Magic Time

Chapter Twenty-Seven

“I don’t-know,” said Hank. His brow wrinkled, sharp and hard, at her question, as if even thinking put him in pain. “There’s these. . dreams.”

They had left the houses of town behind, the stink of privies and woodsmoke. The green sweet stillness of trees lay thick on the night. Wilma had led him away from the terrible flow of those glowing energies, avoiding the hot spots, the bad places.

They passed the old Simmonds house and stood in the dirt lane there, with the trees of the mountain pressing close around them. The old two-story house was dark. A hundred feet away the mist curled, pale and enigmatic in starlight.

Hank pressed his fist to his brow, as if the physical act could push down some clamor within. “I keep to myself, mainly, but. . they know I led the men out of the mines, they’re looking to me to-” He broke off, then struggled again to speak. “There ain’t too much food in the tunnels. We were okay at first, but Green Mountain’s nearly trapped out of deer and rabbits. It’s harder and harder to catch rats in the town, even. They’re talkin’ of hitting the food stores-and the houses.”

Wilma almost asked, Who are? but stopped herself. Now was not the time to break his concentration. She only waited, in the silence that was her custom now as well as his.

In time, he went on. “So there’s these dreams. And in ’em I’m hungry, and it’s his fault. Wishart.”

“Bob Wishart?”

He nodded.

“Is Bob alive?” she asked. “I know Arleta said, right at the beginning, that his machines hadn’t gone down, but now I see that might not even have been Arleta-or she might not have been in her right senses. And I know no batteries, no machines kept working. So what is in that house?”

“I don’t know!” Hank shook his head, and the gesture graded into a quiver, like a shudder of pain. His hand twitched where hers held it and the pressure of his fingers around hers was suddenly crushing and as suddenly released. “I know what you’re saying is right. And I don’t know the truth of it. But in these dreams it’s-there’s this voice saying, He’s pretending. He’s just faking us out. He’s doing it all, with the fog and the things coming out of it.”

He looked up at her, twisting his neck on his bowed shoulders, and the white eyes were deadly serious, deathly afraid. “Whether it’s Bob or somethin’ else in that house, in the dreams it’s Bob-Bob crouching in that bedroom of his with all the food in the town and all the dead around him, Andy Hillocher and Sonny and poor old Arleta, all rotting there. Bob, fat and greasy, with that geeky grin of his. .”

“Bob wouldn’t hurt a fly,” Wilma protested. “It isn’t just that he was afraid of his shadow. He’s a genuinely good man, harmless and friendly.”

“I know all that!” Hank’s face screwed with pain. “Dammit, I know! But these voices, this voice, in my head, in my dreams. In my dreams, it’s Bob. And in my dreams, I kill him.”

Wilma was silent, thinking about Tessa and the others. Thinking about the glowing threads of power, the Indian women screaming with their children, their pain as sharp as it had been two and a half centuries before.

After a long time she said, “Don’t do this, Hank.” And yet as she spoke, she saw the sweat on his face and felt his arm shake where her hand closed around his, and she knew he wouldn’t attack the house because he wanted to. Yet she could come up with nothing else to say.

“Don’t do it.” She pressed his hands. “Whatever is telling you this, sending you these dreams-it’s lying. There’s something going on here, Hank, something we don’t understand, but it’s using you. It has no more regard for you than an old-time miner had for the canary that he used to detect gas. A living tool that would drop over dead.”

Hank shook his head, weary and beaten. “I’ve seen into that house in my dreams. There’s a nightmare in there. It’s crazy, alive and strong. And the voice in my head, saying, saying-”

He stopped abruptly, looking up sharply. Wilma heard the grunters, smelled them, before she saw them. They oozed out of the night, gliding on padded feet from around the gutted Simmonds house and its broken-down sheds, resolved from the silhouettes of pine, beech and oak trees, crawled up out of the gorges. Six, eight, ten of them, grasping ax handles, bights of chain, picks rusted with long storage in the mine. They trampled the smartweed as they came, closing in, all of them staring accusingly at Hank.

“I. . wasn’t supposed to tell,” Hank said.

Then, breaking into a shriek like the offended dead, they attacked.

Hank yelled, “No!” and flung himself at them, iron pipe slashing through the air. “Wilma, run!”

“Hank, I. .”

“Run!!!”

Three of them darted around him, snatching at her, and she had no choice but to fall back into what looked like a little band of the mist, like a projection of it.

She heard the confused shouting of Hank and the other grunters muffle and fall away, the clang of metal pipes and the wrenches they used as clubs. Then the slap of bare feet on the hard dirt came to her, and she knew the grunters-a maddened few, at least-had dared enter the fog after her.

She broke into a run but grew aware that the footfalls of her pursuers were slowing, becoming uncertain as the fog enfolded and disoriented them. They stopped, were silent a moment-and then their screams began.

