Shifting

Thirty-Three

As I stumbled up the slope in the woods I felt a tiny hot wet spot on my face. It was a single tear. I hadn’t shed a tear since the day I’d found my parents. I felt ashamed, not for my weak emotions, but for my selfishness. So many had died, but I could only cry for my own losses.

I felt confused and disgusted and wished with everything I had I’d never gone down there. The Hag was different from all the others. She was far stranger and more powerful, I knew, than even Malkin had been hiding in his little limestone hole. She wasn’t just a normal being, twisted into something new, she was older. She was a creature who had walked the Earth in past supernatural ages like this one. I wondered how many more alien creatures had awakened like Malkin and the Hag, and shuddered at the form our new world was taking.

Perhaps Wilton had been right after all. Perhaps you had to adjust and adapt to survive. Like my ancestors who had once faced the Ice Age, I would have to change my ways. I would have to learn new ways to deal with a hostile and lonely world. I didn’t look at my left hand, but I could feel it in like a lump of hard bones in my pocket, where I’d stuffed it to hide it from myself and anyone else I might meet. It made the skin of my thigh crawl with disgust where it rested.

I trudged in misery for an hour or so, dead-tired. Finally, up ahead, I saw a moving white light in the trees. I thought about the gun I’d had in my pocket, and realized I’d left it behind on the beach in my coat. It did not matter much anyway. I was out of bullets for it. I stood in a pool of shade behind a tree and waited.

While I watched, I wondered about how I had trekked through the woods so far in the pitch dark without a light of any kind. Had my eyes shifted, just a fraction, too? Then I realized that dawn was coming, and was in fact nearly upon the landscape. Perhaps that explained my vision, I thought with relief.

The light came a bit closer and I realized it must be a propane lantern. I stepped out and called out to the bearer, who jumped like a surprised burglar.

“Hello,” I said.

“Holy Moses,” exclaimed Vance. He clutched at his chest. “It’s you, Gannon. I almost filled my pants!”

I grinned. I was very glad to see him. Even in the darkest moments, he could cheer me up. “Hello brother, what are you doing out here?”

“Checking my traps,” he said. “The center is just over the hill. We are gathering all the food we can for winter. But I tell you, I’m still hoping I can get through another year without finding out what muskrat tastes like.”

“Gathering traps in the dark?”

“It’s dawn. Got to get to the traps before the foxes do.”

I nodded and followed him back toward the center. He had a sack of somethings over his shoulder. Occasionally, the sack quivered slightly.

“Not much meat on a rabbit, you know,” he said.

“Even less on a squirrel.”

He snorted in agreement. “But tell me how it went? What did you do? How did it go?”

I told him an edited version of my tale. For now, I left out the part about my fight with the Captain and my altered hand.

“So there’s a city of dead things down there?” he asked with great concern.

“Essentially.”

“Well, great. That’s just grand. I suppose she can turn into a bat and come in our windows as well, eh?”

“I hope not.”

We got to the Center then, and I found my way quickly to my bunk. Monika lavished my dirty face with kisses, and then began to gently bathe my cheeks and forehead with medicated wet wipes she’d gotten from somewhere. The sting of the alcohol in the wipes felt good drying on my face. I kept my left hand jammed in my pocket, and she left it alone. She said a few things to me in her own language, speaking softly and not really expecting an answer. They sounded like the kind of things you might say to a tired, sick and frightened child. I liked it, and closed my eyes.

I wondered if criminals went home like this and enjoyed every kindness they could absorb with intensity before the inevitable heavy knock came at their door. I fell into a sleep as deep as the lake itself.

The heavy knock came about three hours later. I awakened with a jolt of unwanted adrenaline. My dreams tore apart like frosty spider webs and in a few hazy moments of blinking, they were gone forever. I sat up.

The knock came again, three sharp reports. I felt I knew who it was before I opened the door. I almost forgot about my left hand, but managed to jam it deeply into a pocket before the door swung open.

It was the long lost Preacher. Somehow, I’d known that forceful, undeniable knock of confident authority. Seeing his stern face, I knew relief and dread all at once. We studied each other’s faces for a moment, and I knew that mine was honest and showed my feelings plainly. It was difficult to be duplicitous when awakened from a deep sleep.

“John Thomas,” I said in a raspy voice. “Welcome back.”

“The same to you, Gannon,” his voice rolled out. As always, I liked the resonating quality of it. He had the kind of voice that everyone could hear in church-you couldn’t help but hear him. Even when the babies were all crying at once it seemed that you could hear his every syllable in the furthest pews.

I really was glad to see him, glad that he had survived all this time, somehow, just as we had. I was grateful too for the leadership and guidance I knew he would provide us. Just the same, I feared him. He, like no other, would soon divine any secrets I might try to hold back.

