Magic Time

Chapter Eighteen

NEW YORK

Cal’s eyes felt like they’d been scooped out and boiled, his muscles complained like rusty hinges, but he was determined to get everything ready before it grew dark.

The pedicab stood in the living room, beside the recliner-the one Mr. Schenk had sat in a millennium ago yesterday morning. Cal had known of the stashed cycle three doors down, one of David Abramson’s failed summer jobs, and had traded the NYU student his law books, stereo and coffee table for the bike, some food and water, and containers to hold them. Bedrolls and provisions were stacked neatly around it. It would be a bitch to wrestle the thing down the stairs in tomorrow’s pre-dawn darkness, but only an idiot left things outdoors unwatched.

When he straightened up from stowing the knives and arrows, he saw Tina watching from the archway into the hall, leaning against the frame for support. She held out her music box, tilting it questioningly toward him.

“Sure,” Cal said lightly, taking it. He pressed it between the folds of one of the bedrolls, made sure it was secure. The basic frame of the pedicab was a mountain bike with a wide range of gears: it would stand up to hard traveling, but every ounce of weight would tell.

“Funny how little you really need, when you think about it,” Tina said. “It’s like we’ve been carrying all this stuff on our backs; now it’s just shedding away.” She stepped a little shakily to the sofa and sank down with a ragged exhalation.

She’s not well, not at all. He had been so relieved when her fever had broken, when she had come back to him, but the illness was still in her, still working, he could sense that. He sensed, too, her fear, her horror at what was happening to her. He wondered if she had, after all, seen the bands of slouched pale-eyed creatures that he’d glimpsed near the hospital.

“You’re not gonna leave me, are you, Cal?”

“What? No. What makes you think that?”

“When I was little,” she began quietly, “and they told me something had happened to Mama, I tried to imagine the worst thing that could happen, and the worst I could imagine was she had a broken arm.” The light from the blinds cast shadow striping across her face, rendering her expression unreadable. “But she was dead.”

Cal nodded, remembering the day, the helplessness he had felt. Tina reached out and grasped his sleeve, peered up at him with her cobalt gaze. “Sometimes things happen, and it doesn’t make any difference if you’re good or not.”

Cal peered into her strange, troubled eyes. “I’m not gonna leave you.”

A tapping sounded at the front door, and they both froze. Cal had given Doc his duplicate key, and neither he nor Colleen would have bothered to knock. Wordlessly, Cal motioned Tina toward her room. She rose and quickly moved to her door, slid out of sight behind it.

The tapping continued, insistent, as if sharp nails were drumming on the door. Cautious, Cal unzipped one of the packs, withdrew the buck knife Colleen had given him. He unsheathed it, crossed the room in a few soundless steps.

He was almost to the door when there was a harsh thud and the door exploded inward, fragments flying like shrapnel. With a cry, he stumbled back, shielding his face, wood shards bouncing off him. Dimly, he could perceive something squeezing through the ragged hole in the door, dark as some vast insect.

Cal gasped. The intruder was a monstrosity, reptilian and manlike at the same time, standing on two legs that bent in more places than a man’s. It towered over him, head nearly grazing the high ceiling as it leaned forward, stalking toward him, elephantine footfalls shuddering the floor.

It paused and tilted its head, its yellow eyes considering him. Then the creature’s long, projecting face split in a ghastly grin that revealed twin rows of steak-knife teeth.

“This is not Woodstock,” the monster said. “I am not Mother Teresa.”

Cal gaped, recalling the words, hearing in the thunder of that dragon voice a tone familiar from days and months and years endured. Now he could see, unmistakably, in the rough saurian planes of that face, the remnant-no-the essence of the man. “Mr. Stern. .”

Stern nodded, pleased. He wants me to know it’s him, Cal thought. Whatever he’s going to do, he wants it personal.

Stern took another lumbering, gliding step toward him, relishing it. “I told you if you left, you’d be terminated.” He belched, and, incredibly, a tendril of gray vapor curled out the side of his mouth. “Mind if I smoke?”

A nearby gasp drew both their attention. Cal saw that Tina was standing in the doorway of her room, jewel-blue eyes riveted on Stern, vertical-slit pupils staring.

