by Marc Zicree
Magritte turned frantic eyes to me. “Oh, God, I hear it! Enid!”
I understood in a chill jolt. Something was wrong with Enid. The Veil was unraveling. It had been a close, still morning; I already knew there was no breeze to move the chimes.
Without warning, Javier was pulled toward the rafters like a puppet on strings. Maggie grabbed him with both hands and began to sing Enid’s “Refugee Song,” wordlessly, her voice high and trembling. Javier’s upward movement stopped, leaving both flares suspended above the altar.
I turned and bolted from the chapel. There were two sets of chimes hanging under the eaves of the porch. I could make a shield of them.
The courtyard had been awash with morning light earlier. Now shadows swam across it, sucking away the sun, devouring the Preserve’s protective aura. Delmar Crow stood on the porch of the leather shop across the way, staring at the sky.
I shouted at him as I reached for the chimes, kept shouting as I yanked them from their hooks and shook a wild cascade of notes out of them. “Flares! In the chapel! The Storm’s getting at them!”
Delmar’s eyes swung to the chapel, realization dawning. He made a gesture of comprehension at me, then turned and disappeared into the leather shop.
Swinging the chimes, I turned back into the sanctuary, driven by the sudden, insistent sound of drumming, which seemed to come from everywhere at once. I was terrified that in the moments I’d been gone, Magritte and the others had been taken. But I heard her voice as I crossed the foyer, still reeling out song, trying to scramble the signal. I elbowed my way through the inner doors, chimes singing with every movement.
All three flares hung in midair before the altar, linked only by Magritte’s hands. She burned bright, white-hot, her delicate features twisted with effort. Faun and Javier were guttering flames. Their auras were no longer radiant and lucent, but pulsed with muddy reds and purples. Above them in the rafters a malignant shadow spread its arms, pulling them upward into its embrace. Its voice was like the hiss of whitewater, swiftly building to a roar.
I moved without thinking, chimes tangled in my fingers, rushing up the aisle, leaping, grabbing, managing somehow to get my arms around the struggling flares. I felt the warm chill of their changed flesh, the homely fabric of their clothing. I was surprised when my human weight had an effect; they dropped suddenly and my feet met the chapel’s firm floorboards.
Magritte sobbed in my ear. Her voice faltered. We were buoyed upward.
“Keep singing!” I shouted.
“Scared,” she keened, and turned the cry into a note and the note into a trill of song.
“Me, too,” I murmured, and wondered how long we could keep this up. My arms around the flares, the chimes I held were useless. And Magritte was weakening.
There was a crack like thunder and the ceiling above us ripped apart in a hail of debris. The Storm surged into the breach; I could feel and hear the alien wind, sucking at us from above. It stirred the chimes tangled in my hands, but the chaos voices drowned out their song.
Faun let out a cry of despair and fury and twisted in my grasp, her fists striking glancing blows across my shoulders. Javier screamed. We were being lifted again, tugged from the solid earth toward the looming shadows. I looked up.
The Storm’s maw was gaping, black, eternal and ablaze with unnatural, translucent flame in a thousand hues. And behind it Something smiled, unseen, and hungered.
I don’t ever want to feel that touch again.
I tightened my grip. In response, Faun lashed out with a charge of pure, freezing energy that blinded all my senses. My arms went numb, my legs spasmed, my head exploded with hot-white pain. Faun twisted away and flew upward. Javier shot up after her, slipping from the circle of my arms.
I grabbed desperately, clumsily, losing the wind chimes. But I caught one thin ankle with a hand that seemed part of someone else’s body. With the other hand I captured Magritte, crushing her against my side. I would not let go. I swore it to myself, to Tina, to God, to the Source. I would die before I’d let go of either of them.
Enid’s voice cut through the storm fury like a velvet knife, accompanied by a sheet of chime-song. Melody reached up into the blazing darkness and joined battle with it.
Above us, in the Storm-mouth, Faun twisted this way and that, a stray ember thrown from a fire to die. Javier reached after her. The unearthly wind crescendoed, roaring, wailing like a maddened animal, like a lost soul. Then it was gone so suddenly that all sound, all sensation, seemed to have been sucked out of the room.
