Magic Time

by Marc Scott Zicree

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Is it what you need?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Shango drew a deep breath, reminding himself that his job was not yet done. It wasn’t his to judge, just to find. McKay might be able to make something of this, might match up a name, or a town. If it were what he needed, if it might save the day. If the Source Project was even the cause of all this.

  Shango had already done the near impossible. It was time to go.

  To McKay, who had trusted him, whom he had left to the care of less-watchful souls.

  On sudden impulse, Shango fished the steel dog tag from his pocket, laid it in Goldman’s hand. “Can you see the man who gave me this? See if he’s all right?”

  The wild-haired man cocked his head questioningly. Then he took the slip of steel, pressed it between his palms, then to his lips. In the cool morning light, his eyes seemed both focused and distant, seeing beyond the hunks of metal that littered the ground, the stinks of decay. Though the morning was silent, he seemed to hear something, for his face changed, fell a little, the pale brown eyes sad. He made as if to speak, then hesitated.

  “What is it, Goldie?” Cal asked.

  “I’m sorry,” Goldman said to Shango, handing back the dog tag. “The man you work for, the one you like . . . is dead.”

  Shango said nothing. Just folded the steel back into his huge palm.

  “Goldie’s visions aren’t always accurate,” Cal offered.

  “Oh, geez, no,” Goldie agreed quickly, as if the thought that people would take his visions as gospel appalled him. “Sometimes what I see is just ’cause I’m . . .” Suddenly, the jangly quality, the wildness ebbed out of him, and he was calm and sure. “If, when you go back, he’s not there to greet you, go to a fountain near the roses.” He peered worriedly from beneath his straw hat brim at Shango’s motionless, expressionless face. “Just wanted to save you the trip,” he said.

  “I appreciate it.” The words came out like the dry stir of ash. “I still have to go back.”

  Shango slid the metal tag back into his pocket and glanced at the retrieved sheets of wilted paper he still held in his other hand.

  Time to go now.

  And as he folded the sheets, his eyes tumbled down the list of names.

  Wish Heart, Griffin had told him. Shango’s heart was a stone in him, as he kept his silence. And he thought of his duty and of the void that lay there if it were set aside. A void to be looked into and then drawn back from.

  And everyone who had drifted through his wandering life floated ghostlike before him now, the ones who had trusted him and stood for him, and whom he had failed. Czernas, and Mrs. Close and Mr. Dean, and all the other guiltless souls at Angels Rest. And perhaps McKay, too, almost certainly so.

  He contemplated the men standing beside him, who had brought him here and risked themselves. They were, he knew, going into even greater danger, all innocent, like calves to a slaughterhouse.

  What would they be thinking in their last moments?

  Of their loved ones, who would be with them.

  And he knew that his duty, his oath of office, that everything he stood for, decreed that he tell them nothing of the knowledge he held.

  But if McKay were dead, where might that duty lie?

  “Wishart isn’t a place,” said Shango. “He’s a person. Dr. Fred Wishart. And he does live in the South. South of here, anyway. A place called Boone’s Gap, West Virginia— though it’s unlikely he was there when all this came down.” Then he told them all he knew—what precious little there was of it—about the Source Project.

  Surprise showed in Cal Griffin’s eyes, and he was quiet, weighing this intelligence, shuffling it into all that had unfolded in the days that had brought them here.

  Goldie chuckled, but there was no humor in the sound. “You know, funniest coincidence: during the Manhattan Project, there was a serious concern that if they set off an atomic reaction, it might just keep going, blow up the whole world. What the hell, they pushed the button anyway.”

  “This force,” Cal asked Shango in a hushed tone, “is it something the scientists made or something they just plugged into?”

  “I don’t know,” said Shango. “I don’t even know where it was located.”

  “Lay you odds it’s to the west,” Goldie muttered.

  “I can’t say how to stop it or control it,” Shango continued and felt his own futility. “All I know is someone was doing something they didn’t want shared, that it was about power.” But then, it was always about power.

