Magic Time

Chapter Twenty-Two

WEST VIRGINIA

Come to us, the voice-voices-whispered outside the windows in the darkness. Come to us. You’re one of us, and we need you, need you, need you if we’re to be whole.

If I/we are to survive.

Fred only clung tighter to Bob. He knew that part of him, the meat part, was still back in South Dakota, where he’d been when that swirling blue-white hideousness had burst the office door from its hinges, swallowed him up, flesh and bones and brain, as it had swallowed the others. He’d seen it happen, as if at the end of a long corridor, or through the wrong end of a telescope, while he’d clutched frantically at Bob.

And Bob had clutched at him.

And here he was, sitting on Bob’s bed, holding his brother in his arms and feeling the cold unceasing pull that grew and grew and did not sleep or rest. The pull of Sanrio’s will, and Wu’s, and Pollard’s, and that other Will that was greater than them all. It would pull him in, and he would cease to be himself, cease to be anything except a part of that Thing that was all of them now.

And he sent out his heart and his spirit, gathering, absorbing, drinking in strength and energy from the earth, from the air, from time. From the hearts of anyone his heart could touch, anyone who wasn’t strong enough to defend against him, drinking it like coffee, to stay awake. To stay strong.

Just as the Source was doing.

He had to stay strong or Bob would die.

He had to stay strong or he’d be drawn back away and swallowed up.

He heard their mother’s footsteps creak through the silence of the house. Followed her with his mind. Reached out to her-it was easy, for she was one of those his mind and spirit drank from, though there was very little warmth in her, very little light. He felt bad about it, bad about draining her, as he’d felt bad that first day when he’d made her go downstairs and tell people everything was all right and to go away. But he had to. He could see no choice.

If he let go, Bob would die. He would die. And It would be stronger by that much.

He followed her with a fragment of his consciousness, down the hallway-formed precise in his mind, with its new blue carpet and its green-and-white ivy wallpaper-watched as she went mechanically about her tasks. She made food for herself in the pale-blue kitchen, but she didn’t eat it, left the sandwich forgotten on the counter beside three other sandwiches already curling and slimy in the summer heat. Filled another glass of water and left it to stand with the others beside the sink. He knew she couldn’t go on like this but didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t release her. He needed every ounce of strength. The windows that looked out onto the side yard, and those opening into the junk-cluttered rear porch, were black with night now.

His mind drifted out over the town.

Drinking.

As with his mother, he was aware a little bit of those others whose energies he drank. Aware of what they saw through glazed, enraptured eyes.

He tried not to see, tried not to think. Guilt stabbed him, worse than the awful guilt of running away from his mother, from Boone’s Gap, of leaving Bob there with that frightened, clinging woman who didn’t want either of them to leave the house. He tried to tell himself that what he was taking would only be for a little while, and it wouldn’t really hurt them. They were children, and children could take a lot.

He saw Dr. Blair taking Deana Bartolo’s temperature, shaking his head while the girl’s mother and older brothers looked on and whispered helplessly, their faces old and haggard in the gold flicker of candlelight.

He saw stumpy white-haired Marcia duPone trying to comfort Karen Souza, who could not stop weeping when she looked at her child.

He saw Shannon Grant-God, he remembered her when she was nine years old and mowing his mother’s lawn! — in quiet-voiced conference with the Hanson girls, glancing every now and then at where Tessa sat like a silent doll. He was aware of the power glowing within Wilma Hanson and wanted desperately to touch it, to drink it, to help himself with it, but he could not pierce her toughness. He could only feed on the children, and on the whispering, ambient strength of air and earth and trees.

What is it? pleaded Bob softly. I can feel it, I can feel it all around. What’s happened?

It’s nothing, said Fred, and though he hadn’t even a body anymore, he felt the familiar sickened clenching of his stomach. And then, It’s everything.

His brother’s grip closed tighter around him; he felt Bob tremble with the knowledge.

It’s everywhere, Fred said, suddenly grateful to be able to speak of it, to share both the wonder of it and the horror. I can draw it out of the earth, out of the coal; out of the blood that was spilled in olden times in the woods. Out of the trees themselves, and the animals-out of the shapes of the rocks and the stories the Indians made up about them.

He thought, but he did not say aloud to Bob, I can draw it out of the hearts of children, where it glows like little embers.

Maybe Bob knew that already. Or would come to know it and would hate him for it as he already hated himself.

I can draw it out of our mother’s love and the fear that has dominated her life.

He heard the grunters, coming across the lawn.

GO AWAY! he screamed and tried to call the flames that sometimes burst from the ground when he called upon his powers.

They were coming, ravenous hunger in their white, glowing eyes. Their big knobbed hands gripped tools from the mines, from workshops all over town, from the trunks of looted cars. Their serrated mouths hung open, and they panted with hot little barks, like starving dogs. They’d dreamed about hunger, he thought. Dreamed about everything they’d always been denied.

GO AWAY!

On the porch his mother’s romances stirred, fluttered their pages. The heavy couches shifted like restless beasts. Weary, aching, Fred felt the inexorable drag of the Source upon him grow stronger, but he knew what was happening and why. They were coming to kill Bob, coming to cut the cord that held him to this place so that he would have nothing to hold him to life. Nothing to be, or do, or want.

Only the Source.

MOTHER!!!

Arleta was in the kitchen when the grunters smashed the windows of the porch. She fell back against the wall, hands pressed over her eyes, as the house shook with the force of the blows against the door. Frantic, Fred caught up whatever could be used as a weapon and threw them at the attackers: the couches smashing through the windows like enraged bulls, the garden hoses wrapping around their legs and twisting, serpentlike, around their necks, squeezing tighter and tighter. The honeysuckle vines crawling and gripping, tripping and dragging down. Pouring, thrusting, flowing down nostrils and throats to suffocate, strangle, pinch off the circulation of the blood. The invaders writhed, screamed, tore at the tangling attackers while the broken glass of the windows rose in furious clouds, slashing and tearing, blood splattering on the grass.

Get out of here! Get out of here! Get out! screamed Fred, exploding phosphor and fire in the air all around the house, blinding the shrieking things held prisoner around the walls. Don’t ever come back! Cans from the cupboard, broken jars from the porch, the toaster and the mixer and the waffle iron swept through the windows in a hammering whirlwind, cutting, gouging, tearing. And on the other side of town Tessa Grant screamed, clawed with blunt tiny fingernails at her own face and arms. Terrible and wonderful, Fred drank and tasted the deaths of the grunters around the walls, sucked the lives and the souls from their ruptured arteries, and the flame in him roared brighter.

GET OUT! GET OUT! GET OUT!

