The Year of Shadows (4 page)

I sighed. “I don’t know what’s worse, talking to myself or talking to a cat.” I pulled the cat onto my chest. “Oof. You really are fat.”

The cat’s eyes narrowed. I’m sure he was just sleepy, but I took it to mean:
You’re not a very polite hostess.

“But we’re still friends, right?”

His ears flicked.
Friends? That’s presumptuous of you.

I scratched under his chin.

The cat stretched out his neck and closed his eyes.
Oh. Keep that up and we may have something.

I snorted. “You might be the cutest thing ever.”

“Hey, cool,” a voice said from above. “You found a cat.”

I scrambled up into a sitting position and faced the voice: red hair, tons of freckles, stupid ears that stuck out.

Henry Page.

Ugh.

Henry’s parents started dropping him off for concerts a couple of years ago, and eventually he’d begged his way into an usher job—just a part-time thing, and it didn’t pay much, but you’d think it was heaven on Earth the way Henry took to it. Now he was one of the two ushers left. Everyone else had quit a long time ago, except for ninety-something-year-old Archie, who was basically a walking corpse.

Henry was in my grade at school. He played baseball and ran track. He made good grades because he studied a lot, but somehow he still got to sit at the popular table at lunch, which were two things I didn’t think ever went together. But they did for Henry because Henry was perfect. His whole life was perfect. It was so perfect that I had to make a Reasons to Dislike Henry Page list and keep it in my sketchpad so I could look at it whenever I caught myself thinking that it might actually be okay to like him.

The only things that weren’t perfect about him were his millions of freckles and the fact that his ears stuck out. One day last February, people kept coming up to me at school, saying, “Sorry about your mom, Olivia.” “Man, that really sucks, Olivia.” “Why’d she leave, anyway?” Someone had blabbed, and it hadn’t been me. The last thing I wanted was
for everyone to find out my family secrets. The blabber had to have been Henry, who was always hanging around the Hall and learning everybody’s business. So I drew this picture of Henry looking like an elephant, with red hair sticking out everywhere and freckles all over his trunk and ears hanging to the ground. I’d labeled it
DUMBO PAGE
and hung it on Henry’s locker.

All that had done was make people give me nasty looks instead of asking about Mom. Then they’d started ignoring me altogether.

See, that picture couldn’t hurt Henry, even though it was the best elephant I’d ever drawn. Everyone at school loved Henry Page.

Everyone except me.

“Where’d you find him?” Henry said, bending down to pet the cat. The cat started to purr.

Traitor.

“None of your business.” I slung the cat over my shoulder and stalked away, toward backstage. Sounds of the orchestra tuning drifted out through the Hall doors.

“So, I heard your dad talking to Richard earlier.” Henry was hot on my heels.

“Go away, Henry.”

“Something about your family moving backstage? It sounded pretty rough. Are you okay?”

“Go away, Henry.”

But he wouldn’t give up. “I’m really sorry that happened,
Olivia. I don’t . . . well, I know we’re not great friends or anything, but did you want to go get an ice cream or something? Donatello’s is having a back-to-school deal, and I just got my allowance.”

I stopped so abruptly that Henry almost ran into me. We were in the west lobby, right by the cracked violinist fountain, which hadn’t worked for years.

“Listen, Henry. Butt out, okay? Stop eavesdropping and sticking your nose into other people’s business. Why do you care, anyway? Don’t you know you’re supposed to hate me?”

“Why am I supposed to hate you?”

I rolled my eyes. “Remember? That picture?”

“Oh. Right. The elephant.” He shrugged. “Well, I don’t hate you. I know you did it because you think I told everyone about your mom.”

I stepped back. “What? How do you know that?”

“I just assumed.”

“Well, you know what they say about assuming.”

Henry rolled his eyes. “I didn’t tell anyone, by the way. I don’t know who did, but people would have found out eventually anyway. Lots of people have family problems.”

“Oh, yeah? And what do you know about family problems, Mr. Perfect?”

Henry got this weird look on his face, but he didn’t get a chance to answer. The orchestra started playing Tchaik 4—those big opening notes in the French horns and trumpets that sound like the end of the world. And because I was a
conductor’s daughter, my brain recited to itself, automatically:
This is the Fate theme.

Fate
: when things happen to you that you can’t control, also known as “destiny.” Fate happens, and you deal with it the best you can.

The cat hissed at something behind me. The sound of it—and the sudden rush of cold around me—threw chills across my skin.

Behind me, the heavy metal door that led to the basement started rattling on its hinges, like someone was on the other side, trying to break it down.

K
EPLER NEVER LEAVES
the basement unlocked,” Henry whispered.

Old Kepler was the cleaning guy, and Henry was right—Kepler never left it unlocked. He was obsessed with security. “Don’t want no hooligans down there,” he’d grumble. Like there was something in the basement worth stealing.

But someone
was
down there now. Uneven steps stomped up the basement stairs. Dark shapes curled out from behind the door—along the sides, along the bottom. Long, thin, shadowy shapes.

Like fingers.

The cat clawed his way out of my arms and bolted away, yowling like crazy.

