Author: Brent Hartinger
Category: Young Adult
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/brent-hartinger/page,10,62698-shadow_walkers.html
It was all too much. One second I’d been slowly drifting on the ethereal breeze across my grandparents’ kitchen, having a heart-to-heart with Emory. The next second I’d been attacked, and my soul was about to be swallowed by some vile shadow creature. I could hear Emory’s muffled screams from outside my helmet of shadows, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying.
I had to fight back. Even now, I sensed a change in the thing, a gathering of purpose. It was shifting even as it clutched my head, starting some kind of weird metamorphosis. I couldn’t see its eyes, those dark, hateful things I’d seen in the garage, but I could somehow feel them—above me, looking down at me, greedy and determined, boring into me. But at the same time, I couldn’t move—like I’d somehow been drugged or anesthetized. I wanted to fight back, but I couldn’t. My mind wanted something, but my astral body wouldn’t or couldn’t react. How was that possible in a place where my mind was my body? Maybe I didn’t want it after all. As I floated there, the will to fight back was dripping off me like sap down the trunk of a pierced maple. After a second, I didn’t even feel the cold chill in my soul anymore.
“Get off me,” I said to the thing on my head, but it was half-hearted at best. I wasn’t sure I had actually even spoken the words.
I reached limply up and tried to grab the thing. It was elusive—trying to touch it was like trying to grab a cloud of smoke. In the end, though, there was definitely something there. It was squishy and slick, like an oily cushion.
It was clutching my head like a starfish about to feast on the tender innards of a clam. There was no way I was going to tear it off, not as tired as I felt.
But as my astral hands fumbled for this evil, alien thing, I happened to brush something unexpected—something small and orb-like near the top of its head. It was much more solid than the rest of its body, hard, like a large marble.
I’d touched one of its eyes. Ironically, while the rest of its body was soft, its eyes were hard—the opposite of a human body. Its eyes had somehow migrated to the top of its head.
But it hadn’t expected me to touch its eye, and doing so meant that I somehow had access to its mind. It was as if, in preparing to invade my mind, the creature had accidentally left its own psyche wide open. And so, just by touching one of its eyes, I found myself slipping deep into the recesses of its mind.
It all happened in an instant—my touch and a resulting flood of what seemed like … memories. As I glimpsed these memories, it was like I transported back into the past—someone else’s past—experiencing it as if for the first time.
———
I am missing a heart. There are only four of them on the bloody table in front of me. How is that possible? Why is it so easy to lose things in this basement? Then again, I did buy the place for the extra space, not to mention the privacy. “Like a dungeon,” the real estate agent had said. If only she knew.
No matter, I think. The missing organ is bound to turn up eventually. In the meantime, there’s still more work to do.
I turn to the man chained to the basement’s far wall. “This may hurt a little,” I say, but I know he can’t hear me over the sound of the chainsaw.
———
I wasn’t disgusted by the memory—not yet anyway—because I was the one experiencing it, not just witnessing it. But at the same time, the part of me that was still me thought, Why does the shadow creature have human memories? And why the memories of some kind of mass murderer?
But even as I thought that, I touched a different, deeper memory inside the mind of the shadow-being, and was suddenly transported to an earlier place and time.
———
I stare at the carnage in the bedroom in front of me. The mattress is a giant sponge; it’s almost completely soaked with blood. I’m reminded again how much of the stuff there is inside the human body. I look down at the bloodless corpses lying atop the bed. It’s always very unsatisfying when my victims don’t struggle, and these two barely let out a scream. They put up far too brave a face.
Perhaps I’ll have better luck with their children, tied up in the chair next to the bed, especially now that they’ve seen what I’ve done to their parents.
———
These were different men, the one who was separating body parts in his basement, and the one who was torturing and killing that family—I knew that for a fact. I just wasn’t sure how the mind of the shadow creature could hold the memories of two different people. Maybe the creature had eaten the souls of both these men and somehow collected both their memories inside itself. If so, both had gotten what they deserved.
Or were these two different people? They’d inhabited different bodies, but somehow they felt the same, as if the shadow creature had lived more than one life. How was that possible?
I’d seen enough. I hadn’t intended to touch the eyes or the mind of this creature in the first place. I’d said before that if being one with the universe meant being connected to this creature, I didn’t want any of part of it, and here I was, connected to it in a more personal, intimate way than I’d ever thought possible. I had literally become it.
I tried to pull my hand away, but I was in too deep. More lives passed before me, each somehow seen from the same set of eyes. I couldn’t stop the memories from coming, one after the other, each one older than the last.
———
I am determined to ignore the pipe organ of the Ferris wheel outside my office window. Then someone screams in the room behind me, and all thoughts of the Ferris wheel are forgotten. My latest victim has finally woken up. I smile as she begins to shriek in panic, as if she somehow instinctively knows that the vault is airtight and she will soon suffocate. Alas, then I’ll have to deal with the sound of that insufferable Ferris wheel again.