  Shango tucked the sheets into his pack, looked northward. The sun was rising high into the gray, cloudless sky, but it gave no warmth. Time to go.

  Home?

  Or just back?

  Cal put a hand on his arm, smiled into Shango’s dark eyes. “If you’d care to come with us, we could sure as hell use you.”

  And though he had his duty, though his modus operandi had been always to be alone, to rely on no one and watch his own back, Shango felt the longing rise in him to go with them, to be with them.

  Reluctantly, he shook his head. “I have to make sure.”

  Cal nodded. “I understand.” He clasped Shango’s hand. Looking into Cal’s eyes, Shango was reminded, strangely, of McKay.

  “Keep your head low,” said Goldie, as if speaking to a man who proposed to cross a busy street, as if he had said it many, many times.

  “You, too,” Shango said.

  The dead of night was the worst time.

  By day, the white house among the honeysuckle was as invisible to Wilma as it was to the rest of the people in the town—she didn’t see it, didn’t even think about it, except when she walked to the trailer court to help Shannon and Greg care for Tessa or down to the Senior Center, where two or three of the old people were beginning to nod and doze with that same cold constant silence. But at night it seemed to come into focus again.

  That was when things came out of the darkness.

  Two nights ago, skeletal wolves melted into being from the gray mists that lifted from the earth to surround the house, solidifying around burning red fire specks of eyes. Wilma had watched them from her back porch steps as they’d tried to clamber through the broken, yawning windows, through the open door. Blue lightning had sizzled and snapped from the walls, and purplish flame crept from the windows in a phosphorescent stream. The wolves howled and howled, writhing in pain as they burned, and then had melted away. But when dawn came, Wilma, looking hard, saw on the dilapidated paintwork the marks of their claws and teeth.

  Last night, it had started the same, with the mist rising from the ground, rolling across the trailer court, up Applby Street. Surrounding the house in the darkness. But the thing that came striding in the mist was something Wilma had never seen before, something she could barely make out: something that shrieked in a voice that was like the wind but wasn’t the wind, like a machine but not a machine, a terrible hammering that grew louder and louder and resolved itself into pounding on the walls. On the back porch in darkness Wilma had waited, listening, hearing the boards and timbers of the house groan with the strain. Hearing the zap and hiss of those blue flames, that creeping lightning, and seeing the occasional flash of it through the murk. Smelling burning, like hair and flesh and feathers singed and consumed at once.

  Knowing somehow that if whatever it was broke into the house, things would be worse than they were now.

  The howling stopped about two hours before dawn, and the silence that stretched until morning was almost worse than the noise. Then imperceptibly the mists slunk away, and Wilma slept.

  She sat again tonight on her porch with her cats around her and wiped her hands absent-mindedly with the dampened washrags that in some curious way were calming to her heart. She watched the house and watched the darkness, with the stillness of a cat, like Imp when he was waiting for a grasshopper to forget that he was there.

  He has to come sometime, she thought.

  Wh
en he does, he has to speak to me.

  Movement in the darkness. The reflection of milky eyes. Somehow she knew it was Hank—the smell of him, perhaps, sharp and clear as any mouse in the grass or frog beneath the porch steps—and she settled herself more still, lest she break the pattern of stillness and cause him to flee. Beside her, Imp hissed softly and lashed his tail.

  Dark against dark, Hank stepped from the bramble of the overgrown back hedge. Since last she’d seen him, a day or two after the Change, he’d altered little, though she thought he was smaller yet. It was as if his flesh and bones had compacted: the same man, yet more dense, in body and also in soul.

  At least he was alive.

  There was a smell in him of fear, and of madness. He carried a short length of metal pipe in his hand.

  She waited until he was quite near her before she spoke, and then she spoke without moving: Hank, she said softly, speaking as she sometimes spoke without actual words to her cats. But he heard her and froze.

  “Hank.”

  The glinting eyes turned. Wilma rose, very slowly, and held out her hand. When he didn’t move, she descended the porch steps as if she were hunting and feared to startle a prey. His hand with the club moved a little, rose, then sank again. She felt his eyes on her and felt, too, the pain, the yearning in his heart, even before he said her name.

