Angelfire

SEVEN

GOLDIE

Normally, I wouldn’t even think of stepping through a wall of rocky earth, but as milky sunlight oozes into the cave I come to the obvious, if insane, conclusion that that is the only place Enid Blindman and Magritte could have gone. I can still feel the pull of his music. It comes from a place so right under my nose I could put my hand out and touch it.

At dawn, at that moment when the local patch of reality gets its first dusting of enlightenment, I have a moment of mind-altering clarity. The rock and earth seem no more substantial than last night’s mists, and I just step through.

I hear someone shout my name, then there’s silence and darkness. I take another step and the silence is replaced with the slow drip of water and the whisper of air and something else that I don’t hear so much as feel. My eyes adjust to the new reality-a pocket of misty light. Firelight, I think, because of the way it waxes and wanes.

I stumble and fall forward a few steps. Dirt and sand crunch comfortingly under my feet. I put a hand out to steady myself and touch water-slick rock. I’m still in the cave. I smell cave, hear cave, feel cave, and, as my eyes focus, I see cave.

Impressive. Someone’s mimicked rock and earth so well that it took me half the night to see through it. I wonder how far into the mound this goes.

Any second, I suspect, Cal and company will realize what’s happened and come blundering through after me. Question is, do I wait around for them, thus triggering another round of recriminations and explanations and apologies, or do I plow right on in?

I plow, heading for the source of the dancing light. The narrow passage widens out and jogs right. It meets a broader corridor with a ceiling so high it seems to connect with outer space. There are torches here, stuck in crude sconces along the rough walls. To the left, the corridor descends farther into the earth; to the right, it rises. The sound of rushing water comes from the lower branch; above, I hear something that’s almost music.

I swing upward to the right, passing so close to a torch that it should’ve singed my hair. It doesn’t, because it’s putting out no heat. It’s also completely silent. Someone here has gotten the faux-glow thing down to a fine art. I touch a finger to the flame.

“You’re one stubborn son’vabitch, aren’t you?”

I wheel to find the flare, Magritte, floating about five feet up the passage from me in a wash of pale violet light. She throws me off balance, like misjudging a step.

“So I’m told,” I answer. “The Preserve, I presume?”

She tilts her head, looking me up and down with those amazing golden eyes and making me acutely aware of my sartorial shortcomings. Reflexively, I try to shove hair out of my face.

“The doorway to it. A doorway,” she amends. Her voice is soft and carries the lilt of the bayou. “You shouldn’t’ve come here. Mary don’t want people to come here without they been invited.”

“Sorry. I don’t mean to gate-crash, but it’s very important for me to understand how Enid protects you from the Source.”

“I know.” She seems sincerely empathetic. “But I don’t think you can understand it. It’s just something he does. What you do gotta understand is that Mary’s built this whole world here, and she’ll protect it.” She floats closer. So close I can see the subtle wrinkle of concern between her pale brows. “You should go.”

“I can’t. I need to talk to Enid. I need to at least try to understand what he does-how he does it. Maybe it’s something I can learn.”

She shakes her head. “No one’s been able to learn it. Not even Kevin Elk Sings, and he’s a medicine man and a musician. You gotta turn back around and get outta here, before you get caught. She’ll do whatever it takes to protect this place from the wrong sort of people.”

“We’re the right sort of people, Magritte. I promise you.” “Nice words,” says a new voice, “but cheap. How do I know I can afford to believe them?”

If Magritte’s voice is cloud, this one is rock, iron, steel. The woman it belongs to doesn’t even come up to my shoulder, but even at first glance I can see she suits her voice completely. She’s what they used to call a handsome woman-strong-featured, with a square jaw and pale eyes that could cause chilblains with prolonged exposure.

Before I can answer her question, which I suspect is rhetorical, two large and very substantial gentlemen appear on either side of her, making trust irrelevant.

“Mary McCrae?” I bow slightly. “Goldie, a.k.a. Herman Goldman. I see I have some convincing to do.”

“You’re welcome to try, Mr. Goldman, but I can only promise to listen.” She gestures for me to move up the slope past her. I’d be crazy to decline the invitation.

The cave broadens out into a large rounded room with a natural stone pillar at one end. There’s a sooty niche in the center of the formation-someone’s been using it for a can-dleholder-and faded graffiti on the walls.

