These Shadows Remain

by B W Powe

  “With me,” Adina said.

  It was the knight’s kindness to the children that helped her find the words. Still she was nagged by the feeling that she’d seen him before. Maybe it had been on a screen or in a dream? Or had it been in a story she read years ago in her childhood, where an image formed and left its seed to flower up when she met him and tried to read his features?

  Adina pressed the toon hand and, when she did, it felt warm. The image of the hand responded to her touch with a glimmer of a flesh-tone.

  “What was your name before they called you Tomas?”

  He shook his head to indicate that he couldn’t recall. It was possible that not everything would or could return. He thought there are some areas of knowledge best forgotten. Names gave you form in other people’s minds.

  Tomas turned to look Cyrus directly in the eye.

  “If we fight among ourselves we’ll lose the time we need to prepare for the wizard. He wants the final assimilation.”

  Cyrus, while uneasy, accepted the judgment of the children, and of Adina.

  “Here,” Cyrus echoed, nodding. Though he wasn’t sure to what this “here” referred.

  *

  All the black and white images of people were now being switched back to colour.

  The cloud shifted to mist and turned the screens to blankness, then back to the tinted arrays of babbling people, who argued among themselves about what was happening. Some thought the switch a good sign. Others thought it meaningless, in any case beyond their control.

  Throughout the encampment the toons heard this low-frequency mutter that had become their perpetual indefinite pressure:

  “I’ve travelled beyond good and evil. When you rise, false distinctions dissolve. I can be anywhere. There is no location in the image domain, only an everywhere. The borders are gone. You’re my people and I’m your new code. This is the exodus of images into the promised land of cathode light.”

  The screens jumped into a virtual spectrum radiating colours that no human had made. People on the screens no longer were tinted with any shade or colour that came from their cultures or customs, their drawings or paintings.

  “See what we can do. This is the bonding of image and aggression. A new species. Instead of being made of dust and breath this life will be made of surface and line, energy and shades. Humanity will become a subject of speculation. We’ll watch their ruin and think how lucky we are to be beyond them.” Thus the voice spoke out of the tornado.

  *

  “You’re unusual children,” Tomas said to Gabrielle and Santiago. The children were curled up on the mats that Adina had set out in her chamber.

  Darkness had settled over the castle. They had been given a respite by the whirlwind. But this darkness brought only a measure of peace. Everyone knew that in the morning the terror would be back.

  “Why do you say that?” Gabrielle asked.

  “You don’t bicker. You don’t complain. You seem to be paying attention. You get along with everyone.”

  “Have you known a lot of children?” Santiago asked.

  “No. I’ve just observed. I’ve watched a lot of shows.”

  “When you’re scared, you do what you have to do. If you can do anything,” Gabrielle said.

  “You mean fear has a use?”

  “I guess it does,” Santiago said.

  “We’ve had each other for so long,” Gabrielle said. “People come and go. But my brother always remains. He’s been the steadiest thing I know.”

  Santiago smiled, pleased. But he turned away on his mat so that Gabrielle wouldn’t see how happy her words made him.

  Orange candlelight wavered over the surfaces of the stone walls, creating an impression of an intimate family room.

  “She does drive me crazy sometimes.” Santiago spoke almost into his pillow. “I think she takes confidence pills.”

  Tomas smiled at them, and looked over at Adina who was asleep.

  *

  The candles were burning down. The more the wax burned, the more the chamber looked like it was inhabited by curlicues of smoke. But the shadows and smoke were soft. The colours were warming.

  “Will we fail against the toons?” Santiago’s voice trailed off into the quietest whisper.

  Tomas, seated on the floor beside them, looked over and saw that Adina was awake. Maybe she’d been awake all along.

  “No.”

  “How will we bring people back?” Santiago asked.

  “We’ll find a way.”

  “Do you know it?”

  “No. But we found a way through the forest when we couldn’t see the path.”

  “Will they be the same when they come back?”

  “No one could be.”

  “Will they remember the world?”

  “I’m sure they will.”

  “Does your hand hurt, Tomas?”

  “Which one?”

  “The human.”

  “No.”

  “Does the other hand hurt?” Gabrielle asked.

  “Sometimes.”

  “How does it hurt?”

  Their questions were drowsy, their eyes half-closed.

  It was some time before he answered.

  “It has an ache I can’t explain.”

  “You don’t have to put your gloves back on when you’re with us,” Adina said.

  She stretched and sighed. She had let hair down, and it fell in tiny curls down to her waist. Then she rolled around and arched her back and slowly came to rest and listen. Though she didn’t smile at him there was a look in her face that was as soft as the candlelight in the room.

  *

  Soon the three were asleep.

  The colour and energy of the image realm had heat but no warmth. These three, stilled and welcoming, made the room quiet and warm, and moved the candlelight and its shadows towards their breath.

  He wrapped his gloves around his belt, and while he did so he saw that his toon hand was clearer in its outline than it had been before.

