Shadow Walkers (5 page)

Astral projection to find my missing little brother—now
that
was a stupid idea. It would
really
never work.

I glanced over at the shelf under my nightstand. That book,
Voyage Beyond the Rainbow
, the one I’d read the week when my grandparents had taken away my computer, was still there. What had Celestia Moonglow written—something about there being two planes of existence, with the astral plane looking into the material one? If that was true, I could look for Gilbert from the astral dimension. I could also leave the island.

Yeah, this was a stupid idea, and it probably wouldn’t work. But what if it did? At this point, I had absolutely nothing to lose. I opened the drawer of my nightstand, and sure enough, the three sticks of incense were still there.

I found an incense stand in one of the drawers in my desk, then headed downstairs to make sure there hadn’t been any new news about Gilbert. When there wasn’t, I went back upstairs, lit the incense, and immediately settled back on the bed. I didn’t bother with the candle or music this time.

The incense smoldered. Curious, I looked over at it. It burned differently than most incense, with the smoke almost dripping from the stick as if it was heavier than the air. But little by little, the smell of it filled the room.

Once again, it smelled good—at first. But after it burned for a minute or so, I detected that strange undercurrent, definitely something foul.

It smelled as thick as it looked, settling heavily inside my lungs, almost like a liquid.

I tried my best to ignore it. I started my breathing, inhaling, holding it, then letting it go. I didn’t bother with the whole relaxation process that I’d done before: the breathing in and out, the exhaling the cares of the world. There was no way I’d be able to exhale the fact that my brother was missing.

Right away, something felt different. For one thing, I wasn’t nearly so self-conscious. Suddenly, it didn’t feel like I was play-acting at something, with everything forced and calculated. This time it felt real.

And weirdly, in spite of everything that had happened with Gilbert, I also felt …
relaxed
. I felt calmer than I had in ages—definitely more than the first time I’d tried this astral projection thing. But it was more than just being relaxed. It was like I was now very aware of everything I was feeling and experiencing. At the same time, I had some distance—like the emotions were outside me somehow, and I could sit back and examine them, like white lace, intricate and fascinating.

Before I knew it, I was ready to begin the astral separation.

Eyes closed, I once again imagined a single point of light floating on my forehead. Even though the point was outside of me, I knew that it was part of myself, too, and that I had control over it.

The point of energy started to move, slowly drifting up, directly away from my head. I didn’t remember consciously choosing to make the point move.

Six feet or so above me, the point stopped, floating effortlessly.

I knew it was now time for my mind and soul—every bit of me except for my physical body—to join that small, shimmering part of me.

I concentrated, even as the smoke from the incense kept dribbling down my throat into my lungs. I imagined my glowing spectral self levitating up off the bed and rising up to the point of light. In my mind’s eye, it was happening. Now it was just a matter of making it happen for real.

I tried imagining it again, from start to finish.

But even as I was thinking this, I knew that I was still lying on the bed. Everything that was happening was only happening in my imagination.

It wasn’t working. I wasn’t going to be able to help Gilbert, not this way anyway.
Oh, well
, I thought. I’d known it wasn’t real.

Maybe the incense was too thick, too overpowering. I decided to put the stick out, let the room clear for a bit, and then try it again.

I opened my eyes and sat upright in bed.

I looked down. My body was still lying back immobile on the bed. My
physical
body hadn’t moved at all. It was my
spirit
that had sat upright.

It had worked.

It had worked!

The first thing I noticed was that my arms no longer hurt from rowing around all afternoon in that boat. I stared at myself lying down on the saggy bed. I could see my body, eyes closed, stretched out and peaceful, but it was nothing at all like looking in a mirror. This was no flat reflection—this was the real me: the ropy forearms, the mess of brown hair, the too-plump lips. I’d never seen my body from outside myself—never known the exact shape of my head or angle of my jaw—but even now, I didn’t panic. My mind was still relaxed and focused. The whole experience felt alien, but also somehow familiar. It felt like I had done this before, maybe when dreaming.

A dream. That’s what this had to be. I’d fallen asleep, or maybe I’d voluntarily entered some kind of dream state just like
Voyage Beyond the Rainbow
said. Except it didn’t feel like any dream I’d had before. For one thing, I felt like I was awake—fully conscious, fully aware of myself, fully in control. That said, I felt somehow outside myself too, observing everything that was happening as if from the side.

The woman in the New Age store, the one who’d given me the incense, was right: this was no dream.

Only now did I notice that my mind—the part of me that had sat upright in bed—had a “body,” too, sort of. It looked the same as the body down on the bed, with the same clothes. But it was translucent, glowing softly, like a ghost, or like the cheesy picture on the cover of
Voyage Beyond the Rainbow
. I still had a body, but I couldn’t feel it—not my T-shirt clinging to my chest, or the waistband of my underwear, or the itchiness of my athlete’s foot.

For the first time in my life, I was
outside
myself. I wasn’t stuck in that sweaty, itchy, achy body.

