Shifting

walking into some resistant force increased. It was like moving into a pool of water now, it dragged against my feet and sought to push me back. I swung my boots forward and my breathing became labored, more with fear than with physical effort. I glanced back toward the sidewalk where I’d started and that was a mistake.

The air between me and the sidewalk I’d come from seemed to waver, just for a moment, and then it steadied. I felt vertigo rush up from my belly, like a thrill that hits you when you stare down into a deadly fall. Looking back was like looking down when scaling a cliff face: it was a bad idea. I lost my balance and stumbled, but managed to steady myself with an effort. I snapped my eyes forward and stared with determination at the far side of Linwood, absurdly close yet so far away. I felt like a tight ropewalker who had forgone the net and the safety belts for the very first time. The breeze gusted up now and it ruffled my hair and the sweat that had popped out upon my brow dried and turned cold.

I took another step.

It was fighting me openly now. A barrier I could truly feel rose up against me and pressed against my legs. I could only think that a thousand others had felt this very thing and had failed somehow in this test, and had lost their way. They had fallen prey to this force from another age and had been melted by it into a twisted caricature of themselves. What was this force? My mind demanded an answer when there was none. It was like hot magma from the center of the Earth, a force that could destroy and create all in one violent process. I thought perhaps it was an echo left over from the wild violent act of creation of the cosmos. Or perhaps it was a natural ripple from some physical law that we had yet to discover with our arrogant science, still perhaps as primitive and infantile as we imagined the alchemists of centuries past to be.

Soon, as I took step by step, all my thoughts fell away from my mind, as all my focus was needed to quell my fears and force myself to take yet another step into the unknown.

Then, suddenly, I felt something give way and I was through it, I had passed a test of some kind. I almost pitched forward, something I knew would be bad thing. I took another step and felt the resistance grow again. But I felt more confident, I had broken through the first barrier and I would break through them all until the last. I realized now, too, why we had not seen many animals transformed. They knew enough to keep away from such a terrifying thing. Their senses were more acute and their reaction to the unknown was simple and effective: flee. Humans had to make it more complex, had to resist changes in their environment not of their making. This was our street, and I could imagine others like me forcing their way across where any beast would have simply turned and fled with the wisdom of a thousand generations of knowing that anything unknown was deadly. Humanity had forgotten their old deep-seated fears and had bulled their way into trouble much as I was doing now, I felt sure of it. One of the Preacher’s favorite quotes rang in my ears: Pride goeth before the fall.

I put another foot forward, and another, and now it was much worse than water, worse than a tidal surge, I was trying to walk through the Earth itself. I took another step, and the barrier broke, just as the first had. The last barrier was different, however. It didn’t form a wall against me, but rather tried to drag me backward. Like a fly caught in the web of a cunning spider, I struggled to be free of this unnatural thing that held me. It wasn’t just my feet and legs that felt the effect, now it was my entire body. Tiny red sparks had come up from somewhere and ran in little bursts and shivers over me. I ignored them and pressed on, head down, body hunched and leaning now like a man walking into a hurricane, like a fool fighting an incredible force of nature. Which, I suppose, was exactly what I was doing.

It let go all at once, and when it did I stumbled and pitched forward over the far curb. I laid there gasping, and dared turn my head and look back across the street. The yellow fire hydrant still sat there, unimpressed and unmoved. The only thing I could detect now as a slight ripple in the air, like the wavering air on a hot summer day over a distant ribbon of black highway. Had it been only thirty steps? I calculated the distance and nodded my head. The hardest thirty paces I had ever taken.

Twenty-Eight

I had made it. I grinned in wild triumph and shivered with exertion at the same time. Hands trembling, I examined myself. My hands looked normal. My heart was pounding, but felt right in my chest. My face felt familiar under the slightly sticky touch of my sweating palms. Even inside my boots, when I shook them off and exposed bare skin into the freezing air, there were no hidden hooves, nor claws at the end of my legs. I sighed hugely. Upon initial inspection, I was still entirely human.

Why had I made it, when so many others had failed? I could not be sure, but I imagined it was due to natural resistance, and perhaps also due to a sort of acquired resistance I had gained over recent days. It could all have been due to my focused effort to cross it, as well. Others had likely panicked. Perhaps they had stumbled, or turned back, or flailed helplessly and spent hours there, long enough for the change to occur. Steady, determined plodding was the way across, with never a look back, never halting, never faltering. I felt I had learned at least part of the key, but I certainly did not relish doing it again.

I pulled myself together and walked through a parking lot half-full of abandoned cars and around a building that had once been a bank and now had smashed out windows like blinded eyes. The pharmacy was near, and I realized that I could feel something new. Some twitch, not totally unlike the sensation that the shift line had given me when I’d first put my foot onto Linwood Drive.

The pharmacy was red brick and it was an old building, and had been built perhaps more than a century ago, not long after the town’s founding. The painted signs over the entrance were faded. Weathered foot-high letters spelled out Wilton’s. Doctor Wilton had owned the pharmacy but had recently hired another pharmacist to run it, a prim, bespectacled woman named Darla Howell who had vanished on the very first night of the change. The town gossips had whispered words about Darla and Doctor Wilton, as neither had ever married. The quiet words were things that no one had proven, but which had hung in the air around them for years. Now, of course, the gossipers were as dead as Darla herself, and their words as meaningless. No doubt, I thought, she had been one of the first to try to cross the barrier as I just had. I imagined her shock as she came into contact with the supernatural in the middle of her oh-so-orderly world. In the middle of an average town that was in the middle of America itself. After a long day’s work, she’d been caught in a spider’s web and her bewilderment would have turned quickly into terror and then perhaps madness. And for her, like for thousands of others, the spiders had finally come.

I pushed open the door to the Pharmacy. It was dark inside and the ancient bell at the top of the door jangled and scraped wildly against the glass, announcing my presence. I didn’t care. I entered the gloomy interior and pulled the door shut behind me against the winds which were now coming in off the Lake in hard gusts.

“Wilton?” I called with some force in my voice. The atmosphere of the place made one want to use a hushed voice, but I was not in the mood for meekness. I sensed a dark foreboding presence here. And something, something acrid clung to the air. It was an unnatural stink that was not ether or cleanser or bleach. It had an organic base to it, of some kind, that stink.

“Wilton!” I shouted, walking past the initial rows of comic books and hair products. I walked between the aisles, glancing down each one, wishing I had a working flashlight. There were rubber kid toys next to the comic books and then an aisle full of foot gel pads and foot massagers and deodorizers. The next aisle was full of aspirin and ibuprofen and the dozen other over-the-counter pain relievers that relieved about half of any pain you served up to them. The next aisle was all shampoos and conditioners and hair dyes. Last came the final aisle that led to the register in the back. It was full of tampons and prophylactics and I remembered as clear as day how I used to giggle and poke at them with my friends after school, in a distant era that seemed like centuries ago.

Those boys were all dead now, save for Vance, and somehow this made me angry as I approached the register. There was a door behind the register, it hung half open and a yellow light came from behind it. That back room was the very place, I knew, where alleged indiscretions were supposedly carried out by Wilton and Darla Howell. No one else, to my knowledge, had ever stepped back there.

“Wilton!” I roared. I hammered the little service bell she had sitting on the glass- topped counter. Inside, laid out like a movie house display case, she had rows of candies. The chocolates were always at the top and gum always lined the bottom. I’d steamed up and smudged that glass with my greasy kid- fingers a hundred times, perhaps a thousand.