Magic Time

by Marc Scott Zicree

  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 w
eapon 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.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  To Cal, the Wishart house looked like nothing so much as a pale reflection seen within dusky glass, a wavering mirage, elusive and then gone.

  And yet he was staring right at it.

  Peering out the window in Wilma Hanson’s front room, the crackling pine in the fireplace banishing the fog chill from his bones, Cal sensed or imagined—he couldn’t be sure which—shame emanating from that house, a shrinking from even the moon’s fading light.

  Behind him, Goldie sat cross-legged in the corner, welcoming Wilma Hanson’s regiment of cats as they brushed against him, burnished him, while Doc and Colleen stood by the hearth with Wilma. Their voices were soft, their conversation banal. It was a breathing space, a tiny harbor in a great, unyielding storm.

  Leading them to her home over rutted dirt paths, through the slumbering dark of town streets, Wilma had told of the comatose children and the old ones, the sense of their being drained like rivulets of water coursing to the sea, drawn inescapably toward the Wishart home.

  “Even the power held in the land is being fed on,” Wilma had said, on the move, tensing against the pulse of the night that only she could sense, “the ghosts of this town’s history....”

  Cal let the voices behind him blur to a comfortable drone, let himself float on the scent of woodsmoke, the taste of mountain air, the homey warmth of the room about him; all the subtle sounds and smells that brought home back to him. And he was a boy again in Hurley, his infant sister dozing in the far room, his mother a watchful presence to shield them from the chaos of the world.

  Then he heard a soft shifting above him and looked toward the attic. Toward Tina.

  They—he—had locked her there.

  After her emergence from the fog, her headlong flight toward town, she was passive, seemed hardly aware of them. She allowed herself to be led to Applby Lane, not even glancing at the Wishart House as they passed it, only slowing almost imperceptibly.

  But Cal noted her radiance growing ever brighter, her tread barely brushing the ground. She was regaining her strength, would soon have it all, and then none of them could hope to stop her.

  So, in this brief span while she still mutely acquiesed, Cal agreed to imprison her in the one room with no windows, with a door they could bar.

  While the house next door shimmered and waited.

  From above, another thud, louder than before.

  He turned toward the hearth, saw his companions in the Rembrandt light of the fire. His glance caught the photos on the mantel of Wilma’s sisters and their families, of her students.

  “Have you lost many you were close to?” he asked.

  “Well, it’s a very small town.”

  “Those men,” Doc said. “The changed ones outside. Why did it kill them?”

  “One of my friends, the one who—” Wilma stopped as though about to reveal more of her heart than she wished. “He said something got into his mind, was telling him to kill Bob.”

  Bob Wishart. Bob, whom Wilma had thought should be dead already, dead when the machines went down. But who, at least in the minds of the changed ones, was very much alive.
>
  “And you’re sure Dr. Wishart hasn’t been here in months?” Cal asked.

  Wilma nodded as Colleen broke in, “But why the stay-at-home brother? The handyman? Why kill Bob, if he isn’t dead already? What could he have to do with draining the town?”

  “Somehow,” Wilma said, “I have a feeling that whatever’s compelling those attacks doesn’t care about the town, about any of us.”

  Cal began, “But why would the changed ones—”

  “Because,” Goldie broke in from his cat-contented corner, “it told them to. Because you open yourself to it, and the world falls away.”

  Cal stared. It was what Tina had said, in the fog. Goldie turned to him, somber. “There’s two pieces to this. Here and the big one. The real one. It’s not here your sister’s being pulled. It’s through here. To the other. The maw.”

  Cal looked again at the Wishart house, as though he could see it now, even through Wilma’s walls. The brothers used to speak via computer; was Bob some secret whiz kid who had something to do with the Source Project without anyone’s knowing?

  But Wilma had known the twins all their lives, and Bob had shown no such aptitude. Fred had been the brains of the two, Bob—with his over-keen sensitivities—the heart.

  Besides, Bob had been in a coma for months, long before—

  Another thud from above—loud, startling. Through the doorway to the dining room, Cal could see the hanging lamp shudder.

  Then a crash. Tina, unseen, thrusting herself against the barred attic door.

  Answers or no, they were out of time. Cal had to get into that house now, to see.

  Hurriedly, he said to Wilma, “We’ll need something to use for shields—and the most direct route through the house to Bob.”

  Wilma was shaking her head, even before he’d finished speaking. “You don’t understand. You have no way to know what it can do.”

  Cal reached out, grasped her hands. “You had nothing but speed, no protection. And those poor dead ones out there, they had nothing at all. Besides—”