They fled, such as had survived, stumbling over the broken sidewalk that heaved and snapped at their legs, and he drummed them with fragments of the house, the furniture, the keepsakes he had known all his life, ripping at them as they fled.

“Get out! Get out!” Deana Bartolo moaned, twisting frantically in her brother Al’s arms, and Al and his mother stared at one another in terror at the deep hoarse voice that came from the little girl’s lips.

On her front porch in the darkness, Wilma Hanson watched the blue flickering skeletal things run down Applby Avenue, eyes glowing like demon lights. She thought they were the Indian women she’d seen in the woods, old memories of a massacre two centuries ago; the smell of their blood was very strong even from where she sat. The cats smelled it, too, bristling and crowding closer around her chair-and no wonder, she thought-but Carl Souza, hurrying along the sidewalk with a lantern and a makeshift pike, evidently didn’t see them. He stopped in his tracks and set the lantern down, turning this way and that, looking for whatever it was he sensed or smelled or heard, but the things fleeted by him and he didn’t turn his head.

The night was a humming whisper of needles, even after the three surviving grunters fled from the Wishart back porch, scuttered across the lawn and away into the dark.

The cats hissed softly, then turned and darted back into the shelter of the house.

Wilma stood, looked from the white ghostly bulk of the Wishart house to the dark doorway of her own, where the glowing eyes of her friends clustered like a carpet of fireflies. “I’m afraid you all have a point,” she said regretfully. “But Arleta is my friend, and I have to try.”

She went down the steps and across the lawn toward the white house, cautious and listening to the night. There was neither sound nor smell of grunters, but something like greenish foxfire oozed up out of the ground and flowed ahead of her toward the Wishart house, a thin slip like a spectral earthworm; then another, and another. The night had teeth. She felt its breath on her halfway across her own lawn and stopped, knowing whatever was in the Wishart house would let her come no farther.

“Arleta!” she called out, to the gaping black rectangle of the broken porch door. She had little hope, after all this time, that Arleta and Bob still lived, but who knew? Who could know? “Arleta, are you in there? Are you all right?”

She smelled blood inside the house, and death, and a kind of slow steamy rot that probably came from the refrigerator. Her night-sighted eyes could just make out the shape of Arleta where she’d fallen, halfway through the door between the kitchen and the porch. There was a savage gouge on her temple where something had struck her. The heavy breadbox, blood and hair gummed to its corner, lay smashed near the steps. It was clear even from that distance that Arleta was dead.

And Bob? she thought. Was his dead body in there somewhere, still hooked to the machines on which he’d depended during the last few months of semi-life?

Wilma listened-for breathing, for movement, for the barest scratch or twitch of a moving limb, a groping hand. The porch door was a black mouth, the windows above it dead horrified eyes: the whole house was a frozen scream. She had a sense, for a moment, of something inside, crucified but still living, frantic and in pain.

And she felt it change, drawing strength from its own pain. Felt it remember just how strong it could make itself from the life that filled the world all around it.

But that strength changed what it was.

The darkness around her seemed to shift and settle into being something else. Then silence for a long time and the blue wicker of flame in the downstairs bedroom window.

In time, and listening now behind her with all her nerves, ready to bolt at the top of her speed, Wilma walked back to the house. “Hank,” she called, as she mounted the porch steps, padded down the hallway in darkness. “I think you’d better get out here and have a look at this. Tell me what it looks like to you. Hank?”

She pushed open the door of his room.

He was gone.

NEW YORK

Moving with slow deliberation through Tina’s room, Goldie ran his hands over her things, eyes locking on the myriad playbills of The Firebird, Le Sacre du Printemps, Giselle and the rest, the videos of Martha Graham in Appalachian Spring and Patricia McBride in Sleeping Beauty, the signed pointe shoes Tina had so joyously scored backstage from Wendy Whelan after Swan Lake, all the Danskin and Capezio leotards, the Grishko and Sansha slippers, the faux Degas bookends.

He lingered longest, it seemed to Cal, over the big vanity mirror, as he had over the one out in the living room, the glass into which Tina had poured herself, scrutinizing every nuance of movement and position, every ecstatic and agonized pirouette, plie and grand jete. That, and the Nijinsky diary.

Cal found the greater Goldie’s focus, the more he himself fidgeted, wanted to scream. It had taken forever to extricate Goldie from his undercity realm, and Goldie had insisted on hauling along a huge duffel of odd items (“Never know what might come in handy”), then had set about rigging certain “security devices” before entering the building. Cal had protested-Stern had his sister; God only knew what he was doing with her. But Goldie had gone off like a Roman candle, had almost vanished into the open maw of a plundered restaurant’s basement storeroom before Cal had overtaken him, cajoled him to return. All right, Cal had agreed fervently, Goldie could set up any damn thing he desired, but please do it quickly.

And, to be fair, he had.

Goldie reached the shattered window now, glided fingertips along the base. “Bad vibes. Your sister an Aquarius?”

“No.”

Colleen, standing with Doc on the far side of the room, rolled her eyes. Cal tensed even more. When he had emerged with Goldie from the steam vent on Fifty-sixth into the fading twilight, he’d been gone a full three hours-but she and Doc had still been there, somehow sure he would return, as he too had felt certain they’d be waiting. Cal needed their faith not to have been misplaced.

Goldie lifted his gaze from the jagged glass, peered contemplatively out, the cool night breeze wafting his tangle of hair. Then his eyes slid off, looking off at nothing, or perhaps something inward, distant and intense. It was identical, Cal thought, to Goldie’s expression long days ago, when he had stood still and certain amid the morning chaos of Fifth Avenue, before any of this waking nightmare had transpired, when he had intoned, “Metal wings will fail, leather ones prevail.”

“That guy you’re looking for.” Goldie was speaking to Cal now, without turning. “Big scaly dude, right? Eight, maybe nine feet tall, not counting the wings?”

Cal felt a flush of blood, urgency seized him. “Can you see him?”

“Uh-huh.” Goldie’s voice was maddeningly nonchalant. “You wanna see him, too?” He nodded toward the street below.

Cal, Colleen and Doc crowded around the window. The mob was still a few blocks off, hundreds of men and women, moving wild and slow. In the darkness, they seemed almost like a single, savage creature, but Cal knew this was a trick of the light.

Stern was another matter.

The beast stood at the heart of the crowd, towering over the rest, advancing in great, easy strides, a grotesque, ruined angel in the light of their torches. Cal felt a stab of chill certainty that Stern was their leader, had set the madness in motion.

Doc and Colleen stared, awestruck. As much as he had tried to describe Stern, Cal knew he had not come close.

“Sweet mother of God,” Doc breathed.

