The Green And The Gray

by Timothy Zahn

  Melantha didn't seem concerned about that, either. Settling down to a walk, she moved along the rows of trees, her outstretched hand brushing across each as she passed. Occasionally, she lingered by one of them, fingering the rough bark with both hands as if trying to memorize the pattern. When she reached the end of the row she crossed to the next group of trees and started the procedure all over again. Caroline picked out a spot midway from the gate and waited, trying to be patient.

  Eventually, the girl ran out of trees. "Finished?" Caroline asked as she came slowly back to her.

  "I suppose," the girl murmured, turning and giving the trees a last lingering look.

  "Time to go in, then," Caroline said, reaching for the girl's hand.

  Melantha's gaze shifted to a point past Caroline's shoulder. "Could I just go look at those first?"

  Caroline turned. Beyond the park's gate was an open-ended courtyard sort of place sandwiched between the fence and the building to the west. There were several tall trees there, rising from openings in the patterned brickwork covering the ground. The trees alongside the building itself had clumps of bushes all around their bases, this more delicate greenery protected by a foot-high wire fence. "I don't know, Melantha," she said doubtfully. "We shouldn't be outside more than we have to."

  "Please?" Melantha said. "It's on the way."

  Caroline sighed. "You've got two minutes."

  "Thank you." With a renewed burst of energy, she trotted ahead through the park and out the gate.

  Caroline picked up her own pace, unwilling to let her get too far ahead this time. Melantha ran her fingers along the tree just outside the park, then headed across the brickwork toward the ones inside the low enclosure. Hopping the wire fence, she began wading through the bushes toward the biggest of the trees.

  Caroline was looking at the tree, idly wondering what kind it was, when a ripple seemed to run through the lower part of the trunk. The ripple became a long bulge; and, suddenly, a human figure pushed its way outward, melting effortlessly through the bark.

  And before Caroline could do more than gasp, there was an old woman standing knee-deep in the bushes in front of the tree.

  Melantha jerked to a halt, twitching as if she'd stepped on a downed power line. But in her stunned disbelief Caroline hardly even noticed. The tree was far too narrow for the woman to have been hiding behind it, and she certainly hadn't risen up from the bushes around her.

  But yet there she was, snarling at Melantha in a strange language as the girl backed away, shaking.

  She reached the fence, nearly tripping over it before she cleared it and stepped again onto the brickwork. The woman spat one final comment, then started walking through the bushes toward her.

  And with that, Caroline's stunned paralysis finally snapped. "Leave her alone," she ordered, rushing up behind Melantha and clapping her hands protectively on the girl's shoulders.

  "Go home, meddler," the woman said scornfully. "Leave the Peace Child to her own people."

  "No," Caroline said, stepping around Melantha and putting herself between them. Distantly, it occurred to her that Roger wouldn't understand what she was doing, that he would never forgive her if she got herself killed out here tonight. But she had no choice. Melantha needed her, and she was here, and that was all there was to it. "You go away," she insisted. "Or I'll call the police."

  The woman stopped, her expression in the glow of the streetlights going cold and hard. She drew herself up, filled her lungs with air, opened her mouth—

  And screamed.

  Caroline staggered back as the sound washed over her, feeling like she'd been slapped hard across the face. There was an underlying power beneath the wordless cry, a twisting of rage and control and command within the wailing, a hammering of ancient dread and weakness vibrating across her ears and through her head.

  Suddenly, without any memory of even losing her balance, she found herself sprawled on the bricks.

  She looked up, fighting against the dizziness that was spinning the world around her, trying desperately to locate Melantha.

  She found the girl standing over her, apparently unshaken by whatever had sent Caroline herself spinning. And yet, somehow, she was no longer the same little girl Caroline and Roger had knelt over two days ago, huddling alone and miserable in an alley. Melantha's lips were pressed together, her eyes blazing with a wild and dangerous fire as she looked down at Caroline. She lifted her gaze to the other woman and inhaled deeply, and Caroline braced herself for another scream.

