Shifting

Thirty-Seven

“I owe you again,” I said to the Captain.

He shrugged. “You did most of it.”

I just stood there for a while in the rain, which now fell with a quiet, sweet hissing sound. The lobby had no roof and not much left for walls either, so the rain simply fell into my matted hair and ran down loosely over my face. I blinked at the thing in my hands. For a moment, I saw a woman’s eyes, they were a pretty shade of yellowish-brown. They were the eyes she’d been born with, long, long ago before she had become a powerful changeling. In death, she was no longer a Hag. I released her throat and she sank down gently, like a deflating balloon. Soon, all that was left was a vicious dark stain on the carpet and an antique dress. Her flesh had melted away even as she had melted so many things into living horrors.

The lantern sat on the table. Still and waiting. The prism inside it continued to shine, but with a less brilliant vigor. What had she called it? The Eye. Now, it sent out slow ripples of color to splash over the walls, rather than fierce beams that dazzled one’s eyes and seared the mind.

I nodded silent thanks to the Captain. He nodded back and cleaned his knife on his jacket. I turned to face the survivors. There were less than ten of us left.

“Let’s go look for the Preacher and Wilton,” I said quietly. The rest of them followed me, some weeping openly for our dead.

“Is it over?” asked Holly. I gave her a hug, she had lost everything today.

“I think so.”

We heard rustling and thumping back down the hall. I led the way. We found no movement other than the flopping of the oak tree in the basement. I had a sudden thought and went back to the door that topped the basement stairs. When we got there, my heart skipped a beat. It was hanging open, broken down from the inside. I drew my weapon.

Nelson was there, still at his post in front of the door. He had his pistols in his hands, but they were empty and so were his dead eyes. I pushed Holly back so she wouldn’t have to find her father this way. I got Mrs. Hatchell to take hold of her shoulders. She began talking to Holly’s ear earnestly while Holly’s body shivered with silent sobs.

“Vance,” I said in a hoarse voice. “Something got past Nelson. Something is up here with us.”

There were footsteps on the stairs beyond the door. It led down into total blackness. The few propane lanterns that still burned in ruins of the center cast only wan beams in this dark corner of the halls.

I put the tip of my saber into the blackness and gestured madly for a lantern. Vance brought me one that guttered and spit, turning an old orange color that indicated the fuel was all but spent.

“Is the witch dead?” asked a voice from the dark pit of the stairwell. I felt vast relief.

“John Thomas, I’m so glad it’s you,” I told him as he emerged. I waited until I had a good look at him before I lowered my blade. He was gripping his shoulder, there was blood on his face and he was in obvious pain, but he seemed as human and determined as ever.

“I echo the sentiment,” said the Preacher.

I frowned however, looking at the broken down doorway. “You just came up, but I think something else preceded you.”

“I know,” he said, almost whispering. “I think its Doctor Wilton.”

A single thought went off in my head, the lantern.

I headed past the others huddled in the hallway. They watched me with dull aching gray faces. I headed back toward the lobby. There, standing by the lantern, was Doctor Wilton. She had her hands inside the tarnished brass housing and was touching the large prism itself, caressing it.

“Isn’t it a beautiful thing, Gannon?” she asked me quietly as I approached her.

I stalked forward like a policeman approaching a jumper on a ledge. “It certainly is,” I agreed evenly.

“My power is different than hers, you know,” she said, and when she turned her gaze slowly toward me I saw a faint, unnatural light in her eyes. Perhaps, in time, they would come to shine like mirrors as had the Hag’s.

“I can see that you don’t trust me, nor do I blame you. Let me speak, all of you! It was I that stopped an army of horrors coming up from the basement behind you! Would you have been able to survive a second army like the one Gannon cut through? No!”

We looked from one to another. “Go take a look, Vance,” I said.

“Yes, of course, check up on my words, I welcome your scrutiny. I stopped as many of these things from the rear as you did from the front, Gannon. You owe your lives to me as much as to your weapons,” she said. Casually, as she spoke, her twisted hand rested on the table very near the lantern.

“Don’t use the lantern, Wilton,” I warned, taking another step. “It’s dangerous.”

“Oh, I know,” she chuckled. “And don’t worry; I have no intentions to wield it as she did.”

“I don’t think any of us can control that thing safely.”

She laughed aloud at that. “No, there is little safety in something this powerful,” she agreed. “The prism inside this lantern allows one to shape the reality of things around you directly. We saw her do it. I could rebuild this lowly ruin into a shining castle.”

Vance came back up behind me. “It’s true,” he said. “There are more horrors in the basement. At least three more things would have marched up behind us.”

“Exactly,” said Wilton.

“What happened to Nelson then?”