There are grunters here, squatting on their haunches and doing grunter things: chowing down on something unrecognizable, guzzling from steamy clay mugs, and leering at us out of their milky, slug-trail eyes. I can’t contain a shiver.

Mary is amused at my squeamishness. “We are not what you’d call an elite society, Mr. Goldman.”

“Really? I somehow got the idea you were only interested in ‘the right kind of people.’ Um, what kind are those, exactly?”

She stops and drills me with those pale, miss-nothing eyes. “The kind who need refuge, a community, a place to belong. The kind who want a chance to maintain a grasp on their humanity. Can you understand that, Mr. Goldman?”

Do I understand? My years of being looked past, stepped over, and even spit on are not so long gone. I remember someone we encountered in our first days out of New York. A boy named Freddy. At least, before the Change he’d been a boy. After, he was alone, scared, and no longer completely human. In an alternate universe, Freddy might have come west with us to find this place, but he’d run off because he was no longer like us.

“I do understand,” I tell her, and change the subject. “Do all the mounds connect to the caverns?”

She gives me a sidewise glance out of the corner of her eyes. “At times.”

So I’ve seen. I start to ask who designed her “drawbridge” when we reach a concrete stair that spirals upward. I’m reminded of my dream-stairway to oblivion and experience a moment of sharp, clear panic. But this stair goes up into sunlight. Not that wishy-washy post-rainstorm stuff, but golden, unambiguous sunlight. I hold my breath and climb.

At the top of the stairs I stop dead. Before me is arranged a campground of sorts about a large irregular sward of grass laced with neat graveled paths. Among the encircling trees are cabins, summer cottages with canvas walls, travel trailers, campers, RVs, and tents. Directly upslope there is something I have trouble wrapping my mind around. It looks like a little Wild West town complete with saloon, assay office, church, train station, and jail. All is bathed in a golden glow, as if I’m looking through a cinematic filter.

Reality check, please.

The world pauses to watch me. My hostess also watches, an unreadable expression on her face. There is a pleasant ringing in my ears-the music-not-music I’ve been hearing since I got here. It seems to come from all around me. Everywhere there are people, both natural and processed. I see a few more grunters plying the sunny clearing, wearing shades or carrying umbrellas and bundled up as if to keep any exposed skin from being touched by ambient light.

Sounds cute, huh? They are not cute. They are creepy. There are also some tweaks here I’ve never seen before.

My breath catches in my throat. I see another flare-a white-haired boy, who stares at me through azure eyes as if I’m the oddest thing in this picture. An instant later he darts behind a tree.

Mary is watching me closely; she doesn’t miss my reaction.

“How many…?”

“The fireflies? Seven now.” A shadow crosses her face and is gone. She gestures toward the one-horse town, urging me forward.

The town ambles up the hill, at the top of which is a large lodge with smoke curling cozily from its several chimneys. Picturesque in the extreme, but nowhere-nowhere-is there a single burial mound of any kind.

“Where am I?”

My hostess sweeps a strand of graying hair out of her face and smiles. “Not where you expected to be, apparently.” “Where are the mounds?”

“About two hundred miles southeast of here.”

My brain tilts and I do a full 360, taking in everything around me. She’s not joking. The landscape is similar- karst topography, in geologese-but the trees are of different varieties and-behold! — they are not made of crystal. In fact, they’re still green.

But the dead giveaway is the sign. It is posted not more than fifty feet from where I stand and it doesn’t say one word about the Adena mounds or the Delf Norona Museum. It says: OLENTANGY INDIAN CAVERNS, DELAWARE, OHIO: ORIGINAL CAVE ENTRANCE. There is a chunk of exposition beneath this in charmingly rough-hewn letters that have been chiseled out of the wooden plank and painted yellow. I don’t have time to read it, except to note that it speaks of the religious ceremonies of Wyandotte Indians, and of oxen falling down holes. I’m being ushered to the Lodge.

As we pass through the campgrounds, I see where the musical aura of this place comes from. There are wind chimes everywhere-in the trees, on the buildings, and on clotheslines strung between. The chimes are made of glass, metal shrapnel, bits of fired pottery, hollowed-out wooden tubes.

Clearly, this is more than a fashion statement. My musician’s ear notices something else about them, too: they seem to be playing the same scale of notes so that, in the whole gentle cacophony, there is never a note out of tune. There is only harmony. And if that isn’t rare enough, they’re singing away without a breeze to stir them.

