Magic Time

by Marc Scott Zicree

  Cal’s hand tightened on the sword’s hilt. So much had been taken from them, from them all, the innocents and the fragile. I will not let this happen.

  And then he was moving, screaming a war cry, a bluff but knowing it wasn’t a bluff if they refused to let her go.

  He plunged into the group, flailing, all the techniques he’d learned momentarily blanked from his mind, his only ally a blind and absolute determination. The men fell back, one fleeing. But two kept their grip on the girl, and a third made a murderous swing with a length of pipe.

  Cal ducked. The pipe sliced the air a quarter inch above his head. Cal shot up, blade held high, then smashed it down. It struck the pipe with which the man now shielded himself, threw off a hail of sparks and sent it flying. Cal was swinging wildly, using his weapon like a club, uncontrolled, unfocused, and then he realized—

  I’m trying to kill these men. I’m afraid and out of control and only want them to die.

  The realization pierced him like a bullet, both the viciousness of his thoughts and the white terror of impotence behind them.

  Abruptly, his uplifted blade swung down into fencing position. And, with this quick movement, killing shifted from necessity into the option of last resort.

  Cal lunged—a feint, designed to fall short—swordtip sailing toward one of the captors’ breasts. The man flinched back, released his hold just as Cal parried the retrieved piece of pipe, slashed back down to graze the pipe wielder’s arm and, without pause, arc back to the girl’s second captor.

  They loosed their prey, began backing away. The girl gasped, fled stumblingly into her building.

  Cal turned again to the mob, and the next moment carved itself in nightmare. Confronting him was a vast sea of angry faces. Stern’s dark army. They would do Stern’s work, and leave Stern free to do as he pleased.

  Cal’s brief skirmish, terrible and terrifying, hadn’t even marked the beginning.

  Slowly, the mass began to close.

  “Cal!” Doc sailed a trash can lid at him. He caught it one-handed, positioned it as a shield, stepped backward. Cal sensed the mob gaining courage with even this tiny retreat.

  Something inside, deeper than thought, again cried out: I will not let this happen. He said, “The first one who moves . . . this goes right through.”

  He felt no longer himself but rather an electric wire of sheer will in this tiny, firestorm universe. Something in his eyes, his movement, telegraphed that single raw, unwavering message—NO—and he felt Stern’s army begin to falter, lose their nerve. It’s not what I’m doing, Cal thought. It’s what I’m being.

  With a mind-jarring shout, he leapt into their midst, managed to knock a few aside and plow through them to a wall, a guardian for his back.

  His sword shot up before he was aware of having seen the two-by-four sweeping down. He blocked it, kept fighting, gradually inching back, losing ground. There were so many. Five driven off, ten more behind. Slowly, very slowly, he backed along the wall as the pack closed in.

  “Let him be!”

  The voice rumbled through the mob. Stern’s army broke off. Turning, they drew apart like black clouds, leaving an open corridor between Cal and Stern.

  “He’s mine.”

  Stern flashed his murderous smile. Cal’s gaze locked on Stern; he resumed edging backward along the face of the wall, nearer to his own building. Slowly, Stern closed in, taking his time.

  “Goldie!”

  Stern followed Cal’s gaze, swiveled his head to regard the lanky figure. Goldie stood by the brownstone, clutching an electrical cord that ran up through an open window into the building. He gave it a sharp tug.

  There was a sound of release overhead. A big, weighted net flew through the air, fired via some kind of improvised catapult from atop the building, sailed toward Stern.

  Cal stood frozen. The whole street went still and watchful.

  Stern canted his face upward. Taking a vast, deep breath, he hesitated, then exhaled a dazzling great gout of flame.

  It blazed green like some hellish firework and twisted toward the sky, struck the webbing and seared it to nothing. The weights rained down about Stern, clattering harmlessly.

  Goldie, still with the cord in his hands, said numbly, “I think we’ve got a problem.”

  This shouldn’t be happening, Cal thought in the stunned silence. Not with what Goldie had shown him at the campfire, the explosion dissipating, the flame guttering out.

  But then this was a new kind of fire, fed by where that fire had gone, and by the white-hot rage of this demon he had once served. A fire, like Stern himself, capable of anything.

