And then Slink skidded to a stop and spun around, like a figure skater in slow motion, and then fell on his miniature behind and stared dazedly at the ceiling, as if trying to understand the spidery light fixtures.
They stopped running, breathing hard. Looking around.
“We’re here,” Garvey said, gasping, “but I don’t see Niall.”
The aisle looked normal to Inchy, now, not too dark or narrow or leaning. Just library shelves of books, some of them old and leather-bound and tattered, some of them glossy backed. He saw a picture of a naked flying guy holding up the snake-headed lady, on the spine of one of the books. The myth books, for sure. But Niall wasn’t there.
Garvey was staring at Slink. A slender woman with butterfly-type glasses and leopard-pattern pedal pushers, her hair in a retro beehive, was coming down the aisle, smiling at them; one of those hip girls that hang out in front of nightclubs. She said, “You guys lost?”
“Nuh,” Inchy said. “Resting. Looking.”
“Okay-dokers.” She walked on . . . right over Slink, almost stepping on him, not seeing him. He ignored her. She glanced back at Garvey who was staring, as far as she knew, at the empty carpet.
Then Garvey looked up at a top shelf nearby. “He’s looking up there. I thought he was looking at the ceiling but . . . ”
There was a set of books, on the top shelf, that stuck out a little so you could see the edge of the pages under the spine; and some of them were a wet-red color, that looked new, and some were white. They found a stool with little steps on it in the next aisle, and brought it over, and Inchy stood on it to look. There was a little space between a set of gold-covered numbered books and the wooden shelf-wall. In the space between books and wall, in the shadows behind the books, he could see a small, dirty hand clutching a curling, yellowed paperback book. And he saw there was blood seeping into the books.
He felt like he was going to fall backward off the stool, and had to clutch the back of the books to hold on; they were big books and stayed in place. He reached into the niche and took the book from the little, curled hand, having to pull sharply; the fingers curled up like a dying flower as Niall’s charm came free.
As he climbed down off the stool, he felt a series of sensations in his chest. First there was a kind of electrical numbness, then a deep coldness, and then an aching hole. Just a hole that hurt.
Garvey was staring at the old paperback in Inchy’s hand.
The retro girl was coming back toward them. She seemed to work here. “You guys sure you’re . . . What’s the matter?”
Garvey pointed. “We were looking for our friend. Someone left him up there.”
“What?” She laughed. “He’s in the Golden Bough?”
“Behind those books.”
“You got a hamster or something in here . . . ?”
She climbed up on the stool, and said, “Oh my god.”
Inchy and Garvey ran, while she was up there looking; Inchy stuffing the homebase for Niall’s Invisible in his shirt.
As they left the library, he thought he saw the pouchy-faced man with the icy blue eyes; the man was walking around the corner of the building, on his way home from work. Looking at Inchy and Garvey; gone from sight.
Inchy clutched the paperback to his chest, under his shirt, as the wind soughed past him and Garvey, and through them too, it seemed to him. “Garvey . . . I feel like . . . like there’s a window in my forehead that’s just . . . left open and the wind is blowing right inside my head . . . ”
“Yeah well, if it tried to blow through my head it couldn’t get in ’cause there’s a damn brain in there. Shit, it ain’t no cold wind.” But he sounded hoarse, scared.
“I got Leafjacket but . . . I don’t know if he’s in there any more . . . ”
“Maybe Pearly can tell you. I got to go home.”
Inchy looked at him. Home? “You mean the old car? Why?”
“I just got to think.”
“I don’t know—I don’t think we should be apart. I think we should get all the kids and . . . ” He stopped on the corner, dizzy. He felt hot, and then cold, as a ripple of weakness went through him. Was he feverish? His arm ached, where the nail had punched into him.
“I meet you later, man, maybe at the McDumpster. You get ’em together. I got to think. I just . . . I got to think. I got to be alone . . . ”
Inchy watched Garvey walk away, and wanted to chase after him. But he felt too sick to do it now. He felt sick about Niall and just sick. One blended into the other.
