The Shadow Men

From the Back of a Broken Dream

Even if they’d had a car or managed to flag down one of the few taxis they saw passing by, they wouldn’t have gotten very far in a vehicle. The streets that weren’t blocked by rubble or police barricades were jammed with cars driven by people trying to reach loved ones or just get the hell out of Boston. They finally settled on St. James Avenue. Though there were buildings that had merged when the cities collided, spilling debris into the street, the road was passable.

Jim strode with purpose, wanting to break into a run but knowing that the five of them-this impossible gathering of women and him-had to stay together. Sally led the way, and they all seemed to take for granted that she would, despite the fact that she was a child. As the Oracle of Boston, she was both their best guide and their best protection. Jim followed close behind, with Jennifer a few feet to his right. They glanced at each other from time to time, the immediate intimacy they had felt before awkward for both of them. Trix and Anne-that other Jenny-hung back, and Jim felt sure it was partly because Anne and Jennifer did not know how to communicate with each other.

Again and again, they saw examples of this phenomenon as they traveled across the city. Rarely were the twins from parallel Bostons exact copies. They differed in weight and style and clothing. But given what had happened and what was transpiring all over the city, they were impossible to miss. Two old men sat on a stoop, both in gray cardigan sweaters, though one wore a distinguished gray beard and the other looked sickly and had gone nearly bald. They took turns patting the same dog, which perhaps they both now owned. A pair of olive-skinned women shouted at each other in Spanish, both in tears, on the sidewalk in front of a dress shop. One of them held a boy of about eight in front of her, arms wrapped protectively around him, and the boy looked frightened and confused as he listened to the two women-one his mother and one who, in another world, might have been-panic.

Anne reached out to hold Trix’s hand. Trix seemed hesitant for a second, then twined her fingers in Anne’s. Jim saw the shy way that Anne looked at her-the hopeful gaze in her eyes-and found himself wishing that they had both lived in a world where they could have had their heart’s desire. It felt strange but right, and he decided that in a city where reality existed in different facets, everything should be possible.

“It must be so weird for you,” Jennifer said, walking along beside him. She had seen the dynamic developing between Trix and Anne as well.

“Weird for all of us,” he said.

Jennifer smiled, but her eyes were sad, as if they held a painful secret. “That’s for sure.”

They had come to the intersection of Berkeley and St. James, where the building on the southeast corner-he thought there’d been a big insurance company headquarters there in his own Boston-had been merged with a tall, gleaming art deco hotel that had to have come from Anne’s Brahmin-influenced Boston. What had been there in Jennifer’s Boston, with its Irish roots, had been a massive retail space with a Waterford crystal store on the corner. Now broken glass and debris had spilled into the street, and they had to move carefully around it. Sally stumbled a bit, and Jim caught up to her, reaching out, but she recovered without his help.

“I want to thank you,” he said.

“For what? I haven’t gotten you back to them yet.”

“For trying. For removing Veronica’s mark from me and Trix. For coming with us now.”

The little girl glanced at him, but there were storm clouds in her eyes and her lips pulled up into a grim expression that could not have been called a smile. In that moment, she looked far older than her years-ancient. Whatever part of her was the soul of the city of Boston, that was what looked back at him. “I’m not doing it for you,” Sally said. “There are two cities full of frightened people finding their lives crashed together, and now I have a responsibility to all of them. I’m not ignoring them just to help you find your family. I’m doing it because of what will happen if your Oracle gets her way. The death we’ve already seen today will just be the start.”

Jim glanced away, embarrassed without really knowing why. “I get that,” he said. “I know that, of course. But thank you anyway for helping. Not just me… all of us.”

Now it was Sally’s turn to look embarrassed, as if she was ashamed of having snapped at him. “I’m the Oracle,” she replied. “It’s what I’m for.”