His gaze flicked from my face, to Monika, who sat up in the bunk behind me. Monika had no poker face, she wore her fears on her brows. What’s more, I knew that she already knew something was wrong with me. She had said nothing last night, but that was all the more telling.

He took it all in. Her expression, mine, the two cots which were pushed together now, he examined it all in a moment. His eyes even paused on the sword and my pocketed hand. In the dim room, even with reflected sunlight streaming in behind him, the sword still glimmered.

All of this took no longer than three seconds before his eyes were back to my face, boring into my eyes. He always stared you in the eye, unblinkingly. He nodded. He gave me a thin smile.

“I imagine you have quite a story to tell,” he said.

“I certainly do,” I told him. “I bet you do too.”

“Yes, I truly do. Let’s get some breakfast and cleanse our bodies.”

I followed him and Monika followed me. Her hand reached out and I felt her light touch. I reached back my right hand, my good hand, and clasped hers. She was still with me, I knew. Had she, during the night, touched me and caressed me, in my deepest slumber? Had she, perhaps, felt the gray, leathery thing that rode in my other pocket? Or was it simply a sense she had that all was not well? I was again impressed by her natural quiet empathy. She was one of those rare people who didn’t speak much, but was very much involved and always knew the score. I squeezed her hand, and she squeezed back, faintly.

It was about then that I saw the thing on the Preacher’s belt move on its own. It didn’t jump, exactly, but it certainly did shift its weight. A black, wooden handle protruded down from his belt, and I recognized that he carried an axe as he had the last time I’d seen him. He had it attached to his belt with a loop of thick leather, with the head of it resting against his waist the way a carpenter might carry a hammer. The handle, not as long as the usual handle of a wood axe, but perhaps only two feet long, ran down his leg. I could see that he would be able to grab the haft under the head of it and pull it free quickly.

It was the handle of the thing that moved. It switched from one side to the other, first sliding around behind his knee, then rolling forward. The movement was not due to any action on his part, I was sure of it, even though I had not been staring at it directly when it moved. I would have assumed it to be a natural thing some months ago before the world had gone mad, but not now. I knew that when odd, impossible things happened, they happened for a reason and I knew the rippling sources of those reasons intimately.

I knew, instantly, that the axe on his belt was not the same as the last time I’d seen it. I knew that it had a power now, that it was, in a way, alive. I stopped dead and Monika pushed up against my back. She didn’t run into me, she wrapped herself up against my back and peeked around me. She was already aware of what I had just noticed, I realized. She never missed these things. Maybe this was the reason for the look of fear on her face when the Preacher had come calling.

I stopped dead and, after two forward paces, the Preacher stopped too. We were almost out to the lobby. Around us, faces were watching, I now realized. There was Jimmy Vanton, Holly Nelson and Nick Hackler, who chewed on a sandwich. Holly Nelson’s unwashed, rat-tailed hair slipped down into her face, but she paid no attention. Her eyes simply slid back and forth between the Preacher’s back and my face. She had something in her hand. Something very sharp, of course.

“Preacher,” I called out.

He turned his head back and raised an eyebrow at me.

“What rides on your belt?” I asked.

He turned his body around slowly, fully. We stood perhaps twenty feet apart in a corridor that was perhaps ten feet wide. He put his hands on his hips. The thing attached to his waist moved again, this time the metal edge of the axe seemed to be black and shiny, and it twisted and gleamed at me. I realized then that it wanted him to reach down and grab its handle, that it wanted him to pull it out and swing it. He glanced down toward it, and then slid his eyes back to me.

“As I said, Gannon, we both have long tales to tell.”

“But what is it? That is not natural.”

His brow darkened somewhat, the very first hint of anger I’d seen from him today.

“Gannon,” he said, in a voice that told me he struggled to speak as gently as he could. “One might ask you about the shimmering blade strapped to your side. Or-” he paused here, and I knew he was about to say, Or the hand you keep jammed in your pocket. But he didn’t. “Or where you’ve been and who you’ve talked to.”

I chewed my lip for a second, and then nodded. “All right, let’s talk then-now.”

The crowd of pale faces that poked into the hallway breathed a collective sigh of relief then. There would be no clash of wills or weapons. Not yet, anyway.

I followed him out to the lobby and paused at a breakfast spread someone had laid out. I had already decided to forget about our primitive bathing facilities, little more than a can of heated water in freezing shower stall, but I wanted food. There was coffee, weak but wonderful, and a big pile of homemade-looking sausages and homemade-looking flatbread. I realized that everything except the coffee, which was probably brewed up from salvaged grounds, we had made ourselves. Nick Hackler had on an apron and a smile as I approached his buffet. I realized instantly that he had probably gone to great effort to put all this together.

