The Shadow Thieves

  The man started, muttered something, and got up and moved to the front of the bus. Charlotte wasn’t sure, but she thought she saw Zee smiling to himself a little. Just a little.

  They were in the suburbs now, first passing small row houses, then large retail buildings. Charlotte and Zee watched out the window, looking for some sign of…something, while the bird kept on grooming himself. And then, after they had been on the bus for what seemed like eons, the bus approached the biggest retail center of them all.

  The Mall.

  The bird hopped up, flew up to the signal cord, and landed on it, then flew down the aisle.

  “You have got to be kidding,” Charlotte said.

  Zee was staring out the window and shaking his head. “What in the…”

  The Mielswetzskis had not taken Zee to the Mall. There hadn’t really been time, and Aunt Suzanne had been so horrified when she went years ago. Apparently the British don’t really have malls, and especially not megamalls. It was better to break Zee in slowly, they all thought. So he’d never seen it.

  The Mall was Big. It was Huge. It was Mega. As the bus pulled into the parking lot and began to circle around the driveway in front of the Mall, into the six-story parking garage where the bus stops were, Zee’s eyes grew bigger and bigger, until they threatened to take over his head. After this, Charlotte thought grimly, the Underworld will be easy for him.

  Then the bus doors opened, the bird squawked at them, and Zee and Charlotte—both extremely perplexed for entirely different reasons—followed.

  The bus driver, who didn’t seem at all curious about why two thirteen-year-olds and a large black bird would be going to the Mall well after it had closed, waved at them. “Have a nice night.”

  Charlotte swallowed.

  The bird led them up to the front door. Charlotte could see that the Mall was completely shut down for the night. “It’s going to be locked,” she said.

  “Squawk,” said the bird.

  “What in the…” said Zee.

  Charlotte pulled the door, which was, of course, wide open. They walked (or flew) in, and she cringed a little, but no alarm sounded.

  Zee kept muttering to himself as the bird led them down the passageway into the main Mall corridors. They went through the middle of the Mall, through the LEGO land, past the Ferris wheel and the roller coaster and the water ride thingy. Empty carts decorated with pictures of peanuts and cotton candy, and booths hawking ice cream and soda dotted their path. Zee seemed to have entirely forgotten about the purpose of the journey and was simply gawking at all the awful, beautiful excess.

  Charlotte hadn’t forgotten. She couldn’t help notice how quiet everything was. It’s after hours, of course it’s quiet, but shouldn’t there be security guards? Alarms? Something? She followed the bird resolutely as they wound their way out of the amusement park and to the other end of the Mall. They walked past stores, sleeping behind their gates, then turned down a small, dark corridor that Charlotte—despite her many, many visits to this particular Mall—had never noticed before. Next to her, Zee inhaled sharply.

  The bird disappeared into the corridor. Slowly the cousins walked down together, letting the darkness wash over them.

  They reached the end, their eyes adjusted, and they saw in front of them a very plain door, on which there was a very plain sign, which read, very plainly: NO ADMITTANCE.

  Zee gasped. His hand reached out suddenly for the doorknob as if by instinct, and he quickly pulled it back.

  The bird landed on the floor right in front of the door and danced and squawked.

  Zee reached for the door again, more slowly. Charlotte closed her eyes. A simple twisting sound, and the door was creaking open.

  A musty smell washed over them; cold, wet air blew at them; and in front of them there was nothing but black.

  “I guess we should go in,” Charlotte said.

  “Let’s go,” Zee said.

  The two grabbed hands, and together they walked into the blackness.

  PART FOUR

  The Beginning of the End

  CHAPTER 19

  Descent

  DID I SAY BLACKNESS?

  Yes, blackness.

  Cold blackness. Wet blackness. Slimy, icky blackness. The sort of blackness that would make you want to turn around, run home, and hide under your covers, never to get out again.

  But, with trembling hands and brave hearts, Charlotte and Zee stepped into the cold, wet, slimy, icky blackness—for sometimes, as scared as you are, as much as you would like to run, you really have no choice but to go forward—and the door slammed shut behind them with a certain finality that Charlotte did not like one single bit.