Okay, so why hang wind chimes everywhere, then go to the trouble to tune them and keep them moving even when there’s no wind? And how? I hope Mary McCrae likes to play Twenty Questions.

We pass a cleared area marked by concentric circles of logs laid out on the ground. At the center of the area is the smoking remains of a large fire. Clearly a gathering area of some sort. We bypass the Wild West town, cutting straight up the hill. I see only the backs of buildings. Faces in windows.

The Lodge is an archetypal construct of wood and stone and slate shingle. It looks quite perfect sitting there among the trees-serene, rustic. I’m ushered into an office on the first floor-a pleasant room with knotty pine walls and red and green plaid furnishings that trigger a ghost-memory of summers long ago when I was almost happy. A cabin in the Catskills, a white-haired old gent who laughed a lot and who had my mother’s smile.

I shake myself. Mary is asking if I won’t please be seated. I do please, taking the middle of the plaid sofa. She perches across from me on the edge of a large desk. The substantial gentlemen both leave; Magritte stays. A moment later Enid comes into the room looking almost sheepish. He sidles to a chair on my right where Magritte is in restless hover, but he doesn’t sit, he hovers, too, in a manner of speaking, half leaning against the chair.

“Enid tells me you tracked him here,” says Mary.

“I did. We did-my friends and I.”

“Why?”

“He didn’t tell you?”

“I’d like to hear it in your words, if you please.”

“We have a rather special interest in Enid’s music.”

“You wouldn’t be the first. Enid’s ability is quite exceptional and rare. What’s your particular interest?”

“One of the men I’m traveling with-Cal Griffin-has a twelve-year-old sister who is now a flare.”

“A what?”

“Like Magritte,” says Enid quietly. “A firefly. The Storm got her, too, he said. Like in Chicago.” He lowers himself to the arm of the chair.

Mary’s sharp eyes soften just a bit. “I’m truly sorry, Mr. Goldman. But if the Storm got your friend’s sister, how can Enid possibly help her?”

“We’re headed west to where the Source-what you call the Storm-is gathered. If Enid really can shield flares from the Source, maybe he could help break them free of it.” Maybe, I think, he could do more.

Now Mary’s eyebrows shoot straight up into her fringe of salt and pepper hair. “You’re tracking the Storm? How?”

“It’s a little talent I have, I guess. I’m like a compass. It- um-pulls me.” And the sign on that door says: Do not enter.

Mary nods and glances at Enid. “And your ability to see through our defenses-to walk through our defenses-is that also a ‘little talent’ you have?”

“Ah … apparently.” I don’t like the way this conversation is going. Especially since I now suspect that the others aren’t right behind me after all.

“You’ll understand, perhaps, if I tell you this concerns me.”

She slides off the desk and meets me eye-to-eye though I’m sitting. She is shorter, I realize, than Tina, but her stature is not a matter of physical size. This is One Big Woman.

“Usually, people don’t come here without an invitation,” she tells me. “In fact, since Enid and Maggie and I came here, no one has come through that portal that we haven’t led through. This is a place of refuge, Mr. Goldman. A preserve of human life. And your ‘little talent’ could put its very existence in jeopardy.”

I look over at Magritte. Her eyes are wide with what I think is concern (though flare eyes can be hard to read, and that little puckering between her brows could be annoyance). Enid is examining a knot in the floorboards. No help there.

“I’m no danger to you, Mary.” I try to reassure her. “My friends are no danger to you. All we want is to talk to Enid in the hope that maybe he can help us.”

“This compound”-she makes a sweeping gesture with one arm-“is locked in a vault that is somehow folded up in space. We don’t understand how. All we understand is that to keep it hidden, we have to bar the doors and windows and mind the locks. You picked my locks, Mr. Goldman. How many more like you are there at home?”

Several things flash through my mind at once. One is Mary’s choice of words; these are her people, her place, her locks, her gates I have crashed. Second is a quandary: Do I tell her there is one of me or many?

I opt for the truth. “There aren’t any more like me. At least, not among the people I’m with. None of them saw Magritte until Enid let them. None of them can see through your defenses or pick your locks.”

“No?” She turns on her heel, starts to pace. “But you could let them in.”

“I was kind of hoping you’d do that.”

“So they can talk Enid into leaving us to find this Source?”

“Not necessarily. He may be able to share his talent with us in another way. He might know something we don’t, something we can learn. Pardon me, but I kind of got the idea from Enid that helping people in need is your shtick.”

