Shifting

by B. V. Larson

  “So, what the hell is she doing, burning sickly yellow incense out there?” asked Vance.

  “We’ll have to find out,” I said. Everyone looked at me very intently. I realized slowly that my adventures, and even more critically, my returning unchanged from them, had raised my stature in the group. They were all looking at me to give them direction.

  “And yes, I’ll do it.”

  Monika didn’t look happy, but she didn’t object.

  “Well,” Mrs. Hatchell said reasonably. “If one of those places is underwater, the Captain and the Preacher must have gone to the other, the one in town.”

  I nodded, conceding the logic of it. The good Doctor now definitely warranted a visit. Then I thought about the Preacher and the Captain for the first time.

  “You mean that neither of them has shown up?” I asked everyone. I stared at a group of blank, slowly shaking heads.

  “I wonder if they could be under some spell or time-warp, or whatever, the way we were. What is the date?”

  “The twenty-ninth,” said Shelly Nelson.

  “Two days to Halloween. The Doctor kept talking about Halloween,” said Vance.

  “Indeed she did. So no one has gone out to check on Wilton these last two weeks?”

  Everyone looked a bit sheepish.

  “That pharmacy is right on the other side of one of the lines on the map,” said Mrs. Hatchell. “One of the green ones. She set up camp very near a shift line, as you call them. No one wanted to go check that out, especially after your scouting party vanished.”

  I nodded, understanding. “All right, I’m going to go make a social call then, first thing in the morning. Do you have any good food? We’re pretty hungry.”

  Everyone jumped into setting up a good dinner. Nick Hackler cooked up some fresh barbecued chicken, stuff that had been kept on ice since the power had died, but now, even with the cold weather, it was getting gamey. We had a feast that night, knowing we had a long winter of canned goods staring us in the face.

  Later, Vance and Jimmy Vanton, and even Mr. Nelson in his wheelchair came to talk to me quietly. Their eyes were haunted with shades of guilt. I did not ask them to come with me. Instead, I suggested that they all focus on gathering enough food to last the winter. They seemed relieved, every one of them.

  Twenty-Seven

  The next morning was the day before All Hallows Eve. I remembered so many grim stories of that day, that I felt a bit of urgency. It seemed to me all too likely that something might happen on that famous festival of the dead. I could only wonder at our celebration of it, all these years since the last age of the supernatural. Like a distant race memory, we had forgotten exactly what it was that we feared, but we could still recall the fear itself.

  The weather was definitely colder. In November, I knew, we would probably get our first light dustings of snow. The colder, crisp air and the white frost that lay upon the morning grass gave me pause. Something about the approach of winter when all our technological defenses were gone gave me an odd feeling of unease. This winter there would be no bulbs of light burning with magical brightness. Heat would come from wood-burning stoves that burned fuel chopped with axes and sweat. There would be no central heating automatically blowing warmth on the cold bricks.

  The good folk of Redmoor had worked hard as scavengers while Monika and I had slept or dreamt or whatever it was we’d lived through in that chamber beneath the earth. They had set up three wooden stoves and a stockpile of wood in the medical center now.

  I felt, oddly, different from them now. Somehow, my adventures had made me into a different kind of person than the others. They were people who stayed huddled inside with eyes peering out into the night. I had become someone who ventured out into the darkness as a matter of habit. I imagined that in the past, there had always been people like me and people like them, and that we were naturally taking up roles that our ancestors had played out centuries ago.

  I left after a few quiet good-byes. I could feel their eyes on me as I walked downtown, but I didn’t look back.

  Redmoor wasn’t a big town, and I soon reached the forbidden area, bounded by Linwood Drive on one side and Olive Street on another, according to the Preacher’s map. When I reached the boundary, invisible though it was, I felt it. The sensation was similar to what I had felt out in the woods or down in the cave, except perhaps stronger. I realized before I stepped out into the empty strip of patched asphalt we called Linwood Drive that I knew where the line was. The boundary between sanity and insanity, order and chaos, was a few paces away, in the middle of the street. Linwood Drive was wider than most of our streets in our small town, it was a two-laner, but most people still treated it as one lane with slanted parking lines painted on both sides for shoppers.

