Shifting

grip, just as I had suspected.

“You were worried?” I asked in a whisper.

She nodded. Her lower lip quivered, and I thought for a second she might break down, but she didn’t.

“I had strange thoughts from him,” she said. I had noticed that her English became a little worse in stressful moments.

“He often gives people that feeling. He’s not a completely normal man. He fought in many wars. Bad wars.”

She looked at me in sudden understanding and nodded. I wondered what kind of soldiers she might have met in Eastern Europe. Russian veterans of Chechnya, perhaps?

“I think he is okay, he just worries people, especially now that the world is so different.”

“Okay,” she said, I could see her pulling herself together. “Let’s find the way out.”

“Do you like caves?” I asked.

“I don’t know. This is my first cave.”

I grunted as I got down on my hands and knees. “It opens up further down. There are some big rooms below us.”

She followed me as we wormed our way down into the earth. The cave had all the familiar smells I recalled from my teen years when I’d spent quite a bit of time in them. It smelled like fresh dirt and a dozen hinted-at flavors of old dung. The air was very cool and still. I’d only been in this cave a few times, but I remembered it had several exits. To get to them you had to work your way down a few twisting shafts, one that was steep, like a chimney, and then you would be in the big rooms. There were water pools down there and big rock formations, one of which looked like a petrified pipe organ.

Getting down the chimney was the hardest part. It seemed smaller than it had years ago, and I had a lantern instead of a strap-on headlight this time. The lantern clanked and scraped on the walls as I toted it down. I wondered what the hell I would do if I broke it down here. We’d brought flashlights, but of course they didn’t work. They were just dead weights in our pockets now, relics from a forgotten era.

“I wonder how long it will be before we forget about flashlights,” I mused aloud, straining as I lowered Monika down to the floor of the first big chamber.

“What do you mean?”

“If they never work again, years from now people might even forget their original purpose. They might think things like that were some kind of bizarre religious icon.”

Monika looked up at me when she had her feet planted firmly. She wore an expression of bewilderment mixed with a touch of fear. I worked at getting myself out of the chimney and down to the floor of the cave.

I shook my head, “Never mind, a silly thought.”

“No, no,” said a strange voice in the darkness of the cave. It wasn’t Monika, it wasn’t anyone we knew. In fact, the voice wasn’t even human. “Pray thee continue, it is a good question, a deep question, one the earth can answer.”

The voice was high-pitched and querulous, and upon hearing it, my mind conjured an image of a shirtless, skinny old man with every one of his stacked ribs showing between his sunken belly and knobby shoulders.

I fell out of the chimney and almost broke the lantern.

Twenty-Four

“Come out!” Monika demanded, while I struggled to get to my feet. Monika had her pistol out, and her face was all stretched white skin and gray streaks of dirt.

We saw no one. The chamber was big and still. There was a large black pool in the middle of it and at the far end of the pool was the formation that looked like a pipe organ. The room was perhaps a hundred feet in length and our ring of lantern light didn’t reach that far into the gloom.

“Come on, speak up, we mean you no harm,” I called out.

At that, we got a dusty chuckle. “So good of you to worry about my well-being, child.”

I took a step forward, holding up the lantern and peering. Was there something at the far end of the cave, or was that just a shadow? I thought about pulling out my saber, but this sort of encounter was why we had come here, to find out more about these lines on the map where the shifting occurred.

“Do you have a moment to speak?” I asked. I was sure now that I spoke with some kind of changeling, as I had that time on the lakeshore.

“A moment?” cried the voice. “Nay, no one has a moment to spare! But a century, yes, that I have.”

“That sounds a bit long for me, changeling. I only want to ask a few questions and we’ll be on our way. Reveal yourself.”

“Questions?” it all but screamed the word. “Have the fates placed me here in this dank hole only to educate wanderling mooncalves?”

Monika and I eyed one another. This thing, whatever it was, seemed less than sane.

“You’ve only been down here a few weeks, or months at the most,” I said, trying to keep it talking while I strained to pick it out in the dark abyss. “The shifting changed you from human to whatever you are now. Perhaps you didn’t know that. The Preacher calls your kind shadows, humans who’ve lost their humanity, but he still holds out hope for you to return to us, to return to our kind.”

“We would wish you to come back to us,” said Monika.

There was another raspy sound of grim amusement. “You know so little of what you speak, children. But I’ll answer three questions, two of which you’ve already asked.”

“What-” I began, but Monika put her hand on my arm, I glanced at her and followed her pointing finger. There it was, the thing that spoke to us, sitting on a knobby formation that looked like a brown beehive made of stone. It sat in the middle of the pool. I couldn’t make out much more than its generally humanoid shape, but it was small, much smaller than a man.

“Firstly, mortal fools will of course forget the meaning of your torch-of-the-hand. It will no longer function, and so its purpose will be forgotten and turn into a vague legend, as did the true purpose of witch-hazel and belladonna and a cross hammered from single chunk of iron.”

I took a few quiet steps forward along the lip of the black pool. I could see the elf now, and yes, my mind told me, that’s what it was. It was sitting but could not have been more than two feet tall if it stood.

“Secondly,” the creature continued, ticking off my questions on its fingers. “You asked if I have a moment to spare. I will tell you that some of us-changelings as you say-have always been here, but we’ve slept for centuries, as the leaves sleep within the trees waiting for spring. One of your kind has provided me the flesh needed to take my ancient form, but I was here long before your grandfather was whelped out of a screaming farmer’s wife and long before his grandfather did the same.”

I stopped now, about twenty feet from it. The thing watched us and I thought I could see a glitter in its tiny eyes reflected in the lantern light. “You’re saying I get one more question then-”

I sensed its glee and hurried, “-No, wait, don’t answer that, it was a statement, not a question.”

It made a hissing, sucking sound of disappointment. “Ask then, child.”

“What was the thing I met on the lakeshore?” I blurted. It wasn’t the smartest thing to ask, I’m sure, but it was what I wanted to know most at that moment.

“Ahhh,” it said, somehow sighing out the sound in a long single syllable, the way a snake might sigh in contentment when the rat is finally a twitching lump within its swollen belly. “Something useful has not been gotten out of Malkin of the Elfkin in a very long time. As a fitting reward, I’ll reveal myself, as you have previously requested.”

Malkin of the Elfkin. I filed away this bit of information. I imagine in other times Malkin might have been called a troll, or a goblin or a pixie or any of a thousand other names in a thousand other places. I supposed it had only been a matter of time until one of his type showed up. He got up from his perch then, and hopped toward us across the water. He seemed to splash only lightly into the inky pool with each step. I wondered if there were stones down there just below the surface or if this creature was so impossibly weightless