Shadows Read online

  Mongo became an honorary member, since I usually brought him along, and he was good at enthusiasm. (He never learned to love the bus ride, but he learned to put up with it.) And by the end of the summer he could bring the ponies or the wethers to the top gate, or Clare’s chickens back to the henhouse. (We were still working on the alpacas. Alpacas have minds of their own.)

  The best times, that summer, were when Jill came to the shelter with me (mostly she was working too: she was a waitress at Peta’s Café and put in a few hours a week at Porter’s) and we took as many of the long-term residents for walks as possible. Clare tried to get all the dogs out of their kennels at least every other day, but her volunteer walkers didn’t always show up. Mostly you could only walk one or two dogs at a time—no more than you had hands and the dogs had to get along—but Jill and I took the Family out in bulk. I’d have Mongo and Bella and Jonesie plus Athena and Eld and maybe Mugwump, and she’d have Camilla and Twinkle or Angela and Dov and Doodad, who usually wore herself out early on and came home in a pocket.

  But the day we got home from a triumph about a missing chicken, Mom wanted to go to Pineapple and Pepperoni for dinner.

  Once Mom was working for Tennel & Zeet and we weren’t utterly broke all the time, she used to take Ran and me out for dinner at Pineapple and Pepperoni occasionally. P&P was the local pizza place that advertised EVERYTHING for your pizza and so every family in town with kids would go there and the kids would try to think up stuff they didn’t have. They were pretty high wattage, and people didn’t really want to waste their money on something they wouldn’t eat just to give a pizza place a hard time. (Yes, they had chocolate sprinkles but Mom wouldn’t let us order them.) Although Ran went through a period of liking peanut butter on his pizza. Tomato sauce, cheese, pepperoni and peanut butter. They only put it on his third but it was hard even to watch somebody eating peanut butter pizza.

  The thing about P&P was that it had started up after Dad died, so when Mom and Ran and I started going there it was our new family ritual, a ritual that said we could still be a family and do silly stuff like order pizza with peanut butter or raisins or potato chips (Mom only let us order that once, unfortunately, it was pretty good), or zombie fingers (breakfast link sausages) or witches’ eyes (green olives) or demon brains (red peppers. Green peppers were toxic sludge and yellow peppers were chicken toes). I think we may have started laughing again when we started going to P&P.

  And then Mom married Val and she wanted to take him along when we went out for our pizza evenings. Which meant not only Val, but coming home after dark with Val, even though I wasn’t alone with him. First time I said I had a headache and stayed home—and was tactful enough to be in bed when they got back, although I’d been reading by flashlight, and only turned it out when I heard the car in the driveway. Second time Mom phoned me at the shelter, and I said, more or less truthfully, that Clare had asked me to stay late. She had, but I could have made it home if I’d hustled.

  Third time . . . I’d come through the door relatively cheerful and ready to tell everyone about how clever Mongo was. It would give me something to say, you know? It wasn’t like I was having a good time being a sullen teenager not adjusting to her mom’s second husband. It took me a minute to realize that all three of them were standing around like they were expecting to go somewhere. And then Mom said we were going to P&P. After a pause, while I could feel myself deflating like Mongo having been told to stop being a bakayaro and Go Lie Down, I said I wasn’t hungry.

  “Maggie,” said my mother with an edge to her voice, “you have never not wanted to eat pizza in your entire life. Except when you have a headache,” she added grimly, “or have decided to stay later at the shelter than Clare asked you to.”

  I flinched. I’d tried to keep Clare out of my problems. I stared at my hands, hoping that my stomach wouldn’t choose that moment to growl. I was hungry. I was enormously, takusan hungry, and I hoped they’d leave soon so I could get to the refrigerator before I fainted or something. I’d had lunch but it seemed like several years ago. I would love a pizza. I even started to think about going and making my mother happy. Or less angry anyway. But I raised my eyes and involuntarily met Val’s. He was looking at me with that cautious, wary expression he usually had when he looked at me. His shirt looked like something out of one of the dog beds at the shelter.