  I stood on the southern side with my toes resting on the red curb. I was in front of the Redmoor video store that old man Marcus used to run before his wife killed him with claws grown from those painted fingernails she’d always worked so hard on. I hesitated there, I’m not sure for how long. A yellow fire hydrant, a relic of a past that seemed distant, stood on the curb next to me like a faithful pet. We waited on the curb together, the yellow fire hydrant and I. The barrier was right there in the street before me, I could feel it, but I did not yet dare step toward it. I had the sensation of being watched, but could not see the watcher. Perhaps the shift line itself watched me, hungrily, already planning what sort of vile twisted thing it might morph me into. I shook my head at these thoughts. They were absurd, but the feeling of dread would not leave.

  I knew somewhere in my mind that I could go around this border, this barrier, or fissure, or whatever it was, that led into the unknown. I knew I could just walk another mile or so up into the woods past the city limits or down to the lakeshore and find a way around it, but I didn’t want to give in to this thing that had eaten my town and my life. I hated it, and wanted to beat it. I felt, after weeks of learning about it and brushing up against it that perhaps I was ready to beat it. I felt that I had run from it long enough.

  While I thought about it, I spotted some of the flying creatures, roosting upside down like bats in the trees across the street. They were the things that watched me, I knew. They made no move to flutter down and drink my blood. I wondered if somehow they knew I pondered the barrier. Was some other unseen creature directing them? The trees that bore the flying things seemed quiet as well, barely shifting in the breeze as if the trees too, considered me. The whole world seemed to hold its breath.

  After a time, I thought to myself that if I was going to do it—and I knew that I was—it might as well be now. So, after having dithered for perhaps a dozen minutes, or perhaps more, I left the yellow fire hydrant and the video store and finally took my first step into Linwood Drive. The things in the trees moved restlessly. They continued to watch me as I walked into… something. Only heaven—or perhaps hell—knew what.

  I hit an invisible barrier two steps from the curb. I could feel it, but could not see it, not yet. At first, it was very gentle, like a thick spider web breaking over my body. I paused, and the sensation strengthened. Somehow, I knew that if I stopped, it would grow stronger, so I took another slow step, then two more. The sensation of walking into some resistant force increased. It was like moving into a pool of water now, it dragged against my feet and sought to push me back. I swung my boots forward and my breathing became labored, more with fear than with physical effort. I glanced back toward the sidewalk where I’d started and that was a mistake.

  The air between me and the sidewalk I’d come from seemed to waver, just for a moment, and then it steadied. I felt vertigo rush up from my belly, like a thrill that hits you when you stare down into a deadly fall. Looking back was like looking down when scaling a cliff face: it was a bad idea. I lost my balance and stumbled, but managed to steady myself with an effort. I snapped my eyes forward and stared with determination at the far side of Linwood, absurdly close yet so far away. I felt like a tight ropewalker wh
o had forgone the net and the safety belts for the very first time. The breeze gusted up now and it ruffled my hair and the sweat that had popped out upon my brow dried and turned cold.

  I took another step.

  It was fighting me openly now. A barrier I could truly feel rose up against me and pressed against my legs. I could only think that a thousand others had felt this very thing and had failed somehow in this test, and had lost their way. They had fallen prey to this force from another age and had been melted by it into a twisted caricature of themselves. What was this force? My mind demanded an answer when there was none. It was like hot magma from the center of the Earth, a force that could destroy and create all in one violent process. I thought perhaps it was an echo left over from the wild violent act of creation of the cosmos. Or perhaps it was a natural ripple from some physical law that we had yet to discover with our arrogant science, still perhaps as primitive and infantile as we imagined the alchemists of centuries past to be.

