The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories

by Connie Willis

  You’ve had dozens of signs, he thought. Blizzards, road closures, icy and snow-packed conditions. You just chose to ignore them.

  “Why, anybody’d have to be blind not to recognize them,” the radio evangelist had said, and that was what he had been, willfully blind, pretending the yellow arrow, the roads closing behind him, were signs he was going in the right direction, that Cassie’s “Westward, ho!” was outside confirmation.

  “It didn’t mean anything,” he said.

  It was getting dark by the time the tow truck finally got there, and pitch black by the time they got Cassie’s Honda pulled up the slope.

  And that was a sign, too, Mel thought, following the tow truck. Like the fog and the carnival truck jackknifed across the highway and the “No Vacancy” signs on the motels. All of them flashing the same message. It was a mistake. Give up. Go home.

  The tow truck had gotten far ahead of him. He stepped on the gas, but a very slow pickup pulled in front of him, and an even slower recreation vehicle was blocking the right lane. By the time he got to the gas station, the mechanic was already sliding out from under the Honda and shaking his head.

  “Snapped an axle and did in the transmission,” he said, wiping his hands on a greasy rag. “Cost at least fifteen hundred to fix it, and I doubt if it’s worth half that.” He patted the hood sympathetically. “I’m afraid it’s the end of the road.”

  The end of the road. All right, all right, Mel thought, I get the message.

  “So what do you want to do?” the mechanic asked.

  Give up, Mel thought. Come to my senses. Go home. “It’s not my car,” he said. “I’ll have to ask the owner. She’s in the hospital right now.”

  “She hurt bad?”

  Mel remembered her lying there in the weeds, saying, “It didn’t mean anything.”

  “No,” he lied.

  “Tell her I can do an estimate on a new axle and a new transmission if she wants,” the mechanic said reluctantly, “but if I was her I’d take the insurance and start over.”

  “I’ll tell her,” Mel said. He opened the trunk and took out her suitcase, and then went around to the passenger side to get her green bag out of the backseat.

  There was a bright yellow flyer rolled up and jammed in the door handle. Mel unrolled it. It was a flyer from the carnival. The kid must have stuck it there, Mel thought, smiling in spite of himself.

  There was a drawing of a trumpet at the top, with “Come one, come all!” issuing from the mouth of it.

  Underneath that, there was a drawing of the triple Ferris wheel, and scattered in boxes across the page, “Marvel at the Living Fountains,” “Ride the Sea Dragon!,” “Popcorn, Snow Cones, Cotton Candy!,” “See a Lion and a Lamb in a Single Cage!”

  He stared at the flyer.

  “Tell her if she wants to sell it for parts,” the mechanic said, “I can give her four hundred.”

  A lion and a lamb. Wheels within wheels. “For the Lamb shall lead them unto living fountains of waters.”

  “What’s that you’re reading?” the mechanic said, coming around the car.

  A midway with stuffed animals for prizes—bears and lions and red dragons—and a ride called the Shooting Star, a hall of mirrors. “For now we see in a glass darkly but then we shall see face to face.”

  The mechanic peered over his shoulder. “Oh, an ad for that crazy carnival,” he said. “Yeah, I got a sign for it in the window.”

  A sign. “For behold, I give you a sign.” And the sign was just what it said, a sign. Like the Siamese twins. Like the peace sign on the back of the kid’s hand. “For unto us a son is given, and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, the Prince of Peace.” On the kid’s scarred hand.

  “If she wants an estimate, tell her it’ll take some time,” the mechanic said, but Mel wasn’t listening. He was gazing blindly at the flyer. “Peer into the Bottomless Pit!” it said. “Ride the Merry-Go-Round!”

  “And thus I saw the horses in the vision,” Mel murmured, “and them that sat upon them.” He started to laugh.

  The mechanic frowned at him. “It ain’t funny,” he said. “This car’s a real mess. So what do you think she’ll want to do?”

  “Go to a carnival,” Mel said, and ran to get in his car.

  “And there shall he no night there; and they need no candle, neither light of the sun…”

  —Revelation 22:15

  The hospital was a three-story brick building. Mel parked in front of the emergency entrance and went in.

