The City: An American city that resembles Seattle, or perhaps San Francisco, but is neither.
The Magic: Personal “Invisibles” guide, even protect, each of a band of homeless kids . . . but can anything save them when unimaginable evil appears and the mean streets of the city turn deadly?
PEARLYWHITE
Marc Laidlaw & John Shirley
The boy they called Inchy was on his way to meet his friend Clyde for breakfast down at the City Shelter, when Pearlywhite appeared on his shoulder like a wisp of ivory smoke. “Stop. Go back. Around the block.” He’d found his own shelter from last night’s rain and fog beneath the thrown-back lid of a dumpster in Longtree Alley, where half a dozen Asian restaurants cast out their scraps and he could usually find something to eat for dinner. Breakfast was a different story though.
Pearlywhite’s sudden appearance, in the strong gray light of morning, was startlingly out of place: a small but powerful-looking dragon made of white mist that fairly shone in this light; twisting its body as smoke twists; the smoke writhing as dragons do.
Usually the smokedragon didn’t show itself any earlier than twilight—and then only on the darkest days, when three o’clock felt more like dinnertime than it usually did. He wasn’t used to talking to Pearlywhite when other people were around. He didn’t want to look crazy; but right now no one was looking.
For the first time he noticed the tail end of a prowlcar pulled into the alley up ahead, Naiad Lane, and a muttering gathering of people crowded around the spot. Yellow police tape held them back, aided by a lady cop the kids called Officer Cat (from Catlett). “Everyone get back,” she told the crowd, menacingly. It was a different tone of voice than she used on Inchy when she talked to him about getting off the street, into a program. He was always nice to her and pretended to consider her advice, but he always managed to slip away.
She hadn’t seen him yet. Pearlywhite’s warning had kept him from walking into her view.
“Be very careful, Inchy,” said the infinitely soft voice, softer yet more penetrating than the constant rushing noise of traffic. “I want you to go back the way you came, around the block to the corner of Mawkin and Lydell.”
“Whuh—” he started to say, and then noticed a pouch-faced man in a business suit staring at him as he walked up the street, away from the crowd. He didn’t want to look crazy even in front of this suit-guy. “ ’Kay.” He stepped back into the entryway of an apartment building, a little stoop reeking of cigarettes and urine, lined with mailbox slots, and waited till the man went by: a businessman passing through the dingy part of town, on his way to buildings where the lobbies smelled of fresh-cut flowers.
Inchy dreamed of someday entering those buildings on real errands. His dream was to be a courier—on bike, skates, or scooter, he didn’t care. He would wear a helmet and a leather jacket and a scarf thrown ’round his neck; he’d wear new high-top sneakers and carry important parcels from one office to another, delivering them in person to men like this one, who gave him a chilly blue-eyed look that made Inchy even more determined to accomplish his dream.
Inchy spent some time looking after the man, waiting to see if he’d look back, but he never did.
“Go,” Pearlywhite insisted, and Inchy went.
Around the corner and up one block, then down Mawkin to the boarded-up back end of Naiad Lane.
“Now stop here and duck down,” Pearly ordered. “There’s a loose board. Go through it.”
He crouched down, not even daring to see if anyone was looking, for fear that would bring on more attention. Often he hated feeling invisible to the people who passed by, but right now he wished he could have made himself completely transparent. Pretending to stoop for a dropped coin, he reached out a hand and touched the boards until one of them swung aside. There was room to squeeze through, but the cops in Naiad Lane would surely see him.
On the other hand, Pearlywhite had never steered him wrong, and this was no place for an argument. He scrunched through the splintered gap, thankful that Pearly was insubstantial, and came out in a small pile of junk. He was in the alley’s blind end now. Trashcans and giant dumpsters were shoved back here, heaped with wooden pallets and tangles of wire.
He checked his pocket to see if the string of pearls were still there. Once they’d fallen out, when he’d bent over to climb through something, and he’d almost lost them forever. Since then, he checked them constantly. His mom’s pearls. There were seven and one more on the string. He counted them: one-two-three-four-five-six-seven and one more. He could only count to seven; he couldn’t remember the name of the next number, if he’d ever known it.