It was disorienting, but it was also weirdly liberating. It actually
felt
like I was in two places at once. Except it was much more than that. I was suddenly aware that the boundaries that separate us, the feeling that our bodies stop where the rest of the world starts, are artificial—that we’re all part of the greater world and there really is no boundary. The world is me, and I am it.

Mostly, I just felt free for the first time since my parents died.

I looked around the bedroom. The surroundings were the same—I was still in my dad’s old bedroom at my grandparents’ farmhouse on Hinder Island, with its creaky single bed and the faded
Poltergeist
movie poster on the wall. But things were different, too. For one thing, the room was darker, like there’d been a power outage and the lights had gone out.

I take that back. The lamp on the nightstand still glowed—it just burned as if through clouded glass. Celestia Moonglow said that the astral realm was a “shadow” dimension. I guess she’d meant that literally.

The sound was different, too. The sleepy silence of the island had been replaced by some kind of distant, steady roar, a cross between a moan and a hiss. The book hadn’t said anything about this.

I looked back down at the me-on-the-bed. My body was completely motionless. Unconscious.

But
was
I unconscious? Everything that I’d ever been taught said that people’s souls didn’t just leave their bodies.

Not if they were still alive
.

It was like I suddenly remembered to panic. Now that I’d gotten my astral body out of my physical body, how did I get it back inside again?

I tried to inhale, to fight the panic that had filled me like a chest full of frozen water, but I couldn’t get a breath. To hell with being one with the universe—there was no air in this place! I was going to suffocate.

I jerked back.

And suddenly I was lying in bed, back in the real world, body and soul reunited, dizzy and disoriented with aching biceps.

———

I had to try it again. Now that I was awake, I was immediately embarrassed that I’d panicked. Why had I wanted to breathe, anyway? I didn’t need to breathe in a dimension where the physical didn’t exist. Besides, Gilbert’s life was at stake.

That incense had been quick-burning, or maybe I’d lost track of time. Either way, it had already burned its way down to the nub. So I lit a second stick and inhaled deeply, feeling it calm me. Then I worked my way through the visualizations, still breathing in and out. Finally, I imagined the point of light levitating in front of me.

And once again, I sat upright in bed. Once again, my spirit had detached from my physical body. It felt completely effortless.

My astral form climbed off the bed—or tried to anyway. There was no gravity in this astral dimension. Weirder still, my “body” seemed to have no real weight. It was like the bed was greased and I slid right off. I found myself flailing even as I hung in the air next to the bed, floating unsteadily, drifting slowly to the right.

Instinctively, I reached for the nightstand, but my hand passed right through it. If there’d been any doubt before about where I was, and that this really
was
a non-physical dimension, there wasn’t now.

The astral dimension. I was really there—wherever or whatever “there” was. It was still dark and a little disorienting. But now I was getting used to the idea of it all.

And just as I’d suspected, I didn’t need to breathe in this other place. The fact is, I
couldn’t
breathe—there was no air to inhale. After a lifetime of doing that without thinking, this was the strangest thing of all. The first few times I tried to inhale and couldn’t, I felt a flash of panic again. But when I didn’t feel the effects of not breathing—no tightness in my neck and chest, no pounding blood racing to my head—it was surprising how quickly I got used to the idea.

I also couldn’t blink—I couldn’t even close my eyes. My eyes weren’t my “eyes”—they weren’t my way of seeing. I simply “saw” what was around me, even if the information still seemed to be coming in through my eyes.

As I kept floating there, I looked over at my body lying in bed. It was still bizarre to see myself, to be
outside
myself, but now that I was more mentally prepared, it didn’t seem so scary. I was back to liking the way the whole experience made me feel, the sense of oneness and a growing giddiness about the possibility of it all.

As I looked at myself, I saw a faint line of silver light, like an umbilical cord, flowing out from behind the head of my physical body. About the width of a wrist, it spiraled out through the pillow, rising up and gently winding around to connect with the back of my spiritual head.

The silver cord.
Voyage Beyond the Rainbow
hadn’t said anything about this, but I’d heard about it before, even if I couldn’t think where. It was a line of energy that connected the astral body to the physical one.

I reached over to touch it. It was warm and soft, but pliable, like some kind of gel. I could run my hand all the way through it, and I felt a gentle pulse. It was only after I’d touched it that it occurred to me how strange it was that I could feel it at all. I’d passed my hand through the nightstand, but I hadn’t been able to feel anything.

I reached over and felt my own astral arm. Sure enough, I
could
feel it, just as solid as in the real world—and much more solid than the silver cord. So I guess I was able to touch and feel things that were with me in the astral dimension.

By now, I’d stopped wobbling. Somehow I found my balance and was hanging motionless in the air. Suddenly the feeling of weightlessness didn’t feel so uncontrollable. Suddenly I felt lighter than air, like I could fly.

I was in a non-physical realm, a world of the mind. That meant I didn’t travel by physical means, but by mental ones: will power, not horsepower.

I imagined that I was the spot of light that had been hovering above my head. I let that spot float upward, and I began gently rising, too. All I had to do was will myself somewhere, and that’s where I went. It was even easier than walking or riding a bike. Those things still involved the brain sending messages to the body—messages that weren’t necessary in a place where the mind
was
the body.