A hornet caught in her long gray hair, stung the side of her scalp, the pain a red-hot needle. Under her feet she thought the pavement was moving, rippling, shifting and cracking, but she didn’t dare look down. Ahead of her the road had changed, and she couldn’t tell where she was: it looked like the squalid unpaved roads that led up to the hollows, like something out of the last century, muddy and narrow. Yet she felt pavement still under her feet. Another sting on her wrist, and she ran still harder knowing a swarm could easily sting her to death. The insects’ maddened roar filled her ears, and above it, behind it, she sensed still greater desperation.
Something was in the woods, she thought. Something terrified, frantic, insane. Something that wanted her to leave the pavement and run into its darkness, down its throat.
Lights burned gold before her. The flame behind her roared up, and the hornets howled against it like black hail. Shapes waved and closed in through mist and darkness. Then the vapors thinned, and the shapes became definitely human, holding out their hands to stop, seize, calling her name.
“Wilma!” yelled a male voice, raised a weapon—a spear.
“Wilma!”
She stumbled, panting, and looked around in the charcoal mists of evening. She could hear the hornets buzzing sullenly somewhere in the darkness behind her; her head and her wrist throbbed from the two stings. Her hair had come out of its habitual pins and hung down in a scraggly colorless mane over her shoulders, and she trembled where she stood, almost sick with shock.
“Are you okay?” asked Hazel.
She was back at the corner of Blackbird Street.
She had not turned around. She knew that. Had only run forward, continuing in the direction she’d been going . . .
And had emerged from the mist at her starting point, where Shannon and Hazel and Ryan awaited her.
She turned, looking back into the fog that was now dyed with darkness. A voice cried something—words in a language she did not understand—and far away, it seemed to her that blue flames crawled along the ground and then sank out of sight.
She supposed that there were worse things than coming back out exactly where she’d gone in.
She straightened up, still clinging to Hazel’s shoulder for support. “Well, whatever it is,” she said, “it doesn’t want us to leave.”
Chapter Twenty-One
NEW YORK
With an urgency born of despair, Cal tried to tell Goldie of Tina, as soon as they had gotten clear of the snare and the pandemonium of the retreating nightcrawlers had faded to nothing.
But Goldie, implacable, waved him to silence and beckoned him deeper into the darkness.
Making sure no one was following, Goldie led Cal down echoing corridors, past tracks splitting off into lightless infinity, ancillary current rooms, blast-relief shafts. They eased between the rusted, stilled blades of huge fans, stepped lightly over corroded duct work, moved through silent power substations where ceramic transformers twelve feet high loomed lifeless as stone gods. Rats swarmed everywhere, and the darkness stank of raw sewage and the un-buried dead.
At last, a narrow service stair opened onto cavernous space. Neither Cal’s Coleman lamp nor the dim gray reflections of far-off daylight from some unseen grating could pierce its immensity, but the hush of the place spoke to its size. In the nearer reaches of wall, the lantern picked out surprising details: cracked, exquisite remnants of Florentine tile, twisting Nouveau railings, brass cuspidors. High overhead, a monumental chandelier of delicate crystal and gilt glinted in the lamplight. Elegant, top-hatted men, women in fine silks and embroidery had lingered here, certain in themselves and their time. Then the station, magnificent as a treasure room, had fallen to ruin, abandoned, forgotten.
Goldie turned to Cal, smiling. “Home,” he said.
He threw what looked like part of a chopped-up dining table onto a smoldering campfire, and it flared again, its flickering warmth going a long way toward dispelling the chill that had crept into Cal’s bones. Skewered meat cooked on a spit over the flames, skin crackling, the aroma of succulent juices thick in the air.
Now at last, Cal was allowed to speak. The words poured out as from a burst pipe, emotion choking his voice.
Goldie settled in an oak rocker by the fire, began meditatively strumming a guitar. “Bummer about your sister, man...”
“Can you help me?” Cal entreated.
Goldie’s eyes grew bright. “Can I help you? Get a load of this.” He stood quickly, guitar gripped by the neck, scooped up Cal’s lantern with his free hand—and threw it on the fire.
