Shadow Walkers (8 page)

I told my grandparents and the police officer that I was going to see what else I could find on my computer. Then I
ran up to my room to light another stick of incense—my last one. Sure, the officer had said they were going to check out the cabin—but would they really do it? I needed to know for sure. And I needed to be with Gilbert, at least in the astral dimension, until they got there.

Once in the astral realm again, I immediately listened for Gilbert.

I didn’t hear him. I heard women laughing, couples arguing, even monks chanting. But I didn’t hear Gilbert. Suddenly my Internet-like astral search was getting no good returns at all.

I tried again, but no matter how hard I strained, no matter how many sounds I sorted through, I couldn’t hear him. No whimpering, no soft breathing. As I flipped my way through the sounds, I heard plenty of crying, even lots of kids. But none of them were Gilbert.

“Gilbert, where
are
you?” I said, sending out my own astral text message. But I got no response.

I hadn’t counted on this. I’d just assumed that since I’d heard him before, I’d be able to hear him again.

What did this mean? That he’d finally stopped crying? Or—?

No. I couldn’t go there.

Conrad and Evelyn. I could listen for
them
.

I tried, hard.

Nothing.

I tried them one at a time. I tried them together. I tried them in every way that I could think of.

Still nothing.

So I had no choice but to try to retrace the route I’d taken before to the cabin out on Silver Lake.

I rose up over Hinder Island. Once again guiding myself by the lighthouse at Trumble Point, I flew south across the water. The whitecaps were gone now. The bay looked black and heavy from behind the astral lens, like thick crude oil.

I reached the mainland. I knew Silver Lake was beyond the urban area, many miles to the south, so I headed in that direction. But it was different than before, that effortless glide I’d managed while honing in on Gilbert’s crying. This time I couldn’t let go. This time I was searching visually, so I had to be slow, always keeping an eye on the shadowy landmarks below me.

And once I left the lights of greater Tacoma behind, the landmarks got murkier—much murkier.

In the dark of the night, and in the shadows of the astral dimension, everything below me looked the same: a black, choppy sea of fir tree tops. When I’d been traveling this way before, I’d been paying attention to the sound of Gilbert, not to physical landmarks.

Before I knew it, I was lost.

I stared down at the ocean of blackness that stretched out under me in all directions. I had no idea which was the right way, but if I chose wrong, Gilbert was lost to me. Even as I thought this, I sensed myself sliding, blown aimlessly along by that ever-present ethereal breeze.

I looked up into the sky. From the astral dimension, it looked even darker than normal country sky. And yet, because of those faded pinpricks of starlight, it was still lighter than the swath of forested darkness below.

I rocketed straight up into the sky.

And just when I reached the point when I started to see the curvature of the black earth below me, I caught a glimpse of something flat in the distance, glistening like tarnished silver.

A lake.

———

I found the cabin again, but the SUV wasn’t in the driveway, and it looked like the lights had been turned off.

Please don’t let them be gone,
I thought.

I flew down through the ceiling of the cabin. Without light it was a tank of black ink. It occurred to me for the first time that no matter how much time I spent in the astral dimension, my eyes never adjusted to the dark.

Still, it had taken me a long time to find this cabin again. Maybe the police had already come and taken them away.

“Zach?” a voice said.

I jumped. It was Emory, floating next to me in the shadows.

“I thought you said you were going to call the police!” I said.

“I did,” he said, wavering, taken aback by my anger.

But even as I said this, I realized the stupid mistake I’d made. When I’d gone to call the police, I should’ve had Emory stay here with Gilbert. At the time I hadn’t been sure that I’d be able to get back to Hinder Island fast enough, but it had been more important not to lose track of Gilbert.

“By the time I got back here, they were gone,” he said.

“How long ago was that?”

“I don’t know. Twenty minutes?”

I thought back on how long it had been since we’d told the police what we’d learned. If Emory had been here for twenty minutes, there wasn’t enough time for the police to have come and found Gilbert and taken them all away.

I listened, not for Gilbert, but for any sound around me. I didn’t hear a thing. Somehow I just knew that the cabin was empty. Conrad and Evelyn had taken Gilbert somewhere else. But where? It was too dark in the cabin to even look for clues.

“Zach?” Emory said. “Do you feel something? Something not quite right?”

“My brother is gone, and I’m floating like a ghost in the astral dimension!” I said. “
Everything
feels not quite right.”

“No, I mean something else.”

I ignored him. Suddenly I flew straight up through the roof, into the sky, up to the point again where I’d been able to see the curvature of the earth. I scanned the horizon for the white SUV I’d seen parked in the driveway before.

I saw a few sets of headlights cutting through the gloom, and a few more sets of red tail-lights. But most were far, far away, and they were all traveling in opposite directions. If Conrad and Evelyn had left more than twenty minutes ago, they’d be long gone by now.

“Anything?” Emory said. He’d followed me up into the sky and was now looking over the landscape with me.