Wilma plunged away, through darkness her night-sighted eyes could not pierce. She stumbled on what felt like a chunk of old machinery-something in the Simmonds yard, she thought-struggled up, clutching twisted, rusty metal that cut into her. Gasping, the sick-damp air leeching the breath from her, she pressed on.

Something blue and flickering rushed at her from among the trees, driving her deeper into the mists. The ground grew rougher, sloping under her feet. Vines and creepers grabbed at her ankles. Lights flickered among the underbrush, fire-balls, she saw, rolling slowly, steadily toward her along the ground, the sight of them lifting the hair from her nape.

All behind her was stillness now. She turned, speculating about heading back the way she’d come, but knowing that whatever had silenced her pursuers still lay between her and town.

Then she heard it. Coming for her, its panting breath sawing the darkness, the crunch of its feet on last year’s brown leaves. Its phosphor-green light, like a swarm of disease mold, punctured the mist, growing larger and more distinct as it approached.

It had no smell, no reek of decay, no tang of electrical discharge, nothing, and somehow that was the most alarming of all.

The thing reared out of the darkness, and she saw it now in all its malformed detail. Not a grunter, no, nor one of the spectral, massacred Indian women. It peered at her with burning, malign eyes like the Wishart house itself, and its flesh writhed.

Gaping up at it, Wilma forced down the cry that threatened to burst from her, channeled that frenzied energy into her legs, twisting away, bolting off blindly through the mist and dark.

She heard it tearing after her, didn’t risk looking back. Deadfall branches clawed her; she stumbled again in potholes, in cold rivulets of what had to be Boone’s Creek.

And, running full out with all the blessed, feral strength humming through her veins, she knew that the thing at her heels was gaining and would have her.

“Oh, man, this doesn’t belong here.”

Goldie had been the first to see it as they had rounded the bend of the two-lane, under the gaunt September moon. The fog stretched across the road like a prison wall, flat and gray and impenetrable.

He pulled his no-speed to a halt and clambered down as Cal, Doc and Colleen drew up alongside. Tentatively, he approached the barrier, inspecting it as wispy tendrils reached out like beckoning fingers.

The others dismounted and joined him. “What do you mean, it doesn’t belong here?” Cal asked.

Goldie shook his head slowly, never taking his eyes off it.

Sparkling illumination like starlight shone from behind them, dusting the surface of the fog, and Cal realized that Tina had emerged from the pedicab. She floated to the edge of the mist, contemplating it with trembling agitation, breathing in quick gasps, keen and brittle. Cal had observed this mood rising in her over the past days as she had struggled against the growing clamor in her mind, seen it become as much a part of her as the leggings and too-large denim shirt she wore, the globe of swimming light that emanated from her.

She hovered beside Goldie, peering into the coiling vapor, both of them tantalized with dread.

“Maybe if we wait till morning, it’ll melt away,” Colleen said without conviction, and Cal knew that no one had to tell her it wouldn’t.

Nor that on the other side of it, two miles down the road, lay Boone’s Gap.

Shango had given them a name, and their maps the particulars of distance and direction. But as to what might reside there, this thing that had put the name Wishart into Tina’s mind, that somehow dwelled both to the west and to the south, they knew neither its nature nor its weaknesses. Only that it called ceaselessly to her, ravenously.

They had set off along I-64 that morning, their backs to the rising sun, passing Covington, making good time. Just over the state line, east of White Sulphur Springs, they had encountered the empty husk of a Cadillac El Dorado, scorched and crumpled, with perforations like big teeth marks scoring either side of it, amid the pink flowerbeds of the median. Its license plate read, “West Virginia-Wild, Wonderful.”

But beyond that, the day’s journey had been uneventful. No shadow had swept over them as they headed southwest, no sound of leathery wings had assaulted them. Caldwell and Lewisburg and Smoot had blurred by like dreams. And whatever mysteries lurked in the Lost World Caverns, nothing had emerged to overwhelm and drag them within.

The land had lain like a thing insensible. The sound of a bird or sight of a rabbit had proved a rarity, and no person crossed their path. At Sandstone they had dog-legged off the interstate onto State Route 20, skimming south along the spine of a mountain and then dipping down to Hinton, an old railroad town, wheeling past white-washed churches and rotted old barns and hillsides blazing red with sumac.

In the roar and spray coming off the Sandstone Falls, they had paused to fill their canteens.

“Night’ll be coming on soon,” Cal had said, scanning the horizon. “Best we camp here, push on at dawn.” By his reckoning, Boone’s Gap was still a good twelve to fifteen miles off.

He’d begun unloading a tent from the pedicab when a touch like a whisper stayed him.

“Let’s finish it,” Tina had said.

