"They're out there." He tells me, pointing with a shaking hand to the horizon. "Hundreds of 'em. As far as the eye can see."
I look in the direction the shriveled old man is pointing. Endless fields stretch all the way to the horizon, where they disappear. Dark black clouds blanket the sky, casting the ground beneath in unbroken shadow. But I see nothing even close to what this stranger is implying. And what was this old man doing sitting in a dilapidated armchair on the side of the road, anyway?
"I'm sorry, but what's out there?" I ask him. I keep my tone careful and even, not wanting to upset him should he not be of a sound mind. I find myself reaching into my pocket for my smartphone, only to remember that I left it charging in my Dodge Ram, which was now parked on the opposite side of the road.
He scoffed. "You can't see 'em? And you call yourself my apprentice?" He shakes his head and waves his shaking hand in the air. "Young lady, you've got a long way to go, and no time to get there."
I stare at him, perplexed. "Apprentice?" I eye my truck, wondering if I should just walk away and call the local police to come and pick him up. "Since when am I your apprentice?"
He turns and looks me in the eye, his clear brown eyes piercing through me. "Since just now, Christina."
Shock ripples through my body at the sound of my name. "How did--?"
He cuts me off with a nervous glance at the horizon. "There's no time for that now. Listen carefully--the shadows have become infested with 'em. You need to see 'em to fight 'em, and the best way to do that when you haven't learned is with a token."
"A....token?" I have a million other questions, but my brain seems to be working at Internet Explorer speeds with the overload of information.
He pats his blue plaid button-down shirt then sticks his hands into his jeans pockets. "Now, where....?" He shoves his hand down in the space between the arm of the chair and the cushion. "Ah, that's where it was!" He pulls out something and hands it to me.
I take it, turning the small, battered, metal case over and over in my hands. "It's a... cigar case," I say, not sure what to make of it.
"The token's inside it," he says, throwing worried glances at the distant horizon.
The metal case opens with a click, revealing a rolled-up dollar bill in the place of cigars, with a silver half-dollar beneath it. "A dollar fifty? That's the token?" I ask incredulously. The feeling that I'm being messed with grows into a hard lump in my throat and an ache in my head.
"Take 'em out!" the old man urges, growing more antsy.
I take the rolled-up bill and half-dollar out of the case. The bill is worn, feeling more like fabric than paper, and I unroll it. To my surprise, it's not a one-dollar bill like I first thought, but a two-dollar bill. It's my first time seeing one so old and worn--I'm used to two-dollar bills being kept in pristine condition as souvenirs and keepsakes.
"Now do you see 'em?" he asks.
I look up again at the horizon, and my heart nearly stops. The once deserted landscape is now teeming with small black creatures. They look to be the size of house cats, but their forms are humanoid, with long, spindly arms that nearly drag on the ground and smoky wisps of hair that curl upward. They hiss and screech and chitter, some of them crawling over each other with no regard for their fellow creatures.
I drop the silver half-dollar in my shock, but the creatures do not disappear. "What are they?"
"Shadow dwellers," is the old man's reply. "They're like parasites, living in shadows and draining essence from all who step into their territory. Rather harmless on their own, but an infestation of them can drain the land of its vitality." He coughs and hacks, spits out a gob of mucus onto the roadside, then continues. "They scatter soon as the light drives away the shadow, but on an overcast day like today they have plenty of time to kill the land afore the sun comes out."
"What can we do?" I ask, picking up the silver half-dollar without ever taking my gaze off the shadow dwellers.
"Not we," he says. "You."
"Me?" What could I do?
"Yup," he says with a denture grin. "It's time for Lesson One: Creating Light."
Comments