Magic Time: Angelfire

by Marc Zicree

  Primal’s ruby dome was evaporating.

  For the space of several minutes the sky was amber-washed cerulean. A cold wind whipped the streets and flayed the clouds overhead. But then, in the west, a swift unnatural darkness gathered, blotting out the sunset. The sky went yellow-gray, the way it does before a tornado.

  From where I hunkered inside the blasted foyer of the building across Dearborn from the Tower, I saw Enid move out of cover into the middle of the street, his knot of rescued flares hovering close behind him. They were enclosed with him within a shimmering nebula. The light was pure, blue—a weave of flare magic and music.

  Enid raised his eyes to the twisted, static-filled clouds, to the fingers of lightning. He’d seen this before. We all had. He put his harmonica to his lips again and played, the sharp, sad wail of sound reaching up into the sky to grasp at the escaping flares, to do battle for them with the Source.

  In the end fifteen more flares made it into the safety of Enid’s protective pocket of sound; the others were lost— sucked up into the whorl of unnatural wind. When it had taken them, the Storm raged above us, opening and closing its maw, roaring, spewing bright rage, while Enid led the rescued away toward the Near South Side. I had to pray they’d be safe there.

  The Storm lingered for a time, reaching after the lost flares, then retreated into the sunset, taking its lightning and thunder with it.

  The broken skeleton of the Chicago Media Building pointed up into a clear, dusky sky. Wind scraped walls and windows, whistling around corners. Normal sounds. Natural sounds.

  I sagged back against the facade of the building, weakness flooding my limbs. Nearly at my feet, Goldie sat cross-legged on the sidewalk, Magritte’s body limp across his lap. Howard hunkered next to him, sucked into himself.

  “I’m fine,” said Colleen in answer to a murmured question I only half heard.

  “Let me look at you.” Doc’s voice was gentle, as always, but had an undercurrent of alarm.

  I turned, fearing what I’d see. Doc had Colleen’s head between his hands; Colleen was trying to push them away.

  “Ni smyesta!” said Doc sharply. “Don’t move.”

  “Viktor, stop!”

  “You’re bleeding—”

  Colleen grimaced. “It’s not my blood. It’s his.” She glanced across the street to where the puppet master and his puppet lay in a mound of debris. “Look. See? Just little cuts. Nothing major. Stop fussing.” She imprisoned his hands with hers and looked up into his face. “Stop, Viktor. Parestanya.”

  He kissed her. With a passion she obviously shared. And all I could think was, Now, why didn’t I see that coming?

  I pushed myself away from the wall and walked across

  Dearborn toward the ruined building. I tried to think as I walked. What to do next? We’d have to find some way to protect the flares. With Primal/Clay gone, we might be able to find other musicians like Enid who were now “released” from their contracts. Maybe they’d help us against the Source, too, or maybe they could help get the flares back to the Preserve.

  Maybe, maybe, maybe.

  I paused to look back across the street at Goldie, slumped over Margritte in the lengthening shadows with Howard still huddled beside him. That was a mistake. Just seeing them like that made me feel hollow inside. The way I’d felt as I watched Tina change. The way I’d felt in the days after she was gone.

  I took a deep breath and moved to where the bodies lay, Primal’s and Clay’s, in a sea of fallen glass and tile. Primal’s remains weren’t so much a corpse as they were a heap of rubble.

  Behind me, I heard the crunch of boots on debris.

  “This was Primal?” Doc asked, stepping carefully over the littered ground. Colleen was at his side.

  I nodded and knelt to pick up a clod of the detritus. “This was never flesh and blood,” he said. “This was—” “Clay,” said Colleen. “Primal was clay.” She glanced

  over to where the onetime puppet master lay on the ground,

  gray as burnt ash.

  “A golem,” I murmured.

  “A golem?” Colleen repeated. “What the hell’s that?” Doc answered. “An effigy. A lifeless figure made of earth and powered by wizardry.”

  Colleen shivered and pulled the front of her shirt together. “He did like word games.”