“He’s a mother, all right.” Colleen’s voice was flint.

Cal said nothing.

He simply turned, his eyes falling on the glinting, killing metal of the sword.

The noise swirled about him, and it was dreadful.

Sam’s actions were his own once more, but it gave him little comfort. Instead, he felt adrift, abandoned to the chaos. In their frenzy, Stern’s followers-they had thought themselves his followers so very recently, although Sam had not been allowed the luxury of that illusion-were spreading out like acid, wrecking everything they chose not to claim as their own.

They jostled him, shoved him nearly off his feet unnoticed as they bled past abandoned cars and the tanker that still lay slantwise across the road. They were dismantling his tiny world, and Ely had commanded it!

What would Mother have said, had she been there to witness this mayhem? That Sam had reaped the whirlwind, that he had invited it in. And she would be right, of course, as she had always been right, making him feel ashamed and small and wrong.

It was the old, familiar sensation, magnified a thousand-fold, of cataclysm coming on, chaotic and malevolent, himself at ground zero, with nothing he could do to stop it. Mother had said there would be an accounting, had proclaimed it year after year. But she had never stated-hadn’t needed to, he now realized-how, in that accounting, Sam himself would be judged.

At least, Ely had ordered his house spared. On a whim, it seemed, but Sam told himself he should feel grateful. Although who knew how long that whim might prevail.

A group seized on a lamp post, dragged it down with their brute weight, uprooting it. Sweating, grunting, they hefted it, rammed it against a heavily armored door, sent the barrier flying off its hinges. All the doors slammed in their faces all of their lives seemed to drive them, the unreasoning rejections and exclusions. Sam loathed them… and understood.

A roar went up as they poured into the fortress. Muffled screams sounded from within. From other dwellings, faces peered out from around curtains, silent and pale.

From the mouth of the block, Stern looked on in approval. Sam, wretched and heartsick, stepped gingerly over the glass and debris. He stumbled over a piece of rubble, and the sound drew Ely’s attention. Stern’s barracuda teeth glittered contemptuously; clearly, he had read Sam’s mood. “Get used to it,” he purred.

A tubby, olive-skinned man tore out of a building near them, a VCR in his arms. Stern swatted it away. “Leave it. It’s useless!”

Ahead, the horde had flooded the street. Sam found his view blocked by a wall of humanity. Suddenly, slicing through the clamor, a voice rang out, powerful and calm. “I used to work for a monster. . Now you’re working for him!”

Surprisingly, the mob quieted, slowed its advance. Sam’s gaze flashed to Stern. Outrage burned on that demonic face, but in the moment before Stern’s fury seared it away, Sam spied what he prayed to see there: uncertainty.

Stern blasted through the mob. Sam slipped and wriggled after him, desperate to see what would happen.

Stepping free of the crowd, Sam could see Cal Griffin standing before Stern on the steps of his building, his hand resting on a sword at his hip. The pose should have been laughable, but it wasn’t. Griffin seemed taller somehow, straighter.

Stern regarded Cal blandly, rocking on the balls of his feet. “Good golly, Miss Molly. I could’ve sworn I killed you.”

“Where’s my sister, you bastard?”

“Language, there are children present.” Stern turned to his disciples. “Trash him.”

Eyes blinked. A switch, rousing the mob from its torpor. With a cry, they surged forward, brandishing lengths of metal and wood, improvised weapons, comical and horrific. Sam scuttled for cover behind a trash can.

Cal dragged out the sword as Goldie joined him. “Now!” Cal cried.

Goldie made a broad gesture. “BEGONE!” Light dazzled from his hands. Stern’s army fell back, many dropping into a crouch, shielding their eyes.

Then Goldie’s display sputtered and went out. He turned to Cal, apologetic. “Gutter ball.”

From behind a low wall, Doc shot up and hurled a Molotov cocktail at an open space in the mob. It exploded in flames, then dissipated like the fire in the tunnel. But it was enough to scatter them.

Screams echoed from across the street. Cal turned. A waiflike redhead was being dragged from her apartment house by several burly men. They seemed to be gloating in their power, feeding on her fear.

Cal’s hand tightened on the sword’s hilt. So much had been taken from them, from them all, the innocents and the fragile. I will not let this happen.

And then he was moving, screaming a war cry, a bluff but knowing it wasn’t a bluff if they refused to let her go.

He plunged into the group, flailing, all the techniques he’d learned momentarily blanked from his mind, his only ally a blind and absolute determination. The men fell back, one fleeing. But two kept their grip on the girl, and a third made a murderous swing with a length of pipe.

Cal ducked. The pipe sliced the air a quarter inch above his head. Cal shot up, blade held high, then smashed it down. It struck the pipe with which the man now shielded himself, threw off a hail of sparks and sent it flying. Cal was swinging wildly, using his weapon like a club, uncontrolled, unfocused, and then he realized-

I’m trying to kill these men. I’m afraid and out of control and only want them to die.

The realization pierced him like a bullet, both the viciousness of his thoughts and the white terror of impotence behind them.

Abruptly, his uplifted blade swung down into fencing position. And, with this quick movement, killing shifted from necessity into the option of last resort.

Cal lunged-a feint, designed to fall short-swordtip sailing toward one of the captors’ breasts. The man flinched back, released his hold just as Cal parried the retrieved piece of pipe, slashed back down to graze the pipe wielder’s arm and, without pause, arc back to the girl’s second captor.

They loosed their prey, began backing away. The girl gasped, fled stumblingly into her building.

Cal turned again to the mob, and the next moment carved itself in nightmare. Confronting him was a vast sea of angry faces. Stern’s dark army. They would do Stern’s work, and leave Stern free to do as he pleased.

Cal’s brief skirmish, terrible and terrifying, hadn’t even marked the beginning.

Slowly, the mass began to close.

“Cal!” Doc sailed a trash can lid at him. He caught it one-handed, positioned it as a shield, stepped backward. Cal sensed the mob gaining courage with even this tiny retreat.

Something inside, deeper than thought, again cried out: I will not let this happen. He said, “The first one who moves. . this goes right through.”

He felt no longer himself but rather an electric wire of sheer will in this tiny, firestorm universe. Something in his eyes, his movement, telegraphed that single raw, unwavering message-NO-and he felt Stern’s army begin to falter, lose their nerve. It’s not what I’m doing, Cal thought. It’s what I’m being.

With a mind-jarring shout, he leapt into their midst, managed to knock a few aside and plow through them to a wall, a guardian for his back.

His sword shot up before he was aware of having seen the two-by-four sweeping down. He blocked it, kept fighting, gradually inching back, losing ground. There were so many. Five driven off, ten more behind. Slowly, very slowly, he backed along the wall as the pack closed in.

