The Boy Who Walked Between

The first time Josiah stepped through a wall, he was nine years old and running from a man with a whip.

He didn't know what he'd done. One moment he was pressed against the back of the smokehouse, cornered, the overseer's shadow falling across him.

The next moment he was standing in tall grass on the other side of the property fence, shaking so hard his teeth rattled, with the smell of cold air and something like woodsmoke that wasn't coming from anywhere.

He'd found his way back eventually. Stumbled through the grass and ended up in the quarters, where his mother grabbed him and held him tight and told him never to do that again.

"Do what?"

"Whatever you just did. Whatever that was." Her voice was shaking. "There are people who can do things, Josiah. Things other people can't see. And if the wrong person finds out what you are, they won't sell you. They'll use you up."

She wouldn't explain more than that. But from the way she said it, Josiah understood she knew exactly what he was, and that she was terrified of it.

He learned to control it by accident, the way you learn to swim by not drowning.

The spaces between things. That's how he thought of it. The wall between inside and outside wasn't solid the way other people experienced it.

For Josiah, it had seams. Thin spots. Places where the boundary got soft and you could push through into the between-space and come out somewhere else.

Not anywhere. That was important.

He couldn't step into the smokehouse and emerge in Philadelphia.

The between-space had its own geography, and it connected places that were already connected by something else.

History and shared experience. The residue of people who'd crossed boundaries before him.

Suffering left the deepest seams. He learned that early.

Places where people had been hurt, separated, sold, those places had boundaries so thin they were almost transparent. All those forced passages from one life to another had worn the walls between here and there down to nothing.

By fourteen, Josiah could step through a seam and cover a mile in a heartbeat. Could feel the network of thin spots spreading across the South like a spider's web, connecting every plantation and auction block and slave pen in a geography of pain.

He didn't know the word for what he was.

Mistwalker.

Wouldn't hear it for years. All he knew was that he could walk between places, and that the between-space was cold and strange and full of things that watched him pass.

The conductor found him when Josiah was sixteen.

A woman named Patience Cobb. Free Black, living in Ripley, Ohio, right across the river from Kentucky. She'd been running people north for a decade, using safe houses and the kind of courage that got people hanged if they were caught.

She took one look at Josiah and said, "You're a walker."

"Ma'am?"

"Don't play. I can feel what you are from across the room." She sat down at her kitchen table. "I've known one other walker. She could move people through the seams. Not just herself."

"I've only ever moved myself."

"Because nobody taught you." Patience pushed a cup of coffee toward him. "I'm going to teach you. And then you're going to help me move people who need moving."

The first crossing almost killed him.

Not the walking itself. Josiah could step through seams like breathing.

But carrying someone else was different. Another person's weight, another person's fear, another person's life pressing against his in the between-space.

The woman's name was Opal. Twenty-three, escaped from a farm in Mason County, Kentucky. Dogs behind her, river ahead, and no way across that wouldn't get her caught.

Josiah took her hand and stepped through.

The between-space was colder with two people in it. The things that watched, the shapes that moved at the edges of perception, pressed closer. Josiah could feel them investigating the new presence.

Curious. Hungry, maybe.

Will-o'-wisps. That's what Patience called them later.

The things that lived in the spaces between places. They were drawn to crossings, especially crossings freighted with emotion, and there was no crossing more emotional than a person running for their life.

Josiah pulled Opal through the between-space and they stumbled out on the Ohio side of the river, both of them gasping, ice crystals forming on their clothes despite the August heat.

Opal looked at him with wide eyes. "What was that? Where were we?"

"Somewhere between." He was shaking. His hands felt like they belonged to someone else. "You're safe now."

She wasn't. Not really.

Ohio wasn't safe for runaways, not with the Fugitive Slave Act turning every sheriff and federal marshal into a slave catcher. But she was across the river, which was something.

Patience was waiting at the safe house. She looked at Josiah's hands, still shaking, still cold, and said, "It costs you something every time."

"What does it cost?"

"Heat or presence. Whatever you want to call it. The between-space takes a piece of you for passage. Small pieces, but they add up."

"How many crossings before it adds up to too much?"

Patience didn't answer. That was answer enough.

He moved forty-seven people in two years.

Forty-seven souls across the river, through the between-space, from slavery into something that wasn't quite freedom but was closer to it than anything they'd known.

Men and women and children, some of them so scared they couldn't walk on their own, carried through the seams by a boy who was learning the cost of what he could do.

Each crossing took something. The cold stayed longer after each one. Colors looked a little less vivid, sounds a little less sharp, the world losing detail at the edges like a photograph left in the sun.

He started having dreams that weren't his. A woman sold away from her children. A man jumping from a ship in the Atlantic.

A girl no older than ten, walking a thousand miles on bare feet. The crossings of everyone who'd come before, layered into the between-space like geological strata, pressing into him whether he wanted them or not.

"You're fading," Patience told him one morning. She said it plainly, without drama, the way she said everything.

"I'm fine."

"You're not. I can see through you when the light hits right."

She wasn't speaking metaphorically. Josiah had noticed it too. His reflection in mirrors had gone soft.