  They were in a very narrow tunnel made of rock, that much they could tell. The air possessed a certain chilly hollowness that gave Charlotte the feeling that the tunnel wasn’t going to end any time soon. When they stepped forward, their footsteps made muffled clunks against the hard stone floor.

  “At least we have the bird,” said Charlotte.

  “Squawk,” said the bird, who suddenly flew off ahead of them, his flight stirring up the dust of the ages. He disappeared into the blackness, but they could hear the beating of his wings. It went on and on and on for what seemed like miles, getting quieter and quieter, until it faded away. Charlotte and Zee stopped and waited, but the sound did not return.

  “Or not,” said Charlotte.

  “I guess we’re on our own,” Zee murmured.

  They moved on, the light from Zee’s watch the only thing keeping them from perfect blackness. The cave quickly became too narrow for them to walk side by side, so Zee, ever the gentleman martyr, took the lead. Charlotte held on to the back of his sweater.

  Oh, it was cold. The type of cold that travels through your warm sweaters, your shirts, your undershirts, your skin, your muscles, and hits you right in the bone. The type of cold that makes you shiver from your inside, the one that goes beyond chilling your body into freezing your very essence.

  “Wow, it’s cold,” Charlotte muttered.

  “Yeah,” said Zee, his voice shaking a bit. He stopped and turned to glance at Charlotte, who was trembling. “Maybe…well…here.” Tentatively he reached out toward her, putting his hands on her arms. He began to rub them up and down, with a strange combination of chivalry and uncertainty, but all Charlotte could feel was the warmth in his hands. She leaned into him, and he wrapped his arms around her and warmed her back.

  “Better?” he said.

  “Yeah,” said Charlotte.

  “Okay, let’s keep going.”

  And they did. On and on, through the darkness, stopping occasionally to warm each other, forgetting their awkwardness in the need to stop trembling. Every once in a while something flittered by them on the walls, on the ground, or in the air, but Charlotte opted not to think about that too much. Their eyes adjusted a bit over time, and they could see a few feet in front of them, but the view was always the same—craggy rock, slanting down, leading them deeper and deeper into the earth.

  And deeper they were going. Charlotte could feel the pressure changing, as if the weight of the earth were above them, which in fact, it probably was. Her breath felt labored. She noticed Zee seemed to be just fine, which, she supposed, happened when you spent your afternoons running back and forth on a soccer field. She’ll suggest that to the gym teacher as a slogan when they get back—Get in shape! You never know when you’ll have to descend into the Underworld! It’s a looong way down!

  Though as they continued to make their way downward, even Zee seemed to labor a bit. As one, they stopped and leaned against a rather slimy wall to rest.

  “Oh, man,” said Zee, catching his breath.

  “Yeah,” said Charlotte, catching hers.

  He nodded toward Charlotte’s backpack. “Do you have any water in that magic bag of yours?”

  “Oh!” Charlotte slung her pack off her back and unzipped it, bringing out one of the bottles. They each took a few sips. Charlotte wa
nted to drink the whole thing down, but she had a feeling it might be a wise idea to conserve. Which reminded her:

  “Hey, Zee…when we’re down there? Don’t eat anything. Like fruit from the trees or whatever.”

  Zee made a sound through his nose. “I assure you,” he said, “that I will not.”

  Charlotte grinned. “I suppose that was pretty obvious. Persephone did it, though. She ate some pomegranate seeds, and that’s why she had to stay.”

  Zee shook his head. “Next you’re going to tell me not to drink the water.”

  “Well, yeah,” she smiled. “Don’t do that, either.” She took a sip from her bottle. “You know…you can be funny when you put your mind to it.”

  Zee gaped at her. “Can I?” Was Charlotte mistaken, or did he sound just a mite sarcastic? Really, she was just trying to help.

  “Yeah!” Charlotte said. “Once you’ve, you know, relaxed.”

  Zee let out something between a cough and a snort, then grabbed Charlotte’s hands, looked into her eyes, and said, “Charlotte, I promise you on my life that once we get out of the Underworld alive, I will be the funniest person you’ve ever met.”