He stroked the pearls, wondering what now. A police radio crackled nearby. If he went any farther they’d catch sight of him, and you knew where that could lead. Some of the places they put homeless kids—especially ones without families—were no better than prisons.
“Pearly,” he said, slipping the pearls back in his pocket, “Clyde’s waiting on me. He’s gonna go nuts if I don’t get down there soon. You know how he gets when he’s starving.”
“Quiet, Inchy. We have to see this. We have to be sure.”
“We?” he said. “Whatever this is, it’s your idea.”
“You’re doing this for all of us. Now sneak through those bins and put your head out. Not far. Just enough to peek. We have to be sure.”
“Sure of what?”
But Pearlywhite wouldn’t answer. He could be maddening that way—never answering the most basic questions, leaving Inchy to work things out for himself. Inchy sighed, resigned to it, and got down on all fours. The pavement was oily and cold, as if it had sweat all night in a fever; he could smell fish and rotten vegetables and automotive grease, along with the odor of brewing coffee, which was always everywhere on cold mornings. He put his head down and crept under a snag of wire, between two crumpled metal drums. When he lifted his head again he was staring at a cop. Two cops. Three. Two had their backs to him and the other, the one he’d seen first, was crouching down examining a shape crumpled on the asphalt. What mostly stood out was a pair of small feet, white beneath grime they shared with the pavement.
Two small feet, and one of them, the left one, was missing its little toe.
That was all the detail he noticed. That was enough. His mind stopped after that. He just kept thinking one thing: Clyde.
“Get back now,” Pearlywhite said. “Inchy, get back.”
He wasn’t sure how long Pearlywhite had been talking to him. For once the smoky voice didn’t reach him—couldn’t cut through what he was feeling. What finally prompted him to move was fear that the cops might spot him.
The crouching cop was pointing out things around the body—Inchy couldn’t exactly see what. But one of the things started to move. It looked like a ball of ragged bits of string, all different colors collected and tied together and rolled up in a tangle, the sort of thing you’d find in a kid’s pocket. And without any of the cops noticing (so far), the ball came rolling slowly down the alley toward Inchy. Maybe one of them had kicked it. All Inchy knew was that it was coming straight at him. Eventually one of the cops was going to notice it out of the corner of an eye and turn and see the ball of string—and beyond it Inchy himself. And then there would be questions and confinement, and he couldn’t have that. Not ever again.
He started to scramble back, but he’d only gotten a few inches when Pearlywhite said, “Wait.”
“Nooooo.” A thin whine.
But Pearlywhite had never been more insistent. Inchy had the feeling Pearly was actually capable of physically stopping him, although the smokedragon never had before. He’d never felt a hint of this much power. This must be important. He stopped. He trusted Pearlywhite and knew Pearlywhite would never do anything to harm or endanger him, unless . . .
Well, he’d never known there was an “unless” until now.
What had changed?
The ball of string touched his fingers. He opened his eyes, not having re
alized they were shut. His hands closed around the ball.
“Okay,” Pearlywhite whispered. “Let’s go.”
He backed into the cans, bumping them in his anxiety to be away. A piece of crumpled tin came clamoring down, and suddenly there were shouts and whistles blowing, and a whoop of sirens at the far end of the alley. Inchy threw himself free of the garbage, slammed into the board that swung by one nail, and was out on the far side, diving into traffic that somehow couldn’t touch him. And not noticing at first that in slamming past the board he’d driven the nail into his arm . . . He felt as if he were made of the same stuff as Pearlywhite. Wispy, weird, and insubstantial, flowing between the cars. And then there were more alleys, more streets, on and on until he came to the invisible edge of his world, the border beyond which he wasn’t really welcome, where he was always the opposite of invisible. Even if he passed beyond, into those broader, brighter streets, he carried the barrier with him. He was forever something out of place, out there.
