The Shadow's Touch

by Scott VanKirk

  “That’s because he has a brain, Dave. I wouldn’t believe me either if I didn’t have so many bruises, and Jen, Gregg, and my dad weren’t all sent to the hospital. Of course, if you need proof, just go look at the forest growing in my back yard.”

  “Come on, we want to meet her.”

  I was amazed that I hadn’t thought to try this before. The question had never even crossed my mind, and just thinking about it got me excited. I had sadly assumed I’d never being able to hold her again. Could Spring actually do it?

  Let’s find out! said Spring.

  An enormous weight seemed to press me down into my seat. I could feel Spring begin to pull on me, drawing on my stamina. My heart started beating faster and my breath started becoming harder. A vague image of Spring appeared in front of me. The image contracted and coalesced, becoming more solid. Suddenly, there she was, in front of me.

  As usual, she left me stunned, but this time her sheer animal attraction didn’t do it. Her size did it. She stood on the table—all six inches of her. For the first time, she wore clothes. She had on a short, cropped tank top, which showed off her slim waist and belly button. Her dark green, wavy hair was in a long ponytail that cascaded to her ankles and her tightly painted-on shorts left little to the imagination. She bounced up and down causing a seismic reaction in her tiny, but well-stuffed shirt and turned to my friends.

  She waved and said, “Hi guys!”

  This was unexpectedly hard on me mentally and physically. I was sweating now and panting for breath. It felt like I had run a marathon and was still pushing hard. On top of the fatigue, disappointment crushed the joyous anticipation that had started to build in me. She obviously felt it, because she turned back to me. Her face was a reflection of my disappointment— she would have given one of those big-eyed sad puppy-dog paintings a run for their money. Then, she just faded away, and took the strain with her.

  I could tell my feelings hurt her, too. She thought it would make me happy to see her. I’m sorry, Spring! It’s just that for a moment.…

  Suddenly, I heard crying in my brain. I can tell you that it was a truly weird experience. I suddenly felt ashamed that I hadn’t thought more about her feelings. After all, she had gone to the effort to do what I had asked and had been thoughtful enough not to knock me out with the effort.

  Spring? Come on, I was just not prepared for you to be so small.

  She sobbed some more and then wailed, You don’t love me anymore!

  What? Of course, I do, Spring! You know I love you! You can just read my mind to know it’s true!

  Really?

  Really.

  Sniff. Okay, I forgive you. Her whole tone changed, and she said happily, You are my sun, my rain, my root!

  Suddenly, a suspicion about her drama queen performance struck me. Maybe I needed to cut back on cheesy romance movies. I was just about to confront her, when Dave’s laughter sidetracked me.

  He was having the time of his life, laughing uproariously. Great shaking peals of laughter rolled off him. He tried to say something, but he couldn’t get it out. Everyone else had big smiles on their faces as well. Jim, who’d just come back, looked confused.

  Dave started beating his fists on the table. He managed a few words. “Oh! Oh, my god!” came out between laughs. Now, Gregg and Jeff were laughing, too.

  Dave tried to force the words out but only got as far as “Oh, Finn!” before he lost it again. I knew what he thought, and I could feel my face flame red. I tried to stuff the embarrassment away.

  I said over Dave’s laughs, “Dave! Dave, she was human-size before!” There was no response so I tried again. After that failed, I lowered my voice and said as dangerously as I could, “Dave, don’t say it.” That just made him laugh harder. He kept trying to talk, and I said, “Dave, if you say it, I’m going to hurt you. So help me god.”

  I repeated my threats several times until Dave just fell out of his chair holding his stomach, laughing and trying to catch a breath. I just propped my face with my hands, doing my best Dr. Anderson on him, and waited until he calmed down.

  “What did I miss?” Jim said.

  Gregg put out his hand with his finger and thumb about three inches apart and said, “Finn’s dryad is only this big.” With an evil grin he added, “We thought she’d be taller.”