“No,” I said. As irritated as I’d sounded with him, I was actually glad to have him around. At least it meant I wasn’t alone. And the way he hung next to me in the sky was reassuring somehow. He seemed steadier, more solid, not hanging loosely in the sky like me, but actually standing in it, like a floating statue of a sentinel. “How many times have you been here,” I asked him.

“You asked me that before,” he said. “A few times. Why?”

“I’ve never been here before tonight.” I was embarrassed that I’d needed that stupid incense, but for some reason, I decided to tell Emory the truth about that, too. “What about you?” I asked him. “How’d you get here?”

“Same way you did,” he said. “With that weird incense.”

It was an interesting coincidence if it was true—but something told me it wasn’t. But if he hadn’t used the incense, I wondered how he’d gotten here. Celestia Moonglow and the woman at the New Age store had both seemed to agree that without the incense, you could only get here partway, experiencing as if through a dream. Emory didn’t look like he was dreaming. Then again, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to tell the difference.

I heard car tires on gravel down below us. Headlights shone on the cabin—a car had pulled into the driveway.

They’re back,
I thought.

I swooped back down to the cabin.

But it wasn’t Gilbert and his kidnappers—it was a police car. They were coming to check out the cabin, following up on the tip Emory and I had reported. That was something, at least.

It was two male officers, one skinny, one fat. That was all I could make out in the veiled moonlight.

“Where are we again?” the fat one said. “The meth lab or the missing kid?”

“The missing kid,” the skinny one said. “They had a couple reports that someone saw him here.”

“Doesn’t look like there’s anyone home.”

“Yeah, they’re gone,” I said to the cops. “But there might be a clue inside. And you can also look to see who owns this cabin. They’re the ones who have my brother.”

Emory had followed me down. “Zach,” he said, “they can’t hear you.”

I didn’t know that for sure. I didn’t see how it hurt to
try
talking to them.

“Let’s check it out,” the skinny cop said to the fat one.

They left their headlights on, bathing the front of the cabin in light, then walked up to the front door and knocked. When no one answered, the skinny cop knocked again, louder, and called, “Hello? Is anyone home?”

Finally the skinny cop said, “This is the police! If there’s anyone in there, we’d like to talk to you, please!”

Still no one came to the door.

“Just go inside!” I shouted at them, but of course they ignored me.

Instead, they started walking around the house, shining their flashlights into the windows. There were no curtains in the kitchen, so they were able to poke their beams inside.

“I don’t think there’s anyone here,” the fat cop said.

“Looks that way,” the skinny cop said.

“I’ll call it in.”

Then they started back toward the car.

“Wait!” I said. “You’re not done, are you?” I looked over at Emory. “They’re not done, are they? They need to look for evidence—search for fingerprints.”

“I don’t think they can,” Emory said. “Not without a warrant. They need some kind of probable cause, and all they have is two anonymous tips.”

I ignored him and spoke directly to the police. “Wait! Stop!”

But they just kept walking. Then they climbed into their car and drove away.

“Well, they’re still going to look and see who owns the cabin, right? They’ll trace them that way, right?”

“Zach, I don’t know.”

“Well, we can wait,” I said. “Conrad and Evelyn probably just went to get groceries or something. We can wait here until they get back, and then we can call the police again.”

But that didn’t make sense; they wouldn’t have both gone to get groceries, not with a kidnapped kid. He could scream in the supermarket. And even as I thought this through, I remembered how Conrad had been talking on his cell phone and had said something about meeting someone. I told Emory this.

“That’s where they must’ve taken Gilbert,” he said. “To meet a plane or boat?”

I didn’t like the sound of that—there had to be dozens of private airports in the Puget Sound area, and hundreds of marinas. Still, it made sense.

“We need to listen for him again,” I said.

We listened. But I still didn’t hear anything.

“Emory?” I asked hopefully.

He shook his head.

“What does that
mean
?” I said. “I heard him before. Why can’t I hear him now?”

“Zach, he’s fine. I’m sure of it. They wouldn’t have kidnapped him in the first place if they were just going to kill him.”

I hadn’t expected him to say the word “kill”. My head started to swim. For a second, I thought I was going to throw up. Without a body, I didn’t know how that was even possible.

“Conrad and Evelyn, then,” I said. “We need to listen for
them
.” It was as if by pretending I hadn’t already tried this, I might get a completely different result.

But I didn’t get a different result. I still couldn’t hear them, and neither could Emory.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “We can’t hear
them
, either? What happened?” I thought back on that book
Voyage Beyond the Rainbow
, but of course she hadn’t said anything about any of this.

“Maybe it’s because you know Gilbert,” Emory said. “He’s your brother. But we only heard Conrad and Evelyn that one single time.”

This made a kind of sense. But it still made me angry.

“What is going
on
?” I shouted. “Not just the astral stuff—how could they’ve taken him in the first place? Gilbert knows not to talk to strangers. If someone he didn’t know had tried to grab him, he would’ve screamed bloody murder.”

“So maybe Conrad and Evelyn weren’t strangers,” Emory said.

I shook my head so hard it made my whole body sway. “I told you, I’ve never seen them before.”