Shadowshaper (14 page)

The B52 bus was taking forever, but there was still really no quick way to get to certain parts of Bed-Stuy. “Just wait till they get a couple more bakeries and boutiques stuffed in here,” Bennie said as they started and then ground to a stop for the four hundredth time. “New train stations’ll be poppin’ up real quick.”

“True story,” Izzy said.

“What you talking ’bout, Izzy?” Tee said. “All you do is sit around in those bakeries and write poetry.”

Izzy looked truly offended. “That’s not the point, jackass!”

Big Jerome rolled his eyes. “Here we go. They been like this since school got out.”

“The hell we have!” Izzy and Tee said together.

Sierra was in no mood for the banter. She watched Brooklyn pass as the achingly slow city bus lurched ahead. The past three days replayed over and over in her mind, but nothing made any more sense than it had before. She couldn’t get rid of the feeling that Manny was in serious trouble and it was somehow her fault.

“You alright, Sierra?” Bennie said quietly. Sierra nodded, but her friend’s face was suddenly elsewhere. Then she realized: They were passing Vincent’s mural.

Bennie looked like the wind had just been knocked out of her. “You can barely even see it anymore,” she said under her breath. Sierra took Bennie’s hand in hers and squeezed.

“It’s back here, ain’t it?” Jerome called.

They were standing outside a broken-down church. It looked as if it’d been hit by a couple of hurricanes and left for dead. Weeds posed grotesquely in the side yard. Jerome had ventured through the fence and was peering around back, but everyone else waited safely on the curb.

Jerome came back to the group. “Manny’s spot is around the other side and down some stairs to the basement, if I remember right.”

“When were you here?” Tee asked.

“Mr. Draley took us here to see the
Searchlight
offices on one of those get-to-know-your-neighborhood trips in the sixth grade. But they coordinated wrong and Manny was out making a run, so we never got to see the printing press or nothing.”

“Nice.”

“You see the entrance back there?” Sierra asked.

“I think so. C’mon.”

The four girls followed Jerome gingerly into the side yard. There was no way to walk without the icky weeds brushing up against you like greasy old men in the street, so Sierra just gritted her teeth and kept moving.

“God,” Izzy said, “imagine the rats that must hang out here.”

“You’re always so grim,” Tee said.

“They probably play dominos and whatnot too.”

Sierra was about to shush them, but then they rounded the corner and everyone got quiet and serious.

“This don’t look good,” Bennie said.

The trapdoor entranceway to the basement was wide open. Cement stairs led into the darkness.

“Not like him to leave it open, I suppose,” Sierra said.

“Maybe he went for some coffee and forgot to close it,” Jerome tried.

Sierra braced herself and then stepped forward. “I’m going in.”

“You’re crazy,” Izzy said.

“I’m going in too,” Bennie said.

“You’re both crazy.”

Tee frowned. “Ugh. Me too. I hate you guys.”

Izzy sighed loudly. “Fine,” she said, taking Jerome’s tan hand in her small brown one. “But I’m taking the big guy with me. C’mon, Jerome.”

Once Sierra went down the first few steps, the darkness surrounded her completely. She pawed blindly at the wall inside the doorway but found no switches. “Cell phones out, people,” she said, flipping open her own. The dim blue glow didn’t do much, but at least she knew there weren’t any walls in front of her as she moved deeper into the space. Izzy cursed as she tripped over some debris at the bottom of the stairs.

“Can you make anything out?” Bennie said from just beside her. Sierra could see her little phone light dancing through the darkness.

“Nope.” Sierra reached out a hand and touched a cool brick pillar. Lava-lamp color splotches spun in the darkness around her and gradually faded as her eyes adjusted to the dark. Every tick and tremble was a towering throng haint lying in wait. For all she knew, they were surrounded by the things.

Sierra thought she heard something scraping along the ceiling and stopped walking. At first, there was nothing. Then it came again: a raspy exhalation. After a pause came another breath.
Something is down here.
The breathing continued, sickly and uneven, but Sierra couldn’t pinpoint where it came from. She swung her phone around in front of her, but there was only darkness. “You guys hear that?”

“Aw, c’mon, Sierra!” Izzy whined. “Don’t be that jerk.”

“I’m not!” Sierra tried to keep her voice from getting all high-pitched. “I just … you really didn’t hear anything?” Had she made it up? For a second, there were no noises at all. Then it came again: a horrible rattling breath. The same one she’d heard the night before in Flatbush. It was all around her.

“Ahhh!” Bennie yelled.

“What happened?” Jerome called from behind them.

“I’m alright,” Bennie said. “Just stubbed my toe on something.”

Sierra stepped carefully toward Bennie and then watched her friend’s phone light illuminate the ancient, rusty gears of Manny’s printing press. “The dude do it old-school style for sho’,” Bennie said. Its great metal arms stretched into the darkness, and the silver turning rod shone with the ghostly reflections of the phone’s glow.

“You guys,” Izzy whimpered, “I don’t like this at all.”

“Neither do we, dodo,” Tee said. “But we gotta find out what’s going on. Something ain’t right here.”

Sierra couldn’t hear the breathing any more. She inched along past the printing press, keeping one hand on it to steady herself. Her left foot bumped something just as her phone light decided to blink off. She clicked one of the buttons and swung the blue glow down to the ground to see what she’d hit. It was a boot. In her surprise she toppled forward, dropping her phone, and landed on something a few feet above the ground. It felt like a man’s fleshy belly.

“Oh my God!” Sierra yelled, scrambling madly away from the hideous cold flesh. Footsteps came toward her from all around.

“What happened?” Bennie yelled.

“Where are you guys?” Izzy said. “What’s going on?”

