The Shadow Men (16 page)

Across the street from the bar was a small park, lit now by streetlights and apparently deserted this late at night. Perhaps shadows moved within the shadows, but Jim could not see, nor did he care. His own safety was not the priority. There were benched tables outside the bar, chained to metal hooks in the pub’s front wall so that they didn’t walk at night, and even at this late hour lights shone inside. They exited the taxi and Trix paid the cabbie—still dollars, thankfully, and Lincoln was no stranger to him—and Jim could tell that the bar was all but empty. There was faint music playing somewhere in the background, but the usual hubbub of voices was absent, and there was a sense that this place was about to go to sleep for the night. It was a strange way to view it, and disconcerting, but he looked up at the façade and saw tired windows reflecting streetlights; the double doors were a closed mouth, and the building gave the sense that it was something with knowledge and wisdom.

The cab drifted along the street, its engine sounds echoing from silent buildings, and then they were alone.

“Is this one going to be as weird as the old woman?” Jim asked.

“Who knows? What’s the name again?”

“Peter O’Brien.” Jim looked at the envelope in his hand, the messy lettering, and something ran a cool finger down his back. The hair on his arms bristled, and his senses suddenly became clear and sharp, flooding him with input: the scent of damp soil from the park and spilled beer from the sidewalk, the night sounds of doors closing and car engines ticking as they cooled, the kiss of fine rain against his skin. As he turned around to look across the street at whatever was watching them, Trix was already doing the same.

“It’s just the darkness,” he said, staring past the street lamps and trying to penetrate the small park. There was a bandstand at its center and a network of pale paths crissing and crossing, and here and there planting beds exploded with the silhouettes of shrubs and small trees.

“No,” she said, “not just the darkness.”

“Bums, then. Lonely lovers. Drunk teens fucking.” But he knew that none of these was true, either. Whoever or whatever watched from over there was more connected to their journey than that. He rubbed the envelope between his fingers and wondered what it contained.

Jim heard the bar door open. He turned away from the dark park and took a step back toward the curb, and the shadow that filled the doorway seemed to swallow the weak light emerging from inside the building.

“Already poured your drinks,” the shadow said, and his voice was higher than Jim had expected, and much more welcoming. “It’s not cold, and the rain’s not too bad. But I’ll welcome you in to take shelter from the night.”

Take shelter from the night
. Jim almost asked if he sensed the watcher as well. But that would be no way to greet the Oracle of this Boston. “Peter O’Brien?” he asked, though he already knew the answer.

“That’s me. And you’ll be from out of town.”

Trix actually laughed, an unconscious reaction to such a mundane observation. “You could say that!” she said.

“Hope you like good beer,” O’Brien said. He moved back from the doorway to let them in, and in doing so allowed them to make him out properly for the first time. As Trix stepped into the pub, Jim held back and sized the man up. Smartly dressed in black trousers and shined shoes, a white shirt and black suede waistcoat, he was a barrel of a man, well over two hundred pounds, but he carried the weight well. He was tall and broad, and even before he’d turned a little to fat, Jim knew that he’d been a powerful presence. Yet there was a lightness about him that quelled any unease Jim might normally feel in the company of such a huge stranger. He moved back like a dancer to let them in, graceful and gentle, and his smile lit up his face. His hair was long and tied in a ponytail, and a scruff of graying stubble softened his features more.

“Jim Banks,” Jim said, extending his hand as he entered. For a second he saw a flicker of something on O’Brien’s face—fear? Discomfort? The smile flexed a little, but it returned just as fresh and welcoming as before. He took Jim’s hand and pumped it twice, firm but not too hard. In that touch, Jim felt the warmth of hope.

“Pleased to meet you, Jim.”

“And you. I hope you can help me.”

“Well, I’ll say to you what I say to anyone coming to my bar seeking more than a drink and a pie and a place to rest their feet. I can only do my best.” He closed the door behind them but did not lock it. Jim thought perhaps this bar was open every hour of every day, but not always for drinks.

O’Brien showed them to a table in the corner. A candle burned in the mouth of an empty wine bottle, spilling hot wax down the green glass, and three recently pulled pints sat before the chairs. Three chairs. The table was large enough to seat six, at least.

“You knew we were coming,” Trix said.

