These Shadows Remain

by B W Powe

  *

  “We were thrown backwards,” the black knight said to the cloud.

  “He knows things,” Batman said.

  “He has a new power,” Superman said.

  “He knows too much,” the Phantom said. They spoke to the cloud through unseen fibres that telepathically leapt from their minds back to the encampment and to the screens. The cloud thrived on networks. He devoured the signals, and grew.

  On the screens the people, flattened in their emotions so that they couldn’t respond with any depth, nevertheless felt the vibrations of awful change.

  The cloud wondered again how the knight had managed to stay ahead of them.

  Had he read the books of black and white magic?

  How had he come to understand the power of ritual?

  The wizard knew that he would have to drive his swarms on with more demands for sacrifice. Give up more, he would tell them, and your rewards will be greater.

  *

  “What are you carrying?” Tomas asked Adina.

  She had approached cautiously. The children’s circle had been tight. But their voices had died down eventually. It was then that Cyrus had offered his thanks on behalf of the castle.

  Now all looked at her.

  From under her garment she produced a sword.

  They gasped because it wasn’t a sword like any other.

  It gleamed and wavered between states, half solid, half air.

  Tomas watched it warily. Still his emotions said, reach forward, touch the gift. He did so, and the sword sang, its high pulse like the wire-sounds familiar to anyone who had stood near a hydro-electric pole.

  “I made it for you last night while you slept. I couldn’t sleep and suddenly an image came to me from the movies and paintings I’d seen over the years. It was of a sword. I thought I saw it rise from water, and the pale hand holding it was mine.”

  So many dreams, Tomas thought. We were inhabited by dreams, and moved by them. We’d been wrong to think that images couldn’t move around and shift into new formations. We were wrong to think that the image realm was only something fantastic, what we forgot when we went about our daily affairs.

  He held the sword by its hilt.

  “How did you make this?”

  “In the forge. You know, I’d been trained to design lasers. So long ago.” She looked back at the castle gate. Then she looked at Tomas. “And I was guided in my mind to make an outline for a sword, something that would be . . . ”

  “. . . a frame.” Tomas completed her sentence.

  “Yes,” she said. “A frame for your feelings.”

  “What are we becoming?” Gabrielle asked.

  “Something strange,” Santiago said.

  *

  The children shivered in the way they did in the forest clearing. The day was bright, and the terror had retreated, yet they felt lost, the fear surging again. Not even the castle was protection enough.

  Cyrus watched Adina closely, wondering if it was possible that a human could drift to the image side. After all, if Tomas could shift towards flesh, anything was possible.

  The children whimpered in their worry. All except for Gabrielle and Santiago, who gazed at the sword with admiration and wonder.

  “Don’t be afraid,” Santiago said to the other children.

  “It’s been made to help us.”

  Gabrielle felt once more that steadying quality in her brother.

  “If a human made this then it must be a key. It will open up a path back to the dreams,” Santiago said.

  Our inventions, Cyrus thought, are ahead of us. We make things and only learn of their consequences later. But time had been shortened because of the terror. Then it struck him: standing here in this circle with the children and with the knight and with these two wise children and with Adina, each of them were capable of learning and knowing more quickly.

  They were talking to one another on many levels.

  *

  Tomas handled the sword with his toon hand. When he did, the sword sang and tingled, and shifted and coloured. He traded the sword over to his flesh and blood hand. When he did so the sword became silver and solid, more familiar to everyone’s eyes.

  In his toon hand again the sword’s blade flashed the word Rage.

  In his human hand the blade flashed the word Cœur.

  “It’s French for heart.” Adina blushed.

  She felt that her cheek had been touched. “Heart rage,” Santiago said.

  “Or rage heart,” Tomas said.

  “If you put them together. . .” Gabrielle said.

  “. . . they almost spell another word. Courage,” Santiago said.

  “Yes, both. All of those,” Tomas said.

  “When it pulses you can hear the wind,” Cyrus said. “But it isn’t the sound of the wind we heard when the cloud came here.”

  The children had long stopped their whimpering, and astonished they watched the sword’s shape-shifting and the two words flickering. They thought that Adina had magic too.

  *

  “This will help us,” Tomas said.

  “It was the least I could do.” Adina was still blushing.

  “We’ll never defeat the toons directly. The only way is to free them to be at the service of our dreams again. They must turn from being nightmares.”

  “And how will you do that?” Cyrus asked.

  “It’s time to go back inside,” Tomas said.

  He gathered the children, and placed the sword to his side and, with a gentle push with his toon hand, he directed the children towards the gate, and nodded to Adina to help move everyone on to the castle.

  “They may be back, and we have to stay ahead of them in our thoughts,” Tomas said. “Come along.”

  “Do you know what you’ll do?” Gabrielle asked.

  “Shhh . . . ,” Tomas said in the voice he used in the forest.

