These Shadows Remain (10 page)

The wind's darkness and storminess eased off slightly. It was as if it sensed the gradual penetrations of warming rays from the sun.

He entered that easing like the crack of light one sees just before dawn.

*

In his hurry he sensed another transformation.

A communication studded the air, from the canvas screens to the creatures, marking everyone as if a hand had baptized them. The wizard was finding another spell. Through the storm that almost shrouded him – at once obscuring his view and protecting him from detection by the toons – Tomas felt the ripple of dimensions, a turbulence of births.

The toons were excited, feeling the first fevers of powerful emotions.

Tomas was gripped by a greater urgency. He recognized that the toons were taking on shadings. The people on the screens uttered their single word. And the images were becoming more earthbound. This meant that soon the toons would be barbaric and obsessed, luxuriating in quarrelsome expression and newfound feeling. Their derisive laughter at what sprawled across the screens had shifted into moaning. This might turn to discrete passions. Soon the toons might begin to take such estrangements for an independence of soul.

Pluta was trying to stay ahead. He was experimenting by extending the image realm. His alchemical insight was powerful, and it was quickening. He was moving the evolutionary leap into fast-forward.

Tomas couldn't pause. There was no time for reflection. He went on.

*

“Do you smell it?” Gabrielle asked. 

“Yes,” Santiago said.

“What?” Adina asked. When they didn't answer, she asked again. “What?”

“Another change happening,” Santiago said. 

“The toons have an odour,” Gabrielle said. “I've never smelled it before.”

“Neither have I,” Santiago said. “And their voices are louder.”

“I don't smell anything new. The voices sound the same.”

Gabrielle turned to look at her brother, realizing that they were privy to things others were not.

“It's like a circus down there.”

Santiago stared over the valley. The town was lit by the screens' intensities which loomed like fiery plumes casting up from the earth.

Adina saw that the valley below was erupting into a carnival.

“My God . . . ,” she said.

Santiago felt his sister's grip on his hand tighten. He clutched the sword with a fierce determination, though he wasn't sure he would know what to do if the dangerous circus spread towards them. Why was it taking Adina so long to see what they saw? Her responses were becoming simpler. The emotion in her voice was flatter.

He trembled and glanced at Gabrielle, seeing in her eyes that she recognized the signs of what was taking hold of Adina. The protective shield was slipping from her. Gabrielle looked back to the storm and exhaled slowly.

*

Tomas pressed forward.

In his path into the storm he saw yellow tinsel falling, and the path turned to what looked like liquid gold. But the sand beneath him remained as hot as a desert's.

He heard voices through veils of smoke. Then he saw.

The toons mulled up around in a daze, sharing orange popcorn that looked like eye-balls and chocolate covered tidbits in the designs of human heads.

“There's more war coming, more war coming,” Tomas heard some chant. These had gone beyond the mantra of the moan.

It was a cavalcade of toons delighted with the nerve-ends and expressions that they had spied out of the corners of their eyes, along the edges of hearing, when they had first been amazed by the implications of a reality outside of theirs. They were firing one another up. Another assault was in the works. This time the attack wouldn't be just on the castle of the human beings. Eventually they would turn their attention to making the universe a carnival of images. Their power would break from all frames. The raucous image revolution would continue spreading its advertisement into the beyond.

*

“Where is he?” Tomas said to the braying air.

It felt to him as if he were toiling towards a fearful shrine in an ancient enclave.

A toon spotted Tomas. It was a red dragon with black masks around his eyes. He saw a knight muttering his way through the storm at the rim of the trembling crowd that was high on its own excitement. The dragon let him pass. He thought that this guardian was filled with the personality of the smoke and so was returning to its source.

The dragon snorted harmless fire. He scrabbled around, turning back to the place that had become the misty anvil where screens and circuses met.

*

“He's almost there,” Santiago said.

“I know.” Gabrielle's eyes were closed. 

“Where?” Adina said.