“Not you specifically,” O’Brien said. “Just someone.”

“We know who you are,” Jim said. “And what. And we were sent here by someone like you.”

O’Brien raised his eyebrows. Then he held up a hand and nodded at their chairs. The three of them sat, and the process felt almost ceremonial to Jim, a thought given more gravity by O’Brien’s nimble manner. He placed both hands flat on the table and seated himself comfortably, spine straight, shoulders loose, before picking up his pint and taking a long draft. He smacked his lips and nodded gently. “Nectar of angels,” he said.

“What’s the brew?” Trix asked.

“My own. I’ve a microbrewery in the basement. I call it Old Bastard.”

Jim took his first swig. The taste exploded, the alcohol evident but not overpowering, and he felt the rush of its influence spreading through his body. “Certainly well named. And delicious.”

“A bartending Oracle,” Trix said softly. She was looking at O’Brien with a mix of fascination and wonder.

“Who better to have their fingers on the pulse of a city?” O’Brien said. He took another long drink, swallowing half of his pint in one go, and looking back and forth between them over the edge of the glass. He wiped his mouth and placed the glass gently back on the table.

“So, you’re from elsewhere,” he said. “That much I know, and I’ve known it for the last hour. Kicked out the last of my patrons. Pretended I was closing early, when sometimes I don’t close at all. ’Cause I figured you’d be along. Sometimes …” He looked at the window and sniffed softly.

“You can smell trouble?” Jim asked.

“Is that what you two are, then? Trouble?”

“No,” Trix said, shaking her head.

“No,” Jim confirmed. He placed the envelope on the table, keeping one finger on it. “We’re partly messengers, but mainly …” He felt tears threatening, as the weight of events pressed down on him. Sitting here in this ordinary bar with this extraordinary man, he felt control slipping away. By coming through and beginning his search for Jenny and Holly, he had been taking positive action. But now he was about to place himself in the hands of another once again, and he wasn’t sure quite what he thought about that.

The only person he knew he could trust for sure was Trix.

“We’re looking for Jim’s wife and daughter,” Trix said. “They’ve been pulled through from our own Boston into another. Maybe this one.”

“Yeah,” O’Brien said. He looked back and forth between Jim and Trix, his expression unreadable, eyes twinkling with humor or, perhaps, disbelief. He crossed his arms and sighed heavily, but it was merely the action of a tired man. “And you’re Uniques. The both of you. Friends.”

He knows
, Jim thought.

O’Brien looked at Trix, seeming to see deeper than mere flesh and skin. “
Good
friends. And that”—he nodded down at the envelope, which Jim had placed facedown on the tabletop—“that’ll be for me.”

“From your counterpart in
our
Boston,” Jim said.

O’Brien nodded thoughtfully, drinking the rest of his pint and putting down the glass so gently that it made no sound. He stretched and looked around the bar, glanced at his watch, then focused his attention back on Jim and Trix. “It’s been a long day,” he said. “You look tired, both of you. And it’s been a long day for me, too, what with …” He waved one hand, and Jim wondered what wonders O’Brien had performed today, what problems he had solved and lost things he had found. “A couple of hours’ sleep will do wonders for us all, and come sunrise I’ll be better able to help you.”

“You can’t help us now?” Jim asked.

“I could,” O’Brien said. “I could start. But I can’t just”—he clicked his fingers—“out of thin air. I need to talk to you about them. In depth, personally, and a lot of it will be about you as much as them. I need to understand your link to them in order to grab hold of it and pull them in. I need to
know
them so that I can find them. A name’s nothing to me without knowledge of who that name belongs to, and it might not be so easy for you, tired as you are. Maybe your Oracle’s better at this sort of thing. You understand?”

“Not really,” Jim said.

“I do,” Trix said, smiling, and Jim thought of her story about her grandfather.

“But—”

“A few hours,” O’Brien said. “There’s a room made up on the second floor, bathroom attached. It’s a double, but …” He raised one eyebrow.

“That’s fine,” Trix said, smiling.

“I thought it would be.” O’Brien leaned forward and used one finger to pull the envelope from beneath Jim’s hand. For a second Jim wanted to press down, hold it back, but he was not sure why. Insurance? Fear? Or maybe there was no reason at all. O’Brien dragged the envelope across the table to him—it whispered, like a voice in the dark—turned it over, and looked at the writing on the front without expression.