  “May I help you?” the admitting nurse asked.

  “Yes,” he said, “I’m looking for—” and then stopped. Behind the desk was a sign for the carnival with dates at the bottom. “Crown Point, Dec. 14” it read. “Gresham, Jan. 13th, Empyrean, Jan. 15.”

  “May I help you, sir?” the nurse said again, and Mel turned to ask her where Empyrean was, but she wasn’t talking to him. She was asking two men in navy-blue suits.

  “Yes,” the taller one said, “we’re starting a hospital outreach, ministering to people who are in the hospital far from home. Do you have any patients here from out of town?”

  The nurse looked doubtful. “I’m afraid we’re not allowed to give out information about patients.”

  “Of course, I understand,” the man said, opening his Bible. “We don’t want to violate anyone’s privacy. We’d just like to be able to say a few words of comfort, like the Good Samaritan.”

  “I’m not supposed to…” the nurse said.

  “We understand,” the shorter man said. “Will you join us in a moment of prayer? Precious Lord, we seek—”

  The door opened, and as they all turned to look at a boy with a bleeding forehead, Mel slipped down the hall and up the stairs.

  Where would they have taken her? he wondered, peering into rooms with open doors. Did a hospital this small even have separate wards, or were all the patients jumbled together?

  She wasn’t on the first floor. He hurried up the stairs to the second, keeping an eye out for the men in the navy-blue suits. They didn’t know her name yet, but they would soon. Even if they couldn’t get it out of the admitting nurse, Cassie would have given them her health-insurance card. It would all be in the computer. Where would they have taken her? X-ray, he thought.

  “Can you tell me how to get to X-ray?” he asked a middle-aged woman in a pink uniform.

  “Third floor,” she said, and pointed toward the elevator.

  Mel thanked her, and as soon as she was out of sight, he took the stairs two at a time.

  Cassie wasn’t in X-ray. Mel started to look for a technician to ask and then saw B.T. down at the end of the hall.

  “Good news,” B.T. said as he hurried up to him. “It’s not broken. She’s got a sprained knee.”

  “Where is she?” Mel asked, taking B.T.’s arm.

  “Three-oh-eight,” B.T. said, and Mel propelled him into the room and shut the door behind them.

  Cassie, in a white hospital gown, was lying in the far bed, her head turned away from them as it had been in the frozen weeds. She looked pale and listless.

  “She called her sister,” B.T. said, looking anxiously at her. “She’s on her way down from Minnesota to get her.”

  “She told me I was lucky I hadn’t gotten into worse trouble than a sprained knee,” Cassie said, turning to look at Mel. “How’s my car?”

  “A dead loss,” Mel said stepping up to the head of the bed. “But it doesn’t matter. We—”

  “You’re right,” she said, and turned her head on the pillow. “It doesn’t matter. I’ve come to my senses. I’m going home.” She smiled wanly at Mel. “I’m just sorry you had to go to all this trouble for me, but at least it won’t be for much longer. My sister should be here tomorrow night, and the hospital is keeping me overnight for observation, so you two don’t have to stay. You can go to your religious meeting.”

  “We lied to you,” Mel said. “We’re not on our way to a religious meeting,” and real
ized they were. “You aren’t the only one who had an epiphany.”

  “I’m not?” she said, and pushed herself partway up against the pillows.

  “No. I got a message to go west, too,” Mel said. “You were right. Something important is going to happen, and we want you to come with us.”

  B.T. cut in, “You know where He is?”

  “I know where He’s going to be,” Mel said. “B.T., I want you to go get the road atlas and look up a town called Empyrean and see where it is.”

  “I know where it is,” Cassie said, and sat up all the way. “It’s in Dante.”

  They both looked at her, and she said, half-apologetically, “I’m an English teacher, remember? It’s the highest circle of Paradise. The Holy City of God.”

  “I doubt if that’s going to be in Rand McNally,” B.T. said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Mel said. “We’ll be able to find it by the lights. But we’ve got to get her out of here first. Cassie, do you think you can walk if we help you?”

  “Yes.” She flung the covers off and began edging her bandaged knee toward the side of the bed. “My clothes are in the closet there.”