I'm feeling so dim, she thought: this is like the haze that comes over you when you watch too much TV. Her thoughts were clotted, and she wondered if she was about to fall asleep. This was very tempting. She kept seeing a whiteness around things.

Adina felt a hand taking hold of hers. 

“We're here,” Santiago said. “Remember who made this for Tomas.” He pointed to the sword.

“Adina . . . ” She heard Gabrielle's voice coming to her as if from a great distance. “You belong to us too.” Then she felt another hand squeeze her free one.

Adina swayed again. “Maybe we should go down,” she murmured.

Santiago stood close to her so that she could feel his presence supporting her.

“No, we have to wait here,” Gabrielle said. “He's getting closer. I feel it too. He'll be alright.”

“He sees the centre. He's there at last,” Santiago said.

“Yes.” This was all Adina could say.

*

Tomas approached the blurry point where the tower of smoke began its spin.

There were toons scrabbling on all fours around its base.

They looked humbled, like hopeful penitents carrying in their teeth rolled-up sheets that could have been screen-plays or petitions.

He saw Roger Rabbit, Top Cat, Geppetto, Terk and Tantor, Bugs Bunny, Huckleberry Hound, Chick and Dee, Si and Am, Z and Princess Bala, Kerchak, General Mandible, and Yogi Bear. What were they snuffling around for? It came to him: more of life's elixir.

The smoke turned into a whirlwind again. Its power shot out in shafts to the bowed gathering, intimations felt through network lines of an imminent roar and a judgment perhaps too much for even toons to bear.

Tomas held back.

His toon hand was visible. It was a passport that allowed him to cross borders. His human hand he kept gloved. He was sure he heard inside the smoke a chanting that some might have construed as holy. Tomas had to be careful. The wind had eyes. It had a voice.

Stepping forward to meet the centre meant keeping your head clear. It was essential. He stepped closer. He also knew he was being led, or driven. The presence... It told him on wavelengths that didn't use words or images to feel forward, let his spirit join with what was greater than the storm and its effects. It pushed him on.

*

“She's fainting.”

“I know,” Santiago replied to his sister. 

“What can we do?”

“Hold on.”

They held Adina.

“She feels so light,” Gabrielle said. “It's like she's becoming nothing.”

“Hold on to her.”

“O we're losing her. What's she saying? She's whispering and I can't make it out.”

“She's telling us to help her. She's giving us the go-ahead.”

“Hold on, Adina.”

*

Tomas skirted the smoky cloud. The pandemonium from the toons subsided. It soon sounded like an engine revving then fading then revving and fading again.

He gradually recognized that he was walking around in tandem with the cloud's carousel. Together they were wanderers in a wilderness spin. The cloud didn't appear to want to vanish, or transform, or skitter elsewhere, or swarm over him like sand in a desert blowing over a hut or a tomb.

Then the cloud swelled until it was higher than the hills surrounding the valley of screens. It reared up into a tornado funnel. All that he had learned from Gabrielle and Santiago, and from Adina, and from Cyrus and the people of the last castle, had prepared him. He summoned knowledge like a dagger and moved inside the storm's radius.

Once inside he felt as if he had pulled back a curtain of wind.

He'd entered the storm's inner sanctum, its watchful eye.

*

“Ahhh,” said the air.

The breath sounded briefly like an exhalation of doubt. Or was it sadness? Tomas felt he was being gripped. He thought two hands had come together in a squeeze that was like an unloving prayer. Again the breath swept over him. Tomas wouldn't let it enter him deeply. There was a rumbling like an echo of thunder. The earth seemed to hunch up waiting.

Instead it was Tomas who spoke. 

“Look, if you still can,” he said.

In a swift deft gesture he removed his chain-mail glove and showed the fullness of his human hand. Plunging both hands into the smoke, he grabbed hold of the air as if he were seizing a brute's lapel.

