Shadow Walkers

Suddenly a teenager stepped into the room from the opposite side of the cabin. There was a third kidnapper? Conrad and Evelyn had brought their teenage son?

  “They can’t hear you,” the guy said. He was looking right at me.

  “What?” I said, confused. “You can see me?”

  “Sure. I’m not with them. I’m here with you.”

  It took me a second to make sense of this, but as I stared at the guy, I realized how different he looked from the others. He was glowing like me.

  He wasn’t a third kidnapper. He was with me in the astral realm.

  “Wait,” I said to the guy floating across from me. “You can really see me? You’re really here?”

  “In the flesh,” the guy said. “Well, not really, but you know what I mean.” His voice sounded different than the ones I was hearing from the real world—clearer, more solid. We were both on the same side of the looking glass, I guess.

  “I heard you shouting,” he said. “I came to see what all the commotion was.”

  “I wasn’t shouting.” But of course I had been—at Conrad and Evelyn.

  I had no idea what question to ask him first. Then I realized I didn’t have time to ask any questions at all.

  “This is my brother,” I said quickly, nodding at Gilbert. “He’s been kidnapped. I came into the astral dimension to find him, and I did, but now I have to tell the police where he is.”

  As the guy glanced over at Gilbert, I looked at him. He was at least half-Asian, but with pale skin. He reminded me of an elf, someone elusive and mysterious—though how much of that had to do with the fact that I was seeing him in spirit form, I didn’t know. I doubted the confidence on his face, the aura of brashness about him, had anything to do with being in the astral realm.

  “You live around here?” I said.

  “Not really,” he said. “It’s probably, like, twenty miles.” He nodded back, in pretty much the opposite direction I’d come from. Only now did I notice the faint silver cord flowing out of the back of his head, too. It gently spiraled off into the shadows, but it was a lot thinner than the one I’d seen from my own head. That said, when I looked back at my own cord, it was thinner now, too, less than half an inch wide—even thinner than the guy’s in front of me. It was as if there was only so much material to the cords, and the farther they were stretched, the thinner they became, like gum. I wondered if they’d snap if you went too far.

  “I’m Emory,” the guy said. “Like the fingernail board.”

  “Zach,” I mumbled, even as I thought how I needed to get home and call the police. “Oh, hell!” I said, thinking out loud. “I don’t even know where we are!”

  “Silver Lake.”

  I looked at him. “What?”

  “We pass it on the road all the time. I don’t live that far away.”

  “But I saw different cabins. The police won’t know which one he’s in.”

  “It’s okay,” Emory said. “There’s probably an address out on the mailbox.”

  This was a good idea. I turned and flew right through the wall, out to the gravel driveway and the mailbox out by the street. The numbers were white and reflective, and they glowed in the moonlight, even in the shadow of the astral dimension.

  924, it said.

  “But what’s the name of the road?” I was already panicking again.

  “Silver Lake Road,” Emory said. He’d followed me out through the wall. “924 Silver Lake Road,” he repeated.

  I turned toward him. We both hovered, glowing in the dark. “Have you been here before?” I said. “The astral dimension?”

  “Maybe. Why?”

  “I need to get home fast.”

  “Use the silver cord.”

  “The silver cord?”

  “Let it pull you home,” Emory said. “That’s how I do it. It’s much faster that flying. Almost instantaneous.”

  “What do you mean let it pull me home?”

  “You just ... relax. The silver cord will pull you right back to your body. It’s like … falling asleep. But you have to relax. You have to let it happen.”

  Now that he’d said this, I remembered that this is what had happened the very first time I’d entered the astral realm, when I’d panicked. But relax? Now?

  I looked at Emory. “Will you do it, too? Go back to your body and wake up and call the police?”

  He nodded. “Sure. If you want me to.”

  “If they hear the same address from two people, there’s no way they won’t listen.” Besides, I had no idea if this silver cord thing was going to work, and it was a long way back to Hinder Island.

  “I’ll go right now,” Emory said. “924 Silver Lake Road,” he said one final time. Then I watched his eyes lose focus and watched his body hang motionless in the air, leaning back slightly. The silver cord coming out of the back of his head throbbed and buckled slightly.

  Suddenly his body whipped away. One second, he was there, the next second he was gone. It was so fast that it looked like it would be painful. But I reminded myself that it hadn’t been his body at all—that we were in the non-physical astral dimension.

  I had no idea if Emory would actually call the police. He’d said he would, and he’d seemed trustworthy, but I didn’t know anything about him.

  I needed to do it, too. I needed to use my own silver cord to get back to my house on Hinder Island so I could tell my grandparents and the police what I’d learned.

  I couldn’t close my eyes, so I just hung there, thinking about home, willing myself to be reunited with my body. I tried to remember how I’d felt before, relaxed and centered by the meditation and the incense.

  But nothing happened. I’d long since lost the grip on my emotions.

  You have to relax, Emory had said. You have to let it happen.

  I couldn’t relax. Not now. But somehow I had to let go anyway.

  I kept concentrating. I tried to duplicate the breathing I’d done before. But I didn’t need to breathe, so that just felt awkward now.