Jim glanced back to make sure they were all still together. Trix and Anne, hands held tightly, helped each other over the debris. Trix’s pink hair gleamed in the city light. Jennifer gazed around at the terrified people they passed, obviously wanting to stop and help but sticking with them-with him-for the sake of yet another of her otherworldly twins, a woman who was her, though they had never met, and a daughter she had never had.

“Tell me about these Shadow Men,” Jim said. “How do we fight them?”

“They aren’t people… not anymore. I mean, they’re not solid, right? But they’re not really ghosts, either. If they’re solid enough to attack you or grab you, then you can grab them back. It’s tricky. They kind of fade in and out. It won’t help you beat them, but maybe it’ll help you get away from them if they try to take you through.”

“Through where?” Jim asked.

Sally glanced at him, a bit surprised and disturbed at the same time. “Into the In-Between, of course.”

Jim shuddered, mostly because of her tone but also because of the haunted look in her eyes. “What happens if they do?”

Sally glanced back at Trix and the Jennys, then at Jim again. They were making their way around an abandoned Volvo station wagon that had bumped up onto the curb and run over a couple of parking meters. “I know Veronica can’t have told you much, but didn’t the Irish Oracle-”

“O’Brien.”

“Didn’t O’Brien explain what she’d done to you, sending you here?”

Jim shook his head. “We weren’t there long before the faceless guys… the Shadow Men… came and killed him.”

Sally sighed. “Right. Of course.” She gave a small shrug. “Y’know how I just said they’re not people anymore? Well, they were. The In-Between-the shadow stuff that separates three Bostons, or I guess the two Bostons now-it has tides.”

“An ebb and flow,” Jim said, nodding. “Veronica said something like that. But she was saying that sometimes the three cities overlapped.”

“Yeah, but she didn’t tell you about the In-Between. That’s what’s really flowing. And sometimes it washes into one of the real worlds, and when the wave goes back, it brings people with it. If they’re in a place where the cities overlap normally, where the Bostons are the same, then they can slip from one to the other. But if not, and they’re dragged out of their world… they end up in the In-Between.”

Jim felt a little nauseous. “You’re saying they get turned into those shadow things?”

“Not right away,” Sally said. “It takes time. I’ve seen them when they’re not fully changed, part flesh and blood and part shadow stuff.”

“Jesus,” Jim muttered.

“Veronica showed you and Trix how to get through at the crossings, the places where the cities overlap, and as long as you’re quick and careful, you can do that, because you’re Uniques. Holly, too. But Jenny…”

Jim stopped, not liking the girl’s tone. “Jenny what?”

Sally scuffed her feet on the sidewalk, so much like a little girl. “There are only a couple of places where you can get Jenny through. If you tried anywhere else, she’d get lost in the In-Between.”

Jim couldn’t help but laugh. “That unbelievable bitch. That was her plan all along, for us to come over here, lead her killer shadows to you and O’Brien, and then lose Jenny on the way back anyway.”

“I don’t think so,” Sally said. “I’d bet that was just her Plan B. Plan A was for all of us to die.”

Jim gaped in horror and disbelief, a cold edge forming inside him. He had been terrified for Jenny and Holly, determined, but now he was furious. Veronica was going to pay for what she’d already accomplished, and for what she had tried to do. But first he had to get his family back. “So your No-Face Men are…?”

Sally looked up at him, and her smile was almost smug. “My own little victory,” she said. “The souls of those yet to be. That’s why they have those faces-flitting with potential. And those long limbs, where they stretch for life. And they’re eager to serve.”

Jim nodded and fell back, suddenly more afraid of this little girl than he thought possible.

Behind him, Trix and Anne spoke in soft voices. He glanced back at them and saw the way Anne looked at Trix when she talked-amazement that Trix was alive, sorrow that this was not the Trix that she knew; yearning for a love she’d lost, and hope that it might be born again. He wasn’t watching where he was going, and he caught his foot on a bit of cracked sidewalk and fell to his knees. He skinned his hands trying to catch himself and swore softly, feeling like an idiot.