He needed to be invisible now. He needed to blend in. He backed up, thinking of places where he would be safe, where he could think for a while. Pearlywhite was gone now. And he had this ball of twine in his hand. He had a feeling nothing was going to get any clearer until nightfall, when Pearlywhite would certainly return and they could talk openly in the dark. He would just have to hole up and wait it out. And he was used to that.
He barely took notice of the small, perfectly round red-oozing hole punched into his left upper arm.
Inchy sat on the floor of a big circular room—the Thinking Tank—with a high ceiling, under blinking Christmas lights, eating half a stale egg muffin from a dumpster bag. The lights were plugged into a much-taped cord that ran across two roofs to a light socket on the roof of a building that still had electricity.
The nighttime has two personalities; there are two spirits abroad in it, or so it always seemed to Inchy. There was the nighttime that protected, that was like a comforting mother swathed in shadow; there was the nighttime that hunted you. One nighttime tried to protect you from the other.
Right now, Inchy felt he was safe in the arms of night the protector; he knew that Pearlywhite was coiled up in the pearls in his pocket, and the night was curled up around the tank. The Thinking Tank was a dry, busted-open water tank that stood on metal poles atop the defunct Mesmer Brewery. By common agreement, the kids didn’t use it for a home—you only slept there in emergencies. Be there too much, and someone would notice. But they met in the tank when they needed advice, or when they just needed to meet up with each other; if you couldn’t figure out what to do by yourself, you went to the Tank and waited for someone else who also needed help to come. Answers came more easily when you could talk things over.
The mostly empty, rat-haunted factory below still smelled of moldy hops and grain, though no beer had been made there as long as any of the kids remembered.
Inchy thought about Clyde as he chewed meditatively on the rubbery remnant of fried egg white within the hard crust of the English muffin: Clyde and Inchy at the river, fishing with other people’s broken fishing lines, rusty old hooks; Clyde pretending he was going somewhere to piss where he wouldn’t drive off the fish, actually crossing the rotting old wharf and climbing down to the support beams below, where he grabbed Inchy’s line and tugged on it, in the shadows. “Clyde—I got a huge one! It’s something monster big!” Then hearing the fish laugh—but recognizing that laugh. Inchy had been annoyed, but now he smiled at the memory.
He scratched at the tingling wound in his arm, and remembered when Clyde had found some arcade tokens, and taken him into the Flashpoint Arcade to play the games—the greatest moment of their lives, until they got chased out by the fat guy with that drippy wad of smokeless in his mouth.
He remembered when Clyde had been attacked by that wild dog in the bushes of the park, and he’d lost a toe to it—how Clyde, once he’d gotten away, had actually laughed, seeing the dog snapping and gulping the toe down. “Wild dog got to eat too,” he said. But then he’d turned white and fainted, and Inchy—acting on a suggestion of Clyde’s Invisible, Koil—had to drag him to shelter.
And sometimes, when they slept in the cardboard fort under a bridge near one another, they awakened late at night to hear their Invisibles whispering to one another . . .
“Yes,” Pearlywhite said, issuing from his pocket, drifting upwards. “It’s good to remember lost friends. It’s their real funeral, remembering them; it’s the real way to say goodbye.”
“What really happened, Pearly?” For the first time since Clyde died, Inchy felt his eyes burning with tears.
Pearlywhite took up his place on Inchy’s shoulder, nestled against his ear. Inchy could feel the gentle pressure, just a hint of warm cotton. “I don’t know,” Pearlywhite said. He was changing colors with the Christmas tree lights. A red Pearly; a blue one. “But there might be enough left of Koil to ask.”
Inchy’s eyes widened. “I thought he was . . . gone!”
“Let’s see. He was homebased in that ball of string.”
“He was?” Clyde had never told him what object Koil was homebased in. You didn’t usually see them go in and out of their homebases, and most of the kids were secretive about it.
Inchy took the grubby ball of string, a little smaller than a baseball, out of the paper sack and hefted it in his hand. It felt less than it looked. Not lighter, but . . . less.
He set it on the floor between his outstretched legs, beside his scabbed knees.