  Of course that set Dave off again. While Jeff and Gregg filled in Jim, Dave managed to control himself. He looked at me from the floor and lost it again, but finally the need to breathe overwhelmed his mirth, and he started gulping in shuddering breaths. By the time he was upright, and at the table again—his smile still flirting around on his face—he was still flaming pink, and his face was wet from tears. He rubbed his eyes to dry them and said, “Oh, my god, Finn! I haven’t laughed that hard in years. Thank you!”

  I continued my glare. “So glad you could have such fun at my expense.”

  “You have to admit—”

  “Dave!”

  “Okay! Okay! I’m done. I’m all better now.”

  I doubted it, but as always, I just couldn’t stay mad at him. Besides, if I honestly thought about it, it was pretty darn funny—if it had happened to someone else.

  It took us a while, but we finally got back on track. Soon, I told them what I knew about Erik Parmely. I told them everything that happened up to the point where Erik broke into the shop.

  “Get this: Parmely broke into the shop, broke open the skull, and stole my Uncle Mark’s effigy snake whistle, the one we retrieved from the mound. Right after that he went and shot his dad in the head and then shot at Mark and I later that night. Now there is a giant snake running around Newark, Ohio, killing people.”

  There was a moment of silence, and I could almost hear their brains chewing away like beavers at the hard outer covering of those ideas. “That’s just plain scary,” said Jim first.

  “No way. It’s got to be a coincidence,” added Gregg.

  I said, “I don’t know, Gregg. I had nightmares where I got to be inside Chester and Ricky’s heads while they were getting killed by the snake. In Ricky’s dream, I actually saw Erik turn into the snake.” I shivered at the thought of the baleful green reflection off its eyes as it prepared to strike.

  “Holy Fanged Fiend, Batman,” said Dave. He beamed at me. “That means that you and Erik are fated to fight to the death. It will be epic! The Mighty Finn and his teeny-weeny sidekick, The Green Hooter, versus The Evil Snakeboy. You’ll have to use your bear whistle to turn into a bear, track him down, tear him apart, and eat him.”

  I glared at him again—for all the good it would do.

  Jim said, “Wow, Dave, that’s a really pleasant image.” He said to me, “Dave does have an intriguing point, though. If the snake whistle can turn Parmely into a snake, then maybe the bear whistle does the same thing. Finn, I remember in the science lab when you told us the ghost at the mound played the whistle and turned into a bear.”

  Suddenly, it struck me. We were seriously talking about magic, about people turning into bears and snakes. I’d come to take it for granted that weird things were happening around me and to me, but I hadn’t actually allowed myself to put that label on it before. I groaned, and started banging my head against the table. My pathetic “No… No… No…” came out in time with the thumps. I finally laid my head down. “I am so hosed. Every time I think about any of this, it freaks me out! This is just not possible. I don’t believe in magic!”

  “Finn,” said Jeff. “Don’t be like Thomas Covenant! He was such a dick!”

  “It’s not exactly the same, Jeff,” Jim said. “Thomas Covenant was a leper and his survival depended on always keeping that fact in the forefront of his mind. From his viewpoint, if he let himself believe in The Land and its healing, it would be tantamount to suicide.”

  “He was a dick,” Jeff said.

  Dave said, “Jim, I’m with Jeff on this one. That guy was totally a dick. I’d give anything to get the chance he had. My wedding ring is going to be whit
e gold—just in case.”

  “Just in case you get leprosy?” asked Gregg.

  I held my hands up helplessly as my friends geeked out on the classic Thomas Covenant books by Stephen Donaldson.

  “Okay, guys, your point is noted. Can we talk about something else?”

