Shifting

Twenty-Nine

She hobbled back through the door behind the register and vanished into the oily yellow light. I followed her with trepidation. At first, we entered a small office festooned with catalogues and strewn with paper prescriptions and shipping orders that had fallen like leaves, forgotten and useless now.

The yellowy light came from a door to the far side of the office. We went to this and she pushed it open, biding me to follow with a gesture. As I approached the source of light I realized it was also the source of the odd stink that permeated the place. We entered and a very strange sight met my eyes.

In the center of the laboratory, which is what it had to be, was a very large steel sink of industrial size and capacity. It stood over a brazier full of burning charcoal. The coals were searing orange covered in a frost of white ash. In the sink boiled a foul and vicious liquid and it was this liquid, mixed with the glowing of the coals, that made the yellow light. It shined like sunshine.

All of this was far from being the oddest thing in the room, however. That distinction belonged to the sewn sack of pink skins that hung suspended by cords from the ceiling. The sack shivered and dripped. The drippings fell into small catch basins which were cunningly placed beneath it. V-shaped metal channels ran down from these catch-basins to run the dribblings down into the industrial sink, which I realized was serving as a bubbling cauldron.

“Oh my, look at the coals,” she said and scuttled to get out a fresh bag of barbeque briquettes. She spilled a dozen or so black lumps into the brazier and it flared a-new.

“What in the hell…” I said trailing off as she beckoned for me to come to the other side of her contraption.

I came over and looked as she showed me a distillation line that was coming from the bubbling cauldron. It had filled a small plastic vial perhaps a third of the way. The vial, I realized, had an eyedropper built into the cap. It was a liquid dispenser for children’s antibiotics. Beside the one being filled were four others.

“My production is up!” she declared. “The purity of it, as well.”

“What is it, and what kind of skin is that sack made of?” I demanded, jabbing a finger at the foul pinkness that shivered and burbled and dripped overhead.

“It is the skin of changelings, of course,” Wilton told me calmly. “And this, this is a mix of many things.”

“Such as?”

“Such as the waters of the Lake, the blood of trees that are near enough to life to shiver when I harvest it-” she paused at my shocked look and chuckled. “Oh yes, there are quite a few of them that are partially awake around town. And it contains the blood of the flying things, just a hint of that, and many other things that-well, had best be left unnamed.”

My horror-struck face made her laugh.

“Don’t you want to know why it glows?” she asked gently.

I nodded.

“Because I leave that sack out in the middle of the shift line for a long time, a day or so, tied to a line. Then, when it ripens, I drag in the line. It is a liquid distillation of the shifting effects, and I use it as a base.”

“A base for what?”

“Potions, of course.”

“For what purpose?” I managed to croak out. The smell was overpowering in the lab and I wanted to leave. I rubbed at my nose and my face. I’d smelled horse piss I would rather drink than this stuff.

“The key ingredient, I think, is the water of the lake. It took me a while and a lot of reading up on alchemical formulas, mind you. But what it does, essentially, is relieves the breathing.”

“All this to make an asthma medicine?”

“No, no, it relieves the subject from the burden of breathing. It allows one to hold ones breath, or even to breathe things other than air.”

“Death does that as well,” I commented.

She smiled at my joke and offered me four of the potions. Each had only an ounce or so of liquid in them.

“I’ve rigged them up so they can be consumed underwater. All you have to do is cut the rubber top, the bulb of the syringe, and suck the contents out. Optionally, you could unscrew it and squeeze the liquid into your mouth, but some of it would probably be lost in the waters.”

I opened my mouth, and then shut it again. I didn’t know what to say. “This is absurd,” I finally managed. “What is all this for? What do you think I’m going to do with this disgusting stuff?”

“It doesn’t taste all that bad,” she said, with a tiny hint of hurt in her voice. “The potions are of course for you, the Captain and the Preacher. I’m concerned that their doses have run out by now, and I’m giving you enough for all three of you.”

“How long does it last?” I heard myself ask, still disbelieving that I would even entertain the idea of what she was proposing.

“I really don’t know, a day at least, I believe from my own experiments.”

“Do you really think I’m going to the bottom of that huge dark lake trusting to some kind of magic you just worked up?”

“It’s easy enough to test. Just go to the lake and take it and stick your head beneath the waves for a while.”

I gawked at the potions and at her. All in one sick second, I realized that I might actually try it.

I followed her out of the laboratory, thinking hard. When we got back to the register, she offered me another chocolate bar and I took it, absently stuffing it into my pocket with the four potions.

“Malkin told me to beware the Hag,” I said, looking at Wilton intently.

“Yes, yes, and good advice it was, too,” she replied. She seemed oblivious to my meaning.