  Mel helped her hobble to the closet.

  “I’ll go check her out,” B.T. said, and went out.

  Cassie pulled her dress off the hanger and began unzipping it. Mel turned his back and went over to the door to look out. There was no sign of the two men.

  “Can you help me get my boots on?” Cassie said, hobbling over to the chair. “My knee’s feeling a lot better,” she said, lowering herself into the chair. “It hardly hurts at all.” Mel knelt and eased her feet into her fur-edged boots.

  B.T. came in. “There are two men down at the admissions desk,” he said, out of breath, “trying to find out what room she’s in.”

  “Who are they?” Cassie asked.

  “Herod’s men,” Mel said. “It’ll have to be the fire escape. Can you manage that?”

  She nodded. Mel helped her to her feet and went and got her coat. He and B.T. helped her into it, and each took an arm and helped her to the door, opening it cautiously and looking both ways down the hall, and then over to the fire escape.

  “I should call my sister,” Cassie said, “and tell her I’ve changed my mind.”

  “We’ll stop at a gas station,” B.T. said, opening the door fully and looking both ways again. “Okay,” he said, and they went down the hall, through the emergency exit door, and onto the fire escape.

  “You go bring the car around,” B.T. said, and Mel clattered down the metal mesh steps and ducked across the parking lot to the car.

  The emergency-room door opened and two men stood in its light for a moment, talking to someone.

  Mel jammed the key into the ignition, switched it on, and pulled the car around to the side of the hospital, where B.T. and Cassie were working their way down the last steps.

  “Come on,” he said, grabbing Cassie under the arm, “hurry,” and hustled her across to the car.

  A siren blared. “Hurry,” Mel said, yanking the door open and pushing her into the backseat, slamming the door shut. B.T. ran around to the other side.

  The siren came abruptly closer and then cut off, and Mel, reaching for the door handle, looked back toward the entrance. An ambulance pulled in, red and yellow lights flashing, and the two men in the door reached forward and took a stretcher off the back.

  And this is crazy, Mel thought. Nobody’s after us. But they would be, as soon as the nurse saw Cassie was missing, and if not then, as soon as Cassie’s sister got there. “I saw two men push a woman into a car and then go peeling out of here,” one of the interns unloading that stretcher would say. “It looked like they were kidnapping her.” And how would they explain to the police that they were looking for the City of God?

  “This is insane,” Mel started to say, reaching for the door handle.

  There was a flyer wedged in it. Mel unrolled it and read it by the parking lot’s vapor light. “Hurry, hurry, hurry! Step right up to the Greatest Show on Earth!” it read in letters of gold. “Wonders, Marvels, Mysteries Revealed!”

  Mel got into the car and handed the flyer to B.T. “Ready?” he asked.

  “Let’s go,” Cassie said, and leaned forward to point at the front door. Two men in navy-blue suits were running down the front steps.

  “Keep down,” Mel said, and peeled out of the parking lot. He turned south, drove a block, turned onto a side street, pulled up to the curb, switched off the lights, and waited, watching in his rearview mirror until a navy-blue car roared past them going south.

  He started the car and drove two blocks without lights on and then circled back to the highway and headed north. Five miles out of town, he turned east on a gravel road, drove till it ended, turned south, and then east again, and north onto a dirt road. There was no one behind them.

  “Okay” he said, and B.T. and Cassie sat up.

  “Where are we?” Cassie asked.

  “I have no idea,” Mel said. He turned east again and then south on the first paved road he came to.

  “Where are we going?” B.T. asked.

  “I don’t know that either. But I know what we’re looking for.” He waited till a beat-up pickup truck full of kids passed them and then pulled over to the side of the road and switched on the dome light.

  “Where’s your laptop?” he asked B.T.

  “Right here,” B.T. said, opening it up and switching it on.

  “All right,” Mel said, holding the flyer up to the light. “They were in Omaha on January fourth, Palmyra on the ninth, and Beatrice on the tenth.” He concentrated, trying to remember the dates on the sign in the hospital.

  “Beatrice,” Cassie murmured. “That’s in Dante, too.”

