Shadows

by Ken Altabef

“I saw. I saw.”

  “Saw what?”

  The tupilaq shook with the effort, but it didn’t have the words to describe its experience. It was, after all, only a pathetic little semblance of life.

  “Saw Tama?” asked Alaana.

  Tiki shook its head.

  “Then what?”

  The tupilaq made a quiet rumbling noise.

  “All right,” Alaana said, “Don’t strain yourself. You’re barely held together as it is.”

  It gaped at the big open wound that was its chest, then back at her. The blue-white moonbeam eyes were a drastic improvement over the black chips of stone she had placed in its sockets. Certainly, Alaana thought, if nothing else the Moon-Man’s gift should not be wasted.

  “Don’t look at me like that.” Alaana bent to refasten the laces. She removed the copper arrowhead and tossed it aside, then pulled the flaps of dead skin tight across the tupilaq’s chest. “I’ll replace that cold heart as soon as I find something suitable to put in its place. But for now, you’ll just have to do without.”

  CHAPTER 22

  SHADOWS AND SECRETS

  The terns were jittery. They circled over the lake, hovering fitfully, then swooping across the surface. When one did pluck a small fish from the icy water an in-flight brawl immediately followed. Ben watched them rollicking noisily overhead. The birds could sense the chill in the air, the loss of daylight. Soon they would be gone to the south. Flown away.

  He turned his attention back to the children dotting the shore. The lake, only half frozen, posed an enticing danger to exuberant children. He felt his eyes drift closed.

  He forced them open. He didn’t want to sleep.

  He didn’t want to sleep, because it hadn’t been a dream. That strange land he had visited, that place of inky mists and darkness, those pathetic, half-obscured faces. Their desperate voices, like distant echoes, still called out to him even now. He continued to feel their pull. He wanted to forget them. But he couldn’t forget that one voice, that one plaintive cry. Tamuanuaq. He knew it wasn’t a dream, because at night the voices were silent.

  He’d exhausted himself wandering all day, staying out as long as possible. The other men were doing useful work, hunting and storing up food for the winter. And what was he doing? Chasing at shadows.

  The children skirted the lake, harassing the landed birds. Little Kinak ran after them with his arms outstretched as if trying to catch one. Of course he failed every time, but that didn’t seem to matter. He wound up laughing and flopping on the ground with the others.

  He was laughing again, as if Tama had never existed. That was fine, Ben decided. He didn’t want Kinak to hurt as he did. He didn’t want Kinak to suffer. He was glad that his son could play and laugh. But from his own mouth, he was certain, there would never come laughter again.

  He didn’t want Noona to suffer either, though he seemed helpless to prevent it. His daughter stood apart from the others, staring off into the nothingness for long stretches of time. The look in the girl’s eye was frightening, as if she were looking for her lost sister in the faces of the others. Ben wanted to tell her she was looking in the wrong places. She wouldn’t find Tama in the light.

  Ben stood up, brushing a crust of frost from his parka. The sun was almost gone already. The days were getting shorter now on the far side of summer, offering less time for shadow.

  “I’m going for a walk,” he said.

  “You should rest,” remarked Higilak. “You look so tired.”

  “Sleep,” said Pilarqaq. “Have a long sleep. We’ll mind the children for you.”

  “A walk is all I need.”

  Rising to his feet Ben felt dizzy. He tottered for a moment, then set out toward camp.

  He passed between the tents, like a walker in a dream, hardly knowing what he might be looking for. The camp was empty, most of the men out on the hunt, the women at work inside their homes or out by the lake. How many of them would notice, Ben wondered, if he simply disappeared from sight?

  He wove his way across the camp, passing tents he recognized only vaguely, as if his existence among them had been only a half-remembered dream. There was no color left in the world; everything was gray and black.

  Ben stooped to inspect the leeward side of each tent where the lowering sun threw the long shadows. He peered into the cast darkness and he listened.