“Hey,” Jennifer said, helping him up. “Are you all right?”

She turned his palms up to examine the scrapes, the contact making him catch his breath. Sensing his sudden tension, Jennifer glanced up at him with inquisitive eyes. They stood like that for several seconds, and Jim understood exactly how Anne must feel when she looked at Trix. But his wife… his Jenny… wasn’t dead. She wasn’t. “I will be,” Jim said. “Thanks.”

He withdrew his hands from her grasp, and the two of them caught up to Sally. It seemed to Jim that he and Jennifer were both keenly aware of each other’s presence, that there was a magnetism that drew them toward each other even as it pushed them away.

She’s not Jenny, he told himself again. But Jennifer looked so much like her that it hurt.

Trix had never been big into drugs, but she had experimented here and there, licking microdots off paper like children’s candy at the age of fourteen, smoking pot through high school, and taking a turn at cocaine and Ecstasy in college before deciding that both scared the shit out of her. It had been six or seven years since she’d had anything stronger than a shot of tequila.

But damn if she didn’t feel high right now.

Wandering through a devastated city where people faced doppelgangers with whom they would now have to share their worlds and their lives, anyone would have felt lost in the surreal. But it wasn’t any of those things that made Trix feel as though she had fallen down the rabbit hole. It was Anne.

Her skin prickled with excitement, and she felt almost giddy. The feelings confused and frightened her, but she could not ignore them. All the daydreams she’d had about Jenny, from musings and sighs to masturbatory fantasies couched in guilt and reservations, had been real in this world, for some other Trix. Anne was not her Jenny. She was not Anne’s Trix. And yet…

And yet.

Trix knew it couldn’t be. Not really. But Anne kept taking her hand, and the way the woman looked at her with those gentle eyes made her want to laugh. It wasn’t a time for laughter. Jenny and Holly were still missing, and she loved her Jenny and needed to have her back in her life, safe and sound. But maybe there had been three Bostons for a reason. Maybe the whole point of an alternate world was for there to be a place where other fates could unfold, and where broken hearts could find happier endings.

“Hey,” Anne said, nudging her. “Are you okay?”

Trix looked at her, tried not to laugh at the absurdity of the question, and then couldn’t stop herself. She snickered, attempted to cover up, and failed. Anne blinked, stung for a moment, but then she grinned. “Stupid question, huh?” Anne asked.

“Not at all,” Trix said, clutching Anne’s hand and swinging her arm like they were lovers on a leisurely stroll. “It’s the perfect weather for a walk through Copley Square.”

They laughed quietly, and Trix glanced ahead to see Jim looking back at her. She knew that she should cool it with Anne, stop holding her hand, stop whispering with her. She knew for sure that she and this woman shouldn’t be laughing together in the middle of chaos, not when Jenny and Holly were presumably in the hands of someone-or something-that meant them harm. As weird as it was for her, she thought, it must be so much worse for Jim. Trix feared for Jenny and Holly. They meant the world to her. But being with Anne made it all feel incredibly dreamlike, and if she didn’t laugh a little, she might scream.

Trix would die for Jenny or Holly. But please let me live, she thought, looking at Anne. Let us all live.

What would happen afterward, when it was time for Trix and the Banks family to go home, she did not know. But for now, she relished the feel of Anne’s hand in hers and the knowledge that in this world-in this Boston-they had once been happily in love. “Come on,” she said, tugging Anne’s hand. “We should catch up.”

The two women hurried after Sally, Jim, and Jennifer, making their way past Trinity Church and starting across Copley Square. The park in front of the church had been partly converted into a staging area for rescue efforts at a building on Boylston Street that Trix thought had once been the Globe Bar. City workers and civilians alike were pulling apart the rubble of the collapsed building, looking for survivors. From the looks of it, the bar had been destroyed not by being merged with another structure from its parallel Boston but by the quaking of the city during the collision.