———
I stare at the huddle of dark-skinned bodies in the bottom of the pit. They’re clinging to each other in the mud. “Now shoot them all,” I say to the soldiers at my side, and the sergeant pretends to be shocked by his general’s orders. But the lieutenant isn’t shocked; he’s been waiting eagerly for this. The first of the shots ring out. There are those who say that it makes more sense to kill the Indian braves first, so they can’t fight back, but I know better; kill the women and children, and the braves have nothing left to fight for.
———
It’s mid-October, and an early winter has descended on the forest, but I don’t fear the cold. I have the makings of a campfire to keep me warm this night, and a new cache of supplies to see me through the hard months ahead. I light the kindling, and pitch begins to snap and pop in the flames. It lights as quickly as I thought it would, and soon a conflagration illuminates the night. It warms me, but not as much as the screams of the old fool I had tied to the stake in the middle of the blaze.
———
I managed to stop the flood of memories at last. I hadn’t been disgusted by the memories while I had been experiencing them, but now that I’d stopped them, now that I had some distance, a feeling of revulsion washed over me like a cold mist. My grandparents had always been worried about evil in the world, about all the bad things that happened over on the mainland—and only there, they thought. But they had no idea just how evil people could be, what bad things did happen in the world—even on islands, unfortunately.
I hadn’t had any idea either.
And while it was bad enough that I’d had to watch them, I’d also been forced to experience them, to actually be the one who did these terrible things without remorse. It was a different kind of horror, so ghastly that it had even managed to penetrate the dullness that the creature had somehow created in my brain.
“What are you?” I shouted at the shadow creature in my hands.
Suddenly another vision, the earliest memory in a long stream of them, flashed before my eyes. Now I did know exactly what—or, rather, who—the being was, and exactly what it wanted.
The creature chose this moment to fight back.
First, despite having no lids, it somehow closed its eyes. In that instant, I was locked out of its mind.
Then the creature wiggled forward, to the back of my head, out of my awkward, exhausted reach. Once again, the tentacle-like legs gripped me, and its body began to metamorphose again—into what, I wasn’t sure, but it was clearly intent on consuming the soul it had been so close to winning before.
At least I could see again.
But this time, I had no defenses. This time, I was just too tired, overwhelmed by the creature’s anesthesia and by what I had seen in its mind. I couldn’t even raise a finger against it. My mind reeled. Since the start of its attack, the whole encounter had only been a couple of seconds.
I felt the creature quiver in anticipation.
And I saw Emory reach out and grab the creature with both hands. Somehow he twisted it from the top of my head and threw it roughly to one side. It looks so black, I thought dully as the creature flew, undulating, into the shadows. Like a void, like a blind spot moving across my vision.
But at least it was gone—for the moment at least. Already my sense of self was coming back to me.
Emory didn’t wait for it to attack again. Instead he grabbed me and pulled me with him up through the darkened rooms of my grandparents’ house, high into the sky. When we were a couple hundred feet up, Emory released me and let me float free as he stared down into the shadows below, a night watchman on the highest of alert. For a second I thought I was going to plunge right back to the ground, but somehow I steadied myself.
“The thing,” he said, watching me carefully. “What was it doing? Why was it after you?”
“It wasn’t after me, at least not at first,” I said. I had so much to tell him, but I didn’t know where to begin. “It was after you.”
Emory stared at me as I swayed back and forth in the air like some kind of drunken high wire act. I was beyond shaken. What made Emory think we were safe from that creature just because we’d flown up into the sky?
“Thanks,” I said quietly.
“For what?” Emory said.
“Saving my life.”
“Just returning the favor. But what did you mean about the creature? It’s trying to kill me?”
“It doesn’t want to kill either of us. Not exactly.” I thought for a second, trying to figure out how to put into words everything I’d learned. “It’s trying to possess us. It wants to take control of our souls to return to the physical world.”
“How do you—”
“As it attacked me, I somehow touched its mind. It was human once.”
“That thing was human?”
“A long time ago.”
“And you touched its mind?” As we talked, Emory stared down into the darkness. But if the creature came upon us again, would we even be able to see it in the night? It was so black.
I started to explain what I’d learned, beginning with the last thing I had seen in its mind, the deepest memory. “It was human,” I said. “But that was hundreds of years ago.”
“Hundreds of—” Emory said.
“Just listen. His name was Alistair Thorn. He was born in western Pennsylvania. But from a really young age, he liked to kill things. People sensed he was different, even his parents, so he left home at a young age—he knew he wouldn’t be missed, and he wasn’t. Soon he discovered that the thing he loved to kill more than anything was people. But that was hard to do in the settled areas of Pennsylvania. So he left for the frontier.
