Shadow Walkers

  For this and many other reasons, they now hated each other with a passion—and that hatred often dissolved into screaming matches on the front porch of the house.

  Like I said, everyone on the island knew everyone else’s business, including me.

  ———

  At least I had the Internet.

  If an island was a place of endless dead ends, the Internet was the exact opposite: a world without limits. You could go anywhere at any time. Better still, you could do it from the comfort of your own bedroom.

  The first thing I did when I got home, even before I took off my shoes, was to go up to my bedroom so I could update my profile status. I’d have done it out at Trumble Point with my phone, but there wasn’t any service that far south.

  I thought about writing about that weird chill I’d felt, that premonition or whatever. But a bigger part of me was determined to forget all about it. Besides, I could never write it in such a way that people would truly understand.

  I also thought about writing what had happened to Gilbert, but I didn’t particularly want to be reminded about that either.

  Gilbert and I just got back from the beach, I wrote. Wounded Wolf was there fishing. Shirtless. OMFG.

  Wounded Wolf was the nickname I’d given Matt. I wasn’t about to call him by his real name, not where someone on the island might see. The first time I’d mentioned him, I’d said he reminded me of a wolf caught in a trap, and the name had just kind of stuck. Plus, there was that whole piercing-brown-eyes thing.

  Then I started uploading a video Gilbert and I had taken of some centipedes scurrying around under this rotten stump. Most of the people I knew online lived in the city, so I figured if I was forced to live on Hinder Island, I could at least share a little bit of nature with them. It was just one of my “things.”

  By the time the video was uploaded, the comments started coming in fast and furious about my profile update.

  Photos! Kelsey commented. We wanna see Wounded Wolf shirtless!

  LOL, I wrote. Didn’t take any. I may be a perv, but not that much of one.

  A text box popped up in my window.

  Details! Smuggler16 wrote. We want details!

  I laughed out loud for real this time.

  I take back what I said about not having any friends. Maybe I didn’t have any on Hinder Island, but that didn’t mean I didn’t have any friends at all. They were just the online kind. True, I’d never met any of them in person, but I’d known a couple of them since before my parents died.

  These were people who accepted me the way I was, including the whole gay thing. My grandparents weren’t Neanderthals, but they were in their seventies, and that was a conversation I just did not want to be having with them any time soon. And the rest of Hinder Island? Please. The island was only a couple of miles from the mainland, from the south end of Tacoma, with Seattle thirty miles to the north. But it might as well have been a whole ocean.

  Sometimes it was like the life I lived online was the real one, and my life on Hinder Island, that was the fake one.

  I started filling in the requested details about Matt’s body—I still hadn’t gotten a chance to upload some photos I’d taken of a starfish eating a clam—when there was a knock on my door.

  “Come in,” I said.

  It was my grandparents. Together. That was a little weird. But even so, I barely glanced over at them.

  “Zach?” my grandpa said.

  “We need to talk to you,” my grandma said.

  “Go for it,” I said.

  “We need to you to stop typing,” my grandpa said.

  “And give us your full attention,” my grandma said.

  My grandparents said this a lot. They hated how much time I spent on the computer. They were always saying how there were all these bad people online.

  “There’s so much evil in the world,” my grandmother would say. “Why would you want to bring that into your bedroom?”

  My grandfather would always agree. “That’s why we live here on Hinder,” he’d say. “So we don’t have to worry about that kind of stuff.”

  When it came to anything off-island, my grandparents had always been the nervous types, but ever since my parents had been killed, they’d been more paranoid than ever. It had been over a year since I’d bothered arguing with them about any of this.

  I stopped typing. I didn’t want my grandparents seeing anything suspicious on my profile, so I turned off the monitor. Then I turned and gave them my full attention.

  As grandparents go, mine were okay. I’m sure they hadn’t expected to be raising kids again, not in their seventies. Still, they were fit and active. After a lifetime of being together, they’d even started to look like each other. They now had just about the same amount of thinning white hair. And over the years, my grandma had put on some pounds and my grandpa had lost a few inches of height, so they were now both almost the same size. If you didn’t know any better, you might think they were twins—maybe even twins of the same sex.

  Just like twins, they also had this habit of finishing each other’s sentences.

  “It’s Thursday, Zachary,” my grandpa said.

  “Garbage day,” my grandma said.

  I forgot to take the garbage out, I thought. We had to keep the garbage in the garage because of raccoons, and on garbage day, it was my job to haul it down to the curb for the collectors. Today had been garbage day, but Gilbert and I had left for Trumble Point on our bikes before I’d gotten around to it.

  “We don’t ask you to do a lot around here,” my grandma said.

  “But it’s really important that you do that,” my grandpa said.

  “Because you didn’t do it today, your grandfather had to,” my grandma said. “And it’s far too heavy for him, and he fell down and skinned his knee.”

