Shadow Realm Read online

  Shadow Realm

  Book Three of the Dark Matter Series

  Randall Pine

  Chapter 1

  Simon woke up in a strange and terrifying place.

  He had gone to sleep in his own bed—he was certain of that. He had fallen asleep under his own covers, in his own room, in the two-bedroom apartment he shared with Virgil, in the leaky old building on Wayward Street, where everything was nice and normal and familiar.

  But he woke up somewhere altogether different.

  The world in which he found himself was so wholly alien to his normal environment that he had trouble even comprehending what his eyes were showing him. He appeared to be sitting on a black, rubbery surface with a pebble-like texture, not too dissimilar from the spongy surface that was used for playgrounds now instead of gravel and dirt. The sky above was dark, a pitch black night sky with no stars, but it was also layered with flashes and swirls of color and light. It was like the videos he had seen of the Northern Lights, if there were ten different sets of Northern Lights, all in variegated colors, some green-to-blue, some purple-to-red, some yellow-to-orange, all laid over each other like layers of a cake, all flashing and swirling at the same time.

  But the thick, black darkness above was present, and pressing...almost suffocating.

  There were things that looked like trees sticking up from the ground, if trees were made of gigantic toothpicks glued together at all the wrong angles and painted dishwater-gray. The horizon stretched on, forever and ever, in all directions, and Simon had the distinct sense that he could see so far into the distance that if he had the right binoculars, he would actually be able to see himself at the far end of his vision.

  Also, the entire world appeared to be sideways.

  It didn’t look sideways to Simon, because he was sitting up, and the ground was beneath him, and the sky was above him, but something about the gravity felt all wrong. It felt as if it wanted to pull him forward, and if he got up off his seat, he would plummet through the air, straight ahead, dragging his feet along the rubbery black floor.

  “What…is this?” he said aloud. His voice sounded deadened and muted in the air, as though he were speaking into a thick wad of cotton. He lifted his right hand and tried to summon energy into his fist, so he would be ready to defend himself if he had to be. But the energy didn’t respond.

  He had no magic in this place.

  “Hello!” he called out, and his voice fell flat as soon as the sound left his lips. He felt as if he could see the words falling down onto the ground and rolling away.

  “Okay,” he said quietly, turning around and seeing nothing but rubbery ground, flashing sky, and pale trees in every direction. “This has got to be a dream.”

  Just then, there was a sharp SNAP-SNAP-SNAP as the ground began to pop all around him, bursting like blisters and erupting with a thick, red goo. Simon cried out and leapt to his feet, precariously balancing himself against the weird push-pull of sideways gravity, and backed quickly away from the deteriorating rubber floor. The pops spread out in all directions as he backpedaled, and soon the whole world looked like a poorly-choreographed fountain show, with brilliant red streams arcing up from the floor in disastrous syncopation and streaming back down to the ground, splashing and coating what remained of the black floor with a sticky, bright-red sheen.

  Simon turned and ran, trying to put distance between himself and the red fountains, but they spread more quickly than he could move, and soon the entire landscape, from one horizon to the other, was dotted with oozing red spray. Simon danced out of the way as two holes popped open beneath his feet; he stumbled to the side and slipped in a bit of the red muck. He fell onto his back with a low groan as the wind was knocked from his lungs. The goop was sticky, and he couldn’t peel his arms off of it, or his legs, or the small of his back when he tried to kick himself up. He was a human fly stuck to a planet-sized piece of disgusting red flypaper, and as the fountains continued to spew their liquid, the level of the muck rose higher and higher, up over his hands, then over his legs, then up to his ears. Soon it would cover him completely, and he would drown in two feet of sticky red glop.

  “Virgil,” he gasped, his voice hoarse and muffled. “Help…”

  Suddenly, something appeared in the swirling, flashing night. It started out small, hovering between the layers of sky, but it grew larger as it moved downward, approaching the surface of the planet. From far away, it looked like a piece of dark dandelion fluff floating in the air, with soft edges and a hazy center. As it floated lower to the ground, he realized that it was a small cyclone, grayish-blue in color, spinning and spinning and spinning at a dizzying pace, but in a surprisingly controlled manner.

