Shifting

“Downtown. The old part of town, shops and-” and then I had it. “It’s the pharmacy. It’s Wilton, I bet.” Even as I said it I was sure. It was Wilton doing only the Lord knew what. Could she have possibly changed so much that she glowed in the dark like a ghostly yellow heartbeat?

“Look, out there, too,” she said, pointing out to the west side, out in the blackness beyond the town. Another spot, much similar to the one in town, glowed and glimmered. But it was a bluish glow this time, and it was brighter.

Monika slipped her arm around me and her cheek pressed against my chest. “Isn’t that out in the forest?” she asked in a whisper. It was silly to think that whoever was there in that glowing spot would hear us from two miles or more away, but that is how it felt, seeing those lights. They made you want to crawl somewhere and hide.

“No, that spot is out in the Lake.”

I thought about the spot, and I knew in my bones where it was, but I hesitated to say it. Somehow, saying it aloud gave it power. Speaking of evil made it more real, my instincts screamed at me, but I overcame them.

“It’s Elkinsville.”

“What?”

“A dead town, at the bottom of the Lake. That’s the spot where the glow comes from. I bet its related to the hag that Malkin told us about. I saw her out there on the shore.”

Monika turned her face fully into my chest and she broke down then. She’d held it all day, and her tears were hot and soaked through my shirt. I ran my fingers over her hair absently, but didn’t try to coax her into stopping.

As it became darker, we could see the three locations ever more clearly by their individual lights. The medical center twinkled with burning lanterns and the other two, the town in the lake and what had to be downtown Redmoor, glimmered with unearthly fluorescence.

“What’s going on down there?” she asked, her voice muffled. “Where did the others go? Which of those lights is the one the notes are talking about? How long were we down in that cave?”

I just gave her a hug. I didn’t have any answers.

We went back inside. After our adventure with Malkin, I didn’t want to walk the woods again in the dark. We’d have to spend the night in the cabin. I found Monika looking at me with dark desperate eyes.

“How long?” she asked me.

“What?” I replied, but part of me already knew what she was asking.

She held her eye contact with me, and I couldn’t break it. “How long do you think it has been?”

“I don’t know,” I told her honestly.

“A year?”

“No, no,” I said quickly, “it can’t have been a year.”

“In the old stories, it was always a year and a day, or something like that.”

“It can’t have been more than a week or two, judging by the weather. I know Indiana in October, and this is October,” I argued. “If it had been a year-” but I stopped.

“If it has been a year, it would still be October, just a different October,” she finished for me.

My mouth hung open. I couldn’t think of anything to say.

Monika fell against me and I was relieved not to see the pain in her eyes anymore. “What if we are the last ones now?” she asked. “The last ones who haven’t changed yet?”

That night, in the Preacher’s cabin, Monika smoked an entire cigarette, one of her very last. And then we finally, really, made love. It wasn’t a hot and joyful thing, however. It was more of a desperate attempt to console one another. Tomorrow we would have to come down from the hill and face whatever we found there.

Twenty-Six

In the morning we made our way down into town. I felt with each step a sense of dread worse than I’d felt before facing the changelings. A changeling was of flesh and blood, and could be beaten. A vast loss of time was irreplaceable and could in no way be overcome. I couldn’t help but notice signs of time having past. The trees were beginning to lose their leaves now. Soon, there would only be a few left to hang on like the last loose teeth in an old man’s head. I noticed the roads seemed a bit more overgrown with weeds, as there was no one now to cut them. Had they looked that overgrown before I’d gone down that cave? I could not be sure. The streets in Redmoor were strewn with debris, but they had been that way after the storm, hadn’t they?

“Look,” said Monika.

I looked and we both halted. There was the center, at the end of the street. It was completely fenced, at least, as far as we could see. Chain links, arranged in a dull gray steel net, circled the parking lot. My heart sank. There was no way they could have gotten all that work done in one day.

Monika’s hand groped for mine. I took it, and together, with our stomachs in knots, we approached the medical center.

“At least, it looks like we aren’t going to be alone,” I said with a pathetic attempt at a light-hearted tone.

Vance was the first one to see us. There seemed to be a platform up against a tree behind the fence. A guard post, I supposed. He jumped down over the fence and approached with his rifle raised.

“Gannon?” he asked. I heard amazement in his voice. Monika squeezed my hand.

We got closer, and he didn’t look fat or bald or gray, that ruled out decades. I took a breath; it was the first I’d taken for awhile. Vance stopped advancing when he was maybe thirty feet from us.

“Vance, we’re back,” I said.

“Where…?” he asked, trailing off, looking from one to the other of us. “What have you been doing? We’d pretty much given up on you, I hate to say it.”

He didn’t rush up and hug us. In fact, he kept his distance. His gun wasn’t pointed at us, now, but it was at the ready. His frown told me he thought we might be shift-creatures. I realized that, in a way, he might be right.

“How long?” asked Monika, her voice quavered a bit.

“I don’t know,” said Vance. “Don’t you know? About two weeks, I would guess.”

Two weeks. I wasn’t sure if I should be relieved or not, but I was. I felt my chest muscles relax. I could breathe again.

“Two weeks,” I said, nodding. “Not that bad, I guess.”

Vance looked at us suspiciously and it seemed as if maybe he was embarrassed about his suspicions, but could not shake them.

“I don’t blame you for being worried, Vance,” I said. Then I told him our story. I told him about the cave and the creature Malkin that lived in it. I left out some of the details, but gave him the quick version.

He nodded, still looking uncertain. “Can I see you hands, and feet, brother?”

We showed him our extremities and they looked clean and normal. My bulbous pink toes and yellow nails had never looked so good to me.

Heaving a sigh then, he charged us and hugged us and jumped on us. He was Vance again. Even Monika smiled and it warmed my heart to see it. We all walked into the compound together.

“You smell like a monkey’s finger, Gannon,” said Vance affectionately. “How long has it been since you’ve had a bath?”

“Too long,” I said, smiling.

I gathered from talking to Vance that things had been relatively calm in my absence, allowing them to quickly build up the entire fence. He made a particular point to note that they weren’t using any more trees as fence posts. Not that the fence would actually stop one of them, if it were to come to life. Still, the fence did give you a certain sense of protection once you were inside the compound.

As we met the others inside, they had shocked reactions similar to Vance’s. Jimmy Vanton and Mrs. Hatchell in particular seemed shocked and disbelieving. I’m not sure that my return was entirely a benefit in their eyes. But