His shadow seemed thinner than it should be. People looked past him in crowds, their eyes sliding off him like he wasn't quite there.

The between-space was claiming him. Every crossing pulled him further from solid and closer to the in-between, to the place where the wisps lived and the boundaries were always soft.

"You need to stop," Patience said.

"There are more people to move."

"There will always be more people to move. That doesn't mean you have to be the one to move them."

"Who else?"

She didn't have an answer for that.

The last crossing was in December.

A family. Father, mother, three children. The youngest was four.

They'd walked from Tennessee, over two hundred miles, eating what they could find, sleeping in barns and ditches. The father's back was ribboned with whip scars. The mother carried the four-year-old in arms that shook with exhaustion.

The river was frozen near the banks but still flowing in the center. Too dangerous to cross on foot. Too exposed to cross by boat.

Josiah took them through.

Five people. The most he'd ever carried. He held the father's hand and the father held the mother's and the mother held the oldest child's and the chain of them stepped into the between-space together.

The cold hit like a wall. Josiah could barely feel his own body.

The between-space pressed in from all sides, thick with the residue of every crossing he'd ever made and every crossing that had happened before him. Centuries of forced passages compressed into a space that had no dimension.

The wisps came closer than they'd ever been. Not just watching now. Reaching.

Pulling. Trying to separate the chain of hands, to scatter them through the between-space where they'd wander forever.

Josiah pushed. Put everything he had into the crossing, every scrap of warmth and presence and self he had left. The between-space resisted, clinging to them like mud, trying to keep what it had been promised.

They stumbled out on the Ohio side. All six of them, gasping, alive, ice in their hair and their eyebrows and the folds of their clothes.

The father looked at Josiah and his face changed. "Son. Your hands."

Josiah looked down. His hands were translucent. He could see the snow through them, the ground beneath, like his skin had become glass.

"It's fine," he said. His voice sounded distant, even to himself.

"That's not fine. That's not—"

"Get to the safe house. Patience is waiting. Yellow house, third on the left past the church." The words came automatically.

He'd given these directions so many times the words came out on their own. "Go. Now. Before someone sees you."

The family went. The mother looked back once, holding the four-year-old, and Josiah saw something in her eyes that might have been recognition. Like she knew what he'd given to get them across.

Patience found him by the river an hour later. He was sitting on the bank, looking at the water, and the moonlight went through him like he was made of fog.

"How many pieces do you have left?" she asked.

"Enough."

"Liar."

He tried to smile. Couldn't feel his face enough to know if he'd managed it.

"Fifty-two people, Patience. Fifty-two people who aren't slaves tonight because I could do this thing."

"And now you can't do anything because you gave yourself away a piece at a time."

"That's how it works. The crossing takes something. Everybody knows that."

He held up his transparent hands and looked at the stars through them. "Some of us are just the toll."

Patience sat down beside him. She was crying, which he'd never seen her do, not once, not when the marshals came or the dogs were close or the river was too high.

"There are more people to move," she said. "There are always more."

"Someone else will learn. Someone else will find the seams."

"When?"

He didn't have an answer for that.

Josiah didn't die. Not exactly.

He faded.

Over the next three weeks, he became less and less solid. Less and less present. The between-space was pulling him in, calling back all the pieces he'd scattered across fifty-two crossings, reclaiming the toll it was owed.

Patience kept him in the safe house. Fed him food he could barely taste.

Read to him from books he could barely hear. Held his hand even when her fingers started passing through his.

The last morning, he was lying in bed and the sunlight came through the window and went through him too. He was more absence than presence. More between than here.

"I can feel them," he said. "All the crossings. All the people who ever walked between. They're in here with me."

"In the between-space?"

"In everything. The seams hold everyone who ever passed through. All the way back to the ships." His voice was barely a whisper now, coming from somewhere that wasn't quite his mouth.

"It remembers them. Every one."

"Does it hurt?"

"No. It feels like... being everywhere at once. Being every crossing that ever happened."

He was quiet for a long time after that. Patience held the shape of his hand in hers, feeling the cold where his skin used to be.

"Fifty-two," he said.

Then he was gone. Not dead.

Not a body left behind to bury. Just an empty bed and a cold room and Patience Cobb sitting alone with her hand closed around nothing.

The safe house in Ripley developed a reputation after that. Runaways who stayed there reported feeling warmth in the walls. A sense of welcome.

The certainty, deep and irrational, that they were going to make it. That the crossing would hold.

Patience ran the house for another twelve years, until the war made the Railroad obsolete. She never found another walker.

But the seams Josiah had used stayed open after he faded. The between-space remembered the paths he'd walked, and sometimes people stumbled through them without meaning to, just knowing they'd been somewhere impossible and come out the other side.

Practitioners who study the Ohio River valley today can still feel the network. Thin spots worn smooth by a boy who'd carried fifty-two people through and left himself in the spaces between.

The wisps are quieter there than anywhere else in the country. Maybe what he left behind was purpose, and the wisps recognized it as something kin to what they were.

Beings who existed in the spaces between things. Who belonged neither here nor there.

Josiah would have understood them. In the end, he'd become one.