  “What did you do to him?” I asked her. “At the end, when you grabbed his leg. It paralyzed him. What was that?”

  She reached into her pocket and held up the wedge of leather Papa Sky had given her. Mr. Mystery’s talisman.

  “Before I realized what he was, he tried to …” She glanced sideways at Doc. “He made a grab at me and got a handful of this instead. Derailed him. I thought, hell, why not? Nothing to lose, right?” She shrugged, returned the thing to her pocket, then moved to kick at the wreckage.

  A moment later she called out, “Hey, look at this.”

  She picked her way out of the debris and laid something on the ground at my feet. It was a metal tool kit about the size of a shoe box.

  “Where’d you find that?”

  “There was a little cavity of some sort in the torso.” She nodded back toward the broken golem. “It split wide open when it hit the ground, but I figure it was right about here.” She gestured at her own midsection.

  I knelt to inspect it. It wasn’t locked; in place of a lock, what looked like a piece of bone was shoved through the hasp, holding the box closed. I knocked the bone out with a chunk of rubble and opened the lid.

  Inside, sitting in the half-empty metal tool tray, was a sheaf of papers, binder-clipped and held together with a fat rubber band. More specifically, it was a sheaf of contracts. Enid’s, other musicians whose names I didn’t recognize, one I did—Charlie Gwinn, who had chosen death over slavery. He and a Vanessa Gwinn had signed on with Primal as a duo.

  I turned them over in my hands. “Huh. What do we do with these now?”

  “Burn them.” The voice was Goldie’s. He was standing behind me in the wan light of the setting sun, looking wasted, pale, all the luster gone from his eyes. “So we can move on.”

  He wandered off around the field of debris. I followed him with my eyes, wondering why tears wouldn’t come when I so felt like weeping.

  “Cal, what do you make of this?”

  Colleen had come around to hunker down next to me. She’d moved the tool tray to reveal a collection of pitifully mundane objects. There was a wallet, a badge, a small velvet bag, and an envelope.

  I picked up the wallet and flipped it open. There was a photograph in it. In the waning light of a natural sunset, I made out a man, a woman, and two children. Smiling. A normal, happy family. The only other contents were three dollars and a driver’s license issued to one Clayton Devine of Rapid City, South Dakota.

  The velvet bag contained a wedding ring.

  The badge was DOD issue. A security badge, also in the name of Clayton Devine: MAINTENANCE CREW CHIEF. The face of the man on the badge was round with delicate features, eyes that had a vague, unfocused look, mouth cocked in a slightly loopy grin.

  “Level seven access,” Colleen read over my shoulder. “If that’s anything like the Air Force security ratings, this guy had a pretty high clearance somewhere.”

  “Yeah, but where?”

  “Somewhere near Rapid City, looks like,” she said.

  I flashed momentarily to Mary’s office, to Goldie twirling the little Lakota prayer drum in his hands. Badlands, he’d said. I remembered something Clay’s golem had said, too, when I asked how he’d known about the Source.

  There was a leak.

  I picked up the envelope. May, it said. A month? A name? Inside was a single piece of notebook paper with writing on one side. In a barely legible scrawl someone had written, Baby, I know you won’t understand this, but I’ve gotta get out of here. It’s not you or the kids. I love you. Always love you. But something’s happening to me I don’t understand but it’s happening and I’ve got to go away. They know
why it’s happening and I wish I could make them tell me what this is and what it means and if it’s good or bad. One minute I know it’s good and the next I know it’s bad just as hard. It’s power, May. But I don’t think I’m supposed to have it. If they find out I have it I don’t know what they’ll do so I’ve got to go away. I don’t even know if I should be telling you this.

  The letter just ended. Was it an aborted first draft, or had he never sent it? I looked at the date scrawled across the top of the letter. A full three months before the Change.

  A leak.

  I put the stuff into my pocket. “Let’s get back to Legends. Without Primal protecting this place, who knows what’s going to be out tonight? We can get back to this in the morning.”

  Her name was Gwen, not Tina. She was sixteen, not twelve. A child of abusive parents. They were grunters now, and gone. She didn’t even really look like Tina in the light of day.

