B. Larson - Shifting

“Some of us are already learning the inner truth. There are spurs on the backs of hands. Tiny tails sprout, hidden in underwear. Extra teeth in the back of mouths. People will hide it at first, terrified, hoping against hope in natural denial. This is how the last of us are going. We are the resistant ones, or the ones lucky enough to have been far from the fissures all this time. As the population is reduced down to those who are most resistant, we won’t change all at once, it takes a while longer.”

“What kind of proof do you have?” I demanded. I was having trouble buying all this. I’m sure, at least partly, it was because I didn’t like what I was hearing.

She chuckled, “I’m not running a government certified medical lab here with a crack research team, if that’s what you mean. But, I will tell you a few things: For one, our normal internal body temperature in this town is not 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit any longer. The average is now 99.1 degrees Fahrenheit and it seems to be rising. For another, I know of two people in the community right now who have deformities, minor ones that you would never find unless you stripped them down and examined them inch by inch. And you can bet there are others.”

I opened my mouth at this point and raised my index finger.

“And no,” she went on, waving my finger back down again, “I won’t tell you who they are. They seem stable and there is no reason for me to believe they are any more dangerous than anyone else in the group.”

I chewed my lip, thinking I still wanted to know. I wanted to know who to watch.

“Lastly, I’ve observed an increasing number of minor changes in the plant and animal wild life. It is my belief that they will pose our next major threat.”

“How so?”

She sighed. “So far, mostly humans have been affected. But what if a migrating flocks of birds turn into winged snakes-”

“I’ve seen a few of those,” I interrupted.

“I know you have, and what if the trees themselves- changed? ”

I thought of the articles in the newspapers I’d read. Hadn’t trees come to life somewhere?

“There are a lot of trees in this forest,” I muttered.

She nodded, clearly feeling she was victorious over my objections.

“There’s something else,” I said finally. I showed her the stone in my pocket. With the lights turned down, it was easy to see it still glowed.

Wilton touched it and spun it around gently, examining the impression. She looked at me sharply.

“The thing had hooves?”

I nodded, “I guess so. I’ve been seeing such prints quite a bit lately. I think this creature was leaving those prints.”

Wilton suddenly shoved the stone away from her, sending it skittering across the table. I snatched it up and put it back in my pocket. I gave her a frown of annoyance, but she didn’t seem to notice. She wrung her fingers one by one and stared at the desk.

“She’s one of the powerful ones, then,” she said quietly.

I asked her what she meant, but she didn’t tell me.

The first thing I did when I got out of Wilton’s office, of course, was search for Monika. I was yawning despite the coffee and munching on a sandwich that Carlene Mitts had handed me. The sandwich tasted great; neither Vance nor I could cook worth a damn. When we made sandwiches, they came out as Spartan, bachelor-house affairs with only bread, meat and maybe a smattering of one half-crusty condiment or another to glue it all together. I’d forgotten what a real sandwich tasted like when done by an artist such as Mrs. Mitts. There was pickle in there and thin onion slices, it was like a professional deli sandwich. I made a mental note to really lay on the complements next time I saw her.

I found Monika still talking to Mrs. Hatchell. At least she wasn’t crying, but I could see by her reddened face that there had been some tears at some point.

“Oh, hello Gannon,” said Mrs. Hatchell when I nosed the door open. “We were just talking about you.”

“Nothing too incriminating I hope, Mrs. H.” I said. All the ex-school kids called her Mrs. H.

Then Monika jumped me. I needn’t have worried about her forgetting me, I realized as I received her enthusiastic hug. She felt and smelled good, and I slipped my arm around her. We stood in the doorway and listened to Mrs. Hatchell for a while. No one ever ran into old Mrs. H. without stopping and listening for a while.

She was a widow who had lost her husband but not her wedding ring. She would always be married to the man she’d lost to a boating accident she often referred to as “some foolishness” a decade ago. She wasn’t anything special to look at, either. She was thin and had a slight stoop. Thirty years ago in high school, she had been pretty, I was sure, but now her bright eyes looked suspicious rather than curious. Calculating, rather than thoughtful. Not that she wasn’t a good citizen. She was, in fact, one of the best citizens in the county. I liked her, but she was hard to take in large doses.

She talked on and on about traumatic experiences and altered judgment and false redirection of blame and finally worked her way up to something she called The Counter-Intuity of Socionomic Insight. Whatever the heck that meant. While she talked I noticed her noticing that Monika and I were in contact the entire time. That was the funny thing about her, sometimes it seemed like she was just raving on in her own land of terminology and reciting tidbits from interesting articles she’d read, but she really was picking up everything that was going on in the room and sometimes, if you poked her the right way, you could get something useful out of her.

The lecture went on for some time. It was all about the mental state of our community in these trying times. We moved into the room and took up chairs around a small table, joining her. Monika’s eyes went glassy after about a minute and a half. I sympathized, it wasn’t even her native language. I lasted a bit longer, but soon I couldn’t hold on any longer either.

“Mrs. Hatchell,” I interrupted loudly.

“Yes?” she said, seemingly startled.

“Do you know about the shadows?”

“The shadows?”

“The ones that are partly changed, but live among us. Do you think you can spot them? Do you think they are dangerous? How are they feeling about all this?”

She gave a sudden intake of breath. “So you know about them.”

I told her briefly of my encounter in the woods. Monika watched me with big eyes as I told my tale.

Mrs. Hatchell eyed me suddenly, as if seeing me for the first time. “You’ve grown into a fine young man, Gannon.”

“Thank you, Mrs. H.”

“The Shadows,” she said. She took a sip of coffee and ran her finger around the rim of the mug. “I think they are thinking the same thing you would if you found a discoloration on your body-a strange one. First, you feel panic. Then, perhaps you would explain it away as bruise or an injury, but then… Eventually, you would realize you had to hide it from the others. You might live in fear then, feeling like no one was your friend, not the changelings outside nor the humans in here.”

I nodded. “Makes sense. But are they dangerous?”

“I don’t know. If the change affected their minds not just their bodies then yes, they may be. But we’ve never been attacked by anyone who looked purely human. All the changelings were very far gone before they tried to harm anyone else. So I would expect them to be somewhat safe to deal with.”

“But you don’t know.”

“Of course not. Are you thinking of an individual?”

“No, I’m looking for general information. I can see your point about not being too dangerous because no one in that partially changed state has ever been reported as an attacker… But maybe that will change now that there are more of them.”