“Smells great!” I said, digging up three of the sausages, they were about as big as a hot dog each. I wrapped them in the lumpy brown flatbread and putting them on a plate. “Great to see we are becoming independent. No more canned crap around here!”

Nick beamed his appreciation. I meant the praise sincerely. We dammed well had better start making our own food at some point. I bit into the flakey bread and hot brown sausage with only the tiniest hesitation. The texture was all wrong and the taste was decidedly gamey, and what flashed into my mind was an image of Vance out there in the woods with his traps and his sack full of squirming animals. My hunger and my concern for Nick, who was watching me intently, got me through the natural gag reflex. I choked down a big bite and grinned at him.

The Preacher took a somewhat less ambitious helping and headed outside. Monika took nothing but a paper cup of coffee. We followed the Preacher out into the open air of the morning.

The air was clean and fresh and for once it was bright and sunny outside. But I could see immediately that gray weather was rolling in from the north, in fact, it looked like another storm. There was a black roiling center to those distant clouds. I recalled the terror of the last big storm we’d had and frowned northwards.

“I don’t like the look of those clouds,” I said.

“Neither do I,” said Mrs. Hatchell. She had appeared outside with us. “That’s the same look we had the day of the storm, the bad storm. All we need is another tree tearing the place up.”

“We should make preparations,” said the Preacher.

“We’ve already cut down all the perimeter trees,” said Hatchell, and I looked around, realizing it was true. When I had staggered into the compound at night I’d not noticed, but she was right, they had cut down the trees.

“What day is it?” I asked them, worried, suddenly, that I had lost weeks of time again while down in the underworld beneath the lake.

“Relax,” chuckled the Preacher. “Or perhaps don’t relax. For it is All Hallows Eve, and none of our few remaining precious children will be dressing up as goblins tonight. There will be no need.”

I eyed him and the sky in turn, alarmed. What had our ancestors feared during this night, the night of the harvest moon, for all those centuries past?

“I’ll go do what I can to prepare,” said Hatchell. She looked pointedly at Monika. “Monika, I could use your help.”

Monika looked startled, and then looked at me. I could tell she did not want to leave me alone with the Preacher, perhaps she did not trust his gentle intentions.

I looked at her and gave her a smile and a nod.

“Okay,” she said, and she followed Hatchell into the center. I thought I saw a calculating look on Hatchell’s face as she watched the Preacher for a moment, then led Monika away. Perhaps I was just getting paranoid. Hatchell always wore a calculating expression.

We ate our ground-up, spiced squirrel meat, or whatever it was, for few minutes in silence. I spat out a tiny bone and couldn’t finish my last one.

“We need to talk,” I said.

“Indeed.”

“Who goes first?”

“To build trust,” said the Preacher, “we should trade information one piece at a time.”

I nodded. “All right, I’ll go first.” I told him then about Wilton, about finding hoof-prints and then her hoof and then banishing her. I added in my encounters with the hag and her similar hooves, but didn’t tell the full story of the drowned habitation known as Elkinville, or the lantern, not yet. I did tell him about the sharpening stone, with the Hag’s hoof imprinted upon it. He listened to that part most intently.

He nodded speculatively. “I knew some of that, but not all. Thank you.”

“And, your story? Where have you been? What do you have on your belt?”

He sipped his coffee before beginning. “I find the part about your gift from the Hag to be the most disturbing. I too, you see, carry a gift from a creature not too dissimilar.”

He then told me that he had also visited Malkin in his limestone caverns beneath the hills near his cabin. It made sense to me that he would have found it first, that shift line was drawn directly between Redmoor and his cabin.

“My experiences in the cave were similar to yours, but not identical. I came out only last night, after you had gone to the lakeshore. I found when I got to the center that weeks had passed, not hours, just as you did. When I was there in his lair with him, he did talk to me, he did show me, at length, the heads that floated and rolled in the soupy water of his black pool. My reaction was different, however, and so was his. I talked with him about it, and I forgave him, and I told him how his sins might be forgiven forever,” at this point, the Preacher, gestured meaningfully with his Bible.

“And how did that go?” I asked, curious. I had not thought of talking about religion with these creatures.

“He did not laugh at me, he did not become angry. I’d say his response was one of curiosity. He told me he had slept eight times, and awakened nine times, this being the ninth awakening. He told me that long, long ago, in a time so distant that even his memory failed him, perhaps soon after his first awakening, he had had dealings with a creator such as the one I spoke of,” the Preacher shuddered, I thought from deep fear. I was concerned to see such an emotion grip him. He had never shown such a feeling before.

He shook his head, “I don’t know, Gannon. Does that make him an angel, or one of the fallen ones? Or something else that is not written of, that is beyond our feeble, short-lived knowledge?”

