Magic Time

by Marc Scott Zicree

  Sam raised the pitcher over the basin and heard his voice, leeched of emotion. “Hands. Ely, your hands.”

  “Hm? Oh.” Stern extended his hands over the basin as Sam poured. Water flooded over them, dripped off the thick nails that, Sam saw, were growing more like talons, true claws. The blood washed away, swirled down the drain.

  “Quite the night’s work,” Stern mused. “How I put myself out for you.” There was merriment in his eye, ironic and mean. This is your doing, Sam, it said. Not mine. The genie doesn’t get the blame.

  Ely was lording it over him, in his own house, because he could, for no other reason than that. Power, it was all about power, who’s top dog, who rules the roost. Just like everyone else, just like Mother when she had been here, and even after.

  A raw heat of outrage ignited in Sam’s chest, shot into his cheeks and eye sockets. For one mad moment, he almost took the pitcher and smashed it into Stern’s grinning gargoyle skull. But the fear, the years of obsequiousness and invisibility, stayed his hand, and the moment passed. He bowed his head, shame and regret choking him.

  “There now,” Stern said, as the last of the defiled water fled down the drain. “All gone.”

  Numbly, Sam set the pitcher beside the basin, held out paper towels. Stern patted his hands dry.

  Stern’s eyes returned to the mirror. He ran a hand along his craggy, saurian chin. “Used to have the worst five o’clock shadow. Looks like I won’t have to shave for a while.”

  Sam was only half-listening now, rooting about in the hall closet for the item Mother had put there so many years ago. Why keep that? he had complained to her. Who will ever use it? But she had saved it as she had saved everything, and, in this at least, she had been right.

  “Here, Ely,” Sam said in a hushed tone, returning to him. “It was my father’s. He was six-five.” He unfurled the heavy material in his delicate hands.

  Stern felt the faded terry cloth between his fingers, drew it from Sam. The robe was as soft and shapeless as the man who had once inhabited it. Stern shrugged into it, glowered down at Sam. “What was your mother? A circus dwarf?”

  Sam felt the blood in his cheeks, averted his eyes. “We all have our shortcomings.”

  Stern turned back to the mirror. “Gotta develop a thick skin,” he said.

  Mother had called it the guest room, though they’d never had any guests. Sam had always thought of it as the discard room. But now he had a guest, one that he could not discard.

  Stern lay in the narrow oak bed, pulling the moth-eaten covers up, trying to get comfortable—impossibile given his size and shape. Sam hovered by the bedside oil lamp. “There anything else you need, Ely?”

  Stern shook his head, then belched, a low rumble. He winced painfully.

  “Still the heartburn?” Sam’s tone was solicitous, if flat. He found his thinking was musty, as though wrapped in cotton wool like the keepsakes Mother had so carefully placed in boxes and stored away in the recesses of the attic. He felt curiously withdrawn, as if moving through a dream. I’m trying to escape, he thought, I’m trying to escape in my mind. And in some hopeless core of him, that seemed the only way.

  “I don’t get ulcers; I give them,” Stern mumbled. His searchlight eyes were at half-mast, and, as he stretched, groaning, Sam could sense the bone-ache weariness of the—man? Well, no, that wasn’t quite the word, not precisely, not anymore. Nor was guest, either, but that was how it was.

  “You’ve had a busy night, Ely,” Sam said, patting him on the shoulder and feeling that it was someone else saying and doing these things. He blew out the lamp, plunging the room into darkness, the drapes drawn tight against the coming dawn. “Tomorrow’s another day.” He withdrew, closing the door behind him.

  Stern turned toward the wall, drew his legs up until he was curled in a ball. He was warm here, hidden. The pounding in his head had eased back some, and he felt the tempest of the day’s events fading in his mind.