  Soon, as I took step by step, all my thoughts fell away from my mind, as all my focus was needed to quell my fears and force myself to take yet another step into the unknown.

  Then, suddenly, I felt something give way and I was through it, I had passed a test of some kind. I almost pitched forward, something I knew would be bad thing. I took another step and felt the resistance grow again. But I felt more confident, I had broken through the first barrier and I would break through them all until the last. I realized now, too, why we had not seen many animals transformed. They knew enough to keep away from such a terrifying thing. Their senses were more acute and their reaction to the unknown was simple and effective: flee. Humans had to make it more complex, had to resist changes in their environment not of their making. This was our street, and I could imagine others like me forcing their way across where any beast would have simply turned and fled with the wisdom of a thousand generations of knowing that anything unknown was deadly. Humanity had forgotten their old deep-seated fears and had bulled their way into trouble much as I was doing now, I felt sure of it. One of the Preacher’s favorite quotes rang in my ears: Pride goeth before the fall.

  I put another foot forward, and another, and now it was much worse than water, worse than a tidal surge, I was trying to walk through the Earth itself. I took another step, and the barrier broke, just as the first had. The last barrier was different, however. It didn’t form a wall against me, but rather tried to drag me backward. Like a fly caught in the web of a cunning spider, I struggled to be free of this unnatural thing that held me. It wasn’t just my feet and legs that felt the effect, now it was my entire body. Tiny red sparks had come up from somewhere and ran in little bursts and shivers over me. I ignored them and pressed on, head down, body hunched and leaning now like a man walking into a hurricane, like a fool fighting an incredible force of nature. Which, I suppose, was exactly what I was doing.

  It let go all at once, and when it did I stumbled and pitched forward over the far curb. I laid there gasping, and dared turn my head and look back across the street. The yellow fire hydrant still sat there, unimpressed and unmoved. The only thing I could detect now as a slight ripple in the air, like the wavering air on a hot summer day over a distant ribbon of black highway. Had it been only thirty steps? I calculated the distance and nodded my head. The hardest thirty paces I had ever taken.

  Twenty-Eight

  I had made it. I grinned in wild triumph and shivered with exertion at the same time. Hands trembling, I examined myself. My hands looked normal. My heart was pounding, but felt right in my chest. My face felt familiar under the slightly sticky touch of my sweating palms. Even inside my boots, when I shook them off and exposed bare skin into the freezing air, there were no hidden hooves, nor claws at the end of my legs. I sighed hugely. Upon initial inspection, I was still entirely human.

  Why had I made it, when so many others had failed? I could not be sure, but I imagined it was due to natural resistance, and perhaps also due to a sort of acquired resistance I had gained over recent days. It could all have been due to my focused effort to cross it, as well. Others had likely panicked. Perhaps they had stumbled, or turned back, or flailed helplessly and spent hours there, long enough for the change to occur. Steady, determined plodding was the way across, with never a look back, never halting, never faltering. I felt I had learned at least part of the key, but I certainly did not relish doing it again.

  I pulled myself together and walked through a parking lot half-full of abandoned cars and around a building that had once been a bank and now had smashed out windows like blinded eyes. The pharmacy was near, and I realized that I could feel something new. Some twitch, not totally unlike the sensation that the shift line had given me when I’d first put my foot onto Linwood Drive.

  The pharmacy was red brick and it was an old building, and had been built perhaps more than a century ago, not long after the town’s founding. The painted signs over the entrance were faded. Weathered foot-high letters spelled out Wilton’s. Doctor Wilton had owned the pharmacy but had recently hired another pharmacist to run it, a prim, bespectacled woman named Darla Howell who had vanished on the very first night of the change. The town gossips had whispered words about Darla and Doctor Wilton, as neither had ever married. The quiet words were things that no one had proven, but which had hung in the air around them for years. Now, of course, the gossipers were as dead as Darla herself, and their words as meaningless. No doubt, I thought, she had been one of the first to try to cross the barrier as I just had. I imagined her shock as she came into contact with the supernatural in the middle of her oh-so-orderly world. In the middle of an average town that was in the middle of America itself. After a long day’s work, she’d been caught in a spider’s web and her bewilderment would have turned quickly into terror and then perhaps madness. And for her, like for thousands of others, the spiders had finally come.

