Magic Time

Chapter Ten

NEW YORK

Jesus, it’s like a cave in here. As Colleen Brooks entered her apartment, what she half-laughingly thought of as her spider sense snapped onto full alert. When she’d left that morning, the drapes had been open. Now they were shut tight, the place dark as night. And what was that smell? Dank, musky, something she could almost but not quite place. “Hey,” she called out, “any survivors?”

“Hi, babe.” It took Colleen a moment to locate the sound, make out the shape on the lounger. Rory sat like a pile of stone.

“Why’s it so dark in here?” She strode toward the drapes, grabbed the pull.

“Don’t. My eyes are killing me.”

Colleen’s foot bumped something that rolled into the near wall, made a glassy clink. She felt around with her toe, nudged more of the same. Empties.

“Three in the afternoon. Man!” She glared at Rory, knowing full well he couldn’t see her in this gloom.

He chose not to respond or was too fogged out to get it. “Pullin’ a half-day?” he asked dully.

Shit, yes. Case you haven’t noticed, the whole friggin’ city’s closed. Don’t get into it, girl. She sighed, unstrapping the heavy tool belt, feeling her way to the sofa to lay it down. “Yeah, but there’s gonna be an elephant’s dump to clean up when they get the power back on.”

He said nothing to that, so maybe it had occurred on his radar screen that something was going on in the larger world. She added, mostly thinking aloud, “But it’s the cars, too. Like a damn graveyard. You looked outside?”

“Huh?” he responded vaguely.

This was getting old even faster than she was. Stepping cautiously-she didn’t need to tear her foot open on some damn Budweiser shard and add stitches to this royally cocked-up day-she headed for the bathroom. “I’m gonna take a shower.”

“Good luck. Water’s off.”

Great. “And I don’t suppose you thought to go out and buy some?” She caught the acid edge in her voice, just like her mother, and hated it.

“It’s. . bright out.” He managed to sound surly and whiny at the same time.

“Bright.” And now she heard her mother in her head: You sure know how to pick ’em. Yup, when the woman’s right, she’s right, even though she’d been dead from cancer, burned to ashes and dumped at sea, lo these eleven years.

So what now? Colleen plopped down on the sofa, felt the spring pressing her butt through the tear in the leather. She stared at the Rory shape on the lounger opposite, heard the slow rasp as he scratched his arm, over and over. Bitterness filled her. She hoped it was the beginning of some loathsome skin disease, that his worthless hide would bubble and peel away from him like steamed chicken.

Then she repented, thought again of the man he had been. Or was her memory, as it had so many times, playing her for a fool, imprinting an image of someone she had wanted, needed so hungrily that she had tried to assemble him from defective parts?

It had been a long day. And, Christ, it was shaping up to be a long night.

WEST VIRGINIA

They searched for Sonny and the others for nearly an hour.

Then they went on.

It was four in the afternoon by that time, and most of the respirators the men had taken from the walls at the time of the power-out were exhausted. While hunting for Sonny, they gathered every other SCSR they could find, but still they were short two or three apiece for a trek of what could easily extend on into the night, if they could find their goal at all. If it hadn’t been for the batteries going out, for the utter, unexplained failure of every source of power, Hank suspected most of the men would have remained by the downcast rather than undertake the crazy quest through the blackness of the worked-out mains.

He certainly would have.

But he knew the way. It was long and complicated, yet it was clear in his mind, over the grinding of the headache, the feverish dry heat in his bones. Like the road from Boone’s Gap down the mountains and on into Pittsburgh that he used to drive a couple times a month to visit his sister Thea and her kids. Turn here, turn there, this gas station, that burger joint on the right.

He knew it. He felt he had always known.

“Maybe they just got tired of waiting for us?” Ryan blew out the single flame as the men joined hands again, linking together in the dark. “I mean, Sonny’ll walk away from some guy waiting on him at a Burger King if he thinks they’re taking too long to serve him.”

“Yeah, but where’s he gonna go?” asked Brackett.

“And the others wouldn’t have been dumb enough to go with him,” Bartolo pointed out reasonably. “Could-you don’t think something could have-have happened to them, do you?”

“Happened?” repeated Llewellyn. “What do you mean, happened?”

“I dunno. Just-well. .”

“You mean,” said the engineer, interpreting the note in his voice, “do you think something could have got them?”

“Well,” said Bartolo, meaning, Yes, that’s what he thought.

“You mean like those worm things in Rodan?” asked Gordy, as Hank followed the wall of the old main unerringly into the blackness. And with the blitheness of one who knows perfectly well there was nothing down in the mines except themselves, he related the plot of that cinematic epic for the benefit of everyone who hadn’t seen giant rubber maggots devouring unconvincingly shrieking Toho Studio extras on the late night movie.

It was the headache, thought Hank, as he made his way on ahead. He didn’t know why he thought this, but he knew it was true. All he wanted, now, was to walk away also, to disappear into the cool darkness. To be alone. He knew that was what they’d done.

That didn’t give him a reason why they hadn’t come back.