  He woke; he didn’t know how long later. Prickling danced over his skin, then erupted in a fierce blue energy. He didn’t need to open his eyes, he could see it through his closed eyelids. It surged over him, pulsed through his veins, filled his mouth and lungs. He fought to scream but was paralyzed, immobile as it whipped about and within him. And in that instant, that ferocity of being, he realized that he had known this feeling before, earlier, in the office. At the beginning. And he knew too that it had not gone and returned but had merely resurfaced, was always now with him. He was becoming, and this vast, elemental current was the medium of that becoming. He relaxed then, and the energy drew back into him, continued its patient work. He exhaled a long, slow breath and opened himself, accepting. He slept.

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  It had been a damn long night.

  Crossing the dew-soaked lawns to the buildings of the Old Executive Office—where every available bicycle had been stored—Shango felt the same tension that he’d known as a child in hurricane weather. He remembered clearly how it had felt to cross between the run-down brick buildings of the Washington Street projects when the first jagged gusts of rain would come in, cold and strange feeling in the summer heat. Rain and then still. Rain and then still, but in the stillness you could feel the storm to come. Seeing through every window all the TVs tuned to the weather, those colored maps and the crawling ribbon of warning across the bottom of the screen that said, IT’S ON ITS WAY AND IT’S GONNA BE BAD.

  Why did he feel, at the end of this night of riot and fire and fear, that he’d only felt the first cold splatter of preliminary rain?

  “At least we don’t have to worry about lugging guns,” said Czernas, very trim and sleek in black biking shorts and a microfiber shirt. His smooth, sculpted shoulders shifted under the straps of his backpack. “Or about being shot at.”

  Word had come in fairly early in the night, about the guns. Shango had gone out behind the White House after he’d gone off-shift at midnight, and tested both of his personal handguns, the Browning and the P7, with the same results: nada. He remembered McKay’s reaction, when a Guard captain had told him about this.

  Again, nada. He hadn’t been surprised.

  “Might do for you to carry one all the same.” Shango halted in the dark area between the torchlight along the White House walls and the lighted perimeter, and fished his P7 from the holster at the small of his back. “Things changed once. They might again.”

  Czernas obediently stashed the weapon in his backpack, where he couldn’t get to it in under a minute, but Shango said nothing. He guessed the aide was in his mid-thirties, a couple of years older than himself, but he found himself unconsciously thinking of him as younger. This might have had something to do with the other man’s boyish blondness, but Shango didn’t think so.

  He was a rookie. He might know politics, and he might know campaigning, and he might know who was important and how to get things done, but he wasn’t hard. There was no core of iron inside.

  “You have family here in town?” asked Czernas as they climbed the steps. “Someone to leave a message for?”

  Shango shook his head. “You let President McKay check over any message you left, to make sure it doesn’t say too much?”

  The aide looked surprised, then flustered. “Oh,” he said. “Oh, I guess—well, I left it with him.”

  And if he was smart, he burned it, thought Shango, recalling what the President had said about not knowing who was behind the Source funding. In the face of a fuckup this monstrous—if that was what it was—the scramble for deniability would be lethal and thorough.

  As Czernas showed the guard McKay’s authorization, Shango reflected that he was damn glad he’d kept his own life field-stripped. Even in ordinary circumstances he traveled with little more than he carried in his backpack this morning, and he lived the same way.

  No photographs: not of parents, siblings or the house he grew up in. Now, there’s a Kodak moment that you never see on commercials. An advantage, when you had a job to do.r />
  Even at this hour of the morning people were coming and going in the long main corridor where they stored the bikes. There was a guard checking papers there, too, by the light of a half-dozen candles. National guardsmen were bringing in more—commandeered from God knew where—even as messengers were taking them out. Shango picked thin-tired racing models over the heavier off-road bikes, checked to make sure the tires had been puncture-proofed, and got spare tubes from the guardsman in charge, while a makeshift moving crew— National guardsmen, regular Army, and whoever else had been rounded up from stranded office-staff along the Mall—moved computers, phones, and chairs out of the offices around them to make room for incoming supplies of water and food.

  “I got us a survival-blanket apiece, and a first-aid kit.” Czernas came over, a bare-kneed superhero. “We may have to go beyond the airport to find her. Anything else we’ll need?”