  I wasn’t devastated. Just resigned.

  The city was different now. With Clay’s bubble removed, things roamed at night. Chicago would finally face the full effects of the Change.

  There wasn’t much sleep for anyone that first night. Most of it we spent realizing our losses and gains, sorting things out and trying to make coherent plans. Papa Sky showed up at Legends about eight o’clock, according to my wind-up Timex. We owed him a tremendous debt, him and his secret friend. Colleen and I cornered him and asked if we couldn’t meet Mr. Enigma now, to thank him personally for his help.

  Papa Sky just laughed. “No sir, Mr. Cal, I don’t think he’d’ve let you near him on any account. Not yet, anyhow.”

  “What do you mean, not yet?” asked Colleen.

  “Well, the way he put it to me, he’s got some thinking to do before that happens.”

  I was puzzled and didn’t bother to hide it. “Why should he have to do any thinking about meeting us?”

  Papa Sky shrugged.

  Colleen chuffed in frustration. “Well, if he won’t see us, will you at least tell him thanks? For all of us.” She waved an arm at the strange rabble in the room.

  “I don’t think thanks means diddly to him. I don’t think he helped because he was lookin’ for thanks.”

  “What then?” I asked, hoping maybe the answer would shed some light on our mysterious benefactor.

  “I asked him that myself, son. He said you and him had something in common. And before you ask—no, he didn’t say what. And before you ask—I can’t ask him, ’cause he’s gone.”

  Colleen and I exchanged glances. “Gone? Gone where?”

  “Moved on. I think he’s looking for something, too. Maybe that’s what you have in common. Hope he finds it, whatever it is. Hope both of you find it.”

  So much for tidy conclusions. Only on TV does the masked man come out of the shadows and reveal himself to be your long-lost cousin, or the twin brother you never knew you had, or Batman. TV was dead, maybe forever. I was disappointed, but not surprised that its conventions didn’t operate in the real world, if they ever had.

  I also wasn’t surprised when Enid pulled me into the dim little hallway behind Jelly’s bar to tell me he wanted to take the flares back to the Preserve. The pain of losing Magritte was etched on his face. His mouth, for which laughing had seemed the most normal state, drew downward at the corners. I was amazed he was still on his feet, still jamming the Source.

  “I’m sorry, Cal,” he told me. “It’s just something I feel I gotta do. For Maggie. For the other ones like her. And … for the folks I screwed up back there. Maybe there’s something I can do for them, too, now that I’m clear. I know that don’t make sense, but seems like I ought to try.”

  I understood. In fact, it seemed like the most logical, practical, humane thing to do. “It makes sense,” I said. “And I know it’ll make Mary happy.”

  “You all could come back with us.”

  I shook my head. “I can’t. But, hey, you ask the others. Maybe they’ll want to go.”

  He gave me a weird look. “You crazy? You don’t believe that. They’d never leave you. Not in a million years.”

  I knew that. Maybe it was the only thing I knew with any certainty, when it came right down to it.

  “Something else I gotta tell you before I crash and burn.” He rubbed a hand over his eyes. Even in the feeble light that filtered through from the bar, I could see they were bloodshot and red-rimmed from tears and exhaustion. “That guy Clay, the guy on that badge you showed me? I met him before. Just didn’t recognize him. He was one of the maintenance guys at Primal. I seen him working around there when I done some late session work. Funny about all that, ’cause I’d swear the guy wore makeup, even back then.”

  Clayton Devine had twisted before the Change. And come here. From Rapid City, South Dakota. Which meant, what? That the Change had happened there first? By how long? And why? I tried to wrap my mind around that and failed. It made me recognize how close to crashing and burning I was.

  “Enid, you’re going to have to sleep sometime. Who’s going to shield the flares when you do?”

  “I am.” Venus appeared in the hallway behind Enid and moved into our puddle of light.

  I swear all I could do was stare at her. “You’re a musician?” I meant “a tweaked musician” but didn’t want to say it.