  It lowered itself toward Simon, and the closer it got, the slower the advance of the red goop became. By the time the cyclone was hovering thirty feet above the ground, the ocean of red was actually receding, as if it were being pushed back down the drain by the oncoming tornado.

  The cyclone got closer and closer, finally coming to a stop just a few feet above Simon’s prostrate body. And then, Simon heard it speak.

  Light is the maker and the master of shadow.

  Simon furrowed his brow. “What?” he said.

  Light is the maker and the master of shadow, the cyclone repeated.

  “Oh,” Simon said, thoroughly confused. Most of his dreams these days were stress dreams that featured a sudden inability to read words in a grimoire or to remember to wear pants outside. He had an occasionally-recurring nightmare about his sister Laura clawing her way up out of a storm sewer. But he had never dreamt anything as weird as this.

  “Okay,” he said. The cyclone hovered there above him, not moving, and not saying anything more. Simon just lay there awkwardly for a few seconds before adding, “Thanks.”

  You’re welcome, the cyclone said. Then it drifted back up into the sky and disappeared in the swirl of sky-light colors.

  As soon as it was gone, the red goo returned with a fury, flooding the world around him, rising up like a tidal wave, drowning him in its thick wetness, and crashing down on him like a fist.

  Chapter 2

  Simon woke up with a gasp.

  “I didn’t hit you!” Virgil cried, jerking away from the edge of Simon’s bed and tossing the plunger he was holding over his shoulder. “You woke up on your own!”

  Simon blinked. He looked around the room. He blinked again. “What?”

  “What? Nothing,” Virgil said, looking up at the ceiling and trying his best to look casual. “You woke up on your own. Not because I hit you with a plunger.”

  Simon shook his head hard, trying to dislodge the last remnants of the dream from his mind. He squinted up at Virgil, who was barely distinguishable in the watery pre-dawn light. “You hit me with a plunger?”

  “No. Don’t you listen? I didn’t hit you with a plunger.” He relaxed a little, letting his shoulders slump. He picked up the plunger and gave it a twirl between his fingers. “I was about to hit you with a plunger, though.”

  “Why?” Simon asked.

  “Because I thought it would wake you up.”

  “Why?” he repeated.

  “Because I don’t know about you, but if my roommate hit me in the face with a used plunger, I would wake up instantly.” Virgil rubbed his jaw for a second, then he added, “My next move would probably be to throw my roommate out the window. So I guess it’s good for both of us that you woke up on your own.”

  Simon threw up his hands, exasperated. “No, I mean why did you try to wake me up in the first place?!”

  “Oh.” Virgil hefted the plunger onto his shoulder and walked over to
Simon’s bedroom door. He pulled it open and gestured out to the kitchen. “’Cause of that.”

  Simon’s room was directly across the hall from the kitchen. The lights were on in there, and he had to shield his eyes against the glare until they adjusted. When he could finally see, he rubbed the sleep from his eyes and peered out.

  There were dirty glasses on the counter, dirty bowls on the table, and dirty plates on the island.

  They were all hovering three inches in the air and spinning like tops.

  Simon leapt out of bed with a cry of surprise. He gestured wildly out at the spinning dishes, then he gestured wildly back at Virgil. Then back out toward the dishes, then back toward Virgil. “What is happening?!” he finally yelled.

  “I don’t know!” Virgil yelled back. He hopped up and down anxiously and said, “It freaked me out, then I calmed down about it, and now you’re making me freaked out again!”

  “Why are the plates spinning, Virgil?!”