The basement door blew open, slamming into the wall. Arctic cold rushed out, nearly blowing us over. Then a second gust of icy air barreled past us from behind, hitting my arm and Henry’s leg. That one
did
blow us over. My head thudded against the floor, knocking my teeth
together. I looked up just in time to see a long, thin black shape seep into the darkness of the basement stairs.

Hovering there on the threshold, a dark shadow roiled. It wasn’t an ordinary shadow, though. It looked heavy, solid,
real
. And it was shaped like a human—but a deformed human with a too-long neck and too-long limbs, shifting like a black puddle from one shape to the next.

“Olivia?” Henry tugged on my sleeve.

“No sudden movements, Henry,” I said, my eyes fixed on the shadowy figure. More than anything, I wanted to draw it. But I’d have to get out of there alive first, and the feeling seeping off the shadow, like poison, was not good. It was wrong, it was
evil
. “Just back up, slowly.”

“No, Olivia,
look
.”

I turned around, and I saw the gray man.

He stood behind us.
Drifted
behind us. He had legs and feet, but they looked like you could blow them away with a good sneeze. He didn’t have much of a face—a shimmering mass of gray smoke, shifting into shape after shape after shape—a long nose, then a bulbous nose, then no nose at all. His eyes were black, swirling holes the size of saucers. His mouth gaped open wide as a dinner plate, but he had no teeth, just a bottomless pit between his lips.

I opened my mouth to scream, but nothing came out. It was exactly like what happens in nightmares.

And it got worse.

The gray man rushed right at us. He reached us in the blink
of an eye, jerking forward like an old movie with bad film.

Then he was rushing right
through
us.

It shouldn’t have been possible, but I felt the gray man oozing through us like a wintry breeze, except this breeze somehow got into my skin, my blood, my bones. I couldn’t breathe.

I reached for Henry. He was doing the same thing, grabbing at me like he was drowning.

And the gray man wasn’t alone.

More gray, smoky shapes rushed to join him. Three more, to be precise. As each one passed through us—like we were nothing, like
they
were nothing—I struggled not to pass out from the cold that squeezed my insides.

Together, Henry and I stumbled away, trying to run, before I realized the gray shapes were
herding
us toward the basement. Toward that shadow thing with its pointy black fingers. The shadow shrank back as we approached it. Then, it
shrieked
.

“What is it?” Henry clapped his hands to his ears.

I couldn’t answer, watching the shadow shrink back down the basement stairs, in full retreat. Its awful screams wedged beneath my fingernails, in my teeth, shaking me to the core.

The basement door slammed shut.

Silence, except for the orchestra playing.

The shadow was gone.

The four gray figures, suddenly alone, flitted away like
scared rabbits—one into the ceiling, two through the wall, and one—the original gray man—sinking through the floor. Right before he disappeared, he winked at me.

Henry and I jumped to our feet and ran, shoving each other to go faster. Soon we were outside, tearing down the wide gray steps that led from the Hall down to Arlington Avenue, and then we were almost getting run over by a cab.

The wail of its horn brought us to a halt. The wind of its passing tires shot goosebumps up my arms. Suddenly, we stood in sunlight and skyscrapers. The spice of a nearby food cart stung my eyes.

“Watch it!” the cab driver shouted out his open window.

Henry put his hands on his knees, catching his breath. “What
was
that?”

I smoothed my fingers over my arms. Little red lines marked my skin from where the cat had clawed me. Then I felt something weird, a rough patch of skin. I turned my arm over and saw the black spot.

Right where the cold thing had slammed into me, knocking me to the ground, a splotchy black mark glittered in the sunlight. It almost looked like a burn, dark as that shadow by the basement.

“What the . . .” Henry inspected a similar black spot on his right calf. “Olivia, what is this?”

I probed the burn mark with one finger. It sizzled, colder than ice against my fingertip, the skin rough and scratchy.

“Olivia?”

Henry watched me expectantly. A new light shone in his eyes that I didn’t like. I recognized that look. A few brave souls last spring, mostly new kids, had sometimes approached me in the cafeteria with that look in their eyes. They would think, “Could this be a new friend?”

One look from me was usually enough to dispel them for good.

Shadows, after all, don’t have friends.

Especially not friends like Perfect Henry Page.

I gathered myself and drew down the shades. That’s what I called it when I hardened everything about me from my eyes to the way I was standing, so people would leave me be. It’s like when you draw down the shades of your window to keep out all the sunlight.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said to Henry.

“Are you kidding me? We just saw—”

I shrugged. “I didn’t see anything.” Then I walked backstage alone. Henry didn’t follow me. Maybe he was too scared to come back inside.

But he was right: We
had
seen something. For the rest of the day, I caught myself drumming my fingers against the burn. It stung when I touched it, but I couldn’t stop messing with it, like when you just have to keep wiggling a loose tooth even though it makes your gums sore.

Something
had left its mark on both me and Henry. And another
something
had saved us from whatever lay beyond the basement door.

I didn’t know what this meant, but my sketching hand itched to find out. My head swam with images of shadow fingers and gaping black mouths.

What had happened? What had we seen?

One word kept whispering through my head as a possible answer:

Ghosts.