“My shtick.” A smile lifts one corner of her mouth. “Well, it’s a nice story, Mr. Goldman. It touches the heart.”

Her pacing brings her back into my face. “I have over 120 souls here. And more coming, by invitation, every day. What if you’re not what you advertise yourself to be? What if you have other motives that I can’t begin to divine? Or even if you’re sincere, what happens if the only way Enid can help you is to go with you?”

I hold up my hands in surrender. “Fine. I’ll leave.”

She grimaces. “So you can gate-crash again with reinforcements? Try to put yourself in my place. Would you trust you?”

Well, now. Given what the world is coming to, she has a point. Lesson number one in post-Change reality is that if it was ever true that nothing is what it seems, it now goes double.

“If there’s anything I can do to prove we’re harmless…”

Her mouth curls up at one corner. “And how would you go about doing that, Mr. Goldman? How can you be sure you are harmless?”

I can’t.

She’s silent for a moment, her eyes on my face, poking, prying, scanning. Then she steps back a pace. “Enid, find our would-be friend something to eat. He is not to go near the caverns. I’m going to call Council.”

“Yes, ma’am,” says Enid, docile as all get-out. He beckons with his dreadlocks.

I am dismissed into the care of the Bluesman and the flare. They lead me to a large, bright kitchen where the wood stove puts out too much heat and where a pot of tea is boil-ing-eternally, I suspect. I pull off my ratty coat and get a bowl of some sort of grain porridge and a cup of the industrial strength tea. While Enid and Magritte huddle at the kitchen table and speak in muffled tones about something- most likely what they should do with me-I stare moodily out the window, down the hill to the center of the camp, where the rhythm of early morning activity has established itself.

It’s like watching a dance of insects. They beetle around the fire pit, stop and chat, exchange containers of some sort. Near the residences, people are also busy, beating rugs, hanging laundry, tending animals, scratching at the ground. Very normal in a bucolic, medieval sort of way.

While I watch, the rhythm of the dance changes. From several of the cabins, people emerge as if propelled-two here, one there, another over there, a fourth and a fifth. They converge on the camp center, homing. On their way, they tag and draw along a woman hanging laundry, a man weeding neat rows of something green, another man deep in conversation with a group near the fire pit. From there, they start up the hill toward the Lodge. The people around them, the people they pass by, take note, following their progress, pausing to comment on it.

Call me squeamish, but this display of synchronicity makes my hair stand on end. I swallow a suddenly tasteless mouthful of porridge and set down my bowl. Okay, it’s not Children of the Corn-the people coming up the hill are chatting and smiling as they approach-but I am seriously weirded out, nonetheless.

“She called Council,” Magritte says from beside me. Her voice reminds me of the wind chimes. She seems slightly ill at ease.

“Is that a bad thing?” I ask.

“Not a bad thing,” says Enid. “The Council protects us, is all. They’ll do what’s good for the Preserve.”

“Ah. Which may not be what’s good for me and my friends.” Or the rest of the planet. I turn to look at him as straight up as I can. “Look, I meant what I said. Let me go and I’ll take my friends and get out of here.”

Enid drops his eyes. “That’s not my decision.”

“What about the little girl?” asks Magritte. “You ain’t just gonna abandon her?” Her eyes, for a moment, show me as deep and dark a maze as the one I traveled to get here. It doesn’t take special powers to see that Tina’s plight has some special significance for her. After all, she was close to becoming Megillah-fodder herself.

I shrug. “I could tell Cal there was no way Enid could help. But I’d be lying, and I’m not real good at that.”

Her aura seems to fade toward transparence for a moment. Then she looks to Enid, through Enid and right down into his soul.

He puts up his hands to ward her off. “Hey, no, baby. Don’t ask me that.”

She says, “What if he could convince the Council-convince Mary-that it was a good thing?”

“How’s he gonna do that, Mags?”

The look they exchange is loaded with subtext. There’s something here I’m not in on.

“With your ability,” I say, “you might be able to free more flares-more fireflies. You might be able to free them all.”

Shaking his head, Enid slumps farther into his chair. “No, man. No way I can do that.”

“Then maybe I can. I’ve managed to harness a few twisted talents. I can see and walk through your portals. Maybe I can learn to do what you do, or maybe I can help you do it.”