And with it, Faun.
I quivered in the aftermath, dimly aware of Enid’s voice flowing around me. Javier was a dead weight in my arms, his fey light extinguished. He weighed no more than a young child. My legs felt as if they were made of rubber, not flesh and bone. I sank to my knees on the hardwood floor.
Magritte, halo dimmed, sagged against me, panting. She touched Javier’s face with a trembling hand. “He’ll be all right,” she whispered. It may have been a promise or a prayer.
We both looked to Enid. He still sang, desperation in his eyes, sweat gleaming on his face. His voice was raw and his fingers faltered on the strings of his guitar.
I got to my feet, passing the limp Javier to Delmar, who had come into the chapel with Enid. “We’ve got to get the waterwheel online,” I said. “I’ll need Colleen, Goldie—hell, I’ll need everybody you can get.”
Delmar nodded. “I’ll take care of these two. And pray the others got to safety.”
“Where will you take them?”
“Down. Into the caves.”
I headed for the unfinished millhouse, trying to keep my eyes from being drawn to the sky. I knew what I’d see. The weak shimmer of chimes, powered by human hands, held the Storm at bay, but it hadn’t been repulsed. Its unnatural clouds roiled overhead, licking the treetops; I felt them as a hot weight on my soul.
Mary met me near the center of camp, Goldie and Kevin Elk Sings at her side.
“Magritte.” The name tumbled out of Goldie’s mouth the moment he saw me. His hand clutched my sleeve.
“She’s okay. How did you—”
“Delmar,” said Mary. She seemed dazed, wounded. “The drums.”
“Faun,” I said.
She nodded. “I know.”
“There was nothing I—”
“I know. If there were a way you could have saved her, she’d be here now. But the others … you… they’re still with us.” Her eyes came in to sudden focus, locked with mine. “We’ve got to protect them.”
At the millhouse the great wheel was still, poised above the water. A cascade of curses rolled from the open door. We dove inside.
The obscene litany came from a stocky gentleman with an impressive shock of white hair and five o’clock snow on his jaw. Within the halo of white, his face was the color of a boiled lobster and glistening with sweat; a sledgehammer was clenched in his fist. Like Thor or Vulcan, Greg Gustavson must surely be capable of tossing thunderbolts.
Colleen was here, too, crouched above him in the confusion of large wooden gears that formed the mill’s mechanism.
Greg ceased cursing long enough to look at Mary and say, “Before you ask, it can’t be done. She’s not ready. The clutch isn’t finished, and if it were, the wood’d be too green yet.”
“Great Scotty’s Ghost,” murmured Goldie.
I looked up into the recesses of the building. About a dozen feet above our heads a beam as big around as a century oak stretched the width of the millhouse. It was suspended from the ridgepole above its cradle by a web of ropes. Along with the framework of gears that would drive the grinding plates below, there were several pulley-wheels, their lines threaded through the millhouse walls through small, high windows. They connected the mill to our system of chime lines. They were useless without the wheel.
I swung up next to Colleen amidst the machinery and knelt to inspect the clutch “Scotty’s Ghost” had mentioned. I could feel the Storm above us, circling like a vast b
ird of prey, muttering to itself, looking for another opening.
“What’s the good news?” I asked.
“The good news is the gearbox is finished. The bad news is—”
“I didn’t ask for the bad news.”
Colleen shot me a sideways glance. “Well, you’re gonna get it anyway. Bad news is, these brakes need work.”
She ran her hands over the curved wooden brake pads that were intended to slow or stop the wheel. “These are smooth,” she told me. “Too smooth. It’d be a miracle if they could brake this thing under normal circumstances; there’s no way they’ll survive if the shaft hits the cradle moving.”
“Which it will do,” said Greg Gustavson from below, “if the wheel catches running water.”
“We have to get it in the water,” I said. “Now.”
Colleen met my eyes, then looked down at the engineer. “What if we bypass the clutch and—”
“If you drop this thing in the water without a clutch, it’ll tear the whole mill apart,” he snapped. “We’ve got to be able to disengage the gears.”