“You’ll wake us?” Jim asked.

“Sure. You’ll hear me.” O’Brien looked up from the envelope. “And Jim … Don’t worry. We’ll find your family, for sure.”

Jim nodded, unable to talk because the tears were a pressure behind his eyes once again. He and Trix stood, and he realized how right O’Brien had been. He was exhausted. A couple of hours’ sleep would take the edge off his exhaustion, and then tomorrow … tomorrow, he would find his wife and daughter.

“Come on,” Trix said, grabbing Jim’s arm and steering him toward the door O’Brien had pointed out behind the bar.

“Sleep well!” the Oracle called.

As they walked up the curving stairway, Jim heard the sound of paper tearing. And then he heard O’Brien speak again, cursing under his breath. “Oh, you bitch,” Peter O’Brien said, anger and resignation in his voice.

What could Veronica have written?
Jim wondered. But silence followed, and Jim continued up toward what he hoped would be a moment’s peace.

The Worst Day Since Yesterday

T
RIX PADDED
down the corridor of Peter O’Brien’s apartment in her bare feet, exhausted but still alert. Her skin prickled with awareness of her dislocation. In college it had not been that unusual for her and Jenny to end up sleeping on sofas and in guest rooms after parties off-campus or even across town. But she was an adult now, and she could not relax in a stranger’s home. Knowing that the city around her was foreign to her, that she was an intruder here, only made it worse.

She opened the door to the guest bedroom, the hinges creaking, and stepped inside. Jim glanced up as she closed the door behind her. He sat in a captain’s chair by the window, sketching with a pencil he had found in a small drawer in the girl’s vanity in the corner. O’Brien might call this a guest room, but it had obviously once been occupied by a young female, and he hadn’t changed the décor enough to make it suitably neutral for a guest room.

“Jim,” Trix said.

His only answer was the
scritch-scratch
of his pencil on the notepad he’d found in the same drawer.

Trix sighed and unzipped her pants, wriggling out of them and letting them puddle at her feet. She moved to the big queen bed, pushed a bunch of throw pillows onto the floor, and drew back the slightly dusty floral spread before sliding in, clad just in her T-shirt and panties.

Jim hadn’t even looked up.

“Mr. Banks,” she said. “Earth to Jim.”

That got him. He glanced at her, then looked out the window at the cityscape he had been sketching. “Don’t you mean parallel Earth to Jim?”

Trix shivered. “This is fucked, right?”

Jim nodded. “Entirely.” He put the pad down without even glancing at the art he had been trying to create, then stood up and started to wander the room, not quite pacing. He sighed in frustration. “I mean, what are we doing here?” he said, more to the beamed ceiling than to Trix, or so it seemed to her.

“Taking the most direct approach,” Trix replied.

Jim had his fingers pushed into his hair, like he might at any moment attempt to tear his own scalp off. Now he stopped his roaming to turn to her, looking foolish with his hands planted on his head.

“You think?” he asked hopefully.

Trix lay her head back on the pillow and stared at him. “I’m lying in a stranger’s bed in a parallel freaking dimension. Yes, I’m totally burned out and I need a rest. Half an hour of shut-eye might be enough to save my sanity. But do you really think I’d be lying here in my undies if I thought for a second that Peter O’Brien wasn’t our best bet, our fastest road to Jenny and Holly?”

Jim exhaled loudly and dropped his hands. He came to sit on the side of the bed and took her hand. “If I didn’t have you with me, I’d already have totally lost it. I mean … if we hadn’t caught up with each other—”

“—we’d both still be thinking we were going crazy, and that maybe there had never been a Jenny to begin with.”

Jim nodded. “I keep thinking we should have looked longer. I know they had hours on us, and they could be anywhere, but she would’ve tried the familiar places first, and we didn’t cover all of them. We should’ve gone to her parents’ restaurant.”

“She’d have figured out something was badly amiss,” Trix said. “Felt something wrong. Maybe she saw something that scared her
away
from familiar places.”

“But your place? She would have gone looking for you.”

