Chasing Shadow (Shadow Puppeteer) (4 page)

The patrol ship blared into view, moving much faster than we could. It rammed into our boat, shaking it with such force that the wood cracked on impact. Water rushed through the hole, drenching Starr and me first before filling the boat.

Someone was crying, or maybe everyone was crying. I was too cold to focus on anything other than the pin and needle prickling of my skin. The larger ship zoomed in again, ramming us so hard that the tip of the boat crumbled and started to sink.

Within a blink, I was submerged in the water. My muscles froze, making it impossible to wade. The bleakness of the situation was instant, left over from the residue of the drowning captain. I couldn’t save him and now I was destined to his fate.

There were shouts around me, but my lungs couldn’t seize enough air to call out. The ocean was pulling me down. I felt it first in my feet as the heaviness crawled up the length of my legs into my torso and arms.

For one tiny second, with the searchlights glaring off the top of the water and fog, I thought I saw ghostly pale fingers reaching for my face. I pressed my eyes shut, but I didn’t have the strength to open them again. The chill was so deep inside, pulling me down.

The spasm in my chest forced water into my lungs. I choked, but that only pulled more water in. I couldn’t die like this. I refused. It felt like my skin was ripping straight from the core as I forced myself to swim upward. The searchlights went dark, leaving the surface as black as its depth.

I didn’t want to be in the darkness. In my mind’s eye, I could picture the captain swimming up from his new grave to latch onto my ankles and pull me down. At this rate, I was going to drown without the extra effort. I was losing faith that I’d reach the top, but my will gave me the strength to breach the surface.

Salt water burned my throat and nose with every violent cough. Breathing was made difficult with the divided effort of keeping my head above the waves.

The patrol ship was gone and the sirens were once again distant. Did they fish everyone else out of the water? I couldn’t keep wading like this. I needed to find the shore.

My jaw was its own motor, trembling so hard that my teeth clashed together. Any minute, hypothermia would kick in and all my effort would be for naught. Through the gray fog, dim lights twinkled, but I couldn’t tell if that was the Ardent shoreline or the asylum.

It was too difficult staying afloat. My lethargy was getting worse. There were stars in the blackness that was hedging the edge of my vision and they drifted like I drifted. I was ready to surrender when a hand grabbed my collar and yanked me above the water.

Breathe… Breathe… Breathe… Why was it so difficult to draw air into my lungs? There was a great deal of pressure bearing down on my chest.

The waves rolled me to shore and I managed to crawl out of the water before my muscles gave out. I rolled onto my back, too exhausted to do anything but lay there. The air should feel colder, but I couldn’t feel a thing.

A shadow blocked the light and it took a moment to realize it was Starr standing over me.

“Starr.” I tried to smile, but my teeth wouldn’t stop clattering.

“Patrollers are walking the beach. We need to get out of here,” Starr said.

She was wet, but didn’t look nearly as miserable as I was. With her help, I got to my feet. Every small movement was etched with pain. She was extremely patient while I fought for control over my stiff body. It hurt to creep, though that’s what we did straight into the cover of the forest.

“I think I saw the boatman,” I said.

“You didn’t,” Starr said. I was taken aback by the harshness of that statement. She didn’t look at me, but I could feel her frustration. “He’s way out there towards the asylum and we’re over here on Ardent. You didn’t see him.”

Her venom surprised me. Since we were children, Starr always suggested things existed alongside us, but I checked the library computer for these words like aliens and spirits and never found anything more about it. Only the Daily Dark talked about such things, and who knew who published the Daily Dark. There was no location for them in the paper and no author names were mentioned in the publications.

Our conversation ended as we picked our way through the brush. I tried not to focus on my pain, but it was there. I needed a hot bath to melt the coldness and all the other aches from my body.

“I do believe, you know.” She paused, judging her statement and rephrasing it in her mind. “Something exists out there. I mean something not so human. But when you talk about these things and you look like something dragged you through a grave, it freaks me out.”