  But he heard nothing. Was he going crazy? He remembered a crazy old man he had known during his time in the Yukon as a child. A horrific figure, he walked the snows for days on end, muttering to himself. The rest of the natives kept far away from him, saying he was dangerous and possessed by spirits. In the end a shaman had killed the old witch-man.

  Was the shaman’s husband immune from such treatment, he wondered. If others became suspicious of him, what would they do?

  Heading out of the camp, he bumped square into Tooky. Alaana’s tupilaq was thrown out from the young girl’s amaut and onto the snow. It stood up and squawked threateningly at Ben from its raven’s beak. Well, there was your answer, thought Ben.

  “Stop that, Tikiqaq! Ben wouldn’t hurt me. Hush!” said Tooky, waving the monster away. “Oh, I’m sorry, Ben. I’m so clumsy.”

  “It wasn’t your fault. I wasn’t looking.”

  As slim as she was, Tooky’s belly had begun to show a distinctive bulge. He realized she was carrying a baby, her first child. A child conceived in the very same act that had doomed his Tama. It wasn’t Tooky’s fault. Ben knew that. And it wasn’t the child’s fault. Ben knew that as well. And yet, he couldn’t bear to look upon that bulge. He imagined for a moment that he had the long claws of a white bear, that he might seize Tooky and rip her open, digging through flesh and blood like cream, and find Tama hidden there. Horrified, he turned to walk away.

  “Where are you going?” asked Tooky.

  “A walk on the flats.”

  “I’ll come with you.” Tooky followed after Ben, saying, “I can leave Tikiqaq here.”

  Ben shook her off without turning around. “Keep your monster. I want to be alone.”

  Ben walked out onto the barren tundra. But where could he find shadows in the flatlands? Everything lay draped with an unbroken layer of snow; all was white. Forever white.

  Desperation clawed at him. He couldn’t stand the heartbreak of another sunset. They didn’t come at night. In darkness there is no shadow.

  What was it Alaana had said? The shadow world lay beside our own, just like the world of dreams. It existed everywhere, just around the corner. Shadows held secrets, the secrets of the shamans. Places normal people weren’t supposed to go, pathways they couldn’t tread. If it really was that close, one little sideways step should get you there. If only he knew how. Not even Alaana knew the way, or at least that’s what she said.

  But Ben would let nothing keep him from Tama. Nothing.

  He lingered among the long shadows behind the tall rocks. Cutting across jagged crusts of snow, the shadow seemed darker, like a pool of black water. Ben reached out his hand. As a boy he had feared such places, imagining some dreadful, unnamed thing biding its measure, waiting to spring out from the seething darkness. Now he only wished something would come. It would not snatch him; he would grab it, be it monster or demon or wayward soul. He would take hold of it, and he would pull.

  Nothing. Listening with all his heart, he heard nothing.

  He turned back. His own shadow was drawn long, and deep, and dark.

  “Daddy?”

  Ben’s heart leapt. It was his daughter’s voice. In his own shadow!

  It had been real. Not a dream.

  It was real. The sound of that voice sent him to the brink of desperation and utter despair. Don’t go Tama, he thought. Don’t go away.

  He stepped sideways.

  As he tumbled down into the waiting darkness of his own shadow, all color drained away, to be replaced by eternal night. Darkness didn’t frighten him. The Anatatook lived through three months of night every winter. But thi
s place was more than just dark.

  It was made entirely of shifting shadows, a smoky haze that moved as if it were itself alive. Sounds strained to reach his ear as if coming from another place, nearby but unreachable, muffled and indistinct. Frightened groans in the dark, a woman moaning, a man sobbing so intensely it could almost have been laughter. The discord was so horrible it turned Ben’s stomach inside out, causing him to gag and retch. None of it mattered, he told himself. There was only one sound he wanted to hear.

  “Tama?” he called. His own voice sounded distorted, like a long gasping shriek.

  It was so hard to see anything in this inky soup, to put aside the inescapable feeling that he might bump into something terrible at any moment. But he pressed onward, arms out-stretched like a blind man kneading the dark. A crazy old, blind man.

