Worldshaper

by Edward Willett

  The window to our right boasted the same goofily grinning cartoon coffee bean I’d soon be cutting into clay, although the one in the window also had stick legs and arms, and held an oversized coffee mug. Curly tendrils of steam rose from the mug, spreading to form the words “HUMAN BEAN.” Underneath the cartoon, on blackboard, was the day’s coffee bon mot: “God is a coffee drinker—He must be, to get all that work done in six days.”

  I took Brent’s hand again. “Can you sit for a bit?” I asked. “Once we have our coffee?”

  Brent squeezed my fingers. “I wish. But I really am just in transit. Also, I’m parked in a loading zone, and you know how . . . enthusiastic . . . the meter readers are around here.” He nodded down the street, where a guy in a bright-yellow vest was slipping a piece of paper under a pink Cornwallis PeoplePod’s windshield wiper.

  I laughed. “I think they work on commission.” We passed under the shadow of Human Bean’s striped awning. Inside were more tables, the counter, and, at the far end, a small stage where bands of . . . let’s say, diverse levels of musical ability . . . played some evenings. In fact, there was a band due that night, something called the DNA Eruptions. Which sounded messy. But I’d probably check them out anyway, since even a band of dubious quality beat sitting in my apartment binge-watching anime on StreamPix.

  Besides, there was a good chance my best friend, Aesha Tripathi, would be free: we were having lunch together (also at the Human Bean, pretty much my home away from home) and I’d ask her then if she wanted to join me that evening. She’d just broken up with her boyfriend, an aspiring actor who had discovered he was gay during rehearsals for a Fringe show. (Well, that was the way he told it.) And in the evening, the Human Bean served beer (Moose Drool Brown Ale—my favorite!) as well as coffee. We could get comfortably sloshed together and stagger back to my place. And then we’d binge-watch anime on StreamPix.

  Carter Truman, the ex-professional lacrosse player who ran the Human Bean, grinned as he saw us approaching the counter, white teeth flashing in his lean black face. “Ah, my favorite couple,” he said. “Don’t usually see you this time of day!”

  “Serendipity,” Brent said. “I just happened to have business at the post office, and look who I just happened to run into when I just happened to go into her shop.”

  “Every day the world is full of amazing happenings,” said Carter. “The usual?”

  “Large triple-sweet fat mocha latte for me,” Brent said. “Large skinny latte for my boss.”

  I had felt myself gain five pounds just listening to the name of Brent’s preferred obscene concoction. “And for me,” I said primly, “medium French roast. No room.”

  Brent and I looked at each other. “I don’t know how you can drink that stuff,” we said, in unison, an old joke, and Carter laughed again as he rang up the bill.

  “Irreconcilable differences,” he said. “Are you certain the two of you are really cut out for each other?”

  I leaned my head against Brent’s arm. “We’ll work through it,” I said.

  Brent touched his cheek to my scalp. “We agree on the important things. ‘Life’s too short to drink bad wine.’ ‘A fool and his money make great drinking companions.’ That sort of thing.”

  Carter’s grin flashed across his face again, and he turned away to work on our drinks. We moved to one side to let the people behind us reach the counter, where Carter’s place had been taken by Chloe, one of the endless series of interchangeable teenage baristas the Human Bean employed.

  The door opened. A blast of cool air ruffled my hair and blew napkins off the cream-and-sugar counter. Startled, I glanced out the big front windows. A dust devil whirled past, bits of trash caught in the vortex . . .

  . . . and beyond it, on the far side of the street, stood a man in a long black duster, face shaded by a cowboy hat, the wind whipping the hem of the coat around his high black boots.

  THREE

  PUSHING THROUGH THE door at the end of the mine tunnel, the ordinary-looking young man found himself in a large compound, surrounded on three sides by a chain-link fence, with the steep slope of the mountain behind him forming the fourth side. To his right tottered the rusty remnants of an ancient minehead. Ahead, close to the fence’s only gate, he saw a small house, its walls made of peeled logs. Even as he looked at it, a door opened, and an old man in a blue uniform came out, a shotgun in his hand.

