights of mobile phones lit disembodied faces in the darkness, Trix asked, “Have you found them yet?”

“No,” Sally said. “But I haven’t started looking.”

“What? I thought—”

“You need to trust me,” Sally said, panting. “Told you, gotta get her mark off you. Her Shadow Men will come after us, following the mark, and when they find us again they’ll be expecting more than humans.”

“But your No-Face Men, they fought them off, killed them.”

Sally chuckled—a terrible knowing laugh. “Element of surprise,” she said. “And you can’t kill what isn’t alive.”

“Ghosts?”

“I didn’t say that. Now, come on. The less we talk, the quicker we get there.”

“Where?”

“You’ll see,” the girl said.

So Trix ran on in silence, trying to imagine what mark Veronica might have put on her, and how, and when. And it took only moments for her to realize what this meant. If Sally cleaned her of the mark, there was one other person still lit up like a Christmas tree for the Shadow Men to track.

But for now, Jim was on his own.

The exercise went some way to tempering her shock at what was happening, and her fear of what was to come. She’d had terrible destruction wrought upon the city she so loved, and now the heartache that had brought. But she had also seen people killed by something other than the earthquake. She wasn’t sure she would ever forget the image of those bodies, bloodied and deformed by the forces that had destroyed them, strewn around Sally’s building and street where they had come in their desperate search for loved ones. She wondered how many of those loved ones were still alive, and what they would think when they saw the manner of their friends’ and relatives’ deaths.

Muscles burning, chest heaving, she concentrated on matching Sally’s surprising pace.
Worse to come
, she thought, and though she had no idea where that had risen from, she couldn’t shake it.

Another ten minutes of running, and at last Trix recognized their destination. She’d been to the old Granary Burying Ground once before, walking around on her own, reading the grave inscriptions and admiring the unusual tombs. Leaving the cemetery, she had felt displaced, as if she had just arrived in this city after a very long time away. What she’d thought had been half an hour had really been three, and she’d found a Dunkin’ Donuts and sat there for some time, musing over the walk and trying to pin down just why it had felt so weird. She’d lost the memory quickly as life intruded again, and the next day she had barely remembered any of her visit to that place. But it all came flooding back now.

“There’s something …,” she said, standing at the cemetery gates.

“Come on,” Sally said, and grabbed her hand. It elicited a gasp of surprise from Trix, and Sally grinned as she walked them both through the gate.

“I’ve been here before,” Trix said, aware as she spoke that this might not be the
exact
cemetery she had walked around that day several years before.

“Safe,” Sally whispered, and she let go of Trix’s hand, sank slowly to her knees, and leaned forward until her forehead rested against the ground.

“Sally?” Trix said, and for the first time she was worried for the Oracle. The girl seemed smaller than she had before, and the cemetery seemed to hold its breath at their predicament. From all around came the sounds of chaos—sirens, shouting, and the musical tinkle of falling glass—but the cemetery was quiet, and timeless.

Trix knelt by her side but did not quite touch her. The girl took deep breaths. Trix felt as if they were being watched. Hulking shadows shifted slightly as lights moved out on the road, shivering as if unsure of themselves. “I’ve been here before,” Trix said again, and then she saw movement from the corner of her eye.

“Don’t be afraid,” Sally said, a curious statement from a girl hugging herself into a ball. But as Trix stood and spun left and right—following shadows that always seemed
just
behind her,
just
out of sight—the girl’s words settled and gave her peace.

“The air is thin here,” she said. Though Veronica had lied and deceived them, Trix understood the truth of what she’d told her and Jim about thin places, and their ability to perceive them. This was one such place. At first glance she could see no earthquake damage, and she thought she knew why—this cemetery existed in all three Bostons and was the same in each reality. But then along the path from where they’d entered, below the weak glow of a lamp, she saw a bench that had been upended, and below it, an old grave. If she’d seen it any other time, she’d have suspected vandals of uprooting the bench from elsewhere and propping it against the gravestone, some pointless amusement that they would have forgotten by the end of the night. But not here, and not today. This was something more.

“Thin enough to see through,” Sally said. She was standing slowly now, and she seemed calmer than she had since Trix had first laid eyes on her. A tension had gone from her face, and her pose seemed more relaxed. “So she told you about the crossing points?”

“Veronica? Yeah. She said there were places where Uniques could cross between Bostons. The thin places worried her. Thought they meant the Bostons were reintegrating.”

“Just what she wants,” Sally said.

“She said it was easy for us to see, and she told us how.” Trix looked from the corner of her eye, turning in a slow circle, but then shook her head in confusion.

“You won’t see the three Bostons here,” Sally said. “Well, mostly not. Walk with me, and I’ll tell you where we are.”

“You said we’re safe here?” Trix asked.

Sally smiled, with little humor. “Walk with me.”

They moved through the cemetery, away from the entrance gate and the fence lining the boundary wall. It grew darker as they walked, but never so dark that Trix couldn’t see their surroundings. She looked left and right, still trying to catch those shadows that seemed to dance in her peripheral vision. She remembered entering this Boston through Thomas McGee’s ruined room, and how she and Jim had seen the three versions of Boston co-existing, once Veronica had told them how.