Enid grins at me unexpectedly, the furrows alongside his mouth becoming deep smile lines. “Sort of a sideman, huh?” “Or a sidekick.”

He reaches up to rub his eyes, which are bloodshot, I assume from lack of sleep. “It’s not the same thing. The portals is one thing; the music is something else.”

“I’m willing to try if you are. Look, if Mary is as dedicated to freeing and protecting people as you say, then isn’t this a golden opportunity? A talent like yours could save a lot of enslaved flares. We can find the Source-the Storm.”

“You seem awful sure of that.”

“I am.” Sometimes I wish I weren’t. “But let’s say we can free some of the flares. The missing piece in the scenario is where do we take them where they’ll be safe?” I smile. “Nice place you got here.”

Enid and Magritte exchange another verbose look, then Enid says, “Lemme go talk to the Council,” and leaves me alone with Magritte.

I feel her beside me, a cool, blue furnace. I have a swift and unworthy fantasy about what it might be like to make love to her. It shocks me. She is looking at me with those giant cat’s eyes while this slithers through my mind, and the sudden one-two punch of lust and shame drive me over to the hearth, where the heat from my face is lost in the fire. She follows me, so my relief is short-lived.

I try to keep my mind on the problem at hand. “So you were in Chicago when this happened to you?” I ask without looking at her.

“Yeah.”

“Was it sudden? I know with Tina-my friend’s sister- it happened gradually, over several days. We thought she’d gotten some sort of radiation poisoning.”

Magritte’s hands make a series of vague little gestures before she says, “Poisoning, huh? Yeah, it took a while for me to get poisoned, too.” She giggles, but there isn’t any mirth in it. It ends in a strange little hiccup.

I glance at her face and surprise something both bitter and desperate in her expression. “Was it painful?” I ask. “Tina was in physical pain up until… well, until it was over. After, she seemed … relieved … released. I think there was a different kind of pain, then.”

She grimaces, her sharp little flare teeth making her seem feral. “Sounds like sex.”

Well, that catches me napping. I’m speechless, and what’s left of my lust flares (you will pardon the pun) then shrivels right up.

“I don’t know what I’d’ve done without Enid,” she says in a voice like the rustle of dry leaves. “Out of the frying pan, into the fire… Uncle Nathan always said that about me.”

She turns her face away; the flames paint it gold and red, even through her aura of rippling light.

“How close did you get to the Storm before Enid-” “Struck by lightning,” she murmurs. “You ever been in a tornado?”

“Ah, no … an experience I’ve managed to avoid, living in Manhattan.”

“Stay in this part of the country long and you won’t be able to avoid it. Tornado just sucks up anything that gets close. Even at a distance, you can feel the power of it. Like a magnet, pulling at you. You see it; it dances in your eyes. You know it’s a quick trip to hell, but it’s so powerful, so beautiful, that part of you wants to walk right up and touch it. You want it to take you.”

She pins me with her eyes, suddenly dark as the underbelly of a thunderhead. “Storm was like that. One minute I was dancing for him, the next minute I was dancing for the Storm.”

I recall someone a lifetime ago talking this way about cocaine. She got struck by lightning, too, in a manner of speaking. One night, in a cranked haze, she walked right onto the third rail in our tunnel.

“Dancing,” I repeat. “For Enid?” I’m trying, I realize, to wrap my mind around their relationship, as if it matters.

“No, not Enid. Enid is my friend.” She lays subtle stress on the last word. “He was there to save me from one thing, and ended up saving me from something worse.”

“You knew him before the Change?”

“He played at the club I worked before his manager got him a break. After, he’d come back to check up on me, make sure I was okay, talk about getting me out of there. He tried to get me out of there.” She shrugged, spilling radiance into the air. “When all the weird shit came down, he was there for me. In the wrong place at the right time, I guess.”

Darkness flitters across her face again like the shadow of wings. It’s the same look I glimpsed earlier when she asked if we’d abandon Tina. I have the sudden conviction that Magritte knows a lot about abandonment. I fight the urge to stroke her cheek. Did I mention I’m a lousy fighter?

She doesn’t flinch away from my touch as I expect. Instead, she turns into it, fixing me with her whiteless topaz eyes, wrapping me in a tingling veil.

From my fingertips, gold-white light fans out across her cheek and bleeds into her own vivid aura. A luminous mist glides over my hand, my arm, my head. It envelops her, too, and in a moment we’re engulfed in a veil of something kinetic that is both hers and mine. The world is shut out. I hear no shimmer of wind chimes, no snap of flame, no life-noise from the camp outside, not my own breathing, not even my own heartbeat. I am aware only of our mutual amazement.