Stern regarded her with his own changed eyes, identical pupils. “Lord of exiles and miracles,” he whispered, voice trembling. “I thought I was the only butterfly in this brave new world.”

He took a step toward her, one razored hand extended. She shrank back. “Don’t be scared, honeylamb. You’re looking at your future.”

Cal flung himself between them, thrust Tina behind him. “Stay away from her!”

Stern paused, firelight eyes raking Cal. “I will, if you introduce us.”

“She’s my sister.”

Stern weighed it, then flashed an obscene Cheshire grin. “Well, Mr. Griffin, may I have permission to take out your sister?”

Stern lunged with crocodile speed.

“Run, Tina!” Cal shouted, shoving her away. She darted into her room, slammed the door. Cal wheeled on Stern, the long knife blade gleaming.

Stern batted Cal aside like wadded paper. Scrambling to his feet, Cal saw Stern rip the door apart with two quick slashes of his monstrous hands, tear through the bookcase Tina had overturned within as a barricade.

Cal sprang after Stern into the bedroom, leapt on him from behind, bringing the knife down hard. He felt the blade jar aside on bone and gristle, saw Tina shrink back in terror, trying to wedge herself in the corner. Stern roared, more in outrage than pain, threw Cal off and spun on him, claws sweeping across Cal’s abdomen in a wide arc. Cal sprang back and felt his shirt rip, the dagger points lightly scoring the skin of his stomach, just enough to draw blood.

Stern closed on him, and he stumbled back, knife leveled, desperately searching for some soft place under leather hide and bony plate.

A boxy object flew through the air, struck Stern on the back before crashing to the floor. Stern yelled, spun to face Tina. The night stand. She threw the night stand. But now she had nothing close to hand as Stern rushed at her. She fell back between the bed and wall, cowering. He bent over her, reaching out nightmarishly long arms.

Cal dove forward, but Stern twisted, gripped him and sent him flying across the room. Cal’s head hit the wall with a terrible, resounding crash.

Tina screamed as he hit the floor, splayed limply. Oddly, his mind felt clear, but he couldn’t see the room anymore, only a flat grayness. He struggled to rise, to move his arms and legs, but it was as if the strings to them were all severed.

He heard the crack of the big window shattering, then a strange sound as of a great bedsheet unfurling, followed by a rhythmic whooshing of air that filled the world, then diminished, punctuated by the fading keen of Tina’s screams.

In the last moment of awareness before the gray darkened and was all, Cal recognized that sound.

It was the sound of wings.

OUTSIDE D.C.

“You could have said you were sorry,” said Czernas, after about two and a half miles.

Riding ahead, Shango was watching the cars on his left like a hawk, watching the trees that fringed the parkway, planning what he’d do if someone lunged at them from either direction. The bikes were thin-tired touring models, not mountain or hybrid. If they were forced off the pavement, they couldn’t maintain escape speed.

Shango said nothing. I’m sorry. I’m sorry you’re dying, Mister. I’m sorry you’re screaming in pain, sweetheart.

I’m sorry you’re never going to see your husband or children or grandkids again.

Something grated within him at those facile, worthless apologies.

I’m sorry I lent a friend the fifty bucks you were planning on buying the kids’shoes with, honey. They’ll be okay for another two weeks.

As a child he’d learned to hate the words.

Sweat ran down his face. Far to their left, thin smoke rising above the trees showed the location of another downed plane. Shango wondered if he could determine whether it was a United flight by simply standing on top of an SUV and studying it through binoculars, and if his companion would feel obliged to ride over to the wreck to say I’m sorry to them, too.

Czernas persisted angrily, “We may not be able to do anything, but we don’t have to treat people like they don’t exist.”

“She exists, all right.” Shango braked beside a big silver-gray Washington Flyer in the number one lane. “She exists enough to have taken a liter of my water, which is what I’m going to have to give you to split the difference of what you’ll be short.” He slipped his hammer from the straps of the backpack, walked warily among the cars, as careful as if he were in one of the old New Orleans cemeteries, where the tombs cut your field of vision to about two feet. The rear wall of the cemetery backed onto the projects: the Park Service found dead tourists there all the time. The only difference was that the tombs weren’t made of metal and didn’t throw waves of heat.

“Well, you can keep your fuckin’ water!” Czernas yelled from the shoulder.