  But the cry Melantha sent through the nighttime air was something entirely different. It was almost completely silent, rattling Caroline's skull and stomach directly without passing first through her ears, bucking her up into the air and then slamming her back down onto the bricks. The ground seemed to heave again, this time throwing her sideways and rolling her onto her stomach.

  "Melantha!" she heard herself shout, the words hurting her throat. "Melantha, stop!"

  Another of the old woman's terrible screams slashed through the night air, and again Caroline tensed as the world seemed to spin around her.

  And then, in the echoing aftermath of the scream, she heard a gasp. "Caroline!" Melantha cried out.

  Caroline rolled over, blinking away her blurred vision. The old woman had a grip on Melantha's wrists and had pulled her back to the low fence, their arms swinging wildly to the sides as Melantha struggled. Clenching her teeth, Caroline forced herself up onto her knees.

  She was trying to get to her feet when something unseen shot past her and the struggling couple and blew a hole in the brickwork.

  She twisted around. The shot, or whatever it was, had come from behind her, from the direction of the Youngs' apartment. But there was no one in sight beneath the streetlights.

  And then, from midway up the side of the building she caught a flicker of movement, and a slender line of white zipped outward over her head. There was a thundering crack from behind her, and she twisted around again to see one of the lower limbs of the tree behind Melantha and the old woman shatter at the trunk and crash to the ground.

  The old woman snarled, shoving Melantha away from her onto the bricks. Straightening up defiantly, she once again sucked in a deep breath.

  But if she was preparing another scream, she never made it. Even as she opened her mouth, another of the white lines arrowed through the air squarely into her chest, and she was thrown backward as if she'd been hit by a speeding car. She slammed into the tree behind her with crushing force, bounced off, and collapsed onto the bushes.

  Caroline looked at her, an icy chill adding to the pain in her head. There was something about the way the woman lay draped across the greenery that told Caroline she was dead. "Melantha?" she called tentatively. "Melantha!"

  "I'm here," the girl's voice came shakily from somewhere off to her side. Fighting against her lingering dizziness, Caroline once again pushed herself up onto her knees.

  And suddenly the night sky lit up with a brilliant strobing of red lights. There was the roar of a car engine; and with a screech of brakes a police car skidded to a halt by the end of the courtyard.

  "Police!" someone yelled, shoving open the door. "Stay where you are! You—stop!" There was a sound of rapid footsteps—

  And then Roger was there, dropping onto his knees beside her, his arms wrapping tightly around her.

  "Caroline!" he gasped, breathing hard.

  "I'm all right," she assured him, clutching at his arms. The flashing red lights had been joined by the white beam of a floodlight, and in its stabbing glare she looked around for Melantha.

  The coat she'd given the girl was a few feet away, lying crumpled on the ground. Melantha herself was gone.

  So was the dead woman.

  12

  The Crime Scene Unit's floodlights threw multiple shadows in front of him as Fierenzo walked across the courtyard and stopped by the freshly gouged hole in the bricks. "Here?" he asked.

  "No, here," the cop walking b
eside him corrected, pointing to a spot three feet closer to the low wire fence. "I saw her lying right here."

  Fierenzo looked at the mangled bushes alongside the building. A squirrel might be able to hide in there, but not a teenaged girl. "And then she got up and went where?"

  "I don't know," the cop said, carefully filtering most of his frustration out of his voice. "And she only got halfway up before I got the spotlight on the scene."

  "What about the older woman?"

  "She was over there," the cop said, pointing at a group of squashed bushes just in front of the tree with the broken limb. "I saw her, too, before we got the spot going."

  Fierenzo looked around. Two women vanished into thin air, one of whom had allegedly been shot and killed.

  Only there was no body, no blood, and no bullet. She and the girl had both disappeared, as had the two men Whittier had been babbling about when he and Powell arrived. There was, in fact, nothing to prove this whole thing was anything other than a hallucination or a hoax.

  Except, of course, for the shattered bricks and the broken tree limb.