  It was as if they were in the forest and the dark again, although they were on the hill and in the sunlight, and before the castle gate and its walls, among friends and human guardians. All saw that a cloud had descended over his features when he hurried them along. He knew that his victory over the toons had been temporary, and it was best to turn towards walls and their protection.

  *

  They huddled inside the castle.

  What to do next? This thought connected them. The people had once more crowded together in the open space near the forge.

  Tomas read their mood.

  “Stay ahead of him,” he said. “Imagine more.” The people mulled around him knowing that he was their link to what the world was becoming. But few understood what he said.

  *

  The whirlwind plucked up four reserve images in the encampment. He flung them, shocked and silenced, onto the screen, where they melded with people. Sylvester, Mickey Mouse, Mowgli and the jazz cat Thomas O’Malley peered back from the surface at the funnel of smoke. They had been in the audience, now they had returned to their flat realm. They were frozen in horror.

  “You were from the same story anyway,” the wizard snarled.

  He followed his snarl with a cloudy smirk. Only he knew the depths of his joke. This had been one of the secrets he thought he’d snatched from his readings in magic. All stories were one story. It should be easy to flatten everything onto the same plane.

  The whirlwind plucked them out again. The four oozed, watery, pouring from the flat surface. He plunked them back on unsolid ground.

  They had changed again. They were larger, firmer, brighter, clearer, a savage glare in their eyes. These toons were ready to return to war.

  Trapped on the screen the people stared at this exchange, and cringed, shrinking from the stunning display of power.

  And Pluta summoned the toons back from the battlefield to reanimate them.

  And he stripped the people on the screen of their range of words, reducing them to just one word.

  *

  “I knew Miranda,” Adina said.

&n
bsp; “Did you?” Tomas didn’t think he that he wanted to go on with this. He was preparing himself. This was the only moment he would have, among the people, and the children. They had backed off, to let him consider the next move.

  He had already felt in waves how the wizard was reforming. He would appall them with a new spectacle of change, if they were not quick and clear in their countering images.

  “But you recognized me from somewhere.”

  “Yes. A medieval image. A face from long ago. I’ve seen your likeness before.”

  “I’m not someone else.”

  “No, you’re here.”

  “A steady hand with the children.” He smiled.

  She nodded. “You’ll go alone.”

  “He won’t expect that.”

  “Why?”

  “He thinks I need an army to defeat him.”

  “Don’t you?” She was suddenly worried by the prospect he’d placed before her mind. “I’m going to the origin. He’s the beginning of this.”

  “Will you get that close?”

  “That’s what I have to find.”

  “Are you afraid, Tomas?”

  His hand rested uneasily on the hilt of the sword.

  “The terror’s inside us.”

  “You’re offering yourself as a sacrifice?” Adina reached for him.

  He met her eyes. “It won’t be like that. Something else has to happen.”

  *

  He slipped out in darkness carrying a torch.

  The night had come early. It had flowed up from the forest and overrun the castle, thickening the air, crowding out stars, blurring the moon, a night so overpowering that it promised to permanently erode the day. Warm air flowed with the night, and it seemed to all inside the castle that the seasons and the weather and the day and the darkness were out of joint.

  They knew that the wizard was mocking them and their expectations of a predictable sequence.

  *

  People inside the castle, without Tomas now, began to cry out.

  “We should give in,” a guard said.

  “The Lord is punishing us,” a woman called.

  “We should pray to this new power,” a man said, who was a parent of one of the children led out of the forest by Tomas.

  “We should offer money, gifts, service, favours,” a woman wept.

  “Give the magic something,” another man said.

  “Give offerings,” a woman shouted.

  “O my,” Gabrielle said. She stood with them, but she was abruptly unimpressed with many of her elders. This talk of sacrifice didn’t make her too happy. She remembered from somewhere that it was usually children that were tossed into flames, or tied up on altars, or thrown onto the steps and into the trenches of shrines, or dropped down into a monster’s mouth.

  “What do you think of this?” Santiago whispered to her.

  “They’re losing their nerve,” Gabrielle whispered back.

  “Not all. Look.”

  He pointed to Cyrus and to the guards who stood near the walls, shivering, somewhat hunched, but vigilant. She saw Adina hooded, standing in the midst of a circle of children, near the gate, gazing at the door through which Tomas had quietly left.

  “He’s gone,” Gabrielle said.

  “And without us,” Santiago murmured.

  *

  Tomas descended into the transfiguring forest. The ground was moist, mulch-like. The air was so close and hot he felt it would smother him. And there was the darkness, uncanny, new. No vault of heaven, no glittering between the clouds, just darkness.

  “He’s spreading the dream dominion. He’s making matter shift in the way he can. Be careful. All you took to be solid will change under your feet.”

  He edged into the night. Hesitating, unsure of where he was, he stepped forward, moved on, shifted his torch from hand to hand, and stopped again. This was the forest he had made his way through with the children. Yet it was unrecognizable now. He started up again, and saw tropical creepers dangling from branches. Tree trunks became faces with mouths voicing warnings. The grass wriggled and squirmed becoming a pathway of worms. He stopped completely.