So now here they stood, before this gray expanse like a slammed door.

Locking us out, Cal wondered, or something in?

Colleen caught his glance. “It’s your call.”

Why my call? He rebelled at the responsibility for a moment but he knew the answer. Because I brought them here.

Let’s finish it.

But looking at his sister, at her aqua gaze held on the fog, he hesitated. With every mile they had drawn nearer, the voice-voices-had been louder in her mind, a wordless tumult that deafened her, rendered his own voice a mere whisper under it.

Back in Manhattan, he had felt so certain that their only chance lay in confronting this siren force before it grew stronger, while it was still in turmoil, fractured, to know what they were fighting. Now, as his heart battered in his chest, he wondered if he had been wrong to bring her here, if they should have fled, even though he’d been sure there was no hiding place.

Could Nijinsky have fled his God, no matter where he’d run?

No.

But how do you kill a god, even a false one?

You start by stepping through the door.

Cal fetched the Coleman lantern from the pedicab and, lighting it, led them into the fog. The light bounced off the mist, rendering it opaque.

Holding the lantern before him, Cal struggled to see the path, to stay on it, while Doc and Goldie walked the four bikes, Tina floating beside them. Colleen stowed her cross-bow over her back-little use it would be in the fog-and drew out her big knife.

They advanced slowly, silence wrapping itself about them, hearing only the sounds of their breathing, their footsteps on the crackling leaves, amplified alarmingly back on them. The drifting dead grayness filled Cal’s eyes, and he saw nothing, save the ghost of a tree here and there, looming up and shrinking back, seeming to move and shift with the drifting fog. The clammy mist settled on his clothes and skin, bled through, passing its cold into him. He had a sense of being invaded, absorbed by the fog, and felt momentarily as if he were held trapped by it, frozen outside time and space.

Glancing about him, Colleen and Doc and Goldie looked bleached of color, wavered insubstantially. Only Tina blazed clearly. But as Cal watched her, he discerned the fog melting in and out of her nimbus, dancing patterns on its surface like oil on water. It enveloped her, held her in its embrace, seemed to draw her more quickly forward.

She was pulling farther ahead of Cal now, growing misty with distance, like a moon receding behind clouds.

“Stay close, Tina,” Cal called, but got no response. “Tina!”

Then he perceived that she had stopped. She was staring blankly ahead of her, and her voice, when she spoke, was a whisper.

“You open yourself to it, and the world falls away.”

Cal heard an intake of breath beside him and saw that Goldie had gone ashen at the words.

“What is it?” Cal asked.

But before Goldie could speak, they heard the thing running at them, heard its shriek roiling up in the night.

Colleen spun as the figure lunged out of the vapor, slashed wildly at it. Cal dove at her, grabbed her arm and yanked it aside as the body plunged past, smashing into Doc, taking both of them down, the bikes falling in a clatter.

“What the hell are you doing!?” Colleen cried at Cal. But then she saw that the sprawled figure was a woman, breathing hard, crazed with fear. She flailed at Doc in her panic, then halted abruptly as she made him out in the glare of the lantern. She looked about in stunned surprise. She was a big woman, of middle years, Cal could see, tall and solid, with steel-gray hair and clothes that would have been conservatively efficient if they hadn’t been bloody and torn. Rising, Doc tried to help her up, but she pulled free and sprang up with a boneless fluidity that Cal found unexpected and disconcerting.

She whipped about to face the way she had come, as a greenish phospor light exploded out of the mist and a buzzing roar assailed them.

And suddenly, Cal understood what she had been running from.

It towered over them, shambling forward. The living dead heart of it was something that had been a Confederate soldier once, an officer, that much was clear from the glowing gray uniform with the curlicues of braid at sleeve and throat, the brass buttons, the wild and flowing beard beneath burning eyes like the cores of green suns. Through his own terror, it came to Cal that West Virginia had sided with the Union, and that this walking specter might well have been one of the forgotten, unburied dead.

But the man-ghost of this creature formed only the frame, a basis upon which to heap amendment and ornamentation. Hornets swarmed over him in their thousands like a fresh skin, pulsing green as if irradiated, buzzing their rage. And playing over it all, electrical discharges of green-blue energy, snapping wildly like fallen high-tension lines in a storm.

Cal saw that Colleen was nearest to it, that soon it would trample her underfoot. He was on the move already, drawing his sword. Colleen stood her ground, whipping the crossbow off her back as the thing advanced on her. She loaded a bolt and fired. It passed clean through, sailed off into the fog.

The creature paused and regarded Colleen as if it had just grown aware of her. It raised its phantom gun and took aim.

Cal realized he wouldn’t reach them in time. He cried out, just as an enormous explosion rent the air and he was dazzled by a flash of light.

