Nora slept, long and dreamless. But when she finally awoke, she did so with a gasp, as if someone had whispered to her in the dark. The first things she saw were the shadows, pressing in from all sides like a black-clad coterie of deathbed attendants stealing the air from the soon-to-be deceased.
She jerked upright and flailed, but caught only empty air. She panted, shivered. Looked around in confusion.
What was she afraid of? The darkness was her friend, the shadows her servants. So if it wasn’t the shadows that had unnerved her so badly, it must’ve been the memory—the one that’d hit her with such force in her old high school.
No, not a memory. That frightened, bullied girl hadn’t been her. It couldn’t have been.
Still shivering, she swung her legs over the side of her mattress. In the gloom, something slithered or scuttled across the wall to her left. She jerked her head in that direction, but saw only a solid mass of shadows.
What was wrong with her? Why couldn’t she see into the blackness? She concentrated, made a psychic adjustment, and instantly the darkness was hers again—a protective cloak, a womb that enfolded and cradled her.
Still, the uneasiness remained … the recent and increasingly familiar sense that, for a moment, the darkness had not been her friend. Instead it had seemed like … what? Her enemy? No, but a cold and watchful presence perhaps. Sly. A keeper of secrets.
She shook her head. These were dark thoughts. Stupid thoughts. Clearly she was still rattled by what had happened earlier. The massacre. The cult priestess’s words. Her loss of control with Sam. The memory, vision, whatever, at the high school …
She needed to orient herself. Figure out what time it was.
She switched on the little floor lamp beside her mattress, ignoring the shadows that slunk away into the cracks and crevices like snakes or rats.
Her old-fashioned alarm clock, the one with the Mickey Mouse hands, read 6:45. Was that a.m. or p.m.?
She groped for her jeans, which lay in a rumpled heap on the floor of the loft with the rest of her clothes, and fished her cell out of the pocket. She blinked at the display: p.m.! She’d been asleep all day. Several noncommittal texts from Sam asked her what the hell was going on, but the ones that worried her were from her boss. Yesterday had been Sunday, so wandering in a daze all day hadn’t been an issue. But this was Monday, and Raj was not at all happy that Nora had been AWOL.
She didn’t remember arriving home, getting undressed, crawling into bed. She had no recollection of anything after the barrage of memories—not mine, those were not my memories—that had assailed her at the school.
There were a few voice mails as well, from Sam and Raj and from Casey Santiago, the fashion editor at NYChronicle, who’d become Nora’s closest work friend. She couldn’t face listening to any of them right now.
Crawling to the ladder in her underwear, she descended to the living room and looked around for the Assholes. The cats were nowhere to be seen. She couldn’t decide if that was a good sign or a bad one.
She padded to the picture window, clicking on lights as she went. If there’d been anyone out there, they’d have been treated to a view of her in her undies and tank top, a tantalizing glimpse through the mostly bare branches of the tall trees that stood sentinel along the street.
Nora started. Something was squatting on one of those branches, peering inside at her. It was a dark, hunched shape. Her heart quickened as she looked again, staring into the night-black tangle of branches. No, she had been mistaken. There was nothing.
She exhaled. Her own reflection was wan and sickly in the glass. Her hair was lank, her eyes dark hollows in her thin face. That thing in the tree—that thing she’d thought was there—had reminded her of something. In light of recent events she grasped at it almost gratefully, though the recollection was far from pleasant.
It was the night her parents had died.
She’d been nineteen. She and her parents had been celebrating something—a promotion for her father? Her memories of the night were somehow both vivid and hazy, certain details standing out with stark and unflinching clarity, others shrouded in a fog of forgetfulness.
Selective amnesia they’d called it. The therapists, the experts, her parents’ friends and colleagues. She couldn’t remember any of them now. Once it was all over—the initial trauma, the funeral, the aftermath—those people had melted away, though she suspected it was partly her doing. She’d wanted to be alone, to escape her grief and seek out some sort of … meaning, or solace. And so she’d …
But no. She was getting ahead of herself.
That night. Focus on that night. If only to prove the lie in the priestess’s words.