“And she wouldn’t have found me. The odds of us finding her and Holly standing on the sidewalk in front of my building when we got there are about a kabillion to one.” Trix tugged his hand a little, forcing him to meet her gaze. “You heard what Mr. O’Brien said. He’s going to find them. But there are preparations to be made, and one of those is for us to rest a little so we can focus.”

“You think I can sleep?”

Trix cocked her head. “You think
I
can? Listen, we’ll go crazy if we just pace the room while we’re waiting for our Irish Oracle friend to get his shit together. It’s not doing Jenny and Holly any good. Just lie down with me for a little while. Rest your eyes. Seriously. It’s dusty, but it feels good to lie down.”

Still, Jim seemed reluctant.

“Show me what you were sketching,” Trix said, pointing at the notepad he’d left on his chair.

Finally, given a task to perform, Jim seemed to step back from the frantic edge he had been teetering on. He snatched up the pad and brought it to her, sitting on the edge of the mattress.

Trix stared at the shaded pencil drawing of the view from that window, the row houses across the street from O’Brien’s Bar and the taller buildings in the distance, the church steeples, the old stone contrasting strangely with the sleekly modern buildings that the Irish-influenced Boston must have built only in the past decade or two.

Jim kicked off his shoes and slid into bed beside her, sighing as he propped himself up on his elbow to study the drawing with her. “Look familiar?” he asked.

Trix tried to ignore the cold knot forming in her stomach. “You know it does.”

She had dreamed this city dozens of times. In her disturbed dreams, she had walked its dark streets. If she went out right now, she thought she might be able to find her way almost anywhere without a map or directions. Those strange journeys had always felt like more to her, as though she had actually traveled, truly explored the intimidating city and learned its secret ways and corners.

“To me, too,” Jim said.

Though his dreams were never as clear or memorable as hers, Jim had done his own sleepwalking, taken journeys to this Irish-hued Boston, as well as another. Now, though, he didn’t need to paint from the memories of dreams.

Trix stared at the sketch. “Crazy.”

“Yeah,” Jim agreed.

Trix set the pad on the nightstand and slid farther under the bedclothes, nestling her head on the soft pillow. “Rest,” she said.

“What do we have, an hour or so before O’Brien said he’d come get us?”

“About that.”

Relenting at last, Jim put his head on the pillow, but he lay on his back and stared at the ceiling. Trix scooted closer to him and put a hand on his chest, closing her eyes, exhaustion a blanket wrapped warmly around her. Fear and hope chased each other’s tails in the back of her mind, but she tried to block them out.

“Do you think—” Jim began.

“Hush,” Trix said. “Rest. We’ll find them. I promise.”

That seemed to mollify him, if only for the moment. She felt him take a deep breath, and when he exhaled he seemed to relax somewhat. The window was open and a cool breeze drifted through, rustling the curtains and carrying the sounds of distant engines. The Banks clan were like a family to her. Holly might as well have been her niece. Trix and Jim were in this together. Lying there with him, she felt closer to him than she ever had before. She could feel his heart pounding in his chest as he tried to calm himself.

“Not exactly the member of the family I would’ve thought I’d end up sleeping with,” Trix mumbled into her pillow.

Jim laughed softly, then a little louder, and then he leaned over to kiss her forehead and pulled her closer. Sharing their warmth—and their hope and fear—they lay together and began to surrender to weariness.

Trix glanced over at the night-darkened window. Somewhere out there, in this foreign Boston, Jenny and Holly were scared and alone. Or were they? The one thing she and Jim had not yet discussed was the possibility that his girls weren’t in this Boston at all, but in the other—the third, Brahmin Boston. Trix couldn’t even consider it. They were here. They had to be, because though Veronica had shown them the trick to seeing the thin places between cities, she wasn’t sure they would really be able to cross over when the need arose.

We’re coming
, Trix thought, her cheek resting on Jim’s chest.
Help is on the way
.

As sleep claimed her, she smiled sadly at the irony.

Jim woke to the sound of shattering glass. The room seemed to tilt for a moment as he battled the dislocation of waking in a strange place. He looked around wildly, saw that the windows were intact, the door still closed, nothing at all out of the ordinary except that he was in a strange bed in a strange room with a half-naked lesbian who happened to be one of his dearest friends.

“What just happened?” Trix murmured sleepily, propping herself up.