  The armed cadre emerged from the tunnel behind the young man. The old man saw them and stopped in his tracks. He turned to rush back into the cabin, but took only two steps before he stopped again.

  The young man and his dozen followers strode forward. The young man spoke to the old man. He learned the old man was a retired policeman whose main function was to chase amorous and/or curious teenagers away from the abandoned mine site. He learned that the old man had no memory of anyone else coming out of the mine, although he did remember having to replace the chain locking the inner door. He also learned that, two days before, the old man had mysteriously misplaced an old black duster he favored, along with a cowboy hat with a rattlesnake-skin band, which his father had given him when he was a teenager. “Probably some tramp,” he growled to the young man. “I try to keep the fence in repair, but the ground shifts, and sometimes a bear takes an interest in something on this side of the fence, and tears a hole right through it. Not that I saw anything like that, but still—”

  “That’s enough,” the young man told him, and he fell silent.

  Soon after, the old man was making phone calls on behalf of the young man. By early afternoon, two white panel vans and accompanying drivers had arrived. The drivers were full of questions that died away the moment the young man spoke to them. After that, they were quietly obedient.

  “What do we call you, sir?” one of the drivers said to him. “What’s your name? If you don’t mind my asking.”

  “My name changes as I need it to change,” the young man said. “If you must call me something, call me by . . . what I suppose you could call my title.”

  “Sir?”

  “Call me the Adversary.”

  “Yes . . . Adversary.”

  As dusk fell, the Adversary sat in a camp chair and closed his eyes. As his cadre, the drivers, and the old man ate and found places in and around the cabin to sleep, he remained motionless.

  Night came, a dark night, the stars blotted out by swirling, boiling clouds that somehow remained in one tight swirling mass above the Portal, flashes of lightning occasionally lighting their twisting shapes. Still the Adversary sat.

  He did not move until long after midnight, though there were still hours to go until the dawn. His eyes flicked open. He looked up at the lightning-riven clouds. Thunder rumbled, as though in response to his gaze. Then he stood, stretched, yawned, and entered the house. In the kitchen, he found cold chili congealing in a pot on the stove, and ate it with a spoon he found in a nearby drawer. He found a can of beer in the refrigerator, and downed it.

  His sleeping bag had already been spread for him by one of his cadre. He lay down in it.

  He closed his eyes.

  Just before sleep claimed him, a small smile played around his lips.

  * * *

  Ice-blue eyes stared at the Human Bean—stared at me, though I must have been invisible from the sunlit street—and never wavered, even as cars, a city bus, and a semi passed between us.

  My heart raced, accelerated by remembered terror from my sleep paralysis of two nights before. I tugged at Brent’s arm. “Brent, it’s—”

  But the stranger was gone. Another truck had passed, and just like that, he had vanished.

  Brent looked down at me. “What?”

  I saw the man again, I started to say. From the middle of the night. From my dream. But he wasn’t there now, there was no sign he had ever been there, and it suddenly seemed that saying anything about what I had just
seen would be more likely to make me sound crazy than anything else. “Nothing. Forget it.”

  Brent frowned and opened his mouth to reply, but my coffee and his mocha-bomb and his boss’s latte all arrived, and the moment passed. He picked up his and his boss’s cups, glanced at his watch (carefully, so he didn’t spill the coffee down his shirt), and said, “Well, gotta get back. Sorry I can’t sit and chat.”

  I pecked him on the cheek. “Later,” I said. “We’ll chat. Among other things.”

  The corner of his mouth flicked up in the half smile I loved so much. “Deal.” He raised a hand, and then turned and went out into the street, where the wind had died as quickly as it had risen moments before.

  I picked up my own coffee and glanced at my own watch. Lunch with Aesha was still three hours away. Still plenty of time to get some work done. Besides the mugs I owed Carter, there was a craft show coming up at the Eagle River Arts Center’s Fall Fair in a month, and I had to have stock for my table. I did a lot of sales through craft shows—though not as many as I hoped to do through my shop—and I didn’t have much in hand. I’d have to work like a fiend to get ready.

