The Shadow's Touch

by Scott VanKirk

I laid my hand down. At the moment of contact, the firestorm that I had felt the first time returned with equal fury. It howled through me, through my core and out through my hand. This time, I was more prepared and more able. I could watch more closely what happened. If I had doubts the first time about where the power came from, they were laid to rest. I was now able to see that it was flowing from the caduceus into me and then out through the crystal. What was flowing in was different from what was flowing out. I was obviously some kind of filter for the power from the artifact. Instinctively, I tried to slow the flow of that power and was partially successful. I was also able to look through that whirling vortex at Jen. I watched, in wonder and dread, as a growing red flood overwhelmed the blue in her aura. I couldn’t help but think that I was seeing the last bits of my friend disappearing forever.

  Just before the last bits of blue disappeared, I wrenched my hand away from the crystal. Both Jen and I slumped. I managed to stay upright, just barely, but she collapsed back onto the floor with blind eyes looking at the ceiling.

  I pulled myself up on my knees, exhausted, and tried to shuffle over to her. Gregg was there, holding her and calling her name. She blinked, once… twice. She groaned and tried to sit up.

  At that point I almost died. From behind me Herr Doktor Anderson barked, “What are you doing!” I swear my heart stopped beating.

  Unaware of my cardiac arrest, he rushed to Jen’s side and pushed Gregg away. I had never seen him this angry before. Despite the lack of practice, he did angry well. He shouted at us, “What did you do to her?”

  Being inherently tougher and less of a wuss than I, Gregg rallied first. “We were trying to fix her, asshole. It’s more than you ever did for her.”

  “How? By knocking her out? By playing doctor?” He bent and lifted Jen. “Get out of my way!” We did as he commanded and watched as he laid her gently on the bed and began stroking her head tenderly.

  “Did she hit her head?”

  “No, nothing like that,” I said.

  As he bent over her, he called to her, “Jen? Jen, can you hear me?”

  Jen blinked and gazed at Dr. Anderson. She seemed fascinated by him. She lifted her hand to his face and touched the skin of his cheek in wonder.

  “Did you give her anything?” Anderson asked.

  “No, of course not.”

  Gregg reached out and took her arm and got her attention. He said, “Jen, how are you feeling?”

  She shifted her attention from Anderson to Gregg and gave him another wide-eyed stare. Something about him caught her attention. She searched his face, her brows drawn down in puzzlement.

  By this point, Anderson had gone back to stoic-observer mode. The man had more resilience than bathroom mold. He stepped back to watch Jen and her brother’s interaction.

  When Anderson moved back, it gave Jen a clear view of me. I hovered over her, and anxiously hoped that I hadn’t made her worse. When her eyes shifted to me, she grew excited. She struggled to sit up. Both Anderson and Gregg immediately helped her.

  She spat out a rapid-fire question. Something like, “Tong putia sang to fegal in mooga booga lala gungadin?”

  She must have seen the confusion on my face so she raised her voice and repeated herself. This time, she said it more slowly, much like Americans are wont to do when someone speaks a different language and doesn’t understand what the natives are saying.

  She tried once more, louder and even slower. I just raised my hands and shook my head in the universal sign of, “I’m a clueless imbecile.” She tore her troubled gaze from my face and examined the room with eyebrows drawn in confusion.

  She looked down at the bed she sat on, and ran her hand over the blankets and sheets. Then she pulled at the cloth of her pajamas. Her eyes were filled with wonder again.

  “Voola boole wa wa wup?” When she saw our continued incomprehension, she repeated herself. I made the “Huh?” sign again.

  Gregg pushed in closer and said, “Jen! What’s wrong?”

  “Voola boole wa wa way. Icky tiki ta ping gwup!” She seemed terribly adamant about it, too.

  No matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t make heads nor tails of what she said. She didn’t look to be having any better luck. She tried several different phrases, but none of them made sense.

  Anderson pulled out his phone and called for someone to come in to test Jen for a stroke.

  I panicked. “You think she had a stroke?” I asked.