“Or stop the water,” said Kevin quietly. The boy hovered behind Mary, working his hands around and around the barrel of a wooden flute. Somehow I got the feeling he never put the thing down.
Greg shook his head. “The lock’s not finished yet, Kev. We got caught with our pants down. We’re not ready.”
“How fast can you get the wheel into the cradle?” I asked.
Greg shot me a glance that asked who the hell I thought I was to come onto his turf and start issuing orders. “In a matter of minutes, but what’s the point? I told you, if that wheel hits the water in motion—”
“Then Kevin’s right,” I said. “Our only chance is to stop the stream. Then we can lower the shaft into the cradle and use the brakes to control the momentum.”
“If we rough up these braking surfaces,” said Colleen. Greg snorted. “Hell, that’s the easy part. How’re you gonna stop the stream?”
Kevin and Goldie followed me from the mill while Greg, Colleen, and a couple of volunteers worked on the brakes. Mary hurriedly gathered a crew of brawn to manhandle the wheel.
Just above the millhouse the waterway narrowed before cascading into the broader, deeper channel along which the mill was being constructed. I tried not to hear the roaring of the frustrated Storm above the treetops, tried not to imagine its hot breath as we checked the lay of the land, the orientation of trees, the availability of large rocks, logs, branches, anything.
Near the mill, uphill from the stream, a large hunk of granite caught my eye. Apply the right leverage and we could roll this thing downhill into the current right about where the stream fed into the millpond. That would block it only partially and would leave us with the additional problem of getting the boulder out of the water again, but right now I didn’t see an alternative.
The sweet, clear tones of a flute floated up to me, mingled with the purl of the stream. I turned. Kevin Elk Sings sat cross-legged beside the flow, flute to his lips. He seemed to be playing to the water. Goldie squatted beside him, eyes raptly on the flute player.
I heard steps behind me. Shadows fell across the face of the boulder. I tried not to notice how dim they were in the growing darkness, what strange colors they cast.
“What are they doing, Calvin?” Doc asked.
“Not sure,” I said.
I turned. Doc wasn’t alone. Delmar Crow and several other men were with him. “Look,” I said, “here’s the situation. We need a dam. Gustavson and Colleen are getting the wheel ready to go in the water, but first we have to stop the water from flowing into the millpond.”
Delmar nodded, slapping his hand against the granite flank of the boulder. “You want to start with this?”
I nodded. “We’ll need leverage.”
Leverage came from a pile of scrap lumber stacked in the lee of the mill. We dragged out three long pieces and hurriedly worked them under the boulder’s flank.
I looked down the hill, mouth open to warn Goldie and Kevin out of the way. The sound stopped in my throat.
The two of them were just about as I’d last seen them, except that Goldie had moved closer to Kevin, the fingers of one hand resting on the barrel of the flute as if in a caress or a benediction. Just beyond where they crouched, the water eddied, curled, and slowed as if an arctic wind breathed over it. Then it folded back on itself and ran, with all the speed of syrup, back the way it had come.
If Kevin could keep this up, the millpond would be empty in a matter of minutes. I held my breath, feeling as if I were on the verge of an epiphany. But as I watched, the water fell back into its normal state, and my epiphany drained away with it toward the mill.
Kevin slumped on the bank with a wail of frustration.
I nodded to Delmar. “We’re on. Let’s get this thing in the water.” I wrapped my hands around a rough two-by-four. “Doc, can you go down there and get them out of the way?”
He threw me a sideways glance. “I am prepared to help here,” he said.
“Doc, we need them out of the way.”
He moved off down the hill, gait stiff, but no longer limping. At the water’s edge, Goldie gave him an argument and Kevin was slow to move, but he managed to get both of them out of the path we hoped our boulder would take.
It took more than the three tries requisite in most fiction, and Goldie, Doc, and Kevin had to add their strength to the effort, but in the end we heaved the boulder out of its bed and watched it roll ponderously into the stream. It splashed down about where we’d intended, but then rolled back toward the mill, leaving generous floodgates on both sides.
“Now what?” Goldie had to shout, making me realize that the roar of the Storm had grown.