The celebration is at a restaurant. An Italian place. Family-run affair, small but classy, in the theater district. Maybe West Forty-Fourth Street. Somewhere around there.
They’re happy. Drinking champagne. Laughing a lot. Her dad is square-jawed, handsome in his double-breasted suit, his dark hair slick and neat. Her mom is wide-mouthed as she laughs, bright red lipstick framing gleaming white teeth. She’s elegant in an off-the-shoulder number, which shimmers like gold.
Checked tablecloths. Candles. Music. It’s all as hazy as a dream. But Nora carries the images within her, enclosed in a fragile bubble of happiness.
Then … the dark night. It’s drizzling. The streets gleam like black metal. Light reflects off passing cars like white shards of endlessly shattering glass. Everyone is bundled up in coats and scarves. Her father opens an umbrella, holds it over the heads of his wife and daughter.
“Got to keep my girls dry,” he says. It isn’t particularly funny, but they all laugh.
Stepping from the warm restaurant into the cold air, Nora shivers. The soles of her shoes crackle on the gritty pavement. But the car isn’t far away. Her dad has parked it in an almost-empty lot owned by a company he does business with.
“Special privileges,” he’d told them earlier that evening as he cut the lights and he engine. And Nora thought how important, how respected, he must be among his colleagues, and how proud that made her feel.
The quickest route between the restaurant and the parking lot is an alleyway, little more than a cut-through. Too narrow for even a single vehicle to negotiate and made narrower still by the Dumpsters lining its walls on both sides.
Alone, she might be scared, but flanked by her parents, she feels safe, impregnable. Even when a black, hunched shape detaches itself from the dark block of a Dumpster ahead and glides along the alleyway toward them, she feels not a flutter of unease. Only when the figure raises its arm and she sees light slither along the barrel of the gun in its hand does she realize with a jolt what terrible danger they are in. Even now, though, her overriding emotion is not terror but indignation.
You can’t do this! she thinks. Not to us! How dare you!
She looks at the man’s face but she can’t see it. He is nothing but a void in her mind. Later she will be no use when the police question her about the incident … or at least …
She blinked, coming back to herself for a moment. A faceless man? Of course not. He was only faceless either because he kept to the shadows or because she’s blocked his features from her mind. As for the police, the truth is, she remembered nothing of the evening’s immediate aftermath simply because she was—quite understandably—deep in shock.
The gunman’s voice is a generic bad-guy growl. He demands her father’s wallet, her mother’s jewelry. How the mugger knows her mother is wearing a diamond necklace beneath her thick scarf Nora has no idea. Perhaps he’s been watching them through the window of the restaurant.
What happens next happens so quickly that to Nora it’s like a series of flash images, like movie stills:
The mugger makes a grab for her mother’s throat.
Her father yells and steps forward, arms outstretched.
A flash of gunfire, and her father reels, arms outflung, head back.
Then he is on the ground, sprawled, perhaps already dead, and Nora and her mother are screaming.
The gunman panics, the gun blazes again, two more shots ring out.
Now Nora’s mom is on the ground beside her husband, arms and legs outflung obscenely, bloody holes in her forehead and chest, rain falling into her open eyes …
Time slows, to shift back on track. The movie camera in Nora’s head clicks and whirs back into life. All at once the movie stills are once again replaced with real-time footage, and Nora sees …
… sees herself leap at the man, both in a desperate attempt to save her own life and to prevent him inflicting more damage on her parents. Hands curled into fists, she slams into him before he can bring the gun to bear on her, knocking him backward.
Down they go, the two of them, in a sprawl of limbs. The impact with the ground causes the mugger to let go of the gun, the weapon spinning and clattering away.
In an instant Nora is up again, quick as a rabbit, chasing after the gun. Slivers of light wink and flash on its metal surface as it skids across the slick ground.
By the time she’s scooped it up, the mugger is back on his feet. But he doesn’t close in on her or attempt to retake the weapon. Instead he turns and flees, his feet splatting in the rain, his elongated shadow stretching behind him.
