Shifting

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.

She looked at me over the counter appraisingly. “You crossed the shift line, didn’t you?”

I nodded. “How did you know?”

She shrugged and I noted, without wanting to, that she seemed to have a fleshy hump on her left side now. “You look normal enough, but you don’t sound quite like the Gannon I left behind. It’s not just the body that is changed by the shifting, you know.”

I stopped chewing for a moment, thinking about this. I had to admit her words made sense. It wasn’t a pleasant thought, wondering if your personality had changed. “I don’t feel very different. It was an ordeal, that’s all.”

“Trust me,” she said waggling a finger in my direction. The finger had a warped, calloused look to it. I tried not to focus on it. “When you cross that line you come out changed. Perhaps it is only a tiny, hidden change, but it is there.”

“You’ve crossed it, then,” I said. It was a statement, not a question.

“Yes. That line in the middle of town and several others. I’ve done more than cross them, I’ve explored them, Gannon. They are as full of wonders as they are of terrors, if you know where to look.”

I nodded again and crunched up the chocolate wrapper. The candy was gone. I believed she had done it, probably far more than was wise, if even a single trip could be said to be wise.

“Most of the lines are like that one, but some are very different, more like portals to other places,” she told me.

“I think I’ve been in one of those different places,” I said, and then I gave her a quick version of our adventures in Malkin’s cave.

“Yes, time distortion,” she said, “I’ve experienced it, but nothing as strong as you describe. I’ll have to make a note of that cave and that interesting cave-dweller. The barrier in town is strong, but not the strongest around. I think they tend to get stronger when more people try to cross them, but that is only a theory of mine.”

“Do you know why I’m here, Doc?” I asked finally.

“Honestly, I expected to see the Captain or perhaps the Preacher. I’ve sent them both off on missions some time ago, and neither has returned. Perhaps they are caught in a time distortion as you were. Like you, however, I expect them to survive.”

“You sent them off? Where?”

“To Elkinsville, of course.”

“So you know that something is going on out there?” I demanded. “How did they get there and what did you expect them to do with a sunken town? Did they take diving equipment? And why does this place and Elkinsville glow with an evil light in the darkness? What are you up to?”

“Better than diving equipment,” said the Wilton, waggling that unpleasant finger again. “I’ll tell you about it, but you must be patient.”

I felt anything but patient. In fact, I realized I was tempted to kill Wilton now. Something told me I should do it. My hand crept of its own accord to my sword, but I did not draw it.

“You see, Gannon,” began Wilton, oblivious to my thoughts and lecturing me now. “The world has changed. It has progressed to a new era. History shows us that those who survive are those who adapt to change. So I have chosen to embrace the shift lines and the odd things they produce, rather than to fight them. Much like the technological magics that we produced in our time as a civilization, those who embraced them and used them best prospered the most. I’m simply a woman who is trying to get ahead of the curve.”

I shook my head in bewilderment. “The shift just makes monsters and warps the mind and body. What possible use is there for that? You might as well embrace a rash of earthquakes.”

“You’re wrong!” she declared. “What it does is change things. Why should it only work random changes upon us? Why can’t we use it to change things to our liking?”

I considered the idea.

“The shift is like fire, Gannon. Flame can destroy a forest or a town when it is wild and unchecked, but if controlled, it gives us light, heat, transportation and weaponry.”

I looked at her in sudden understanding. “You’re talking about sorcery.”

She stared at me and that one wild eye gleamed now, rather than glowed. “Yes! Yes, exactly. I’m Redmoor’s first sorceress. I’m sure there are others out there in the world, certain of it, in fact. But perhaps I’m the first of the new age in this place once known as Indiana.”

“So, what have you come up with?”

I saw her teeth then, for the first time, as she showed them beneath her cowl in what I took for a yellow grin.

“I thought you’d never ask,” she said.