“No!” Cal leapt for the lantern, but it was too late. The glass shattered, there was a whoomph of ignition. Cal felt the heat flash on his face, his eyes dazzled. Then, incredibly, the flame passed over him, dissipating, spreading like a ripple on a lake, and was gone.
The campfire guttered, nearly going out. Cal sat back on the ground, stunned. Wordlessly, he touched his brow and cheeks, felt nothing more than a tenderness like a mild sunburn.
“Where—” He swallowed, mouth dry. “Where’d it go?”
Goldie removed the spit from the fire, started eating off the skewer. “Good question. Somewhere else. When anything reaches a certain temperature, it just vanishes. Like something’s drawing it off . . . to power other things.”
“What things?”
Goldie shrugged, held out the skewer with its blackened meat. “Hungry? You should try this. Not bad.”
Cal hesitated. Around them hung a ring of smoke where the flame had spread, now misting away to nothing. “What is it?”
“Track rabbit,” Goldie said through a mouthful.
“Track rabbit?”
“Rat.”
Cal grimaced. Goldie laughed and settled back in the rocker. “Old-style thinking, my man. Thems on bottom gonna be on top now.” He tossed another chunk of wood on the fire, throwing up a shower of sparks that danced in his melancholy eyes. “No more Invisible Man.”
“Goldie,” Cal began and suddenly felt absurd. “The other day, you said you could foresee things. Can you—can you see my sister?”
Goldie’s eyes glided over to him. “Cal, I can see everything.” He glanced about, as if to be sure of their privacy, then leaned forward in a conspiratorial whisper. “It was like this a long time ago. All the myths are true. Everything is true.” He paused, then added, “Ask me how I know.”
“How do you know?” Cal found that he too was whispering.
Goldie peered into Cal’s face gravely, scant feet apart. Then the corners of his mouth lifted in a grin. A chuckle bubbled out. It grew. In the hushed blackness, a roiling, uncontrollable laughter spewed forth, raucous and loud. Goldie spasmed, held his stomach, bent double with hilarity.
Cal stared at him, unnerved.
Finally, when he could control himself enough to speak, Goldie gasped out, “I read between the lines, Cal, the stone lions. Up the steps into the vastness, where the books are. Signs everywhere but no one to see, no, it took a true omnivore, at liberty, so to speak, time to burn. The ancients got it, some of it, a bit at least. Eratosthenes and Iamblichus and Zhang Heng. Then the modern boys boogied in, R&B, R&D.... The Ordo Templi Orientis, Gurjieff, Von Liebenfels, Hoerbinger and Deibner of the Reich. A grand jeté over the Rhine to the Volga, and a Red frisson from Petukhov and Emelyanov. The Wall comes down and our own little burrowers join in, Kaiser Wilhelm to Popov to Arzamas to Sandia, spinning, spinning....”
His eyes were wild now, face glistening in the firelight. “Insanely simple, if you know where to look.”
Cal’s heart was a stone in him, face rigid. “I see,” he said, measuring his words. He rose. “I’m sorry. I’ve got to go.”
He was moving toward the entrance now, wondering how—if—he could find his way through the labyrinth without his lantern.
“Wait! Wait! No!” Goldie headed Cal off. “I’m going to help! That’s what this miracle’s all about!” His buttons clattered against each other as he waved his arm
s, nukes and whales and smiley faces.
Cal backed deeper into the room at Goldie’s onslaught, bumped against something hard and uneven. He turned to it—and all thought of Goldie fell away.
Towering over him, unnoticed before in the gloom, rose an enormous pile of junk, thirty feet and more. Castoffs of every imaginable kind: baby buggies and stuffed blowfish, Lava lamps and hair dryers, tooled leather saddles, bus-station TVs in wire mesh, party hats, roulette wheels, even an iron lung. Scavenged from every part of the city for years, a dazzling magpie variety, a masterpiece of obsessive packrattery.