“Let him be!”

The voice rumbled through the mob. Stern’s army broke off. Turning, they drew apart like black clouds, leaving an open corridor between Cal and Stern.

“He’s mine.”

Stern flashed his murderous smile. Cal’s gaze locked on Stern; he resumed edging backward along the face of the wall, nearer to his own building. Slowly, Stern closed in, taking his time.

“Goldie!”

Stern followed Cal’s gaze, swiveled his head to regard the lanky figure. Goldie stood by the brownstone, clutching an electrical cord that ran up through an open window into the building. He gave it a sharp tug.

There was a sound of release overhead. A big, weighted net flew through the air, fired via some kind of improvised catapult from atop the building, sailed toward Stern.

Cal stood frozen. The whole street went still and watchful.

Stern canted his face upward. Taking a vast, deep breath, he hesitated, then exhaled a dazzling great gout of flame.

It blazed green like some hellish firework and twisted toward the sky, struck the webbing and seared it to nothing. The weights rained down about Stern, clattering harmlessly.

Goldie, still with the cord in his hands, said numbly, “I think we’ve got a problem.”

This shouldn’t be happening, Cal thought in the stunned silence. Not with what Goldie had shown him at the campfire, the explosion dissipating, the flame guttering out.

But then this was a new kind of fire, fed by where that fire had gone, and by the white-hot rage of this demon he had once served. A fire, like Stern himself, capable of anything.

Stern grinned at Cal. “Surprise.” He reached out to him with razor claws.

Suddenly, an arrow flashed through the air. Stern gasped as it struck him in the arm.

Colleen stood beside the Volkswagen that had been shielding her, the crossbow in her hands, already reloading. She fired another shot.

This caught Stern in the shoulder, spun him. Cal seized the moment to dart past, get clear.

Stern wheeled on Colleen, glaring. “You woman. .” He swept the arrows off his body, took a deep inhalation, the inferno rising in him.

Fluid crashed into him, drenching him. The scent of gasoline hung pungent in the night. Stern bellowed, twisted around to see Cal standing by the derelict tanker, still aiming its hose at him.

Cal’s voice was low and deadly. “Try your fire trick now.” He pulled a lighter from his pocket, flicked it. Stern cringed.

“Where’s my sister?”

With a howl of rage, Stern grabbed a bus bench, ripped it free of the concrete and hurled it at Cal. Cal dove aside as it smashed to the pavement. Stern took off running back the way he came, scattering the crowd in his blind charge.

Cal was on his feet now, running, waving toward Colleen, Doc and Goldie. “Don’t lose him!”

In the dim, creepy house, Tina stirred fitfully. There were sounds outside, but they seemed distant in the heat haze of her fever. She had been getting better, but somehow being near Stern had made the sickness flare with new ferocity. It churned in her like a living thing, worked its will. In her delirium, she saw blurry, indistinct figures, enticing her. Sometimes, she fancied they were Petrushka and Odette and the Firebird calling her to the dance, but then they would shift into other forms, some human, some not, and the place they beckoned from was a dark haven she had never known.

The front door burst open, rousing her. She opened her eyes to see Stern, gleaming with wetness that steamed off his hot skin. He tore down the gauzy curtains, wiped furiously at himself. “Damn, that stings!”

Footsteps sounded from outside. Through the open door, Tina saw Cal running toward the house, followed by the woman and man who had been in her room and also another man. She cried out to them, but Stern grabbed her up in his rough arms.

He brought his ghastly face down to her. “I’m sick of this dump. How about you?”

She fought to form words of protest but found she could only moan. Stern strode toward the window.

Sam banged the back door and burst into the room, wheezing hard. The import of the scene burned instantly into his mind. Ely was leaving, and he was taking the dancer girl with him-to whatever dark destiny he chose next.

Amazement washed over Sam, he couldn’t believe it. The genie, the dread genie would be gone, and miraculously Sam would be spared, left alone. The dancer girl, it would be her turn to reap the whirlwind, wherever it chose to spin her, even tear her apart in its brute savagery.

But she hadn’t invited it in. Sam had.

Ely was almost to the window, his broad wings stretching out. He would have to smash out the glass, perhaps even the frame, to fit through, but that would be nothing to him. No amount of destruction ever was. Sam hung back in the shadows, breathless and watching. The little girl hung limp in Stern’s arms, and she looked so small, so fragile, not like a real person at all.

Her eyes opened, all depth-of-ocean blueness, and found Sam in the shadows. For just that moment, Sam felt swallowed in her gaze, recognized the desperation and despair there, the helplessness and humanity. Then her eyes slipped shut, and the connection was broken.

Hang back, the voice in Sam cautioned. Do nothing, and they’ll be gone.

But his legs were already working, rapid, little steps that quickly overtook Stern. Sam stepped in his path, blocked his way.

“I can’t let you, Ely,” he said simply.

Stern advised, “Move aside, Mr. Mole.”

Sam felt dizzy, sick with terror. His hand sought out an end table for support, and his fingers brushed the Loetz silver-overlay vase that had been Mother’s favorite, a precious thing in a houseful of precious things that populated his life, that had never been his. Sam’s glance held on Stern’s face, so magnificent and appalling.

“I can’t,” Sam said.

The girl’s eyes half-fluttered open, and Sam thought he saw comprehension there, that she knew what was happening. Stern drew in a deep, warning breath.

Sam’s fingers closed about the Loetz vase, and he brought it up in a swinging arc. The light in the dim room caught it, and it gleamed blue and black and green iridescence, like Ely himself.

Just before the flash, the sound like a furnace flaring to life, Sam saw the glass shatter against Stern’s face, had time to think, That will leave a mark.

The dolls, in all their delicacy and indifference, watched Sam burn.

Chapter Twenty-Three

NEW YORK

Down the street. She had been there all this time, only three houses down, and he hadn’t known, hadn’t suspected.

From his living room window, Cal could still see the embers of what had been Sam Lungo’s house, pulsing darkly in the night, wisps of smoke curling weakly, the stench of charred wood and flesh heavy in the air. In the firestorm that had en-folded it, the roof had crumpled, timbers falling in on themselves, throwing up a firefly swarm of sparks and ash. Mercifully, a breath of summer rain had come and quenched it, and the blaze hadn’t spread.

The street outside was empty now, but it bore witness to the maelstrom that had passed through, windows broken, chunks of pavement gouged out, nameless fragments scattered wholesale as if some giant, willful child had played his roughhouse game, smashed his toys and moved on.