“I wish we had time to help them,” Jennifer said.

“So do I,” Sally said. “There are three people still alive in there, and one of them not for much longer.”

“How do you-” Anne began.

“Are you serious?” Jennifer said. “You know that? You can, whatever… sense it? We’ve got to go and tell them.”

Jim looked at her, eyes narrowed in pain. “You can go if you want to, but it won’t help them dig any faster. I’ve got to keep going. My daughter needs me. And my wife, my Jenny. My you. She needs me, too.”

Jennifer flinched. Trix saw the recognition in her eyes, and wondered if her desire to help everyone else sprang solely from her empathy or if it also came from her fear of what they would find ahead. This Jennifer had never married, never had a daughter. Trix couldn’t imagine how the woman felt.

Jennifer held out a hand to Jim. “Let’s go. We can always come back and help. After.”

They cut across the park, headed for the Boston Public Library, its imposingly beautiful facade with its row of arched windows looking out over Copley Square. The McKim Building, the library’s main structure, appeared untouched by the disaster that had shaken the city. Its red tile roof, crested with green copper, had not been disturbed, which mean that the building existed in all three Bostons.

Trix had known that, of course. Sally had told them. The Boston Public Library had been preserved by the people of three cities-with one difference. The Abbey Room, among the best known of the library’s features, boasted richly textured mural paintings by Edwin Austin Abbey, including a series entitled The Quest of the Holy Grail. In the Boston from which Trix and Jim hailed, the room was sixty or seventy feet in length, but in the Irish Boston, the city’s one and only terrorist attack had destroyed half of the room. Instead of restoring it, the architects had decided to separate the unaffected portion of the room with a wall and a door, on the other side of which they designed a new room, filled with paintings by Irish masters. It was meant to be a place of reflection, to honor the seven people who had died that day.

In the heart of the library, the Reflection Room was an island of stability, a place where the parallel cities did not overlap.

That was where the Shadow Men were holding Holly.

Trix took a deep breath, held Anne’s hand more tightly, and followed Jim, Sally, and Jennifer up the library’s front steps, passing between the statues that represented Art and Science. The middle of the three arched doors stood propped open, inviting them in. Holly awaited within.

As for Jenny…

Trix let go of Anne’s hand, giving her a soft smile to let her know that she hadn’t done anything wrong. But as they passed through the doors, she found clarity returning. Anne was a beautiful fantasy, but Trix could not succumb to that dream. Not yet. Not when the Jenny she had always loved still needed her.

She glanced around anxiously as they walked through the vestibule, the pink marble deceptively warm. There were people moving about in the entrance hall, but she glanced within and saw nothing threatening about them, and no trace of the Shadow Men. Jim went in first, and Trix watched the door through which they had entered, just to make sure they would not be attacked from behind. When she walked into the entrance hall, Trix glanced at the vaulted ceiling, imagining that at any moment the Shadow Men would emerge from the tile mosaic and attack.

“Trix,” Jim said, and gestured for her to join them.

The others had gathered a few feet inside the hall and off to the right. The sound of weeping echoed off the walls, and she glanced up to see a grieving woman coming toward the doors, attended by a trio of comforting friends. Moments later, Trix caught sight of a woman who could only be the twin of the one who’d been grieving, and who was apparently following the group but trying not to be seen. She looked bewildered and afraid.

“It’s real,” Trix told her.

“What?” the woman asked, flinching, as though afraid Trix might try to strike her.

“All of this,” Trix said, waving her hand to indicate the women who had just left and the city as a whole. “It isn’t your imagination. It’s just what is now.”

The woman’s eyes widened and she hurried out the door, leaving Trix to wonder if the truth had done the woman good or harm.

“Stay with me,” Sally told them as Trix came to stand between Jennifer and Anne. Her little-girl face seemed anything but innocent now. She was grim and determined. “Veronica must have Shadow Men holding Holly, so be prepared. If they grab you, shake them off. They’ve got to partially solidify to hold you, so fight them. But don’t try to beat them, because you can’t.”