Nora raises the gun and levels it at his back, her finger tightening on the trigger. But she can’t bring herself to kill him. Not in cold blood. And so she lets him get away. Lets the man who killed her parents slip into the darkness.
The instant he’s gone, her hand drops to her side. The gun that ended her parents’ lives suddenly feels heavy. With a cry of revulsion she opens her fingers. The weapon hits the ground with a thud. A second later she’s dropping, too, her legs folding beneath her, no longer able to support her weight.
On her knees, rain darkening her hair and running down her face, she stares at the bloodied, broken bodies of her mother and father. At their blank, openmouthed faces, their glazed eyes, their fine clothes soiled with blood and grime.
A few minutes earlier they had been laughing. Life had been good. Now, in seconds, it was all gone.
It’s incomprehensible, impossible. Unreal.
Like an animal she raises her face to the sky and begins to scream.
* * *
Nora came back to herself with a jerk, surprised to find she was no longer standing at the picture window, but at the sink of her little kitchenette. She was shaking. Tears blurred her vision, pouring down her cheeks.
She grabbed a glass from the drainboard with one hand and turned on the tap with the other. Having filled the glass with water, she tilted it to her lips and downed the cold liquid in three huge swallows.
As soon as the glass was empty, she refilled it and gulped down this one, too. She emerged gasping, but she felt better—marginally, at least.
Putting the glass down, she washed her face and thought once again about her parents. The memory of how they had died was vivid and distressing, but for the first time she felt that it was also … strange. She wasn’t sure why, but she couldn’t help but think of her mind like a wall, and of the memory of her parents’ death like a thick layer of wallpaper, concealing cracks in the plaster beneath.
What might seep out of those cracks if she could only get at them she had no idea. But she wasn’t sure that she wanted to get at them. Indeed, she recoiled inwardly at the thought.
When she turned from the sink, something dark flittered at the edge of her vision … something that seemed to scurry out of sight the moment she focused on it. One of the Assholes, or merely a shadow?
“Kelso? Hyde?” she called, but was answered with nothing but silence.
Crossing to the sagging sofa, she plumped into it, raising a cloud of cat hair. Almost immediately she jumped up again.
Photo albums. Where were her photo albums? They would prove her memories were real! She shook her head. How come she hadn’t thought of them before? She was sure she had them stowed somewhere. In her mind’s eye she could see the spines, dark blue and red. But when she tried to focus on exactly where she’d seen them, she couldn’t remember.
For the next few minutes she searched the apartment, feverishly rooting through drawers and cupboards. It didn’t take long; her apartment was small. Finding nothing, she switched on her computer and looked through her files for old photos that she might have forgotten about.
Five minutes later she slumped back from the screen, defeated. That she couldn’t find a single photograph of her parents—or even of a time before her present life—troubled her greatly.
What was going on? And why had these things never bothered her or even occurred to her before? More to the point, what about her time in Nepal? How come she didn’t have any photographs from her trip? It could be that she hadn’t had a camera or a cell phone back then. Or maybe, in her quest for serenity, she had abandoned such worldly goods.
Balling her hand into a fist she knocked on the side of her skull, as if seeking access. Why couldn’t she remember? What was wrong with her?
Physical evidence or not, there was no way Nepal hadn’t happened. Nora could vividly remember her time there. She had traveled from one end of the country to the other, seeking enlightenment. She had utilized all forms of transport: boat, train, ramshackle bus, horse and cart. And on many occasions—through the subtropical jungles of the Terai region, and the hills and valleys of the Pahad region—she had traveled on foot, sometimes in a group or accompanied by a guide. Sometimes alone.
Her mind was a montage of amazing memories: the bustling streets of Kathmandu, the beautiful Hindu temples of Patan, the calm friendliness and generosity of the brightly clothed Nepalese villagers. Time and again these wonderful people, to whom she would forever be indebted, had taken her into their homes, shared their food with her, provided her with a straw mat on which to sleep.