  He was standing in front of the wall between the kitchen and the front hall, where usually Mom’s grandmother’s quilt hung on a long rail. But she’d taken it down for mending—it was so old it kept trying to disintegrate, but Mom would sew it up again and put it back on the rail. If the quilt had been there I wouldn’t have seen much.

  But tonight as I met Val’s eyes this great writhe of shadows erupted up the empty white wall behind him. It was so startling I gasped and stepped back.

  “Maggie . . .” began my mother, and she was really angry, because she thought I was faking it. But she must have seen how shocked I really was when I turned to her, and she stopped, and her face changed, and she almost looked like my old, pre-Val mom again. She put one hand on my arm and the other one on my forehead. “Sweetie, are you ill?” she said. “Do we need to get you to a doctor?”

  “No,” I said, or mumbled, because the fear spike on top of the too-long-ago lunch was making me feel kind of weird. “I’m fine. It’s just—” And then I couldn’t think of what to say instead of “your new husband is hitodenashi—some kind of monster.” What is the polite alternative? “I’ll be fine. I’ll make myself some scrambled eggs.”

  Mom wavered. She’d moved the looking-for-a-fever hand to my other arm. “Maybe we should all stay home,” she said.

  “Oh Mom,” said Ran. “She said she’ll be fine.”

  My little brother, the soul of unselfishness. But in this case I was totally with him. “I make great scrambled eggs,” I said. “I don’t need help. Or looking after. You should go.”

  Mom smiled. “I know you make great scrambled eggs. Right after—before Tennel & Zeet, when I was working all hours, we lived on your scrambled eggs.”

  “Hey,” I said. “I learned to cook.”

  “You did,” said Mom. “But at first it was scrambled eggs. Are you sure you’ll be all right?”

  “I’m sure,” I said firmly. Mom put her hand on my forehead one last time. It’s a mom thing. You come home covered in blood from beating up (and being beaten up by) the playground bully, or wet, muddy and hysterical because you dropped your knapsack with all your schoolbooks in it in the river and it got dragged downstream a ways before you managed to get it out again, and the first thing your mom does is feel your forehead for fever. “Mongo will take care of me.”

  “I’ll leave my phone on,” said Mom. “Call me if you need to.”

  “Okay,” I said, and she hugged me, and I almost cried. Before Val, we used to hug each other a lot. . . . I risked a look at Val. There was only one shadow left on the wall behind him and it was kind of saggy and . . . almost like it was sad. Margaret Alastrina, I said to myself, Hit the circuit breaker. Then Val moved . . . and the shadow on the wall was just the shadow of a short hairy guy in a really awful shirt.

  I was in bed when they got back again, but this time I was reading by my ordinary table lamp. Mom came in to check on me. She sat on the end of my bed and we talked a little. But there wasn’t really much to say. She was married to Val. And I couldn’t bear to be around him.

  • • •

  Val spent most of the days in his shed. He’d already been tutoring before he met Mom, so now his students came here. Fortunately there was a back gate so we didn’t have a constant stream of losers and dreeps through the house. Mostly he tutored math and science, not philosophy. I knew that Takahiro was going to be doing some kind of hot-wired super-science project with him starting in the fall semester. I was trying not to think about it because Taks was my friend.

  It was something, I gu
ess, that Mom hadn’t found a way to cram an office for Val into the house. Our house was way too full already, even after Dad and Mom turned the garage into a dining room. Mom’s cubby at the end of the dining room was pretty well impassable. It was known as the Lair, and Ran always roared or snarled when he mentioned it. There wasn’t room in the living room even for a desk. If Ran and I wanted to do our homework downstairs (the better to torture each other) we did it on the kitchen table. So having Val in the shed was relatively great, as great as anything was about Val.

  Except that every now and then Mom sent me out there with some kind of message. How lame is that? It would cost money to connect the groundline so that never happened and Val wouldn’t have a pocket phone out there. When he went to the shed he left his phone in the house. Even Mom thought this was kind of weird, and kept asking him why. Eventually, one night at dinner the subject came up again, and Mom asked why again, and he got a funny little smile on his face and said, “I don’t like the energy.”

  “You—what?” said Mom.