The dead Starr flashed in my mind along with the image of that entity feeding on the dancers’ vibrancy. Even for that short time in the fog, I swore I saw the captain reaching for me.

Starr dropped her voice. “Do you remember those books down in your grandma’s basement?”

“She’s not my grandma. We just share a space so she can collect money from the government.”

She probably used the money to fund her organization.

The forest floor crunched under our feet filling the silence. We stopped just within the fold of the trees to stare down at the city. This was the city I knew since I was six. I wasn’t in love with it, but it was comfortable.

“We need to look at those books again,” Starr said.

I didn’t want to think about books. I wanted to sleep and Ms. Sable probably had something I could take to keep the dreams at bay.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said.

“You’re going to school looking like that?”

Starr’s honesty was a little brutal.

“I’ll shower,” I said.

She scuffed and I started down the path towards the city. I was too tired to stand around and take her barbs. It was just Starr.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” she called after me.

Her house was back in the woods where the richer people lived, which left me walking alone. The smallest sound left me jittery. I couldn’t help but picture the dead Starr stalking silently behind me. I really wanted the little flashlight that served as a security blanket for a good portion of my life, but it was back at the rave, along with my purse, sitting on the sink.

The night left me restless. I craved company, hungered for it, obsessed over it. The city was dead. Not a light shined in the homes and a few of the streetlamps flickered out above me. Despite the soreness, I took the last couple blocks at a sprint, openly crossing streets. The risk of getting caught past curfew by a floating camera or patrollers was high.

My neighborhood was a welcoming sight. By the time I made it to the front porch, I was out of breath. I pulled the house key from the little pouch within my skirt and let myself in.

I
leaned into the stream of hot water as it pelted a path against my shoulders and down my back. The pure heat melted the coldness that set in the marrow of my bones, but it didn’t clear the nightmare from my head or the pain from my body. When I closed my eyes, even for a few moments, I saw the dead Starr coming at me with half a jaw and water pouring through its mouth.

I promptly shut the water off, cutting the image from my thoughts. The moment I brought the towel over my head, I thought of the captain’s fingers reaching for me. Despite what Starr said, I know I saw him.

My skin prickled. Guilt churned in my stomach. I spared the mirror one glance, long enough to assess that I looked as bad on the outside as I felt on the inside. If I went to school tomorrow, I’d likely get terrorized by students aiming to find another reason to make fun of me. If I was smart, I’d pack my bags and be gone before Ms. Sable woke up, but I didn’t have enough money to bribe a ship to take me to the mainland without a proper passport.

It was possible to pass from my island to the mainland. As for seeing the rest of the world, that was off limits. Travel was very limited and each country had to abide by the rules. There were a lot of regulations.

Besides, I couldn’t leave without warning Ms. Sable about what I’d done. I was dreading the minute we had to speak.

There was a false wall under the cabinet where Ms. Sable kept a number of medicine bottles. I found it by accident three years ago when I was goofing around. It was illegal having any medical products in one’s residence, but now I knew why they were here. If she went out with the Berserkers, she probably came home with wounds.

I couldn’t find one store that sold cough drops, let alone disinfectants. The most a person could buy at a store was bandages. You had to know someone who sold liquor, cigarettes and medicine if you wanted them and at a very high price.

I grabbed a dark bottle from the cabinet. There were quite a few cuts to pour it on. It stung and bubbled, which left me hopeful that it was disinfecting the many wounds. The scratch on my wrist and the puncture wounds on my hips were the deepest. The skin around the wounds was now black and swollen with pus. I gave one an experimental squeeze and brackish liquid oozed from it. The pain was immense. It probably stank, but with my nose swelling, I couldn’t smell it.

When the sting abated, I used a cotton ball to smear an antibiotic gel over the cut on my left wrist, the knuckles on my right hand, the scratch on my chest and the puncture wounds up my thighs. I’ve been treating myself for so long that this was second nature. I slapped a big bandage on my wrist and wrapped it tight with gauze. Smaller bandages worked perfectly for everything else.

