by B W Powe
Tomas’s thoughts were interrupted by a presence.
“We’re being followed.”
“Keep going,” Gabrielle whispered.
Down they went into wooded areas beyond where they had first met. Quietly, steadily, they sorted their steps through dust and fallen branches. They walked, and walked. Deeper into darkness the changes waned.
Tomas broke the silence.
“We’re getting close.”
“How do you know?” Santiago asked.
“He doesn’t feel the need to mask his camp. It’s only around the castle that he set up the extreme changes and the total darkness.”
“He didn’t think anyone would get this far,” Gabrielle said.
*
Rustlings behind.
“Steps,” Gabrielle said.
“Human or toon?” Santiago used the old question that they had directed at all that they met, once the adults had disappeared, after the battle of the shadows in the night.
The forest had resumed some of its original form, though there were still voodoo hangings, vines and creepers, and sand pyramids scattered piecemeal along the pathway they had followed.
The trees were falling away and, ahead of them, in an irradiated valley, spread the toon encampment and its towering screens.
“No reconnaisance, no pickets, no moat, no surveillance devices.” Santiago felt wise in his use of military terms.
“They’re safe enough,” Tomas said.
“There’s something behind us,” Gabrielle said.
“Don’t look back. Follow the line,” Tomas said.
“What line?” Santiago asked.
“The line from your hearts. The thread we’ve formed between us. The line that’s been leading us from the start. The one that led us to one another and keeps us together, and keeps leading us forward and holds us safe.”
“Something we can’t see,” Santiago said.
“We hold on anyway.” Gabrielle’s matter-of-fact tone was back in her voice.
“You see,” the knight said, “we complete each other’s sentences too. It’s the language we can’t see but we know is there.”
“All the same, we need to be careful,” Santiago said. “Their eyes may be out.” He was leading them with his torch, and he felt very much empowered.
Tomas knew the worst was to come.
And the stalking presence hadn’t gone away.
*
The forest came to an end. Darkness began to blend into the background behind them. They stepped up to a ledge, and stopped on that brink.
“Look down there. All that light,” Santiago said.
“It’s not from the sun or moon,” Gabrielle said.
They stood on the ledge gazing down. Tomas shuddered suddenly, not from
what he saw, but from the presence behind him. He turned and found nothing. At the corner of his eye he thought he glimpsed a shadow and he turned again, but there was no trace of what had been there.
The radiance spread out below them. It looked like the Milky Way inverted, glittering on earth.
“What is this?” Santiago couldn’t move. The fleeting thought passed that he didn’t want to move, and shouldn’t.
“Where are we?” Gabrielle was entranced, swaying slightly. The light was vibrating and beautiful.
“The toon camp.” Tomas had gone still too. They doused their torches. The light before them spread to the horizons in either direction. Tomas thought that if it had been day, this light would have been even more blinding than the sun’s. The whirlwind had rerouted all electricity here.
*
“Is this where you came from?” Gabrielle said.
“It’s where I started.”
“Is it the same?” Santiago asked.
“I recognize it, and yet I don’t.”
“Do you know where he is?” Gabrielle asked.
She didn’t say the name, but the other two knew who she meant.
“I’ll find him.” Tomas stared out over the luminous landscape.
Light seemed to blur the air. Santiago thought, this light is becoming like the traces of rain on a car’s windshield at night during a storm.
The moment Santiago thought this, he also felt how protected he was in the company of Tomas and Gabrielle. Their shield hadn’t been stripped by fear or by their journey through the changeling forest. If that shield hadn’t been there, then would the wizard have seen them by now? Suddenly it dawned on the boy that maybe the whirlwind had detected them and they were being lured on towards absorption.
But he trusted Tomas. There was always this trust, not entirely the result of logic, and he believed that their quest had slipped in under the toons’ radar.
*
When their eyes adjusted to the spectral glow, they saw tent walls had been pitched in this valley, and spread up to foothills, to the edge of another forest, to the brink of a sea on one side, and to the cusp of a river system on the other.
The valley of images vibrated with faces and scenes, gestures and movements. Humanity was on the surfaces. Slowly the children could make out the toons in clumps before the screens, packed and rapt, staring up at what unfolded for their pleasure.
A dry-sounding drone rose from the valley. Gabrielle and Santiago listened closely. It was the muttering of the enthralled audience. This was the soundtrack they offered to the simmering scenes of humanity.
“It’s like a gigantic drive-in theatre with hundreds of movies playing,” Santiago said.
“No cars. I wonder if the toons get popcorn?” Gabrielle said.
“They do, and they feed on the wind. He breathes into the images. But this has grown since I was here.” Tomas hid his alarm. Sensing the shadows shifting again, he turned in another direction. What had been near flitted away before he could fix it with a gaze.
“They’re spreading?” Gabrielle said.
“The more people they lull, the more screens they need.”
“Must be billions up there,” Santiago said.
“All done without CGI,” Gabrielle said.
From below they heard applause ripple.