  “I was. Vocals, keyboards. My … Charlie played horn. We’d just signed with Primal Records when everything changed. We got stuck here on the inside. When Charlie… when I saw what happened to Charlie, the music in me just dried up. Just stopped. I haven’t written or sung a note since the Change.”

  Enid shook his head. “God Almighty, I only been holding it in since Wisconsin. I can’t even imagine.”

  “You’re Vanessa Gwinn,” I guessed.

  She nodded.

  “She’s going back to the Preserve with us,” Enid told me, then hesitated. “Look, Cal. I owe you…”

  I shook my head.

  “Yes,” he said, “I do. I’m free because of you guys. After I get them all home safe, I’ll come find you. Catch up.”

  I started to answer him, realized I didn’t know what to say. I wanted him to find us, but how likely was that, really? I nodded, mute.

  He put a hand to my shoulder. “Take your own advice. Man’s gotta sleep sometime. That includes you.”

  Man’s gotta sleep. I was terrified of sleep. How badly I needed it, I only realized when I sat down to consider where I would sleep. Most certainly not in the room I’d slept in last night, nor in that company. The thought of sharing a room with Doc and Colleen made me feel like a teen who’s terrified of what he might catch his parents doing. What did they call that?

  A “primal” moment?

  I started to laugh. Sitting alone in a corner of the restaurant with the murmur of other people’s lives going on around me, I laughed. I caught Jelly gaping at me from behind his bar. But that only made the laughter more fierce.

  Then, when I thought I would never stop, the tears finally came.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  GOLDIE

  They say the ritual of burying or burning the dead gives a sense of closure. I’ve never known that to be true. Not when I sat shiva for my grandfather. Not for all the deaths since. Most especially not now.

  I’m familiar with the phases you supposedly go through. Denial, anger, grief, acceptance, whatever. I don’t know what phase I’m in as we stand out in Grant Park under a clear dawn sky with dew scattering jewels across grass and lake and watch Magritte burn. The packet of twisted contracts burns with her.

  God, that sounds wrong. It isn’t Magritte we burn. It’s a shell Magritte lived in for twenty-two years and then abandoned.

  That’s Denial talking. Anger is the next scheduled speaker. I think I feel it coming on as I murmur kaddish, a prayer that I am now sure is more for the living than for the dead.

  So, we are standing here and Enid and Venus are crying out the blues—he for Magritte, she for her lost Charlie. All the words have been said and Mag
gie’s embers rise on a slight breeze—bright little birds freeing themselves from gravity for the last time. And I am a black hole. I suck light in, but no light comes out.

  The air is chill and tastes like snow and ash on the tongue. Already the clouds have banked to the north, hesitant, as if unable to believe Chicago is once again open for their trade.

  Away to the west I can hear the Voices again, dark and insistent, clear as this day, no longer muddled by Clay’s Black Tower. But I still have the nightmare, because my Black Tower doesn’t stand at the corner of Dearborn and Randolph. My Black Tower, like the Kingdom of God, is within.

  And as I stand at Magritte’s pyre with the music draining away and my friends standing close beside me and watching me with apprehension, I think perhaps her death here and now is a good thing. She will never look at me the way Cal is looking at me, the way Doc and Colleen are looking at me. She won’t have to watch me become whatever it is I am becoming.

  People are wandering away from the park now. Even Enid and Venus are taking their leave—along with the inscrutable Howard, who will also return to the Preserve, and who, I’m forced to admit, grows on you like fungus.

  This morning, as we laid wood on the pyre, he came to Cal and said, “Enid says once we get angelfire to the Preserve, we’ll catch up to you.” He moved in close and fixed Cal with those bulgy, marble eyes and added, “We will. Sometimes miracles happen.” He held up his hand, turning it back and forth in the sunlight, and it seemed to me it looked more human.

  “Yeah,” Cal said. “Sometimes they do.” They were words of hope, but I saw little of that in his face. And he wasn’t looking at Howard when he said them; he was looking at Doc and Colleen, who seem reluctant to stray more than three feet from each other today. I recognized what I saw in his face then—loneliness.