Shifting

Six

“As I was saying about the limestone caverns in the area. We need to know if they can be traveled, if people can safely move around and under the lines, these shift-lines, let’s call them, then we will have a great deal more control than we do now.”

“How do I fit into this… plan?”

“You know these woods as well as anyone left alive now, I’d say. And you know the caves. There is one line too, very close to your house that leads down to the lakeshore. Possibly, it goes right into the lake itself.”

I nodded. My hometown was famous for its caves. Since boyhood, I’d spent a lot of time in those cool limestone holes, exploring, getting into trouble.

“How did you compile this map?”

He smiled grimly. “See these dots? They mark places where people shifted and others were killed.”

I looked more closely at the map. There were faint dots all along the shift-lines. I understood then, he had simply mapped where things had gone badly and connected the dots, forming lines. The map was really an epitaph for hundreds of deaths. The thought gave me a tiny chill.

“What about the animals? Why aren’t they shifted by these lines, if they exist?” I asked finally.

He nodded, “I’ve been thinking about that, why animal changelings are so rare, mostly birds. I think they must sense these places. I think they avoid them, but it is only an idea.”

I must have looked doubtful.

“Look,” he said, leaning forward suddenly. “We’re all going to be dead soon at this rate and this is the best plan we could come up with given what we know. Are you willing to go out and scout some of these spots?”

I looked back at those burning eyes. I knew he had already lost a family to the changelings. Hell, who hadn’t? He was right in that we had to do something.

“I’ve got no better plan,” I said. The words seem to echo in my head. “I’ll do it.”

He nodded. I could tell he had never really doubted that I would accept the mission. I wasn’t sure if that made me a natural, brave champion or a chump. A bit of both, I supposed.

“Check this one first,” he said, pointing to a blue line that ran between my cabin and town. It ran in dashes, as if no one was sure where it was exactly, all the way down to the lakeshore.

I looked at it. “What’s special about it?”

“Not much is known about it, but there have been some strange reports. I think it is related to the lake itself, somehow.”

I looked at him questioningly, but he just shrugged. I assumed that was all he knew, and nodded. “Okay, it should be easy to find, we drive right past it every time we go to town.”

“And when you get to town, you should see the Doctor, and the Captain, we need them both to join us in the compound when it’s built,” he continued. He folded up the map and handed it to me.

“You can keep the map, I’ve got copies,” he said in answer to the unspoken question posed by my raised eyebrows. “We are making them for everyone.”

“Anything else?” I asked, standing up. My plans for spending the evening chatting up Monika were dying fast. It was nearing noon already, and I had some hiking to do.

He nodded, looking worried with a final thought. He sat back, his swivel office chair creaking, and put his feet on his desk.

“I think I should tell you, I believe there is a third type of changeling.”

He had recaptured my wandering attention.

“The lost ones wander about in the woods until they find something interesting, and then at that point someone dies, either us or them. They seem to be like simple predators, no more intelligent than wolves, maybe less so. The seekers are a bit more intelligent and head on a path of destruction until destroyed. But there is another sort-the worst of all.”

I sat down again. His news was grim, but I kept my face as impassive as I could. Unlike Vance, I never liked to be the panicked one in the room. I liked to stay cool, no matter what I was feeling inside. So I waited.

“I think there are changelings living amongst us. I think they are only partly shifted, and hiding it. Or, perhaps, they are waiting for the right moment to strike, or are engineering the deaths of the strongest among us. In any regard, these are the most dangerous of all, I believe in the end.”

“Wonderful,” I said, standing up again. “You’ve given me a lot to worry about, sir.”

He nodded. “Sorry to burden you, but there are only so many of us left. The time for secrets and happy fictions are long past. I would have you know that I still have hope for these victims in our midst, these shadows. I think they can still be redeemed. At least, I still pray for them.”

I went to the door. “I’ve got to get moving.”

We went out, watching carefully in case something was to spring down upon us from the top of the roof. Whatever had been up there, however, was now gone.