  “I’m lost.”

  *

  “No, you’re not,” Gabrielle said.

  She took his hand, the one she knew came from the toon world.

  “The wizard is overdoing it again,” Santiago said.

  He appeared at Tomas’s other side.

  “It’s a big theme-park,” Gabrielle said.

  “And not a very good one,” Santiago said.

  “Where did you come from?” Tomas was uneasy but pleased to find them there.

  “We followed your path down through the dark,” Gabrielle said.

  “You left a trail of footprints in the muck. We saw your torch.”

  “Easy to follow,” Santiago said. “And we brought two more torches.”

  “You told us once the universe speaks many languages. If we look hard, and listen hard, we’ll be able to figure it out,” Gabrielle said.

  “I told you that?” Tomas smiled in spite of his worry that they were with him in this skewing darkness.

  “You did,” she said.

  “We just followed the signs,” Santiago said. “One way or another we knew we’d find you.”

  “This isn’t safe.” Tomas knew that was obvious.

  “Your journey is ours,” Santiago said.

  “We claimed you so we’re responsible for you. That’s how it goes,” Gabrielle said.

  “The wizard could use you both to bait me, if he wants to catch us all,” Tomas said.

  “We’ll see about that,” Santiago said.

  “Shhh . . . ” Gabrielle whispered. “The forest has ears.”

  “And eyes,” Santiago said.

  Gabrielle grasped the knight’s hand firmly, and led on.

  *

  More creeping change came to the forest. It looked like a cemetery. Around them the stumps and branches and trunks and exposed roots were sepulchers, mausoleums, phantom angels and quivering crosses.

  They inched onward using their torches to light the way.

  The trees began to breathe, their breath heavy and intoxicating. The ground was disturbed so that dust drifted upwards in ghostly streams.

  “It’s not meant for us,” Tomas said.

  “What do you mean?” Santiago asked.

  “He’s possessing the world, melting it down into the images and symbols of dreams. He’s breaking down the barriers between dream-life and nature.”

  “Maybe he should try something a little less corny.”

  Santiago saw that his sister was saying this to whistle in the dark.

  But he wasn’t afraid. Still he felt himself becoming almost drugged. The images were a weight. Too much was being added to the world.

  Gabrielle heard the cries of young people discovering their first kisses.

  Santiago heard swords clanging, pistols barking.

  Gabrielle thought she heard heavy stamping animals in a bizarre dance.

  Santiago thought he heard thundering wings rising over them.

  Through the blackened backdrop of the trees they thought they heard rituals taking place. Magicians uttered abracadabra from secret ceremonies.

  “It’s like the soundtrack to Fantasia.”

  Tomas heard the distress in Gabrielle’s voice. Santiago took her hand and, in spite of the images and echoes in the darkness, led on. The three were in a line. They held the torches like warnings to what impended. Tomas kept his human hand on the hilt of his sword.

  *

  Trees and leaves reached out with brazen intimacies. “Feel us,” the forest seemed to say.

  “Keep going,” Tomas said.

  Heat lightning crashed low. The forest became sand sculptures, dunes, pyramids and rows of sphinxes.

  “Does he know where we are?” Gabrielle asked.

  “If he did, he’d send something more than special effects. He’s twisting up nature to cover t
he path.”

  “Clever,” said Santiago.

  The air turned foul with the rankness of a primal swamp.

  “Alchemy,” Tomas said. “He’s using the powers to manipulate nature. That’s all it is. It’s just manipulation, not a complete transformation. Not yet.”

  This was another one of those snap understandings that had started coming to his mind since he found the children and journeyed with them to the castle.

  Santiago squeezed Gabrielle’s hand, and she in turn squeezed her brother’s.

  *

  They edged through a rain forest draped with grotesque vines. And they made their way forward, trying to retrace the path they took days before. They found their way by paying attention through the shape-shifting to the ground and the trees. Every time the shapes changed, a part of the old forest somehow remained. They had to see past the images and see that something surged around the magic.

  “My imagination was better at night,” Santiago said, leading the way. “Remember? I told you stories, Gabrielle. I read them out loud to you. Sometimes I made them up. I added things to what was there on the page and made them my own.”

  “We grew in the night,” she said.

  “We just have to trust that,” Santiago replied.

  “The wizard won’t be able to follow what we make up ourselves.”

  “That’s right, yes,” he said.

  *

  Tomas followed the children through the forest.

  Although there wasn’t much to smile about, he smiled. Direction always came from unexpected places. If you admitted that you were incomplete then the world spoke and the inventions spoke, and people spoke, and the images and dreams spoke.

  In torchlight the pathways dripped with voodoo hangings.

  But these displays no longer held a terrifying sway. Slowly they became familiar. If you had never seen such things before, you might have gone mad with the shock of their powerful newness. Slowly it was becoming obvious to Tomas that the wizard’s manipulations had their root in the human imagination. Images and shadows had great power, but not quite the final power that the wizard envisioned.