Jim shook his head, wondering the same thing. If it had woken her as well, then it hadn’t been a dream, which meant the sound had come from nearby. Outside? Maybe. Downstairs? Also maybe.

He crawled out of bed, gesturing for her to remain, and to be quiet.

“Fuck that,” Trix whispered. Of course she did. It was Trix. Jim should have known better.

As he slipped his shoes on and Trix dragged on her pants, they heard a muffled shout coming from the bar downstairs. O’Brien’s voice, raised in fury. A pounding noise began, like the fist of God knocking on the front door, and the whole building shook in time to that awful rhythm. A crack appeared in the wall, running from the upper edge of the door frame to the corner of the room.

“What the hell is that?” Jim whispered, not sure if Trix would hear him over the noise—not really sure if he was even talking to her.

Trix had one shoe on and the other one in her right hand as she hurried past him to the door.

“Wait,” Jim said.

“For what?” Trix asked, spinning on him, eyes wide with fear.

More glass shattered downstairs, and Jim pictured the shelves of hard liquor behind the bar being smashed to the floor. There’d been a big mirror there as well. He glanced at the window, wishing there was a fire escape out there so they could go down and survey the fracas from outside.

“Weapons,” he said. “We’re not going down there empty-handed.”

Trix put on her other shoe. “There’s an iron on the top shelf in the bathroom.”

Jim picked up the heavy crystal lamp from the bedside table, pulled off the shade, and yanked the cord out of the wall. He glanced at Trix and nodded for her to go ahead, and she turned the knob and swung the door inward.

Out in the corridor, Jim went for the door that led downstairs to the bar. Trix raced into the bathroom and emerged holding the iron Peter O’Brien had probably used for years to take the wrinkles out of his clothes. It seemed all too mundane a detail to exist in the same reality as the shouting and the noises of destruction from below.

A roar of pain rose from the bar, becoming a scream. The pounding stopped in a violent splintering of wood, and Peter O’Brien’s voice fell silent.

Trix slipped up beside Jim, reaching out to stop him from opening the door. “What the hell are we doing?” she whispered.

She didn’t need to explain. Jim wondered the same thing. From the sound of it, whatever was going on downstairs wasn’t some simple bar fight.

“He’s our best chance of finding them!” Jim whispered back.

Trix nervously licked her lips, then nodded.

Jim tore the door open and burst through it, running down the stairs, wielding the crystal lamp like a club. Trix came right behind him. He had a moment to wonder if she was thinking what he was thinking—that they were batshit crazy, that these were piss-poor weapons—and then the silence in the bar was broken by a human voice. It might have been O’Brien’s, but the big Irishman sounded very small now. “Don’t,” the voice pleaded. “You’ll destroy it all.”

As they hit the curve in the stairwell, the words were punctuated with a terrible crash. Jim leaped the last few steps—there was no door, only an archway leading into the bar—and as he stepped into O’Brien’s, music started to play. Flogging Molly’s “Cruel Mistress.” He knew it well.

“Jesus,” Trix whispered as she stepped into the bar behind him.

The place was a ruin of overturned tables, broken chairs, and shattered glass, but Jim only got a glimpse of the wreckage—and the blood on the brass bar rail—before he noticed something shift near the huge square saw-toothed space where the plate-glass front window had once been. A figure stood amid the shattered glass, the puzzle of partially painted fragments that had once spelled out
O’BRIEN’S
in green and gold among them. Taller than a man, it was nevertheless shaped like one. A silver shadow, it seemed to have simply appeared there, standing atop the debris.

No. It was there
, he thought.
You just didn’t see it at first
.

“What are they?” Trix asked, her voice a fearful rasp.

Jim blinked, and he saw that she was right. Beyond the demolished front of the bar, two more of the wraiths stood out in the street, faceless silhouettes who seemed somehow still to be looking at him and Trix. Shadows fell upon the smooth slopes of their faces, suggesting eyes and mouth where there were none, only minor ridges that hinted at noses. They were the memories of men, all personality torn away.

Fear clenched at his gut, but Jim took two steps toward the thing still inside the bar, feeling the weight of the crystal lamp in his hand. “Who the hell are you?” he asked, though he thought that Trix’s
what
was indeed a better question.