“Wait!”
She reached for his shoulder, intending to take hold of it and stop him. But a shadowy clawed hand emerged from his back and took a swipe at her. In her mind, she heard an inhuman voice shout, Ours! She jumped back, but not in time to avoid being struck. The Shadowkin’s claws struck her right shoulder, slicing through the leather of Larry’s jacket and into the skin beneath. The impact of the blow knocked her hard against the alley wall. She hit, bounced off, lost her balance, and fell. Fresh pain flared in her knee, but it was nothing compared to the fiery agony that now burned in her shoulder. She sat up and looked at her injury, saw torn flesh through the ragged opening of the jacket’s shoulder, saw blood – lots of it.
She looked for the man, but didn’t see him. He’d reached the alley’s other end, walked out, turned right or left, then continued down the sidewalk. She needed to get up and get moving if she didn’t want to lose him for good. She tried to rise, but her bad knee refused to support her weight, and she slumped back down. She took a deep breath and tried again. This time she concentrated on the faces of those who had died. Except they weren’t dead in this time, were they? And if she could change what happened, prevent the Shadowkin from wreaking havoc in the real world, the Cabal would never intervene, and Larry, Reeny, and all the others would live. It was this thought that gave her the strength to get on her feet and stay there. She pressed her left hand to her shoulder wound to slow the blood loss as best she could, and then began hobbling down the alley.
She could move, but not very fast, and she almost lost sight of the man several times. The pain in her shoulder and knee merged into a single throbbing sensation of agony that suffused her entire body. It only made sense. She’d failed to confess and atone, and now she was suffering. The thought initially made her laugh, but this sent off a fresh wave of pain, and she instantly regretted it.
This slow-speed chase continued for several blocks until they reached the worst section of the Cannery District. Here, the buildings were run-down, many of them unoccupied, windows broken or boarded up. Most of Oakmont’s residents stayed away from this part of town, and only the homeless or drug users looking for a secluded place to feed their addictions came here. Before Goat-Eyes had approached her in FoodSaver, she would’ve been nervous about coming here. Now, after everything she’d seen and done in the last day, this place seemed about as dangerous as a child’s playroom.
The man never looked back once the entire time Lori followed him. She called out to him several times, but he never responded. Maybe he was hard of hearing, or maybe he didn’t want to have anything to do with her after her past self had blown him off like that. But she thought he didn’t respond because he was filled with Shadowkin and all he could hear were their voices whispering in his mind.
Eventually he stopped in front of a building with a faded sign over the entrance that said this was The Respite, below it the tagline Living Redefined. Like so many of the buildings in this neighborhood, The Respite had long been abandoned, and she wondered if the man was homeless, if this was the place where he sought shelter when the weather got bad. He walked up the concrete steps, opened the door – which creaked and sagged on its hinges – and went inside.
There was no traffic in this neighborhood, and Lori limped across the empty street, hand still pressed to her shoulder wound. She didn’t know how much blood she’d lost, but she felt weary, and she was having trouble keeping her eyes open. She’d been through a lot in the last twenty-four hours, and her mind and body were exhausted. That, combined with her blood loss, made her want to go find an alley of her own, lie down, close her eyes, and rest. Whether she slept, passed out, or died didn’t matter to her at this point. She was just so fucking tired.
She forced herself to keep going, though, and when she reached The Respite’s front steps, she walked up them, each step taking a major effort. When she got to the door, she took hold of the handle and tried to open it, but it wouldn’t budge. She wasn’t just tired. She was weak, too. She tried again, gripping the handle with both hands now. The blood coating her left hand made her grip slippery, but she pulled harder this time, and the door came open with a loud creaking sound.
She entered.
She stepped into a dark hallway, the only illumination the faint dingy light filtering through the small dirty window set into the door. The paint on the walls was flaking off, the plaster beneath cracked and crumbling, and the carpet under her feet was moldy and threadbare.There were numbers on the doors she passed, metal ones nailed to wooden surfaces. They’d lost whatever luster they once possessed years ago, and now looked as if they’d been burned into the doors. She could make out a few numbers, guess at others. 1-A, 1-B, 1-C, and so on. The air was stale, flat, dead, and she breathed through her nose, hoping to filter out any nasty particles that might be floating around her. She knew it wouldn’t work, though, that the best she could hope for was to minimize her exposure to whatever was in the air by breathing slow and shallow. The precaution made her feel a little safer, and even if it was an illusion, she’d take it, and gladly.
There was a smell in the air, one that underlay the mingled scent of mold and rotting wood. It was so different from anything she’d smelled before that her mind could find no comparison for it. The closest she could come up with was a crude approximation. It smelled black, and while she’d never experienced synesthesia before, she thought that, or something very like it, was what was happening to her. How else could a color have a smell?
This was the last point where she could turn back, her one and only opportunity to turn around, hobble down the hallway, push open the entrance door, and return to the street. Once outside, she could keep walking and never look back. She almost did it, and to hell with the consequences. Instead, she continued forward.
Halfway down the hallway, one of the unit doors was open. She pressed her left hand to her shoulder wound once more and walked toward the apartment. When she reached it, she stopped at the doorway and peered inside. The room was empty of furniture, but trash littered the floor. Empty beer cans and liquor bottles, crumpled fast food wrappers, syringes, and in one corner a dead rat. Chunks of plaster were missing from the walls, and graffiti covered the area that remained intact. Huge stylized letters formed words Lori couldn’t decipher, along with crude images of erect penises, swastikas, and anarchy symbols. The wall on the far side of the room had a large jagged crack in it that ran from floor to ceiling. It was two inches wide, three in some places, and it was pitch dark inside. Looking at it, Lori a felt a profound sense of wrongness, as if she was seeing something that should not exist. She thought of what Goat-Eyes had told her on the Nightway.
