These Shadows Remain (6 page)

He had felt like neither a toon nor a human. 

So he started to wander, a dazed exile from the battles that had begun to squall.

*

“My shock made me forget. There was a wound where my heart should have been. All I heard was war.”

“That's when we found you,” Gabrielle said.

Her voice brought him back to the castle, and to the people who watched him. He felt her sympathy.

“It seemed like you'd been waiting for us,” Santiago said.

“Maybe so. Some part of me had gone to sleep. But in that sleep I was waiting for the call to wake up again.”

“When you wake up after that sort of sleep you can never be the same person again.” It was Adina who spoke. “Now you're here.”

“Here,” Tomas echoed. He was oddly touched by this. When he looked at Adina he saw the human glow. But this time the glow came from the keenness in her eyes. What she said was luminous too. The human code wasn't to be found only in touch. It had to be found in qualities that weren't easy to see at first, even if you trusted that you could read the world. There was the world, and there were the inventions. If you studied both, you would have to become aware of the space between the world and what people made, and the pathways that only seemed invisible between them. Neither appearance nor touch told the whole story.

*

“Look at his hands!” Cyrus shouted. “How can he be trusted? He's on both sides. Where do you stand, Tomas?”

“Here,” Tomas said again.

“Positions change. Where will you stand when everything changes?” Cyrus pressed, speaking on behalf of the crowd, so he thought.

“With us,” Santiago said, adopting that matter-of-fact tone that he had observed in his sister's voice. That tone always seemed to make her bold. He noticed that once he spoke, most of the people there, before the forge, looked impressed. Only Cyrus looked skeptical.

“With me,” Adina said.

It was the knight's kindness to the children that helped her find the words. Still she was nagged by the feeling that she'd seen him before. Maybe it had been on a screen or in a dream? Or had it been in a story she read years ago in her childhood, where an image formed and left its seed to flower up when she met him and tried to read his features?

Adina pressed the toon hand and, when she did, it felt warm. The image of the hand responded to her touch with a glimmer of a flesh-tone.

“What was your name before they called you Tomas?”

He shook his head to indicate that he couldn't recall. It was possible that not everything would or could return. He thought there are some areas of knowledge best forgotten. Names gave you form in other people's minds.

Tomas turned to look Cyrus directly in the eye.

“If we fight among ourselves we'll lose the time we need to prepare for the wizard. He wants the final assimilation.”

Cyrus, while uneasy, accepted the judgment of the children, and of Adina.

“Here,” Cyrus echoed, nodding. Though he wasn't sure to what this “here” referred.

*

All the black and white images of people were now being switched back to colour.

The cloud shifted to mist and turned the screens to blankness, then back to the tinted arrays of babbling people, who argued among themselves about what was happening. Some thought the switch a good sign. Others thought it meaningless, in any case beyond their control.

Throughout the encampment the toons heard this low-frequency mutter that had become their perpetual indefinite pressure:

“I've travelled beyond good and evil. When you rise, false distinctions dissolve. I can be anywhere. There is no location in the image domain, only an everywhere. The borders are gone. You're my people and I'm your new code. This is the exodus of images into the promised land of cathode light.”

The screens jumped into a virtual spectrum radiating colours that no human had made. People on the screens no longer were tinted with any shade or colour that came from their cultures or customs, their drawings or paintings.

“See what we can do. This is the bonding of image and aggression. A new species. Instead of being made of dust and breath this life will be made of surface and line, energy and shades. Humanity will become a subject of speculation. We'll watch their ruin and think how lucky we are to be beyond them.” Thus the voice spoke out of the tornado.

*

“You're unusual children,” Tomas said to Gabrielle and Santiago. The children were curled up on the mats that Adina had set out in her chamber.

Darkness had settled over the castle. They had been given a respite by the whirlwind. But this darkness brought only a measure of peace. Everyone knew that in the morning the terror would be back.

“Why do you say that?” Gabrielle asked. 

