B. Larson - Shifting

The well stones went by my face for a long time. I felt like I was burying myself, but fought back the panic and kept gently sinking. At the rocky bottom, there was an opening in the side of the well. I crawled inside and up into a large air pocket. The air was very dank and very stale. Doubled over and breathing hard was the Captain.

“Don’t,” he said, “don’t use any of the air. You don’t need it. Not much oxygen left in it.”

I saw then there were tanks down here with him. He’d brought his own oxygen at least. Smarter than I was. I wondered how long I had before I was gasping like a fish.

He choked down the potion and seemed to relax a bit. He slid back against a wall.

“Thanks for bashing my face in,” he gasped. “Moron.”

I nodded and shrugged. I snuck in a gulp of air, figuring he would be okay soon. It felt so good to fill my aching lungs again. Even if they didn’t need the air, they felt like they needed it.

“Okay, okay, you can talk now,” he told me. “I think it’s working. I won’t need oxygen soon.”

“So strange,” I said, stopped, choked, and coughed up some water. I was alarmed. I wondered how much water was in my lungs. I kept coughing and choking for a bit. When I was finished, I said, “So strange not to breathe.”

He nodded, closed his eyes, and leaned back. His sucking breath had slowed down some. “Yeah.”

“Is the Preacher down here?”

He shook his head, “Haven’t seen him. Came down here, looked around, but the things from the graveyard over behind the church found me and chased me back here.”

“Things?” I said.

He nodded.

“Things like back on the beach?”

“Yeah, but with a lot less meat on them. They don’t float. They came out of the local graveyards down here, and they seem to like it down here. After all, this is their hometown.”

“What about the Hag?”

“The witch-thing? She only comes out at night. She does something in the church, something that lights up the town,” he was talking almost normally now, and I figured that neither of us was using up any oxygen anymore. So strange.

“How did you end up in here?”

“I was just checking things out. I had already investigated the well and found this reeking air pocket when I tried out the church and the skeletons came after me, I lost them down here. They aren’t big thinkers.”

He laughed then, and it was a bitter thing.

He caught my eye and reached out a hand.

“Thanks,” he said, sounding as if it was an unnatural word to him. I took his hand and we shook. As far as I knew, that was the only handshake he’d ever given to a man in Redmoor.

“You don’t leave a man behind.”

I shook my head.

“I thought about swimming straight out to the surface, but I knew I’d get the bends. We have to be about a hundred feet or more down. The potion ran out and I’ve been living on these two tanks and on the air pocket. There are two of us now, I say we fight our way out.”

I shook my head. “I came all this way down here to investigate. I’m going to see what that glow is about.”

“You’re crazy,” he said flatly. “It’s swarming with those things. And the Hag, she is out there somewhere.”

I considered telling him about the time distortion that Monika and I had experienced. Maybe he thought he had been down here for only a day, but really it had been a week or two. But this wasn’t inside a changeling dwelling, he wasn’t really their guest, which usually seemed to be the case in the histories of such things. I really didn’t know how long he’d been down here and it didn’t really matter, as long as we could get out.

“How long does the breath potion last?” I asked him.

“A few hours.”

My mouth sagged open. I’d already been down here an hour. Perhaps it had been two.

“Gannon, if you are going out there, I’m not coming,” he told me. “Thanks for the breath potion, but I’m going to make a run for it. I’ll wait half an hour, and then I’m climbing to the shoreline and out of this pit.”

Deciding there was no time like the present, I took out my sharpening stone and ground away the nicks in my saber’s blade. There was a notch where I had cut through some particularly tough bone.

The Captain watched me pensively. His eyes were on the stone and the shine that it emitted. Somehow, down here the glimmer was more noticeable. Finally, he could not keep quiet any longer.

“You are enchanting it. The blade is glowing.”

I smiled grimly at him. “I’m full of surprises.”

“I don’t think a sword will do it, even a magic one.”

“You’re afraid of her.”

He flashed me a look of annoyance. “Yeah. Yes, I am.”

I could tell he did not like admitting it.

As I struggled up out of the well shaft, which felt so much like a rocky, underwater tomb, I imagined that I now knew what it was to be a vampire. The bitter cold of the water clawed at my face, shocking it anew. I had become accustomed to air again very quickly, no matter how stale it was. Behind me, the Captain would either follow or he wouldn’t. I was determined.

When I climbed up out of the well and onto the lake bottom, I noticed the blue light was brighter than before. Whatever it was, that sky-colored flame, it was lighting up the green-black gloom of Elkinville.

I crossed the churchyard, the first human to do so in perhaps three generations. The church had no doors or roof left, but inside, there were still some pews visible beneath fallen beams and murky sediment. I went through it, and found my way out the back wall, which had fallen away to reveal the graveyard.

And there it was: the source of the majestic light. It was beatific and I immediately pitied the Captain, who in his fear might never lay eyes upon its glory. The flame was due to a large brass lantern with a prism inside of some clear substance, perhaps cut crystal, or even diamond, I could not know. The light that shone out of it wasn’t all blue, I could see now; it shot out a rainbow of colors in various directions. In our direction, back toward Redmoor, the color was bright, pale blue, the color of underwater artic ice. The lantern sat upon a large gravestone that was shaped like a pyramid. I could see no source for its luminescence, but I could feel the tickling nearness of the shift line that I’d followed down here. The lantern, with the prism inside, atop its drowned gravestone, must have been about in the dead center of the shift line.

Then, suddenly, I thought I had it. Perhaps, just maybe, it was the source of the line, or maybe it was the terminus of the line. Perhaps, it was the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

“You are the first mortal to have laid eyes upon it in many centuries,” said a soft voice at my side. I startled, but even so, it took an effort of will to remove my eyes from the prism. I turned my head slowly, toward the voice, as if in a dream. Standing at my side was the Lady of the Lake, the creature I had walked and talked with in the woods and on the lakeshore. Somehow, I didn’t feel terribly threatened. I knew that I should, but the sensation was a vague one. I wondered if this was the sensation one had when a spell was laid over the mind. It was not important, I told myself.

The Lady-I found I could not bear to think of her with that other term Hag- was a tall woman with a white gown that seemed made to float and flow around her. She shined with inner light, emitting that same pale blue radiance that the lantern did. Her floating black hair was astoundingly long and radiated out from a face that was not uncomely. Her pupil-less, mirror-like eyes did have an alarming quality to them, but somehow they didn’t bother me.