“Doctor Wilton-Beatrice,” I said, using her first name. “What is a Hag? Describe such a thing to me.”

“The Hag is a well-known element of every fairytale and myth from across the planet!” she replied with gusto. “She’s hideous, and a witch. More than that, she’s evil and powerful and tricky. Every story from the Sleeping Beauty to Hansel and Gretel is based on the Hag. But in our modern terms, we’ve got one near at hand. I think that thing you met in the woods is our Hag, come back to life after centuries of sleep, like that elf Malkin you met.”

“A solitary female bent on witchcraft, eh?” I said, eyeing her. “And what would you call your research, if not witchcraft?”

She opened her mouth, and then closed it. Finally, I saw understanding in her eyes. She laughed. “No, no. My work is different. I’m a woman of science. I want to understand this new phenomenon and work with it. I’m a chemist who has turned to alchemy, admittedly, but I’m not some ancient spirit come back to haunt humanity, some beast from below bent on evil. Quite the opposite, I’m defending us! Gannon, I am your only hope. How can you beat what you don’t understand? How can you understand it without studying it? Besides, I don’t want to help this Hag of the Lake, I want to defeat her.”

“I wonder what the Preacher would say about your investigations.”

She drew herself up and her cheeks showed a slight tremor. “Well, go ask him! Go find him, boy, before it is too late for him. I think you are stronger than he, I think you may pass barriers where he failed. Bring him back, and slay the Hag who will slay us all if she can. Hags often take prisoners, and I think you can free them.”

I shook my head, eyeing one of the potions she’d given me. “How can I trust the very thing that seeks to destroy us to save me? Everything that bubbles up from these supernatural fissures is evil.”

She laughed at me again. She leaned forward and spoke with infinite patience, as though I were her slowest student. “Don’t you see, Gannon? You and I are the same. Neither one of us is untouched. There is no more black and white in our world, only many subtle shades of gray.”

“No-” I began, but she raised her foul finger to stop me.

“No, before you speak, think back upon the first moment we met today. Did you not want to draw your blade and cut me with it? Is that normal? Is that the Gannon of three months ago? Were you a murderer then, or only now, with new dark thoughts in your mind, which has been darkened by the shifting. You are no changeling yet-but in a way, you are. You are still on the same side, but you have changed, you can’t deny it. You are no longer pure. You are a shade of gray. And so am I.”

“So, you are saying that we have already lost.”

“Far from it! We are adapting, changing to meet these new requirements in our new supernatural world. Much as in any time, you win your battles by gathering your forces and your allies and by careful preparation. And when we take the field, we will be victorious over the Hag. She will not bring back whatever horrors of the past her mind plans.”

I gazed at her flatly for a long pause. Her words weren’t to my liking, but neither were they irrational. I was torn between a devil I knew and an unknown one. I thought about the Captain and the Preacher and made up my mind.

“I’ll go,” I said, but I put up my hand to stop her toothy grin. “But remember this: I’m not going because I’m on your mission. I’m going to find the others you’ve sent before me. And, I’m not about to fall into whatever trap you may have designed, because I’m not your creature. I only hope for your sake that they live still.”

Her grin was subdued, reduced to a smoldering tiny glimmer of a smile. “Very well, and I wish you luck.”

“One more thing,” I said. “You are going to drink one of these potions before I go.”

Her face fell. “What?” she sputtered. “You won’t have enough then. You need them all to get those two back out.”

I shook my head. “The way I look at it, if everything you say is true, they would be dead anyway if they needed air down there all this time. I only need enough to get down there and check it out.”

“It’s an unnecessary waste,” she began, and argued at length. I held my ground, and in the end, she snatched the bottle I offered at random out of the ones she had given me and tossed it down. She glared at me, gestulating with her arms in exasperation.

“There, are you happy? You’ve gotten me to waste a half-week of work and possibly killed one of the last good men in Redmoor.”

I nodded slowly, watching her. She didn’t seem to be getting any more hideous. “I’m happy.”

“When you drink one, have a care,” she said, “it takes a few minutes to work. A brief span, but long enough to be a problem if you are in a hurry. I think it is due to the changes the liquid must work upon your system.”

“I feel I was right to exile you and your dangerous work to this place,” I told her. “I really hope your work helps us. But I don’t trust it, and will not, until it has been proven.” And maybe not even then, I added to myself, silently.

“My work will pass your test, boy,” she said. “One last thing.”

“What?”

She looked, for once, very hesitant. She chewed at her lower lip and sucked in a breath before going on. “I’ve seen some things on the lakeshore, not like the usual ones we have around here. I believe that shift line, that barrier, extends out into the lake itself and she feeds on it. What I mean to say is, keep on your guard if someone approaches you and says nothing in response to your challenge.”

“I always keep on my guard, but thanks for the warning.”