“You’re going to call some of them up, though, right?” Jennifer asked. “Some of your No-Face Men, the ones who answer to you?”

Uncertainty flashed in Sally’s eyes. “I’m going to try. But it takes focus to call them and to command them, and I’m so tired I can barely stand. All of this… it drains me.”

“You’ll do fine,” Jim assured her, one hand on the little girl’s shoulder.

But Sally was looking at Trix for reassurance. Trix smiled. They had bonded a little in the short time they’d known each other. “You’re the Oracle of two Bostons now,” Trix reminded her. “If there’s magic in all of this, you’ve got more of it than ever. You’ll kick ass.”

Sally smiled. “Thanks.”

“Okay,” Jim said. “You heard her. Sally knows exactly what room Holly’s in. We follow her in, get Holly, and let Sally worry about the Shadow Men. And we try not to let them take us into the In-Between.”

“What happens if they get one of us?” Anne asked.

“Let’s just say it would be bad,” Jim replied.

“Bad?” Trix said. “Great. Thanks.”

“We’d turn into them,” Jim explained. “Shadow Men.”

Trix felt sick, a terrible dread spreading like poison in her veins. She tried to shake it off, reaching out to clutch Anne’s hand, but it clung to her and would not be dispelled.

“Ready?” Sally asked.

“Not even close,” Anne said.

Jennifer glanced at her, their faces mirror images. “In some other world, this girl is your daughter.”

Anne shifted uneasily. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t go. Just that I’m not ready. How could anyone ever be ready for this?”

Trix squeezed her hand and glanced at Sally. “Let’s go,” she said.

The atmosphere inside the library crackled with static electricity. Jim wondered if he might be the only one who felt it, and if it sprang from the knowledge that his daughter-his little girl-was so close. During the trek across town, he had forced himself not to hope, and now he put it inside an iron box in his heart and turned the key, not to be released until he held Holly in his arms again.

Jaw set, hands clenched, he marched grimly across the entrance hall, his companions nearly forgotten. A glance into the main reading room showed precisely what he had expected-not the quiet studiousness of an ordinary day but the shock and hushed trauma of the aftermath of catastrophe. People sat on the floor, or at reading carrels, faces buried in their hands or laid upon the shoulder of another, who might try to provide comfort in the midst of their own astonishment and horror. The whole city was like this now, and it would take time for them to wake from this shock-trance and try to see how much of their lives remained.

“Upstairs,” Sally said, nudging him as she passed by and went through the triumphal arch to the marble staircase.

Jennifer, Anne, and Trix followed, but Jim hesitated a moment. Something wasn’t right in the reading room. Something was off, a sense that no one there was concentrating on whatever they appeared to be doing. He met the gaze of a white-haired old man who had begun to stare at him and turned away so that the man would not think him some kind of ghoul, entertained by the dozens of little tragedies unfolding in that room. Then he caught sight of a plump black woman standing beside a pale white teenage boy with orange hair. They seemed to sense him looking and turned toward him. Jim felt himself the focus of unsettling attention.

Holly, Jim thought, tearing his gaze from them and hurrying through the arch toward the stairs. The others were already moving up the steps, and Jim hustled to catch up, glancing around warily. At the landing above, where the steps turned before continuing up to the second floor, the marble lions seemed ready to pounce. He couldn’t help feeling that the air held a similar threat.

“It’s like some kind of weird Roman palazzo in here,” Jennifer whispered, her voice echoing off the marble walls and staircase as she stared at the paintings in the arched recesses at the top of the steps.

Jim barely acknowledged that she’d spoken, quickening his pace so that by the time Sally reached the second floor he was only two steps behind her. In the shuffle of echoes that their climb had sent cascading from the walls, he thought he heard something that shouldn’t be there, something that didn’t match, and it took him a moment to realize that there were footfalls below them on the stairs. He glanced over the balustrade and spotted the plump woman and her ginger-haired teen companion starting up the stairs.