Sierra flailed along the ground till she found her phone. “I’m okay, but someone’s here. I think it’s Manny.” All she wanted to do was run as fast as possible out of that basement and far away, but she had to know what was going on. She raised her glowing cell phone in front of her.

It was Manny, sitting up in a chair, his mouth twisted open in terror, his eyes staring emptily into the darkness. Sierra gasped. Then Bennie was beside her, grabbing her arm, sobbing silently.

“Guys!” Jerome called from across the room. “I think I found the” — bright fluorescent lights blinked on along the ceiling, making everyone squint — “light switch.”

Izzy screamed at the sight of Manny. Then Tee turned around and started screaming too. Jerome ran past them toward Sierra and Bennie. “Oh my God,” he said, gazing over the bloated, sprawled-out body.

Manny was in an old-fashioned barber’s chair, the one folks said he sat in to brainstorm the next issue of his paper. His guayabera hung open, splayed to either side of his gigantic belly. His big arms hung limply at his sides. Sierra had seen dead bodies before, had been to more than her fair share of open-casket funerals, but this was something entirely different. His body looked as lifeless as the chair he was slouched in — an empty vessel.

But it was Manny’s pale face that really got to Sierra. His mouth seemed inhumanly huge, like his jaw had twisted itself out of place to allow for a wider expression of fear.

Izzy was crying. Tee wrapped an arm around her girlfriend’s shoulder and sniffled quietly. Jerome stood completely still, as if any movement might make everything suddenly even worse.

“We gotta get outta here,” Bennie said, her voice shaking. “Whatever it was did this might still be around.”

Sierra nodded, but it didn’t seem right, just leaving Manny like that. She had known Manny practically her whole life — they all had — and now he was just a heap of lifeless flesh and bones slumped in a barber’s chair. All around them, the image of the Domino King grinned out of shiny, scribbled-on photographs with various celebrities and back-in-the-day civil rights leaders. Stacks and stacks of old copies of the
Searchlight
were scattered haphazardly around the giant metal printing press.

“Sierra,” Bennie said, from what seemed like miles away.

It was those eyes, those unseeing, terror-stricken eyes, fixed on the ceiling. Without thinking about it, Sierra reached over and closed his lids.

Manny groaned.

Sierra stumbled backward as all five teenagers screamed at the same time. He’d barely moved — just the slightest twitch swimming across his tormented face — but the sound had unmistakably come from him.

“He’s not … dead?” Sierra gasped. She wasn’t sure whether to turn and run or try to help him. She took a step closer to Manny.

“Sierra, what are you doing?” Izzy said. “Let’s get out of here!”

“But …”

“SIERRA!”
Manny gasped. Except it wasn’t Manny’s voice, it was the hideous cacophony of voices from the throng haint.

Panic swept over the group. They dashed up the cement stairs and out into the dimming afternoon light, then bolted across the street.

“What … was that? What the hell was that?” Izzy kept sobbing.

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” Tee moaned. “What’s going on, Sierra?”

“I don’t know, but we can’t leave Manny there, you guys. He’s still alive! Even if he’s … whatever he is.”

“You gonna go back in?” Bennie demanded.

Sierra glanced warily at the vacant lot and dilapidated church. “No. We gonna get someone else to do it.”

Fifteen minutes later, Sierra and Bennie strolled back around the corner, trying to act as casual as possible. Police cars and ambulances filled the street, their angry red lights pulsating against the brick buildings.

“What happened?” Bennie asked an ornery-looking paramedic with a potbelly and salt-and-pepper mustache.

“Nothin’,” he grunted, tossing his equipment into the back of his truck. “Another prank call. Stupid kids.”

“What do you mean
nothing
?” Sierra demanded.

“I mean” — the medic lit a cigarette and glared at her — “some kids called up and said there’s a dead guy in the basement. But there ain’t. So nothing. Nada.”

“Are you sure? Did you check the whole place?”

“Who do you think you are, kid?” the medic growled. “You made the call? Huh? You know it’s illegal to prank call 911, right? Lemme see if I can get one of the cops to come and have a word with you.”

As if on cue, a police officer walked out of the basement. He was young, with startling blue eyes and a severe frown. “What’s the problem?”

Bennie grabbed Sierra’s wrist. “Sierra, come on!”

They fast-walked around the corner. When they made it out of earshot, Sierra threw her hands up in exasperation. “It doesn’t make sense! You think Manny could’ve walked away in the state he was in?”

“I don’t know,” Bennie said, gazing back toward the flashing police lights.

They rejoined the rest of their group in a small park and told them what happened. The late afternoon turned to gray dusk around them as Brooklyn settled into another summer night.

“What do you mean, he wasn’t there?” Izzy demanded. Tee put a calming hand on her girlfriend’s shoulder.

“I mean,” Sierra said, “for the fifteenth time, that’s what the angry EMT guy said. And then some young-ass cop started looking a little too interested in us and we split. What else can I tell you?”

Izzy stood up and paced a small circle around them. “It’s not like he could just stroll off! He was, like, ninety-eight percent dead!”

“True,” Sierra said. The trees around them rustled, and she had to squint to make sure no shadows were loping out toward them. She looked around at her friends’ worried expressions. The smudged faces in the photograph. The shadowshapers. Sierra looked at her hand. Wick had figured out she was a shadowshaper before she’d even known.

“What are we gonna do?” Izzy moaned.

Wick had sent corpuscules after Sierra and Robbie, and they’d failed. He would probably try a shadowshaper he’d be more likely to catch next — someone who wasn’t aware of the danger….
Perhaps a new generation of shadowshapers that must be looked into …
, Wick had written.

Sierra stood up suddenly.

“What is it?” Bennie asked.

“Juan!” Sierra threw her shoulder bag on and started heading for the bus stop. “I gotta warn him. Y’all coming?”