  “Just water and food.” Shango’s pack was already weighed down with those and he guessed his companion’s was, too. He kept his voice even but the sense of impending chaos pressed more closely than ever.

  IT’S ON ITS WAY AND IT’S GONNA BE BAD.

  “What about weapons?”

  Czernas had a big hunting-knife sheathed on the outside of his pack—the National Guard was stockpiling the contents of every sporting-goods store they could reach. Bows and arrows, fiberglass crossbows, knives, hatchets were all being brought in, as well as horses from the wealthy countryside across the river: wagons, pleasure-buggies, harness, fodder. Shango had a couple of knives in his pack already, as well as one sheathed on the outside where he could get to it fast, but he knew a desperate man can go on fighting for a long time with a knife wound. And he’d never quite trusted guns. Only an idiot carries a gun, he remembered his father saying to one of his punkier uncles. All a gun’ll do is make you think you can handle something you can’t. Uncle Marquis had ended up shooting a cop in a panic and was probably still at Angola—Shango could guess what had happened there, and in other prisons, when the lights went out.

  But he smiled at the recollection of his father.

  John Henry Shango. He’d boxed weekends around all the small clubs in Orleans and Jefferson parishes and could double up a leather kicking-bag with one blow of his fist. When he’d first heard his father sing “John Henry,” Larry had seen his father as that doomed, wonderful, steel-drivin’ man.

  So he said, “Wait here,” and hunted around for the utility room, where the guardsmen had put all the tools they thought they were going to need: axes and bolt-cutters and lengths of cable and chain. There was a sledge there with an eight-pound head, with a long enough handle to give Shango reach on a man with only a knife in his hand, heavy enough that a small man or an unskilled one couldn’t use it against him: it swung with his arm like a motherfucker.

  He slipped it down through the hand-loop at the top of his backpack, so the head rested high between his shoulders.

  He’d spent a day and a night watching people deal with the fact that everything had suddenly stopped working. Christiansen and the Army boys in a panic because no missiles would fire and maybe someone would be dropping them—which hadn’t happened so far. People in the Mall, on the streets, screaming for Metro transport and telephones. The corporate suits frantic because suddenly there was no power to run anything and no way of getting what they had to sell to people who wanted to buy it. Every guardsman and soldier holding his useless rifle thinking, What do I do if someone comes at me?

  This was one item, thought Shango, that wasn’t going to quit working.

  Czernas was waiting in the hall with the bikes.

  “Ready to go,” Shango said.

  Outside, horses neighed in the hot night. The White House looked dark in its ring of torches. Shango couldn’t see light in any of the windows, but he was willing to bet McKay wasn’t sleeping.

  For eighteen months he’d lived his life as an extension of the President’s, keeping tabs on appointments, travel, people in his life; on likely threats or difficult situations. Sometimes he felt weirdly akin to those fixated “quarterlies” he and the other agents checked up on every few months, people who’d made threats against the President, some of whom could have told him where McKay was going to be and do. He remembered one woman in St. Elizabeth’s, back before Shango was on White House detail, rambling gently on about Hillary Clinton’s wardrobe and how certain of her dresses matched Bill’s ties.

  As he and Czernas carried the bikes down the front steps, he felt a deep uneasiness. There were other agents on the job, good agents, he knew. Men he’d worked with for years and had trusted with his own life: Cox and Breckenridge and the others.

  But he sensed he was leaving McKay in danger. More danger than even McKay realized.

  He glanced sidelong at the young man gravely pulling on Pearl Izumi bike-gloves, adjusting straps on his airflow-grooved helmet. An idealist, as McKay was an idealist, but without McKay’s experience. A pain in the ass and possibly a danger on the road. But he was the friend McKay trusted to find Bilmer, to get her or her information back safely.

  And it was Shango’s job to back him up. To make sure that the job got done, no matter what the cost.

  He had been chosen because he was the best at what he did.

  And because he was best, he felt disoriented to be riding away from the President into the darkness of pre-dawn and the smoke of burning that marked the rising of the new day.