“Our ignorance of these things might kill us,” I said, and I told him of Wilton’s theory, that we were all shades of gray now, partway between human and changeling.

The Preacher nodded. “There is some wisdom in that point of view. We have all been tainted, there is no escape. We are all now creatures both mundane and magical.”

While he had spoken he had sat down upon the dead burned tree which now served us all as a bench in the parking lot. He stood up then, straight as a sword, and his face took on the stern demeanor I knew so well.

“But there is a line that can be drawn, I’m sure of it. Determining exactly where the line lies, however, is the difficult part. But it can be drawn, and I will be the one to draw it, if no other is up to the task.”

Again, as if excited by his mood, the thing on his belt shifted. It reminded me of an anxious pet, trying vainly to get its master’s attention. He turned blazing eyes to me. I blinked, there was wisdom and murder in those eyes, all wrapped into one. And, most strongly of all, what blazed out from those windows into his soul was stern, fixated stubbornness. I felt his strength of will like a warm fire and I admired it.

“And what of the thing on your belt, I don’t think you got to that part,” I said gently.

He relaxed somewhat, and breathed deeply. “Yes, our bargain,” he said. “I got the axe from Malkin. It was a gift from the fissures of hell, or heaven, or the primordial residue of creation itself-whatever these places connect one to. Unlike your sword, however, it wasn’t from an imprinted stone left behind, it was from a tiny cut upon his tiny foot, and a splash of his ancient blood that was left there. Like a magical oil, it brought the axe alive.”

“How did you catch him?” I asked.

The Preacher grinned and that grin was not entirely healthy and clean. “I was fascinated by him, and he by me, and when he did not accept the forgiveness I’m bound to offer even such a soul as his, I passed judgment upon him.”

With unnatural speed and grace, the axe appeared in the Preacher’s hand. He had reached down in a blur of motion and drawn it from where it begged to be drawn, ripped it from the loop of old stinking leather and pulled it out into the fresh air of the fall morning. It was big and black and it reflected the sunlight in white gleaming arcs. I was startled, but I could only stare at the curved black blades-for in the bright light of day I now saw the axe had two blades where I had seen it before with only one. The blades clouded over for a moment at the touch of my gaze and then, just as quickly, returned to a glass-like sheen.

The Preacher continued to grin his wise, but feral, grin. “For you see, Malkin is ancient and wise and swift-but my judgment was even more so.”

I had my hand on my saber before I knew it. I didn’t draw it; in fact, I doubt I could have drawn it before he could swing. He moved so quickly with that axe, it was far from natural. So I stared at him, meeting his gaze with my own. After a few seconds, he nodded and idly put away his living weapon. The axe seemed reluctant to go. I thought to myself, it knows the taste of blood now, and it likes it.

The Preacher continued as if he had never threatened my life. Perhaps in his mind he hadn’t. “I nicked Malkin,” he said, “and his essence both blessed and cursed my weapon. Since that moment, it has been warped in shape and nature, but not in purpose. I still use it to judge the wicked lost ones and free them from their torment.”

“Have you found any yet that could be redeemed and still live?” I asked suddenly. It had always been his position that some could be. He was the only person I knew of who didn’t completely condemn the monsters we fought, he was the only one who still held out hope for them.

He lowered his head sadly. “No,” he said, “but I will keep seeking such a creature.”

“John,” I said. “I’ll tell you one more thing and then I’ll ask you one last question about your travels.”

I told him then about my walk down through the waters to Elkinsville, about my encounters with the Captain and the Hag. I told him of our escape, and of our fight on the beach, and of the brass lantern we carried up from that dark place. I did not tell him why we fought or of how I had died briefly down there, clutching the prism in one hand.

He glanced at the hand I still had jammed in my pocket.

“Is that all you have to tell?” he asked me, and I almost told him all of it then, but I couldn’t.

“Yes,” I said.

He sighed, as if a great weight had been placed upon his shoulders. I watched him with some wariness. He spoke with high words, but was his mind as intact as his philosophies?

“What about the lantern? You just left it there on the beach?”

I nodded.

“She will come for it, you know. And she will come here,” he said.

“Why here?” I asked.

He turned and pointed. I followed the gesture and squinted in the sun. The daylight was just beginning to fade behind the growing storm clouds that blew overhead. I shaded my eyes with my good hand. There were two figures approaching from the northeast. They both appeared to be favoring sore feet. It took me a moment to recognize them. It was the Captain, and Doctor Wilton. Wilton had something wrapped in a dark cloth.

The dark cloth she carried was my own coat. It flapped up in the growing winds. The thing hidden beneath it shot out a beam of crimson light in my direction. It was blinding and beautiful all at once.

It was the Hag’s lantern.