  Ben realized he had found his way back to camp. The tents felt vague and insubstantial to his questing fingers. He walked through the caribou-hide walls as if he were a ghost. Or a shadow.

  The tents were empty. Completely empty. Where there should have been cooking pots and spare clothing and tools there lay only uneven blankets of shadow. Where were the people? How did they live? He heard rustling in the darkness beside him, behind him.

  “Hello?” The sound of his voice echoed slightly then died away in the emptiness.

  He was getting nowhere. As he approached the center of this dreary encampment he stopped and waited, afraid the gloom might swallow him entirely. There was nothing to do but stare into the swirling darkness. Time was running out. The sun was almost down, the shadows growing longer and even more distorted. It seemed this twisted, frightful place had not yet made up its mind whether to accept him or spit him back out.

  Worst of all was the sky. It was a living, seething darkness, devoid of stars, where the sun would never shine. He looked up at it, a swirling, hungry thing. The sight was disorienting as if the sky were a shapeless black pit that he might fall into, that was neither up nor down, simply there, ready to draw the life out of him at the slightest misstep. He was afraid. But fathers don’t balk from fear, not when their little ones need them. He squinted, seeing figures in the blackened mist. He was sure they were people, yet every time he approached they shrank away.

  “Help me,” he said. “Please help me.”

  The figures stood still, their outlines hazy and unsure.

  “I want my daughter. I know she’s here.”

  As he drew nearer, their faces grew more distinct. Their eyes stared dumbly, without spark of life or emotion, their mouths hung open. Ben was overwhelmed with a sense of pity for them. But he would not turn away.

  He paused before one such cringing shadow. I think I recognize him, he thought. That hair, that face.

  “I know you!” he said. “I know you.”

  The thing shrank back, seeking to fade into the obscurity of black mist. Ben would not have it. If there was a link here, he wasn’t going to lose it.

  He grabbed the shade’s wrist. For a moment he expected his hand would pass right through the inky smoke but it didn’t. The shadow felt like dough in his hand.

  The figure shrank back again, its vacant expression horrifying and pathetic.

  The mist-shrouded face was certainly familiar, but all the faces were so distorted, so empty, here. The dark hair faded into the black pool of shadow. The look in the eyes was not the confident, lighthearted expression this face so often wore. Instead, the rounded cheeks were drawn and thin. Nonetheless, it was Maguan.

  “Maguan!” Ben exclaimed. “Don’t you know me?”

  The dark eyes shifted, but recognition was not there.

  “You know me,” insisted Ben. “You have to help me. Where is my daughter?”

  The shadow shook his head.

  “Your sister Alaana is my wife. Is Alaana here?”

  The shadow’s voice was hesitant and weak. “There is no Alaana here. My sister died many turns ago.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “My sisters fell ill, many years ago. Both of them, Avalaaqiaq and Alaana, they died. That happened in your world. The real world. We are only shadows and smoke here. When the soul on the other side passes to the distant lands, when the daylight person dies, we fade away.”

  “But Alaana didn’t die of the fever,” Ben said. “She changed, she became a shaman. I don’t understand any of this. Where is my daughter?”

  Maguan’s head shook slowly as if he didn’t understand. He seemed to be drifting backward, receding into the dark. His voice, a frail whisper, said, “I don’t know who you mean.”

  Ben regarded the crowd of dark faces gathered around. He recognized Kigiuna and Mikisork and Talliituk and a few others. They began to disperse in a disinterested way, moving slowly with shuffling feet.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” said an oddly-familiar voice. “You are not a shadow.”

  Ben turned to see who had spoken. There was an old woman at his elbow. It was Higilak.

  “It will be nighttime soon,” said Maguan’s shadow. “You must leave this place.”

  “Not without my daughter.”

  “We can’t help you,” said Maguan.

  “Old Mother?” asked Ben. Unlike the others, the shade of Higilak did not flinch or shy away. “You have to help me.”