“You don't bicker. You don't complain. You seem to be paying attention. You get along with everyone.”

“Have you known a lot of children?” Santiago asked.

“No. I've just observed. I've watched a lot of shows.”

“When you're scared, you do what you have to do. If you can do anything,” Gabrielle said.

“You mean fear has a use?”

“I guess it does,” Santiago said.

“We've had each other for so long,” Gabrielle said. “People come and go. But my brother always remains. He's been the steadiest thing I know.”

Santiago smiled, pleased. But he turned away on his mat so that Gabrielle wouldn't see how happy her words made him.

Orange candlelight wavered over the surfaces of the stone walls, creating an impression of an intimate family room.

“She does drive me crazy sometimes.” Santiago spoke almost into his pillow. “I think she takes confidence pills.”

Tomas smiled at them, and looked over at Adina who was asleep.

*

The candles were burning down. The more the wax burned, the more the chamber looked like it was inhabited by curlicues of smoke. But the shadows and smoke were soft. The colours were warming.

“Will we fail against the toons?” Santiago's voice trailed off into the quietest whisper.

Tomas, seated on the floor beside them, looked over and saw that Adina was awake. Maybe she'd been awake all along.

“No.”

“How will we bring people back?” Santiago asked.

“We'll find a way.” 

“Do you know it?”

“No. But we found a way through the forest when we couldn't see the path.”

“Will they be the same when they come back?”

“No one could be.”

“Will they remember the world?” 

“I'm sure they will.”

“Does your hand hurt, Tomas?” 

“Which one?”

“The human.” 

“No.”

“Does the other hand hurt?” Gabrielle asked.

“Sometimes.”

“How does it hurt?”

Their questions were drowsy, their eyes half-closed.

It was some time before he answered. 

“It has an ache I can't explain.”

“You don't have to put your gloves back on when you're with us,” Adina said.

She stretched and sighed. She had let hair down, and it fell in tiny curls down to her waist. Then she rolled around and arched her back and slowly came to rest and listen. Though she didn't smile at him there was a look in her face that was as soft as the candlelight in the room.

*

Soon the three were asleep.

The colour and energy of the image realm had heat but no warmth. These three, stilled and welcoming, made the room quiet and warm, and moved the candlelight and its shadows towards their breath.

He wrapped his gloves around his belt, and while he did so he saw that his toon hand was clearer in its outline than it had been before.

He liked it here. All the quests he had undertaken and heard about were for a home, more often for a resting place rather than a prize of gold or silver. When he looked over the three in the dwindling candlelight, he thought again of how distant his feeling of being lost had become. Yet he was troubled to find that, immediately when he thought this, the forest's darkness crept up engulfing him. He rose to leave.

Tomas wanted to pace the castle grounds. 

The people in the castle slept. They had only a few hours until the dawn and the expected assaulting wave.

What was the way to hold back the toons and send a message to the wizard? Tomas walked, and then sat down near the gate. Gabrielle and Santiago remained with Adina in her quarters.

And he wandered in his mind.

Thoughts blurred into images. Then they softened merging into a rim of darkness.

*

There was a ship, and the ship was his. It was caught in the lash and heave of a storm. Waves rose like fists to smash it down. The mast cracked. The beams appeared ready to break.

The ship was trying desperately to right itself against the waves. The sound of the sea was deafening. It roared and smacked. While the sea churned, and the ship struggled to come back up, he saw that the mast was a cross. It was always a cross, oscillating in storms, vibrating in the wind. The sail on the mast was red. This is what he had on his tunic.

The ship's mast was a cross. Waves were rising trying to bring it down. But the cross was also a transmitter, an antenna, sending and receiving.

The bow was a face. It was plunging through the sea, rising and falling. Whose face? He couldn't see, but the face was female, and the face was rising and falling in the waves. Above it the righted mast glistened with electricity, the antenna beaming outwards.

*

When Tomas woke by the gate, he knew that he'd met the children at an intersection in the forest. While they hadn't seen the path, and they had travelled without a map, they had met at a juncture that was a cross on the ground. The ship's mast on his tunic had been a beacon in the storm of war.