Wilton looked troubled. Her hand moved up to her face, then dropped. “That was unfortunate. I came through the door after I held back the enemies at your rear, but Nelson was there. We surprised each other. He fired at me, and I had to… I stopped him.”

“You killed him, you mean!” cried out Holly.

For just a moment Wilton looked human and almost like her old self. “I’m so sorry, my dear. It was an accident. When people fight in the darkness, they don’t always know friend from foe.”

“Perhaps he did recognize you,” said Vance.

I took a step forward, then another. She fixed me with her gaze then, and I stopped my approach. I stood motionless.

“Think, Gannon,” she told me. “We have here the very gift we need to survive in this harsh new world. We could make an army of these trees, sworn to protect us, to guard the last precious humans that still breathe.”

I thought hard, and asked, “Why didn’t you speak when you tried to come up out of the basement? We would have let you come up.”

She blinked for a moment. I was glad to see I had her off track. “I wasn’t thinking then.”

I nodded. I was vaguely aware that the others were filling the lobby behind me. I needed time to think and to let them gather before we tried anything, so I kept talking. “You were the one that came up the stairs. You were the thing that twisted the doorknob against all my strength.”

“Not quite,” she said with a new hint of a smile. “You held it in the end.”

“It was you then,” said the Preacher. He had arrived and stood at my side. I glanced at him and his eyes were dark and unforgiving.

“You survived the basement as well! You are indeed blessed, Reverend,” said Wilton, but she didn’t seem pleased.

The Preacher talked to me, but kept his gaze on Wilton. “Gannon, you put Mr. Nelson on guard in front of that door, and he didn’t survive the task did he?”

Wilton’s eyes flicked from him to me, and then down to Holly, who now stood with us, grim-faced.

“You can’t refuse this gift, it is everything that I’ve worked for and much more!” she said pleading with us. “Don’t you understand, without harnessing this new force of nature, as man has always done, we will be only mundane. We will be slaves to whoever wields the power of the shifting. I’m offering you a chance to do more than survive another week, I’m offering you a chance to rebuild.”

“We cannot tolerate abominations of the flesh such as this artifact produces,” said the Preacher in a tone of absolute certainty. “Warped magic tools yes, but not warped individuals. I have drawn the line. This line must not be crossed.”

“You! You!” she cried out with wild frustration. “Who are you to draw the line between science and morality? I offer you so much for so little.”

“What do you want in return?” asked Gannon. “Our service?”

“Your help, yes,” she said. “That’s all, just your aid, your working hearts and minds.”

Gannon shook his head. “I’ve already declined to enter the service of one Hag today, I’m not going to serve a second.”

“Abominations, eh? What of you, boy? You are no mundane! Show them, I demand that you show them! What do have hidden in that pocket?”

I opened my mouth, closed it again.

The Preacher turned to me. “She has a point, Gannon. It has come time to show us.”

I hesitated. Things had suddenly reversed. I felt everyone’s eyes on me. The claws in my glove clutched into a ball. I stood there for a moment, dumbfounded.

The Preacher grabbed my wrist and before I could react, ripped my hand into the open. The scaly claw of a velociraptor splayed itself in the cool air.

“Gannon too, has been touched by these unnatural forces,” he said to the others. “Look what your perfect prism has done to the best among us, just by his touching of it. Such a force can’t be wielded by us, not if we are to remain human.”

Monika grabbed my shoulder. She looked up at me with worried dark eyes. “Let’s just go, Gannon. I’ll go with you,” she said.

I looked around at them, into their faces. They didn’t know what to do. I had been their champion, but I was not a mundane, as she called us. I had been one of the enemy all along. And Wilton, was she feeling the same way that I was? Did she see us all as her friends, turned upon her after all her work to save us?

“Come with me, Gannon,” said Wilton. “We will form a leper colony and wait for the rest of them to fall sick. For mark me, all of them will.”

Monika buried her face against my chest. Of all of them, she was the only one not looking at my hand.

I looked at everyone. The Captain was there, sitting on a beam that had fallen from the ceiling. He and the Preacher seemed the most passive. The rest of them were staring at the horror that terminated my left wrist.

“Give him a moment,” said Mrs. Hatchell. “He knows what must be done.”

The Preacher glanced at her, and then slid his eyes back to me. He knew it as well, I could tell, but for a few seconds I could not think of what it was. Then, slowly, I had it.

I jerked my hand from the Preacher’s grasp. The sudden motion made people jump back. I had become a feral animal. I was going to split up the last survivors if I left, and already, despite their love for me, they feared me.

It was more than I could bear.

Accordingly, I held out the claw, and I raised my sword, which still glowed with the magic sharpness the Hag had given me, and I chopped it off in one horrible, but clean, stroke.