  “Perhaps it is you who are called here to help us,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  The old woman, her dark face scored by even darker lines that told of the years, said, “We are slaves to the sunlit world. If someone should die on the other side, we cease to exist. Just one mistake, the wrong step on the ice, a heated argument with a neighbor, and we are gone forever. We are shadows only.”

  She paused as if to regain her strength. Was that a sign of old age or would such a long speech be a chore for any of them, Ben wondered.

  “My daughter is here,” said Ben angrily. “I’ve heard her voice. And if her shadow is here, does that mean she’s still alive?” But that couldn’t be true. He’d seen Tama’s body, had held it in his arms, had wiped his own tears from where they had splashed her dead face. Tama was buried under a cairn of stones on the beach at the Tongue. Of that there was no doubt. But if her shadow roamed here, it was because her soul had not yet passed across the divide.

  “I must find her.”

  “Our Ben disappeared several days ago,” said the old woman, “and so we thought that he must have died. But here you are, a living, breathing man, now come among us. What can it mean?”

  “I don’t know,” said Ben, “I’m looking for my–”

  “Your daughter,” said Higilak. She turned and exchanged a hidden glance with the others. “You say you are married to Alaana, who we believe is long dead and gone, and that she has borne your children.”

  “It’s true. We have three children.”

  The old woman bowed her head as if struggling to think. “Too many riddles. There is only one who might be able to help…”

  “Who do you mean?”

  “The Light-Bringer. A great hero from a time of heroes. He is kind and good. He will help.”

  “All right. How do I find him?”

  Higilak cocked her head to the side. “He walks paths we may never tread. We are only shadows. Without him we wouldn’t even exist.”

  “Where is he?” Ben raised his voice. The old woman shook her head slowly. She seemed exhausted.

  “Old Mother?”

  “One can never say when he will appear.”

  This was all she would offer. None of the others seemed to have anything more to add either. Their faces grew indistinct as they receded back into the blackened mists of the shadow world. Or perhaps the shadows deepened around them, blurring their edges. Frightful new sounds arose from the background, wails and groans of terror and pain.

  Ben didn’t know where else to turn.

  A cloud of liquid shadow surged forward. The crowd of people faded into the infinite dark.

  “You must go,” said Higilak,
“before it’s too late.”

  The desperate sounds increased as terror mounted; all was darkness. The sun had set.

  “You must go,” said Maguan. He grabbed the front of Ben’s parka and pushed.

  Ben woke, still out on the tundra, freezing cold.

  Alaana was shaking him by the shoulder.

  “Ben,” she called, brushing frost from his face. “Ben!”

  When night had fallen and he hadn’t returned to camp, she’d gone to look for him. It had been a close thing. His tracks had been swept away by the evening wind. If not for the faint glimmer of his soul-light among the endless expanse of tundra she might never have found him, lying face down in the snow.

  He blinked up at her, his eyes rolling sightlessly in their sockets, then his lids closed again.

  “Ben!” she said. Alaana took him into her arms and held him close. He shivered so intensely she couldn’t hold him still. She ripped open the front of her parka and wrapped him inside, rubbing his face with her hands.

  She feared he’d succumbed to grief and that he was ready to die. For the past few days he hadn’t been eating or sleeping. He had refused even to speak with her about it.

  Ben sighed against the nape of her neck and his shivering subsided.

  “I find you lying here,” she said angrily, “snow in your mouth, in your eyes…”

  He didn’t answer.

  “What’s happening to you?” she asked.

  “I fell asleep. I…”

  “Asleep? In the snow?” She held tight, still warming him up. It was better this way, she thought; with his face buried in her shoulder they didn’t have to look at each other. Maybe this way they could actually talk. “Do you want to die?” she asked.

  No answer. She hung on the precipice for a moment, and then leapt. “I don’t want you to die,” she said.

  “If I die,” he said softly, “will I find her?”

  “I will find her!” Alaana became angry. If a shaman should lose the confidence of the people, disaster would follow. She would be incapable of protecting or helping them, of healing them, of guiding them through danger. But if a shaman should lose the confidence of her husband, that would be even worse.