  He stepped over to the limb. This wasn't some delicate little branch a careless ten-year-old might break if he put his weight on it. It was long and healthy and two inches in diameter, the kind of limb you would normally take off with a chain saw.

  But this one hadn't been chainsawed. The cut was rough and compressed, like someone with immense upper-body strength had taken a slightly dull axe to it.

  In fact, it rather reminded him of the much smaller gashes he'd seen on the trees at the Whittiers'

  place.

  He crouched down beside the downed limb, glowering with frustration. It had taken them over an hour to track down the cabby who'd brought Caroline Whittier and the girl here, and as a result they had arrived only minutes before the incident. If the cabby had given him the right address in the first place, he and Powell might have been in position to witness the incident themselves instead of being two buildings up the street looking at mailbox names.

  But they only had what they had. Glancing around, he started to stand up.

  And paused. From this angle, and this elevation, he could see something he hadn't noticed before.

  Etched across several groups of the bricks were long, narrow cracks. Stress lines, apparently, only they weren't centered on the hole that had been blasted in the brickwork. Instead, they were radiating outward from a spot near the low wire fence. "Where did you say the woman was lying when you came around the corner?" he asked the cop.

  "Right about there," the other said, pointing to a spot a foot away from the center of the crack system.

  "Thanks," Fierenzo said, straightening to his feet. Retracing his steps across the courtyard, he crossed the street, making his way through the line of neighborhood gawkers gathered on the far side. The cop standing guard on the building door let him in, and he trudged his way up the stairs to the third floor.

  Powell answered his knock. "Anything?" Fierenzo asked.

  The other shrugged. "They've given a statement," he said. "Doesn't make any more sense than what they'd already told us downstairs."

  The Whittiers were sitting side by side on the couch, Caroline nursing a cup of tea as another cop stood watch against the opposite wall. "Mr. and Mrs. Whittier," Fierenzo said as he crossed the living room and sat down in a chair facing them. "I'm Sergeant Thomas Fierenzo. You and I talked earlier this afternoon, Mr. Whittier."

  Whittier's lips compressed briefly. "Yes."

  "Let's start with Melantha," Fierenzo said. "I want her full name, and where exactly she is."

  The Whittiers glanced at each other, and the husband give a microscopic shrug. "We think her name's Melantha Green," Mrs. Whittier said, her voice tight. "And we don't know where she is.

  When I looked for her after the police arrived, she was gone."

  "What about you?" Fierenzo asked, shifting his gaze to Whittier. "Did you see where she went?"

  Whittier shook his head. "I noticed her a few feet away from Caroline as I was running up," he said.

  "But I was concentrating on my wife."

  "Did you see her get up or start to crawl away?" Fierenzo persisted. "Do you remember which direction she was facing? Anything?"

  "All I remember is seeing Caroline's coat on the ground."

  "Where was she hiding when the two officers came to your apartment Wednesday night?"

  "I don't know that, either."

  Fierenzo looked at Powell. The other detective nodded fractionally and started for the door, gesturing to the cop standing by the wall. "Officer?"

  The cop followed him out into the hall, Powell closing the door behind him. "All right," Fierenzo said, leaning back in his chair and eyeing the Whittiers. "It's just you and me now; and if you'd like, all of this can be off the record. Just tell me what happened."

  "What do you mean?" Whittier asked cautiously.

  "I mean all the strange things you've been afraid to tell anyone," Fierenzo said, studying their faces and trying to judge whether or not he was hitting anywhere near the target. "Melantha's habit of disappearing whenever cops show up, for instance. Or tell me about the people on your balcony this afternoon trying to break into your apartment."

  That one got definite twitches from both of them. "Breaking in from the balcony?" Whittier demanded, frowning.

  "They tried to hammer their way through the glass," Fierenzo said. "My guess is that they were scared away by the second group, the ones who came in through the front door."

  "Wait a second," Whittier said, sounding thoroughly confused now. "Are you saying we had two different sets of intruders?"

