Shifting

by B. V. Larson

  Malkin’s voice came to us again, from behind us somewhere in the dark. There was no way to tell where he was, he could have been in any of these side passages.

  “You have not melted. You are very young and very strong,” he said.

  I crawled forward, reaching back my hand and half-dragging Monika after me. The barrier I felt but could not see slipped away and I managed another ten feet of progress before I felt it again, stronger this time. It was as if a huge plastic ball of water rolled up against me, crushing me softly down.

  I pressed against it. Monika was a dead weight behind me, but I clung to her hand. I kept moving forward, one inch at a time. I knew now what we faced. This must be the shiftline. This was what it felt like to cross one.

  “You intrigue me,” came Malkin’s voice again. “I shall let you pass.”

  Suddenly the barrier was gone. I fell forward and my chin dug into loose debris at the bottom of the tunnel.

  Monika cried quietly, but she needed no further urging. Grim-faced and barely speaking, we found our way to the far end of the cavern. Sometime later, tired and panting, we wriggled our way out into the fresh breeze again, like two fugitives from the grave.

  Twenty-Five

  We made it to the surface and beat the gray dust out of our hair. The sky had turned cloudy and the morning sunshine was gone. There should have been plenty of hours before sunset still, I was sure of it. We’d only been down in that cave for maybe two hours, probably less. But still, my feeling from the skies around us was that it was nearing dusk.

  “I didn’t like it,” said Monika suddenly.

  I looked at her, “What?”

  “I didn’t like the cave. You asked me before.”

  Her face was so pitiful then. She looked young and lost. She was so far from home. I put my arm around her and kissed her dusty forehead. “Well, I was glad to have you with me,” I told her.

  We headed up the hill toward the Reverend John Thomas’ cabin. I hoped, that after all this, he would be there. It could still be a very bad day if we found him torn apart, or if he had shifted. I also wondered vaguely what the Captain was up to. I thought he would make it, and would probably beat us up here.

  We made it to the cabin without further mishap. We stood in the cover of the trees, looking out over the bald hilltop, listening. Nothing seemed wrong. Nothing stirred at all. There were a few crows on the eaves, no doubt attracted by the makeshift graveyard with crosses made of wooden sticks. I counted thirteen graves there, two more than the last time I’d been up here. It seemed like a lot of the wandering, lost ones were attracted to this spot.

  “What do we wait for?” whispered Monika.

  “I don’t see anyone, but the Captain might be waiting and watching too.”

  After twenty minutes of watching a quiet scene, I finally decided the hell with it, and walked out into the open, approaching the cabin. The crows lifted off only when I was in spitting distance and lazily flapped away, cawing at me reproachfully. I tapped at the door, which stood ajar. There was no response, so I entered.

  There were no bodies or other horrors inside. I breathed out a sigh of relief. There were, however, two notes. Each was held down by a stone on the desktop. The first one I read was from the Captain. It said:

  I waited a full day. I doubt you have survived, but in case, I’m writing this. I think he’s right. I’m going to investigate the strange phenomenon he mentions in the note. Possibly, I’ll even find him there.

  -Captain Ryerson

  I stared at the note for a bit and chewed my lip. One thing about it kept beating in my head, pulsating in my brain: I waited a full day. I knew just by looking around that he had sat right here. I counted sixteen cigarettes butts lined up on the desktop, each smoked down to the yellow filter. The Preacher never smoked. I didn’t know how it had happened, but we had spent a long time down in that cave. Had we been under some kind of spell down there? Had we been inside a shiftline, where perhaps, time ran differently? I didn’t know, but the implications made me feel queasy.

  “That thing,” said Monika, reading the note carefully. “That thing in the cave did something. It was a skrítek. An elf.”

  “Yes.”

  “Sometimes, they make you think a day was an hour. Or that a century was a year. My grandparents believed in them. Perhaps there were some still around, when they were children.”

