Over the Edge Read online

  Who are you, the murmur rumbled through the assembled shadows. “Who are you indeed?” asked the shadow of a crippled man, and “Yes, who?” chimed in the dollopy shadow of a fat woman.

  The large shadow drifted free of the woman-shadow who was afraid, and settled into a drop between two swells. He turned and drifted, as though he were reluctant to answer, but finally he said: “I am the shadow of one who is long dead…the name of my substantial means nothing, however.

  “You may all call me Obregon.”

  The assembled shadows—hundreds of them, all beneath that pier—rumbled and slithered and wondered. Finally, it had to come…for they had all been abruptly freed, and had been drawn away from the substantials whom they had accompanied since thought was theirs…one of the shadows started forward and paused before Obregon.

  “There are many questions. We—we are so startled by our release. How has it come about? Why are we free? I was always certain I was just a shadow, nothing more, without will or freedom.”

  Obregon threw his arms above his head, commanding attention. “Yes! Yes!” he said. “You all thought you were nothing but dark, without soul or volition. But that was the state into which we were cast by a cosmic quirk.”

  They appealed to him with perplexity, wonder, confusion. “What do you mean? What…?”

  Obregon resumed, telling it hurriedly, as though time were running silently from him. “Our island universe has always been at the focus point of many waves of force. It is difficult for me to explain; I am not a scientist, but these things I know—”

  A slim, ascetic-looking shadow interrupted. “How do you know these things?”

  Obregon spread his hands. “A dream; reflexes; species knowledge. I don’t know what to call it, but I simply know. Can you understand that? I barely understand it myself, but can you see what I’m trying to say?”

  The ascetic-looking shadow stroked its chin, nodded after a moment. “I think so. Please continue.”

  “Who are you?” Obregon asked quickly.

  “Adler before…by the new system that appears to be coming, Relda. I was a student of semantics when I was tied to my corporeal self.”

  “You can be of much help to us, Relda,” Obregon assured him. “If you will.”

  The ascetic-looking shadow did not answer, but there was a tilt to his head that defined willingness to listen. “You were saying, Obregon?”

  “Yes, to be sure. Our island universe has moved slightly, within the spiderweb framework of these force waves, and the power that was deprived us, the power that held us to our substantials, is gone. We have passed through that force wave, and now we are free.”

  He hesitated, as though summoning an unclear impression. “On other worlds in other galaxies, this has always been the way of it—the shadows and the substantials separated. Now we are free to join our brothers on other planets. We, too, are free, and with the absence of that hindering force, we may use our powers to rule this world as we should.”

  The murmuring rose again, and was blotted out by the mourning dirge of a foghorn off across the water. It was joined then by the soft jangle of a buoy, but the murmuring of the shadow voices continued.

  “Powers? What powers? What are you talking about?”

  Obregon rippled and moved in to them once again. “That is why you are here tonight. I have a demonstration for you; of skills and powers you did not suspect were yours.

  “Will you come with me and see for yourselves? Are you ready to accept your rightful place as rulers of the Earth?”

  One voice, high and shrill as the chirruping of katydids, struck through: “No! I don’t think this is right. We were born to follow the feet of the substantials, and I want to go back to mine.”

  Obregon turned, and without eyes, with the deadly black of himself alone, he stared at the speaker. It was a slight, stooped shadow. That of an old woman with a sunken chin.

  “You wish to go back to slavery?”

  The voice of the old woman shadow, chirping, rose above the din. “I never thought of it as slavery! I was secure, I had no responsibility, no fears. Now you tell me I’m free, that I must wage war on the humans, and rule the world. I don’t want it, I don’t like it, I—”

  Obregon’s quiet, reasoning manner dropped away instantly. His body seemed to tense, even as the water atop which it lay rippled angrily; and his voice smote the night and the stillness and ripped time to tatters.

  “Fool! Peasant-mind in a shadow’s form. You have the world at your fingertips, and you would settle for ease and sloth and mimicry. There is no room for you in the world that is about to be. The first of your powers, fellow insubstantials…observe!”

  And one arm shot out, aimed at the old woman shadow. The fingers were extended, joined, and even as he spoke, a darker darkness, black against the utter black of the shadowy arm, sprouted forth. A flame of ebony, a force beam in itself. It surged out of the fingertips, and rolled across the water faster than any sight or sound, and struck the old woman shadow.

  The shadow seemed to swell, as though pumped with air, and then—

  It was gone.

  Gone totally. Erased out of existence by the new force Obregon had unleashed. The substance of non-substance that had been the old woman was gone. Off to some reservoir of energy stored at the ends of creation, but changed to nothing. The shadow was gone. Death could come to the insubstantials, as well as their mortal counterparts.

  Obregon turned to the assembled shadowmass, and asked, “Are there more among us—traitors among us—who are unwilling or too frightened, to accept the burden of power that now rests with them?” He saw other shadows extending their arms in wonder, trying to learn if they, too, had this new strength in them. But no voices were raised as the old woman shadow’s had been.