The wind's breath turned to wheezing. “You have no weapon.” There was a long pause – so long it became a silence between them, while the two stood in that touch and snare.

“Neither do you,” Tomas said at last.

The whirlwind had no features. But Tomas could have sworn that if Pluta had had them, this terrible origin would have still registered nothing. With his power he had made the toons leap and the humans faint onto the screens. Yet now he seemed void of intention.

Pluta sensed that Tomas was reconciled to his sides. He had gained an insight from his melding. His physical strength could never match that of a shape-shifting storm. But his awareness of how he could move between dimensions was very great. He could do so by opening his hands, embracing with flesh what couldn't be seen. Openness was his power.

The whirlwind subsided into more sighing. Tomas didn't know what was being said, whether it was an implicit accusation, an offer of solace, some final truth, or an invocation to an energy beyond the torture of its turbulent mask.

*

The wind became a cloud.

Out of the cloud came the voice: “What do you wish to see or know that hasn't already been shown on the screens? What stage do you wish to understand? Look at the circus the toons have become. Even this new creation is flawed. Give them freedom and they become idiots.”

Pluta sighed. In this sighing he seemed to recharge himself. The cloud smoothed like a beach left unruffled by a retreating wave.

“Now you've come back.” 

“Not the same.”

“Nothing's the same.” 

“I know.”

“Ahhh, you're the one who's truly learning something.”

“The images are becoming something other than you intended.”

“Not terribly complex, I'm sorry to say. They just smell worse. And moan sometimes.”

“More elaborate in their foolishness.” 

“That's one way to put it.”

The cloud let out a stream of sighs. They were more mournful than the first he uttered when Tomas stepped towards him.

“My children have become as shallow as their watchers. Which the screen? Which the watchers? Things I never foresaw. Things beyond the books.”

Tomas felt he was being studied. The heat and breath became more embracing, clogging his senses. Then he noticed he was shaking. But the shaking was more from the concentrations of response. There was a discharge of energy occurring between them.

*

How could you defeat the whirlwind?

Tomas wondered if you could outsmart elemental force. Humans seldom fared well in a war with gods. Then it came to him. Don't fight it. This is what Pluta expected. Don't try to overpower this singular energy. Let things happen.

The voice growled in a tone Tomas knew too well.

“The outmoded human. The weakest cog and the most self-important. The spoiled killer who prides himself on being an angel. You have no idea how the cosmos hates you. Somehow privileged. Somehow standing above things. Somehow with dominion. Somehow destined.”

Abruptly Pluta shifted.

“Everything human degrades the universe. You were the nightmare long before the images came. You were betrayers long before the images decided against you. You were the shallow ones who couldn't imagine more. You were the ones who wanted the sacred to be simple, just like most of you. You were the dreamers of freedom who cared nothing for what you enslaved.”

Gone were the agitations of the spitting static. He spoke in the matter-of-fact way that Tomas heard in Gabrielle's voice. Chameleon wind. It changed its shape to distract him.

*

“We've lost her,” Gabrielle said.

“No no,” Santiago said. “Stay with her. Don't let her get away.”

“I've never felt anyone so light.”

They knelt beside Adina. Gabrielle lifted her head, Santiago comforted her shoulders. They felt that she was fading away from them and from the world.

“She's being absorbed.” Gabrielle understood at last.

“Look over there. The storm is lessening. It isn't threatening in the way it was before.”

“It's softened. Tomas is there.”

“If you can hear us, Adina, stay. It won't be long. Don't disappear.”

The fading shell in their arms shifted slightly and moaned.

*

On the battlement of the castle Cyrus watched. He had set up old style telescopes, black and small, and he looked through one into the distance. The image was hazy. All he wanted to see were glimmers. He'd been an astronomer before the images had leapt. He was accustomed to studying things that were far away, and accustomed to making reassuring lists and careful coordinates that ordered the mass of information he collected. He had once learned patience from such mappings.

On the horizon there was a glow like a fire being stoked higher.