It was a new world indeed, one where men-or what had been men-could see in the dark, shoot light from their hands, fly. New gifts of power but, clearly, none of insight. Cal felt he’d been given no gifts at all, only a dream in which he’d seen the ridiculous sword that hung at his side, but what use had it been? He was a man, nothing more, and that had proved achingly inadequate.

Standing nearby, Doc caught Cal’s expression. “If you’d like to crucify yourself, I could get some nails.” But there was sympathy in his eyes, a forgiveness Cal could not grant himself.

“ ’Scuse me.” Goldie slid between the two of them, stepped lightly to the window. He cracked it open, lifted a potted plant from the sill and upended it without looking, dumping dirt and greenery onto the thankfully vacant street below.

The earthenware pot now empty, Goldie cradled it in one arm, gliding along the periphery of the room, his free hand outstretched, hovering above each object like a psychic metal detector.

“Deja vu all over again,” Colleen sighed, to no one in particular.

“Symbolism is very important when it comes to visions,” Goldie said, not stopping, not looking at her. “You burn something as a token of what you want to see. In this case, we want to view something that, yesterday, sanity would have told us was. . ah.”

He snatched a copy of TV Guide off the television, said to Cal, “You won’t be needing this.” He dropped it in the pot. “And, um, if I could trouble you for a light. . ”

Cal fished in his pocket, tossed Goldie the lighter. Goldie plopped cross-legged down in the middle of the room as the others looked on. He set the pot in his lap, then shot his cuffs. “Nothing up my sleeve.”

He flicked the lighter. A thin blue flame shot up, which he angled to the edge of the TV Guide. The pages started to smolder, blacken, curl like moth wings aborning.

Goldie bent his head and began to mouth words under his breath quickly, blurred in a droning mantra. He repeated the incantation, gaining in speed and intensity. He rocked from the waist, davening like a Hassidic rabbi, eyes screwed shut, mouth working. Cal strained to make out the words, caught several syllables, a snatch of phrase. Something about not believing what you hear, only what you see. .

Goldie was intoning the lyrics to “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.”

Colleen hissed, “This is such bullshi-”

“Shh,” Cal cut her off. For the smoke rising from the burning digest was becoming something more, resolving into a vague, rectangular shape, a flickering cascade of light playing over it just like. .

Snow, on a television screen.

The shape hovered above the pot, smoke framing it, the lilt of Goldie’s words a soft, toneless music. In the darkened room, the light from it illumined their faces, stilled in wonder, even Colleen’s.

The screen-for such it was-began to clarify into an evanescent image, shimmering as though seen through a rain-slicked window. Quickly, it gained substance, took on weight and solidity. The object was beautiful and ornate in its war of Nouveau and Deco. The gilded, dark gleaming stone stood cold against a malevolent night sky.

Of course it was where Stern would go. Cal felt the chill rise through his veins.

Goldie let out a soft groan. The image folded in on itself and winked out. The fire died, the magazine consumed.

Goldie opened his eyes. His face shone with sweat, and he was trembling. He looked up at Cal with regret. “Sorry, man, couldn’t hold it.”

“It’s all right,” Cal murmured.

The Stark Building-Stern’s office, and his-stood waiting.

Cal and his cohorts advanced toward the building cautiously, alert for any assault, but it proved needless. The street was deserted, shut up tight, no light in any window. Fitful gusts spun bits of paper about their feet and ankles. A pale, un-caring moon lit their approach.

Drawing close, Cal peered at the brooding structure, towering over its neighbors, its stylized lightning bolts and stars of steel and gold whirling about doorframes and ledges. In his mind’s eye, he had a vision of how this building, this street, would look in a hundred years, a thousand, vines choking its stones, birds shrieking from empty windows, as lost to memory as Angkor Wat or Machu Picchu had been.

This place had served its purpose, and now it was done, abandoned by those who had used it, left only to monsters.

The Stark Building’s massive doors had been locked, but that proved no impediment. Colleen, as part of the maintenance crew, had a key.

The lobby, however, proved a surprise. When Cal had last seen it, it had been a vast, open space, airy and clean. Now it was a wreck, dust hanging thick, a charcoal stench in the air that caught at the back of his throat. Both the staircases and elevator shafts were trashed and scorched, ragged chunks of concrete piled high in them, tumbled like a storm of meteors, blocking all passage.

Stern wanted no visitors.

So now they stood outside again, staring at its black immensity, hard against the night sky.

“I don’t suppose you have any spells to conjure up a helicopter,” Doc said to Goldie.

Colleen set down her heavy shoulder bag and unzipped it. She withdrew coils of rope, nylon harnesses, bags of chalk dust, tapered aluminum wedges.

“I’ll let you know what I find up top,” she told Cal, securing her crossbow across her back. She took a step toward the sheer face, but he reached for her shoulder.

“Nobody goes unless I go,” he said.

She scrutinized him with a baleful eye. “You ever climbed anything but a corporate ladder?”

Cal shook his head. Colleen pointed out that it was suicide for him to attempt a climb like this and, when Cal refused to be swayed, brought out every colorful epithet she could remember from a childhood of Air Force bases and low-rent dives.

Through it all, Cal was gently, maddeningly deaf to protest.

In the end, she handed him a harness.

Doc stepped up. “You know, I fancy a little exertion myself.”

“Sorry, Ivan,” Colleen replied, “just got the gear for Rory and me. Two’s the limit.”

“My first name is not Ivan,” Doc noted.

“Someday, remind me to ask you what it is.” She turned to Cal and smiled grimly. “Ready to climb, farmboy?”

“This city’s finished.”

From where he crouched high on the roof’s edge, Stern could see pallid lights flickering here and there on the black, unknowable surface of the city, like maggots on a corpse. It was a dying thing, he had known that for years, had only forgotten it momentarily in the heady exhilaration of his new birth.

A gentle moan issued behind him, a sweet sound. He turned to see the girl stirring. She lay a few yards off, so delicate and untainted, nothing like the bitch predators that had circled him, smelling power and money.

A few long strides, and he was bending over her. She looked up at him with distant, appraising eyes. If she was afraid, she wasn’t showing it. He liked that.

Her skin was pale as lace now, with only the finest mottling, a hint of robin’s egg blue along her cheeks and brow, a porcelain tint that reminded him of a cup and saucer he had seen as a boy and coveted. Sweat fever damped her face, but it only highlighted her cheekbones and eyes.

“Excuse the rough handling. Feeling better?”

“Where. .?” She pressed herself partially up, drawing to the roof’s edge to peer at a bottomless drop. Wind caught her fine, blanched hair, whipped it with insolent abandon.

“Where you can rest. . and let it all go.”

