Shifting

by B. V. Larson

  “Things?” I said.

  He nodded.

  “Things like back on the beach?”

  “Yeah, but with a lot less meat on them. They don’t float. They came out of the local graveyards down here, and they seem to like it down here. After all, this is their hometown.”

  “What about the Hag?”

  “The witch-thing? She only comes out at night. She does something in the church, something that lights up the town,” he was talking almost normally now, and I figured that neither of us was using up any oxygen anymore. So strange.

  “How did you end up in here?”

  “I was just checking things out. I had already investigated the well and found this reeking air pocket when I tried out the church and the skeletons came after me, I lost them down here. They aren’t big thinkers.”

  He laughed then, and it was a bitter thing.

  He caught my eye and reached out a hand.

  “Thanks,” he said, sounding as if it was an unnatural word to him. I took his hand and we shook. As far as I knew, that was the only handshake he’d ever given to a man in Redmoor.

  “You don’t leave a man behind.”

  I shook my head.

  “I thought about swimming straight out to the surface, but I knew I’d get the bends. We have to be about a hundred feet or more down. The potion ran out and I’ve been living on these two tanks and on the air pocket. There are two of us now, I say we fight our way out.”

  I shook my head. “I came all this way down here to investigate. I’m going to see what that glow is about.”

  “You’re crazy,” he said flatly. “It’s swarming with those things. And the Hag, she is out there somewhere.”

  I considered telling him about the time distortion that Monika and I had experienced. Maybe he thought he had been down here for only a day, but really it had been a week or two. But this wasn’t inside a changeling dwelling, he wasn’t really their guest, which usually seemed to be the case in the histories of such things. I really didn’t know how long he’d been down here and it didn’t really matter, as long as we could get out.

  “How long does the breath potion last?” I asked him.

  “A few hours.”

  My mouth sagged open. I’d already been down here an hour. Perhaps it had been two.

  “Gannon, if you are going out there, I’m not coming,” he told me. “Thanks for the breath potion, but I’m going to make a run for it. I’ll wait half an hour, and then I’m climbing to the shoreline and out of this pit.”

  Deciding there was no time like the present, I took out my sharpening stone and ground away the nicks in my saber’s blade. There was a notch where I had cut through some particularly tough bone.

  The Captain watched me pensively. His eyes were on the stone and the shine that it emitted. Somehow, down here the glimmer was more noticeable. Finally, he could not keep quiet any longer.

  “You are enchanting it. The blade is glowing.”

  I smiled grimly at him. “I’m full of surprises.”

  “I don’t think a sword will do it, even a magic one.”

  “You’re afraid of her.”

  He flashed me a look of annoyance. “Yeah. Yes, I am.”

  I could tell he did not like admitting it.

  Thirty-One

  As I struggled up out of the well shaft, which felt so much like a rocky, underwater tomb, I imagined that I now knew what it was to be a vampire. The bitter cold of the water clawed at my face, shocking it anew. I had become accustomed to air again very quickly, no matter how stale it was. Behind me, the Captain would either follow or he wouldn’t. I was determined.

  When I climbed up out of the well and onto the lake bottom, I noticed the blue light was brighter than before. Whatever it was, that sky-colored flame, it was lighting up the green-black gloom of Elkinville.

  I crossed the churchyard, the first human to do so in perhaps three generations. The church had no doors or roof left, but inside, there were still some pews visible beneath fallen beams and murky sediment. I went through it, and found my way out the back wall, which had fallen away to reveal the graveyard.

  And there it was: the source of the majestic light. It was beatific and I immediately pitied the Captain, who in his fear might never lay eyes upon its glory. The flame was due to a large brass lantern with a prism inside of some clear substance, perhaps cut crystal, or even diamond, I could not know. The light that shone out of it wasn’t all blue, I could see now; it shot out a rainbow of colors in various directions. In our direction, back toward Redmoor, the color was bright, pale blue, the color of underwater artic ice. The lantern sat upon a large gravestone that was shaped like a pyramid. I could see no source for its luminescence, but I could feel the tickling nearness of the shift line that I’d followed down here. The lantern, with the prism inside, atop its drowned gravestone, must have been about in the dead center of the shift line.