“This way,” Sally whispered, spurring him on.

They went through the arcade that separated the stairwell from the second-floor corridor, a gallery named for the artist whose paintings hung there but whose name Jim could not recall. His mural of the Muses of Greek mythology was one of the best-known pieces of art in the library, and two men stood in the corridor staring at it with the casual air of tourists, despite the disaster the city had become. Jim frowned at the sight of them, but now they were so close to Holly he could practically feel the presence of his daughter.

At the southern end of the gallery corridor was the Abbey Room. Jim passed Sally, but the young Oracle grabbed the tail of his shirt and forced him not to rush ahead. The girl glanced back at Trix and Anne. “I’m kind of a wreck. If I have to call up my No-Face Men, I may pass out,” Sally said. “Will somebody catch me?”

“I’ve got you,” Anne said.

“Me, too,” Jennifer added. She had been lagging behind, the shocks of the day catching up to her, turning her gaze distant and hollow. “Do what you have to do.”

They went into the Abbey Room and spread out instantly, Jim taking the lead with Sally and Trix behind him, and Jennifer and Anne coming last. The room rivaled the greatest museums Jim had ever entered, not just because of the paintings but because of the beauty of the room itself, all oak and marble, with thick ornamental rafters on the ceiling. As Sally had told them, the room had been divided by a wall, this portion just over thirty feet to a side. The far end of the room had heavy oak doors set into the dividing wall, and Holly waited on the other side.

There were half a dozen people in the Abbey Room already. Two middle-aged women-European tourists by the look of them-huddled together on a bench, holding each other as though cowering in fear. A sixtyish Asian man in a business suit stood in the center of the room, facing Jim and the others as they rushed in. A young couple, perhaps graduate students, flanked the far door as if they were guarding it.

The sixth person was a dead security guard. He lay on the marble not far from the Asian man, a pool of blood beneath him.

Sally stopped short, glancing anxiously around, and the rest of them followed suit. “I should have realized…,” Sally said. “I sensed them, but I didn’t see them. I never thought she’d risk it.”

“Sally?” Jim said warily.

“What the hell is this?” Trix asked.

Jim glanced back the way they’d come and saw the woman and the orange-haired kid from downstairs follow them into the room. The old man who had caught his eye entered a moment later, still staring at Jim. “Who are they, Sally?” Jim asked.

“Not ‘who,’ “Sally said. “But ‘what’? They’re Shadow Men.”

“But they look normal,” Trix whispered, glancing at Anne and Jennifer, the five of them clustering together as the strangers began to close in on them. Only the two terrified women on the bench did not rise-they were ordinary people, trapped here in the midst of the horror.

“They haven’t been changed completely yet,” Jim told her, glancing at Sally to confirm his suspicion.

Sally nodded. “They’re not dead yet.”

The white-haired Asian man had remained in the center of the room, but now he glanced at the others, and the strangers all paused. Jim blinked, thinking his vision had begun to blur, but it was the strangers that were blurring. The orange-haired teen’s shadow seemed to separate from him, wavering just a few inches to one side like a ghostly conjoined twin. The others all shuddered as the same transformation went through them. Part human and part wraith, they were bodies with living shadows.

One of the women on the bench screamed; the other sobbed hysterically.

Jennifer grabbed Jim’s arm. “What do we do?”

Jim glanced at Trix. “We fight.”

“What?” Trix asked.

Jim grinned, all his anger and fear swelling up inside him, fists clenching. “They’re solid, Trixie. Let’s get Holly. And if they try to stop us, kick the shit out of them.”

“Jim…,” Anne said.

Sally nodded, reached out, and gave Jim a shove toward the door at the far end of the room. “Go!” she shouted.

Even as her voice echoed off the walls, the Asian man made a single gesture, and the Half Shadows attacked.