  Still nothing happened. But I kept trying—my spirit was meant to be inside my body, so I knew it couldn’t be that hard to get them back together.

  Finally, I felt my mind growing foggy, felt my body slowly turning so the back of my head, with the silver cord, was facing the way I wanted to be traveling. It was all very gentle. Somehow I knew that I’d wink away at any second, but I was more relaxed now, so it didn’t scare me.

  Just then I felt a familiar chill, a shiver up and down my body, like what I’d felt that day out at Trumble Point. The difference was that I didn’t have a body now. So how could I feel the cold? Maybe this was part of the travel-by-silver-cord. But if so, why did I get that same feeling that something terrible was going to happen?

  At the same time, I felt my body begin to slip away, like I was starting backward down the slope of a steep water slide. As I was being pulled away, I caught the vaguest flash of something out of the corner of my eye, like it was coming down right over my head.

  It had to be a trick of the light, a stray shadow. But the truth is it almost looked like some kind of black tentacle.

  ———

  I opened my eyes—my physical eyes. I was back in my bedroom at my grandparents’ farmhouse on Hinder Island. It all happened in an instant.

  It was a shock, waking up back in the real world. It wasn’t at all like waking up from sleep. That’s when you rest your mind. But my mind hadn’t been at rest—it had completely left my body, and now had to reintegrate itself back in.

  My body was still alive, and it had kept on breathing while I was gone. Now I had to synch my mind back up with that breathing. But I’d gone so long without breathing in the astral dimension that it was like I was fighting my body’s involuntary reflex. It was all I could do not to choke. I’d even forgotten
the impulse to blink.

  Then there was gravity; it was so much heavier than I remembered! And my clothing was tighter, and any itches I felt were stronger too. In a way, it was harder to go from the astral dimension to the real world than it had been to go into the astral dimension in the first place, which was ironic because I’d spent my whole life inside my body.

  I ignored all that. What I had to tell the police was far more important than any disorientation or irritation I was feeling.

  I thundered down the stairs of my grandparents’ house. “Grandma! Grandpa! I know where Gilbert is!”

  My grandparents had been in the kitchen talking to a police officer, but they met me in the front hallway. My grandpa clutched the handle of a coffee mug in his hand, but he was holding it horizontally, like he’d spilled the contents in his mad rush to get to me.

  “You do?” my grandma asked. “Zachary, why didn’t—”

  “—you tell us before?” my grandpa said. Even now, they were still finishing each other’s sentences.

  “I didn’t know before!” I said. “I just found out!”

  “Where is he?” the police officer said.

  “He’s being held in a cabin out on Silver Lake, about an hour south of Tacoma!” I told her the exact address.

  “How do you know this?” the officer asked me.

  That’s the moment I saw the problem with my plan. I couldn’t very well tell my grandparents and the police officer the truth. They’d never believe me.

  “Someone online,” I said. “I posted a picture of Gilbert, and someone said they saw someone who looked just like him being carried into this cabin on Silver Lake Road.”

  I was proud of myself—I’d come up with a pretty good lie, right there on the spot.

  My grandparents both turned to the police officer.

  “You have to send somebody!” my grandpa said.

  “You have to see if he’s there!” my grandma said.

  The officer looked at me. “Can you show me this email?”

  Maybe this isn’t such a good lie, I thought.

  “It wasn’t an email,” I said. “It was an IM message. And I didn’t save it—I have my settings set so my computer doesn’t save them. I should’ve saved it!”

  “It’s okay. But can I talk to whoever sent it to you?” Even now she was starting for the stairs.

  “It wasn’t anyone I know. I just posted Gilbert’s picture in this local forum, and someone saw it, and they just IM’d me out of the blue.” I stopped. The policeman just stared at me. “But it was real, and I know that’s the right address. You have to send someone out there!”

  “Yes!” my grandma said. “Please!”

  The officer looked from me to my grandparents, all our eyes filled with the same desperation and hope. Then finally she said, “924 Silver Lake Road? Sure, I’ll call it in. But I wouldn’t get your hopes up too high. Whenever word of a kidnapping gets out, we always get a lot of calls like these, and almost all of them turn out to be either pranks or cases of mistaken identity.”

  Maybe so, I thought, but this is definitely no mistake.

  Then I exhaled for what felt like the first time since I’d entered the astral realm at least a half hour before.

  I told my grandparents and the police officer that I was going to see what else I could find on my computer. Then I ran up to my room to light another stick of incense—my last one. Sure, the officer had said they were going to check out the cabin—but would they really do it? I needed to know for sure. And I needed to be with Gilbert, at least in the astral dimension, until they got there.

  Once in the astral realm again, I immediately listened for Gilbert.

  I didn’t hear him. I heard women laughing, couples arguing, even monks chanting. But I didn’t hear Gilbert. Suddenly my Internet-like astral search was getting no good returns at all.

  I tried again, but no matter how hard I strained, no matter how many sounds I sorted through, I couldn’t hear him. No whimpering, no soft breathing. As I flipped my way through the sounds, I heard plenty of crying, even lots of kids. But none of them were Gilbert.

  “Gilbert, where are you?” I said, sending out my own astral text message. But I got no response.

