Magic Time

by Marc Scott Zicree

  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 wa
s 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, plié and grand jeté. 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 barracu
da 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.