Shifting

Her face was so pitiful then. She looked young and lost. She was so far from home. I put my arm around her and kissed her dusty forehead. “Well, I was glad to have you with me,” I told her.

We headed up the hill toward the Reverend John Thomas’ cabin. I hoped, that after all this, he would be there. It could still be a very bad day if we found him torn apart, or if he had shifted. I also wondered vaguely what the Captain was up to. I thought he would make it, and would probably beat us up here.

We made it to the cabin without further mishap. We stood in the cover of the trees, looking out over the bald hilltop, listening. Nothing seemed wrong. Nothing stirred at all. There were a few crows on the eaves, no doubt attracted by the makeshift graveyard with crosses made of wooden sticks. I counted thirteen graves there, two more than the last time I’d been up here. It seemed like a lot of the wandering, lost ones were attracted to this spot.

“What do we wait for?” whispered Monika.

“I don’t see anyone, but the Captain might be waiting and watching too.”

After twenty minutes of watching a quiet scene, I finally decided the hell with it, and walked out into the open, approaching the cabin. The crows lifted off only when I was in spitting distance and lazily flapped away, cawing at me reproachfully. I tapped at the door, which stood ajar. There was no response, so I entered.

There were no bodies or other horrors inside. I breathed out a sigh of relief. There were, however, two notes. Each was held down by a stone on the desktop. The first one I read was from the Captain. It said:

I waited a full day. I doubt you have survived, but in case, I’m writing this. I think he’s right. I’m going to investigate the strange phenomenon he mentions in the note. Possibly, I’ll even find him there.

— Captain Ryerson

I stared at the note for a bit and chewed my lip. One thing about it kept beating in my head, pulsating in my brain: I waited a full day. I knew just by looking around that he had sat right here. I counted sixteen cigarettes butts lined up on the desktop, each smoked down to the yellow filter. The Preacher never smoked. I didn’t know how it had happened, but we had spent a long time down in that cave. Had we been under some kind of spell down there? Had we been inside a shiftline, where perhaps, time ran differently? I didn’t know, but the implications made me feel queasy.

“That thing,” said Monika, reading the note carefully. “That thing in the cave did something. It was a skritek. An elf.”

“Yes.”

“Sometimes, they make you think a day was an hour. Or that a century was a year. My grandparents believed in them. Perhaps there were some still around, when they were children.”

“Yes,” I said, realizing with a mild shock that I now believed something I’d thought impossible only this morning. Why I would still place anything in that rarified category of impossible after what I had seen over these past weeks defied logic, of course. But one must cling to physical laws as one clings to sanity itself.

There was one thing I refused to think about. What if it had been more than a day? What if it had been a week-or a year, or-? But I clamped down on that monkey, I caged it up and bound and gagged it. Gibbering and with eyes full of madness, it was a thought that could not even be considered. It had been a day, I told myself, and only a day, and it was weird, but that was all it was.

I picked up the second note. It was from the Preacher.

Gannon, I know it will most likely be you who reads this. I’ve observed a phenomenon from my hilltop which you can’t see from the town. I’ve decided to go investigate. When it begins to get dark, gaze to the northwest and you will see where I’ve gone. God willing, I will join you at the center.

— John Thomas

“What do we do?” asked Monika.

“I suppose we wait until dark.”

While we waited, we found some coffee to brew up on an ancient propane stove along with a can of chili and half-empty box of very stale crackers. We scraped chili onto the crackers. It actually tasted pretty good. As we ate them, I couldn’t help but wonder if a box of crackers would last a year before turning to dust. Probably, I had to admit. But not a century.

“I would have liked your home, Gannon,” Monika told me after a time.

“Indiana?”

“Yes. It makes me think of my home. Cool air, trees, hills.”

“You mean you would have liked it more before the changes?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Well, I like you Monika, just the way you are.”

She flashed me a shy smile and looked back down at her food. I wondered if smiling a lot was embarrassing in her country. They must think that we all grinned all the time like fools. But TV and Hollywood and models in magazines didn’t matter anymore. They didn’t even exist anymore. The world had become a quiet, empty place. I tried to cut off that depressing line of thought.

As I finished the last of our meal, I wondered vaguely about the cave. If we had spent more than a day in that cave, wouldn’t we be hungrier afterwards? Or had time slowed down for our stomachs as well? I was hungry, but not ravenous. I tried again with a force of will to put the whole thing out of my mind.

“It’s getting dark,” Monika said in a hushed voice. I nodded and we moved out to stand on the hilltop. The planted sticks at the very crest of the hill that marked the makeshift cemetery rattled when the breeze shifted. I saw that the Preacher had gone to the effort of scratching names and dates in the crossed sticks that marked the graves. The three graves of the Krenzer children had a date of simply October. I suppose a year wasn’t necessary. If ever there was a good time to start counting years from zero again, this was it.

We watched the last trickle of sunlight die in the west. The cloud cover had broken up enough to see the sunset. It burned the sky a blazing orange that was streaked with lavender clouds. I tried not to see anything suspicious in the skies. There had been colorful sunsets before, and there was nothing strange about it. I had my arm around Monika’s shoulders and she leaned up against me.

But as the sunlight died, the strange landscape of the town laid out before us did take on an alien and sinister aspect. There was no denying that things had changed down there. The town was dark, of course. The street lights and moving headlights and twinkling stop lights you would have seen in abundance just a few months ago were all gone. Human civilization had ground to a halt, like some extinct beast of the plains. We had not gone out with a bang, but rather with a heavy sigh.

The gloom of night descended on Redmoor while we watched. Inky shadows grew from the buildings, purple and indigo and flat black. These shadows pooled together and drowned entire streets and neighborhoods, swallowing them from our view.

A few twinkling white lights were visible at the medical center. Propane lanterns, no doubt. It was so strange and lonely to be able to see only one other spot of human habitation in the middle of what had once been a bustling town.

“Look, there,” said Monika, pointing toward the east, toward the downtown district. Finally, I saw what the notes were about. In the entire downtown area, there was only one sickly yellow glow visible. It wasn’t the white shine of a lantern or the yellow twinkle of a campfire. It was an unnatural yellow glow, and it seemed to pulsate gently as we watched. It reminded me immediately of the glowing nimbus I’d seen around the hag that one night, while we walked together in the woods.

It gave me a chill to see it. I wondered if you were down there, carrying a lantern in those streets, if you would even notice the shimmering yellowy air. Would the glare of your lantern drown it out?

“What part of town is that?” she asked me.