The Preacher strode across his yard toward the trees. He took out his Bible as he went and held it high overhead, as to ward off evil or to block the rays of the dying sun. “Enough nonsense,” he told the trees. “Come out and face justice, children of the dark.”

I’m not sure if it was his words, his gestures or his proximity to the tree line, but they charged.

There were three of them, and they looked like mutant spiders with at least four extra legs each and hairless, human-like, gray-pink skin. They had circular mouths like loaches and something else on their hindquarters that looked like a stinger.

One of them giggled like a preteen girl as she charged. I wondered who she was, and if I had met her parents in town.

I was wrong about the stingers, they were spinnerets. These organs were those used by spiders to make their deadly webs, but formed in proportion to these grotesque bodies. They each shot out a loop of silver-gray spider silk at us. I dodged the one that came at me, and it hissed through the air over my head. A second thread touched the Preacher’s cloak but found nothing to attach to there. The third hit the Preacher on his Bible hand. I saw it loop around his wrist and in a second it was stuck fast.

They had more than eight eyes as well. They wore skirts of eyes, like a fleshy mass of fish-egg jelly. Each eye rolled wetly and independently.

The Preacher bared his teeth in determination, and readied his axe with one hand by dropping it and catching the handle at the last instant. He stubbornly refused to drop his Bible despite the spider creature, which tugged at the line excitedly.

I took a step forward and slashed, severing the silvery web and freeing his hand. It left a glistening shine on the tip of my blade. The Preacher had time to wipe a sticky mass from his skin and nod thanks to me before they all charged in unison.

They were not very big or bright and we had had a lot of practice with these moments. We chopped the first two to pieces, but the third got under my guard and sank venomous fangs into my boot. The steel tip held, however, and after a moment’s frustration, I felt those pumping feet climbing my legs to my mid-section. I knew the thing could smell my terror and the hot blood flowing in my neck. It scuttled up my torso, its loach-like mouth forming an idiot’s grin.

It was awkward, slashing at something that is clinging to your chest, but I managed to get the blade into the rippling line of legs. The most memorable sensation was when I cut through a long line of those pumping, hot dog-thick legs. There were bones in there, very thin bones, but I felt them as my saber cut through them. Normal spiders didn’t have bones, I didn’t think, at least not in their legs. Had they shifted that way from someone’s finger and toes? Had each toe thinned and stretched into the shape of a spider leg? I almost retched when we were done, just from thinking about it.

There was a scrap of red clothing on one of them with a picture of a cartoon animal on it. The Preacher identified it with a nod. “The Krenzer girls,” he confirmed evenly. “They’ve been missing for days.”

I was further sickened to learn another family had gone bad.

“Weren’t they junior high girls?” I asked, disturbed. Families often turned as a group, which made things worse. Distantly, I wondered why that happened.

“The youngest, perhaps. The older two were in high school this year, I believe.”

It was horrifying, but we talked about it calmly. Somehow, doing that helped keep your sanity going.

The Preacher insisted on a service right then and there. We buried them under heaps of dirt in the stony yard. It was my second service today, and I was just glad that I didn’t have to mumble the words this time. He talked about final peace and blessings. He did not sound like he was just going through the motions, either. He meant every word of it, you could tell. He meant to send those souls to heaven, if there was any possible route by which they could get there, which I strongly doubted. But I bowed my head and mumbled with him in pray anyway. I was surprised he could keep his faith so tightly after all that had happened. I admired him for it.

“Gannon,” he said as I left his hilltop. I turned back to him. He stood there in the middle of a makeshift graveyard that would have seemed pathetic even to the first settlers who came centuries ago to farm this land. There were fresh mounds everywhere, and I knew that before he slept tonight, he would fashion ratty crosses out of sticks and twine for the newest three graves, just as he had for all the others.

He hesitated, and for a moment, I thought I saw a tiny tremble at his mouth. It must have been the dim light, however; the Preacher never wavered.

“There is something else out there,” he said at last. “Something is sending these things to us.”

He paused, and then said, “Watch your back.”