Cleanup was easy. I pushed the bloody cotton balls and bandage wrappings into the trash and slid the medical supplies back into hiding.

A quick peek into the hall proved Ms. Sable hadn’t stirred from her bedroom. I really needed this quiet time to think. I tiptoed back into my bedroom and locked the door, but even in the safety of my room, I was too restless to sleep. The Raver said he was watching our house, but why?

To clear my mind, I toyed with the idea of pulling my guitar from its hiding spot to practice. It cost me three months pay from my part time waitressing job to get it restrung. It was difficult finding someone to buy the strings off of and to restring my guitar without a permit showing I had a right to own the instrument.

Music was another notion World Congress took seriously. They controlled what played on the radios and at concerts. They stopped bands from gathering in the park, but not everything could be monitored. They couldn’t stop the underground from playing their own variations for private parties, like the rave we attended.

The guitar would give me peace, but I was dwelling on Starr’s comment about the basement. Once I got in high school, I completely forgot about the books. If Ms. Sable was part of the Berserkers, it made sense she had unregulated items hidden.

I grabbed two flashlights and stuck them in the wide pockets of my flannel robe. With the third flashlight on, I entered the hall. With my ill luck, I didn’t want to take chances my flashlight bulb would blow, leaving me in the dark down in the basement. I couldn’t handle anything else right now.

There was no light under Sable’s door. Squeaky boards and all, she never exited her room at night when it was obvious that I was sneaking out. We had an understanding. I never bothered her, she never bothered me. Due to this unspoken bargain, I knew very little about the old lady.

The moonlight was strong at the bottom of the stairs coming through the kitchen window. It was the only outside light since the living room was walled up and used as an office. Up until now I was curious why the office door was always locked. Now that I knew she was a Berserker, she probably kept heads in there. I shuddered and pushed the image it conjured to the back of my mind.

I was tempted to turn on a few lights along the way, but I didn’t want to draw old lady Sable down the stairs. The way my night was going, anything was possible. I grabbed the knob, surprised that it wasn’t locked and pulled a second flashlight to combat the darkness. Just for good measure I tried the light switch, but there wasn’t a bulb in the socket when I was a kid and I didn’t expect there to be one now.

I weaved the light back and forth as I descended the stairs to ward off anything else my imagination could summon. The real threat was that people were watching our house and Sable was connected with the Berserkers. Someone was going to get hurt and I was worried that someone would be me.

More boxes were stacked along the wall, but nothing really changed down here. The cobwebs had grown dusty and there were dead bugs, but that was it. I set up all three flashlights so that the light was directed straight at the boxes in question, and then wiped my sweaty palms on my housecoat. The only shadow that stirred down here was my own, but with my pulse elevated, even that made me jittery.

The boxes were neatly stacked and marked in thin letters: family photos. These were the only set of boxes down here that looked perfect. All the other boxes were smashed with things sticking out of them; old wires, lamp shades, purse straps and the likes.

Two boxes were missing from the original eight that Starr and I found. I hoped those weren’t the boxes with the books. My fingers itched to touch these taboo items again. I was older now and understood things on a larger scale. What Abigail Sable kept down here was enough to get her thrown on Xyla or worse, the asylum.

The dusty boxes dried my hands as I set to work pulling them down and opening them up. The movement caused a great deal of pain in my lower back reminding me of how I faired in the earlier fight. Nothing much changed within the boxes, except the interest I now had in them. The first box held clothes that I don’t remember seeing the first time Starr and I came down. It was spooky enough finding what we had.

I pulled out a few of the colorful scarves and wild ankle socks. They were much too colorful and bright to be unregulated clothing. Digging through the box, I found colorful skirts that were far shorter than standard and all sorts of slinky tops. There were even rainbow knee high stockings and six inch heeled boots with chains on the side. I picked a few items that I liked and put them to the side before closing the boxes back up.