Shango paused beside the searing, silvery wall of the Flyer’s side. “I can’t even do that,” he said patiently. “Because if you collapse from dehydration, we stop, and since we can’t stop, I have to split my water with you.”

“I’ll manage.”

The fuck you will, thought Shango, but he let the quarrel drop. Yet it disturbed him, because he knew Czernas was right, or at least right in any context but this one. When you’re pinned down by enemy fire, you don’t sit there putting Band-aids on the bullet holes, you take out the goddam machine-gun nest and then care for the survivors.

The hot steel of the bus seared his bare knees and elbows where they brushed it. Even standing up on top, he couldn’t see past the trees in the direction of the rising smoke.

Fuck. Another side trip, and it was nearly noon. If Bilmer started walking to Washington-given that her plane had landed at least three minutes early-she wouldn’t follow the main road. They’d never find her.

He could see two more smoke columns, too, which might or might not also be planes.

Probably were. The countryside around Dulles would be littered with them. He put from his mind what that meant, in terms of death and lives shattered, of men and women like those the woman in green was trying to care for, with her two pitiful little liters of water, of people sitting in dark houses somewhere wondering if their mothers’ or husbands’ or grandkids’ plane had touched down before the lights went out.

“You think he can do it?” Czernas asked, when Shango returned to the shoulder and mounted his bike again. “Turn this around?”

“Do you?” Shango took a drink, held out one of his bottles to Czernas, who shook his head. Shango unceremoniously draped the strap around the aide’s neck. Czernas made a move to pull away, and their eyes met. Then the young man’s lips tightened, and he looked aside and adjusted the strap to sit better on his shoulder, and swung onto his bike.

“I don’t know,” he said after a time. “Even if whatever Bilmer found is complete. . The sooner we get it to him, the better. The quicker he can act. He has enemies, even in his own party; he always has.”

For some reason Shango heard Cox’s voice in his mind again, Things fuck up, and they start wreckin’ their own neighborhoods.

But he couldn’t even begin to explain to Czernas why he laughed.

NEW YORK

He hadn’t ever liked her, Sam reflected. But then, he hadn’t actually known her.

And now, surprisingly, she was his second guest.

The little neighbor girl, the dancer, sat mute in the corner, scanning the room with queer blue eyes. She was pallid as uncooked dough and sickly blue veins spiderwebbed out over her skin. He might have feared catching some awful illness from her, if he hadn’t seen Ely first. She was “becoming”. . something. If she didn’t fade away to nothing first, crumble to white ash like his precious notepads, now cold dust in the fireplace.

Stern crouched on his haunches watching Tina, who stared back at him silently, doll-like amid the curled and coifed bisque figures.

“What’s wrong with this picture?” he murmured contentedly. “Nothing at all.”

It was only because Sam was watching her closely, looking for it, that he saw the lightning flash of fear across her face before she submerged it, masked it with indifference. She’s trying to be brave.

Sam clucked his tongue. “We don’t need her.” And he didn’t know, really, if he was saying this in an attempt to protect her or because he resented her presence; in some perverse way, he felt possessive of Ely’s attention. The taunts, the malice, the contempt-at least they made him visible.

“Speak for yourself,” Stern said acidly, and Sam felt the sharp prick of his scorn. Stern drew closer to his unwilling guest. “I thought I was a solo dance. Turns out I’m a pas de deux.”

Tina raised her head defiantly. “I’m not like you. I won’t be like you.”

“Look in a mirror, child. Oh, I admit, you don’t have all the luxury extras yet, but give it time.” Stern eyed himself in the aged wall mirror, its silvering half fallen away. “Symmetry, matched and balanced, the two of us. . How little faith I showed, to think all this would unfold and I’d be left alone.”

“You weren’t alone, Ely,” Sam demurred.

Stern’s eyes slid over to him, narrowed to slits. “Sorry, you’re not my type.” He cast a critical gaze about the room. “And, frankly, I’m used to better.”

“You have to change with the times.” Sam heard the edge of anger in his voice. He had barely slept since Ely had arrived, and he was finding it increasingly hard to hide his feelings.

“That’s just what I’ve been thinking.” Stern rose and strode to the window, swept aside a curtain. Twilight was falling-“magic hour,” Sam had heard it called-and its melancholy light washed over Stern’s face, emphasizing its monumental, grotesque beauty.