  I pushed open the door to the Pharmacy. It was dark inside and the ancient bell at the top of the door jangled and scraped wildly against the glass, announcing my presence. I didn’t care. I entered the gloomy interior and pulled the door shut behind me against the winds which were now coming in off the Lake in hard gusts.

  “Wilton?” I called with some force in my voice. The atmosphere of the place made one want to use a hushed voice, but I was not in the mood for meekness. I sensed a dark foreboding presence here. And something, something acrid clung to the air. It was an unnatural stink that was not ether or cleanser or bleach. It had an organic base to it, of some kind, that stink.

  “Wilton!” I shouted, walking past the initial rows of comic books and hair products. I walked between the aisles, glancing down each one, wishing I had a working flashlight. There were rubber kid toys next to the comic books and then an aisle full of foot gel pads and foot massagers and deodorizers. The next aisle was full of aspirin and ibuprofen and the dozen other over-the-counter pain relievers that relieved about half of any pain you served up to them. The next aisle was all shampoos and conditioners and hair dyes. Last came the final aisle that led to the register in the back. It was full of tampons and prophylactics and I remembered as clear as day how I used to giggle and poke at them with my friends after school, in a distant era that seemed like centuries ago.

  Those boys were all dead now, save for Vance, and somehow this made me angry as I approached the register. There was a door behind the register, it hung half open and a yellow light came from behind it. That back room was the very place, I knew, where alleged indiscretions were supposedly carried out by Wilton and Darla Howell. No one else, to my knowledge, had ever stepped back there.

  “Wilton!” I roared. I hammered the little service bell she had sitting on the glass-topped counter. Inside, laid out like a movie house display case, she had rows of candies. The chocolates were always at the top and gum always lined the bottom. I’d steamed up and smudged that glass with my greasy kid-fingers a hundred times, perhaps a thousand.

  My next sucked in a breath, ready to shout WILTON!
again with such power that the good Doctor would have awakened from the very dead to answer, died into a hiss that passed my teeth quietly. The door behind the register creaked open a bit further, letting out more of that yellow, oily light and a hunched figure eased out of it.

  Wilton was not herself. She had what looked like a pillow case pulled over her head. It was a hood, I realized, and a long cloak hung down from it. I thought it looked like a cannibalized blanket or perhaps even a dark curtain. The hood raised up and a single, baleful eye regarded me. That eye would have looked human, but I saw now that it glowed, just slightly, just enough to make you think that it glowed, but not enough to make you certain. It was an effect that on any other day I would consider odd, and tell myself was impossible, but here, now, anything was possible and I knew it. I wondered what further monstrosities were hidden beneath her makeshift cloak and decided I didn’t want to know.

  “You rang?” she said, showing she still had a sense of humor.

  I snorted and demanded, “What are you up to out here?”

  “Nice of you to come check on me,” said Wilton. As she spoke she slid open the display case under the register and dug something out. It was a chocolate bar. She pushed it across the table.

  “Your favorite, if memory serves me rightly.”

  I looked at it, then took it and was about to slide it into my pocket. Then I relented and tore it open and took a bite. It was my favorite, after all. It was a bit stale, but still tasted good. She still had not answered my question so I didn’t repeat it.

  “I’ll show you what I’m up to,” she said, “but we’ll talk a bit first.”

  After staring at her for a minute while chewing on the chocolate bar, I nodded in agreement. A part of me still liked her, still wanted to like her. That organic stink was stronger here and I realized it had to either be Wilton herself, or it was coming from that door behind her. It smelled like someone was cooking bacon in a pot of chlorine.