  Then, suddenly, I thought I had it. Perhaps, just maybe, it was the source of the line, or maybe it was the terminus of the line. Perhaps, it was the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

  “You are the first mortal to have laid eyes upon it in many centuries,” said a soft voice at my side. I startled, but even so, it took an effort of will to remove my eyes from the prism. I turned my head slowly, toward the voice, as if in a dream. Standing at my side was the Lady of the Lake, the creature I had walked and talked with in the woods and on the lakeshore. Somehow, I didn’t feel terribly threatened. I knew that I should, but the sensation was a vague one. I wondered if this was the sensation one had when a spell was laid over the mind. It was not important, I told myself.

  The Lady—I found I could not bear to think of her with that other term Hag—was a tall woman with a white gown that seemed made to float and flow around her. She shined with inner light, emitting that same pale blue radiance that the lantern did. Her floating black hair was astoundingly long and radiated out from a face that was not uncomely. Her pupil-less, mirror-like eyes did have an alarming quality to them, but somehow they didn’t bother me.

  I turned back to the eye of the lantern, which was even more interesting than the Lady. I opened my mouth to speak, but of course, I only got a mouth full of water. I coughed, and bubbles burst out in a silver explosion.

  She nodded. “Let go of that vile stuff from above. The atmosphere down here is oh so much smoother. Feel the water,” she said, and it was as if she commanded it.

  I reached out my hand and groped in the water.

  “You see how smooth it is? Nothing is smoother than that; there is no sensation like it. Not the finest minks or the softest gauze. None compare to the simple sensation of perfect, smooth, soft water.”

  She was quite right, of course. I wondered why I had never realized it before. I worked my hands in the water around me, feeling the infinitely delicate touch of it.

  “Take in the water with your lungs, you can breathe it,” she told me. “If you wish to speak, beyond a burble, you must do so in this world.”

  I opened my mouth and breathed it in. It was a shock at first. I coughed, spasmed, and then the sensation of drowning died away. I breathed in and out, sucking water through my nose and mouth. The sensation was strange, but not entirely unpleasant. Somehow, in some way, it served to wake me up.

  “Who are you then?” I burbled out. My voice sounded very strange in this place, speaking underwater. It was audible, but wavered in pitch and volume.

  “Ah, a question!” she laughed then, and I almost fell in love with that laugh, that wonderful quavering sound. “You are indeed a strong one, to be able to ask me a question now. I am impressed, mortal, and I will grant you an answer, but only one. So, think hard upon what you wish to ask for you will hear no more answers for all of your existence.”

  I thought hard, for she had bid me to do so. I knew the one thing I’d like to know above all others. “What killed my mother?” I asked her.

  She smiled then, a slow thing, and her lips pulle
d upward impossibly far, until it stretched into the grin of a jack-o-lantern carved with an overzealous hand.

  “He who did this thing is very close,” she said. I could tell that she savored my growing interest. “He is known to you as Captain James Ryerson, although that is not the name he was christened with.”

  She watched my face then and floated closer, I could almost sense an animal lust in her to see my emotion, to feel what I did, to know my grief and anger. I felt these sensations, but they were deadened by the effects of her spell.

  I saw something moving behind her, and I drew my sword in that smooth motion I’d practiced so well. My only thought was to protect her, to save her from whatever moved up with great stealth like a spider upon the ruined stone walls. My saber was shining blue now, unlike the tiny remote glimmer before. Now, in this place, it was like a shimmering blue-white length of frozen fire. I did not know why it shined so, perhaps it was the lantern, or the nearby shift-line, or the Hag herself. Or perhaps it was me.