“But the people he met on the frontier weren’t easy victims. They were well-armed and suspicious, even harder to kill than the people back in Pennsylvania. Alistair wouldn’t have survived at all if he hadn’t found this Indian shaman named Bitter Eye. He had been thrown out of his tribe for practicing dark magic.
“Alistair and Bitter Eye traveled together for months. At first Alistair laughed at the shaman’s weird fireside prayers. But Bitter Eye’s powers seemed real—he somehow saw things that turned out to be true—so Alistair talked the Indian into sharing what he knew. Bitter Eye taught Alistair how to enter the spirit world—the astral dimension.
“Alistair was evil, but he wasn’t stupid. He was a fast learner and had a strong mind. Bitter Eye saw how powerful he was growing, but he was also starting to see just how evil Alistair was. So he betrayed him to a group of Indians who ended up killing him. But Alistair was able to use what he’d learned about astral travel to cheat death.”
This part was complicated, and I was so tired that talking felt like rolling a boulder up a hill. But it was important that Emory understand.
“That vortex?” I said to Emory. “You were right. It’s a gateway that opened up in order to take that old man’s spirit to a different dimension. But when Alistair’s physical body was killed by those Indians, his spirit didn’t die. A gate opened up for him, just like it opened for that old man. But by now Alistair was so comfortable in the astral dimension, and so mentally strong, that he was able to avoid the gate. His body died, but his spirit lived on inside the astral dimension. But over the centuries, the astral dimension has changed him. His spirit has become less and less human. Or like you said, maybe that’s just how he sees himself now.
“And even here in the astral dimension, he was driven to kill. So he started attacking the spirits of the other humans he came across. Some of them were strong enough to fight him off. But some of them weren’t—the spirits of the dead were almost always weak and confused, and even some of the spirits of the living were, too. And if these living spirits were weak enough, he discovered he could do more than just kill them. He could possess them.”
If these living spirits were weak enough, I thought.
“Living humans hardly ever come fully into the astral realm,” I said. “It’s way too hard for most people. But every now and then, one does. Alistair found if he could possess these spirits, he could follow the silver cord back to their body. Then he could possess that body, too. In other words, he was able to go back to the real world and be a human again, and live the rest of that body’s life. Sort of a very warped form of reincarnation.
“And once back in the real world, he kept on killing—starting with Bitter Eye himself. But it was even worse this time. The one thing that keeps most serial killers in check is the idea that they might get caught, that they might never be able to kill again. Alistair didn’t have to worry about that now. If he got caught, he knew he could just move on to another body. So his kills got more and more complicated. And this is exactly what he’s done, again and again, for hundreds of years now.”
Down below us, something rustled in the shadows—maybe it was the shadow creature, or maybe it was just an animal in the real world.
“But what does all this have to do with me?” Emory said.
The astral breeze had changed directions, blowing us back toward the interior of the island. Or maybe we were caught in a different current entirely. Didn’t the astral realm ever just stop?
“At first I thought it was me who had drawn the creature to us,” I said. “You heard me when I was making all that noise out at the cottage on Silver Lake, so I figured maybe the same thing that drew your attention had also attracted it. But at that point, it was already stalking you. That’s why you were the first to sense it—because it’s been following you. It started tracking you over a week ago—it’s seen you in the astral dimension three times before. It’s just been waiting for the right opportunity to overpower you.”
“Because it thinks I’m weak,” Emory said.
“Not as weak as it thinks I am,” I said. “It knows I took some kind of a shortcut to get here, that I didn’t have the mental discipline to come here on my own. Now it’s mostly after me. It attacked me in my grandparents’ kitchen because I was distracted, so focused on you.”
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br /> “So what are you saying?” Emory said. “If I’d kept coming here and we hadn’t met, the creature would’ve eventually overpowered me?”
“It would’ve tried. But it was waiting for just the right moment because it knows that when it attacks and fails, the person usually doesn’t ever come back to the astral dimension again.”
Emory laughed a bitter laugh. “It would’ve been in for a real surprise when it got back to my body.”
“It knew about your body,” I said. “It didn’t care. It’s more excited by how young you are—how young we are.” I wasn’t telling Emory the whole truth, here. Part of the reason the creature wanted me more now was because of my body, the fact I could walk.
Emory just stared at me.
“We need to go home now,” I said. “Back to our bodies. And we can’t ever come back.”
“But Zach—”
“There’s no but. There’s too much we don’t understand about this place.”
There was one other thing I wasn’t telling Emory: the shadow creature wasn’t the only being of its kind in the astral dimension. Over the centuries, it had come across other creatures like itself—some human, some not. That afternoon at Trumble Point, I must’ve felt the chill of one of them. Humans could sometimes feel such astral evils all the way over in the material world. It might have even been this shadow creature that I’d touched that day, although it didn’t seem to have any memory of me.