  Jim leaned back and balanced on two legs of his chair, hands folded across his stomach. “Okay, so let’s take this at face value. According to Finn’s vision, hundreds, or thousands of years ago, a bunch of Native Americans fought and killed this big demon monster by turning into giant animals. The shaman then bound the spirit of the monster into its own skull so it couldn’t possess someone else. The heart you pulled out of the skeleton grants people the ability to heal and attract spirits and can supposedly free the monster spirit, but breaking the skull did it first. Now Erik has been possessed by this thing and uses the snake whistle to turn into a big effing snake. Meanwhile, the heart woke up a dryad and somehow caused Finn’s dreamstone to possess Jen—incompletely. Now Jen and Finn can both see auras and these black spirit demon things riding around on people driving them crazy. Finn can push them off of people, but they just go latch onto someone else. Jen is convinced that these black things are plotting to destroy the planet, and now she wants to finish the interrupted possession so she can stop them…”

  “And don’t forget, Finn has a six inch Hooter in his pocket,” interjected Dave.

  I glared at him. “Shut up, Dave.”

  Jim continued unperturbed. “Six inch hooters aside, did I miss anything else?”

  I banged my head another few times against the table again just to see if I would wake up. I didn’t wake up, but it did hurt. “Oh, God, that’s so lame!”

  Gregg didn’t seem fazed. “So, who is Il Saia, why is she stuck in the crystal and where did she come from?”

  Jeff leaned forward and started talking around a chip he was munching. “Yeah, despite what Thomas Covenant here thinks, she’s obviously real and she’s been communicating with Finn in his dreams, and we’ve been reliving her life when we play in Finn’s game.”

  Gregg, my fellow skeptic, finally jumped in. “How can it be real? No one’s found evidence of an advanced civilization before a few thousand BC, especially with buildings made of crystal and populated by humans, hobbits, gentle folk, and a whole bestiary of magical creatures.”

  “What about Atlantis? It was supposedly advanced, magical and was destroyed by something. Maybe these shadows did it,” Dave said.

  Jim waved the suggestion away. “Bah, Atlantis was mentioned twice in passing by Plato. It’s just mass hysteria and wishful thinking.”

  Dave laughed. “Yeah, and people don’t turn into snakes or bears or become infected with a case of the dryads.”

  “Shut up, Dave,” said Jim, sporting a pleasant smile.

  Jeff piped in. “Maybe it’s from an alien race? Wouldn’t that be awesome if it was the last record of a dying race that was shot out into the stars in the hope that someone would remember them?”

  Dave nodded his head. “Yeah, aliens make sense.”

  Gregg slapped his hand on the table. “Who cares? I just need to know how to get my sister back.”

  “Gregg is right,” I said. “We need to concentrate on things we know and solutions to the problems.”

  Jim flopped forward with his chair and grabbed a piece of paper and pen. “Okay, so what are the problems we need to concentrate on?”

  “My sister,” Gregg said. Jim wrote it down.

  I added, “That and the homicidal, possessed, snake-man, Erik.”

  Jim wrote that down too. “Is that it?”

  “Well… I guess I’d be worried about an army of hungry shadow demons planning on eating the world,” said Jeff.

  Jim nodded and wrote it down. “Hungry… demons… eating… world.” He looked up again. “Anything else?”

  “How are we going to make money off of this?” Dave added.

  “Shut up, Dave,” I said. Everyone else echoed this sentiment in one form or another.

  He spread his hands in supplication. “Well at least we need to think of possible public relations. If we’re going to be fighting demons and stuff, we at least need people to know that we are the good guys fighting for truth, justice, and free beer for all. We all need names and costumes to hide our secret identities.”

  Dave held up his hand to stem the rising tide of derision.

  “Look, if the bad guys know who we are, then we put all our friends and family in danger.”

  The thought of all the friends and family I’d already put in danger made my stomach hurt.

  While I was dwelling on this, Dave said something else.

  “Huh?”

  “I said, we need to come up with a name for your stick,” said Dave.

  “Uh, why?”

  “Come on, Finn. Powerful magic items always have names, and ‘Finn’s Magic Stick,’ though funny, is probably not what you want us calling it. ‘Finn’s Heart’ is too granola and ‘Wendigota’s Heart’ makes me think of sticky rotting things.”

  Gregg got up out of his chair and shook his head. “I’m going to the bathroom.”

