Shifting

another, I know of two people in the community right now who have deformities, minor ones that you would never find unless you stripped them down and examined them inch by inch. And you can bet there are others.”

I opened my mouth at this point and raised my index finger.

“And no,” she went on, waving my finger back down again, “I won’t tell you who they are. They seem stable and there is no reason for me to believe they are any more dangerous than anyone else in the group.”

I chewed my lip, thinking I still wanted to know. I wanted to know who to watch.

“Lastly, I’ve observed an increasing number of minor changes in the plant and animal wild life. It is my belief that they will pose our next major threat.”

“How so?”

She sighed. “So far, mostly humans have been affected. But what if a migrating flocks of birds turn into winged snakes-”

“I’ve seen a few of those,” I interrupted.

“I know you have, and what if the trees themselves-changed?”

I thought of the articles in the newspapers I’d read. Hadn’t trees come to life somewhere?

“There are a lot of trees in this forest,” I muttered.

She nodded, clearly feeling she was victorious over my objections.

“There’s something else,” I said finally. I showed her the stone in my pocket. With the lights turned down, it was easy to see it still glowed.

Wilton touched it and spun it around gently, examining the impression. She looked at me sharply.

“The thing had hooves?”

I nodded, “I guess so. I’ve been seeing such prints quite a bit lately. I think this creature was leaving those prints.”

Wilton suddenly shoved the stone away from her, sending it skittering across the table. I snatched it up and put it back in my pocket. I gave her a frown of annoyance, but she didn’t seem to notice. She wrung her fingers one by one and stared at the desk.

“She’s one of the powerful ones, then,” she said quietly.

I asked her what she meant, but she didn’t tell me.

Eleven

The first thing I did when I got out of Wilton’s office, of course, was search for Monika. I was yawning despite the coffee and munching on a sandwich that Carlene Mitts had handed me. The sandwich tasted great; neither Vance nor I could cook worth a damn. When we made sandwiches, they came out as Spartan, bachelor- house affairs with only bread, meat and maybe a smattering of one half-crusty condiment or another to glue it all together. I’d forgotten what a real sandwich tasted like when done by an artist such as Mrs. Mitts. There was pickle in there and thin onion slices, it was like a professional deli sandwich. I made a mental note to really lay on the complements next time I saw her.

I found Monika still talking to Mrs. Hatchell. At least she wasn’t crying, but I could see by her reddened face that there had been some tears at some point.

“Oh, hello Gannon,” said Mrs. Hatchell when I nosed the door open. “We were just talking about you.”

“Nothing too incriminating I hope, Mrs. H.” I said. All the ex-school kids called her Mrs. H.

Then Monika jumped me. I needn’t have worried about her forgetting me, I realized as I received her enthusiastic hug. She felt and smelled good, and I slipped my arm around her. We stood in the doorway and listened to Mrs. Hatchell for a while. No one ever ran into old Mrs. H. without stopping and listening for a while.

She was a widow who had lost her husband but not her wedding ring. She would always be married to the man she’d lost to a boating accident she often referred to as “some foolishness” a decade ago. She wasn’t anything special to look at, either. She was thin and had a slight stoop. Thirty years ago in high school, she had been pretty, I was sure, but now her bright eyes looked suspicious rather than curious. Calculating, rather than thoughtful. Not that she wasn’t a good citizen. She was, in fact, one of the best citizens in the county. I liked her, but she was hard to take in large doses.

She talked on and on about traumatic experiences and altered judgment and false redirection of blame and finally worked her way up to something she called The Counter-Intuity of Socionomic Insight. Whatever the heck that meant. While she talked I noticed her noticing that Monika and I were in contact the entire time. That was the funny thing about her, sometimes it seemed like she was just raving on in her own land of terminology and reciting tidbits from interesting articles she’d read, but she really was picking up everything that was going on in the room and sometimes, if you poked her the right way, you could get something useful out of her.

The lecture went on for some time. It was all about the mental state of our community in these trying times. We moved into the room and took up chairs around a small table, joining her. Monika’s eyes went glassy after about a minute and a half. I sympathized, it wasn’t even her native language. I lasted a bit longer, but soon I couldn’t hold on any longer either.

“Mrs. Hatchell,” I interrupted loudly.

“Yes?” she said, seemingly startled.

“Do you know about the shadows?”

“The shadows?”

“The ones that are partly changed, but live among us. Do you think you can spot them? Do you think they are dangerous? How are they feeling about all this?”

She gave a sudden intake of breath. “So you know about them.”

I told her briefly of my encounter in the woods. Monika watched me with big eyes as I told my tale.

Mrs. Hatchell eyed me suddenly, as if seeing me for the first time. “You’ve grown into a fine young man, Gannon.”

“Thank you, Mrs. H.”

“The Shadows,” she said. She took a sip of coffee and ran her finger around the rim of the mug. “I think they are thinking the same thing you would if you found a discoloration on your body-a strange one. First, you feel panic. Then, perhaps you would explain it away as bruise or an injury, but then… Eventually, you would realize you had to hide it from the others. You might live in fear then, feeling like no one was your friend, not the changelings outside nor the humans in here.”

I nodded. “Makes sense. But are they dangerous?”

“I don’t know. If the change affected their minds not just their bodies then yes, they may be. But we’ve never been attacked by anyone who looked purely human. All the changelings were very far gone before they tried to harm anyone else. So I would expect them to be somewhat safe to deal with.”

“But you don’t know.”

“Of course not. Are you thinking of an individual?”

“No, I’m looking for general information. I can see your point about not being too dangerous because no one in that partially changed state has ever been reported as an attacker… But maybe that will change now that there are more of them.”

“Gannon,” said Monika then, speaking up for the first time. “If you do find someone like that, don’t be too hard on them. I’m sure they are afraid themselves.”

I looked at her dark eyes and saw the hurt there. Of course, I realized she must be thinking of Billy.

“She’s right,” said Mrs. Hatchell. She leaned forward and her eyes became intense. “There aren’t too many of us left. We may have to make compromises.”

I got a weird feeling from her, but then, who didn’t after talking to Mrs. H. for a long while? After her husband had vanished there had been plenty of cruel jokes to go around. If anything, she had become more intense since then. Sometimes she even talked about her husband as if he were still around.

“The Reverend said the same thing, more or less. He said that they are lost and they might possibly be brought back to us. He still prays and hopes for them.”