  “I don’t know, Simon!” Virgil shouted, pulling at his own hair in frustration. A streak of silver tufted up between his fingers, woven in against the darker brown. “I woke up to go to the bathroom, I was washing my hands, I looked up, and the toothbrushes are going all Tasmanian Devil!” He whirled his finger frantically through the air, in case Simon needed a visual aid. “Then I went out to the living room, and Alexa’s just out there, pffffft!” He made a helicopter noise with his lips and did another finger twirl to mimic the supernatural movement of their smart speaker. “Her cord’s whipping around, she almost took my head off! Then I go into the kitchen, and that’s happening,” he said, pointing out the door with the plunger. “And I come in here, and you’re sound asleep, and you won’t wake up, and I’m screaming in your face, and you won’t wake up, and I’m like, ‘Well, Simon might actually be dead,’ and there was only one way to know for sure, so I went back to the bathroom, grabbed the plunger, and I’m telling you, I’m glad I didn’t have to hit you with it, but I was standing here trying to figure out if I should swing it like a bat or just straight-up plunge on your face, and I had pretty much decided to bash you in the head, and then you woke up, and Simon, what is going on?!”

  “I don’t know!” Simon shouted, rubbing his temples. “Give me a second to think, I just woke up!”

  The plates and bowls and glasses suddenly lost momentum. They slowed down, wobbling in the air, coming to a stop altogether…then they came crashing down, shattering on the counter, the table, and the island, exploding on impact, and sending shards of glass sprinkling across the room.

  “I think we might have a poltergeist,” Virgil said quietly.

  Simon grunted. “We’re not that lucky,” he replied. He turned on his bedroom lamp and pulled on his sneakers before stepping out into the kitchen, crunching carefully over the shattered glass. He dug the broom and dustpan out of the closet and set to work sweeping up the shards.

  After a few minutes, he looked up at Vigil expectantly. “You going to help?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.

  “I want to,” Virgil said, “it’s just that I’m barefoot.” He lifted up one foot to prove to Simon that it was, in fact, bare. “My shoes are in my room, way down the hall.”

  Simon shook his head and muttered something under his breath.

  “I hope whatever mean-spirited thing you just said was about the magic, spinning dishes and not about me,” Virgil called from Simon’s room.

  “It was about both of you,” Simon grumbled, sweeping the glass into the dustpan. He straightened up, leaned on the broom, and sighed. “It’s just…between the Refracticore, and the Shadow Lord, and the backwards reflections in the Dixie Diner bathroom last Thursday, and now spinning plates and toothbrushes…there’s a lot happening all of a sudden.”

  “‘Backwards’ is not the right word for those reflections,” Virgil said as he remembered the shock at seeing the back of himself in the mirror. A shudder vibrated through his entire body. “I will never un-see that.”

  Simon dumped the broken glass into the trash can and blew air through his lips, sounding utterly exhausted. “I know it’s only been, like, a week,” he said, “but we can’t keep facing these things, just us. We need help. We need Llewyn. We need him back.”

  “Wait,” Virgil said, furrowing his brow. “What are you saying?”

  Simon sighed. “I’m saying, Virgil, that I think it’s time to let Morgan le Fay out of the box.”

  Chapter 3

  “Do you think she’s going to be mad that we left her in there so long?”

  Virgil, Simon, and Abby all stood in Llewyn’s dungeon room and stared uneasily down at the locked and sealed coffin before them.

  Abby shrugged. “Judging by the look of the chains and the wax, I’d say she’s already been in there for a couple hundred years, at least. I’m not sure a few more days is going to be what pushes her over the edge.”

  Virgil considered this. “Huh,” he said. “Well in that case, do we think she’s going to be mad that we as a human race left her in there so long?”

  Abby tapped her lips. “That does seem likely,” she decided.

  “Great.”