  Her reaction was instantaneous, in any case. She loosed a powerful, ear-bending screech that made me yank my head down like the snapping turtles that cruised the lake would when a noisy group of boaters approached. Then she shot up into the water, straight up, with alarming rapidity. The wake of her exodus rolled me backwards and I stumbled.

  The Captain looked at me and the sword that burned in my hand. He had a long killing knife with a gleaming serrated edge in his hand.

  For a fraction of a second, I was going to kill him. He was an assassin, and a single thrust would end the whole foul business. But, when the Hag vanished, so did my intentions. For a few long seconds, we just blinked at each other and scanned the dark waters overhead, but there was no sight of the Hag.

  I realized, numbly, that it must be night now up there in the world of smells and wind and sound.

  “What…?” I asked in confusion.

  The Captain eyed me warily. He stared at my sword, which had lowered with drifting slowness to rest at my side.

  I stopped looking for the Hag and turned my gaze back down to him. He didn’t walk upon the bottom as I did, but was in a more normal swimming position, lying on his side near the bottom.

  “You can speak,” I told him. “If you just suck in the water, and empty your lungs of air, the water will let you speak.”

  He shook his head. He pointed up, to the distant, invisible, impossible surface. I knew that somewhere up there winds blew and stars twinkled, but that was another place.

  I pointed with my sword to the lantern. He watched the tip of my blade moving through the water and floated backward a bit, giving it some distance. I felt my senses coming back to me. I felt cold again. And I felt fear. But some of that dream-like quality to things stayed with me.

  “Let’s take that with us,” I said. “I think it is the source of her power.”

  He shook his head and pointed up again but I was already approaching the lantern. The truth was, I had enough self-control to try to leave this place, and to try to leave the Hag, but I didn’t want to leave the light in the lantern. I realized that I couldn’t leave it behind.

  Accordingly, I laid hands on it and it shocked me. There was a silent blue flash. It wasn’t an electrical shock, not exactly, but every nerve in my hands was jolted with sensation. There are many things that stimulate human nerves: pressure, heat, cold, and the pain of severing or crushing damage. Picking up the lantern was like experiencing all of these rolled into one.

  But I lifted it anyway, and I held on. I could not drop it and chance shattering the artifact, it was much too lovely for that. So I held on, howling, raving, for how long I’m not sure. It seemed like an eternity, but was probably less than a minute. I opened my squinched eyes again when the pain subsided and saw the Captain had not moved. He still floated there at the ruined stone walls, watching me warily.

  I turned and moved slowly back to him, carrying the lantern. It was surprisingly heavy and dense. It was like carrying a cannonball. There would be no swimming to the surface with this thing in my arms.

  I would have to leave the lake the way I came in. I would have to walk out.

  Thirty-Two

  We made it about as far as the fallen barn with the dead trees standing guard around it before my breath potion began to run out. It started as an odd tickle in my chest, which rapidly changed into a wild burning. It was a horrible sensation, worse than just drowning, because I already had drown, sometime ago when I’d sucked in that first lungful of murky water. I scrambled wildly, digging in my pockets. I never dropped the lantern, however, I never even considered it. I strained to hold it with my left hand while my right searched for the last potion frantically.

  For one horrible moment I was sure that I’d lost it along the way. I couldn’t believe I’d been such a fool as to just shove the very breath of life into an open-topped coat pocket, and then proceeded to battle a dozen horrors and trust to luck I wouldn’t lose anything. Then I found it.

  I used my teeth to tear open the rubber stopper that topped the bottle and sucked out the contents. It’s hard to drink something underwater while you are drowning and suddenly becoming increasingly aware that your lungs are already full of water, but somehow I managed to get most of it down. I almost puked, but fought it down savagely. I had to hold on to every drop.

  Over the next minute or so the world almost went black. I just stood there, on the muddy bottom of the lake, head bent, waiting for death or life, not knowing which would occur first.