She cried out then as blue energy sparked out of her pores, splayed across her body in a mad dance. Her back arched at the white agony of it, and he felt a swell of sympathy, knowing firsthand her pain. With an angry snap as of an electric arc, it sucked back into her body and abated.

“What’s happening to me?” Her words were gasping exhalations. “You know. . ”

“Don’t be afraid. It’s just a transition.”

“To what?”

“I don’t really have to tell you that, do I?” The girl said nothing. Stern made his earth-rumble voice as soothing as he could. “Give in to it.”

“That’s what you want.” Resistance flared in her eyes. “That’s what is.”

His words struck home, he could see it. The fire in her eyes, like the color leeching out of her skin and hair, faded to nothing, replaced by an unreadable blankness that might have been despair. “To be. . like you.”

Like him, yes, the one he had been waiting for so very long, his own self mirrored back. But gentled, with none of the scalding rage that had ravaged every waking hour of his life. She would calm him, be a balm to his soul. And thinking this, it was as if a door in him were opening, and through it he could see the black emptiness that had been his life, the terrible loneliness he had ferociously denied. Emotion surged in him; he wanted desperately to slam that door.

He feared how much he needed her.

A shudder wracked her, and she fought hard to bite back a whimper. He drew up close, knifeblade hands hovering over her, a benediction.

“Soon you’ll be past the pain. . where no one can touch you.”

Rory’s leather climbing shoes with their sticky black rubber soles were a tight fit, but Cal managed to squeeze into them. Colleen eased into her harness, the black nylon looping around her waist and thighs, then she secured Cal’s. She taped both their hands and chalked them.

As Doc and Goldie looked on, Cal craned his neck to stare at the mocking immensity of the building, water dribbling off the wild projections that made up its disturbing asymmetry.

Colleen studied him, her skillful hands loading the loops on her belt with slings, stoppers, the other vital paraphernalia. She thought of Cal back on his block, facing down that mob, driving them back with that absurd sword of his, so crazily determined that he had pulled off something that never in a million years should have worked.

Surveying this building, he had that same look.

She thought of her dad in his combat fatigues long ago, teaching her aikido and tae kwon do, telling her that practice and coordination and knowledge only got you so far. In the end, the one with the edge was the guy with the hunger, the one who needed something so badly that nothing, absolutely nothing, would make him stop.

Her dad, in his best moments, had been unstoppable. Rory had never been.

You that guy, Griffin? she wondered, and felt an old hope flare in her, which she labored to smother.

She turned to glare at the structure. Eighty-two stories straight up, with a cherry on top that breathed fire. She sighed. “Hell, if George Willig can do it. .”

“George-?”

“Climbed the World Trade Center in the seventies. But then, he was fucking crazy.”

Cal peered again at the summit, forever away. Or maybe he just needed what was on top to go on living.

“Show me what to do,” Cal said.

Colleen went first, climbing quickly and elegantly, finding purchase for her hands and feet in tiny crevices, irregularities in the slippery, pitted stone surfaces. Cal stood on the ground, paying out the rope tied to her harness. This cord wasn’t for climbing but rather for safety; every twenty feet or so, Colleen rammed spring-loaded devices-little aluminum plugs with plungers like hypodermics-into whatever crack or indentation would hold them, feeding her rope through metal cables in the cams, creating a network of braces to assure she would fall so far and no farther. A belaying device affixed to Cal’s harness would provide the friction to slow the rope in case of a drop and allow the cams to do their work. As her belaying partner, Cal had the easy part of the job-keep a grip on the rope.

After a hundred feet or so, Colleen found an outcrop, a pigeon-fouled, scowling patriarch. She clambered atop it, anchoring herself with four or five cams at different angles. Then she fed her rope through a twin belaying device, and it was Cal’s turn. He started up, tied to her rope, trying his best to replicate the hand and footholds he’d seen her use. The rain-slick surface was treacherous, and he slipped repeatedly, flailing wildly, somehow managing to find a hold and not fall.

It was a battle of inches. The sword banged against his thigh, throwing him off balance, and the banshee wind cascaded up from the corridor of buildings, snatching away his body heat. Before long, his fingers and biceps and throbbing head were shrieking protest.

“Let your legs do the work, not your arms!” Colleen shouted from above, voice nearly lost on the wind. “And try to rest your weight on your skeleton, not your muscles!”

Easy for her to say. But after a time he got the rhythm of the thing and it grew, if not easier, at least manageable. He surrendered his mind to the flow of muscle and bone, levered himself ever higher. He spied his hands, blisters coming on, bloody and raw as they slid up the rough, cold stone. He remembered how Tina’s feet had been like that when she had first gone on pointe.

He reached the outcrop, pulled himself up trembling. Colleen’s eyes gleamed in the moonlight, appraising him. “How you doing?”

“I’m doing it.”

“Are all your family this bonehead stubborn?” she called over the wail of the wind. Beneath her words he heard grudging admiration.

“My mother was. . and my sister.”

Colleen nodded.

They would rest here a moment, then continue. Another fifty feet and another and so on.

Stern could fly. . but they could climb.

The waves were coming faster now and with greater insistence, labor pains of a thing giving birth to itself. The girl lay panting at the edge of the rooftop, her breaths shallow and rapid. Cool light oozed out of her mouth and ears, trickled from the corners of her closed eyes, dripped off her fingertips like blue quicksilver.

Stern had backed some yards off, wary of impeding its progress, and squatted, watching her.

“There’s this philosopher, Hoffer,” he mused, not knowing if she could hear him. “He said, ‘What monstrosities would walk the streets were men’s faces as unfinished as their minds.’ Me, I thought, no-beautiful. Nothing more to hide. .” He caught the smell of ions wafting off her, and something like burning flowers. “I always knew I was different.”

She turned her head to him, opened her eyes against the pain, the liquid current washing over her.

“You knew, too, didn’t you? Well, what if-” Under her gaze, he felt timid, fragile. “What if the lonely days for both of us were gone?”

At the fourteenth floor, Cal discovered the stairwell no longer blocked. He and Colleen took the rest of the journey upward inside the belly of the building, and so were able to recover strength. A service shaft on the top floor led to the roof. Crouching within the low structure, Cal insisted on taking point. So he was the first onto the roof, cracking open the shaft cover, hauling himself across the raised lip and stealthily dropping down.

He was surprised at the jumble that greeted him: a ram-shackle penthouse of wood frame and glass that had seen better days; hulking, water-rotted packing crates; corroded fuel drums; big squares of tarpaper curling leprously across the deck.

His eyes scanned the dark contours, searching. A blue glimmering caught his eye. On the far side of the roof, maybe a hundred feet off, a pale nimbus, and in its midst the frail, prone form of his sister. Backlit by the gleam, turned from him, hunkered the brute shape of what could only be Stern.