There are locations on your planet where the barrier between it and Shadow are more permeable than others. Oakmont is one such place.
A Thin Place, Goat-Eyes had called it. Lori was looking at proof of this right now – a crack in reality, one that opened into Shadow.
The man stood in front of the crack, regarding it.
“I come here sometimes,” he said. “Into this building. When it’s too cold out or when it’s raining too hard. Sometimes there are other people in the building. If it’s too crowded, I move on, look for someplace else. A couple of days ago, we had a real bad storm, remember? Rain, wind, lightning, the whole show. I hauled ass over here, and when I got inside, I was surprised to find no one else was here. I thought for sure others would come looking to stay warm and dry. I figured the storm must’ve come on too sudden for anyone else to get here, and I decided it was my lucky day, and I was going to have the whole place to myself. I picked a room at random – this one – went inside. And I found this.” He nodded toward the shadow-filled crack on the wall. “I’d never seen anything like it. It seemed kind of real and unreal at the same time, you know? I got closer so I could get a better look.” He laughed, shook his head. “Dumbest goddamn thing I ever did. See, there was something alive inside the crack. Something that wanted out. But they couldn’t do it on their own. They needed a kind of…anchor to take hold of, something they could use to pull themselves into our world. They used me as that anchor. They all rushed into me at once, maybe a dozen in all, and once they were inside, they made themselves at home. Coming into our world took a lot out of them, and they needed a place to hole up for a while and rebuild their strength. I’ve been walking around town the last couple days, trying to figure out what to do about these damn things. They’re wrong, you know? They shouldn’t be loose in our world. They don’t belong here. I wanted to find some way to get them out of me and send them back to where they came from. But I had no idea how to do it. So I started asking people if they knew what I could do. I asked everybody I met, but either they didn’t have any answers for me, or they ignored me.”
He glanced over his shoulder at her.
“Like you did.”
How did he know that this version of her was the same woman he’d just met on the street? Some instinct or insight granted to him by the Shadowkin dwelling inside him? Probably.
He turned back to the wall.
“You were the last straw. After you wouldn’t talk to me, I decided there was nothing I could do about the shadow things, so I came back here. See, they’re strong enough to come out now. They’re hungry for our world, and if I can’t send them back, I have to let them out. There’s nothing else I can do. I’m like an egg, and it’s time for them—” He broke off, doubled over, grimaced in pain. “—to hatch.”
He straightened, threw his arms wide, and screamed. Dark clawed hands emerged from his body, followed by heads, shoulders, torsos…. As the Shadowkin tore themselves free from the man’s body – a man whose name Lori had never learned, she realized – he faded a bit more, as if the Shadowkin were leeching away his life, his very existence, as they departed their temporary host.
Unable to do anything to help the poor man, Lori turned and left, moving as fast as her injuries permitted. She was frightened by the prospect of what the Shadowkin would do to her once they had fully emerged, but she was also filled with despair. She knew now what she’d done to upset the Balance, but she also knew that if she’d originally stopped and listened to the man’s question, it would’ve made no difference. Either way, he’d returned here, to the place where the Shadowkin had entered him, to release them. The creatures had clawed their way out of him – just as they were doing now – and began roaming around town, feeding, growing in strength over the course of a week until they were strong enough to start causing some real damage. And there was nothing she could’ve done to stop it. For all their efforts at manipulating her, for all the lives it had cost, the Cabal had failed – and so had she. Everything would happen the same way it had before, and in the end the Intercessor would appear and destroy Oakmont before the Balance between Shadow and the real world could be disrupted any further. And if the entire planet had to be destroyed to maintain that Balance, so be it.
The Shadowkin flooded into the hall, moving as a single dark mass as they came after her. She would be their second meal in this new world of theirs – after the man – and they intended to enjoy her to the fullest. There was no way she could outrun them on her best day, let alone when she had a fucked-up knee and was low on blood. She was within arm’s reach of the entrance when they fell upon her. They swarmed around her, encircling her with absolute darkness. She could do nothing now but wait to die.
But in the darkness, she heard a voice. It was Aashrita.
You’re stronger than he was, and you know more about the ways of Shadow. There’s still one thing you can do – if you hurry.
What did Aashrita mean? What could Lori do to stop the Shadowkin now? How—
Then it came to her, and in the darkness, she confessed.
“I ignored the man when I should’ve listened. I did not help him then, and I could not help him now. But there is one thing I can do.” She steadied herself for what was about to happen. “I can become your prison.”
She opened herself to the Shadowkin, drew them inside her, heard their angry howls of protest, and she smiled.
Chapter Sixteen
When the darkness cleared, Lori found herself standing in Woodlawn Cemetery once more, the Driver at her side, the glowing horn of the Intercessor in the sky above them. The terrible sound of reality being torn asunder had stopped, and as she watched, the Intercessor’s horn began to slowly withdraw. After several moments, it was gone.
The rain still fell, but it was only misting now. Soon, she knew, it would end, and the storm – both literally and figuratively – would’ve passed.
The Driver turned toward her and gave her a weak smile.
“I take it you were successful.”
“In a way,” she said.
Her knee still hurt and her shoulder throbbed like hell, but otherwise she felt surprisingly good.
“Did I fix it?” she asked. “All of it?”