  Three days after Abby had summoned her, they had moved the legendary Arthurian sorceress to the basement of Llewyn’s mansion, to a dungeon room that none of them had known existed until they went searching through all the open, non-frozen doors in order to find a safe place to store her. None of them exactly relished the idea of putting their hands on the box and lifting it up, much less carrying it a few hundred yards through the mansion and down a deep, deep flight of winding stone steps, but they couldn’t bear to leave the coffin sitting in the hallway next to Llewyn’s frozen form. They didn’t want to see it every time they came into the hall, and as far as any of them knew, a box containing a powerful sorceress could explode or combust or become sentient or any number of things, and they reasoned that it was best for Llewyn if they moved her to a safe distance. So together, they had gathered up their courage, held their breath, grabbed the rickety coffin, and hauled the most powerful and dangerous sorceress in history down into the wizard’s dungeon.

  They had only dropped her four times.

  “She’s probably also not going to like the fact that we kept her prisoner in an underground torture cell,” Simon pointed out, walking around the small room and running his hands along the cold, wet stone wall. Most of the stones were splotched white with niter, and when the torches set into the wall flamed to life—which happened of its own accord every time they approached—the entire room gave off an eerie, ghostly glow. The far wall was inset with chains and manacles that were properly positioned to secure two arms and two legs. The room could be barred with a heavy iron door, and the only toilet to speak of was a narrow grate set into the center of the floor.

  They avoided that grate as much as possible.

  “According to the stories, she’s spent a good portion of her life in dungeons worse than this one,” Abby pointed out.

  “Maybe that’ll work in our favor,” Virgil suggested. “Maybe it’ll feel homey.”

  “Yeah.” Simon kicked over a small pile of rubble in the corner of the room, and a mummified rat tumbled out from beneath it. Simon blenched. “Real homey.”

  “If she’s going to be mad about anything, it’s going to be the fact that we dropped her on the way down here,” Abby decided.

  “Are we sure we want to do this?” Virgil asked. “We don’t want to keep looking for a different way to thaw out old frosty-beard? Or maybe just pack up and move to Wyoming, and never come back?”

  “We’ve spent enough time looking for other ways to save Llewyn,” Simon said with a note of finality. “We’re just stalling. If there were a better way, he would have told us. It’s time to get him back.”

  “All right,” Virgil said, raising his hands in defeat. “It’s just that I’ve been reading a lot about
Morgaine on Reddit lately, and—”

  “We’re letting her out!” Simon said.

  Virgil looked at him curiously. But eventually, he nodded. “All right. Abby?”

  “Let’s do it,” she said. “I’m not exactly thrilled about setting the world’s most powerful sorceress free after someone took the time to bind her so well, and I think there’s a decent chance she slaughters all three of us within half a second of escaping, but hey. It’s our best and only option.”

  “Great,” Virgil said miserably. “Well, then, what are we waiting for?” He clapped his hands and rubbed them together. “Let’s get this party started.”

  The three of them cautiously approached the coffin. The box was definitely heavy enough to be holding a person inside, but Morgaine hadn’t made a sound. It had crossed Simon’s mind more than once that perhaps she wasn’t even in there, despite the fact that her name was scrawled into the ancient wood. Part of him hoped the box was empty. But the greater part of him needed Llewyn, and he knew that she was the only hope of bringing him back. “Okay,” he said, taking a deep breath. “Let’s do it.”

  He extended his right hand toward the box, opening his palm over one of the heavy iron padlocks. He charged up his hand, said, “Here goes nothing,” and shot a kinesthetic blast at the lock.

  The bright orange light collided with the metal, bounced off, and ricocheted across the room, nearly taking off Virgil’s head.

  “Whoa!” Virgil screamed, falling backward and landing hard on his seat. “Not okay!”

  “Huh,” Simon said, looking down quizzically at his hand. He glanced over at the padlock, which looked completely untouched by the powerful magic blast. “Well, that didn’t work.”

  “You think?!” Virgil cried. He pushed himself back up to his feet and brushed off his jeans. He gave Simon a look of warning. “Not okay,” he said again.

  “There’s a pretty good chance the locks are immune to magic,” Abby said. She bent down and inspected the chains, running her hand over the metal links, which were warm to the touch, despite the damp chill of the dungeon. “Magic might not do the trick.”