On other occasions, Nora had found shelter among the many traditional teahouses along her route. She retained a vivid memory of sitting on the sunny balcony of one such establishment, eating dal bhat and looking out over a spectacular view of the distant snow-covered mountains. She even remembered the tiny green lizards that had scampered around her feet, and the breathtakingly colorful butterflies busying themselves among the local flora.…
From the grandmother of the owner of a teahouse in the Manaslu Himal region, Nora first hears of the monastery. The grandmother is tiny and ancient, her spindly limbs making her wrinkled hands and feet appear overlarge, her face as creased and brown as a walnut shell with a kindly face carved into it.
Despite her age, the old woman’s eyes are still young, still bright. She speaks no English, and Nora speaks little Nepali, but somehow the two manage to communicate.
Nora conveys her story to the old woman, and the old woman, in turn, tells Nora about the monastery in the mountains. There she will find what she is looking for.
The encounter, although certain details of it stand out starkly in Nora’s mind, now seems like little more than a dream. As does the solitary trek into the mountains, the lush greenery gradually giving way to rockier outcrops, the air becoming thinner and colder the higher she climbs.
Had she carried provisions on her journey? Did she have a tent? The answer must be yes, but she can’t remember.
One thing she does remember, though, is fighting off the wolves.
She has been trekking for five days, perhaps a week. She is nearing the summit—she must be—but she is also nearing exhaustion. She builds her camp in the shelter of some rocks and is sitting beside the fire, warming herself. The land around her is dark and silent, though the moon and stars, unsullied by light pollution, bathe the surrounding snowcaps in a minty-blue luminescence. The first signs that she is not alone are the glints of light she sees in the darkness, which she initially thinks are fireflies. Then she realizes that the lights are in pairs, and suddenly it occurs to her what they really are.
Eyes.
Sitting up a little straighter, heart thumping hard, she reaches for a length of burning wood. Drawing it from the fire, she stands up slowly—and all at once, as if knowing that their presence has been detected, the glints of light converge on her as the wolves close in.
Nora can hear them, growling softly in the darkness. She sweeps her gaze from left to right, counting the eyes. Seven pairs. Seven wolves.
A pack.
With a snarl, two of the animals rush forward. Nora swings the burning brand, a slash of orange flame in the darkness. One of the wolves yowls and veers away. The other skids to a halt at the edge of the firelight.
It is lean, its fur pale, its jowls crinkled back to reveal long yellow teeth. It snaps at the flame, but when Nora thrusts the brand forward again, it yelps and retreats.
Holding the flaming branch at arm’s length, moving it slowly from side to side, she wonders what to do. Should she yell at the wolves in the hope they will take fright and flee, or should she remain silent? Should she turn aggressor, rush at them with the brand, or stay where she is, close to the fire?
In the end she decides that discretion is the better part of valor—
Or does she? Is that really how it happened?
Looking back now, Nora couldn’t rightly remember the outcome of the encounter. She had a vague notion that the wolves had stuck around for a while, and then, discouraged by the fire, had slunk away, never to return.
And after they had gone? What had happened then?
“Come on, you idiot, remember,” she muttered.
But she couldn’t, no matter how hard she tried, and in the end she decided to move on. Decided to concentrate on the monastery itself, and what had happened when she had finally got there.
She tried to picture her arrival, but all she could remember was collapsing on the steps, half-dead with hunger and exhaustion. But after trekking all that way, had she really been unable to make the final effort to climb those steps to the top and knock on the heavy wooden doors? It seemed unlikely, even a tad melodramatic.
She screwed her eyes tightly closed in the hope that darkness would let her unearth the memories.
She sees the huge double doors of the monastery opening, orange-clad monks hurrying down the steps toward her, lifting her up, carrying her inside. She is delirious, only half-aware of her surroundings. The monks tend to her. They nurse her back to health.
And after that …
After that …
She trains with them. They teach her how to manipulate shadows. How to forge weapons out of darkness. How to—
No!
Her own denial shocked her. Her eyes snapped open. Something inside—something that seemed, for a split second, as if it was independent of her—recoiled. Nora felt overwhelmed by panic, felt her mind attempting to backtrack. Once again she thought of wallpaper covering a crack-filled wall, hiding a multitude of sins.