Keeping low, Cal crept forward. He could sense Colleen close behind, unslinging her bow. Approaching, he discerned the croon of Stern’s voice on the wind. “Away from this sinkhole, soaring like two damn prehistoric hawks. . to the west.”

Tina rose up on her elbows, the sickly blue radiance like mold glow on her. Her eyes were on Stern, she had not yet seen Cal. “There’s a wave.”

Stern straightened with excitement. “Yeah, yeah, that’s right. You saw it, too.”

“To the west and,” Tina’s voice came haltingly, Cal had to strain to hear it, “and the south, like an artery pulsing off it.”

“We’re tuned to the same station, sweetpea. The whatever that caused all this, it’s calling us.” Stern stood and stretched hugely, gazed out over the changed, dark city, the East River beyond. “Soon we’re gonna own the world.”

Another wave crashed upon Tina, and she crumpled with a strangled cry. The St. Elmo’s fire flickered down to a mute guttering that licked at her skin. Her strange aqua eyes found Stern again, held on him as she whispered, “I don’t want your world.”

With a surprising burst of strength, she bolted upright, made a stumbling dash along the edge away from him, toward the open drop between buildings.

Stern gasped in alarm, shot an arm toward her, but she was beyond his reach.

Unmindful of himself, Cal shouted, “Tina, don’t!” Hearing him, she stopped, wheeled around, nearly pitching off the side. But she righted herself, just barely, and sank to one knee.

Stern too had swiveled to face Cal. “If you’d shown this much initiative on the job, I’d never have fired you.” He took a single murderous stride toward Cal and drew in a deep, merciless breath.

The arrow caught Stern just above the collarbone, spun him so that the torrent of flame missed Cal by a good three feet. It raked across the tarpaper, igniting it.

Cal dove behind an exhaust outlet, saw that Colleen had managed to take cover behind a pile of crates. Stern rained a flamethrower stream of crackling green hellfire on her.

The crates burst alight in a glorious, mad consumation that no natural source could any longer have kindled, only Stern or some devil-kissed thing like him. Colleen scrabbled back quickly, gained shelter behind a concrete stanchion. Stern closed on her, the endless exhalation blasting the concrete white hot, fiery contrails ricocheting off it. Colleen struggled to reload her crossbow, lift it to aim, but the onslaught was too fierce; it drove her back against the roof’s edge.

Stern swept aside the melted stanchion, exposing Colleen, leaving her defenseless. Cal took a running leap off the exhaust outlet and landed atop Stern’s back. Stern screamed in fury. Twisting and bucking, he shot flame from his mouth like napalm, slashing across the roof. The penthouse caught like an oil-soaked rag, rusty drums detonated in volcanic plumes.

Then Stern’s firestream cut off at last. Stern cursed and spun, trying to reach behind him, fling Cal off. But Cal dug his fingers into the armored ridges of Stern’s shoulders, held on fiercely. The roof was an inferno now, sheets of angry flame dodging about them. Frantically, Cal sought out Colleen and Tina but couldn’t see them as he careened atop Stern.

“Get off me!” Stern shouted as they lurched toward the edge. He leaned sideways like a swooning man and plunged over the side. Cal clutched Stern’s neck, clinging to him. He heard a scream-Tina’s-but it was swallowed in the wind that pummeled him. His stomach rose nauseatingly as the building fell away.

The black street rushed at them. Cal felt a ripple of powerful muscle beneath him, Stern’s great wings unfurled with a snap like a bedsheet, and they were soaring, whirling and swooping, rocketing crazily above Fifth, the dark towers on either side grim cliff faces, dizzying blurs. Stern’s wings pounded as Cal clasped the leathery furrows of skin, tightened his legs about Stern’s massive waist. Harsh, staccato rasps were coming off Stern, beast sounds that might have been crazy, raging laughter.

Abruptly, Stern veered sideways, rammed into a building face, scraping along its edge. The impact flared pain flash-bulb bright behind Cal’s eyes, and he was flung loose, only saving himself by grasping a spur of bone projecting from Stern’s spine. He clambered back, again locked his legs, hunkered down close.

Stern howled, threw himself from side to side against the buildings as they whipped by. The blood was loud in Cal’s ears; he snatched breath as the wind tore past. And then Stern tilted up sharply, soared above the level of the buildings, wings hammering the air as he rose.

Stern slashed through the night sky, climbing fast, dozens, then hundreds of feet above the tallest spire. They were almost dead vertical. Cal grasped Stern as though trying to merge with him as the world fell away.

They pierced a cloud, and Cal felt the damp kiss of fog on his face. The steady rise and fall of Stern’s respiration throbbed beneath him like a huge bellows, and he found himself matching his breathing to Stern’s.

Almost lazily, Stern angled over, dipped below the cloud layer. He was gliding now, banking in a wide, descending spiral.

Then he folded his wings and dived.

The change was so abrupt, it caught Cal unawares. Blood rushed to his head, he fought to keep from blacking out. They were spinning, shrieking downward. Cal felt his body lighten, the pull of gravity ripped away under their savage velocity. In a rush, he saw clearly Stern’s intention to hurtle toward the pavement, then pull up at the last minute, certain the momentum would wrench Cal free, smash him into the asphalt like an offending bug.

Stern was screaming now, a primal howl that matched the wind and challenged it. Cal found himself screaming, too, but he couldn’t hear it over the din, only feel the raw outrage in his throat. Fighting down vertigo and panic, Cal made out a blazing rectangle rising swiftly to meet them, knew it for the roof of the Stark Building.

A sudden, desperate hope seized him. Stern was slowing his rate of spin now, gauging his target. Cal held his breath as the rooftop neared. He locked his legs about Stern more firmly, dared to loosen his arms. He sought out the scabbard at his hip, closed a hand about the wrapped leather binding of the hilt, eased out the sword as they thundered down.

The fiery summit was only yards away now, below and to the west of them. In an instant they would sweep past, and the moment would be lost.

Steeling himself, Cal gripped the sword in both hands, raised it high overhead and-with a cry that surged up from the core of him-rammed it between Stern’s wings.

Stern screeched in anguish and surprise as the blade pierced through hide and meat, splintered bone. Blood geysered up, drenching Cal in a sickening hot stench. Stern’s wings spasmed, flapping reflexively as he curled in on himself, tumbling.

It was the effect Cal had prayed for, as wind resistance slowed Stern’s plunge, at least marginally. He tore the sword free, launched himself clear into space, toward the roof. Stern plummeted like a downed bomber, was lost in the blackness between buildings.