This clapping seesawed upwards. The children had the sensation that they stood over a great ocean and its churning. Laughter followed the applause. Up came the words: “More, more.”
*
A shadow formed up beside them.
“Impressive,” Adina said.
As the children shouted her name, she was already dowsing her torch and reaching for their hands, while turning from the valley of images to Tomas. She wore a cloak with a hood. He reached out for her with his toon hand, but he knew instantly that she wasn’t the presence he had felt. In a way he expected her to be there. He had from the beginning picked up the thread of her bravery. No, something else hovered close, disappearing when he tried to find it, vanishing when he wanted to make it known to his eyes. It was something that didn’t want to be known directly.
“Adina . . . ”
It was the first time he’d said her name aloud. When he did so it had power, and it gave form to feelings stirring in him.
“You didn’t think you could do this without me, did you?” she said.
“How did you make your way through the forest?” Santiago asked.
“Silly. She followed our steps. We must have left our mark everywhere we went,” Gabrielle said.
“Like a thread through a labyrinth.” Adina recalled that old story. This time it was the children who had provided the path. She’d observed that from the murky imprints in the unstable earth. Their smaller steps had been ahead of the knight’s.
“Interesting special effects back there,” she said. “Like Halloween on drugs.” The words from her former world often erupted in the present.
“Look.” Gabrielle swayed then passed one hand turned flat, palm open, over the glowing scene beneath them. To her brother her gesture looked like a blessing and a steadying motion.
*
Their eyes grew accustomed to the bewi
tching light. Gradually they made out figures on the screen.
They faced what humanity had become. Gabrielle and Santiago had grown up with images on vibrant surfaces. Now they saw there was no depth, though there was height and width. People swept across planes like flatfish in waves. No risings, no fading, just an endless streaming.
They thought they heard a word from the screen. But they couldn’t be sure.
What word did they hiss? What word had been permitted to them?
“Yes.”
All four on the brink of the valley finally heard it.
“Yes.”
It was no affirmation. There was no joyous excitement. It was a levelled “yes” said to everything. It was the one word the wizard had come to permit.
“Yes,” came the hiss.
Excruciating to the children’s ears, more a screech than a comfort, it was a flattened word, meaning nothing.
*
In the camp of light and shadows the cloud felt cramped.
Pluta had the sensation, inexplicable and invasive, that his realm was hemmed in by a strange border.
He swirled around. What was near? His breath became wheezy. The cloud turned a sullen colour. No one can fence the wind. Yet he had the sensation again that another power encroached.
“It’s him.”
He drew out the words in a sustained gasp.
“How did he get so close?”
Dangerously, the knight was learning at faster speeds. He had his invisible shield of protective emotion to filter or deflect transmissions and receptions.
The cloud wondered if the toons had become so mesmerized by the flat-screen images that they no longer paid attention to any portion of the world. Even if the world was being recreated in their image, they still preferred to watch, and comment, and hoot and applaud, and ask for encores.
*
Tomas unsheathed his sword and passed it to Adina.
“Hold this. You made it, after all.”
“You won’t need it?”
“You might. And I have a plan.”
The children were silent. They had broken the hypnotism of the glare below to watch and listen to the adults.
“You’re going down there.”
“Yes.”
“Tell me what you’re going to do.”
“Shhh . . . ” Tomas pressed the unstill forefinger of his inhuman hand gently onto her upper lip, in the soft crevice there.
She inhaled and then held her breath. Gabrielle and Santiago both thought that they saw her tremble.
Adina brought her hand up and pressed her forefinger onto his upper lip, in the soft crevice there. Nodding, she echoed his almost inaudible whisper. “Shhh . . . ”
A message moved between them. He repeated this gesture first with Gabrielle and then with Santiago but each time he did so much more lightly. A slight sad smile played on his lips. They didn’t smile back. Instead they nodded in their unspoken understanding.
*
Tomas slipped away from them again down towards the radiant camp.
“He could be in trouble soon,” Gabrielle said.
Adina stood behind the girl and brought her close to her heart.
“He’ll outsmart the storm.” Santiago spoke more to the air than to the two beside him.
“How on earth is he going to do that?” Gabrielle said.
“He may never tell us. But it’s why he went without his sword.”
Adina placed her free hand on the boy’s shoulder.
After a moment’s thought, she removed her arm from around Gabrielle and her hand from Santiago’s shoulder. She took the sword she had herself made and handed its hilt to the boy.
The sword quivered shifting from toon lines to steel and back again to the unsteady state and once more into solidity. The words on both sides glowed with a luminousness none had seen before. Cœur Rage.
“Here,” she said to Santiago. “You may need it.”
He eased the sword from her hands.
“I’d know how to use it better than he would,” Gabrielle muttered.
When her brother heard this, he handed the sword to her, but she refused it immediately.
“When the time comes,” she said.
Another message passed between them. Gabrielle knew they had made the way ahead for their knight in the shape-shifting forest, and it was their steps that had made the path for Adina to follow. If they kept sending messages and kept their heart lines open, they would know what to do.