But this was something different.

“Special place,” Sally said, waving her hand to indicate the whole cemetery. “You’ll find this cemetery in each Boston, looking the same, with the same people buried here. It’s one of the oldest untouched places in all three Bostons—well, in two now. The Shadow Men from your Boston won’t be able to track you here. Whatever mark Veronica put on you—and I’ll work out exactly what that was soon enough—will be confused. There’s static between worlds, and it bleeds through here. It’ll confuse them.”

“They didn’t seem easily confused,” Trix said.

“In this form they’re drones, that’s all, dancing to Veronica’s song, but here they won’t hear it. I doubt they’ll wander within half a mile of here. The cemetery is unique.”

“Like me?” Trix asked.

“Not quite,” Sally said after a slight pause.

“What do you mean, ‘in this form’?”

“Let’s save the Q & A until we get you clear of her influence,” Sally said, and Trix didn’t argue. There was nothing she wanted more.

They passed rows of graves and tombs that cast uncertain shadows. The city was more alive than ever around them as rescue and recovery operations got under way, and that made the silence in the cemetery even more haunting. And when they approached a grave in the center of a path—the tombstone sprouting somewhere it should not have been—Trix felt a chill pass through her, and she asked, “What have you brought me here to see?”

But Sally did not answer that, and as they drew close enough to read the name on the stone, Trix found she could no longer swallow.

“Not you,” Sally said quietly. “This place is much older than that.” She stopped, hesitated, and then turned to Trix and grasped her hands. “This is the grave of a dead Oracle,” Sally said. “A Unique, of course, because we have to be. And it’s the only grave in the cemetery that doesn’t exist in each Boston.” She waved a hand at the bench, then walked past, dismissing the scene.

“So if Oracles can die, why haven’t the Bostons collided before today? You haven’t been Oracle for long, and there must be more who’ve died, in this Boston and the others.”

“An Oracle always knows when his or her time is coming, and so does the city. They both have time to prepare, look for a replacement.”

“But Peter O’Brien was murdered,” Trix said, understanding perhaps a little.

“Not only that. Those things Veronica sent …” Sally actually shivered, and Trix saw it in the darkness. She remembered the girl summoning her No-Face Men from the basement floor of her home, and her triumphant cry, and she wondered how much that had cost her. “They ripped out his soul and dragged it into the In-Between. Tore out the heart of the city. That was enough.”

They hurried on, and Trix wished there was some way she could reach Jim. She needed to talk to him, hear his voice, and tell him what was happening. Her cell phone had been smashed in the quake, and if they hadn’t had the sense knocked out of them by events, they would have bought new phones. But shopping had been the last thing on their minds. Besides, she suspected that tonight of all nights, the networks would be jammed. She hoped that he’d found Jenny and Holly by now. Hoped that they were safe, and uninjured by the cataclysm, and untouched by Veronica’s wraiths.

“We’re here,” the little girl said.

“Where?” Trix glanced around. They were at a corner of the cemetery, bounded by two tall buildings. There was a square paved area with several benches spaced around the edges and a small water fountain at the center. The fountain was not working. Small trees grew here, their shadows cast across the paving stones from weak floodlights fixed to the walls of one of the buildings.

“A focus point,” Sally said. “A place where the city’s power is at its greatest. It’ll help me do what I need to do to you.”

“Veronica’s mark.” Sally nodded. “Will it hurt?”

“I hope not,” the girl said, and Trix thought,
You and me both
.

She didn’t understand any of this. She’d been made aware of her Boston’s Oracle by her grandmother, but that didn’t mean that she’d even come close to understanding anything about her. Perhaps understanding would come later.

“So what happens?” she asked.

Sally walked to the center of the small paved square and pointed at her feet. “First, you come and sit here.”

It did not hurt.

Trix tried talking to Sally to begin with, asking her about the cemetery and the locus of power, and how it couldn’t have been a coincidence that they were in the same place, but the girl seemed unwilling to comment and most of the time did not even appear to listen. So then Trix started thinking about Jim, and Jenny, and Holly, and how likely it was that all of them would make it back to their Boston alive. The reality of what they were going through fucked with her senses, and a voice kept whispering,
Unique, Unique
. She could not decide whether her situation made her someone special, or a freak of nature that allowed what was happening.

Because nature
had
to allow it. Trix was no believer in God, and had always found the whole idea of a supreme being, sin, guilt, and worship troubling.
If He’s there, He should let me know
had always been her answer to devout friends. But at the same time, she had always acknowledged the wondrousness of nature, the incredible things that the universe contained and did, and the many facts that humanity, in its arrogance, still did not know. She was a follower of popular science, and well aware that the existence of the multiverse was now considered a valid theory rather than being confined to the realms of science fiction. What was happening here was something familiar to the universe. She and Jim had simply stumbled upon it.