Magic Time

Chapter Twenty-Six

With the young man called Cal Griffin, with Colleen Brooks and Dr. Lysenko and Goldie and Tina, Shango returned to Angels Rest. As he expected he found the house looted, the old men and women who had sheltered there dead. They had been clubbed like cattle, presumably a fate Cadiz considered more merciful than being left to starve.

In the potting shed behind the shady, silent house, under the dispassionate moon, they found a broken-handled shovel Cadiz had left and began digging a mass grave. Through all of this, Shango said little of himself and nothing of the business that had brought him here.

“The guy’s military or security services, I know the vibe from my dad,” Colleen told Cal, as the others spelled them on the digging. “Maybe AWOL.”

“No,” said Cal. “He doesn’t strike me as a man to walk away.” He glanced over at the big man working the shovel, shirtless now, the lantern light showing the dark sheen of him in the night air. His eyes were mirror mazes that reflected back the viewer, that gave up nothing. But in his actions by the creek, in his watchfulness and in the quiet, deep tenor of his voice, Cal read compassion.

As they laid the bodies in the pit, Goldie murmured some words from the Bhagavad Gita, and Doc said a blessing. Then they filled in the hole, and Shango found them a campsite that was shielded and secure.

Huddled beside the fire, Cal told Shango of the events in New York, of the man who’d changed into a dragon, and of what he’d seen in the tunnels. He spoke of the miracles they had encountered, cruel and otherwise, along the road, and of the Plant Lady in the little town off the Patuxent. And he told him of the place they sought called Wish Heart.

To all of this, Shango listened attentively, and nodded, and observed, “Staying off the beaten path, sounds like you’ve had an easier ride of it.” But he didn’t tell them of the Source Project, or of D.C. And looking across the fire at Cal, seeing the lines of weariness on the face that was so youthful, and the way those hazel eyes followed the flare-girl Tina with such worry and such grief, Shango thought of the ties of obligation and affection and relation, thought of his family in New Orleans, and of Czernas and McKay.

A log broke and fell in the sheltered fire. A flake of light fell across Colleen Brooks, nearly invisible in the trees, listening, standing guard; Shango saw her eyes, and they were on Cal, with a look in them that told him things that Cal had probably never seen. And Cal was watching Goldie, worried about the man but believing, caring for him. And Doc’s gaze moved among them, concerned and at rest.

People holding each other’s hands in the night.

“What about you?” Cal asked Shango. “Where are you bound?”

“Here,” said Shango, the word speaking double to him. Where are you going, and to what place are you tied?

Here.

“I came to find a woman who was on the plane that crashed here. I don’t think she survived,” he added, seeing the way Cal’s eyes shifted, “but she had something, was carrying something, that I was sent to find. And I see now it’s going to be a long search, especially if I’ve got a pissed-off gang of skinheads runnin’ around the woods lookin’ for me.” He thought of those cold mad coal-black eyes in the fear-caster Brattle’s pale face, and of what Cadiz and his band would do to him if they caught him again.

“What you’re looking for. . is it bigger than a breadbox,” asked Goldie softly, “and smaller than the Empire State Building?”

Shango glanced up and met the man’s wild brown eyes. A crazy, he thought, but he had seen the fireballs leap and blaze from his hands.

To his own surprise he heard his voice saying, “No. It’s just a couple of sheets of paper, folded up small. She probably glued it in her purse lining. That’s what she usually did.”

“Did you know her?”

“I met her once or twice.”

“What was her name?”

“Jerri Bilmer. Geraldine.”

Goldie chewed meditatively on his corn chowder. “You have anything she owned, or touched, or wore?”

“No.”

Goldie sighed and set his bowl aside, rising. “You’re gonna make me break a sweat, aren’t you?”

They insisted on going with him to the plane, despite his protests. In the end, his pragmatism won out. With Cadiz and Brattle in the woods somewhere, Shango needed whatever help he could get-even if his common sense told him magic tricks were ridiculous, that this was insanity.

These were insane times.

Still, as morning had broken and they’d set off, he had demanded that the glowing girl and the Russian and the Brooks woman stay behind in camp, sheltered, protected. No need to draw them all into the crosshairs.

So now Shango stood beside the blackened, sheared metal of United 1046 out of Houston, Griffin beside him, alert, his sword unsheathed, while Goldman bent beside a crumpled piece of fuselage and scooped a handful of fine gray ash that might once have been part of a seat cushion, or a backpack, or a dress. Standing, he sifted it slowly in his hand. There was no mirth to him now, no hint of the Woodstock Nation clown.

“What would she have been thinking about at the end?” Goldie asked Shango. “Her family, loved ones?”

“No. . about the mission, and failing.” And Shango realized he was speaking too of himself.