  “Yes,” I said, realizing with a mild shock that I now believed something I’d thought impossible only this morning. Why I would still place anything in that rarified category of impossible after what I had seen over these past weeks defied logic, of course. But one must cling to physical laws as one clings to sanity itself.

  There was one thing I refused to think about. What if it had been more than a day? What if it had been a week—or a year, or—? But I clamped down on that monkey, I caged it up and bound and gagged it. Gibbering and with eyes full of madness, it was a thought that could not even be considered. It had been a day, I told myself, and only a day, and it was weird, but that was all it was.

  I picked up the second note. It was from the Preacher.

  Gannon, I know it will most likely be you who reads this. I’ve observed a phenomenon from my hilltop which you can’t see from the town. I’ve decided to go investigate. When it begins to get dark, gaze to the northwest and you will see where I’ve gone. God willing, I will join you at the center.

  -John Thomas

  “What do we do?” asked Monika.

  “I suppose we wait until dark.”

  While we waited, we found some coffee to brew up on an ancient propane stove along with a can of chili and half-empty box of very stale crackers. We scraped chili onto the crackers. It actually tasted pretty good. As we ate them, I couldn’t help but wonder if a box of crackers would last a year before turning to dust. Probably, I had to admit. But not a century.

  “I would have liked your home, Gannon,” Monika told me after a time.

  “Indiana?”

  “Yes. It makes me think of my home. Cool air, trees, hills.”

  “You mean you would have liked it more before the changes?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Well, I like you Monika, just the way you are.”

  She flashed me a shy smile and looked back down at her food. I wondered if smiling a lot was embarrassing in her country. They must think that we all grinned all the time like fools. But TV and Hollywood and models in magazines didn’t matter anymore. They didn’t even exist anymore. The world had become a quiet, empty place. I tried to cut off that depressing line of thought.

  As I finished the last of our meal, I wondered vaguely about the cave. If we had spent more than a day in that cave, wouldn’t we be hungrier afterwards? Or had time slowed down for our stomachs as well? I was hungry, but not ravenous. I tried again with a force of will to put the whole thing out of my mind.

  “It’s getting dark,” Monika said in a hushed voice. I nodded and we moved out to stand on the hilltop. The planted sticks at the very crest of the hill that marked the makeshift cemetery rattled when the breeze shifted. I saw that the Preacher had gone to the effort of scratching names and dates in the crossed sticks that marked the graves. The three graves of the Krenzer children had a date of simply October. I suppose a year wasn’t necessary. If ever there was a good time to start counting years from zero again, this was it.

  We watched the last trickle of sunlight die in the west. The cloud cover had broken up enough to see the sunset. It burned the sky a blazing orange that was streaked with lavender clouds. I tried not to see anything suspicious in the skies. There had been colorful sunsets before, and there was nothing strange about it. I had my arm around Monika’s shoulders and she leaned up against me.

  But as the sunlight died, the strange landscape of the town laid out before us did take on an alien and sinister aspect. There was no denying that things had changed down there. The town was dark, of course. The street lights and moving headlights and twin
kling stop lights you would have seen in abundance just a few months ago were all gone. Human civilization had ground to a halt, like some extinct beast of the plains. We had not gone out with a bang, but rather with a heavy sigh.

  The gloom of night descended on Redmoor while we watched. Inky shadows grew from the buildings, purple and indigo and flat black. These shadows pooled together and drowned entire streets and neighborhoods, swallowing them from our view.

  A few twinkling white lights were visible at the medical center. Propane lanterns, no doubt. It was so strange and lonely to be able to see only one other spot of human habitation in the middle of what had once been a bustling town.

  “Look, there,” said Monika, pointing toward the east, toward the downtown district. Finally, I saw what the notes were about. In the entire downtown area, there was only one sickly yellow glow visible. It wasn’t the white shine of a lantern or the yellow twinkle of a campfire. It was an unnatural yellow glow, and it seemed to pulsate gently as we watched. It reminded me immediately of the glowing nimbus I’d seen around the hag that one night, while we walked together in the woods.