  “Wilma.”

  “Hank, will you walk with me?” In the dark she saw his face flinch, twist a little. Some inner pinch of pain. But he didn’t move, beyond the clenching of his big hand, and she came up close to him and took his arm. Her voice was the murmur of the night. “Let’s walk,” she said.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  “I don’t—know,” said Hank. His brow wrinkled, sharp and hard, at her question, as if even thinking put him in pain. “There’s these . . . dreams.”

  They had left the houses of town behind, the stink of privies and woodsmoke. The green sweet stillness of trees lay thick on the night. Wilma had led him away from the terrible flow of those glowing energies, avoiding the hot spots, the bad places.

  They passed the old Simmonds house and stood in the dirt lane there, with the trees of the mountain pressing close around them. The old two-story house was dark. A hundred feet away the mist curled, pale and enigmatic in starlight.

  Hank pressed his fist to his brow, as if the physical act could push down some clamor within. “I keep to myself, mainly, but . . . they know I led the men out of the mines, they’re looking to me to—” He broke off, then struggled again to speak. “There ain’t too much food in the tunnels. We were okay at first, but Green Mountain’s nearly trapped out of deer and rabbits. It’s harder and harder to catch rats in the town, even. They’re talkin’ of hitting the food stores—and the houses.”

  Wilma almost asked, Who are? but stopped herself. Now was not the time to break his concentration. She only waited, in the silence that was her custom now as well as his.

  In time, he went on. “So there’s these dreams. And in ’em I’m hungry, and it’s his fault. Wishart.”

  “Bob Wishart?”

  He nodded.

  “Is Bob alive?” she asked. “I know Arleta said, right at the beginning, that his machines hadn’t gone down, but now I see that might not even have been Arleta—or she might not have been in her right senses. And I know no batteries, no machines kept working. So what is in that house?”

  “I don’t know!” Hank shook his head, and the gesture graded into a quiver, like a shudder of pain. His hand twitched where hers held it and the pressure of his fingers around hers was suddenly crushing and as suddenly released. “I know what you’re saying is right. And I don’t know the truth of it. But in these dreams it’s—there’s this voice saying, He’s pretending. He’s just faking us out. He’s doing it all, with the fog and the things coming out of it.”

  He looked up at her, twisting his neck on his bowed shoulders, and the white eyes were deadly serious, deathly afraid. “Whether it’s Bob or somethin’ else in that house, in the dreams it’s Bob—Bob crouching in that bedroom of his with all the food in the town and all the dead around him, Andy Hillocher and Sonny and poor old Arleta, all rotting there. Bob, fat and greasy, with that geeky grin of his . . .”

  “Bob wouldn’t hurt a fly,” Wilma protested. “It isn’t just that he was afraid of his shadow. He’s a genuinely good man, harmless and friendly.”

  “I know all that!” Hank’s face screwed with pain. “Dammit, I know! But these voices, this voice, in my head, in my dreams. In my dreams, it’s Bob. And in my dreams, I kill him.”

  Wilma was silent, thinking about Tessa and the others. Thinking about the glowing threads of power, the Indian women screaming with their children, their pain as sharp as it had been two and a half centuries before.

  After a long time she said, “Don’t do this, Hank.” And yet as she spoke, she saw the sweat on his face and felt his arm shake where her hand closed around his, and she knew he wouldn’t attack the house because he wanted to. Yet she could come up with nothing else to say.

  “Don’t do it.” She pressed his hands. “Whatever is telling you this, sending you these dreams—it’s lying. There’s something going on here, Hank, something we don’t understand, but it’s using you. It has no more regard for you than an old-time miner had for the canary that he used to detect gas. A living tool that would drop over dead.”