But something nagged at her. Something about her own story. Something that simply wasn’t right.
It had to do with when she’d been a little girl. To do with something she’d done. Something she’d liked.
So why did she have a sudden memory, dredged from deep within her, of sitting in a dark place?
She probed at the memory, focusing on that dark place in particular. Could it have been … a wardrobe? Yes! But why did she have a memory of sitting huddled in a wardrobe, scared and alone, wishing she could be invisible, finding comfort from books she read by the glow of a flashlight?
No, not books …
Comics!
Yes! Comics! She loves them, doesn’t she? Her mother disapproves, but Nora reads them anyway. She sneaks them into the house, conceals them wherever she can find hiding places—behind the wardrobe, under her thin, ill-fitting bedroom carpet …
“Oh!”
Once again Nora snapped back to the present. The recollection was so vivid she was amazed she hadn’t remembered it before, was amazed that she could ever have forgotten.
Even now, though, she sensed her mind trying to squirm away from the subject. Saw the brightly colored comic-book panels—such an escape from her own miserable existence—blurring and fading in her mind’s eye, as if some part of her brain was attempting to deny her access to her past.
She concentrated again, concentrated hard, squeezing her eyes shut, screwing up her face until the comics came back into focus, and with them particular images, particular stories, popped like hatchlings from her memory.…
Her heart thundered and her breath hitched in her throat.
It was impossible, but at the same time she knew that it wasn’t. The past she remembered, the death of her parents, the monastery in Nepal …
It wasn’t her past. It wasn’t real.
Bruce Wayne’s parents had been shot by a mugger in an alley, leading to him becoming Batman. Danny Rand had learned his skills in a mountaintop monastery after fleeing a pack of wolves and later became Iron Fist. She had adopted their stories as her own.
And don’t forget Doctor Strange, an insidious little voice muttered. He, too, had studied the mystic arts in some mountaintop monastery in Asia, hadn’t he?
“Holy shit,” she whispered.
Panic and confusion overwhelmed her and the strength drained from her body. If she hadn’t already been sitting down, she would have fallen. Slumping over her desk, she buried her head in her hands.
Somehow she had taken the stories of a bunch of superheroes, twisted them, and adopted them for herself. It wasn’t wallpaper that covered up the cracks in the wall of her memory, but the pages of comic books. But if her past was false, what had her childhood really been like? Why had she blocked it from her mind?
In the corners of the room, the shadows whispered, the sound almost like the giggle of imps. “No photos,” she whispered. “No records.”
Brainwashed, she wanted to tell herself. Or maybe you’ve blocked out the truth.
A truth worse than her parents being murdered in an alley and wandering Nepal in search of enlightenment and nearly being eaten by wolves?
Maybe.
But she felt sure there must be more to it than that. After all, if none of that was true …
If none of that was true …
“Oh, my God,” she whispered.
Heart slamming inside her chest, Nora jumped up from her desk chair and retreated until she could put her back against the wall. The chair continued to glide backward a few feet as if nudged by a ghost, then came to a halt. She stared into the dark corners of the room for a moment, then rushed around switching on the rest of the lights in her apartment—the table lamp, the floor lamp. But even with all of them blazing, the room was still full of small shadows.
If none of those memories were true, then where the fuck had the shadows come from? How could she do the things she could do as Indigo?
What the hell was she?
Her panic and confusion gave way to a rush of terror. Her throat went dry and she opened and closed her fists as if she might be attacked at any moment. If the shadows weren’t some mystical power she had been trained to control, then what were they? What might they do to her? What kind of control over them did she really possess?
Forcing herself to breathe, listening to the thunder of her heart, she tried to calm down. Normally she liked to be alone, but now she could not stay by herself. Not now. Not when she was on the verge of screaming. She desperately needed to talk to someone. Solitary by instinct ever since the death of her parents—however that had really happened—there was only one person she could trust with her secrets.
Shelby.
Reeling like a punch-drunk boxer, still barefoot and wearing little, she staggered to the door of her apartment and pulled it open. The stairs up to Shelby’s floor swayed in front of her. For a moment shadows amassed there, forming a barrier to block her way. Then she blinked and the shadows dispersed, skittering in all directions like roaches exposed to the light.
