Magic Time

Chapter Seven

NEW YORK-9:13 A.M. EDT

“He’s breathing fire,” Janice Fishman warned from her desk as Cal Griffin pushed through the double doors into the lobby of Stern, Ledding and Bowen.

The secretaries and mailroom boys and paralegals were chattering on their headsets, scribbling notes, rushing about under herniating weights of paper. Cal dodged them, slid up to the closed conference room doors, gleaming like twin coffin lids. Through the glass on either side he could see the meeting well under way; Ed Ledding and Peter Chomsky and Anita La Bonte were there, as well as the other associates- with one notable exception-silent as stone heads around the big table. The familiar black-suited figure strode up and down like the predator he was, holding forth, his words cloaked to silence by the glass, his back momentarily to Cal.

Cal’s fingertips brushed the heavy wooden doors and paused. He wanted to be calm, but his heart was jackhammering; his brow and upper lip glistened with sweat. Curiously, a phrase drifted into his mind, one that at first he couldn’t place. Then the memory came of their mother reading by Tina’s bedside; he heard it, muffled and musical, through the walls of their wind-whipped home.

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else. .

Cal steadied himself, eased the doors open and stepped through.

“-cells working in harmony, you get a hummingbird, an orchid, a humpback whale.” Stern was speaking quietly, as he always did when most dangerous. “In mutiny and rebellion, all you get is cancer.”

The others had spied Cal and tensed. Sensing this, Stern turned to face him. “Ah, Mr. Griffin. Word of your morning’s handiwork hath preceded you. Should we give you a ticker-tape parade? Perhaps a party with clowns?”

Indignation flared in Cal; he opened his mouth to speak. But Stern raised a preemptive finger. “No. Not a word.” He closed, glowering with eyes impenetrable as mirrored shades. “This is not Woodstock. I am not Mother Teresa. So the only relevant issue is-”

His words cut off as the tremor hit the room, like the flat of an immense hand smacking the building. The walls shook violently; the floor lurched. Cal staggered, barely managed to keep standing as he clutched the table and felt something pass through him like a great wind. Stern grasped the wall for support. Bunky Hegland and Seth Harris tumbled out of their chairs, amid a babble of shrieks and gasps. The overhead fixtures swayed, and the lights went out, plunging the room into darkness.

Cal shouted, “The table! Get under the table!” En masse, they dove beneath the thick slab-all save Stern, who stood frozen by the wall. Out of the corner of his eye, Cal thought he saw a blue light surge about Stern, an eruption that flared and was gone. But he couldn’t swear to it; his eyes were still phosphor-flashing from the sudden shift of light to dark.

The tremor continued, rose in rhythmic, undulating vibrations, the walls swaying and groaning, the floor bucking. Distantly, Cal heard glass breaking, the thud and clatter of objects, impacts dull and splintering. Huddled under the table, he felt the warmth of bodies mashed against him, the rise and fall of rapid, shallow breath. There were no screams now, only grunts with each concussion, wordless murmurs of incomprehension, the need for it to stop.

Cal found that he had his arms draped over two others, he couldn’t tell whom, instinctively sheltering them. The intimacy of the dark, the clamor, the proximity of bodies all held an echo, a resonance of his dream.

But it was real. As the blood pulsed in his ears, his bones and flesh and teeth shuddering, all he could think of was his sister.

The shaking began to subside, the cacophony of distant sounds racheted down. The voices about Cal whirled up in sharp whispers, collided, broke upon each other. “Earthquake, my god-” “In Manhattan?” “Explosive device-” “Big gas main over in, my cousin-” “Vertical fault lines, right under-”

The creaking of the overhead fixtures slowed, the glass tubes cooling, extinguished. Cal crawled out from under the table, motioning the others. “Come on.”

They followed, as he shoved open the big doors and rushed out into the bullpen. It was brighter here, daylight filtering from the open doorways of Ledding’s and Bowen’s suites. Paralegals and secretaries were helping each other up, dim shambling forms in the gloom. Somewhere a man or woman-impossible to tell-was sobbing quietly.

Cal grabbed up a desk phone, held the receiver to his ear-dead.

“Who’s got a cell phone?” he shouted.

“Here!” Janice Fishman handed off her Nokia, and Cal punched in the number of St. Augustine, hit send. Nothing.

“Where the hell are the emergency lights?” That was Paul Cajero, panic fracturing his voice.

Cal cast about the room, made out the misty shapes of Bob Williams Jr. and Chris Black holding cell phones to their ears, shaking them ineffectually. By now, Anita La Bonte had fished a portable radio from her desk, and Paul Leonard had retrieved a flashlight from the utility cabinet. Inexplicably, they weren’t working either.