Feeling the wall, Hank took comfort in the rambling monotone. It was as good, he thought, as having someone counting-a way of gauging by sound whether the air was bad without reminding everyone that’s what they were doing. Remembering the way the main ran on for hundreds of feet before the floor began to rise, before the first of the submains branched out into the worked-out areas where they’d collapsed the roofs back in ’89.

Seeing it in his mind again, the way he’d walked a thousand times.

Remembering.

God knew whether the passageways would still be open. Roof falls had a way of spreading. But he knew in his bones they would die, waiting for rescue by the shaft.

“You okay, Hank?” Ryan asked him, the first time they stopped and lit a quick flare to take their bearings. That was when they reached the first of the old caved-in submains. Hank blinked, flinching from the light, raising his hand against it.

“Put that out,” he said. “I can remember how it goes better in the dark.” Somehow the memories were clearer, and the light confused him, hurt him.

“Okay.” And he heard in Ryan’s voice a note that hadn’t been there before.

Shock. Shock and fear.

“Hank. .”

“I’m okay.”

Long silence. Whatever the boy had seen by the brief quick blinding light, Hank knew he didn’t look okay.

Hank added, “I’m just real tired.”

“Sure,” agreed Ryan.

What the fuck had he seen? “Everybody still with us?”

“I think a giant maggot got Gordy.”

“Good.”

“Hey, I saw this movie once where there’s these things in the sewers of New York City. .”

They moved on.

Crosscuts. Old vent shafts. Submains and rooms whose entrances were now simply rubble walls. Hank remembered them with the odd ease of one recalling that a pool hall used to stand where a parking lot was; it was like walking to the old elementary school on Front Street, though he hadn’t done that in over forty years. Clearer and clearer the memories came, the awareness of where walls lay in the dark, the sense of changing air, of shifting smells. Sometimes it seemed to him that he could see the walls, see the passageways they passed.

And looking back, he was both shocked and not shocked to see the men behind him. Dimly, and with a sense that was not exactly sight. Black with coal dust, running with sweat under their grimy hardhats, their useless headlamps, eyes moving, shifting blankly, hands linked in a chain. Ryan, Greg Grant, Roop, Lou. Llewellyn with a frown between his brows as if he were trying to work out in his head what was going on. Al Bartolo with tears running down his face, fighting not to sob with fright. Hillocher. .

Dear God!

In the darkness Hank wasn’t sure if he was seeing correctly-if this were a dream or a hallucination. But somehow he knew it wasn’t.

And somehow he understood that, in a way, he was seeing what Ryan had seen in the brief flare of the light.

Dear God, did he look as bad as Hillocher?

He realized he himself was slumping that way, slouched forward in a way that should hurt his back but didn’t. In fact it hurt him to stand up straight. Had his hair gone wispy, thinning away like that?

Did his eyes look like that?

And across the darkness, for a moment his eyes met those milk-white bulging eyes with mutual recognition, mutual sight.

He turned his head quickly. No, he thought. No.

Hallucination, fever, headache.

But he found his way unerringly in the dark.

There was a crosscut to the mains that had been made in the seventies, where the seam dipped sharply upward and narrowed to a few feet in height. It was over a thousand feet, and Hank crawled in the lead, groping in the darkness that was no longer quite so dark, and behind him the men crawled, each holding onto the ankle of the man in front. That was almost the worst, with the rock scraping their heads or their butts if they raised up even a little, and the smell of the coal dense and choking around them.

Voice echoing in the tiny tube, Gordy Flue started to sing.

You’d have thought it would be something like “Dark as a Dungeon” or “Sixteen Tons.”

But Gordy Flue took up “Doo Wah Diddy,” and everybody joined in.

After about three hundred years and a thousand miles and a zillion choruses of “Doo Wah Diddy” the shaft widened out again, and Ryan cautiously lit up his little torch and counted heads. Hillocher was gone.

“Fuck, he was right behind me!” cried Gordy in distress. He turned back to the gaping throat of the tunnel, wet pony-tail hanging like a dead onion top on his shoulders. “I thought he was hangin’ onto my pant leg!”

“Even if he let go,” pointed out Lou, “he couldn’t get lost. It ain’t like there’s a lot of places to go. Andy!” he yelled back down the shaft. “Andy, you okay?”

“He didn’t look good,” said Ryan. “He was bummin’ aspirin all the way before we started crawlin’.”

“I’ll have a look for him,” said Hank. “You wait here.”

“I’ll go,” said Ryan. “You sit here and rest.”

Hank moved instinctively back from the flame of the torch. He could see, in the mirror of the boy’s eyes, what he must look like.

Ryan crawled all the way back down the shaft, over a thousand feet. The young man was so skinny that Hank, crouched at the top, could always see the glimmer of the light he held out ahead of him. Could see it growing brighter and brighter as he crawled back.

Hillocher wasn’t in the shaft. Hank felt no surprise. “What happened to him?” Ryan kept asking, “What happened?” It was as if Hank knew something in his marrow that the others didn’t know and couldn’t know.

“Put that out,” he said. And he led them on, into darkness.