*
Down he stepped into the valley of images.
While he made his way with caution, Tomas felt the presence again, the unseen haunting and gliding. It stepped when he stepped. It crept when he crept. It stopped when he stopped. It flitted off when he turned to face it.
This presence wasn’t Adina’s, following him in the way she did when she followed the three in the forest. It was like the ticking of an invisible clock. Sound gave it away. The sound was a pulse he could feel around him.
It didn’t belong to the wizard or to a reconnaissance toon out to ambush him. Nor was it a shape-shifter that the cloud had summoned and set loose, another spectacle in the metamorphosis of shadows. Nor was it a straggling human that the scavenging image horde hadn’t flattened for their delight.
*
Maybe it was the last of the animals. The earth had been brushed clean of creatures, the eeriest experience of all in these protean lands. The animals had reared, slithered, crept, fluttered and crawled away. They shied, loped, skittered, slunk and pounded. Their senses must have been running riot when the images made their evolutionary jump. The animals had reacted in the way they did when they sniffed the coming of tidal waves or sensed earthquake vibrations.They had exiled themselves to higher ground.
The world had been turned towards dreams. And the animals had felt there could be no conciliation with the images. They had been observed, and the toons came upon them, moving in their brilliant synchronized lines.
Animals sensed the coming. Children had sensed the arrival too. The adults had been thinking of themselves, and of the things they thought they needed. When they took time to pray, they did to another realm entirely, off-world. They had been warned, over and over. But they weren’t prepared for the new dominion.
No, whatever followed wasn’t a stray animal looking for its mate or flock or herd or brace.
Tomas wasn’t sure what the other could be only that it was close. He knew that he wanted to invite it into himself, feeling little fear of whatever it was that tracked him, moving when he moved, slowing when he slowed, always slightly behind, near his touch, at the corner of his eye.
*
He went forward over rocks and pebbles.
Tomas paused behind hordes watching on, murmuring. He sensed that their connection with the screens was deepening. The screens beamed outwards, strengthening in their emanations, sending new shoots from flat-lined skin to toon.
It appeared to him at first that the toons were being told to reabsorb the human images and their “yes.” The word from the screen sounded like a massive rusted iron wheel that had not moved in centuries but was finding a fresh impetus to heave and turn. The groan grew, monotonous and hypnotic.
The toons were swaying.
Their commentaries and critiques were changing into the mantra of a moan. A new circuit was developing. Shocked, Tomas heard the toons’ rising chant.
Had Pluta foreseen this?
It was possible that his studies in magic hadn’t given him the gift of prophecy. That was it. He hadn’t foreseen that the images, now earthbound, would urge themselves on towards a kind of freedom.
*
Riveted, Tomas saw that the people on the screens were beseeching the toons, saying “yes. . . yes . . .” Through the slightest variation in intonation they were seeking communion with their captors.
The throbbing canvas of the screens was speaking out with what had once been humanity.
He stopped in awe.
; There it was again: the mantra of static, and he felt himself being pulled towards it. This was what the world’s sound would become – a mantra by those on the screen and those in the watching crowds. It would become an endless loop, their piece of eternity. It was almost peaceful. He wanted to enter it, linger and sleep, dream and linger, sleep and dream, linger and linger, dream and sleep.
The static enfolded him, and he needed rest. Maybe he should stay here for a time.
Tomas shook himself.
Then he felt the presence again. He glanced back from the unfolding spectacle, thinking he could catch a glimpse of what had seized his attention. He had to turn away. This wasn’t his place. If he stayed too long, he might succumb to the entrancing communion.
He saw the woods behind and the path on the stones he’d taken. Then, through something alive in his consciousness, he gazed at his hands. This is who I am, human and image. He stood between toons and their backs and their hording mantra and the beseeching humans, and the ledge in the forest where he had left Adina and Gabrielle and Santiago. When he thought of them he felt warmed, and the warmth was again different from the heated chant of the toons.
He put a glove he’d kept with the other wrapped round his belt on his human hand.
*
All at once he sensed that the wizard knew he was homing in. The whirlwind became a column of desert sand, then a pillar of dark flame. Beyond the tents and the mantra, the storm fumed in black silence. Tomas made his way into this dusk.
*
“There’s a storm coming,” Gabrielle said.
“It’s been there for a long time,” Santiago said.
“Do you think Tomas sees it?”
“He’s already in it.”
Adina gazed at the two, studying them, wondering at their ability to see so far. She saw little of the storm, only the whirlwind’s dark outline. The lights from the screens blurred her vision.
“It’ll swallow him whole,” Gabrielle said.
“He’s finding his father,” Santiago murmured.
They were silent.
When Adina looked at the children, she saw how firmly Santiago clutched the sword she’d made. Gabrielle held her brother’s other hand. Affection, fear, anxiety, and some reaching for a steadying power – these were there in her grasp. Adina saw that Santiago returned the pressing in his sister’s hand. She was steadying him too.
