B. Larson - Shifting

I shook my head in bewilderment. “The shift just makes monsters and warps the mind and body. What possible use is there for that? You might as well embrace a rash of earthquakes.”

“You’re wrong!” she declared. “What it does is change things. Why should it only work random changes upon us? Why can’t we use it to change things to our liking?”

I considered the idea.

“The shift is like fire, Gannon. Flame can destroy a forest or a town when it is wild and unchecked, but if controlled, it gives us light, heat, transportation and weaponry.”

I looked at her in sudden understanding. “You’re talking about sorcery.”

She stared at me and that one wild eye gleamed now, rather than glowed. “Yes! Yes, exactly. I’m Redmoor’s first sorceress. I’m sure there are others out there in the world, certain of it, in fact. But perhaps I’m the first of the new age in this place once known as Indiana.”

“So, what have you come up with?”

I saw her teeth then, for the first time, as she showed them beneath her cowl in what I took for a yellow grin.

“I thought you’d never ask,” she said.

She hobbled back through the door behind the register and vanished into the oily yellow light. I followed her with trepidation. At first, we entered a small office festooned with catalogues and strewn with paper prescriptions and shipping orders that had fallen like leaves, forgotten and useless now.

The yellowy light came from a door to the far side of the office. We went to this and she pushed it open, biding me to follow with a gesture. As I approached the source of light I realized it was also the source of the odd stink that permeated the place. We entered and a very strange sight met my eyes.

In the center of the laboratory, which is what it had to be, was a very large steel sink of industrial size and capacity. It stood over a brazier full of burning charcoal. The coals were searing orange covered in a frost of white ash. In the sink boiled a foul and vicious liquid and it was this liquid, mixed with the glowing of the coals, that made the yellow light. It shined like sunshine.

All of this was far from being the oddest thing in the room, however. That distinction belonged to the sewn sack of pink skins that hung suspended by cords from the ceiling. The sack shivered and dripped. The drippings fell into small catch basins which were cunningly placed beneath it. V-shaped metal channels ran down from these catch-basins to run the dribblings down into the industrial sink, which I realized was serving as a bubbling cauldron.

“Oh my, look at the coals,” she said and scuttled to get out a fresh bag of barbeque briquettes. She spilled a dozen or so black lumps into the brazier and it flared a-new.

“What in the hell…” I said trailing off as she beckoned for me to come to the other side of her contraption.

I came over and looked as she showed me a distillation line that was coming from the bubbling cauldron. It had filled a small plastic vial perhaps a third of the way. The vial, I realized, had an eyedropper built into the cap. It was a liquid dispenser for children’s antibiotics. Beside the one being filled were four others.

“My production is up!” she declared. “The purity of it, as well.”

“What is it, and what kind of skin is that sack made of?” I demanded, jabbing a finger at the foul pinkness that shivered and burbled and dripped overhead.

“It is the skin of changelings, of course,” Wilton told me calmly. “And this, this is a mix of many things.”

“Such as?”

“Such as the waters of the Lake, the blood of trees that are near enough to life to shiver when I harvest it-” she paused at my shocked look and chuckled. “Oh yes, there are quite a few of them that are partially awake around town. And it contains the blood of the flying things, just a hint of that, and many other things that-well, had best be left unnamed.”

My horror-struck face made her laugh.

“Don’t you want to know why it glows?” she asked gently.

I nodded.

“Because I leave that sack out in the middle of the shift line for a long time, a day or so, tied to a line. Then, when it ripens, I drag in the line. It is a liquid distillation of the shifting effects, and I use it as a base.”

“A base for what?”

“Potions, of course.”

“For what purpose?” I managed to croak out. The smell was overpowering in the lab and I wanted to leave. I rubbed at my nose and my face. I’d smelled horse piss I would rather drink than this stuff.

“The key ingredient, I think, is the water of the lake. It took me a while and a lot of reading up on alchemical formulas, mind you. But what it does, essentially, is relieves the breathing.”

“All this to make an asthma medicine?”

“No, no, it relieves the subject from the burden of breathing. It allows one to hold ones breath, or even to breathe things other than air.”

“Death does that as well,” I commented.

She smiled at my joke and offered me four of the potions. Each had only an ounce or so of liquid in them.

“I’ve rigged them up so they can be consumed underwater. All you have to do is cut the rubber top, the bulb of the syringe, and suck the contents out. Optionally, you could unscrew it and squeeze the liquid into your mouth, but some of it would probably be lost in the waters.”

I opened my mouth, and then shut it again. I didn’t know what to say. “This is absurd,” I finally managed. “What is all this for? What do you think I’m going to do with this disgusting stuff?”

“It doesn’t taste all that bad,” she said, with a tiny hint of hurt in her voice. “The potions are of course for you, the Captain and the Preacher. I’m concerned that their doses have run out by now, and I’m giving you enough for all three of you.”

“How long does it last?” I heard myself ask, still disbelieving that I would even entertain the idea of what she was proposing.

“I really don’t know, a day at least, I believe from my own experiments.”

“Do you really think I’m going to the bottom of that huge dark lake trusting to some kind of magic you just worked up?”

“It’s easy enough to test. Just go to the lake and take it and stick your head beneath the waves for a while.”

I gawked at the potions and at her. All in one sick second, I realized that I might actually try it.

I followed her out of the laboratory, thinking hard. When we got back to the register, she offered me another chocolate bar and I took it, absently stuffing it into my pocket with the four potions.

“Malkin told me to beware the Hag,” I said, looking at Wilton intently.

“Yes, yes, and good advice it was, too,” she replied. She seemed oblivious to my meaning.

“Doctor Wilton-Beatrice,” I said, using her first name. “What is a Hag? Describe such a thing to me.”

“The Hag is a well-known element of every fairytale and myth from across the planet!” she replied with gusto. “She’s hideous, and a witch. More than that, she’s evil and powerful and tricky. Every story from the Sleeping Beauty to Hansel and Gretel is based on the Hag. But in our modern terms, we’ve got one near at hand. I think that thing you met in the woods is our Hag, come back to life after centuries of sleep, like that elf Malkin you met.”

“A solitary female bent on witchcraft, eh?” I said, eyeing her. “And what would you call your research, if not witchcraft?”

She opened her mouth, and then closed it. Finally, I saw understanding in her eyes. She laughed. “No, no. My work is different. I’m a woman of science. I want to understand this new phenomenon and work with it. I’m a chemist who has turned to alchemy, admittedly, but I’m not some ancient spirit come back to haunt humanity, some beast from below bent on evil. Quite the opposite, I’m defending us! Gannon, I am your only hope. How can you beat what you don’t understand? How can you understand it without studying it? Besides, I don’t want to help this Hag of the Lake, I want to defeat her.”