  He just did his inscrutable thing. “She seems to be suffering from schizophasia or a very extreme form of receptive aphasia.”

  Anxiously, I asked him, “Is that bad?”

  He used his burning gaze to fry his words into my brain. “It means that there has probably been neurological damage to the Wernicke’s area of her brain.” Seeing my incomprehension, he added, “The language processing part of her brain. She’s speaking gibberish because she cannot access her word memory. She can make sounds and hear words, but she cannot make sense of them.”

  Gregg put his hands on his head and yelled, “Fuck!” He walked away from the bed repeating himself several times.

  “Is she going to get better?” I asked Anderson.

  He just shot me his best laser stare. I tried to think, to grab for some hope. I said, “It sounded like she was talking in a foreign language or something. It wasn’t just gibberish.”

  “It’s possible to retain some sense of syntactic structure but still be unable to recall words.”

  I felt like mimicking Gregg. Jen sat watching our conversation intently. She looked to be listening closely, more focused than troubled.

  Gregg calmed down from his rant. “Okay, so what can we do?”

  “I don’t know that there is much we can do.”

  At this point, Jen got up from the bed, walked unsteadily past all of us and headed for the door.

  Gregg stopped her by grabbing her arm and saying, “Jen, where are you going?”

  Jen scowled at his hand.

  Gregg didn’t take the hint. “Jen, I think you should stay here until we can figure out what’s wrong.”

  She jerked her arm from his grip and scowled when he immediately grabbed her again. She said a few words and twiddled her fingers at him. She paused, looking confused for a second and then inhaled deeply and let out a sizable breath. She walked calmly back to the bed with Gregg and sat back down, erect, clothed in dignity and pajamas, searching our anxious faces. Her eyes finally settled on me. They narrowed as though deep in thought.

  After taking this in for a moment, Anderson said, “I think you two have done enough damage for now. I need you to leave for a while. I think she’s overwhelmed, and we need to simplify her environment. I have experience dealing with this sort of injury. At least I should be able to help her stay calm.”

  “I’m not going anywhere. She already looks calm,” Gregg said.

  Anderson stared at him, and this time I watched Gregg wither under his intensity.

  “Go get some lunch or something,” said the doctor. “You can come back. I just want to give her a little time and breathing room before we examine her for brain damage.”

  Gregg nodded mutely and said, “Come on, Finn.”

  McFreaky

  As we were walking down the sidewalk, through the park-like (barren) front lawn, Gregg punched a tree and said, “Damn it, Finn! I was sure that would fix her! I should have just listened to you. Now she’s got fucking brain damage. Ow!” He shook out his fingers and examined his bloody knuckles.

  “I don’t know, Gregg. I don’t know if I buy the whole brain damage thing. Some of what she said almost made sense to me.”

  Shady Oaks is out in the eastern boonies of Newark—well, boonier at any rate—and there is nowhere close to eat. We hopped into Gregg’s car and headed to the nearest Micky D’s. When we arrived, there was quite a line. We waited without talking. A guy, in some sort of heavy metal hair-band tee shirt, turned away from the counter with his lunch. He was walking past us,
and his face lit up when he saw me. He veered over towards me. He wore two long, glitzy earrings, which swung from each ear. When he was directly in front of me, he poked a lazy finger at my chest and said, “Hey Tiger! How’s the naughty boy?” He scanned Gregg lasciviously and raised an eyebrow. “And who’s this delicious little chocolate morsel?”

  “Uh, this is my friend, Gregg,” I stammered.

  He smiled slyly and said, “Hi, handsome, any friend of Tiger’s is a friend of mine!” He presented his hand to Gregg in a way that made it look as if he wanted Gregg to kiss it. Looking as flummoxed as I felt, Gregg shook the man’s hand quickly.

  The man arched an eyebrow at me, and said with a hint of reproof, “Aren’t you going to introduce me, Tiger?”

  “Uh, Gregg, this is, uh…” I racked my memory, trying to remember him. I couldn’t believe I’d ever forget someone like this. In fact, he felt a little familiar. His name was… “Max.”

  Apparently, I got it right, because Max smiled brightly. “Charmed, I’m sure!”