  “The carnival was in Crown Point on December fourteenth,” Mel went on, trying to remember the dates on the sign in the hospital, “and Gresham on January thirteenth.”

  “The carnival?” B.T. said. “We’re looking for a carnival?”

  “Yes,” Mel said. “Cassie, have you got your Bartlett’s Quotations?”

  “Yes,” she said, and began rummaging in the emerald-green tote bag.

  “I saw them between Pittsburgh and Youngstown on Sunday,” Mel said to B.T., who had started typing, “and in Wayside, Iowa, on Monday.”

  “And the truck spill was at Seward,” B.T. said, tapping keys.

  “What have you got, Cassie?” Mel said, looking in the rearview mirror.

  She had her finger on an open page. “It’s Christina Rossetti,” she said. “‘Will the day’s journey take the whole long day? From morn to night, my friend.’”

  “They’re skipping all over the map,” B.T. said, turning the laptop so Mel could see the screen. It was a maze of connecting lines.

  “Can you tell what general direction they’re headed?” Mel asked.

  “Yes,” B.T. said. “West.”

  “West,” Mel repeated. Of course. He started the car again and turned west on the first road they came to.

  There were no cars at all, and only a few scattered lights, a farm and a grain elevator, and a radio tower. Mel drove steadily west across the flat, snowy landscape, looking for the distant glittering lights of the carnival.

  The sky turned navy blue and then gray, and they stopped to get gas and call Cassie’s sister.

  “Use my calling card,” B.T. said, handing it to Cassie. “They’re not looking for me yet. How much cash do we have?”

  Cassie had sixty and another two hundred in traveler’s checks. Mel had a hundred sixty-eight. “What did you do?” B.T. asked. “Rob the collection plate?”

  Mel called Mrs. Bilderbeck. “I won’t be back in time for the services on Sunday,” he told her. “Call Reverend Davidson and ask if he’ll fill in. And tell the ecumenical meeting to read John 3:16-18 for a devotion.”

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” Mrs. Bilderbeck asked. “There were some men here looking for you yesterday.”

  Mel gripp
ed the receiver. “What did you tell them?”

  “I didn’t like the looks of them, so I told them you were at a ministerial alliance meeting in Boston.”

  “You’re wonderful,” Mel said, and started to hang up.

  “Oh, wait, what about the furnace?” Mrs. Bilderbeck said. “What if the pilot light goes out again?”

  “It won’t,” Mel said. “Nothing can put it out.”

  He hung up and handed the phone and the calling card to Cassie. She called her sister, who had a car phone, and told her not to come, that she was fine, her knee hadn’t been sprained after all, just twisted.

  “And I think it must have been,” she said to Mel, walking back to the car. “See? I’m not limping at all.”

  B.T. had bought juice and doughnuts and a large bag of potato chips. They ate them while Mel drove, going south across the interstate and down to Highway 34.

  The sun came up and glittered off metal silos and onto the star-shaped crack in the windshield. Mel squinted against its brilliance. They drove slowly through McCook and Sharon Springs and Maranatha, looking for flyers on telephone poles and in store windows, calling out the towns and dates to B.T., who added them to the ones on his laptop.

  Trucks passed them, none of them carrying Tilt-a-Whirls or concession stands, and Cassie consulted Bartlett’s again. “A cold coming we had of it,” it said. “Just the worst time of the year.”

  “T. S. Eliot,” Cassie said wonderingly. “‘Journey of the Magi.”

  They stopped for gas again, and B.T. drove while Mel napped. It began to get dark. B.T. and Mel changed places, and Cassie got in front, moving stiffly.

  “Is your knee hurting again?” Mel asked.

  “No,” Cassie said. “It doesn’t hurt at all. I’ve just been sitting in the car too long,” she said. “At least it’s not camels. Can you imagine what that must have been like?”

  Yes, Mel thought, I can. I’ll bet everyone thought they were crazy. Including them.

  It got very dark. They continued west, through Glorieta and Gilead and Beulah Center, searching for multicolored lights glimmering in a cold field, a spinning Ferris wheel and the smell of cotton candy, listening for the screams of the roller coaster and the music of a merry-go-round.