The opening of the kitchen door pulls us apart. The combined aura explodes soundlessly and the outside world rushes back in. I am dispossessed.

“Council wants to see you,” says Enid, and if he is aware of having interrupted something, he hides it.

The Council meets in a large parlor I suspect was once the staff lounge. There is a huge braided rug around which sit nine people on chairs, bench seats, and pillows. They are an interesting mix, five women (including Mary), four men. They are racially mixed, too-three blacks, one Hispanic, one Asian, two Native American. Mary is the sole Caucasian. They are old and young. Fresh and worn.

Their clothing suggests diversity of social strata, as well. The Asian gentleman wears a sweater that is obviously cashmere, but his L.L. Bean boots are muddy and scuffed. The Hispanic woman next to him is dressed in ill-fitting overalls and a man’s flannel jacket-Kmart wardrobe. They both have very clean but very chapped and callused hands.

In the once real world, clothes said something about who you were. Now I think they might only say something about where you’ve been. The Change has been a great equalizer, I suppose, whatever its faults. Perhaps it’s true that no evil happens that does not bring good in its wake. If there was ever a time you couldn’t judge a man by his clothes, it’s now.

I smooth the loose tails of my own gaudy purple and green plaid flannel and await their verdict.

“Enid has explained what you’re proposing,” Mary says. “On the surface, it sounds ideal. Like Kismet. You have a way of tracking the Storm; we have, just possibly, the means of freeing its slaves and an underground railroad ready to receive them.”

“But?” I prompt.

“Mr. Goldman,” says the Asian gentleman, “we have had a number of people approach Enid during his sojourns with an interest in using his talent. Ultimately, they wish to seek advantage from it over their unfortunate fellows. Machines such as we once relied on for services no longer work. There is only one means of replacing them that does not require arcane talent.”

“Human machines,” I murmur. The ambient temperature in the room drops a few degrees and I shiver.

He is nodding at my reaction. “In a word, slaves. So you see, there are people in our new world who have a need, and others who will attempt to fill it. Commercialism, Mr. Goldman, at its most despicable. Out there, human beings are once again becoming a commodity. I think you will understand how some would find Enid’s talent attractive in that context.”

“I do understand. And I understand that your mission is to protect all of this. I don’t know what I can do to convince you that my friends and I are no threat. Look, um, maybe if I tell you what we know about the Change and the Storm, you’ll understand our mission.”

They exchange glances, then all eyes go to Mary. She nods.

“There was a government project code-named ‘the Source.’ I don’t pretend to understand the physics behind it, but I do know that it went pretty horribly wrong. We … met one of the scientists who’d worked on that project. He’d been changed by the disaster-not like anyone we’d ever seen. Not like anyone we’ve seen since. We suspect that when the project went south, something terrible was born. You call it the Storm; I call it the Megillah; I’ve heard it called other things. It’s powerful. It’s sentient. It sees. It senses. It hungers.”

Even at a distance, you can feel the power of it.

“And for some reason it’s most hungry for flares, people who were twisted like Magritte was. Like my friend’s little sister, Tina. She was twelve when the Storm took her. Look, I don’t want to sound like, um, like Mr. Sob-story, but since you seem to be in a position to decide my fate, I think you should know the kind of person Cal Griffin is. He’s been taking care of Tina since their mom died and their dad ran out on them. Well, not quite in that order, but it’s a complicated story. The point is, he’s spent most of his adult life protecting her. But he couldn’t protect her from the Change or from the Storm.” I glance at my musician friend, where he leans against the door frame. “Cal wasn’t as lucky as Enid, or maybe the legal profession just doesn’t lend itself to sorcery, but there wasn’t a damn thing he could do to stop what happened to her. It was like Magritte said, a-a tornado just sucked her away from him. Since then, we’ve been on a sort of quest-Cal, Colleen, Doc, and me. Cal is determined to find Tina and free her and the other flares the Source has taken. More than that, he intends to find some way of defeating the Source.”

A ripple of surprise circles the room.

Mary watches the reaction of her fellows closely then turns to me. “And you and your friends accompany him. Why?”