Cal felt a vise tighten around his heart. He had to get onto the street, see how widespread this was, get to a working phone, if there was one, make sure Tina. .

A soft moan issued from the conference room. Cal turned to it. Through the open doors, he saw the figure within, slumped against a wall, alone.

Cal entered and drew near. In the murky light from the doorway, he could see Stern sitting motionless on the floor, face averted. Stern grew aware of him, angled his head slightly, eyes nearly closed.

“Do you need a hand up?” Cal asked. The sight of Stern so still, emptied of his hectic, decisive energy, shook him.

“No,” Stern said languidly, indifferent. Shock? Cal couldn’t see any obvious injuries, but that meant nothing. Stern grimaced, shielded his eyes from the dim light.

“Hey, everybody! Look!” Barbara Claman’s Marlboro rasp sang out from the common room. Stern turned his head away dismissively. Cal withdrew.

He found the rest of the staff massed with Barbara by the window in Russ Bowen’s suite, peering down, strangely subdued. He squeezed through them, squinted at the daylight.

On the street far below, and on all the streets as far as the eye could see, the cars, trucks, cabs and buses were still. Tiny figures emerged from pygmy vehicles, lifted hoods, stood stunned and disbelieving. “They’re not working either,” Janice muttered incredulously, needlessly. Her voice held awe, and fear.

Cal let out a long breath. His eyes lifted to the heavens- and he froze. “Oh, my God,” he whispered.

The others turned to him, saw the dawning horror on his face.

The objects looked almost like toys, so many miles distant, and they were lovely, really, glinting in the sun, all twisting and angling downward.

“The planes,” Cal said. “They’re falling out of the sky.”

WEST VIRGINIA-9:17 A.M. EDT

Fred felt it grab him at the same instant every machine in Bob’s room went dark.

There wasn’t even the steady flamenco of alarms that you saw in TV movies when the hero’s wife or mother or best friend went into seizure in the emergency room. Just no lights, no readouts. Even the backup batteries had gone dark. And Bob’s mind, screaming, screaming for help. .

Bob, I’ve got you! Fred caught him, seized him, reached out into the dark into which he was falling and held on, even as he felt the horrible cold dragging at him. .

They were children again; Bob had fallen into Cherry Creek during the floods of ’63, racing current ripping him away. Fred had managed to grab him, hook his own arm around the remains of the old dock, while the cold water hammered him and icy numbness bored deeper and deeper into his flesh.

I won’t let you go! I won’t let you go!

And the child-Bob pressed into his chest, clutched at his arm with nerveless fingers. He couldn’t breathe or think. He only knew that he couldn’t let go.

Roaring in his ears, in his mind. Weightless swinging over a void, and that terrible, ghastly dragging at him, drawing him back to the Source. Voices screaming, thunder in his brain: Sanrio, Wu, Pollard. Come back here! Come back! We need you. .!

Bob screaming his name.

He’d deserted Bob once before. He would not do it again.

Fred reached out, gathered everything the Source surrounded him with, all that power, all that light, and poured it into Bob’s still heart and still lungs and dying bloodstream and brain. I won’t let you go!

And in his ears and heart and brain and soul, the world screamed.

Roof fall, thought Hank in a second of blind, hideous panic. Floor heave. Explosion. His hands fumbled automatically at the Self-Contained Self-Rescuer-the respirator-hanging at his belt.

“Fuck a duck!” howled Sonny Grimes from the darkness behind him, and for some reason the man’s yowl of protest steadied Hank, centered him. As soon as he yanked the SCSR’s strap tight, he hit the levers of the shearer, though the thing had ground to an instant, shuddering halt already.

Hollow in the respirator’s filters, Gordy Flue’s voice said, “C’mon, Sonny, where you gonna get a duck down here?”

And Ryan, “What happened to the headlamps?”

Silence. A million tons of mountain and darkness deep as the end of the world.

Hands shaking, Hank fumbled the flashlight from his pocket. He heard something clatter, small and metallic on the floor, and Gordy cursed. He guessed the others were doing the same.

He switched over the toggle, and he might as well have flipped a tiddly-wink for all the light it summoned. “Son-of-a-bitch batteries,” said Roop McDonough as Hank shook his own flashlight, took the fresh batteries from his pocket, tried again.

Zip.

Hank felt himself trembling, sweat on his face and bile in his mouth. The smell of coal dust was thick in his nostrils, his lungs. Every man at the face knew that a flame here could be the last light any of them would ever see. Aftershocks, he thought. Wasn’t that what happened in California and Japan? The earth calmed down and then went on shaking, on and off, for days?

Ryan Hanson spoke again. “How come all the helmet lights went out?”

“Everybody okay?” Hank called into the blackness, and Al’s voice and Tim’s echoed in response. Hank hit the toggle on his radio and got nothing-no surprise there. By the stillness of the air he knew the vent fans had quit working, too. “Anybody hurt?”