“Inchy?”
Mina’s face hovered in lamplight, just around the corner of the library, her body in shadow. So shy with her bony fingers creeping around the cold gray edge of the building. He looked up at the massive building, thinking it looked like a tomb. He could hear sirens coming to claim Niall. He hurried toward Mina, grateful for her appearance, and took hold of her thin elbow through the ragged sweater.
“Inchy, you’re hurting me!”
“We gotta get out of here, Mina. Come on.”
“I—I came to find Niall.”
His teeth started chattering. “N-Niall . . . ”
“Did you tell him? What the Invisibles said, did you tell him?”
“Niall’s dead,” he spat out. “Garvey and me, we found him in there in the books. He’s dead, Mina, killed.” He had to bite his tongue; he didn’t want to tell her more than that. He could have, he desperately wanted to unburden himself, but it would have been cruel to her. She had loved Niall, Inchy knew, loved him in something like the way Inchy himself loved her. Niall never really noticed Mina, unless they were talking about books; but Inchy had seen the way she looked at him and sometimes let her glasses slide down a fraction of an inch so she could peer at him clearly, shyly, when he wasn’t looking.
She didn’t ask any questions, he was grateful for that. She just started shaking and sniffing, and he tried to hold her up but suddenly she was down on her knees on the sidewalk, just wailing. He moved her over a little bit, out of the way, back onto the stoop of a massage place. A Korean woman looked out at him, fat and sweaty, fanning herself with a magazine; it felt so cold out here, but warm humid air pushed its way through the iron grating that held the woman. She narrowed her eyes and fanned the kids away with her mouth hardening. “You go!” she said. “You bad for business!”
Mina cried harder. Inchy had to get his hands under her arms and haul her to her feet. There was a park around the corner, a little place that used to be a vacant lot until they put in hedges and grass and benches; but the grass had been pissed on until it was burned yellow, and the hedges were so choked with trash they seemed to have browned scraps of paper for leaves, and the benches were long gone, just uncomfortable metal struts remaining. It was basically a vacant lot again. But he found a dirt knoll and brushed it sort of clean and sat there next to her, taking some comfort when she finally pushed him away from holding and hugging her, because it meant she was finding her strength again. She held her knees up to her face, arms wrapped around her shins, and rocked and moaned until finally she sighed and raised her eyes to him. He saw that she’d taken her glasses off. He thought maybe she was going to call Glimmish. Instead she just stared at him clear-eyed and said, “What now, Inchy? Who’s next? Who’s hunting us?”
“It’s not that,” he said. “There’s . . . there’s so many people out here . . . people getting hurt and killed and just plain lost . . . every day it seems there’s someone else missing. Don’t you feel that way, Mina?”
“I don’t feel any way,” she said. “I just know someone took Clyde and now . . . now Niall. And it feels like it’s coming for us. And I want to know why.”
He nodded, hanging his own head.
And found himself staring at Leafjacket.
The old book seemed to stir, the pages parting like a parched mouth trying to speak.
“Look, Mina!”
She looked at the crumbling paperback, then quickly scanned the street around them. There
were people here and there, business on the corner nearby, men arguing up the block, some women leaning in to chatter at the driver of an idling car which pulled away just as a black and white cruised through; but no one was watching the two kids. She ducked her shoulders and huddled in closer to Inchy, as if they were making a barrier around Leafjacket.
Inchy wondered if he should try to pry the pages open with his fingers, but there was no need. For the first time in his memory, Leafjacket opened. The pages crackled and ripples began to spread through the gray smeared ink, greenish-brown stains puddling on the ancient paper like rain or tears. Forming letters . . . words. He could hear the book whispering, but it was too weak to speak. Inchy tried to mouth out the letters, but he only knew a few of them: “I-N . . . N . . . I-S-I . . . D?”
“B,” said Mina. “In-vis-i . . . Invisible.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s all,” she said. “Look.”