  Charlotte blushed. “Okay, okay. It’s just…you know. What you said before. About not knowing what to say. I mean, all the girls at school are totally crushed out on you.”

  Zee dropped her hands. “They are?”

  Charlotte nodded. “Most of them, anyway. Ashley and Audrey asked me if you had a girlfriend.”

  “They did?”

  “Yup.”

  Charlotte watched as Zee contemplated this for a while. Then something seemed to come over him. He looked away and muttered, “Well, I don’t. Have a girlfriend.”

  His tone seemed to end the conversation. Charlotte offered him a last sip of water, then screwed the top back on and put the bottle in her backpack. Zee was still staring at something indefinable off at the other end of the tunnel. He exhaled and then said quietly, “There was a girl, though. In London…Samantha…”

  Charlotte looked up. “Oh! What was she like?” Some sort of large, spiderlike thing crawled right by her foot. She glared at it. She was finally getting something personal out of her cousin; no Underworld spider was going to make her shriek.

  “I don’t really know,” Zee shrugged. “But I wanted to find out.” He shook his head. “She was one of the first to…you know—they took her shadow.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah, so…”

  “So.” Charlotte looked at Zee, and Zee looked at Charlotte, and they both nodded and proceeded on their way.

  It was about a half hour later, when they were just beginning to despair of ever reaching the end, that they noticed the change. Something had opened up, the air moved more freely, and off in the distance—in the very great distance—they could see something that looked very much like light.

  Charlotte’s heart started throbbing, and not from the exertion. Her grip on Zee’s sweater tightened. He reached back, grabbed her hand, and squeezed it (Charlotte noticed his palms were as clammy as hers), and together they moved toward the light.

  A few paces on, Zee stopped and started to look around carefully. He leaned back and whispered, “Did you hear something?”

  “You know,” Charlotte whispered back, “I really hate it when you ask that.” She listened. Yes, she did hear something. Wings! She heard wings! Their bird was coming toward them! Well, good, that would be a big help….

  No, no, wait—not their bird. Too big to be their bird. Really, those wings sounded awfully large—very, very large….

  “Duck!” Zee hissed.

  “Du—? Oh!” And Charlotte ducked.

  A huge mass of a thing flew by them, a thing that was definitely not a duck, a thing that made their bird look like a chickadee. The thing was the size of a bear—a flying bear—with vast wings like those of an eagle. It was an eagle, a bear-size eagle, or it would have been, had its face not been that of an old woman. A nasty old woman, like the one who sat in the ice cream aisle of Charlotte’s grocery store shouting mean things at whoever passed her by. The thing (the ugly bird, not the ugly ice-cream-aisle woman) had claws the size of sickles, the tips of which seemed to gleam.

  The Harpy—for that is what the woman-faced, eagle-bodied, impossibly enormous, and, while we’re at it, quite bad-smelling creature was—was singing a little song to herself. If it could be called singing, if singing were a tuneless, phlegmy, cackling, screeching sort of endeavor, which it’s really not. But anyway. The song went something like this:

  “I’m a little Harpy, short and stout.

  Here is my handle, here is my spout.

  I’ll be back soon, so start ta shiver,

  Cuz I’m coming to gnaw on yer liver.”

  [Repeat]

  Charlotte and Zee remained as still as they could possibly be, long after the sounds of the flapping wings and the raspy song had faded into the air.

  “Is it gone?” Zee whispered after a time.

  Charlotte checked behind her. “I think so.”

  “Man,” said Zee. “I hope there are no more where she came from.”

  But as they continued on, they found that there were at least two more where she had come from, or so they learned as a pair of them swooped in from behind them, heading toward the light. Charlotte and Zee ducked again, but the Harpies had no interest in them, they were too busy singing, in a round, this song:

  “Twinkle, twinkle, little man,

  I wonder how you’d taste with jam,

  Chained above the world so high,

  Like a lamb chop in the sky.

  Twinkle, twinkle, little man…”

  [And so on]

  The Harpies weren’t the only creatures Charlotte and Zee encountered. There was more flapping, more scurrying, more crawling, and a great deal more creeping. Two-headed bats flew by; rats with fire for eyes and a squadron of fist-size beetles scurried past as if they had somewhere very important to be.