  He gave a little wiggle and then said, “Well, as fun as this is, I have to run. You two behave now! Buh-bye.” He wiggled his fingers at us and turned to leave. He said to Gregg over his shoulder, “Make sure Tiger shows you ALL his moves.” He shimmied his butt suggestively, and then he added the coup de grace with a big wink. “He will blow your mind!” With that, he was gone in a flurry of fast food bags, swaying hips, and dangling wrists. Gregg raised his eyebrow and said, “Tiger?”

  I opened my mouth to say something, but I had no idea what, so I closed it and tried again. Just when I was sure my life couldn’t get any weirder, it had.

  Gregg started laughing. “Finn, what the hell was that all about?”

  I shook my head, my face turning red. “I have no idea.”

  “You knew his name! Where did you meet him? That guy is fruitier than a San Francisco poodle groomer’s convention!” He laughed harder.

  I was burning by this point. “I swear, I have no idea, Gregg! None. I just guessed his name!”

  He pointed behind me and said, “Suuure…Tiger, you’re up, go order something. Make sure to show me some of those moves while you’re at it!”

  I muttered at him under my breath as he almost hyperventilated with laughter. “Yeah, you’re one funny guy.”

  I tried to ignore the burning of my face and ears and ordered a McBurger, McFries, and a McDr. Pepper. I didn’t stick around to hear Gregg order, I just told the cashier to put it all on Gregg’s bill.

  Even being stiffed for lunch, Gregg was still smirking when he came to the table with our McFood. “You owe me eight-fifty.” He gave me an exaggerated wink and added, “Tiger.”

  “Gregg, I swear, I’ve never seen that guy before, honest!”

  “Holy tamale, that guy is a hoot! You have to admit it was pretty funny.”

  “If it had happened to you, then it would be funny,” I countered.

  He laughed again. One thing the incident did was take our mind off Jen for a time. While we ate, we tried to come up with scenarios that would result in that encounter. Someone’s practical joke was my favorite. Closet-flaming-homosexual-me was Gregg’s.

  I found the whole ordeal speeding the onset of my McIndigestion™.

  I got a little respite when he headed back to order something for Jen, and I went to the bathroom. As is often the case when I was sitting on the toilet, a thought pushed into my brain. (Some sort of weird application of Newton’s third law). I finished my business and joined Gregg outside.

  “Gregg! I know why what Jen was saying was so familiar!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Gregg, she was speaking Illyrian,” I said.

  “Illyrian.”

  “Yes, Illyrian! Remember when I was working on a language dictionary for my game a couple of years ago? That’s what she was speaking.”

  “Get out of here!”

  “No, really, you have to take me home so I can get the lexicon I started.”

  “Finn, Jen wasn’t gaming with us when you came up with that.”

  “I know! It’s freaking me out, too, but it makes sense. All along she has been talking about things from my gaming world! Gregg, I swear it’s coming from the crystal!”

  “I need to get back to see her,” said Gregg.

  “We have to get my list of words. I know right where it is! I’ll be in and out, and we will be back here in a half hour.”

  I finally convinced him. It took about 45 minutes before we arrived back at the facility.

  I tried to follow Gregg to Jen’s room again, but burly attendant Tom stopped me before I got very far down the hall. Gregg just kept going.

  “Get out of my way! I have to go see Jen!”

  “No, you are not going to see her. Not without the doctor’s permission.”

  “Come on, Tom! This is important!”

  “Sorry, Finn, doctor’s orders.”

  I shouted to Gregg’s receding back. He came back when I waved my notebook at him. He took the book, and I helplessly watched him continue down the hall. “Where’s Anderson?” I asked Tom.

  “He’s probably in his office.”

  “Am I allowed to go see him?”

  He just nodded. My amazingly cutting remark perturbed him not at all.

  I had planned on just storming into Dr. Anderson’s office, but the door was shut and locked. I had to knock. That takes a lot of the wind out of one’s sail.

  The door clicked, and I heard Anderson say, “Come in,” from the other side of the door. I opened it. He was sitting across the room behind his desk.