  Hank shook his head, weary and beaten. “I’ve seen into that house in my dreams. There’s a nightmare in there. It’s crazy, alive and strong. And the voice in my head, saying, saying—”

  He stopped abruptly, looking up sharply. Wilma heard the grunters, smelled them, before she saw them. They oozed out of the night, gliding on padded feet from around the gutted Simmonds house and its broken-down sheds, resolved from the silhouettes of pine, beech and oak trees, crawled up out of the gorges. Six, eight, ten of them, grasping ax handles, bights of chain, picks rusted with long storage in the mine. They trampled the smartweed as they came, closing in, all of them staring accusingly at Hank.

  “I . . . wasn’t supposed to tell,” Hank said.

  Then, breaking into a shriek like the offended dead, they attacked.

  Hank yelled, “No!” and flung himself at them, iron pipe slashing through the air. “Wilma, run!”

  “Hank, I . . .”

  “Run!!!”

  Three of them darted around him, snatching at her, and she had no choice but to fall back into what looked like a little band of the mist, like a projection of it.

  She heard the confused shouting of Hank and the other grunters muffle and fall away, the clang of metal pipes and the wrenches they used as clubs. Then the slap of bare feet on the hard dirt came to her, and she knew the grunters—a maddened few, at least—had dared enter the fog after her.

  She broke into a run but grew aware that the footfalls of her pursuers were slowing, becoming uncertain as the fog enfolded and disoriented them. They stopped, were silent a moment—and then their screams began.

  Wilma plunged away, through darkness her night-sighted eyes could not pierce. She stumbled on what felt like a chunk of old machinery—something in the Simmonds yard, she thought—struggled up, clutching twisted, rusty metal that cut into her. Gasping, the sick-damp air leeching the breath from her, she pressed on.

  Something blue and flickering rushed at her from among the trees, driving her deeper into the mists. The ground grew rougher, sloping under her feet. Vines and creepers grabbed at her ankles. Lights flickered among the underbrush, fire-balls, she saw, rolling slowly, steadily toward her along the ground, the sight of them lifting the hair from her nape.

  All behind her was stillness now. She turned, speculating about heading back the way she’d come, but knowing that whatever had silenced her pursuers still lay between her and town.

  Then she heard it. Coming for her, its panting breath sawing the darkness, the crunch of its feet on last year’s brown leaves. Its phosphor-green light, like a swarm of disease
mold, punctured the mist, growing larger and more distinct as it approached.

  It had no smell, no reek of decay, no tang of electrical discharge, nothing, and somehow that was the most alarming of all.

  The thing reared out of the darkness, and she saw it now in all its malformed detail. Not a grunter, no, nor one of the spectral, massacred Indian women. It peered at her with burning, malign eyes like the Wishart house itself, and its flesh writhed.

  Gaping up at it, Wilma forced down the cry that threatened to burst from her, channeled that frenzied energy into her legs, twisting away, bolting off blindly through the mist and dark.

  She heard it tearing after her, didn’t risk looking back. Deadfall branches clawed her; she stumbled again in potholes, in cold rivulets of what had to be Boone’s Creek.

  And, running full out with all the blessed, feral strength humming through her veins, she knew that the thing at her heels was gaining and would have her.

  “Oh, man, this doesn’t belong here.”

  Goldie had been the first to see it as they had rounded the bend of the two-lane, under the gaunt September moon. The fog stretched across the road like a prison wall, flat and gray and impenetrable.

  He pulled his no-speed to a halt and clambered down as Cal, Doc and Colleen drew up alongside. Tentatively, he approached the barrier, inspecting it as wispy tendrils reached out like beckoning fingers.

  The others dismounted and joined him. “What do you mean, it doesn’t belong here?” Cal asked.

  Goldie shook his head slowly, never taking his eyes off it.

  Sparkling illumination like starlight shone from behind them, dusting the surface of the fog, and Cal realized that Tina had emerged from the pedicab. She floated to the edge of the mist, contemplating it with trembling agitation, breathing in quick gasps, keen and brittle. Cal had observed this mood rising in her over the past days as she had struggled against the growing clamor in her mind, seen it become as much a part of her as the leggings and too-large denim shirt she wore, the globe of swimming light that emanated from her.