  Obregon relaxed; the shadow settled into a shallow between two swells. Then the shadow rose, and he cried, “Follow me! I will show you what lies in store for you, now that the revolution is at hand.

  “Come; come and observe!”

  He slizzled away, up a piling and off across the night-shrouded pier walk. The others hesitated an instant, twittering among themselves at the strong shadow who seemed to be leading them, and then almost as one they followed.

  The dark mass oozed away, and the night was alive with shadows.

  The crippled man cavorted home. He unlocked the door to his single room, and slammed it behind himself, not bothering to turn on the light. In the past he had always turned on the light immediately. He was afraid, literally and truthfully afraid, of darkness and the shadow of himself darkness brought. He was a man afraid of his own shadow. It had always been a misshapen travesty of his own deformity. It had always been an alter ego of more monstrous brokenness than himself; sensitive of his ruined legs, his warped back, his hunched body, his shadow had been a constant mirror. Till hatred had altered and changed to fear, and fear had metamorphosed into terror.

  The crippled man had lived in constant dread of his shadow. And only the necessity of its existence—his very inability to do anything about it—had kept his terror in check. Life with terror became a steady thing.

  He had lived in darkness…for only in darkness was there surcease from the oppression of the shadow. Or light. Light without shadow. Neon light, all-around light, non-directional light. And when the shadow of his thin arm fell across the paper on which he wrote—he would rip it and throw it into the waste basket. Fear.

  The crippled man was free now!

  Utterly, utterly free, and joyously happy.

  The shadow was gone. His body was no longer cast before him blocks long, blocks miscast. He was a free man, and he could imagine himself (dreams, yes, but dreams nonetheless that were now his!) whole and straight. Thank God, with the shadow gone.

  He savored the still cool darkness that wrapped him. He savored it, knowing at last that he was alone, without the unwanted company of the shadow. He was alone in the dark, and happy. He smiled softly, and knowing his way witho
ut light, found his path to the deep old cane-back chair. He settled into it with the chair creaking reassuringly, and looked up at the faint shape of the light fixture over his head.

  Alone. And it was so good, so good alone.

  He bathed in the goodness of it, cleansing his fears, soothing his hurts, putting balm on his psychoses.

  From nowhere an indefinable oddness smote him.

  It swirled in from nowhere, barely touching him, and was gone. For an instant he had the strangest feelings. He could not name them, for they had been with him such a short time. But again they came, and his body was licked by a subliminal fire.

  It spread up through the wrinkled bones of his legs, penetrating to his groin in a lancet of smooth fire. It was the Godfather of all whiskies, hot and burning and live with power.

  He clutched with gnarled fingers at the arms of the chair, and his body tightened, arching back—not straight, but as straight as his warpedness would allow—as the force from somewhere drenched him.

  Breath sucked in raggedly between broken teeth, and his nostrils flared as that breath came out blast-ovened and cutting. His eyes shut and he felt his bowels tighten. His head swam. Behind his eyes a wall of white-hot coals advanced, searing the tender flesh behind the eyeball.

  Then, when he thought he could no longer stand it, when he thought he might burst like an overripe pod, the tingling, searching, burning allness of it was gone.

  He was alone once more.

  But he had known a thing. A very strange thing. And he could not name it, pin it down, say what it was to his own soul. It had come, and he had been man-plus, and now it was gone.

  For many hours there in the stillness, the crippled man sat back, breathing with difficulty, savoring the intermingled greatness of being without-shadow, and having been a vessel for that new power. Finally, he fell asleep in the cane-back chair.

  Troubled, so troubled were his dreams.

  Black and red.

  The shadow mob moved up from the waterfront. Leading the ooze was Obregon, now more powerful and huge, as though the power he had exerted in destroying the shadow of the old woman had returned, three times magnified, and poured back into his shape, enlarging him. It was illusion, but were they not an army of illusion?

  The sidewalks and streets overflowed with the pulsing mass, as it spread like oil up through the financial district, into the center of the city. Before them, before the fright of them, people fled—many of them bewilderedly realizing for the first time that their own shadows were gone, many departing, fleeing even as they fled, black shapes joining the crowd of darklings that slithered up the street. And the city was a welter of madness.

  The shadow army came to a halt at the foot of a skyscraper. Their assembled mass flooded the sidewalk, overflowed into the streets, ran up the sides of other buildings. Obregon stood a little away from the edge of the seething, overlaying mob. He stood in a cleared space, just at the foot of the building that stretched up toward the sky. He raised his arms for silence, and when a hush had stolen through the crowd, he pronounced the words so clearly, and so loudly, that substantials, in the windows of the surrounding buildings, heard him. They heard him, and the shrieking of the human women was a living thing that zig-zagged like many lightnings through the concrete canyons of the city.

  “The second of our powers!” Obregon shouted. “As I lay dormant in a dark hell that has not changed for ten thousand years, as I lay hiding after my corporeal self had died—but I was not ready to die—this power came to me. And it is yours, too!”

  He slid up the wall of the skyscraper, and when he was full-length, tremendously powerful-looking—taller than a lamppost—the shape turned, and called again:

  “Join me! Join me!”