  It gave me a chill to see it. I wondered if you were down there, carrying a lantern in those streets, if you would even notice the shimmering yellowy air. Would the glare of your lantern drown it out?

  “What part of town is that?” she asked me.

  “Downtown. The old part of town, shops and—” and then I had it. “It’s the pharmacy. It’s Wilton, I bet.” Even as I said it I was sure. It was Wilton doing only the Lord knew what. Could she have possibly changed so much that she glowed in the dark like a ghostly yellow heartbeat?

  “Look, out there, too,” she said, pointing out to the west side, out in the blackness beyond the town. Another spot, much similar to the one in town, glowed and glimmered. But it was a bluish glow this time, and it was brighter.

  Monika slipped her arm around me and her cheek pressed against my chest. “Isn’t that out in the forest?” she asked in a whisper. It was silly to think that whoever was there in that glowing spot would hear us from two miles or more away, but that is how it felt, seeing those lights. They made you want to crawl somewhere and hide.

  “No, that spot is out in the Lake.”

  I thought about the spot, and I knew in my bones where it was, but I hesitated to say it. Somehow, saying it aloud gave it power. Speaking of evil made it more real, my instincts screamed at me, but I overcame them.

  “It’s Elkinsville.”

  “What?”

  “A dead town, at the bottom of the Lake. That’s the spot where the glow comes from. I bet its related to the hag that Malkin told us about. I saw her out there on the shore.”

  Monika turned her face fully into my chest and she broke down then. She’d held it all day, and her tears were hot and soaked through my shirt. I ran my fingers over her hair absently, but didn’t try to coax her into stopping.

  As it became darker, we could see the three locations ever more clearly by their individual lights. The medical center twinkled with burning lanterns and the other two, the town in the lake and what had to be downtown Redmoor, glimmered with unearthly fluorescence.

  “What’s going on down there?” she asked, her voice muffled. “Where did the others go? Which of those lights is the one the notes are talking about? How long were we down in that cave?”

  I just gave her a hug. I didn’t have any answers.

  We went back inside. After our adventure with Malkin, I didn’t want to walk the woods again in the dark. We’d have to spend the night in the cabin. I found Monika looking at me with dark desperate eyes.

  “How long?” she asked me.

  “What?” I replied, but part of me already knew what she was asking.

  She held her eye contact with me, and I couldn’t break it. “How long do you think it has been?”

  “I don’t know,” I told her honestly.

  “A year?”

  “No, no,” I said quickly, “it can’t have been a year.”

  “In the old stories, it was always a year and a day, or something like that.”

  “It can’t have been more than a week or two, judging by the weather. I know Indiana in October, and this is October,” I argued. “If it had been a year—” but I stopped.

  “If it has been a year, it would still be October, just a different October,” she finished for me.

  My mouth hung open. I couldn’t think of anything to say.

  Monika fell against me and I was relieved not to see the pain in her eyes anymore. “What if we are the last ones now?” she asked. “The last ones who haven’t changed yet?”

  That night, in the Preacher’s cabin, Monika smoked an entire cigarette, one of her very last. And then we finally, really, made love. It wasn’t a hot and joyful thing, however. It was more of a desperate attempt to console one another. Tomorrow we would have to come down from the hill and face whatever we found there.

  Twenty-Six

  In the morning we made our way down into town. I felt with each step a sense of dread worse than I’d felt before facing the changelings. A changeling was of flesh and blood, and could be beaten. A vast loss of time was irreplaceable and could in no way be overcome. I couldn’t help but notice signs of time having past. The trees were beginning to lose their leaves now. Soon, there would only be a few left to hang on like the last loose teeth in an old man’s head. I noticed the roads seemed a bit more overgrown with weeds, as there was no one now to cut them. Had they looked that overgrown before I’d gone down that cave? I could not be sure. The streets in Redmoor were strewn with debris, but they had been that way after the storm, hadn’t they?

