Shifting

Wilton didn’t look up, but she put her pistol down on the desk in front of her.

“Have you got one of the lanterns, Gannon? I’d like to read something to you,” she said in a distant voice. Her head was still lowered.

“Yes,” I said, “yes, I’ll get one. Stay right there.”

I headed out into the hall, moving fast. I gritted my teeth, expecting to hear a single, popping shot behind me. When it didn’t come, I hurried to find a lantern before it did.

In situations such as we were in, the social rules regarding suicide changed. None of us spoke these thoughts aloud, they were too terrible to voice, but we knew that it was understandable, should anyone wish to take their own life. Our own sheriff had done it on the third day, after his four young children had gutted his wife and left her to die on the kitchen tile. He had blown them apart, I think with the same shotgun that Erik Fotti so proudly toted today, and then he had turned it on himself.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that we condoned suicide or that we wanted anyone to do it. Rather, the act had lowered somewhat on the unthinkability chart. Now it was more on the level of quitting a shitty job. You argued your coworkers out of it when you could. You would miss them, but you didn’t blame those who checked out. You understood them.

When I got back with the lantern, the gun was gone and she had a small clothbound book out instead. I set the lantern on a shelf and turned it up a notch. It hissed and brightened.

I saw then that the book had the look of an old library book, and many yellow bits of paper stuck up from it at different angles with notes scrawled on them. After a moment she began to read:

In ancient days the dog was looked upon as man’s best friend, and the enemy of all supernatural beings: fairies, giants, hags, and monsters of the sea and the Underworld. When the seasons changed on the four “quarter days” of the year, and the whole world, as the folks believed, was thrown into confusion, the fairies and other spirits broke loose and went about plundering houses and barns and stealing children. At such times the dogs were watchful and active, and howled warning when they saw any of the supernatural creatures. They even attacked the fairies, and sometimes after such fights they returned home with all the hair scraped off their bodies, if they returned at all.

She looked up at me very seriously, as if what she had read had great and obvious importance.

I nodded solemnly, thinking all the while, what the hell does that mean?

“How many dogs do we have?” she asked me.

I let slip my confusion. “Um, none here, I expect.”‘

“People tend to try to save them, don’t they?”

“Yes, well, the things…” I trailed off. “Not many survived, I guess.”

“Try none,” she said somewhat smugly. “When was the last time you heard one bark, or howl at night?”

I shook my head, it had been weeks.

She nodded and opened the book again to a new passage.

Knee-deep she waded in the pool-

The Banshee robed in green-

Singing her song the whole night long,

She washed the linen clean;

The linen that must wrap the dead

She beetled on a stone;

She washed with dripping hands, blood-red,

Low singing all alone:

The Banshee I with second sight,

Singing in the cold starlight;

I wash the death-clothes pure and white,

For Fergus More must die to-night

She gazed at me bemusedly for a bit and closed the book. “You still don’t get it, do you?” she asked. “I had thought that you would, out of all of them.”

This statement irked me just a bit. “Okay, you are saying that these old legends are like what is happening now, I get that.”

“More than that. I think things have turned again, back-back to the old days when superstition ruled the minds of men. But what we didn’t know was that it ruled for a reason. It ruled because those fantastic creatures and stories were all real, or at least most of them. The thing you saw at the lake, it would have been called a Banshee, or a Hag, or Mermaid perhaps in years gone by, depending on where and when you were, but everyone everywhere was familiar with that type of creature.

“This time, I think however, is very different,” she continued, paging through her book. “This time I think it is worse. It’s like the Ice Ages, I believe, these magical times, they come and go. Usually, it is small waves of magic that don’t warp history much, like the little Ice Age that just ended a few centuries ago. Between the year 1550 and 1850, the world was much cooler than it is now. I think the Magical Ages are like that, these ages of the supernatural. They come and they go and are forgotten until the next time.

“But this is a bad one, this time. Like the Ice Age ten millennia ago that froze those mammoths in Siberia so fast that they still had grass and flowers in their mouths. They were flash-frozen. In a few years, the glaciers grew dramatically and cataclysmically. The world froze over and thousands of species died out forever. Most of the big mammals died out. And now this age, with its increase in the supernatural, is like that time. Cataclysmic.”

“Okay, so then why are there no fossils of things like these monsters we’ve been encountering?”

“Good! Good point,” she said, rising. For the first time, she seemed animated. She got up and paced. I noticed as she walked that she had a slight limp, but decided now was not the time to interrupt. Mostly, I was glad to see some distance between her and that pistol.

“I suppose I could flippantly ask in return what you think a tyrannosaurus or a giant sloth really was, if not a monster, but the real answer is, of course, that I don’t know. But perhaps, just perhaps, these warped creatures don’t leave remains because when the effect fades, it changes the creatures-including their bones or what-not- back into their original form.”

I made an appreciative face. “Like you say, we have no idea, but that’s as good as any.”

“Do you know what percentage of the cultures of Earth over the last thousand years has had tales of supernatural creatures and occurrences?”

“All of them?”

“Exactly. Not all of them are identical, mind you, although certain themes tend to come up again and again.”

“So, Doc,” I said, “what should we do?”

It was the wrong thing to say. She sagged down again into her chair. “I think it’s the end. We will descend into barbarism at best, become extinct at worst. This time, the supernatural is so powerful, life is not just more interesting, it’s like a nightmare. I’ve yet to find any way we can survive it, and I don’t think we’ve seen the worst of it yet.”

I nodded, but took one thing to heart. “Well, even if we all survive as just changelings of some sort or another, eventually, our descendants will go back to what they once were.”

She frowned deeply at that. “Provided some survive.”

“Of course.”

She nodded, taking to the idea. “You are right. Quite right, I hadn’t extrapolated far enough.”

She smiled then, looking fully at me for the first time. “You’ve given me peace of mind in the form of a tiny ray of hope. Thank you, Gannon. You are a natural leader, you know. Now, if you will excuse me, I’ve got one more duty this day.”

I stood up and put my hand on my saber. “Give me the gun and I’ll be on my way,” I told her.

She moved her hand near the pistol slowly. I took a step toward her. She looked at my hand on the hilt of