Cal smashed into the lip of the rooftop, went flailing across the surface, blasting through a curtain of green flame and halting thankfully on a bare strip of concrete. Shakily, he rose to his feet, slapping away burning ash, sheathed his blade. A blast furnace roar assaulted him, the heat was appalling.

“Cal!” He spun to see Colleen, smudged but unharmed, thirty feet off near a wall of flame. He ran to her, caught the desperation on her face. She nodded toward the barrier.

Through the flames Cal spied his sister standing on the precipice, the unbroken line of demonfire advancing, backing her inexorably toward the drop.

There was no way to reach her.

Colleen hocked a shaft into her crossbow. Her voice was grief, a whisper. “If you want, I could. .”

“No!” Cal said. He cast about for some answer, some tool. But there was no water, nothing to quench or smother.

Through the leaping, killing flame, Cal locked eyes with his sister, saw terror there and a forgiveness that cut to his soul. She was moving her lips, speaking to him, but he couldn’t hear her over the wail of combustion. Sparks of blue energy spat from her pores, flared swimming across her skin.

And then the fire surged up to her, and she reeled back from it, off the edge into space. Cal screamed. A blue flash like lightning erupted from her, and she was lost from sight. Flame shot off the roof in a long tendril toward where she had been, as though drawn by a vacuum, whipped about in midair, coalesced into a tornado of fire. It wheeled and swelled, drawing fuel from the rooftop, inhaling ravenously.

Like a molten sea emptying out, the fire gushed to the edge, cascaded into the whirlwind until the roof was free of flame, a wasteland of char and smoke. The funnel was spinning faster now, an impossible blur throwing off blazing fingers. It grew brighter and more frenetic, contracting upon itself, squeezing down to a pitiless core, dazzling white. Then it exploded.

The blast knocked Cal off his feet, blinded him. Dazed, the afterimage strobing in his eyes, he groped, found a handhold, the stone still hot, searing him. He dragged himself upright.

He could see a little now. Colleen stood with an odd light shimmering over her, childlike with awe. He followed her gaze past the lip of the building to the space beyond.

There Tina, or what had been Tina, hovered in a nimbus of light, an opalescent play of midnight blue, yellowjacket, carnelian weaving over its surface. Her face seemed broader yet more fine-boned than before, her skin blue-veined marble, lips thin and bloodless. Her ears elongated to fine points that thrust outward through hair that, albino silk, wafted about as if underwater. Her clothes too drifted weightless, the sphere of light about them seemingly a shield from the world’s forces.

Cal thought of the boy he had glimpsed in the tunnels, who had fled at his sight.

Tina was regarding her hands abstractedly, the fingers El Greco long and nail-less, turning them this way and that. Then she glanced up, and her eyes met Cal’s. They were all blue save the vertical pupil, with no whites showing, and blazed such a savage cobalt they seemed lit by an alien fire. Her mouth twisted in a bleak grimace, and he saw to his dismay that her teeth were triangular razors, like a shark’s. What are you? he wondered. She seemed so inhuman.

But then she began to weep, and he knew he had not lost her, at least not fully. He stretched out his arms, coaxing her, and she came floating to him. His arms pierced the boundary of light and then his face, effervescence tingling on his skin. But Tina was solid, and his arms enfolded her as she cried.

Devil night. That’s what old Granny Marxuach had called it, making him tremble and quake back when he was a little pissant on the rancho. All the demons and witches and hell shades take to the sky, so you better dig yourself under the covers and keep tight your soul.

But Papa Sky hadn’t believed any of that crap for the better part of eighty years. Real life had been woolly enough.

His own brand of night had come on him back when he was straight and smooth-skinned and fine, his hair black and gleaming like oil. At first, it had been merely ripples in his vision like smears on glass, then a fog, and then darkness.

Still, it hadn’t been all bad. He hadn’t had to watch himself grow bent and lined and worn, a lank tree that had stood too many storms. And he had his axe, the 1922 Selmer alto sax that was part of his body, that he could make sing like Jesus himself humming. Blind as he was, he could still cut his own reeds, shaving down the Le Blanc bamboo with the straight razor he kept by his bed, in the one-room walkup he’d had since that glory night when he’d subbed for Johnny Hodges with Ellington at the Cotton Club.

How New York had changed since then. The elegance and grace and courtliness had sluiced away, leaving the young who had never known it desolate, abandoned, longing.

Of course, it had changed a good deal more in recent days, now wasn’t that the truth. He could smell it in the wind, feel it on the air. And the stories he’d been hearing, like hophead D.T.s out of Bellevue. Some crazy badness was running the streets, no two ways about it.

But for some reason, no one messed with him. He’d gone about his business, gigging on street corners for quarters and dimes, that butterscotch sound booming up sweet and mournful along the concrete canyons. And the take had been good. The coins jingled warm in his pocket, a tambourine accompaniment to the tapping of his fiberglass cane as he made his way home along the uneven stones of the familiar alleyway. He’d sensed the desperation in the listening ones, their fear. They needed to be soothed, and maybe that was the answer: they hungered for just one thing that wasn’t all screwed up, even if it came wafting off some old blind black Cubano.

And sometimes, when no one else was around, there’d be a soft shuffling of something in the corners, swaying to “Body and Soul,” to “Stardust,” saying nothing. He’d catch a musky stink at those times, and a shiver would run up his back. He’d be glad he couldn’t see whatever it was that was hearing him.

Now it was late night, the summer heat leeched away and the cold seeping into him as he eased along the path like a shadow, his case clutched tight, the axe silent and drowsing.

Ahead of him, a low moan sounded, a timber that swelled and tremored through him. A hot liquid iron smell assailed him, like a whole lake of blood, like a slaughterhouse.

He was seized with a panicky, frantic urge to turn, bolt headlong away, never mind what he might plow into, what stick-thin chalky bones might snap.

But then the moan faded down, was broken by something like a sob of pure anguish. This cat’s in a world of pain. Papa Sky’s heart rose in him. And he’s alone, in the dark.

Tentatively, he stepped forward. The tip of his cane found a shape along the ground, resilient and large. He could feel heat radiating off it, hear a raspy, resonant breathing.

Nervously, Papa Sky licked his lips, tongue running over the ridges of callus. “How we doin’ there?” His throat was dry, the words shaky.

The breathing stopped, and there was a long, hanging silence. Finally, a voice croaked through the pain, “I’ve had. . better days.”

Papa Sky laughed, and there was tenderness in it. He bent down, put a gentling hand on the figure’s back. Slick with blood, the leather felt hard as armor, bone projected at odd angles.

“Well, you just take it slow.” Papa let out a breath that would have been exquisite through the axe. “We gonna see what we can do for you.”