Louis Shalako: The Shape-Shifters, Chapter Thirty-Seven. Louis Shalako.

Sunday, January 24, 2021

The Shape-Shifters, Chapter Thirty-Seven. Louis Shalako.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

It must have seemed like an impossible shot…

It must have seemed like an impossible shot.

The words, unbidden, came to him with an eerily-imagined bit of golf clapping in the background.

“He shoots! He scores!”

The inner commentary, the quiet voices of a sportscaster and his sidekick, mumbled in his head, as he put the gun down and studied the scene through his hand-held telescopic sight, which had a tendency to fog up as his breath was so close.

Poor old Gagnon. Imagine standing by the kitchen table, practicing a little Tai-chi, and getting shot for being a nice guy. It was just bad luck. Ted could see a clump of something dark and heavy-looking in the bottom of the right-hand corner of the kitchen window, barely visible through the thin sheers on the lower sections. That something hadn’t been there before.

The trouble was that his actual shot’s small smoke signature totally obscured any view of the slug’s impact on the target. His naked-eye was no better at proper identification.

How little did he know, that his real target, the real Jean Gagnon, stood just slightly to the left of the window, staring in mute horror at the body of the man-thing in his kitchen.

Teddy was still counting in his head. Again he stared through the scope. Yes. There was the hole in the glass. Gagnon had been there the one minute, and just fucking gone the next…

So there was no mistake. It was so strange, so surreal, to just sit and listen to the sounds of the streets, the sounds of the city below. When he got to thirty seconds, he put the scope in the side leg-pocket of his hunter’s suit. A simple Velcro fastener. He pulled up the hood and picked up his gun. Pulling the potato off the end, he zipped it into a side pocket.

He slipped the weapon into a long bag, and zipped it up securely. The adrenalin rush was almost unbelievable in its intensity. He marveled at his ability to manipulate objects, to do the simple little tasks, without shaking fingers or dropping things. All he had to do now, was to get down the ladder safely. Calm was the key to escape. The next five minutes were crucial. Once that window closed, the odds of capture went down markedly.

Teddy figured if they didn’t arrest him within about the first forty-eight hours, then they never would. Amateurs fear detection. Professionals merely avoided being convicted of anything. He was going poaching somewhere, anywhere, as soon as he got out of there. If questioned, he could plead to the lesser crime. The freaking court could give him an alibi, and the Heckler and Koch could sleep in the bottom of a little lake he knew. All he had to do is chop a hole in the ice and shove it through. It couldn’t take more than five minutes. Hell, he could eat the potato. He could handle a bit of a gut-ache from the powder residue.

His heart was beating so hard and heavy in his chest, but he kept methodically moving his feet up and down. All was silent in the church as he made his way to the small basement room, where a broken window awaited him. This was when the fear became almost unmanageable.

Freedom lay on the other side of that hole.

***

After a time, the body on Jean’s kitchen floor began to go through transmutation after transmutation. Finally it became the body of a dead coyote, and then slowly faded from sight with a strong smell of ozone in the room, wisps of noxious vapor wafting around.

Afraid to move just yet, Jean Gagnon took a proper breath for the first time in three or four minutes, still listening intently. He was wondering if the gunman was still out there.

Epilogue

The owl soared ever higher…

The owl soared ever higher, over the town, over the river, now with ice floes streaming past in an endless procession. The owl soared over the valley, and the highway, and the hills and lakes, gazing on the remnants of the winter snow-pack, still sleeping serenely in the highland fastnesses, the cracks and crevices, the crooked places where the sun still couldn’t get at it.

The town and its streets were named for the newcomers, but the land was still known by the names that the first people had given. Names like the Ottawa River, flowing down in fits and dashes from the Algonquin hills. The original people had given their names to the lake known as Nipissing, the rivers known as Madawaska, and Petawawa, and others innumerable. The spirits, who were once so plentiful, so vocal, so clamoring in all their lusty contests, with their feasting and their slaying, were mostly gone now. They were taken by surprise by their own intemperance, laid waste by their own temptations. The owl had learned that you are better off poor but free. The coyote should have learned that a long time ago, but now he never would.

Mind you, he would have given a million bucks—well, maybe a half a million—to see the look on Gagnon’s face, when the coyote showed up there, wearing those clothes, and Jean’s features, even his mustache, all set to take over his life, his home and his girlfriend.

What he wouldn’t give to have watched Gagnon’s face as the coyote, shot through the heart, changed through a hundred, or even a thousand different forms before quietly dissipating in the cool, brilliant light of the overhead kitchen chandelier. He might have given a few bucks to see the look on Coyote’s face as well. Life had played its final trick on Coyote.

Surely the coyote, with his satirical wit and humor, would have appreciated the joke, as well as the legend he had given new life to.

As for the look on Teddy Hiltz’s face, next time he went to the beer store, and Jean Gagnon stood on the other side of the counter, making nineteen bucks an hour…with his cute little French accent, saying, How may I help you sir?

That one would just be so precious.

Fuckin’ priceless…to coin a phrase.

The owl’s face held a wide grin for a moment.

As for the newcomers, they too shall pass. When the owl was younger, everything was fresh and pure, clean and new, holding much promise. Nothing lasts forever, not even the bad stuff.

The owl slowly cruised north on the freshening breezes of spring, grateful that another long winter was over, and that he could go home again, to dream in clarity and to brood in perfect solitude.

The End

Louis Shalako began writing for community newspapers and industrial magazines. His stories appear in publications as diverse as Perihelion Science Fiction, Bewildering Stories, Aurora Wolf, Ennea, Wonderwaan, Algernon, Nova Fantasia, and Danse Macabre. Louis has been published in seven languages in addition to English. He lives in southern Ontario and writes full time.