As Goldman concentrated, his color drained, and he looked wounded. He took a couple of hesitant steps to his left and then turned back and strode between two willows.

He led them to the sad, crumpled object that had been Jerri Bilmer.

She had been flung out of the dissolving plane and decapitated by flying debris. Shango soon found her purse under a shattered wing section that had protected it. Delicately, he peeled back the lining and revealed the folded sheets of paper that had cost Bilmer her life and might yet cost him his. Carefully, he unfolded them, drew them apart. Water had soaked most of the sheets, but the inner one was readable. A list of personnel, of home addresses. A last-minute marginal note concerning buffalo and wolves and blue lightning that crawled from the ground.

And that was all.

Shango turned them over in his hands, fighting the urge to laugh. All this, he thought, remembering the chaos of Dulles and the horror of plane after wrecked plane that he’d patiently searched, pawing through the corpses of people he didn’t know, rifling the burned, soaked luggage that was all that remained of thousands of ended lives, and in the end getting only this.

“That what you were looking for?”

Shango looked to Cal. The young man was watching him, concern in his dark eyes, as if he saw how close Shango was to ripping the papers into white flakes of nothingness, releasing them to the winds that would carry off his soul and his life as well.

“Yes,” he said.

“Is it what you need?”

“I don’t know.”

Shango drew a deep breath, reminding himself that his job was not yet done. It wasn’t his to judge, just to find. McKay might be able to make something of this, might match up a name, or a town. If it were what he needed, if it might save the day. If the Source Project was even the cause of all this.

Shango had already done the near impossible. It was time to go.

To McKay, who had trusted him, whom he had left to the care of less-watchful souls.

On sudden impulse, Shango fished the steel dog tag from his pocket, laid it in Goldman’s hand. “Can you see the man who gave me this? See if he’s all right?”

The wild-haired man cocked his head questioningly. Then he took the slip of steel, pressed it between his palms, then to his lips. In the cool morning light, his eyes seemed both focused and distant, seeing beyond the hunks of metal that littered the ground, the stinks of decay. Though the morning was silent, he seemed to hear something, for his face changed, fell a little, the pale brown eyes sad. He made as if to speak, then hesitated.

“What is it, Goldie?” Cal asked.

“I’m sorry,” Goldman said to Shango, handing back the dog tag. “The man you work for, the one you like. . is dead.”

Shango said nothing. Just folded the steel back into his huge palm.

“Goldie’s visions aren’t always accurate,” Cal offered.

“Oh, geez, no,” Goldie agreed quickly, as if the thought that people would take his visions as gospel appalled him. “Sometimes what I see is just ’cause I’m. .” Suddenly, the jangly quality, the wildness ebbed out of him, and he was calm and sure. “If, when you go back, he’s not there to greet you, go to a fountain near the roses.” He peered worriedly from beneath his straw hat brim at Shango’s motionless, expressionless face. “Just wanted to save you the trip,” he said.

“I appreciate it.” The words came out like the dry stir of ash. “I still have to go back.”

Shango slid the metal tag back into his pocket and glanced at the retrieved sheets of wilted paper he still held in his other hand.

Time to go now.

And as he folded the sheets, his eyes tumbled down the list of names.

Wish Heart, Griffin had told him. Shango’s heart was a stone in him, as he kept his silence. And he thought of his duty and of the void that lay there if it were set aside. A void to be looked into and then drawn back from.

And everyone who had drifted through his wandering life floated ghostlike before him now, the ones who had trusted him and stood for him, and whom he had failed. Czernas, and Mrs. Close and Mr. Dean, and all the other guiltless souls at Angels Rest. And perhaps McKay, too, almost certainly so.

He contemplated the men standing beside him, who had brought him here and risked themselves. They were, he knew, going into even greater danger, all innocent, like calves to a slaughterhouse.

What would they be thinking in their last moments?

Of their loved ones, who would be with them.

And he knew that his duty, his oath of office, that everything he stood for, decreed that he tell them nothing of the knowledge he held.

But if McKay were dead, where might that duty lie?

“Wishart isn’t a place,” said Shango. “He’s a person. Dr. Fred Wishart. And he does live in the South. South of here, anyway. A place called Boone’s Gap, West Virginia- though it’s unlikely he was there when all this came down.” Then he told them all he knew-what precious little there was of it-about the Source Project.

Surprise showed in Cal Griffin’s eyes, and he was quiet, weighing this intelligence, shuffling it into all that had unfolded in the days that had brought them here.

Goldie chuckled, but there was no humor in the sound. “You know, funniest coincidence: during the Manhattan Project, there was a serious concern that if they set off an atomic reaction, it might just keep going, blow up the whole world. What the hell, they pushed the button anyway.”

