B. Larson - Shifting

I turned back to the eye of the lantern, which was even more interesting than the Lady. I opened my mouth to speak, but of course, I only got a mouth full of water. I coughed, and bubbles burst out in a silver explosion.

She nodded. “Let go of that vile stuff from above. The atmosphere down here is oh so much smoother. Feel the water,” she said, and it was as if she commanded it.

I reached out my hand and groped in the water.

“You see how smooth it is? Nothing is smoother than that; there is no sensation like it. Not the finest minks or the softest gauze. None compare to the simple sensation of perfect, smooth, soft water.”

She was quite right, of course. I wondered why I had never realized it before. I worked my hands in the water around me, feeling the infinitely delicate touch of it.

“Take in the water with your lungs, you can breathe it,” she told me. “If you wish to speak, beyond a burble, you must do so in this world.”

I opened my mouth and breathed it in. It was a shock at first. I coughed, spasmed, and then the sensation of drowning died away. I breathed in and out, sucking water through my nose and mouth. The sensation was strange, but not entirely unpleasant. Somehow, in some way, it served to wake me up.

“Who are you then?” I burbled out. My voice sounded very strange in this place, speaking underwater. It was audible, but wavered in pitch and volume.

“Ah, a question!” she laughed then, and I almost fell in love with that laugh, that wonderful quavering sound. “You are indeed a strong one, to be able to ask me a question now. I am impressed, mortal, and I will grant you an answer, but only one. So, think hard upon what you wish to ask for you will hear no more answers for all of your existence.”

I thought hard, for she had bid me to do so. I knew the one thing I’d like to know above all others. “What killed my mother?” I asked her.

She smiled then, a slow thing, and her lips pulled upward impossibly far, until it stretched into the grin of a jack-o-lantern carved with an overzealous hand.

“He who did this thing is very close,” she said. I could tell that she savored my growing interest. “He is known to you as Captain James Ryerson, although that is not the name he was christened with.”

She watched my face then and floated closer, I could almost sense an animal lust in her to see my emotion, to feel what I did, to know my grief and anger. I felt these sensations, but they were deadened by the effects of her spell.

I saw something moving behind her, and I drew my sword in that smooth motion I’d practiced so well. My only thought was to protect her, to save her from whatever moved up with great stealth like a spider upon the ruined stone walls. My saber was shining blue now, unlike the tiny remote glimmer before. Now, in this place, it was like a shimmering blue-white length of frozen fire. I did not know why it shined so, perhaps it was the lantern, or the nearby shift-line, or the Hag herself. Or perhaps it was me.

Her reaction was instantaneous, in any case. She loosed a powerful, ear-bending screech that made me yank my head down like the snapping turtles that cruised the lake would when a noisy group of boaters approached. Then she shot up into the water, straight up, with alarming rapidity. The wake of her exodus rolled me backwards and I stumbled.

The Captain looked at me and the sword that burned in my hand. He had a long killing knife with a gleaming serrated edge in his hand.

For a fraction of a second, I was going to kill him. He was an assassin, and a single thrust would end the whole foul business. But, when the Hag vanished, so did my intentions. For a few long seconds, we just blinked at each other and scanned the dark waters overhead, but there was no sight of the Hag.

I realized, numbly, that it must be night now up there in the world of smells and wind and sound.

“What…?” I asked in confusion.

The Captain eyed me warily. He stared at my sword, which had lowered with drifting slowness to rest at my side.

I stopped looking for the Hag and turned my gaze back down to him. He didn’t walk upon the bottom as I did, but was in a more normal swimming position, lying on his side near the bottom.

“You can speak,” I told him. “If you just suck in the water, and empty your lungs of air, the water will let you speak.”

He shook his head. He pointed up, to the distant, invisible, impossible surface. I knew that somewhere up there winds blew and stars twinkled, but that was another place.

I pointed with my sword to the lantern. He watched the tip of my blade moving through the water and floated backward a bit, giving it some distance. I felt my senses coming back to me. I felt cold again. And I felt fear. But some of that dream-like quality to things stayed with me.

“Let’s take that with us,” I said. “I think it is the source of her power.”

He shook his head and pointed up again but I was already approaching the lantern. The truth was, I had enough self-control to try to leave this place, and to try to leave the Hag, but I didn’t want to leave the light in the lantern. I realized that I couldn’t leave it behind.

Accordingly, I laid hands on it and it shocked me. There was a silent blue flash. It wasn’t an electrical shock, not exactly, but every nerve in my hands was jolted with sensation. There are many things that stimulate human nerves: pressure, heat, cold, and the pain of severing or crushing damage. Picking up the lantern was like experiencing all of these rolled into one.

But I lifted it anyway, and I held on. I could not drop it and chance shattering the artifact, it was much too lovely for that. So I held on, howling, raving, for how long I’m not sure. It seemed like an eternity, but was probably less than a minute. I opened my squinched eyes again when the pain subsided and saw the Captain had not moved. He still floated there at the ruined stone walls, watching me warily.

I turned and moved slowly back to him, carrying the lantern. It was surprisingly heavy and dense. It was like carrying a cannonball. There would be no swimming to the surface with this thing in my arms.

I would have to leave the lake the way I came in. I would have to walk out.

We made it about as far as the fallen barn with the dead trees standing guard around it before my breath potion began to run out. It started as an odd tickle in my chest, which rapidly changed into a wild burning. It was a horrible sensation, worse than just drowning, because I already had drown, sometime ago when I’d sucked in that first lungful of murky water. I scrambled wildly, digging in my pockets. I never dropped the lantern, however, I never even considered it. I strained to hold it with my left hand while my right searched for the last potion frantically.

For one horrible moment I was sure that I’d lost it along the way. I couldn’t believe I’d been such a fool as to just shove the very breath of life into an open-topped coat pocket, and then proceeded to battle a dozen horrors and trust to luck I wouldn’t lose anything. Then I found it.

I used my teeth to tear open the rubber stopper that topped the bottle and sucked out the contents. It’s hard to drink something underwater while you are drowning and suddenly becoming increasingly aware that your lungs are already full of water, but somehow I managed to get most of it down. I almost puked, but fought it down savagely. I had to hold on to every drop.

Over the next minute or so the world almost went black. I just stood there, on the muddy bottom of the lake, head bent, waiting for death or life, not knowing which would occur first.

I held up the lantern still, never did the thought of letting it go cross my mind. It warmed my hand now rather than burned it. Strangely, it felt less heavy, rather than more, as I died. I had to wonder, vaguely, as my mind faded toward oblivion, if it had become lighter or I had become stronger. I felt there, in my hand, a new, strange, twisting sensation that I could not identify. At that point, I believe I lost consciousness, at least for a moment.