Cal ran his eyes along the hypnotic disorder of it, lifted his gaze to the ragged pinnacle. And now he could see, high above the pile in the distant cavern roof, a hole piercing to the surface. It was through this that the shaft of evening sunlight slanted in, dust motes dancing as it sliced golden onto the great heap of useless, coveted things, picking out one brilliant, incredible object.
It was a sword. Not ornate and loud, glittering its arrogance, but quietly assured in its darkened steel, the hand-worn leather of its hilt.
Cal knew it. It was the one in his dream.
A killing thing, he thought, designed to cut through flesh and muscle and bone. It filled him with dread. If I take this, where will it lead me?
Nowhere I won’t need to go.
He clambered up the hill of marvels and refuse toward it, slipped back, found purchase and climbed. Eight-track players fell away under his hands, CRT monitors shifted and held. He pulled himself over jagged edges of plastic and metal and glass, got tangled in lengths of coaxial cable, tore himself free and kept climbing.
At last, it was within reach. He grasped the cool, welcoming hilt, felt it join to him, as much himself as his heart. He pulled, and the blade slipped smoothly from its prison of debris.
Cal slid back down, leapt the final ten feet or so and landed on solid ground, prize in hand. Goldie came up beside him, silent.
“Where did you find this?” Cal asked.
“Where do you find anything? Someone threw it out.”
Cal made a few practice moves with it. It was deliciously, ominously heavy, and light.
“It likes you,” Goldie said. “Consider it a gift.”
Cal nodded thanks, self-conscious.
Goldie turned to the pile, rummaged about a moment, then pulled a second object free. He turned back to Cal, holding it in front of him, an offering.
It was the scabbard, secured to a belt with a strange worked buckle. Cal seized it, slid the blade effortlessly into it. He thought of Colleen with her crossbow, Goldie with his snare. To each, by his nature.
He held the belt out before him, hesitating at this last embrace, then thought of his sister. He secured it around his waist.
“Goldie,” Cal’s voice was contemplative. “Do you believe in dreams?”
“Very little else.” He stepped close to Cal, his gaze calm now, voice sure. “I can help you. Trust me.”
From behind his eyes, from the place where he lay curled and hidden, Sam Lungo watched himself and screamed.
Not that anyone could hear him.
Sunset was just settling over the street, washing everything in burnished tones of flame. The crowd had swelled, faces ardent and hungry, eyes gleaming. He held them in thrall, his voice liquid and easy, the words coming effortlessly.
Of course, it wasn’t him, not really. It was Ely. Somehow, he had planted part of himself here inside, like a wasp laying its eggs in an insect host. Sam was merely a passenger, a dormant accomplice, like a paralytic after his neck had been broken or a torture victim clamped to a chair.
“What happened to values?” he heard himself call to the eager throng. “What happened to the Golden Rule? Ask the big shots—he who has the gold makes the rules!”
Shouts of agreement erupted from the crowd.
“They’ve been insulated by their life of privilege, their limos, their offshore tax shelters. But that’s all over now.”
Folks nodded, an ugly, avaricious look to most of them. In the back, a young man in dreadlocks shook his head. “This is sick, man.”
Heads turned toward him, eyes spoke indignation and violence. The young man parted from the mass and was gone. The rest stayed rooted to the spot.
“Only one rule now, friends. Survival of the fittest. And the fittest aren’t in Armani sweatsuits on the StairMaster. They’re the ones who can smell which way the wind blows!”
Across the street, beyond the crowd, Sam spied a National guardsman listening uneasily, standing watch over a chained-up electronics store. Ely is seeing this through my eyes, Sam realized, and felt a distant echo of anticipation. Desperately, Sam tried to move some small part of his body by his own volition—blink his eyes, move a pinky— and could not. Now I know why Pinocchio wanted to be human, he thought wildly, and would have shrieked in hysterical, anguished laughter if he could have uttered a sound.
“It’s a new day,” Sam was saying. “No fast shuffle, no bait and switch. We take what’s ours.”
A guy in the crowd piped up, “What you talkin’ about? Those soldiers got guns!”
“You’re right.” Sam leaned in, said slyly, “But we have an ace up our sleeve. Wanna know what?”