  Stern grinned at Cal. “Surprise.” He reached out to him with razor claws.

  Suddenly, an arrow flashed through the air. Stern gasped as it struck him in the arm.

  Colleen stood beside the Volkswagen that had been shielding her, the crossbow in her hands, already reloading. She fired another shot.

  This caught Stern in the shoulder, spun him. Cal seized the moment to dart past, get clear.

  Stern wheeled on Colleen, glaring. “You woman . . .” He swept the arrows off his body, took a deep inhalation, the inferno rising in him.

  Fluid crashed into him, drenching him. The scent of gasoline hung pungent in the night. Stern bellowed, twisted around to see Cal standing by the derelict tanker, still aiming its hose at him.

  Cal’s voice was low and deadly. “Try your fire trick now.” He pulled a lighter from his pocket, flicked it. Stern cringed.

  “Where’s my sister?”

  With a howl of rage, Stern grabbed a bus bench, ripped it free of the concrete and hurled it at Cal. Cal dove aside as it smashed to the pavement. Stern took off running back the way he came, scattering the crowd in his blind charge.

  Cal was on his feet now, running, waving toward Colleen, Doc and Goldie. “Don’t lose him!”

  In the dim, creepy house, Tina stirred fitfully. There were sounds outside, but they seemed distant in the heat haze of her fever. She had been getting better, but somehow being near Stern had made the sickness flare with new ferocity. It churned in her like a living thing, worked its will. In her delirium, she saw blurry, indistinct figures, enticing her. Sometimes, she fancied they were Petrushka and Odette and the Firebird calling her to the dance, but then they would shift into other forms, some human, some not, and the place they beckoned from was a dark haven she had never known.

  The front door burst open, rousing her. She opened her eyes to see Stern, gleaming with wetness that steamed off his hot skin. He tore down the gauzy curtains, wiped furiously at himself. “Damn, that stings!”

  Footsteps sounded from outside. Through the open door, Tina saw Cal running toward the house, followed by the woman and man who had been in her room and also another man. She cried out to them, but Stern grabbed her up in his rough arms.

  He brought his ghastly face down to her. “I’m sick of this dump. How about you?”

  She fought to form words of protest but found she could only moan. Stern strode toward the window.

  Sam banged the back door and burst into the room, wheezing hard. The import of the scene burned instantly into his mind. Ely was leaving, and he was taking the dancer girl with him—to whatever dark destiny he chose next.

  Amazement washed over Sam, he couldn’t believe it. The genie, the dread genie would be gone, and miraculously Sam would be spared, left alone. The dancer girl, it would be her turn to reap the whirlwind, wherever it chose to spin her, even tear her apart in its brute savagery.

  But she hadn’t invited it in. Sam had.

  Ely was almost to the window, his broad wings stretching out. He would have to smash out the glass, perhaps even the frame, to fit through, but that would be nothing to him. No amount of destruction ever was. Sam hung back in the shadows, breathless and watching. The little girl hung limp in Stern’s arms, and she looked so small, so fragile, not like a real person at all.

  Her eyes opened, all depth-of-ocean blueness
, and found Sam in the shadows. For just that moment, Sam felt swallowed in her gaze, recognized the desperation and despair there, the helplessness and humanity. Then her eyes slipped shut, and the connection was broken.

  Hang back, the voice in Sam cautioned. Do nothing, and they’ll be gone.

  But his legs were already working, rapid, little steps that quickly overtook Stern. Sam stepped in his path, blocked his way.

  “I can’t let you, Ely,” he said simply.

  Stern advised, “Move aside, Mr. Mole.”

  Sam felt dizzy, sick with terror. His hand sought out an end table for support, and his fingers brushed the Loetz silver-overlay vase that had been Mother’s favorite, a precious thing in a houseful of precious things that populated his life, that had never been his. Sam’s glance held on Stern’s face, so magnificent and appalling.

  “I can’t,” Sam said.

  The girl’s eyes half-fluttered open, and Sam thought he saw comprehension there, that she knew what was happening. Stern drew in a deep, warning breath.