Leafjacket cracked open all the way along its spine, sighing away bits of brittle dust. For a moment the letters hung across two smeared pages, then they faded out like the headline of a newspaper taped up in a shop window for years and years. Inchy caught the halves of the book before they could fall apart completely. He dug in his pocket and found a rubber band, snapped it around the remains of Niall’s homebase, and shoved the whole wad down into his jacket with the remains of Koil and the warm pearls of his own Invisible.
“Garvey said we should get the others,” he said.
“Garvey? Where’d he go?”
“His old car.”
“Inchy, that’s not a good idea. We shouldn’t be apart tonight, we should . . . we should all stick together. It’s the only way to get through this, I think.”
“Maybe you should tell him that. Could be he’d listen to you.”
Garvey would get into strangers’ cars if he thought they would drive him a few blocks. “Saves me some wear on these shoes,” he’d say when Inchy told him he was crazy. He didn’t believe Garvey would take any chances at a time like this, but you never knew. He was suddenly stricken with fear and concern for his friend. Garvey on his own, always acting so fearless, and sometimes so genuinely trusting—sort of an idiot about it, really.
“We should go,” he said.
“Yeah.”
He was so grateful for Mina’s company. They walked close together, stumbling on the uneven sidewalk and bumping up against one another. She was walking more steadily now; she hadn’t put her glasses back on yet and he wasn’t sure if he should say something about it. Without him even asking she said, “I want to see again. It’s making me crazy, seeing everything all bent and foggy. Glimmish will understand.”
“Okay,” Inchy said. “Sure. Glimmish is probably glad. Makes her job easier.”
“You think?”
They came to a stop past the wall of a brick building where the sidewalk just . . . ended. The Pit. For as long as Inchy could remember, there’d been a gaping hole here, all that remained of what had been a hotel or a skyscraper or some building they’d knocked down years ago. The Pit was all that remained of a basement two stories deep. You could see girders and beams down there, where floors used to be. Someone had come along and scooped out the center of the building and left this hollow place to be carpeted with broken glass and weeds and charred wood and cans and trash barrels. Piles of whitish foam and mold and shredded upholstery that one could no longer call furniture. And in the middle of all that, a car. It had crashed into the Pit one night, ending up crumpled like a can someone had stepped on. The glass was smashed from every window; it was rusted and crushed and dangerous to touch. But inside it, Garvey found shelter. It wouldn’t keep a grown man dry; but it was barely enough for the boy.
They stood at the edge of the pit and yelled down: “Garvey! Gaaaarvey!”
A siren whooped and startled Inchy into leaping down to the floor below. He held up a hand to Mina, who knelt at the brink and then leapt down with him. They made their way over to the foundation wall of the adjacent building, where some bent prongs of rebar formed steps down into the Pit. At the bottom, they picked their way across the broken glass.
Back in the permanent shadows, Garvey’s neighbors laughed and coughed and someone kicked bottle shards toward them.
“Garvey?” Inchy said, stooping toward the car.
“He ain’t here,” called a hoarse voice. A flame flared up; he saw a hooded figure with milky eyes. Old Mule. He was okay.
“You . . . you seen him tonight?” Inchy asked.
“Not since this morning,” the raspy voice replied. “You’re welcome to wait, though.”
“Sure,” said another voice, one they didn’t know. “You come on in, and bring that sweet thing of yours.”
More laughter. Mina scuffed away in the glass. Inchy had to stop himself from rushing in there, making them stop. Didn’t they know what was out here in the night? Maybe they did. Maybe it was one of them.
“You watch out!” he called. “You don’t know who you’re talking to!”
“Woo-hoo!” called the voices. “Hoo-hoo!”
“Hey!” Old Mule, chastising them. “You watch your mouth around them kids.”
“Mule,” someone laughed. And then Inchy heard more glass breaking. Someone choked. The laughter got louder. Inchy moved back because he could see them surging forward out of the shadows. Old Mule made a wet broken noise and fell over into the light, his head slamming down on the broken glass.
“Run!” Inchy whispered. “Get out, Mina!”