“Yeah, I slipped in it when I pissed my pants.” Gordy again, and the unwilling laugh it got was like the breaking of an iron band around Hank’s throat.

“What happened to the batteries?” asked Bartolo. His voice was moving. He was feeling his way along the wall, Hank guessed, toward the tunnel that led back to the main.

“Coulda been some kind of electronic pulse,” said Ryan. His voice struggled to retain its calm before his seniors. “Like they say a nuclear attack would cause.”

“Nuclear attack?” Panic edged Roop’s words. “You think. .?”

“Fuck, who’d drop a bomb on West Virginia?” cut in Grimes, exasperation further chipping at the terror, breaking it up like a boulder into manageable chunks.

“Could be something like the same thing, I meant,” Ryan amended hastily. “You know, that would put out electronic equipment.”

“A mile down?”

“A battery and a bulb ain’t exactly what you call ‘electronic equipment,’ butthead.”

“Hey!” Hank pocketed his useless light. “Doesn’t matter what put them out. They’re out. We’ll find out what happened when things get working again. Everybody get to a wall and work your way around to the entrance of the main. Let’s get back to the elevator and maybe find some lights that work.”

Nobody said what everybody was thinking: What if there was a roof fall in the main?

If there was, they’d find out soon enough.

Stumbling and slipping on the rolling masses of shale and coal, Hank worked his way back along the face, the curved gouges in the rock sharp and rough under his fingers. In the darkness the men kept up a banter, cursing or making jokes to cover their fear (“Hey, let’s play Marco Polo!” “Fuck you, Gordy”) and Hank marveled again at their capacity to deal with terror, emergency, God knew what.

We’re not dead. We can deal with the next ten minutes.

“Got here,” called out Tim, presumably from the entrance.

Very suddenly, Hank’s hand encountered damp, slightly greasy cloth and the warmth of a shoulder. “That you, Tim?” He could have hugged the man.

“Ryan?”

“This’s me.”

“Gordy?”

“What, my good looks don’t glow in the dark?”

“Smells like shit, it’s gotta be Gordy.”

“Sonny?”

“Who the fuck else would it be down here?”

Al, Roop-voices out of the darkness, hands touching hands. So far, thought Hank, so good. Don’t think about what it means.

The men linked hands and felt their way along the wall. Whenever they encountered a box containing another SCSR, they took it, slinging it onto their belts. In addition to the danger from methane, without the fans working, the air would go bad quickly and there was no telling how long they’d have to wait for rescue when they reached the elevators.

If they reached the elevators. Thank God, thought Hank, Applby had gone over to long-wall mining in the new section. He couldn’t imagine trying to grope their way to the downcast if they’d still been doing room and pillar, with the mazes of crosscuts and subsidiary mains. At least there wasn’t anyplace to go but straight back. And another little prayer of thanks that a respirator worked by compressed air and wasn’t susceptible to whatever had knocked out all the batteries. His greatest dread, as he led the way along, was that every second his fingers would encounter an unscheduled wall of loose rock that would tell them they were well and truly screwed.

As they walked, Ryan was still trying to figure out what had happened to the batteries. Others proffered suggestions of who to blame: management fuckup, Arab terrorists, Chinese bombs. Grimes rode the boy unmercifully, jeering at his speculations but offering nothing of his own except obscenities. Hank wanted to punch him but kept silent. Any speech was better than none, against this terrible blind silence and the racing puzzlement that filled his heart.

A faint scuffling of bodies, of voices in the dark ahead. Hank called out, “Yo!” and Andy Hillocher’s voice replied.

“Hank? You guys got a radio?”

“Deader’n a road-kill skunk.”

There was appropriate commentary on both sides.

“Roof’s holding stable, anyway.”

“Well, be sure to write that down for the geology boys,” retorted another sarcastic voice-Dixon’s, Hank guessed from the slight intonation of black speech. “They’ll be glad to hear it.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” snapped Hank. “Who all’s here?”

After an endless crawl through darkness, Hank’s groping hand felt the corner of the wall and, cautiously removing his respirator, he smelled water and wet rock. A little farther on, his hand encountered the edge of the unmoving conveyor belt that led the way toward the downcast. “Hang on a minute,” he said. “Everybody shut up for a second.”

When the voices ceased, the silence flowed back. Terrible silence, horrifying in its completeness, broken only by the slow, infinitesimal drip of water leaking from the pipes and, at long intervals, a far-off tapping and creaking.

“That’s the mine breathin’ in her sleep,” his dad had said. And his grandfather had made spooky eyes at him and whispered, “It’s the tommy-knockers. They digs in the mines, too.”