Pearlywhite said something in the language of the Invisibles, which sounded like a breeze whistling through a broken bottle. The ball didn’t move. Pearlywhite spoke again. The ball rolled—ever so slightly—a quarter-inch one way, then back. Just rocking in place. Then the end of the string lifted up, and from it issued a smoky bluish shape—more like a seahorse than a dragon—made out of strings of mist; the foggy tendrils stretched up and twined, and turned, and coiled, back and forth, looping in the air to make the outline of Koil’s body, like a sculpture made entirely of a single strand of wire.
But this time, the living string of mist was broken, here and there—stretched thin and missing in places, fraying to nothingness at the edges. Fading.
“He’s weak!” Inchy said in alarm.
“What happened to Clyde?” Pearlywhite asked Koil; in Inchy’s language, so he could understand.
Inchy heard Clyde’s voice faint and far away in his head, through a crackly-ness like the song on the scratched record his dad had played for him when he was little; before the police took his dad away, and his mom died.
“Killed . . . too strong . . . no . . . experience with . . . teeth like the blade of all suffering . . . with what sorrow, he . . . glass three . . . hunter hunted by his hunting . . . ”
“His weakness is even in his speech,” Pearlywhite said. He whistled another question in his own language.
But a gust of wind seemed to answer from the two-foot-high gap in the rusted metal of the wall, its sharp edges curled back by the kids—and the wind reached into the Thinking Tank to push Koil out of shape, so that he blew into wisps—and then into nowhere.
“Koil!” Inchy shouted, grabbing the ball. There seemed to be a fading bluish light deep in the ball of twine, but then even that ebbed and went out without answering.
“Something’s taken them both,” Pearlywhite said.
They heard a crunch in the broken glass outside. And Inchy knew from the slightness of the crunch that he didn’t have to worry about bolting.
In came Garvey, a black kid who was older and stronger than his small limbs and legs suggested. He wore a brown suit jacket, brown corduroy pants with a seam so sharp it looked like he had just picked it up from the dry cleaner. His shoes were shiny brown, freshly polished and buffed. Beneath the suit jacket, the neck of a frayed yellow T-shirt was just visible. He wore a ring he’d found in the train station bathroom, missing its jewel; there was just a shiny socket. And in the jacket’s breast pocket, the poin
ted tip of a neatly folded bright red handkerchief, vivid as a rose—clean and crisp in appearance, although the kerchief was older than Garvey and had belonged to his father. The kerchief was the one unchanging element of his attire. Garvey had the uncanny ability to delve into masses of dingy rags at the clothing banks and emerge with an outfit that looked as if it had been tailored for him. His father, a Caribbean immigrant who’d sold flowers on street corners, had taken similar pride in his appearance. And even though he’d hardly known his father, Garvey spoke with a hint of the older man’s island accent.
“Good,” Garvey said, not at all surprised to see him. “You got word of the meeting.”
Inchy shook his head. “I’ve been here all day.”
“That’s not smart.”
“I had—I had to hide.”
“Let me in,” came a small cracked voice from outside.
Garvey turned and held the ragged metal open behind him, and Mina put her head through, pausing when she saw Inchy getting to his feet. Her eyes slid around, looking scratched and blurred behind her thick eyeglasses. She had hair cut just below her ears, dyed turquoise at the ends, a look at odds with her shyness, since it meant that you couldn’t help but look at her, and that always made her nervous. She stood with her back to the curved metal wall, wiping her nose on the thick tattered sweater several sizes too large for her, and pulling on the blue ends of her hair, looking away every time Inchy glanced at her.
After Mina came Vick, a tall boy with wild white hair and skin so pale it seemed to be powdered and eyes of cold blue crystal. Vick stood next to Mina, a few feet away, his back to the wall. Then came the twins, Rosalie and Junebug, and they took their positions. Inchy got up as Cassandra came in, and she was the last one for now. He leaned against the chill metal until it boomed beneath his weight. They all jumped at the sound, and Garvey gave him an irritated look.
Magic City: Recent Spells Page 55