  Sam’s fingers closed about the Loetz vase, and he brought it up in a swinging arc. The light in the dim room caught it, and it gleamed blue and black and green iridescence, like Ely himself.

  Just before the flash, the sound like a furnace flaring to life, Sam saw the glass shatter against Stern’s face, had time to think, That will leave a mark.

  The dolls, in all their delicacy and indifference, watched Sam burn.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  NEW YORK

  Down the street. She had been there all this time, only three houses down, and he hadn’t known, hadn’t suspected.

  From his living room window, Cal could still see the embers of what had been Sam Lungo’s house, pulsing darkly in the night, wisps of smoke curling weakly, the stench of charred wood and flesh heavy in the air. In the firestorm that had en-folded it, the roof had crumpled, timbers falling in on themselves, throwing up a firefly swarm of sparks and ash. Mercifully, a breath of summer rain had come and quenched it, and the blaze hadn’t spread.

  The street outside was empty now, but it bore witness to the maelstrom that had passed through, windows broken, chunks of pavement gouged out, nameless fragments scattered wholesale as if some giant, willful child had played his roughhouse game, smashed his toys and moved on.

  It was a new world indeed, one where men—or what had been men—could see in the dark, shoot light from their hands, fly. New gifts of power but, clearly, none of insight. Cal felt he’d been given no gifts at all, only a dream in which he’d seen the ridiculous sword that hung at his side, but what use had it been? He was a man, nothing more, and that had proved achingly inadequate.

  Standing nearby, Doc caught Cal’s expression. “If you’d like to crucify yourself, I could get some nails.” But there was sympathy in his eyes, a forgiveness Cal could not grant himself.

  “ ’Scuse me.” Goldie slid between the two of them, stepped lightly to the window. He cracked it open, lifted a potted plant from the sill and upended it without looking, dumping dirt and greenery onto the thankfully vacant street below.

  The earthenware pot now empty, Goldie cradled it in one arm, gliding along the periphery of the room, his free hand outstretched, hovering above each object like a psychic metal detector.

  “Déjà vu all over again,” Colleen sighed, to no one in particular.

  “Symbolism is very important when it comes to visions,” Goldie said, not stopping, not looking at her. “You burn something as a token of what you want to see. In this case, we want to view something that, yesterday, sanity would have told us was . . . ah.”

  He snatched a copy of TV Guide off the television, said to Cal, “You won’t be needing this.” He dropped it in the pot. “And, um, if I could trouble you for a light. . . .”

  Cal fished in his pocket, tossed Goldie the lighter. Goldie plopped cross-legged down in the middle of the room as the others looked on. He set the pot in his lap, then shot his cuffs. “Nothing up my sleeve.”

  He flicked the lighter. A thin blue flame shot up, which he angled to the edge of the TV Guide. The pages started to smolder, blacken, curl like moth wings aborning.

  Goldie bent his head and began to mouth words under his breath quickly, blurred in a droning mantra. He repeated the incantation, gaining in speed and intensity. He rocked from the waist, davening like a Hassidic rabbi, eyes screwed shut, mouth working. Cal strained to make out the words, caught several syllables, a snatch of phrase. Something about not believing what you hear, only what you see. . . .

  Goldie was intoning the lyrics to “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.”

  Colleen hissed, “This is such bullshi—”

  “Shh,” Cal cut her off. For the smoke rising from the burning digest was becoming something more, resolving into a vague, rectangular shape, a flickering cascade of light playing over it just like . . .

  Snow, on a television screen.

  The shape hovered above the pot, smoke framing it, the lilt of Goldie’s words a soft, toneless music. In the darkened room, the light from it illumined their faces, stilled in wonder, even Colleen’s.

  The screen—for such it was—began to clarify into an evanescent image, shimmering as though seen through a rain-slicked window. Quickly, it gained substance, took on weight and solidity. The object was beautiful and ornate in its war of Nouveau and Déco. The gilded, dark gleaming stone stood cold against a malevolent night sky.

  Of course it was where Stern would go. Cal felt the chill rise through his veins.

  Goldie let out a soft groan. The image folded in on itself and winked out. The fire died, the magazine consumed.