  Then his shadow seemed to flicker at the edges, seemed to waver and ripple and billow, and as the other shadows watched, as thousands of eyeless ebony faces turned upward, Obregon’s form went into the building.

  Not through door or window or aperture of any sort, but through the very concrete and steel and lath and glass of the building’s facade. A portion of blackness remained on the face of the skyscraper—an arm.

  Beckoning.

  The other shadows clustered and mumbled among themselves, until finally one slim, adventurous shadow raced up the wall, and disappeared likewise: through the pores of the structure.

  That started the exodus. From the street, from the surrounding walls, from the sidewalks where they had lain thick as coal dust, the shadowmass spread toward the building.

  They entered without sound, without tremor, by the thousands, and there in the interstices of the structure, they gathered again. Inside the walls of the skyscraper.

  “This is a part of the second power that is yours, now that freedom is upon us,” Obregon said to them. “We can go with impunity through even the densest metals, through plastic, through fire and water. We are invulnerable and invincible. But this is only a part of it.” An expectant hush settled in after his words, and then the rising whispers of questions filled the building’s walls.

  “Concentrate, shadows! Concentrate with me. Will yourselves to be larger, more powerful, to expand, will your shapes to expand, to absorb fully this new force that flows to us from space. Will yourselves to greatness!”

  And as demonstration, he began to expand. His self began to swell out, and in an instant the other shadows were following suit. They all began to grow, to melt, to shimmer and grow larger.

  Then, without warning, as all empty spaces were filled by the shifting, slithering growth of the shadowmass, internal tension was reached—

  —and passed.

  The skyscraper exploded.

  In one hellish roar and flash that sent the the shadows scudding harmlessly into the air, the metal and stone and plastic of the building erupted skyward. It exploded outward and upward, and the city was filled with the cataclysmic roar of the explosion. Great gouts of flooring and tile were thrown out, spinning, to smash in the streets below. One entire wall tottered, rumbled, and fell, massively crushing dozens beneath its weight. Volcanic puffs and clouds of dust and powder rose, and the sun was obscured from below by the motes. Floors dropped through, and great machines on those floors crashed and crashed and crashed down, crushing everything in their paths, finally coming to rest in the basement. The sounds of death—of the building, of the people within it—were deafening. Then, abruptly, save for the soft clatter and tankle of masonry plunging through the pits that had been floors, all sound died away.

  The second power of the shadows was terribly, frighteningly evident. Obregon spoke more, telling them about the powers they now possessed. And they listened avidly, his fellow shadows. Whom he had already begun to refer to as, “My subjects.”

  The crippled man lay on his back, looking up at the ceiling. A fine, watery tracing of marks had drifted across the plaster, from the radiator dripping in the room above. He lay twitching spastically, for the force had come again to bathe him.

  It had finally left him, nearly an hour in progression from the first faint touch to the final jolting surge, and he was spent. His body was a welter of pain and strange tingling sensations; his very eye-rims were crimson with pain. His joints were swollen, and it seemed there was gravel in the ball-and-socket joints, so that the slightest movement brought agony.

  His breath came raggedly, paining in and out so that the tiny wrinkles on his neck stretched out and became smooth. His cheeks were flushed, in the whiteness of his face, and his hands clutched the top blanket as though the last stages of rigor mortis had petrified them.

  Weird thoughts pulsed within him.

  Like live, glowing worms, they ate the rotted edges of his brain, imbuing him with thoughts ghastly and sickening. The crippled man tried to flee from them. He sent his mind out out out in an attempt to escape these new thoughts, totally alien thoughts. They remained, and grew stronger.

  They were the pollen left after the force-blossoms had touched his thoughts. The dust
that lay soft and thick on his mind. He tried to see through it, to pierce the curtain that hung over his mentality, but it was no use.

  He tensed there on the bed, stretching as though he were racked and tortured. Then he sat up. He had been changed, god how changed.

  He had a place to go, and a thing to do.

  He swung his misshapen legs from the bed, and the tired fabric of his ancient herringbone suit scraped the army blankets with the sound of poverty. He rose, and did not see his hand put his battered hat on his head. He did not see his feet move him from the lone room he occupied, and he did not see his other hand lock the door behind him—as though he would be away for a long time.

  He moved as in a dream, his feet dragging and his step marred by wilted and warped bones. He moved down the padded stairs and out into the street. As though lines of magnetism were drawing him, without volition or meaning, he crossed streets, waited at stop lights, turned corners, and finally mounted a bus.

  The force was still within him. His bodily structure had been altered, of that he was sure. He could feel an uneven, different pulsing of the blood within his veins. His teeth had grown. The deformity that had plagued him, no longer bothered him with shootlets of pain as it had all through his life. Still without shadow, he sat silent on the bus, and the power was active within him. His skin tingled with pins and needles, as though he were radioactive. What drew him on, what was now calling him, he had no idea; but he had gone, and the force that had come so abruptly, was taking him downtown, toward the financial district.