She was halfway up the first flight when one of the now-exposed cracks in her mind gaped open and another long-buried memory slammed into her like a fist to the stomach.
She is young, still in her teens, naked and bound, rough cold stone pressing into her back. Someone is looming over her—a woman. Marble-white skin. Burning eyes. A skull-like face bisected by a red, wet grin. She is clutching something in her hand. Something sharp. Something that flashes in the candlelight …
Nora staggered, spun, grabbed the handrail, and sat down hard on the steps. The memory was there and gone in an instant, but the image was so awful, so terrifying, that she thought she would pass out. She felt nauseated. Beads of cold sweat appeared on her skin, making her shiver. Clinging to the metal strut of a banister rail, she willed herself to stay conscious, to take slow, deep breaths.
At last she dragged herself to her feet and plodded up the stairs again. By the time she reached the fifth floor she was exhausted, as if she had run a marathon. She stumbled across the landing to Shelby’s door, balled her hand into a fist, and raised it to knock …
* * *
And then she was no longer outside her best friend’s door. Instead she was sitting at her desk, fully dressed, in the bustling, open-plan office of NYChronicle. Her fingers were poised on her keyboard, a half-finished article on the screen before her. Perched on the edge of her desk was Casey Santiago, a Starbucks coffee in her hand, her dark curls swishing as she tossed back her head, plump red lips stretching wide as she laughed.
Nora jerked back in her seat as if her keyboard had bitten her. Disoriented, she looked wildly around.
“What’s going on?” she muttered.
Casey stopped laughing and frowned. “You all right, girl?”
“How did I get here?”
Casey blinked. “Well, I dunno, honey. The subway maybe?”
Nora stood up so fast that her chair glided back on its casters and crashed into the wall behind her. A few people looked over to see what the commotion was about, curious expressions on their faces.
The room spun in front of Nora’s eyes. The strip lighting above her seemed overbright, piercing her vision, awakening pain centers in her brain.
“I shouldn’t be here,” she muttered.
Still bewildered, Casey asked, “Is that right? Then where should you be?”
“At home. I should be at home.”
Casey nodded. “Maybe you’re right. You do look a little pale. Like maybe you’re coming down with something?”
Nora staggered from her office cubicle, heading for the exit. The room was still spinning and swaying. She felt eyes on her, watching her weaving progress. Some of her colleagues might think she was drunk, but she didn’t care. All she cared about was getting home, talking to Shelby, trying to make some sense out of what was happening.
A dark shape loomed in front of her. She cried out.
“Hey, hey,” a voice said. She felt hands on her arms, steadying her. “It’s just me. Are you okay?”
She blinked until her vision cleared. Staring down at her with concern was Sam Loh, his lower lip cut and still a bit swollen from the punch she’d thrown at him.
“Sam, I … I gotta go.”
“Go where? Look … I came by to talk about what happened the night before last. You’re not yourself. I don’t think you should be going anywhere right now, Nora. You look terrible.”
“I’m fine, I’m just … not feeling too well.”
“Look, Nora, there’s obviously something going on with you—”
“There isn’t,” she insisted, pulling away from him. “I’m fine. Well, except for the fact that I think I’m coming down with something … flu maybe.”
“Flu?”
She scowled. “You don’t believe me?”
He raised his hands. “The way you’ve been behaving recently, I don’t know what to believe.”
She saw the hurt on his face, the concern. She reached out a trembling hand and touched him on the shoulder. “Look, Sam, I’m really sorry. You’re right. I haven’t been myself and I was … stressed. It’s this story I’m working on. The murders. It … well, it got to me, that’s all. But I’m so sorry, and I’m fine now. Other than…” She wafted a hand.
“The flu.”
“Yeah. The flu. I just need to go home, get some sleep.” She was already edging past him. “Look, I’ll call you, okay?”
“You’d better.”
“I will. I promise.”
And then she was past him, and out the door. Running down the stairs as if something were after her. Her thoughts churning, churning.