She was already running, working her way onto the first of the rebar steps. Inchy found himself frozen in place, his fingers working furiously at the pearls in his pocket, squeezing them and clicking them together, please let Mina get away, please let Mina be okay . . .
Swirling mist. Pearlywhite cut the air, bridging the gap. The laughing ones hadn’t even cleared the shadows before the pearly gray dragon was among them. Inchy knew they would see nothing but a blur, if that. But for Inchy it was clear enough. Pearly seized the darkness and tightened it, made a web and caught the lurkers in it, snarling it over their heads and throwing them backward. He heard them shriek. They didn’t have a clue what was happening. He saw the smoky whiteness of his Invisible turn sharp and savage and tear into them like a mass of gnashing knives. Now they were screaming. He didn’t care what Pearlywhite did to them . . . they deserved it, for scaring Mina.
“Inchy!” She called him from street level. He spun away, finding the rebar rungs, mounting quickly to the sidewalk. He turned to peer back down into the darkness. Pearlywhite was already drifting back toward him, wrapping around his neck, slithering down his arm. Not a sound came from the Pit.
“Was . . . were they the ones?” Mina said.
Pearly looked at her. Tendrils of fog curled around the smokedragon’s broad lips like the catfish whiskers of a Chinese dragon. The fangs no longer visible. A gentle smile hid the dragon’s fangs. Its opalescent eyes were heavy-lidded, reassuring.
“No,” Pearlywhite whispered. “Not them. They’re no danger to any of us. Not now.”
“Where . . . but where’d Garvey go?” Inchy said. “He was supposed to come down here.”
Pearlywhite reared back, nostrils flaring as it sniffed the air. “I don’t smell either of them,” said Pearlywhite. “Slink or his boy. Garvey’s not here.”
“Is that bad?” Mina asked.
Pearly made an urgent sound. Mina understood, and pulled the thick spectacles from somewhere in her pockets. At Pearly’s cry, the Invisible unwound from her homebase, glittering up from the warped depths of the lenses. She polished the glasses on her cuff as Glimmish danced in the air. Pearly and Glimmish spoke for a moment, without either human understanding their meaning, and then both grew very still. Glimmish twisted around, said something abrupt to Mina, then swirled like a small storm of sparks and shot off into the night.
“He’s going to look,” she told Inchy. “He can see farther than Pearlywhite.”
“They come,” said Pearly. And at that moment Inchy heard footsteps rushing up the sidewalk, scuffing and slapping steps of bare feet and rotten sneakers bound with duct tape. And here came the pale, excited faces of the others—Vick and Cassandra and the twins. Vick stopped at the edge of the pit, out of breath, and barked out a hoarse cry into the dark maw below: “Garvey! Inch!”
“Psst!” Inchy waved them toward the shadows where he and Mina hid. Rosalie notice them first, tugged Junebug’s arm, and then the two of them kicked the back of Vick’s heels until he turned. He came stomping toward them, his face so pink from running it looked as if it would burst. Cassandra stood looking back, until the twins grabbed her sleeves and pulled her along.
“We saw . . . oh, man,” Vick said suddenly. “Inchy? It’s you?”
“Of course,” Inchy said. “Who’d you think?”
“We thought . . . we . . . ” Vick didn’t seem to know how to say it.
Rosalie finished for him: “We thought he got you.”
“Who?”
“The big man,” said Junebug. “The one who’s been doing it.”
“—we think—” said Rosalie.
“We figured it out because we saw the same guy this morning, hanging around Naiad Lane, and just little while ago we saw him again with a kid . . . a little kid about as tall as you—”
“—same color hair—” said Rosalie.
“We thought it was you,” said Cassandra, and swallowed a lump in her throat. Tears sat on the edge of her eyelids.
“Big man,” Inchy repeated. “Was . . . was he in a blue suit?”
Remembering the man at the alley this morning; the man he had seen this evening, walking away from the library. Two places of death, and the man in both of them.
“Yes!” said Rosalie and Junebug, their words blurring together. “Blue!”
Magic City: Recent Spells Page 57