  Chapter Seventeen

  WEST VIRGINIA

  Thunder and darkness. Lightning that hurt the eyes.

  And even so, it was nothing to the darkness Fred saw, as through a window. Nothing to the light that seared forth out of that dark, like a searchlight, into his mind.

  WISHART The cold-water drag of the current redoubled, like the current of Cherry Creek, the wildness that would separate them. Desperate, desperate and scared, Fred clung tighter to his brother’s arm, to the dock. The dock? But it was as if he saw them all standing on the dock, Sanrio and Wu and Pollack, only it wasn’t three people or five people or ten people or all those people who’d been in the project when Hell had broken loose there in a roiling, glowing flood, streaming out of the Maze in a shattered firefall of exploding glass.

  It was One.

  WISHART And the tolling of the voice was like the sounding of a huge bell. Only it was his own voice. His own face on the thing on the dock.

  I can’t leave Bob. He’ll die.

  But even as he said it, he drew the power from it, from that One; the power to keep Bob alive. Every light on those useless machines was black and dead, hunks of expensive metal closing in the downstairs bedroom, looming around the bed; and every light, every flash of electrochemical brightness in Bob’s imprisoning flesh was dark also. The only light was what Fred poured into it, out of his self, his strength and the borrowed brilliance of the One.

  COME TO US

  I can’t leave Bob.

  They didn’t hear. They never did.

  COME

  Twisting, dragging, clutching . . . And he fought them. I can’t. He’ll die. I can’t.

  Hell. Agony. Tearing him apart. Drawing him down into something that was worse than dying, worse than living— the loss of self into that all-devouring malice and power. The loss of who he was. Eaten alive.

  Then slowly the vision faded, and Fred was in the downstairs bedroom still, clinging to Bob, who sobbed like a child in his arms.

  Don’t leave me.

  I won’t.

  Stillness, and the peace of momentarily being out of pain. But because he was part of the One, because his thoughts were entangled in the shining awfulness that was growing in South Dakota, Fred knew it wasn’t over. It was gathering strength, calling to itself everything that would serve it, and he knew it too well to believe that it would give up on him. It had Sanrio’s cold single-mindedness; it had Wu’s dogged patience, which had taken her through fifteen years in a reeducation camp; it had Pollack’s skill in finding alternate sol
utions to problems.

  It wanted to be whole. And to be whole, it would eat him. Make him be it, whether he wanted to or not.

  I have to fight. I won’t leave Bob; I won’t become part of that thing, that One, that Source. . . .

  In his heart he could almost hear Sanrio’s voice—or was it his own?—whisper, But you are part of us, Fred. You ARE us.

  Bob would be taken away, never to be seen again. And he would be taken. The terror was suffocating.

  I have to fight. Somewhere, somehow, I have to get the strength to fight.

  NEW YORK

  Tina dreamed, and the dream was a swarm.

  She couldn’t see them, but she could feel them, all blue— somehow she knew they were blue—scurrying like bugs’ legs, tiny bugs all over her, and inside her too, frenetic, insistent. They whispered reassurance, a cicada hum, soothing words she could almost but not quite discern, lulling her, wafting.

  Even so, she tried to fight, but she was so weary, so leaden. Time to wake up, she urged herself. Time to wake up now.

  But she lacked the will, felt sapped by the cocooning presence. Rest, it sang to her, unspeaking, rest and grow strong.

  As Cal and Colleen approached through the dawn shadows of the street, Doc stepped from the doorway and drew them aside. “How is she?” Cal asked.

  “Sleeping. Her fever’s down a bit. Not out of the woods yet, but . . .” He trailed off. Cal sensed his reticence to draw conclusions, to offer false hope. Still, it was hopeful. Doc stretched the stiffness out of his back and yawned hugely.

  “You should get some rest,” Cal offered. “We can spell you a bit.”

  “Thank you, Calvin, but not just yet.” Cal could make out the stubble on Doc’s chin, the dark patches under his eyes. Morning at last, and relief swelled in him. No telling what the day might bring, but it had been an interminable night.