  “I do not like the energy,” repeated Val. “I would be without electricity and my ’top also, but that is too difficult, and I am lazy.” He had an old-fashioned fold-up ’top that lived on a shelf in the kitchen with its power cord tucked behind the refrigerator where Mongo couldn’t get at it. It was so old that when you unfolded it not only did you have to tell it to turn on, you had to tell it to plug into the webnet. And almost all the letters on the keyboard had worn off.

  There was a creepo silence. Finally Mom said, “Oh, you philosophers,” and changed the subject.

  Philosophers. What Val had said sounded like the sort of thing the loopheads who studied the physics of the worlds might say, not that I knew any of them personally. How to Go Crazy in One Easy PhD: get it in physwiz and then get hired by one of the brain bureaus. There was one in Steelgate, called The Intellectual Trust, in a big grey building that was so ugly it looked like squashy purple methane-breathing aliens must have built it. Trust. Not likely. Mom’s mysterious missing sister was supposed to have worked for a brain bureau before she disappeared—or maybe she disappeared because she worked for a brain bureau. There was a rumor that the one in Steelgate had a whole floor sealed off against stuff like electricity and groundlines and the webnet, and you had to work with paper and pencil by oil lamps. Doing what?

  If Val had been a friend I’d’ve said shut up. Don’t talk about energy. Maybe someone dropped a ’top on you when you were a baby and it bent a little piece of your brain. There’s nothing wrong with groundlines and electricity. The rumor about those sealed-off brain-bureau areas was that they were trying to discover where science meets magic. Where the boundary is. And how they could cross it. But they got rid of magic because it made people crazy.

  If Val was a magic user, instead of some kind of monster, he would make sure he didn’t have shadows, wouldn’t he?

  And why didn’t everybody see them? What was my problem?

  I had kept my eyes on my plate. All my life Mom had been making us have dinner together at least two or three times a week. This had survived Ran’s throwing-up phase when he was about two years old. It had survived Dad’s job, although there were nights when Mom gave Ran and me most of our supper at the usual time and then we had dessert with Dad, who’d come home, yank his tie off, and sit down at the table immediately, his briefcase leaning against the wall below the quilt.

  Dinner together had even—just—survived those months after he died, when Mom was working three jobs. When she was super late I used to put Ran and me to bed on the sofa (heads at either end and feet in the middle. He kicked, of course) and I’d get up and stagger into the kitchen and turn the skillet on for scrambled eggs when I heard the car. She didn’t like this much and tried to tell me I should go to bed (Ran could sleep through the end of the world, and he was still little enough for Mom to carry him upstairs) but I said we eat dinner together in this family and I could see she didn’t know what to do. I didn’t dare tell her I was afraid of the dark when it was just Ran and me: I already knew she couldn’t afford a babysitter and I was ten pretending to be thirty. I’d make scrambled eggs and heat up a roll and get the salad out of the refrigerator and sit at the table with her and drink a glass of milk and listen to Ran snore. It won’t be for long, she’d say. I’ll get a real job soon.

  And she did. And we got Mongo. And P&P opened. And we all got older.

  And then Val happened.

  Dinner together two or three times a week was apparently also going to survive Val. I was careful to be out as many of the other nights as I thought I could get away with. This would be easier as soon as school started again. Val had only been around about half the time when it ended at the beginning of the summer. But the kind of thing you’re out late for when it’s school-related takes less explaining to your mom.

  So anyway. If Mom wanted to say anything to Val when he was in his shed she had to go out there. Or send a messenger. Occasionally she managed to send me. Sometimes she just sent me out there with a mug of coffee because she was making coffee (all of us except Ran drank a lot of coffee). Because unfortunately I liked watching TV on the big screen in the living room instead of my weeny ’top up in my room and I’d decided this was something I wasn’t going to let Val totally wreck. So there I was when Mom wanted someone to go. Although I guess this was part of her Make Maggie and Val Friends project.

  I can’t remember what message I was supposed to be delivering that day. I’d been out there a few times before and it was always creepo, but that’s all, and I’d learned to say whatever I had to say, or hand him the note or the mug, and run away. That day I’d knocked on the shed door and he’d said “Come” so I had to go in.