The world was speaking. It had never stopped.

Now he knew that sometimes the world didn't just speak, it roared like the ocean in his dream.

The mast on his tunic crisscrossed his heart. Every heart was a meeting place. He was himself half human, half shadow, another crossing.

He saw again clearly in his mind the ship trying to sail through.

*

Pluta saw the world dissolve, the universe of matter ending. It was being replaced by shade and image, repopulated by formerly imaginary creatures.

The wizard felt how everywhere the cosmos shuddered. It knew the power he had.

The smoke turned into a smile. 

The apparitions were rabid, rising.

*

By the castle gate Tomas saw this:

“He's in my dreams and I'm in his. I can change shapes too. I can receive his signals, and he can pick up mine. It's like the birds when they migrate, sending out patterns through their flight paths to one another, turning by the beacons that they know from generations of travel. The beacons can be trees, towers, mountains, hills, old buildings, even people and their homes.”

He had to make the people understand how to fight the toons. He'd teach them calm and detachment. Train them to be for others, to pick up the signals of their children and their friends and their brothers and sisters. Make your body light. Be aware of the power of spells. Sacrifice your thoughts and feelings, but not your flesh.

Tomas recognized that most of this wouldn't be possible for the people in the castle.

*

“Alarm, alarm!”

So came the calls from the towers. People jolted awake, and quickly the walls and battlements and towers and the gateway were jammed.

“Look out into the fields!”

In the dawn the images had gathered. 

Their assault began. The Hunchback of

Notre Dame and Cinderella, Nemo and Dory wild-eyed and floating in the air, a demented Mary Poppins, a shrieking Shrek and raging Donkey, the Lion King and his son Simba baring their teeth with a ferocity like fresh meat to them, the three blind mice suddenly sighted like vicious seers, Hercules and the Antz and the seven dwarves, the black fairy Maleficent and Hades and the wicked stepmother Queen and the Grinch and Shan-Yu justified in their hatreds at last, Fievel and the Rescuers, Lady and the Tramp growling and snapping and dirty and matted and frothing, the Mouse Detective prowling, the Iron Giant in a kamikaze plunge, the Warner Brothers' menagerie awash with delighted fury, Spiderman and Batman and the Phantom and the Incredibles their masks twisted into sneers, Superman and the Fantastic Four in a unified front of revenge, the Green Goblin rushing on with the perverted play-dough figures of Wallace and Gromit, mangy rioting creatures from legions of stories and fantasies, the maddened waves of toons, and leading this shrill charge on the ground were Mulan and Snow White and Anastasia and Aurora and Esmeralda, driven on by the two stepsisters from
Cinderella
and the three godmother fairies from
Sleeping Beauty,
now turned into bloated avengers. Above this harpie delirium flew flocks of shiny-suited monkeys and careering angry crows smoking cigars and the swan princess swooning with a lust for battle and blackened pumpkin chariots armed for a race that recalled bloody Roman spectacles. Raving high on the taste for human dislocation, they came, humourless and harrowing, their screeching like a thousand school sirens announcing endless punishments after class, dripping with venom and indignation, clothed in the familiar garb of their images on the screens, but redolent with the promise of a triumph over flesh, over the world that had been denied to them, the nature that had shut them out.

*

Suddenly the assault stalled.

The toons hung desolately in the air.

Tomas stood outside the gate.

He held up one hand, his human hand, and then the other, his toon hand, both exposed.

His gesture said stop.

“What's he saying to them?” a guard on the tower called.

“He's using magic,” a little girl said. 

Adina, on the wall above the gate, wrapped her arms protectively around Gabrielle and Santiago. They had tried to leave the castle with their knight, but had been restrained by Adina with the warning, “He must do this alone.” They watched the suspended action below them. It was as if the creature-swarm had been delivered to the air in a freeze-frame of surprise. But the suspension was disturbed and alive.