  I walked in and said, “You really have a buzzer for your door?”

  He put down the pen he had been using, put his elbows on the table and placed his finger tips together. “Yes, I find it useful.” He gestured to the chairs in front of his desk and said, “Sit down, Finn.”

  I swallowed my nervousness. He observed me like a cat watches a mouse playing innocently in front of it. Once I sat, he continued to stare at me. I knew him well enough now to know he would sit like that for a long while if it suited his purposes, so I short-circuited the process.

  “Jennifer Washington does not have a damaged Warner’s area.”

  “It is Wernicke’s area,” he said, carefully timed to keep me unbalanced.

  It worked. “Uh, yeah… anyway it’s not damaged. She’s just not speaking English.”

  This was obviously something the doctor did not expect. He folded his fingers and rested his chin on them.

  This time it was his carefully timed lack of comment that threw me. I’d been expecting at least a sneering reply. “Uh…yeah, she’s speaking Illyrian.”

  That got a raised eyebrow, “Illyrian?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who speaks Illyrian?”

  “Uh, only Jen, as far as I know. I know a few words, but that’s it.”

  “Finn, are you deliberately mocking me?”

  “Uh, no sir. Illyrian is spoken by people who live in Illyria. It’s the name of my gaming world.”

  He sat back in his chair with a pained expression, closed his eyes, and took a deep breath. “Go on.”

  “Look, I think that amethyst crystal came from a real place called Illyria. I think it contains the memory of the high priestess of the Crystal City.” Anderson’s look was chilling, so I hurried on before I lost my courage. “Illyria doesn’t exist anymore, but it did at one time.” I tried to choose my words carefully. I knew how I sounded and didn’t want to thoroughly torpedo my credibility by spouting off words like “magic.”

  “I believe that Illyria was destroyed in a war against another race. The shadows were the enemy’s weapons or allies or slaves—I’m not certain which. For some reason, when I grabbed the crystal at the same time Jen did, it somehow transferred some of those memories from the crystal to her mind.”

  Any minute, the doctor was going to blow his top. I knew it, so I pushed the story out as fast as my mouth could move.
“The first time, she got parts relating to the war, but not enough to put it all in the proper context. That was why she was so afraid and confused.”

  “Finn—”

  I talked over his interruption desperately. “The same thing happened to my mother before I was born! I swear! You can ask my dad!”

  That stopped him. He leaned back in his chair, placed his hands on his desk, and studied me further.

  “My mother was institutionalized after my father gave her the crystal. Some of the things she said were the same things Jen mentioned. I think the crystal is where my game ideas came from, only they didn’t overwrite my brain. That’s why I recognized the language Jen was using.”

  His silence unnerved me, so I kept talking to fill it. “The last couple of days, Jen has been begging me to do what I just did. Yesterday she convinced Gregg that we had to try, and the two of them double teamed me. I didn’t want Jen to go around crazy for the rest of her life, so we grabbed the crystal together, and there was this rush of fire through me, and I could see the Priestess’s aura grow larger while Jen’s grew smaller.”

  “Don’t you think it would have been a smart idea to talk me or her parents about this before you tried it? Real or not, it was remarkably rash, self-centered, and dangerous not to pass this by Dr. and Mrs. Washington and me.

  “But, the Washingtons wouldn’t let me! Dr. Washington still thinks I drove her crazy in the first place.”

  “It sounds to me like you believe that, too.”

  “But I…” I stopped and slumped into my chair. “Yes, I do. Somehow, I did this to her. Don’t you understand? I had to do something to try to undo it… and no one would have believed us, anyway, if we had asked first. Most days, I can’t even believe it myself.”

  Dr. Anderson took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and got up from his chair. He started around his desk and said, “Finn, come with me.”

  Uh oh. “Where?” I didn’t even try to keep the apprehension from my voice.

  Reaping What Was Sowed

  “I want to show you some things.” The doctor walked past me to the door. I stood up in a hurry to follow him. He led me up the hall to the common room and then down another hall. He knocked on the half-open door of a room and entered when the occupant invited him in.