I pause to consider this. “Before the Change, I lived on the street. People stepped on me, over me, and around me on a daily basis. Most of them took me as just another crazy. While insanity is a great defense against all sorts of abuse, I … I admit I slip in and out of reality more easily than the average guy. Cal always treated me like a man, even on my bad days. Sometimes he even treated me like a friend. So when he says we can find the Source and do something about it, I believe him.”

“Why?” Mary asks.

How to describe Cal’s possession by this mad vision that we four merely human beings can confront and conquer the unknown? That we must do it. “Because he believes,” I say at last.

The Native American fellow, who appears to be in his early fifties, leans forward, eyes intense. “This Doc you mentioned, he’s a real doctor? A medical doctor?”

Duh. I should have my head examined.

I nod eagerly. “Yes. Yes, he is. He was a surgeon in Russia, but he knows a great deal about general medicine, and he’s absorbed bookloads about herbal remedies. He’s had to.”

I neglect to tell them that before the Change, Doc was peddling hot dogs on Manhattan street corners.

Mary says, “I know what you’re thinking, Delmar, but I’m not sure we can afford to let ourselves be seduced by need.”

I’m not much of a seducer, but it doesn’t hurt to try. “If you need a doctor, Doc Lysenko will be only too happy to assist. He can train nurses, medics. He might even be able to recruit some doctors from Grave Creek.”

Mary draws a deep breath as if I am taxing her patience mightily. “Mr. Goldman…”

“Goldie.” I give her my most winsome and lopsided smile. It even worked on my mom… when I was ten.

She grimaces. “Goldie. We are charged with protecting these people and with adding to their number. Right now, I can’t send anyone out through that portal because your friends are camped right in front of it. From what you’ve told me about Cal Griffin, I suspect he’s not likely to leave without you.”

She’s right. Stunning thought. Being left and leaving, I realize, had become rather a lifestyle for me.

“We could bring them in,” says Delmar.

“And then what?” asks the Asian gentleman. “It doesn’t sound as if they intend to stay.”

“We could stay long enough to help with your medical needs.”

“We need a doctor, Mary,” says a black woman with tight, graying cornrows. “Even a temporary doc would help.”

“We need more than that, Letty.” Mary looks at me. “Well, Mr. Goldman, you’ve given us a lot to think about. Enid, why don’t you and Magritte show Goldie around while we try to come to consensus here?”

We stroll outside-or at least Enid and I stroll; Magritte swims the air between us like a sea wraith. I congratulate myself that I’m no longer a prisoner. Now I’m a tourist.

I peer into the forest as we make our way down the hill in front of the Lodge. It seems to go on forever, blurring to a misty green in the deepest reaches. A thin haze rises up from the far treetops and forms a shining bowl overhead. In a trick of the eye, the sky looks more golden than blue. The temperature is almost balmy.

They give me the cook’s tour. I see vegetable gardens, windmills, a water tower that catches rain and flows it out to the cabins and vegetable patches. The Lodge and some of the larger outbuildings are on wells. There’s a waterwheel, too, snuggled up against a deep channel cut from a fast-running stream. It’s nearly complete. It will be a working mill, Enid tells me, used to grind wheat, corn, and various seeds and nuts into flour.

“That’s something else we gotta go outside for,” says Magritte. “We haven’t been here long enough to harvest much.”

“Mary said she wasn’t sure why it was cut off from the outside. Any theories?”

“I sure as hell don’t get it,” says Enid. “That’s more up Maggie’s alley. She’s got a kind of sense about these things. It’s got something to do with the old tribal magic, I think. That it, Mags?”

“Mags” nods. In the sunlight she looks like an archangel, sans plumage. Her hair is pale flame and her skin gleams like opal. She makes me hurt inside.

“There was Wyandotte Indians around here,” she says. “They used the caverns to protect them from the Delawares. Sort of a hideout. There’s an old Indian Council Chamber and some other places they used to have ceremonies. Power’s real strong down there. Real strong. Some folks even say they seen ’em. Or their ghosts, I guess. Especially in the old Council Chamber.”

Some folks. “Have you seen them?”

She hesitates, then nods. “So’s Kevin Elk Sings. His daddy, Delmar, was a chief, and his mama was a medicine woman, so he sorta comes by it natural. I don’t know why I see ’em. Maybe because I’m like this.”

“Is that what protects the flares while they’re inside? This power? Or maybe the ghosts?”