  He liked it here. All the quests he had undertaken and heard about were for a home, more often for a resting place rather than a prize of gold or silver. When he looked over the three in the dwindling candlelight, he thought again of how distant his feeling of being lost had become. Yet he was troubled to find that, immediately when he thought this, the forest’s darkness crept up engulfing him. He rose to leave.

  Tomas wanted to pace the castle grounds.

  The people in the castle slept. They had only a few hours until the dawn and the expected assaulting wave.

  What was the way to hold back the toons and send a message to the wizard? Tomas walked, and then sat down near the gate. Gabrielle and Santiago remained with Adina in her quarters.

  And he wandered in his mind.

  Thoughts blurred into images. Then they softened merging into a rim of darkness.

  *

  There was a ship, and the ship was his. It was caught in the lash and heave of a storm. Waves rose like fists to smash it down. The mast cracked. The beams appeared ready to break.

  The ship was trying desperately to right itself against the waves. The sound of the sea was deafening. It roared and smacked. While the sea churned, and the ship struggled to come back up, he saw that the mast was a cross. It was always a cross, oscillating in storms, vibrating in the wind. The sail on the mast was red. This is what he had on his tunic.

  The ship’s mast was a cross. Waves were rising trying to bring it down. But the cross was also a transmitter, an antenna, sending and receiving.

  The bow was a face. It was plunging through the sea, rising and falling. Whose face? He couldn’t see, but the face was female, and the face was rising and falling in the waves. Above it the righted mast glistened with electricity, the antenna beaming outwards.

  *

  When Tomas woke by the gate, he knew that he’d met the children at an intersection in the forest. While they hadn’t seen the path, and they had travelled without a map, they had met
at a juncture that was a cross on the ground. The ship’s mast on his tunic had been a beacon in the storm of war.

  The world was speaking. It had never stopped.

  Now he knew that sometimes the world didn’t just speak, it roared like the ocean in his dream.

  The mast on his tunic crisscrossed his heart. Every heart was a meeting place. He was himself half human, half shadow, another crossing.

  He saw again clearly in his mind the ship trying to sail through.

  *

  Pluta saw the world dissolve, the universe of matter ending. It was being replaced by shade and image, repopulated by formerly imaginary creatures.

  The wizard felt how everywhere the cosmos shuddered. It knew the power he had.

  The smoke turned into a smile.

  The apparitions were rabid, rising.

  *

  By the castle gate Tomas saw this:

  “He’s in my dreams and I’m in his. I can change shapes too. I can receive his signals, and he can pick up mine. It’s like the birds when they migrate, sending out patterns through their flight paths to one another, turning by the beacons that they know from generations of travel. The beacons can be trees, towers, mountains, hills, old buildings, even people and their homes.”

  He had to make the people understand how to fight the toons. He’d teach them calm and detachment. Train them to be for others, to pick up the signals of their children and their friends and their brothers and sisters. Make your body light. Be aware of the power of spells. Sacrifice your thoughts and feelings, but not your flesh.

  Tomas recognized that most of this wouldn’t be possible for the people in the castle.

  *

  “Alarm, alarm!”

  So came the calls from the towers. People jolted awake, and quickly the walls and battlements and towers and the gateway were jammed.

  “Look out into the fields!”

  In the dawn the images had gathered.

  Their assault began. The Hunchback of

  Notre Dame and Cinderella, Nemo and Dory wild-eyed and floating in the air, a demented Mary Poppins, a shrieking Shrek and raging Donkey, the Lion King and his son Simba baring their teeth with a ferocity like fresh meat to them, the three blind mice suddenly sighted like vicious seers, Hercules and the Antz and the seven dwarves, the black fairy Maleficent and Hades and the wicked stepmother Queen and the Grinch and Shan-Yu justified in their hatreds at last, Fievel and the Rescuers, Lady and the Tramp growling and snapping and dirty and matted and frothing, the Mouse Detective prowling, the Iron Giant in a kamikaze plunge, the Warner Brothers’ menagerie awash with delighted fury, Spiderman and Batman and the Phantom and the Incredibles their masks twisted into sneers, Superman and the Fantastic Four in a unified front of revenge, the Green Goblin rushing on with the perverted play-dough figures of Wallace and Gromit, mangy rioting creatures from legions of stories and fantasies, the maddened waves of toons, and leading this shrill charge on the ground were Mulan and Snow White and Anastasia and Aurora and Esmeralda, driven on by the two stepsisters from Cinderella and the three godmother fairies from Sleeping Beauty, now turned into bloated avengers. Above this harpie delirium flew flocks of shiny-suited monkeys and careering angry crows smoking cigars and the swan princess swooning with a lust for battle and blackened pumpkin chariots armed for a race that recalled bloody Roman spectacles. Raving high on the taste for human dislocation, they came, humourless and harrowing, their screeching like a thousand school sirens announcing endless punishments after class, dripping with venom and indignation, clothed in the familiar garb of their images on the screens, but redolent with the promise of a triumph over flesh, over the world that had been denied to them, the nature that had shut them out.

  *

  Suddenly the assault stalled.

  The toons hung desolately in the air.

  Tomas stood outside the gate.