  I hadn’t counted on this. I’d just assumed that since I’d heard him before, I’d be able to hear him again.

  What did this mean? That he’d finally stopped crying? Or—?

  No. I couldn’t go there.

  Conrad and Evelyn. I could listen for them.

  I tried, hard.

  Nothing.

  I tried them one at a time. I tried them together. I tried them in every way that I could think of.

  Still nothing.

  So I had no choice but to try to retrace the route I’d taken before to the cabin out on Silver Lake.

  I rose up over Hinder Island. Once again guiding myself by the lighthouse at Trumble Point, I flew south across the water. The whitecaps were gone now. The bay looked black and heavy from behind the astral lens, like thick crude oil.

  I reached the mainland. I knew Silver Lake was beyond the urban area, many miles to the south, so I headed in that direction. But it was different than before, that effortless glide I’d managed while honing in on Gilbert’s crying. This time I couldn’t let go. This time I was searching visually, so I had to be slow, always keeping an eye on the shadowy landmarks below me.

  And once I left the lights of greater Tacoma behind, the landmarks got murkier—much murkier.

  In the dark of the night, and in the shadows of the astral dimension, everything below me looked the same: a black, choppy sea of fir tree tops. When I’d been traveling this way before, I’d been paying attention to the sound of Gilbert, not to physical landmarks.

  Before I knew it, I was lost.

  I stared down at the ocean of blackness that stretched out under me in all directions. I had no idea which was the right way, but if I chose wrong, Gilbert was lost to me. Even as I thought this, I sensed myself sliding, blown aimlessly along by that ever-present ethereal breeze.

  I looked up into the sky. From the astral dimension, it looked even darker than normal country sky. And yet, because of those faded pinpricks of starlight, it was still lighter than the swath of forested darkness below.

  I rocketed straight up into the sky.

  And just when I reached the point when I started to see the curvature of the black earth below me, I caught a glimpse of something flat in the distance, glistening like tarnished silver.

  A lake.

  ———

  I found the cabin again, but the SUV wasn’t in the driveway, and it looked like the lights had been turned off.

  Please don’t let them be gone, I thought.

  I flew down through the ceiling of the cabin. Without light it was a tank of black ink. It occurred to me for the first time that no matter how much time I spent in the astral dimension, my eyes never adjusted to the dark.

  Still, it had taken me a long time to find this cabin again. Maybe the police had already come and taken them away.

  “Zach?” a voice said.

  I jumped. It was Emory, floating next to me in the shadows.

  “I thought you said you were going to call the police!” I said.

  “I did,” he said, wavering, taken aback by my anger.

  But even as I said this, I realized the stupid mistake I’d made. When I’d gone to call the police, I should’ve had Emory stay here with Gilbert. At the time I hadn’t been sure that I’d be able to get back to Hinder Island fast enough, but it had been more important not to lose track of Gilbert.

  “By the time I got back here, they were gone,” he said.

  “How long ago was that?”

  “I don’t know. Twenty minutes?”

 
I thought back on how long it had been since we’d told the police what we’d learned. If Emory had been here for twenty minutes, there wasn’t enough time for the police to have come and found Gilbert and taken them all away.

  I listened, not for Gilbert, but for any sound around me. I didn’t hear a thing. Somehow I just knew that the cabin was empty. Conrad and Evelyn had taken Gilbert somewhere else. But where? It was too dark in the cabin to even look for clues.

  “Zach?” Emory said. “Do you feel something? Something not quite right?”

  “My brother is gone, and I’m floating like a ghost in the astral dimension!” I said. “Everything feels not quite right.”

  “No, I mean something else.”

  I ignored him. Suddenly I flew straight up through the roof, into the sky, up to the point again where I’d been able to see the curvature of the earth. I scanned the horizon for the white SUV I’d seen parked in the driveway before.

  I saw a few sets of headlights cutting through the gloom, and a few more sets of red tail-lights. But most were far, far away, and they were all traveling in opposite directions. If Conrad and Evelyn had left more than twenty minutes ago, they’d be long gone by now.

  “Anything?” Emory said. He’d followed me up into the sky and was now looking over the landscape with me.

  “No,” I said. As irritated as I’d sounded with him, I was actually glad to have him around. At least it meant I wasn’t alone. And the way he hung next to me in the sky was reassuring somehow. He seemed steadier, more solid, not hanging loosely in the sky like me, but actually standing in it, like a floating statue of a sentinel. “How many times have you been here,” I asked him.

  “You asked me that before,” he said. “A few times. Why?”

  “I’ve never been here before tonight.” I was embarrassed that I’d needed that stupid incense, but for some reason, I decided to tell Emory the truth about that, too. “What about you?” I asked him. “How’d you get here?”

  “Same way you did,” he said. “With that weird incense.”

  It was an interesting coincidence if it was true—but something told me it wasn’t. But if he hadn’t used the incense, I wondered how he’d gotten here. Celestia Moonglow and the woman at the New Age store had both seemed to agree that without the incense, you could only get here partway, experiencing as if through a dream. Emory didn’t look like he was dreaming. Then again, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to tell the difference.