  When I went in that day it was like . . . I don’t know what it was like, but whatever it was that made Val bigger in the dark was living in there, not just the shadows—suddenly the shadows seemed tame and harmless—this huge awful unimaginable thing—something like a combination of the silverbug checkerboard where all the little black void holes were gaping jaws with glinting silver teeth and a monster out of a fairy tale with too many eyes and too many claws as well as too many mouths with too many teeth. . . . I may have screamed.

  Then Val had his hands on my shoulders like he was holding me up and he was saying, “Maggie, Maggie, it’s all right,” when it was anything but all right, and he led or dragged me out of the shed and kicked the door closed, which cut off some of the worst of it. But there was a breeze that day, and it was late in the afternoon and all the ordinary leaf shadows were running around madly anyway, as well as all the stuff following Val, because yes it was still there and dreeping rioting over the garden. I would probably have gone completely doolally in another minute, frothing at the mouth and biting his hands (ewww) but he let go of my shoulder with his right hand and made some weird twisty gesture where his hand seemed to disappear under a great dizzy-sparkling swirl of shadows, and at the same time breathing out some phrase I didn’t understand, in Orzaskan or something I suppose.

  It all fell away—whatever it was—like taking a coat off, and I was okay. Shaken—and furious—but okay.

  He dropped his other hand and for a moment we stood looking at each other. I would have run away instantly except my knees were rubber. I noticed he looked weirdly shocked. That was my job in the circumstances. I was about an inch taller but I felt like unmown grass next to a bull: the grass may be taller, but . . . Val loomed, even if he was shorter than me.

  “Maggie—” he began, but with the sound of his voice I stumbled away from him. I can’t remember if I gave him the message or not, whatever it was. I turned and rubbery-kneed raced back to the house like there were devils (with mouths full of glinting silver teeth) after me. Magic user, I was thinking. Magic user.

  How had he got across the border? They never let magic users across the border anywhere in Newworld, even if they’d been legal wherever they c
ame from.

  “Maggie?” Mom said as I blundered into the house, trying not to cry or gasp or be weird any way she’d notice. I failed. Mongo rushed up to me and whined.

  “Maggie, what’s wrong?” she said.

  “Ask Val,” I said in a squeaky voice nothing like what I usually sound like, and bolted upstairs, Mongo so close to my heels I nearly tripped over him. I ran into my bedroom and slammed the door. I don’t know what Val told her, but Mom left me alone that night. After everyone else had gone to bed I crept downstairs again and made Mongo and me a giant platter of scrambled eggs. Ran, who had the teenage boy’s radar for food, followed the smell of coffee and toast downstairs, so then I had to make an even more gigantic platter of scrambled eggs. Ran and I had ours on toast and Mongo had his on dog kibble. Nobody else came down and asked us what we were doing.

  “Mom said you were sick,” Ran offered, around a mouthful of eggs. I’d dropped a handful of peas into the eggs so there was a green vegetable involved and Ran was separating them out and making a little pile on the edge of his plate. Mongo ate his.

  “Yeah,” I said. “More or less.”

  “She was worried about you,” said Ran. “Val too.”

  I succeeded in not snorting my scrambled eggs out through my nose. I said, “You mean mad at me, don’t you? Mom doesn’t really think I’m sick.” And I have no idea what Val thinks, I added silently.

  “No,” said Ran, distinctly, having swallowed his mouthful. “Worried. You know. . . .”

  “Don’t make me sorry I scrambled some eggs for you,” I said.

  Ran shoveled some more in and chewed. “Okay,” he said. “But he’s really not so bad. Val,” he added, like I might not know who he was talking about.

  “You can wash the dishes,” I said. I took Mongo out, and then we both went back to my room again, and Mom never said a word about what happened with Val, or about Mongo spending the night in my room. Or about how she was married to an illegal magic user monster. Worried? Yeah. They could be worried. I could go down to our local Watchguard and tell them I suspected my mom’s new husband of being a magic user. They would check him out—especially after they found out he’s a Commonwealth emigrant. And then . . .