“This force,” Cal asked Shango in a hushed tone, “is it something the scientists made or something they just plugged into?”

“I don’t know,” said Shango. “I don’t even know where it was located.”

“Lay you odds it’s to the west,” Goldie muttered.

“I can’t say how to stop it or control it,” Shango continued and felt his own futility. “All I know is someone was doing something they didn’t want shared, that it was about power.” But then, it was always about power.

Shango tucked the sheets into his pack, looked northward. The sun was rising high into the gray, cloudless sky, but it gave no warmth. Time to go.

Home?

Or just back?

Cal put a hand on his arm, smiled into Shango’s dark eyes. “If you’d care to come with us, we could sure as hell use you.”

And though he had his duty, though his modus operandi had been always to be alone, to rely on no one and watch his own back, Shango felt the longing rise in him to go with them, to be with them.

Reluctantly, he shook his head. “I have to make sure.”

Cal nodded. “I understand.” He clasped Shango’s hand. Looking into Cal’s eyes, Shango was reminded, strangely, of McKay.

“Keep your head low,” said Goldie, as if speaking to a man who proposed to cross a busy street, as if he had said it many, many times.

“You, too,” Shango said.

The dead of night was the worst time.

By day, the white house among the honeysuckle was as invisible to Wilma as it was to the rest of the people in the town-she didn’t see it, didn’t even think about it, except when she walked to the trailer court to help Shannon and Greg care for Tessa or down to the Senior Center, where two or three of the old people were beginning to nod and doze with that same cold constant silence. But at night it seemed to come into focus again.

That was when things came out of the darkness.

Two nights ago, skeletal wolves melted into being from the gray mists that lifted from the earth to surround the house, solidifying around burning red fire specks of eyes. Wilma had watched them from her back porch steps as they’d tried to clamber through the broken, yawning windows, through the open door. Blue lightning had sizzled and snapped from the walls, and purplish flame crept from the windows in a phosphorescent stream. The wolves howled and howled, writhing in pain as they burned, and then had melted away. But when dawn came, Wilma, looking hard, saw on the dilapidated paintwork the marks of their claws and teeth.

Last night, it had started the same, with the mist rising from the ground, rolling across the trailer court, up Applby Street. Surrounding the house in the darkness. But the thing that came striding in the mist was something Wilma had never seen before, something she could barely make out: something that shrieked in a voice that was like the wind but wasn’t the wind, like a machine but not a machine, a terrible hammering that grew louder and louder and resolved itself into pounding on the walls. On the back porch in darkness Wilma had waited, listening, hearing the boards and timbers of the house groan with the strain. Hearing the zap and hiss of those blue flames, that creeping lightning, and seeing the occasional flash of it through the murk. Smelling burning, like hair and flesh and feathers singed and consumed at once.

Knowing somehow that if whatever it was broke into the house, things would be worse than they were now.

The howling stopped about two hours before dawn, and the silence that stretched until morning was almost worse than the noise. Then imperceptibly the mists slunk away, and Wilma slept.

She sat again tonight on her porch with her cats around her and wiped her hands absent-mindedly with the dampened washrags that in some curious way were calming to her heart. She watched the house and watched the darkness, with the stillness of a cat, like Imp when he was waiting for a grasshopper to forget that he was there.

He has to come sometime, she thought.

When he does, he has to speak to me.

Movement in the darkness. The reflection of milky eyes. Somehow she knew it was Hank-the smell of him, perhaps, sharp and clear as any mouse in the grass or frog beneath the porch steps-and she settled herself more still, lest she break the pattern of stillness and cause him to flee. Beside her, Imp hissed softly and lashed his tail.

Dark against dark, Hank stepped from the bramble of the overgrown back hedge. Since last she’d seen him, a day or two after the Change, he’d altered little, though she thought he was smaller yet. It was as if his flesh and bones had compacted: the same man, yet more dense, in body and also in soul.

At least he was alive.

There was a smell in him of fear, and of madness. He carried a short length of metal pipe in his hand.

She waited until he was quite near her before she spoke, and then she spoke without moving: Hank, she said softly, speaking as she sometimes spoke without actual words to her cats. But he heard her and froze.

“Hank.”

The glinting eyes turned. Wilma rose, very slowly, and held out her hand. When he didn’t move, she descended the porch steps as if she were hunting and feared to startle a prey. His hand with the club moved a little, rose, then sank again. She felt his eyes on her and felt, too, the pain, the yearning in his heart, even before he said her name.

“Wilma.”

“Hank, will you walk with me?” In the dark she saw his face flinch, twist a little. Some inner pinch of pain. But he didn’t move, beyond the clenching of his big hand, and she came up close to him and took his arm. Her voice was the murmur of the night. “Let’s walk,” she said.