  “Mary, I’m fine,” my grandpa said.

  “That’s not the point!” my grandma said.

  “I’m really sorry,” I said. “I totally forgot. Gilbert and I rode our bikes out to—”

  “It seems like you forget a lot,” my grandpa said.

  “Not that much,” I said.

  “We’re at our wits end trying to get you to remember,” my grandma said.

  “But we think you might be more likely to if you’re punished,” my grandpa said.

  “As of tonight, we want you off your computer for one week,” my grandma said.

  It took a second for the words to sink in. No computer? For a whole week? They couldn’t be serious.

  “And your phone too,” my grandpa said. “If you need to make a call, you can use the line in the house.”

  “But—” How did I explain to them what a big deal this was to me? Without the computer, without contact with my friends, being on Hinder Island would be like being in prison.

  “It’s just as well,” my grandma said. “It’s just not right, how you’re always on that thing. It’s going to lead to something bad, I just know it.”

  That’s when I knew there was nothing I could say to change their minds. They’d been looking for an excuse to take my computer away anyway.

  “And if this kind of thing ever happens again,” my grandpa said, “we’ll take your phone and your computer away for good.”

  ———

  But just because my grandparents had made up their minds, that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to try to change them. Of course no matter how I tried to talk them into a different punishment, they wouldn’t listen. All my arguing was just proof that they’d stumbled upon a punishment that might really have an impact on me.

  After a while, even Gilbert pulled me aside. “Zach?” he said to me, with all the maturity of his seven years. “Give it up. You’re just making it worse.”

  To make things even more dire, we didn’t ha
ve a television—it had been hard enough talking them into getting me an Internet connection. I’d never really cared that we didn’t have TV because I watched everything online or on my phone, but what was I going to do now for the next week?

  “Why don’t we all play a game of hearts?” my grandma said after dinner.

  The offline world can’t be that boring, I thought.

  On Hinder Island, it could.

  “I’m going up to my room,” I said, which is exactly what I did.

  But once I got there, I realized there wasn’t anything more interesting there either, not with my computer out. My bedroom had been my dad’s when he was a kid, and it hadn’t really changed since then. It had the same saggy bed he’d slept in, with a couple of torn STP stickers stuck to the headboard. There was a matching nightstand and dresser, but a different desk, much older with darker wood, some kind of antique. And he’d tacked a poster from the 1980s movie Poltergeist to the wall, though it was now pretty faded.

  It was funny. I’d never really noticed how little I’d changed the room since moving in with my grandparents two years earlier. Partly it was the fact that I spent most of my life online, so I didn’t really care what my room looked like. But it was also the way Gilbert and I had ended up here after our parents had been killed. My grandparents had never really talked about it, never officially said to us, “We’re going to raise you now. This is your new home.” As a result, it had always kind of felt like I was living in one of their spare bedrooms. I’d never really thought about it before, but maybe this was part of the reason why I spent so much time online.

  I paced around my bedroom for a while until I was almost desperate enough to go back and join my grandparents for that game of hearts, but then I heard the creaking of old pipes and squeaking of old floorboards as my grandpa started getting a bath ready for Gilbert.

  Shortly after that, my grandparents got themselves ready for bed, too. A few minutes later, the squeaks and creaks stopped. It wasn’t even nine o’clock at night, and the rest of the house had already gone to bed. Did they do this every night? I’d never noticed.

  And I still didn’t have anything to do except lay in bed and stare at the ceiling. There sure were a lot of dead bugs in the light fixture.

  My grandparents said there was all this evil in the world—out in cyberspace and out across the water that surrounded our little island.

  I suddenly remembered that strange chill I’d felt out at Trumble Point.

  I didn’t want to think about that.

  On the shelf in the bottom half of the nightstand, I spotted some books. They must’ve also been my dad’s—another thing I’d never noticed in the two years I’d been living here.

  I looked at some of the titles. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene. Something called Onions in the Stew by Betty MacDonald.

  No, thanks, I thought. It’s not that I never read books, but I couldn’t remember the last time I read them in actual book form—and I had no interest in reading anything that old.

  I came to a book with the title Voyage Beyond the Rainbow by someone named Celestia Moonglow.

  That made me sit up.

  I pulled the book off the shelf. The subtitle was The Art of Astral Projection. From the font, it looked like it had been published in the 1970s. The cover had a picture of a man sitting in a chair with his head down. The way he was clenching the arm rests, it almost looked like he was strapped to the chair. Rising up from out of the man’s body was this glowing image of the same man, arms outstretched toward the sky, this peaceful expression on his face.

  I flipped the book over.

  At last it can be revealed—the ancient secrets of astral travel! read the bold print at the top of the page. Free your soul from its physical confines and send it soaring into strange new realms!