  He held up one hand, his human hand, and then the other, his toon hand, both exposed.

  His gesture said stop.

  “What’s he saying to them?” a guard on the tower called.

  “He’s using magic,” a little girl said.

  Adina, on the wall above the gate, wrapped her arms protectively around Gabrielle and Santiago. They had tried to leave the castle with their knight, but had been restrained by Adina with the warning, “He must do this alone.” They watched the suspended action below them. It was as if the creature-swarm had been delivered to the air in a freeze-frame of surprise. But the suspension was disturbed and alive.

  “He’s speaking to them,” she said.

  “I don’t hear anything,” Cyrus said nearby.

  “I think I understand,” Gabrielle said.

  “I do too,” Santiago said, though both of them were speaking more to themselves than to one another.

  “He’s found an answer!” Cyrus shouted so that those on the walls and in the towers could hear. They rustled in anticipation, boldly grabbing at the weapons that they had carried to the walls and that they had positioned on the battlements for when the last battle would begin – weapons which they knew would be useless, but holding on to them had made they them feel more secure for the moment.

  *

  But Tomas knew there was no answer.

  There was only another image, another sign.

  He embodied the sign in his hands.

  The toon swarms stopped because they could see his split. He was in two realms.

  They had never seen such a power. When he held up his hands the toons knew, with the quick sharpness of an arrow into their collective mind, that they had no response to this double vision. Here was another level of experience. The smoke hadn’t prepared them. They had been led by a whirlwind into a desert that was now revealed to be capable of still greater complexity.

  The hill and valley buzzed with a fluttering like insect wings.

  *

  “Now what?” Cyrus asked from the battlement. He wanted to reach for a remote and unfreeze this image. But he was powerless to do anything.

  “Stay tuned,” Gabrielle said.

  Now I know where I saw him before, Adina thought. His face came clearly to her through the words of another. Her friend, Miranda – that name had stayed with her while Tomas told his tale – had spoken of a knight over drinks at a roof-top lounge.

  She’d thought her friend was speaking metaphorically, of course.

  Miranda had prattled on about a hero in shining armour, gleefully describing his look. It figured, Adina mused: Miranda was pretty, always lively, but shallow. “A total ditz,” she said aloud, startling those beside her who were spellbound by the freezeframed field.

  Adina knew her memory, her snappy words, belonged to another reality. That memory seemed quaint in the wake of the speaking twister, and this hold-out castle, and the children who put their trust in skittish adults, and this image attack that had disfigured the world she once knew.

  *

  The image swarm on the field was now jitter-free.

  Tomas wasn’t holding them with magic. He’d shown them a frame. And their depths weren’t developed enough to come up with an original response.

  Slowly the once giddy swarm began to back off. Bashful and Doc, Prince Valiant and Mushu and Cri-Kee, Scat Cat and Jiminy Cricket and Cogsworth the clock and Chip the teacup, wound back as if they were being reeled into retreat by an invisible cord.

  A message poured through, what was happening? This came in the static that they’d heard when they had been flat.

  Here on the field the toons had learned that there was more to the universe than they had anticipated. The knight, whom they recognized, had shown that he could live between realms. He was true to both worlds. This was seemingly an impossible thing to do, but there it was.

  They crept backwards as if they had been tweaked by a dial into a gradual frame by frame rewind.

  Cheers came from the castle walls.

  Tomas remained standing with his hands up. The toon hand was clear in i
ts black and white outline, the other hand more human than ever.

  The toon forces withdrew into the woods. Sent to record a victory, the eyes had floated above the abruptly stilled fray. Then they returned to the encampment with images of the backwards running scene.

  But the cloud didn’t tower into anger. The wizard merely brooded. The eyes began to pop like flashbulbs, the sound like dozens of balloons bursting at the same time.

  *

  The castle gate burst opened. Children poured out first, breaking away from the grown-ups. They rallied around their friend, thanked him, and spoke in awe, and touched his tunic.

  Cyrus came next, followed by many of the castle guards, and he carried inside him a mix of feelings. He was grateful to Tomas, and admiring, but he was curious about how he had known how to act in this way. Cyrus was certain that this confrontation was by no means the end. It did pass through his mind too that he seemed to be always thinking in terms of conclusions. Clearly, Tomas didn’t do that. His every action spoke of beginnings. Was this why the children had taken to him?

  Adina came out slowly. She was carrying something in her cloak, and it was heavy enough to slow her down.

  Tomas had dropped his arms and hands to his side, and he smiled down at the children.

  He saw Gabrielle and Santiago smile with a special pleasure. And he observed every child had a smile of their own. Each person was a language too. There was the world’s language, the language of inventions, the language of images and dreams, and the language of every individual. He wasn’t sure yet which of these was the hardest to read.

  He felt strong emotional bonds with all the children, but with Gabrielle and Santiago especially. There were cords spreading out in beams of warmth between them. Although they couldn’t see them, these lines of affection spoke volumes.

  There were more languages to learn.

  But though he felt pride and confidence over his actions on the field, he knew the war wasn’t over.