One of the company boys in engineering had once explained to Hank what those noises really were in terms of ground water and weight distribution over the rock. But when he heard them, he always thought of his granddad, sitting in the warm corner between the big old iron kitchen stove and the cellar door, cradling a shot glass in his hands.

“What you think you’re gonna hear down here, asshole?” demanded Sonny Grimes.

“Maybe Superman and Batman talkin’ about how they’re gonna find us,” retorted Hank. There was something in the air-the coal dust, maybe-that made him itch all over, and his head ached something fierce. He was in no mood for Sonny.

A little farther on they found the tram, dead on its tracks and empty. They encountered the men who’d been in it at the downcast, after Hank laboriously worked the manual openers on the three sets of airflow-control doors that guarded the elevator. “That better be somebody we know,” Gene Llewellyn’s voice called out from behind the third set of doors, and of course Gordy couldn’t resist and let out a horrible growl that fooled nobody.

“Get your hand off my ass, Gordy,” retorted Lou Hanson, and there was general laughter.

“They know we’re down here,” Brackett said comfortingly, as everybody shifted to make room, and they counted off names, made sure it was the whole shift. “Even if the emergency generator up top got knocked out, they’ll have another one in place inside a couple hours. This isn’t like the old days.”

No, thought Hank, scratching absent-mindedly at his shoulder. It isn’t like the old days. In the old days there’s no way we’d have been trapped a mile under the ground. The Green Mountain mine was a slope, not a shaft, and you could walk out, provided you weren’t cut off or buried yourself.

In the old days, too, there were things that worked without batteries.

“What about it, Gene?” asked Andy Hillocher. By the sound of it he’d removed his respirator, to save on air, something he was pretty safe doing here by the shaft. Hank had already taken his off, because the straps itched like fury. “You’re the company egghead. How come all the headlamps went out?”

“Beats the crap out of me.” Llewellyn tried to sound jaunty but didn’t quite succeed.

“There any record of gas in this part of the mine?” asked Hank.

Llewellyn’s voice replied from the darkness. “If there’s been a floor heave, there could be gas anywhere; you know that.”

“Okay,” said Hank. “But even with a couple of respirators apiece, things are gonna get pretty stuffy pretty quick. I think somebody needs to take a look around outside. I mean a look.”

There was silence. They knew he was right. But they all had the miner’s inborn horror of fire below the ground.

“After you close that third door behind you,” Gene said at last, “you count to three hundred before you light that match. There shouldn’t be dust this close to the downcast, and if there’s gas, you’re not going to make it that long and nobody has anything to worry about. Anybody in here got a problem with that?”

“I got a problem,” groused Sonny. “Why the hell don’t we just wait till the company gets its butt in gear and comes down after us?”

“Because they might not, asshole,” Hillocher retorted. “And if the ceiling’s getting ready to cave in or there’s water pouring down the walls or something, I’d kind of like to know about it while there’s still time to shift our sorry asses someplace else, okay?”

There was a little more argument, but at length Hillocher handed his lighter and a twist of paper-it felt like a page from a magazine-to Hank. Hank cranked open the doors, cranked them shut and cranked open the next pair, and the next.

“Fuckin’ asshole’s gonna blow us all up,” Grimes muttered.

“So sue him.”

The doors shut off their voices.

Beyond the third set there was the dim smell of coal and rock dust, of wet rock and oil from trams and machines.

And silence.

Hank listened again to that silence and let it fill him.

On the other side of the downcast, he knew, would be the mains leading into the older sections of the mine, the worked-out room-and-pillar areas where black crosscuts intersected the rubble of roof falls and controlled collapses that had occurred as the men had retreated after taking every fragment of the supporting coal. But no sound, save for the drip of water, the creak of the tommy-knockers.

Behind him, muffled by three sets of doors, he heard Brackett ask, “Some other kind of gas, maybe? Does anybody smell anything?”

“You mean other than the shit in Hanson’s pants?”

“Oh, fuck off, why don’t you, Sonny?”

“Does anybody else have a headache?”

“I’m gettin’ a headache listening to Hanson’s crap about Arab fuckin’ terrorists and nuclear warfare.”

Hank had a headache. Not the same as he’d had from his brushes with firedamp in the mines, but a strange sense of tightening, a weird ache in his neck and back and in some deep center of his brain. Looking back toward the doors- toward his friends-he felt a curious unwillingness to return to them, a sense that he’d be more comfortable here in the dark, with the tommy-knockers. Hank lit the spill of paper, but he had to force himself to do it. The light showed him the tunnels, the silent machinery, the pipes slowly dripping water. Everything as normal.

Quickly he blew out the flame. The light of it, he found, hurt his eyes. He wondered if that meant anything.

Shaking his head a little, he made himself go back.