“Know why most people hire a lawyer? They don’t want justice. They want more.” His saurian head swiveled to regard Sam, and his twisted smile revealed ivory scalpel teeth. “I ran a business. I can run a mob.”

Sam felt his stomach clench, a wave of nausea surge into his throat and mouth. “But if they see you. .”

“Ever catch Cyrano de Bergerac? After she fell in love with his ideas, she didn’t care what his nose looked like.” Stern let the curtain drop, his eyes burning into Sam. “He just needed a front man.”

Sam remembered the grade school play Mother had made him appear in, as J. Pierpont Morgan, of all things. He had opened his mouth to utter the first line and had vomited in front of them all.

And now, to venture out onto those riot-torn, killing streets-a front man-so naked, so vulnerable. .

He said, pleading, “Ely, we’re safe here.”

“Mr. Mole wants to stay in his mole hole.” Stern’s lips curled contemptuously. “Well, I need room to spread my wings.”

Astonished, Sam heard himself say, “No.”

“No?” Stern’s response was immediate and terrible, his anger igniting like a firestorm. Before Sam could shriek or move at all, Stern was upon him, grasping either side of his head in immense, taloned hands.

For an instant, Sam knew what it must have been like to be that man with the dog or the little girl’s big brother in their last moments. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Griffin’s sister watching them, horrified and still.

Sam whimpered and prayed it would be quick.

But the pressure on his head did not increase. There was no cracking of bone, no finality. Instead, Stern peered into his eyes, and the gleaming yellow gaze flared brighter, blazed into a white-hot nuclear glare that flooded into him, hushed all the babble in his mind with a vast, powerful will. Sam felt himself fall away, all objection shattered to a mute, distant compliance.

“Say after me,” Stern intoned. “It’s a new world. . ”

WEST VIRGINIA

Half sunk in sleep, Hank listened to Wilma moving around in the house.

The strange darkness of the morning was long gone. He’d been awake when it clouded over the new day. His headache had returned, fit to split his skull, a hammering sense of something, some Voice, shouting at him. Or a dream of someone shouting at him, terrifying, overwhelming, while he cowered before it, naked in this new strange body.

But that dream had fleeted away as quickly as it had come, taking its very memory with it. Later Wilma had come in and told him that lightning had struck again and again around the Wishart house, leaving great patches of burned honeysuckle and charred earth.

Now he heard her go out onto the porch and knew she was sitting on the steps, surrounded by her cats, watching and listening to the strange heat of the afternoon.

Drifting toward sleep, he heard with his new and preter-natural sharpness the footfalls of neighbors passing along Applby Street. No one paused near the white house on the corner, almost as if something prevented them from seeing the place. Considering some of the things Wilma had told him, he didn’t even feel surprised.

Things are not going to be the same, she’d said.

Through the dense weave of the bedroom curtains he could still see a pin-mesh of sun. Even that hurt his eyes. He raised his hands and looked at them. Huge hands, deformed bones growing still larger. The ache in the long bones of his arms informed him that his body still had a few more changes to make.

And Wilma, he thought, with a glimmer of delighted pride. Wilma lithe and strange and fast, Wilma with eyes that, like his, saw in the dark, quick and agile as one of her own cats.

Snotty as a cat, too, he thought, and grinned affectionately to himself. Why the hell hadn’t he ever seen that, in all these years? And yet with a cat’s strange all-accepting softness, unsurprised and undemanding.

Things are not going to be the same.

What was he now? A creature of darkness, like Sonny and Hillocher? But inside he hadn’t changed-had he? The thought that maybe he had, or would later, was a frightening one. Would he turn on his friends and neighbors? Become what Sonny had become?

And what was Wilma now? What were we ever?

But he knew the answer to that. In a way, the sharpening of the differences between them made the differences matter less. She was his friend. She had always been his friend. And she had always been herself.

The thought brought him a measure of peace.

But you have no place in this world, whispered a voice in his mind.

It was a cold voice, and the thing it did to Hank’s heart was a twisting pinch of bitter cold.

You’re different from them. Alien. You’ve always been different and you’re more so now. They will kill you for being different. Wilma won’t protect you.