  And then, suddenly, they were out. The cave ended and launched them into…not light, exactly, but not blackness, either. Grayness, maybe—a strange, glowing grayness that seemed to flicker as if lit by fire.

  They stood at the mouth of the cave, looking out at what lay before them. It was a world made of rock—a deep red rock that looked like nothing on Earth, craggy and cliffy and endless. Perpetual fog rolled in front of them. And there was not a creature in sight. Charlotte felt suddenly a distinct and terrible sense of loneliness, as if she were the only person in the world, as if she would never see anyone again, never hear another voice, never feel another touch. Her very bones were lonely. Next to her she felt Zee shudder—and the cousins stepped closer together.

  Charlotte gulped. They had better get moving. “I don’t think…I don’t think,” she started. “I don’t think we’re really there yet. There’s a river we have to cross….”

  Zee nodded slowly. “Okay, let’s keep going.”

  They exchanged a look, then began to move forward.

  “The Outer Banks are where people, um, line up and wait after they’ve died,” Charlotte said after a few moments. “And I guess Charon—that’s the Ferryman—won’t take you over unless you’ve got a coin. And if you haven’t been buried, well, you can’t go into the Underworld for, like, a hundred years, so you wait on the Outer Banks.”

  Charlotte realized Zee probably knew most of this and was simply too polite to tell her to shut up already; he’d seemed pretty caught up with the whole Greek myths unit. (And…hey! Wasn’t it funny that Mr. Metos had started with a Greek myths unit? It was like he was trying to prepare them. Which he probably was. Wow…cool.) Anyway, it was reassuring for Charlotte to say it. As if she had some idea what in the heck they were in for. As if.

  It didn’t matter. Zee didn’t seem to be listening anyway. He was off in Zee land again, staring at something that wasn’t there.

  “Hey, um, Charlotte?” he said quietly. But then he pursed his lips and shook his head.
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  Charlotte stared at him. “What?”

  “Well…I’m just wondering…,” he muttered, looking down at his feet. “Do you think we might be able to, you know, find people who have died?”

  “Oh!” she gulped. “I…I don’t know.” She bit her lip and looked at the ground.

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay. So anyway, to the Styx…”

  They walked up a small hill and looked down. A valley stretched before them, long and dark, filled with that strange, glowing fog. Rock formations were everywhere, cliffs rose from the ground, and at the end of the valley, just beyond the cliffs, they could see the river. Which seemed to be, by the way, steaming.

  And there was nothing else. Just…nothing.

  “Shouldn’t there be, you know…” Zee trailed off.

  “People?” Charlotte said. Yes, there should be. People…or whatever they were now. She hadn’t known what to expect in the Underworld, but she certainly didn’t think it would be empty.

  “Maybe they’re all…somewhere else,” Zee said weakly.

  “Yeah,” agreed Charlotte, gulping. Not that she actually wanted to encounter any Dead, now or in the rest of her life, but she’d at least like to know where they all were.

  Slowly they began to climb down the rocky hill. Charlotte gasped as her foot hit a small rock and she started to skid. Then Zee reached out and grabbed her arm before she fell down completely.

  “Thanks,” she muttered.

  “We better be…”

  Zee stopped. He was staring at something just beyond, looking as if he had seen a…well, you know. Charlotte turned. Just ahead of them hovered a bright, ghost-like form, and before Charlotte could really process that, another appeared before them. And then another. And then another. The cousins stood, wide-eyed and trembling.

  “I guess those are the Dead,” Charlotte said, nearly inaudibly.

  “I guess so.”

  And then the cousins realized that these ghosts were everywhere, had been everywhere the entire time—what they had thought was fog was a great mass of Dead. Charlotte and Zee were surrounded. Hundreds, thousands, of ghosts floated about. They were indistinct, faceless, like shadows without a body—but these shadows were made not of darkness, but of an eerie, pale kind of light. Charlotte felt tears rise to her eyes, chills wracked her body, and somehow despite herself she could not help but feel that there was something oddly beautiful about them, these creatures of light illuminating this dark, dark place.