It was straight line and punchline. From the crowd burst a roar of affirmatives. Sam twisted around and pointed toward a shadowed space between the buildings. “Ely!”
Stern emerged from behind piled crates, stepped lightly onto the street beside Sam. As one, the crowd gasped and drew back. A few screamed.
He was an astonishment. The shredded flesh and pustules and oddly cracked bone had healed to a vibrant efficiency of muscle and claw, covered in tough, pebbled hide. In the darkling light, a muted iridescence gleamed rainbow off his scales of black and brown and ocean green. His folded wings swept high above his dragon’s head like a cathedral arch.
Staring wildly at him, the crowd shouted, threatened to shear off, scatter, be lost. Sam extended his arms. “It’s all right! It’s all right! He’s on our side!” Sam wondered how Ely could manage to work his own body and Sam’s simultaneously. But then, in the time Sam had known him, Ely had proven himself a man—thing—of endless invention and resource.
The crowd quieted, but tentatively, unsure.
Stern’s glance slid over them toward the horizon, a mirror of the dying sun. “A visual aid . . .” His voice was a rumble they could feel in their bones.
He swept forward. The crowd parted and followed in his wake, and Sam found himself being force-walked smartly to keep pace. Stern strode up to the guardsman. The man quailed but held his ground.
Stern cocked his head, allowed the hint of a smile. “I imagine you have a question.”
Sam could see the guardsman was little more than a teenager, a boy playing soldier in an overlarge uniform. Pimples dotted his forehead, sweat sheened cheeks that had never known stubble. Sam felt a momentary flash of sympathy and sadness, knew there was no action he could take in his marionette state.
Stern held his gaze silent on the guardsman, awaiting a reply. The eyes of the multitude prompted. Finally, in a high quaver, the words came.
“What the hell are you?”
Stern’s lips split into a broad smile, revealing those appalling, beautiful daggers. “Your death... if you don’t shoot me.”
Stern lunged. The young guardsman’s assault rifle sparked. A fleeting but deadly silence—and the bullets fell, clunking like pebbles, rolling back against the guardsman’s foot.
The boy soldier gawked. The only sound on the entire street was Stern’s laughter, like the echoing footfalls of a giant. Then Stern grabbed the gun, snapped it in two, tossed the pieces contemptuously aside. The boy turned to run, but Stern reached out a taloned hand—almost casually, it seemed—and swept a terrible slanting cut that opened him wide. The boy screamed, and his legs gave under him. Stern caught him, sent him pinwheeling into a wall, where he sprawled, wet and broken and still.
A sound of re
vulsion rose from the crowd. But Sam suspected many were thrilled, too, guiltily pleased.
Stern turned to face them, and this time only a few stepped back. “No man behind the curtain anymore. No army, no police.” He straightened to his full height, spread his wings so they fanned out over them. In the streaks of the setting sun, they looked rimmed in fire.
“The only thing to fear . . . is us.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
WEST VIRGINIA
Come to us, the voice—voices—whispered outside the windows in the darkness. Come to us. You’re one of us, and we need you, need you, need you if we’re to be whole.
If I/we are to survive.
Fred only clung tighter to Bob. He knew that part of him, the meat part, was still back in South Dakota, where he’d been when that swirling blue-white hideousness had burst the office door from its hinges, swallowed him up, flesh and bones and brain, as it had swallowed the others. He’d seen it happen, as if at the end of a long corridor, or through the wrong end of a telescope, while he’d clutched frantically at Bob.
And Bob had clutched at him.
And here he was, sitting on Bob’s bed, holding his brother in his arms and feeling the cold unceasing pull that grew and grew and did not sleep or rest. The pull of Sanrio’s will, and Wu’s, and Pollard’s, and that other Will that was greater than them all. It would pull him in, and he would cease to be himself, cease to be anything except a part of that Thing that was all of them now.
And he sent out his heart and his spirit, gathering, absorbing, drinking in strength and energy from the earth, from the air, from time. From the hearts of anyone his heart could touch, anyone who wasn’t strong enough to defend against him, drinking it like coffee, to stay awake. To stay strong.
Magic Time Page 25