screaming, that she wouldn’t tell on me, or leave me. But I knew that having lizard fingers, even in a glove, would be a turn off for any girl. I moved behind the X-ray shield, with its tiny window of leaded glass, to put it on. There was a sink back there, and I felt the dry chaffing of my leathery new hand when it came out of my pocket. I wondered if it was part sea turtle, it felt so dry and chapped. It was not at all happy to be away from the watery world it was created in. I turned on the tap water, wanting to wet my curled thick fingers just a moment before I cruelly shoved them into a rabbit skin glove. The sink stuttered and thumped. I’d forgotten, the power was out and the pumps hadn’t been on for days. Still, the faucet pissed out a dribble of cool water on my hand. I rubbed it over the whole thing, as far as it would go. It was like a teaspoon of butter spread over a mile of thirsty bread, but it felt good anyway.
“Do you need help?” called Monika delicately.
I shook my head and tried to jam my strange hand into the glove. The fingers were too thick, especially the knuckles. It was like putting on clothes two sizes too small. When I finally had it on, one of the glove fingers sagged and flopped emptily, of course. I only had three fingers and a short thumb now. Still, it looked pretty good if I kept it relaxed. If I clenched a fist, that one missing finger was obvious, but if I was careful, the whole thing would pass a lax inspection.
I managed to get a fake grin on my face when I turned back to face my faithful girlfriend. I held up the glove and wriggled my fingers a bit inside it. She smiled at first, but the wriggling was a mistake. The fingers move in an unnatural, clutching motion. I ignored her expression and kept the grin pasted on. I put the hand back down at my side.
“Thanks, Monika,” I told her.
In answer, she kissed me. We kept kissing for a bit, and then I noticed that it had grown quiet out in the hallway. I glanced at the door, and underneath, a faint kaleidoscope of lights flickered, as if there was a rainbow out there or maybe one of those disco balls doing a slow spin.
Someone had uncovered the lantern, I knew it in an instant.
I released Monika and strode to the door, throwing it open.
“Don’t look at it,” I told her over my shoulder.
She nodded in confusion.
Thirty-Five
Everyone was in the lobby. The lantern was still on the kid table, uncovered now. Wilton stood next to it, talking like a salesman doing a demo. The rest of the group was strangely silent. They stared at the lantern, and I knew what they were thinking and feeling. They were in its power, or soon would be. Would we fight to the death over it? I felt it tugging at me, even as I approached. A lime-green beam reached out and touched my eyes and my left hand clawed excitedly. I jammed it back into my pocket.
“What is it? What is it, you ask?” said Wilton, her eyes alight and almost as bright as the eye of the lantern itself. “It is the heart of the shifting, the end of any shift-line, like an anchor at the end of a chain. It is an artifact unlike the others you’ve seen. You’ve only seen shadows of the real thing, objects and beings altered from their original form by the creative chaotic power that sometimes glances randomly off of things that come too near. The Eye is a creation from whole cloth, there was nothing before it. With a single grunting thrust of power it came into being.”
No one said anything. I took two more steps forward, not quickly, not threatening, but closing the distance.
Wilton noted my approach, but kept talking to the people gathered around her.
“This is made of the very stuff of creation,” she said. She ran a caressing hand over it, and I saw she wore a glove of her own. Her hand was oddly shaped, and I thought of a beaver’s paw, or a dog’s. Inside that glove, I suspected there were furry pads and curved nails.
“Does everyone recall the old theory of Spontaneous Generation? From history class?”
No one responded. They just looked at her. No, I realized, they were staring at the lantern, not her.
“Centuries ago they noticed that frogs and fish and insects would appear if you created a pond artificially, or if you dried it up and refilled it. Wildlife would soon appear and flourish and thrive in a new pond far from any other water source, seemingly by magic. People took it as proof of the hand of a Creator hundreds of years ago, but it was all disproved by science since.”
She tore her eyes from the lantern to look at me. She smiled at me, and I knew it was the smile the cat gives the bird it’s brought in the house to play with and show off to the Master before killing it.
“But maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t all disproved. Maybe there was a hint of this power left over back then, and in any case, we don’t need any theories here. We are faced now with hard evidence of this creative power. We are living with it, trying to survive it. One might as well develop theories debating the existence of volcanoes during an eruption. The power we face is in truth as destructive as it is creative. Better to call it the power of chaos, the power of heat when applied to candle wax. The wax takes a new, splattered form, but is this the creation of a new form or the destruction of the old? I’d say it is one and the same, but what matters is that we are the candles.”
“What are they then, these forces you speak of?” I asked, stepping closer and playing her game. I didn’t look at the lantern, although I wanted to as much as the rest of them. They stood there, slack-jawed, mostly. Some of them flinched when I spoke, but none of them looked at me. Even Mrs. Hatchell just stared at the brilliant sprays of color that rippled and danced on the walls.
“I believe these forces have lain sleeping in the Earth, in the belly of our world, for all time, undetected by our fledgling sciences. Our only hint of them comes from our myths, our persistent stories of the past which we’ve all chosen to laugh off. The wisdom of those that went before us we consider the ravings of the mad and the ignorant. All superstitious nonsense and children’s fables, fabricated to keep them from straying too far into the forests.”
She had both her hands on it now, and she was gazing deeply into it. She kept talking, seemingly immune to its mesmerizing powers. I wondered if her voice was hypnotic.
“You all realize that magma bubbles and froths just a few miles below our feet, intense, destructive heat that could kill us all in an instant if it chose to? The supernatural forces are like that. They have been in the Earth all along, lying dormant. What makes a volcano happen? Or a rash of them? One finger of lava is sent up through a weak spot in the planet’s thin skin. That finger sprays out like a hose and fills the land with new molten minerals, killing and destroying everything it touches, making new islands in the sea or blowing old ones into history. We don’t question these amazing phenomena. We accept a long history of such events. Just as we accept the falling of chunks of the sky to Earth, wiping out vast areas and causing vast extinctions. Just as we accept the random new tilting of the Earth’s axis, causing ice ages and warming periods, causing life to wilt or bloom all over the globe. These upheavals are known. But this new one, this upheaval of the supernatural, is unknown to us. We’d forgotten about this one. Perhaps humans, as we now think of them, were created in one such upheaval long ago. Perhaps our confused history is full of such hiccups and belches of chaos.”
“I can accept such lofty theories about the age we now face and that there might have been previous such ages,” said a new voice, the Preacher’s voice. He stepped in our makeshift plywood doorway from outside and approached. He stared directly at Wilton, never glancing at the lantern. He avoided looking directly at it, just as I did. He glanced at me and I nodded and took a step toward Wilton. She shuffled her feet and frowned at both of us.
“What I don’t accept,” the Preacher continued, “is the embracing of the destructive powers of the shifting effect. I think a man might wield an instrument touched by the effect, with some peril, but through strength of will, it could be overcome. I’m less convinced that an artifact forged wholly in the fires of the supernatural can ever be controlled by a human. Not if they still planned on remaining human, that is. I’m willing to offer as proof, your sad sore foot, Wilton, and your hound’s paw, which you favor along with a dozen other abominations, I’d wager, beneath that shapeless garment of yours.”
She curled her lip at him, and her eyes flicked between us.
“Can’t you all recall the basic images that have stuck with us for all time?” the Preacher continued. “What