But she did. Hank argued with the Voice, for it seemed to be a thing coming from outside of him; like the voice that spoke in his head sometimes when he dreamed about the Devil of his Southern Baptist upbringing. She kicked Souza’s butt and got me here.

To be her pet, sneered the Voice. He tried to look where it was coming from-he knew he’d drifted off to sleep and was dreaming-but he couldn’t see it, exactly. His dreams were dreams of darkness, and in the darkness shone a bluish light; the light was a shield, hiding something darker still. To be her pet like one of her fucking cats, so she could run your life the way she runs theirs.

Come off it, thought Hank. Nobody runs a cat’s life and nobody runs mine.

But the doubt was cold in his heart.

You’ll have to kill her, the Voice said reasonably. And the others.

What others? He wanted to simply shut his mind off from the Voice but couldn’t. Wanted to wake up and go outside and talk to Wilma, but the Voice held him in sleep. I don’t want to kill nobody.

But you’ll have to, said the Voice. Or they’ll kill you. Haven’t you realized that yet?

And he saw again the crowd by the gates of the mine, the torches burning in the darkness, the men with their guns and their clubs. Saw their faces and knew them: Carl Souza, Leo Swann, Ed Brackett, Jim Stickley. His cousins Sid and Ernie, and Aunt Claire, faces twisted with revulsion at the sight of him. In his dream they all stooped and picked up stones (That area in front of the shaft was paved, there’s no stones there!). He saw the stones fly toward him, felt them thudding into his flesh. In the dream the men around the tunnel opened fire, bullets whining and pinging against the concrete, tearing like hot bees into his flesh.

No! he thought. It didn’t happen that way!

You’ll have to kill them, said the Voice, and it was hard to see why he shouldn’t.

Who? he asked.

And he thought the Voice smiled.

We’ll tell you, it said. We’ll tell you when the time comes.

“She doesn’t seem to have any fever.” Shannon Grant’s voice trembled as she touched her daughter’s hand. “When she-when she started to get like this, I asked her what was wrong, and she said, ‘It’s all going away. He wants it. It’s all going away.’ ” She swallowed hard, looked pleadingly up into Wilma’s face.

Wilma passed her hand in front of Tessa’s eyes. They neither blinked nor moved, only stared out ahead of her, not blank, precisely, but rapt, gazing into distance. “Tessa?” she said, and the child made no response. “ ‘He wants it.’ ” She turned back to Shannon. “Nothing about who he is? Or what he wants?”

The young mother shook her head, hastily slapped tears from her own cheeks. “Dr. Blair says he doesn’t know what’s wrong with her,” she said, naming the only physician in Boone’s Gap. “He says he can’t find anything physical.” Her voice cracked, and she looked quickly away.

“But wait,” said Hazel, in grim imitation of a TV huckster, “there’s more.” She stood in the doorway of Tessa’s tiny bedroom, arms folded, watching her sister and her friend with weariness in her eyes. “Terri Brackett says her son Billy’s the same way. Just staring, no fever, doesn’t move. She says his hands are freezing, and she doesn’t like the way he’s breathing. And Fawn Leary.”

“All this stuff going on,” whispered Shannon despairingly. “The guys in the mines, and Hank and…” She looked at Wilma again, as if she would have said something else, maybe something about why she’d thought getting Wilma to look at Tessa would be helpful, but didn’t.

And Wilma understood.

She passed her hand over Tessa’s dark curls, felt her face and her hands-both noticeably cold-and tilted her head a little, letting her own mind go a bit slack, relaxing into what she was more and more coming to realize was the cat part of her, or the part that was connected to her cats.

Tessa looked wrong. Faded. Pale. There was a smell to her, more dead than alive, a scent that prickled Wilma’s nape with fear. If she’d been a cat, she would have taken her at once to hide in some dark place. But even then, she knew that hiding would do no good.

She brought her mind back, looked up at Shannon. “We just don’t know enough about what’s going on,” she said. “Maybe it’s time to walk down the mountain, see if someone in Charleston or Lynchburg knows what’s going on.”

“That’s just it!” Shannon’s voice shook, and for the first time Wilma noticed the bruises on the young woman’s face, the tear in her plaid shirt and the scratches on her arms. “I tried this afternoon! I can’t leave town!”