  “Look,” said Monika.

  I looked and we both halted. There was the center, at the end of the street. It was completely fenced, at least, as far as we could see. Chain links, arranged in a dull gray steel net, circled the parking lot. My heart sank. There was no way they could have gotten all that work done in one day.

  Monika’s hand groped for mine. I took it, and together, with our stomachs in knots, we approached the medical center.

  “At least, it looks like we aren’t going to be alone,” I said with a pathetic attempt at a light-hearted tone.

  Vance was the first one to see us. There seemed to be a platform up against a tree behind the fence. A guard post, I supposed. He jumped down over the fence and approached with his rifle raised.

  “Gannon?” he asked. I heard amazement in his voice. Monika squeezed my hand.

  We got closer, and he didn’t look fat or bald or gray, that ruled out decades. I took a breath; it was the first I’d taken for awhile. Vance stopped advancing when he was maybe thirty feet from us.

  “Vance, we’re back,” I said.

  “Where...?” he asked, trailing off, looking from one to the other of us. “What have you been doing? We’d pretty much given up on you, I hate to say it.”

  He didn’t rush up and hug us. In fact, he kept his distance. His gun wasn’t pointed at us, now, but it was at the ready. His frown told me he thought we might be shift-creatures. I realized that, in a way, he might be right.

  “How long?” asked Monika, her voice quavered a bit.

  “I don’t know,” said Vance. “Don’t you know? About two weeks, I would guess.”

  Two weeks. I wasn’t sure if I should be relieved or not, but I was. I felt my chest muscles relax. I could breathe again.

  “Two weeks,” I said, nodding. “Not that bad, I guess.”

  Vance looked at us suspiciously and it seemed as if maybe he was embarrassed about his suspicions, but could not shake them.

  “I don’t blame you for being worried, Vance,” I said. Then I told him our story. I told him about the cave and the creature Malkin that lived in it. I left out some of the details, but gave him the quick version.

  He nodded, still looking uncertain. “Can I see you hands, and feet, brother?”

  We showed him our extremities and they looked clean and normal. M
y bulbous pink toes and yellow nails had never looked so good to me.

  Heaving a sigh then, he charged us and hugged us and jumped on us. He was Vance again. Even Monika smiled and it warmed my heart to see it. We all walked into the compound together.

  “You smell like a monkey’s finger, Gannon,” said Vance affectionately. “How long has it been since you’ve had a bath?”

  “Too long,” I said, smiling.

  I gathered from talking to Vance that things had been relatively calm in my absence, allowing them to quickly build up the entire fence. He made a particular point to note that they weren’t using any more trees as fence posts. Not that the fence would actually stop one of them, if it were to come to life. Still, the fence did give you a certain sense of protection once you were inside the compound.

  As we met the others inside, they had shocked reactions similar to Vance’s. Jimmy Vanton and Mrs. Hatchell in particular seemed shocked and disbelieving. I’m not sure that my return was entirely a benefit in their eyes. But Mrs. Hatchell soon warmed up, and everyone raptly listened to the longer version of my tale.

  “How come these things only talk to you, Gannon?” asked Holly Nelson’s usually quiet mother, Shelly. She had hair that naturally formed a wild balloon of tight dark curls.

  “We’ve all talked to one,” said Vance, speaking up in my defense. “Don’t forget the good Doctor Wilton.”

  “What I want to know about are these glowing areas,” jumped in Mrs. Hatchell, never one to stay out of any conversation for long. “You say one of them is Elkinsville—absurd, but so is everything else these days. The second one though. What is behind that?”

  Monika and I glanced at one another. “It is about where the pharmacy would be,” I explained.

  “It’s her,” blurted out Monika, “the Doctor.” She looked shy afterwards and I could tell she was glad when no one argued the point.