“No!” he screamed. But then he saw that Colleen stood unharmed, saw the apparition blasted away and dispersed to nothingness, the hornets scattering and vanishing into the fog.

Cal looked about him in confusion and spied Goldie standing just behind him, holding the musket he had carried here so lovingly, despite all of Colleen’s jibes. Sparks were still spitting from its muzzle and a golden light played over its surface, which died out as Cal watched. The weapon crumbled away, fell from Goldie’s hands.

“Okay, you win,” Colleen said to Goldie, still shaking. “I’m the asshole.”

“They’re coming back,” cried Tina, floating up out of the mist. The gray-haired woman became aware of her for the first time, and her expression was amazed and beatific. Cal noted-strangely, without surprise-that the illumination from Tina reflected off the woman’s eyes, like a cat’s.

Now Cal heard the angry buzzing, growing in volume, speeding toward them. The hornets. .

“Tina,” Cal spoke urgently. “What you did back at the creek, with that spearman-can you do it again?”

“I don’t know. . I think so.”

“Get close about her, everyone!” They drew in around Tina. She concentrated, and the light about her spread outward to encompass them all.

Then the hornets were upon them, hurling themselves at the swirling light, immolating themselves. Cautiously, Tina moved forward through the fog as the insects pursued them, Cal and the others huddling close, feeling her Corona tingling on their skins as the fog had done, but with none of its frigidity.

Now other things were coming out of the mist and night at them. Hard spectral fingers tore up out of the earth; glowing blue stalks snaked from the mist and were repulsed.

Cal saw Tina’s aura flicker, begin to fade, read the weariness in her face. He gripped his sword, tensing for what might come.

But just as her light faded out, as she sank to the earth with a groan, they punched through the mist into the outskirts of town. No one was in sight, just a few tumbledown shacks, a scattering of weedy farm equipment in the moonlight.

Cal crouched beside Tina. Her hair pooled around her shoulders, her body earthbound now, with only the faintest twinkling playing over her skin. “You did it,” he said, but she didn’t seem to hear. She lifted her head and peered into the night, away from the fog, toward town. The tension had all fallen away from her, and her face held only a distant, contemplative serenity. It chilled Cal, pricked memory. Once, as a boy, he had passed the glassworks in Hurley, seen a frantic crowd trying to dissuade a hollow-eyed man from shooting himself. Aaron Barnes it had been, Cal went to school with his boy Cameron. Hanging back on the periphery, transfixed, Cal stared past dark-suited legs, the babble of scared, pleading voices engulfing him. It had looked as though they were swaying the man, when suddenly an expression of peace came over him, of vast relief, like an exhalation. . and he fired.

Cal made a move to gather Tina in his arms, to lift her, but she cut him off with an abrupt gesture, still gazing away, and struggled to her feet. Not weightless, not yet. Give her time to recharge and to come back to them.

Colleen, Doc and Goldie were checking out the bikes, seeing what was still attached after their flight. Cal looked beyond them, saw that the older woman had hurried down the dirt road to a derelict two-story house.

He walked up to her, found that she was staring intently at a spot on the ground where he could just make out a dark stain. Then she straightened, shaking her head. “Not blood,” she said with relief, and Cal wondered how she could be sure of that.

She scrutinized the tangled yard, the heaps of discarded washing machines, the labyrinth of trees farther on, seeing, Cal felt certain, far more acutely than he could, but not finding what she sought.

“What are you looking for?”

“A friend who put himself in harm’s way for me.” She shoved back her disheveled hair, managed a smile. “As you and your friends just did.” She extended a hand. “I’m Wilma Hanson.”

“Cal Griffin, from New York.”

“Well, Mr. Griffin, I’m afraid now that you’ve entered-” Her eyes grew alarmed as she glanced past him. “Stop her!”

Cal spun and saw that Tina was running hell for leather toward town. He took off after her, his legs kicking up the dirt, the cold air whipping at him. But Colleen, Doc and Goldie were ahead of him. They caught hold of her, dragged her to a staggering halt. She cried out, struggling, tearing at them, but there was no strength in her. She relapsed to stillness, her eyes on the dark, the unseen town.

We couldn’t have done that if her tank wasn’t on empty, Cal thought worriedly.

“Keep hold of her,” Wilma Hanson said. “There’s something in town that gets into them, makes them do things.”

Cal looked up sharply at this, caught his own look mirrored on Colleen’s face, and Goldie’s, and Doc’s.

Something that gets into them. Into Tina and Stern and that pitiful boy in the woods, and all the twisted, anguished ones. That beckoned them all the way from Manhattan. That blighted their waking hours, made a horror of their dreams, infected their souls.

Welcome to Boone’s Gap.

“Do you know what it is?” Cal asked quietly. “No,” Wilma replied. “But I know where it is.”