  Not that I minded. I loved shaping . . .

  The thought died as I looked up from my watch, and saw the man in the duster and cowboy hat outside the window, now on my side of the street. For some reason, I registered a detail I hadn’t noticed before: the hat had a snakeskin band around it.

  Our eyes met. Most strangers look away when their gaze meets yours, but not him. Of course, I could have looked away . . . but I didn’t either, even though the eye contact felt so invasive that my hand clutched the top of my plaid flannel shirt without my even thinking about it.

  Then he turned and walked out of sight.

  Maybe if I’d run to the door, I could have seen where he went, but I couldn’t seem to move. I tried to remember what he’d looked like, so I could tell Brent and Phil the Policeman, but all I’d really registered were those eyes: bright, piercing blue, like polished sapphire.

  I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the approaching storm or the Human Bean’s air conditioning, and took a sip of coffee to warm up. Except, of course, it was too hot, and I felt the familiar burn that meant my tongue would feel funny for the rest of the day. Annoyed, I pressed the scalded tip to the back of my teeth, gathered my wits, and headed for the door.

  I looked right as I stepped into the street, the direction in which the stranger had disappeared, but he was nowhere to be seen. Must have gone into another shop, I thought, but it still left me with a funny feeling. Like the oncoming storm that no one else seemed worried about, something about the stranger felt wrong. Out of place. Like he didn’t belong here.

  When I got back to my own shop, the two young men on the scaffolding were just finishing the S. I looked at the clouds above the mountains. They seemed to have stalled, filling perhaps a third of the sky. Not as a good a sign as you might think: that potentially meant a slow-moving storm, building and building over the peaks before it finally rushed down over the foothills into the city, the kind of storm that wouldn’t just hit and blow out in short order, but would clobber us for hours.

  Another chilly gust of wind blew down the street. I looked back up at the young men. “How much longer?”

  “We’ve got the ‘hang’ of them now,” the older of the two said, which was a lame pun but not an answer, and also didn’t fill me with confidence, since one would generally hope that the people attaching heavy metal letters to old bricks above the entrance to one’s shop had the hang of it before they were almost halfway through the process.

  I sighed again and went inside, where I wouldn’t worry as much and couldn’t see those disturbing clouds. I reset the LED window sign to OPEN and then headed into the studio. I pulled on my apron, uncovered the chunk of clay I’d sliced just before Brent showed up, slapped it onto my plaster slab, and kneaded it until there were no air bubbles. I filled a plastic bowl with water and set it beside the wheel. Then I tossed the clay into the center of the wheel, shaped it roughly with dry hands, started the wheel spinning, dipped my hands into the water, and set to work. As always, the feel of the clay beneath my fingers, the near-magical, sensual way it rose from an amorphous blob to become something beautiful, calmed and centered me.

  When I was eight years old, our third-grade class took a field trip to a pottery. Each of us was given the opportunity to try it, and I’d been obsessed with it ever since. Every time I put a slab of clay on the table or wheel, I felt a humbling sense of awe at the infinite possibilities inherent in that pliable material, so organic to my touch. On the wheel, the clay slips endlessly, almost effortlessly, from shape to shape beneath my fingers, as though it exists in a strange quantum state, neither one thing nor another until I make the decision to collapse its infinite possibilities into a single (hopefully beautiful) reality.

  Which admittedly sounds a little high-falutin’ when you’re making something like coffee mugs with a goofy anthropomorphized coffee bean on the side, but art is one thing, making a living is another. And anyway, I liked making mugs. By the time my phone chimed an alarm to remind me of my lunch appointment with Aesha, I’d thrown ten, and put them aside to set up a bit before I added the handles. The area around the wheel had already started to collect that nice layer of clay dust I was used to.

