Shadow Walkers (3 page)

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. It 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.

This wasn’t working.

I tried it again from the top—the long, deep breaths, imagining the stress flowing from my body.

It didn’t work the second time either.

Astral projection wasn’t real, just like I’d known it wouldn’t be.

———

The next morning, I actually sat down at my computer and turned it on before I remembered the punishment my grandparents had given me. To their credit, they hadn’t made me move my computer into their bedroom or anything.

Then I remembered what they’d said about taking the thing away for good if I got caught doing anything else wrong, and it was all I could do to not yank the plug right out of the wall.

When the computer was off again, I realized I had the exact same problem I’d had the night before.

What am I going to do without a computer for a whole week?

I had breakfast and even washed my dishes. That took twenty minutes.

I took a shower and got dressed. That took another twenty minutes.

I cleaned the dead bugs out of the fixture on my ceiling—and took a broom and brushed out the cobwebs in the corners too. That took about fifteen minutes.

When I was done with all that, it wasn’t even ten in the morning yet. How was I going to spend the rest of my day?

My grandparents had specifically forbidden me from using my computer, but they hadn’t said anything at all about
another
computer. But my options were limited on a place like Hinder Island. I didn’t have any real island friends. And while there was computer access at the island’s public library, they were only open a couple days a week—and not for three more days. Plus, they limited the amount of time you could be on because there were usually other people waiting.

I went out onto the front porch. My grandparents were in the garage shellacking a bureau, and Gilbert and Billy were across the street chasing grasshoppers. They were two blond streaks tearing around the yard.

“Hey, Zach!” Gilbert called to me. “Come play with us!”

Once again I was so desperate I almost considered joining them. Then I remembered the island’s Internet café. It was more like a couple of ancient computers-for-hire in the back of Hole in the Wall, the town’s lone coffee bar, but hey, it’d do the job.

———

The town of Hinder was located in the middle of the island. It wasn’t far from our house—
nowhere
was far from anywhere else on the island. I rode my bike there and stored it in this wooden rack just outside the town center. There was no need to lock it up—no one ever locked up anything on the island, not bikes, not cars, not houses.

Hinder wasn’t much: a few dozen houses surrounding a weird mix of businesses, some that catered to islanders, like the hardware and grocery stores, and some that relied mostly on the weekend tourists. You could tell which were the businesses that catered to the islanders, because they were the ones that didn’t ever repaint or repair their signs, if they even bothered having a sign at all.

As I turned away from my bike, I found myself facing the open garage of one of the houses on the main road leading into town. Matt Harken—Wounded Wolf—was inside, working on some project. It looked like he was carving a canoe out of an actual log—alone, of course. I’d known he lived in that house, but I’d never actually seen him outside before.

He hadn’t noticed me, but I felt myself flush red anyway. After he’d caught me ogling him on the beach out at Trumble Point, the last thing in the world I wanted was to talk to him.

Okay, I take that back. I
did
want to talk to him. That was the whole point of the fake online name and my documenting his every move. I
desperately
wanted to talk to him.

Hadn’t I always said that out of all the guys on the island, he seemed the one that I had a shot with? I mean, he was carving a canoe out of a log! If I didn’t talk to him, I’d never know for sure if we had any kind of connection. It’s not like I had to ask him out on a date. I just wanted to introduce myself, chat a bit, and see if there was any spark—find out if there was any chance he was like me. And since I was going to be offline for a whole week, there was no better time than now to finally do it.

Weirdly, taking the idea seriously finally made my face stop turning red. I took a deep breath.

I was going to do it. I was finally going to talk to Matt.