Shifting

Mrs. Hatchell soon warmed up, and everyone raptly listened to the longer version of my tale.

“How come these things only talk to you, Gannon?” asked Holly Nelson’s usually quiet mother, Shelly. She had hair that naturally formed a wild balloon of tight dark curls.

“We’ve all talked to one,” said Vance, speaking up in my defense. “Don’t forget the good Doctor Wilton.”

“What I want to know about are these glowing areas,” jumped in Mrs. Hatchell, never one to stay out of any conversation for long. “You say one of them is Elkinsville-absurd, but so is everything else these days. The second one though. What is behind that?”

Monika and I glanced at one another. “It is about where the pharmacy would be,” I explained.

“It’s her,” blurted out Monika, “the Doctor.” She looked shy afterwards and I could tell she was glad when no one argued the point.

“So, what the hell is she doing, burning sickly yellow incense out there?” asked Vance.

“We’ll have to find out,” I said. Everyone looked at me very intently. I realized slowly that my adventures, and even more critically, my returning unchanged from them, had raised my stature in the group. They were all looking at me to give them direction.

“And yes, I’ll do it.”

Monika didn’t look happy, but she didn’t object.

“Well,” Mrs. Hatchell said reasonably. “If one of those places is underwater, the Captain and the Preacher must have gone to the other, the one in town.”

I nodded, conceding the logic of it. The good Doctor now definitely warranted a visit. Then I thought about the Preacher and the Captain for the first time.

“You mean that neither of them has shown up?” I asked everyone. I stared at a group of blank, slowly shaking heads.

“I wonder if they could be under some spell or time-warp, or whatever, the way we were. What is the date?”

“The twenty-ninth,” said Shelly Nelson.

“Two days to Halloween. The Doctor kept talking about Halloween,” said Vance.

“Indeed she did. So no one has gone out to check on Wilton these last two weeks?”

Everyone looked a bit sheepish.

“That pharmacy is right on the other side of one of the lines on the map,” said Mrs. Hatchell. “One of the green ones. She set up camp very near a shift line, as you call them. No one wanted to go check that out, especially after your scouting party vanished.”

I nodded, understanding. “All right, I’m going to go make a social call then, first thing in the morning. Do you have any good food? We’re pretty hungry.”

Everyone jumped into setting up a good dinner. Nick Hackler cooked up some fresh barbecued chicken, stuff that had been kept on ice since the power had died, but now, even with the cold weather, it was getting gamey. We had a feast that night, knowing we had a long winter of canned goods staring us in the face.

Later, Vance and Jimmy Vanton, and even Mr. Nelson in his wheelchair came to talk to me quietly. Their eyes were haunted with shades of guilt. I did not ask them to come with me. Instead, I suggested that they all focus on gathering enough food to last the winter. They seemed relieved, every one of them.

Twenty-Seven

The next morning was the day before All Hallows Eve. I remembered so many grim stories of that day, that I felt a bit of urgency. It seemed to me all too likely that something might happen on that famous festival of the dead. I could only wonder at our celebration of it, all these years since the last age of the supernatural. Like a distant race memory, we had forgotten exactly what it was that we feared, but we could still recall the fear itself.

The weather was definitely colder. In November, I knew, we would probably get our first light dustings of snow. The colder, crisp air and the white frost that lay upon the morning grass gave me pause. Something about the approach of winter when all our technological defenses were gone gave me an odd feeling of unease. This winter there would be no bulbs of light burning with magical brightness. Heat would come from wood-burning stoves that burned fuel chopped with axes and sweat. There would be no central heating automatically blowing warmth on the cold bricks.

The good folk of Redmoor had worked hard as scavengers while Monika and I had slept or dreamt or whatever it was we’d lived through in that chamber beneath the earth. They had set up three wooden stoves and a stockpile of wood in the medical center now.

I felt, oddly, different from them now. Somehow, my adventures had made me into a different kind of person than the others. They were people who stayed huddled inside with eyes peering out into the night. I had become someone who ventured out into the darkness as a matter of habit. I imagined that in the past, there had always been people like me and people like them, and that we were naturally taking up roles that our ancestors had played out centuries ago.

I left after a few quiet good-byes. I could feel their eyes on me as I walked downtown, but I didn’t look back.

Redmoor wasn’t a big town, and I soon reached the forbidden area, bounded by Linwood Drive on one side and Olive Street on another, according to the Preacher’s map. When I reached the boundary, invisible though it was, I felt it. The sensation was similar to what I had felt out in the woods or down in the cave, except perhaps stronger. I realized before I stepped out into the empty strip of patched asphalt we called Linwood Drive that I knew where the line was. The boundary between sanity and insanity, order and chaos, was a few paces away, in the middle of the street. Linwood Drive was wider than most of our streets in our small town, it was a two-laner, but most people still treated it as one lane with slanted parking lines painted on both sides for shoppers.

I stood on the southern side with my toes resting on the red curb. I was in front of the Redmoor video store that old man Marcus used to run before his wife killed him with claws grown from those painted fingernails she’d always worked so hard on. I hesitated there, I’m not sure for how long. A yellow fire hydrant, a relic of a past that seemed distant, stood on the curb next to me like a faithful pet. We waited on the curb together, the yellow fire hydrant and I. The barrier was right there in the street before me, I could feel it, but I did not yet dare step toward it. I had the sensation of being watched, but could not see the watcher. Perhaps the shift line itself watched me, hungrily, already planning what sort of vile twisted thing it might morph me into. I shook my head at these thoughts. They were absurd, but the feeling of dread would not leave.

I knew somewhere in my mind that I could go around this border, this barrier, or fissure, or whatever it was, that led into the unknown. I knew I could just walk another mile or so up into the woods past the city limits or down to the lakeshore and find a way around it, but I didn’t want to give in to this thing that had eaten my town and my life. I hated it, and wanted to beat it. I felt, after weeks of learning about it and brushing up against it that perhaps I was ready to beat it. I felt that I had run from it long enough.

While I thought about it, I spotted some of the flying creatures, roosting upside down like bats in the trees across the street. They were the things that watched me, I knew. They made no move to flutter down and drink my blood. I wondered if somehow they knew I pondered the barrier. Was some other unseen creature directing them? The trees that bore the flying things seemed quiet as well, barely shifting in the breeze as if the trees too, considered me. The whole world seemed to hold its breath.

After a time, I thought to myself that if I was going to do it-and I knew that I was-it might as well be now. So, after having dithered for perhaps a dozen minutes, or perhaps more, I left the yellow fire hydrant and the video store and finally took my first step into Linwood Drive. The things in the trees moved restlessly. They continued to watch me as I walked into… something. Only heaven-or perhaps hell-knew what.

I hit an invisible barrier two steps from the curb. I could feel it, but could not see it, not yet. At first, it was very gentle, like a thick spider web breaking over my body. I paused, and the sensation strengthened. Somehow, I knew that if I stopped, it would grow stronger, so I took another slow step, then two more. The sensation of