  I stretched, took off my apron, went out into the store . . . and caught just a glimpse, out on the sidewalk under the scaffolding, of someone stepping out of my sight, someone in a long black duster. My breath caught, and then I felt a surge of anger. This had gone beyond creepy to frightening, and it had to stop. I ran to the door, threw it open, and stormed out onto the sidewalk. I looked left, but the only person in sight was a gray-haired woman with a cane, hobbling as quickly she could down the cobblestoned street, which I suddenly realized glistened with rain.

  I stepped out into the drizzle to examine the sky. To the east, a band of blue still glowed, but gray soup covered the city, and to the west . . . to the west, it was almost black. Lightning flashed, and a few seconds later, thunder grumbled. The wind swirled and gusted, as though uncertain which way to blow or how hard, though I had a feeling it would make up its mind with a vengeance soon. I strode to the middle of the street, then turned and looked up at my sign.

  “WORLDSHAPER POT,” it read, which was likely to attract (and then peeve) a completely different set of customers than the ones I sought. It was also likely to annoy the marijuana shop five doors down, who’d think I was horning in on their business. Just four letters left to mount, and there they were, still stacked atop the scaffolding, but there was no sign of the young men or their tools. They’d clearly abandoned the task in light of the approaching storm, which nobody could deny now. I just hoped they’d had securely fastened the letters they had managed to install. My neighbors wouldn’t appreciate it if they found a P or a T or an H inside their shattered front windows.

  It’s just a storm, I told myself. It’s not a hurricane. Nobody else was worried about it.

  On the other hand, nobody else had even seemed to be able to see it coming. And certainly no one else seemed to feel the strange . . . disturbance in the Force, to steal a phrase . . . that I did.

  I felt discombobulated (a word I don’t think I’d ever before had occasion to use). But between the nightmare and the multiple encounters with the weirdo in the hat and duster—it occurred to me at that moment he might be a flasher, but if he was, I wished he’d hurry up and show me whatever he was so proud of so I could laugh and move on—not to mention the approaching storm, “discombobulated” seemed to the be the only word that fit.

  “Worldshaper Pot,” said a voice behind me, making me jump. “You didn’t tell me you were branching out.”

  I laughed then, and turned to face my best friend. “Anything for a buck when you’re self-employed. As you should know.”

  Aesha was a head shorter tha
n me, so petite—“elfin” was the word that always came to mind—that she got carded at bars, even though she’d turned thirty a year ago. A freelance writer, she’d self-published a couple of fantasy novels through Orinoco Direct, to no noticeable acclaim, but made a pretty comfortable living writing corporate histories, annual reports, and magazine articles, plus doing freelance editing for a big self-publishing firm. She’d promised to write a history of Worldshaper Pottery for its fiftieth anniversary. She’d be eighty by then, and I’d be next door to it, but I had every intention of holding her to her word.

  She worked out of her apartment just a couple of blocks from my studio, another reason I’d been thrilled to find this location: we could have lunch together whenever we wanted, like today.

  She looked up at the gathering storm. A flash of lightning lit her dark-skinned face, glinting off the jeweled stud in her right ear. “Might get wet if we don’t get moving.”

  “We’ll get poured on anyway once lunch is over,” I pointed out. “This isn’t just a thunderstorm that’s going to blow over.”

  She looked at me. “What makes you say that? Doesn’t look bad to me.”

  “Doesn’t . . .” I bit off my retort. To me, it looked like a tornado could pop out of the clouds at any moment. Discombobulation. “Well, damp, at least.” I felt like an evangelical vegan at a Texas barbecue, or the weirdo who demands tea—or worse, hot chocolate—when the waiter comes around with coffee. Whenever I spoke the truth as I saw it, that the storm approaching looked like a monster, people looked at me like I was crazy—even though it was clear to me that they were the crazy ones. Rather than insist, I pretended to fit in. Wimp. But I really didn’t want to argue with Aesha, any more than I’d wanted to argue with Brent.

  “Well, if you’re scared of a little drizzle, we’ll have no choice but to linger over a second glass of wine.” Aesha grinned. “Or a third. Or . . .”