  "Three in through the front, two in from the balcony." Fierenzo lifted his eyebrows at the wife. "It was two people you saw up there, wasn't it, Mrs. Whittier?"

  Whittier looked at his wife. "You saw someone on our balcony?"

  "Yes, from Lee's," she said, an odd note of dread in her voice. "And yes, there were two of them."

  "Who also apparently tried to chop down your potted trees," Fierenzo went on.

  The reaction this time was pure surprise, with no guilt or hidden knowledge mixed in. "The trees?"

  Whittier asked. "Why?"

  "No idea," Fierenzo said. "Who's Cyril?"

  The sudden change of subject caught both of them by surprise, and in the half second before they could cover it up, Fierenzo spotted the twin flashes of recognition.

  Whittier tried the dumb approach anyway. "Cyril?"

  "He called your apartment while we were there," Fierenzo told him. "He said that if you didn't return Melantha to him thousands of New Yorkers were going to die." He let his gaze harden. "I trust I don't need to tell you how we react to threats like that these days."

  Whittier winced. "No, sir."

  "Then tell me what's going on."

  Whittier sighed. "Before God, I have no idea," he said. "Like we told the other detective, Melantha was handed over to us at gunpoint. We've been bouncing around like Ping-Pong balls in a hurricane ever since."

  Fierenzo suppressed a grimace. Unsatisfying though the answer might be, Whittier's voice and body language were finally carrying the ring of truth. "And Cyril?"

  "Melantha told me he was one of her people," Mrs. Whittier said, lifting her hands helplessly. "That's all I know."

  "I get the impression he was involved with some agreement, too," Whittier offered. "But what agreement, and between whom, I don't know."

  "Possibly with someone named Halfdan," Mrs. Whittier offered. "Melantha mentioned that name, too."

  "What about the thousands of dead New Yorkers?" Fierenzo asked. "Any idea what he was talking about?"

  The Whittiers looked at each other again. "Melantha told me the Greens and the Grays would all die if she didn't go back," she said hesitantly. "But I didn't think there were that many of them."

  "The Greens, as in Melantha Green?" Fierenzo asked.

  "Yes, though that might just be a coincidence," Mrs. Whitt
ier said. "But then she said they all wanted her dead."

  "Did Cyril say anything else?" Whittier asked.

  "Nothing that made sense," Fierenzo said, deciding not to mention the references to Sylvia and Aleksander just yet. "We let the machine take the message. You can listen to the whole thing later if you want."

  "So what happens now?" Whittier asked cautiously.

  For a moment Fierenzo gave him what Lieutenant Cerreta referred to as the Official NYPD Stare. "If you mean are you under arrest, the answer is no," he said. "But this is not the end of this. If the girl shows up, or if you learn anything else, you will call me immediately. Understand?"

  Whittier swiped the tip of his tongue across his upper lip. "Yes, sir."

  Standing up, Fierenzo pulled out his wallet and slid out a card. "Here are my office and cell phone numbers," he said, handing it to Whittier. "Call me any time."

  "Yes, sir," Whittier said again, handling the card carefully.

  "Then I'll say good-night," Fierenzo said, nodding to each of them. "I suggest you lock the door behind me."

  Powell was waiting for him in the hallway. "You get any of that?" Fierenzo asked.

  The other shook his head. "Not really. That door's pretty thick."

  "To summarize: they don't know Cyril, they don't know where the girl went, and they don't know anything else."

  "Did you tell them Umberto had matched Cyril's voice with the ringleader of his polite break-ins?"

  "No, I thought we'd keep that to ourselves for the moment," Fierenzo said. "Because for all their wide-eyed surprise at the news that someone had tried to get into their apartment from their balcony, neither of them remembered to ask how someone could have gotten up there in broad daylight in the first place."

  "So how does someone do that?"

  "Damned if I know," Fierenzo conceded, heading toward the stairs. "But I'm pretty sure they do."

  "You want to haul them in for obstruction?"