  I held up the lantern still, never did the thought of letting it go cross my mind. It warmed my hand now rather than burned it. Strangely, it felt less heavy, rather than more, as I died. I had to wonder, vaguely, as my mind faded toward oblivion, if it had become lighter or I had become stronger. I felt there, in my hand, a new, strange, twisting sensation that I could not identify. At that point, I believe I lost consciousness, at least for a moment.

  The Captain was poking my cheek and lifting my chin when my eyes snapped open. He recoiled and I grinned at him. “I live,” I burbled. I found I still stood, and the lantern was still warming my left hand, feeling lighter than ever.

  We came up onto the shoreline and I shivered in the cold night winds. Nothing makes a man quite as cold as sopping wet clothes and stiff wind. The only warmth I had was from the lantern, and I clutched at it, hugging it to my chest.

  “Can you breathe?” asked the Captain, looking at me strangely.

  I shook my head, and sicked up a great gout of water. It was only the beginning. It was a while before I could choke and cough wretchedly, I had to build up to that. First, I simply fountained lake water. The only thing that helped, besides the warmth of the lantern in my hand, was that I still didn’t really need to breathe. I’ve heard you can drown in a teaspoon of water, but I must have unloaded a half-gallon or more onto the sands before I was done.

  The Captain waited until I was simply trembling and gasping, and then asked, “Put that thing down, would you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Why not?” he asked quietly.

  I stopped, I didn’t know why not, but I didn’t want to do it.

  “I think you are going to have to,” he said.

  I felt a flash of anger, my lip twitched up in a snarl, but I quieted when I followed his pointing finger.

  The things on the beach had finally noticed us, and they were humping in our direction. There was a pretty big pack of them.

  “Put down that stone and get out your sword, boy,” he hissed, “They’ll take that thing back to the witch if they beat us, you know.”

  I realized he was right and I put the lantern down on the sands in a spot that looked soft and was devoid of rocks that might mar the polished surfaces. I threw my soaking coat over it, mostly to get rid of the cumbersome garment, but partly to hide it. The dripping coat didn’t completely cover it, and beams of colored light still shined out onto the beach in trickles and shafts. I wiped spittle from my face and lowered my he
ad determinedly. We walked confidently down the beach to meet the pack of shambling things.

  There were two of us, this time, and we were mentally prepared and methodical. The fight went on for perhaps two full minutes. It took several more to fully dismember the flopping corpses.

  * * *

  When it was over, we were both winded, but relatively unharmed. They had come at us strung out, in ones or twos, and we had cut them down as they reached us. We had started the fight with our pistols empty of bullets and full of water, so we had stuck to blades, he to his combat knife and me my saber.

  “What the hell?” he said to me, staring, when we had finished.

  I followed his gaze, and sickness waved over me again. He was gazing and pointing to my left hand. It looked very different. It was gray now, the skin had changed to the color of a bloated corpse. I looked at leathery fingers with black claws like thick pencil graphite where my nails should have been. There were only three fingers.

  I yanked up my sleeve to see how far the horror had gone. It ended at my wrist where it turned back into normal, slightly hairy skin. I flexed the hand and it clutched at the air in accordance with my thoughts. To me, it looked like the claw of a predatory reptile. Perhaps that of a dinosaur.

  I looked at the Captain and blinked. My face worked but I couldn’t speak for a second. I knew, right then, what had happened to Doctor Wilton. I knew how she had felt to discover her hoof.

  “It must have been the lantern,” I croaked out.

  He nodded grimly.

  I staggered back toward the spot on the beach where we had left it. I was glad, even after everything, to see that it was still there and still safe. I was glad too, that I’d only been holding it with one hand when I’d been weak, when my body had been shutting down and dying. It had made its move then, and had shifted me.

  We headed up the beach, weary. The Captain trudged beside me. He put his arm around my shoulders and leaned on me for support, as if exhausted. He was a friend, and I suspected nothing.