  Goldie opened his eyes. His face shone with sweat, and he was trembling. He looked up at Cal with regret. “Sorry, man, couldn’t hold it.”

  “It’s all right,” Cal murmured.

  The Stark Building—Stern’s office, and his—stood waiting.

  Cal and his cohorts advanced toward the building cautiously, alert for any assault, but it proved needless. The street was deserted, shut up tight, no light in any window. Fitful gusts spun bits of paper about their feet and ankles. A pale, un-caring moon lit their approach.

  Drawing close, Cal peered at the brooding structure, towering over its neighbors, its stylized lightning bolts and stars of steel and gold whirling about doorframes and ledges. In his mind’s eye, he had a vision of how this building, this street, would look in a hundred years, a thousand, vines choking its stones, birds shrieking from empty windows, as lost to memory as Angkor Wat or Machu Picchu had been.

  This place had served its purpose, and now it was done, abandoned by those who had used it, left only to monsters.

  The Stark Building’s massive doors had been locked, but that proved no impediment. Colleen, as part of the maintenance crew, had a key.

  The lobby, however, proved a surprise. When Cal had last seen it, it had been a vast, open space, airy and clean. Now it was a wreck, dust hanging thick, a charcoal stench in the air that caught at the back of his throat. Both the staircases and elevator shafts were trashed and scorched, ragged chunks of concrete piled high in them, tumbled like a storm of meteors, blocking all passage.

  Stern wanted no visitors.

  So now they stood outside again, staring at its black immensity, hard against the night sky.

  “I don’t suppose you have any spells to conjure up a helicopter,” Doc said to Goldie.

  Colleen set down her heavy shoulder bag and unzipped it. She withdrew coils of rope, nylon harnesses, bags of chalk dust, tapered aluminum wedges.

  “I’ll let you know what I find up top,” she told Cal, securing her crossbow across her back. She took a step toward the sheer face, but he reached for her shoulder.

  “Nobody goes unless I go,” he said.

  She scrutinized him with a baleful eye. “You ever climbed anything but a corporate ladder?”

  Cal shook his head. Colleen pointed out that it was suicide for him to attempt a climb lik
e this and, when Cal refused to be swayed, brought out every colorful epithet she could remember from a childhood of Air Force bases and low-rent dives.

  Through it all, Cal was gently, maddeningly deaf to protest.

  In the end, she handed him a harness.

  Doc stepped up. “You know, I fancy a little exertion myself.”

  “Sorry, Ivan,” Colleen replied, “just got the gear for Rory and me. Two’s the limit.”

  “My first name is not Ivan,” Doc noted.

  “Someday, remind me to ask you what it is.” She turned to Cal and smiled grimly. “Ready to climb, farmboy?”

  “This city’s finished.”

  From where he crouched high on the roof’s edge, Stern could see pallid lights flickering here and there on the black, unknowable surface of the city, like maggots on a corpse. It was a dying thing, he had known that for years, had only forgotten it momentarily in the heady exhilaration of his new birth.

  A gentle moan issued behind him, a sweet sound. He turned to see the girl stirring. She lay a few yards off, so delicate and untainted, nothing like the bitch predators that had circled him, smelling power and money.

  A few long strides, and he was bending over her. She looked up at him with distant, appraising eyes. If she was afraid, she wasn’t showing it. He liked that.

  Her skin was pale as lace now, with only the finest mottling, a hint of robin’s egg blue along her cheeks and brow, a porcelain tint that reminded him of a cup and saucer he had seen as a boy and coveted. Sweat fever damped her face, but it only highlighted her cheekbones and eyes.

  “Excuse the rough handling. Feeling better?”

  “Where . . . ?” She pressed herself partially up, drawing to the roof’s edge to peer at a bottomless drop. Wind caught her fine, blanched hair, whipped it with insolent abandon.

  “Where you can rest . . . and let it all go.”

  She cried out then as blue energy sparked out of her pores, splayed across her body in a mad dance. Her back arched at the white agony of it, and he felt a swell of sympathy, knowing firsthand her pain. With an angry snap as of an electric arc, it sucked back into her body and abated.