I could no longer hear the wind chimes, and had to glance at those nearest us to even see that they were moving. Around us the woods flickered with strange, uncertain light and our shadows squirmed and writhed on the ground as if sinister life grew within them.
“Now we build a dam,” I answered.
Delmar was already headed for the pile of scrap lumber. The rest of us followed. We hauled everything we could lay our hands on down to the stream, then Delmar and I plunged in to start the water wall. We were joined by two men who could have easily passed for defensive linemen. Their names were Tomas and Hagen.
Our backs against the boulder, we worked desperately to seat the odd-size planks across the stream’s mouth. The water was glacially cold; in a matter of seconds hands and feet were numb. Wood slipped easily from frozen fingers, forcing us to grapple with it again and again.
When we had built an unsteady, shifting, four-foot wall, the others plunged into the stream with us, forming a human brace against the water. Only Doc was left on shore, ferrying materials from the mill.
It was working, but so damned slowly. And the stream was stubborn. It breached the wall in a dozen places and foamed over the top, blinding us. The roar of the water bled into the Storm chaos until I couldn’t tell one from the other. We needed more wood.
I glanced up to where Doc hovered on the bank, a short piece of board in his hands. “Too small!” I shouted. “Longer!”
He hesitated, then dropped the board and scrambled up the bank. It seemed an eternity before he was back, struggling with several longer pieces. He was trying to pass one of them out to us when he missed his footing and toppled into the stream just above our would-be dam. The force of the water slammed him into the leaking wall and sent Kevin Elk Sings tumbling backward into the dwindling millpond. Water shot through the unmanned gap.
Delmar shouted and lunged to cover the hole. Kevin scrambled as well, out of the water and around the end of the dam to help Doc clamber out of the water. The cavalry arrived, after a fashion; several more people hurried down the slope to tackle the pile of wood, pass us lumber, and lend brawn to the dam.
While Doc sat watching them, gasping for breath, Kevin turned to the millpond. “It’s falling!” he cried after a moment.
“Water’s falling!”
He was right. The water was at my waist, then at my hips, then at mid-thigh. I had no way of knowing if it was enough, but we couldn’t wait any longer. I could distinguish between the sounds of stream and Storm now, and the Storm was the louder of the two.
I pressed a shoulder into the wall and waved at Kevin, shouting to get his attention. “The wheel! The wheel!”
He got it, turned and ran, slipping and sliding in the water that now lapped up the bank. Doc was nowhere in sight.
I worked myself around so the dam was at my back and I could just see the mill past the curve of the boulder. Beside me, Delmar did the same. Along the ridgepole stood eight men and women intent on an array of tethers that ran down to and around the wheel’s massive hub. At some signal I could neither see nor hear, the phalanx of brawn leaned into the cant of the roof; ropes went taut.
From inside the mill there was a crack like the breaking of a tree limb. The top of the wheel tilted back toward the mill as the nether end of its shaft dropped into the inland cradle. A moment later there was a second crack and the wheel sagged toward the creek bed. Its weight hit the lines hard, pulling the team on the roof forward.
Breath stopped in my throat and I mentally pulled with them. Who knew? In this mangled reality, maybe willpower had a real effect.
The wheel stopped moving, suspended by the ropes. Then ponderously, a few inches at a time, it slid downward, groaning like an aged dinosaur, and slipped into its cradle. The water lapped at it but lacked the power to move it.
On the millhouse roof the rope team stood down, except for a lone figure that straddled the ridgepole, apparently waiting to signal us when the gears were engaged.
“Problem!” Delmar yelled in my ear. Water cascaded over his head in a foamy veil. “We just let go this stuff—it hits the wheel—could damage it!”
Damn. He was right. We’d have to dismantle our dam piece by piece, and try to lose as few of those pieces as possible.
I opened my mouth to shout back when I heard music. Flute music. Kevin stood above us on the stream bank, trilling out a melody that cut through the shriek of the Storm in gentle defiance. Around us the roar of water diminished. Less of it poured over the top of the dam. What did come over cascaded in slow motion—lazy banners of foam.