  I pulled the heart off my neck and examined it. It was still a short, gnarled, black piece of wood that narrowed down to a point on one end and was wider and flatter on the other. It was exceptionally hard, with no perceptible flex to it. I had occasionally thought of it as a spearhead or a stake but I had mostly just thought of it as the heart or as my stick. Dave was right: “Finn’s Magic Stick” wasn’t going to cut it. But, other than that, I drew a blank.

  I’m embarrassed to say that we spent the next thirty minutes coming up with names for my stick. We were confronted with shape shifting killers, invading demons, and magic, and we were talking about names. Go figure. “Stick,” “pole,” “rod,” “Larry,” “wand,” “driftwood of doom,” and several others were mentioned and summarily discarded. As usual, when the English words weren’t cool enough, we headed to the Web to check out other languages. I pulled out my iPad, and we went through Greek, Latin, and Gaelic translations of power, stick, light (suggested by Spring), staff, and others. Nothing quite caught our imaginations.

  My mom finally came up with the winner. She and Dad came in about half way through our conversation. Dad headed upstairs, while Mom came down and listened for a bit. She suggested “caduceus” after the symbol of the medical profession. The gnarly and twisted stick did kind of look like one: wavy, thick on top, and thin on the bottom, so the name stuck. My friends were hugely impressed by the coolness of my mother. I was, too.

  Of course, Jim pointed out that the caduceus was actually the symbol of commerce from the Greek messenger god Hermes, and that we really wanted was the Rod of Asclepius. But caduceus sounded better and won the day. Besides, everyone knows what a caduceus is. Well, geeks like us did, anyway.

  By the time we broke for the night, it was about 3:00 AM and we hadn’t come up with much more than a list of questions:

  1. What had happened to Jen and how could we fix her?

  2. What were the shadows clinging to the doc’s patients and could they be destroyed?

  3. Was the thing possessing Erik the same thing that was on the patients? How could we stop him?

  4. Who was Il Saia? Was she from an ancient human or alien civilization, or was the crystal an advertisement for a virtual world from the future?

  5. What was the stick, the caduceus, and where did it come from? Why did it interact badly with the crystal? Did it pose other dangers?

  6. Was there any other magic stuff out there beside the effigy whistles we found? Did people cast spells? How about Vampires, werewolves, demons, angels, fairies, etc? How could we find out?

  7. Just what was I seeing when I saw auras and shadows? Could it be measured physically?

  8. Since I seemed to have dreams that were true, could I dream about other things that were real? Could I control them and use that ability to track Erik, or more importantly, to
see the future and get rich?

  9. How were we going to find powers for everyone else?

  10. Do any of Spring’s daughters (growing out back) need a boyfriend?

  11. Could I see ghosts now?

  The last four were Dave’s of course, though Jeff was just as excited about ghosts as Dave.

  After everyone had left, I sat silently in our family room with the drapes closed to try and digest everything. My leaden exhaustion convinced me to go to bed.

  Spring said, This One, I want to go dancing.

  I replied aloud, “I’d, uh, rather not. It’s too late, and I don’t like to dance.”

  You just don’t know how! We can learn together! Please Finn, take me dancing, I want to move like that with you! I want to feel the music moving through our body. It’s glorious. In my tree, I never knew any music different than the heartbeat of the world. How can you expect me to sit still now? I don’t want to grow old and wrinkly and die without going dancing.

  Stop worrying about it, Spring. You used to live in a tree and got along just ducky without dancing and trees never… almost never, move by themselves.

  I’m not living in a tree anymore.

  That made me feel a bit guilty.Can’t we just put it on the bucket list and watch television tonight?

  All right, but we will go dancing, right?

  Uh, right… I sighed mentally and felt herecho the sentiment. She had caught the sub-context running through my mind, which was something like, unless I can help it. My arm picked itself up and used the remote to change the channel—without me. God, my life just kept getting weirder. I fell asleep after a couple of hours while she continued to watch.

  I dreamed of dancing.

  Sharing

  The next day, I found myself looking in on Holly with Doc Anderson. She was awake but mostly unresponsive. They could get her to eat, if they hand fed her, but not much else. Her small, sad form nearly broke my heart.