  I’d heard of astral projection. Out-of-body travel.

  The writing continued in smaller type. “For centuries, people have reported the ability to separate their souls from their bodies. Now you can try astral projection too! Author Celestia Moonglow presents the first practical, step-by-step guide to out-of-body travel. In easy-to-follow language, Celestia lays out a simple, time-tested strategy for astral projection. At last it’s possible to separate your astral body from your physical one—to travel through space and time, visit distant planets, and even travel to different dimensions!

  This was crazy. Astral projection was like angel-readings and past-life regression and tarot cards and the rest of the New Age nonsense.

  I put the book back on the shelf and sat back to stare up at the ceiling. I also had cobwebs in my corners.

  On the other hand, the alternative to the book was staring up at my ceiling all night.

  I reached for book again, opened it, and sat back on my bed and started reading.

  By eleven o’clock, I’d finished reading Voyage Beyond the Rainbow. It really was a step-by-step guide to this thing called astral projection. Supposedly you could separate your soul from your body and go soaring around something called the astral realm.

  The astral realm is a shadow dimension that exists alongside the material world, the book said. People in the material dimension cannot see into the astral dimension and are usually unaware that it even exists. But occupants of the astral dimension can see things in both the astral realm and in the material one. Still, the astral realm is a spiritual dimension, not a physical one. Nothing exists there except spirits. Even distances don’t exist in the way that they do in the material world.

  The way you traveled to this realm was to become so relaxed that your mind and body literally drifted apart.

  It’s a form of dreaming, Celestia Moonglow said. And it many ways, it feels very much like dreaming. But it’s not a dream, because you’ll be in control. And unlike a dream, this is very real.

  This was all garbage, of course. An astral realm? Please. Still, I’d spent all that time reading the book, and I wasn’t ready to go to bed yet. I figured I might as well give it a try. I knew it wouldn’t work—but what if it did? It was a way off this stupid island that didn’t involve paying for the ferry—or getting permission from my grandparents.

  Astral separation only occurs when a person is very relaxed, the book said.

  So I lit a candle and put on some soft music, just like the book suggested. Then I sat back in bed, as comfortable as possible. It’s funny, I thought, how you don’t notice all the places where your clothes pinch and bind until you’re trying to relax.

  At the same time, the book went on, you have to be fully aware of everything that’s going on, which requires a state of heightened awareness. We achieve this state through meditation. But mediation is really just a fancy name for a sustained focusing of the mind. Many people create this same heightened awareness through athletics, the playing of an instrument, or even prayer.

  I’d never meditated before, but it’s not like I found the whole concept weird. I knew what Celestia Moonglow meant about that sense of heightened awareness that comes from being really focused on something. I’d felt it when editing a video clip or writing code for a website.

  I closed my eyes and began to breathe deeply. The book gave different suggestions on how to enter a meditative trance—concentrating on chimes or a mantra that you repeat over and over in your mind. But the one I liked was simply concentrating on the point in your nostrils where the air enters and leaves your body. The goal was to become your breathing—to focus the mind in such a way that you didn’t think about anything but the air flowing in and out of your body.

  I kept breathing. The only thing that existed for me was the little exchange of air at my nostrils.

  In.

  And.

  Out.

  It was harder than it sounded, blocking out awareness of yourself and your surroundings. I
t didn’t help that the candle was smoking and I had an itch in my right ear. Once or twice, my brain may have flashed to an image of Matt, shirtless and in shorts, on the beach earlier that day.

  Imagine that with each breath, you’re releasing all the stresses and cares of everyday life from your body, the book said. Feel them flowing out of you. That’s what I was trying to do. And with each breath, I did feel a little more relaxed.

  But how relaxed was relaxed enough? You could always be more relaxed. The fact that I was even thinking about these things meant that I probably wasn’t relaxed enough.

  So I kept breathing, and kept imagining the stress flow from my body.

  Long.

  Deep.

  Breaths.

  I wasn’t sure how long I went on like this, but eventually I got tired of wondering if I was relaxed enough, so I decided it was time to push on.

  In order to achieve the astral separation, the book said, imagine a little point of light on your forehead. There had even been a little diagram.

  In my mind’s eye, I tried to focus on that single point. It took me a moment to get a mental handle on it.

  Now very slowly move that point out from your body until it’s hovering about six feet above you.

  I did my best to follow these instructions, imagining that little point on my forehead slowly rising up from my body, over my head.

  Now imagine your spirit floating free from your body, rising to join the point of light above you.

  I imagined my spirit floating free.

  But I still had that itch in my right ear—I’d obviously made a mistake deciding not to scratch it—and I suddenly had that mental image of Matt again.

  Concentrate, the book said. Let yourself go.

  But I couldn’t concentrate. Or, rather, I was concentrating, but on the itch in my ear.