They exchange glances, then Magritte says, “Sort of. When everything changed, the Preserve got cut off, somehow. You can’t walk in or out, except through the portals. You try to walk out, you just end up somewhere back inside.”

Sounds familiar-Boone’s Gap had a similar if more sinister means of dissuading escape. “And the Storm can’t get in?”

“Not with Enid here.”

Enid again. I’m in awe. Enid’s a regular one-man show. “How do you do it?”

He gives me a weary smile. “Wish I knew.”

“So, how did Mary find this place? Does she have some sort of talent herself?”

Magritte glances at Enid and says, “We found the Preserve-me and Enid. We both saw it, but he made it open up. With his music.”

I’d be more surprised at that if I hadn’t felt the power of Enid’s music for myself. “The music opens the fold and draws in the sheep,” I murmur.

“If they hear it,” says Enid. “Some people got too much anger to hear it. It kind of picks who it wants to come in.” “It picked me,” I say.

Maggie treads air, turning to Enid. “He’s right. It did. It did pick him.”

He stops, sagging back against the trunk of a pine tree to look up at her, a crooked grimace on his dark face. “What- so now you’re thinkin’ he belongs here, or some cosmic shit like that?”

“I can’t stay-” I begin.

But Magritte cuts across me with, “Enid’s the only one who can open this place up.” Her eyes meet mine, making me dizzy. “Except now … there’s you.”

Enid looks up into the branches of the pine and says, “Dammit, Maggie.”

Well, this puts a new spin on things. “How do other people-”

“Enid has to open the portal for them. When we’re out on the road, no one else goes in or out. Scares poor Mary just about to death that something’s gonna happen to him out there.”

“There’s literally no one else that can do it?”

“We can,” says Magritte. “Fireflies, I mean. But without Enid we don’t dare go outside. We don’t dare.”

Enid shakes his head and the little bells woven into his dreadlocks sigh musically. “Dammit, girl, you got the biggest mouth on you. She’s right, though. Kevin Elk Sings can see the portals, but he can’t open ’em. It’s taken a month of Sundays to bring in the folks we got here.”

Catch-22. “So there’d be some benefit to me staying here.”

Both of them are looking at me with wary gazes, Magritte’s eyes going from azure to silver. She says, “I’d be lyin’ if I said no, but even if you did, there’s no way the Council’d let Enid go. Gettin’ in and out is one thing. Keepin’ the lid on this place is something else.”

“Are you sure you couldn’t train this Kevin Elk Sings to-”

“Tried it,” says Enid. “The kid’s got a ton of talent or power or whatever you want to call it, but it’s real raw. And me, I do this stuff; I don’t know how I do it. Makes it damn hard to teach someone else.” He shakes his head and gazes out over the parkland. “Hell, I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

He looks like hell, I realize-gray beneath his chocolate skin, eyes weary.

“This must take a lot of energy.” I gesture at the bright golden haze on the meadow.

“More every day, seems,” Enid says, and adds, “So, your friend Cal’s a lawyer?”

Okay, we change direction. “Uh… yeah. Or he was, any-way-before things got interesting.”

“He know how to find loopholes in a contract?”

“I’m sure Cal can find loopholes with the best of ’em.”

“Think maybe he’d be willing to help find one in mine?” “Why? Any contract you had before would have to be void now.”

“You’d think so, huh? But you’d be wrong. Mine just sort of changed shape.”

I’m fascinated. I’ve seen many strange and terrifying twists and tweaks in our topsy-turvy world, but a twist of law is unique. “I thought this Howard what’s-his-name was the problem.”

Enid doesn’t answer. He doesn’t even seem to have heard the question. His eyes are closed, and his skin glistens with sudden dew.

Magritte touches his hand. “You go on back to the Lodge, Enid. Get some sleep. I’ll stay with Goldie.”

He starts to open his mouth, then just nods and levers himself away from the tree trunk. We watch him make his way back up the hill, walking like a man three times his age.

“Is he sick?” I ask.

Magritte is silent. When I look at her, her violet-blue aura is dancing with darker hues. “He… It takes a lot out of him, all he does.”

She seems about to say more when someone pops out of a nearby cabin and waves us down.

“You’re wanted up to the Lodge, Maggie,” she says. “Pronto.”

We go up, pronto, and I’m introduced to Kevin Elk Sings. This might have been a pleasant event, except that he brings chilling news from the West Virginia portal: Cal, Colleen, and Doc are under attack.