Magic Time: Angelfire

by Marc Zicree

“If there’s anything I can do to prove we’re harmless…”

  Her mouth curls up at one corner. “And how would you go about doing that, Mr. Goldman? How can you be sure you are harmless?”

  I can’t.

  She’s silent for a moment, her eyes on my face, poking, prying, scanning. Then she steps back a pace. “Enid, find our would-be friend something to eat. He is not to go near the caverns. I’m going to call Council.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” says Enid, docile as all get-out. He beckons with his dreadlocks.

  I am dismissed into the care of the Bluesman and the flare. They lead me to a large, bright kitchen where the wood stove puts out too much heat and where a pot of tea is boil-ing—eternally, I suspect. I pull off my ratty coat and get a bowl of some sort of grain porridge and a cup of the industrial strength tea. While Enid and Magritte huddle at the kitchen table and speak in muffled tones about something— most likely what they should do with me—I stare moodily out the window, down the hill to the center of the camp, where the rhythm of early morning activity has established itself.

  It’s like watching a dance of insects. They beetle around the fire pit, stop and chat, exchange containers of some sort. Near the residences, people are also busy, beating rugs, hanging laundry, tending animals, scratching at the ground. Very normal in a bucolic, medieval sort of way.

  While I watch, the rhythm of the dance changes. From several of the cabins, people emerge as if propelled—two here, one there, another over there, a fourth and a fifth. They converge on the camp center, homing. On their way, they tag and draw along a woman hanging laundry, a man weeding neat rows of something green, another man deep in conversation with a group near the fire pit. From there, they start up the hill toward the Lodge. The people around them, the people they pass by, take note, following their progress, pausing to comment on it.

  Call me squeamish, but this display of synchronicity makes my hair stand on end. I swallow a suddenly tasteless mouthful of porridge and set down my bowl. Okay, it’s not Children of the Corn—the people coming up the hill are chatting and smiling as they approach—but I am seriously weirded out, nonetheless.

  “She called Council,” Magritte says from beside me. Her voice reminds me of the wind chimes. She seems slightly ill at ease.

  “Is that a bad thing?” I ask.

  “Not a bad thing,” says Enid. “The Council protects us, is all. They’ll do what’s good for the Preserve.”

  “Ah. Which may not be what’s good for me and my friends.” Or the rest of the planet. I turn to look at him as straight up as I can. “Look, I meant what I said. Let me go and I’ll take my friends and get out of here.”

  Enid drops his eyes. “That’s not my decision.”

  “What about the little girl?” asks Magritte. “You ain’t just gonna abandon her?” Her eyes, for a moment, show me as deep and dark a maze as the one I traveled to get here. It doesn’t take special powers to see that Tina’s plight has some special significance for her. After all, she was close to becoming Megillah-fodder herself.

  I shrug. “I could tell Cal there was no way Enid could help. But I’d be lying, and I’m not real good at that.”

  Her aura seems to fade toward transparence for a moment. Then she looks to Enid, through Enid and right down into his soul.

  He puts up his hands to ward her off. “Hey, no, baby. Don’t ask me that.”

  She says, “What if he could convince the Council—convince Mary—that it was a good thing?”

  “How’s he gonna do that, Mags?”

  The look they exchange is loaded with subtext. There’s something here I’m not in on.

  “With your ability,” I say, “you might be able to free more flares—more fireflies. You might be able to free them all.”

  Shaking his head, Enid slumps farther into his chair. “No, man. No way I can do that.”

  “Then maybe I can. I’ve managed to harness a few twisted talents. I can see and walk through your portals. Maybe I can learn to do what you do, or maybe I can help you do it.”

  Enid grins at me unexpectedly, the furrows alongside his mouth becoming deep smile lines. “Sort of a sideman, huh?” “Or a sidekick.”

  He reaches up to rub his eyes, which are bloodshot, I assume from lack of sleep. “It’s not the same thing. The portals is one thing; the music is something else.”

  “I’m willing to try if you are. Look, if Mary is as dedicated to freeing and protecting people as you say, then isn’t this a golden opportunity? A talent like yours could save a lot of enslaved flares. We can find the Source—the Storm.”

  “You seem awful sure of that.”

  “I am.” Sometimes I wish I weren’t. “But let’s say we can free some of the flares. The missing piece in the scenario is where do we take them where they’ll be safe?” I smile. “Nice place you got here.”

  Enid and Magritte exchange another verbose look, then Enid says, “Lemme go talk to the Council,” and leaves me alone with Magritte.

  I feel her beside me, a cool, blue furnace. I have a swift and unworthy fantasy about what it might be like to make love to her. It shocks me. She is looking at me with those giant cat’s eyes while this slithers through my mind, and the sudden one-two punch of lust and shame drive me over to the hearth, where the heat from my face is lost in the fire. She follows me, so my relief is short-lived.

  I try to keep my mind on the problem at hand. “So you were in Chicago when this happened to you?” I ask without looking at her.

  “Yeah.”

  “Was it sudden? I know with Tina—my friend’s sister— it happened gradually, over several days. We thought she’d gotten some sort of radiation poisoning.”

  Magritte’s hands make a series of vague little gestures before she says, “Poisoning, huh? Yeah, it took a while for me to get poisoned, too.” She giggles, but there isn’t any mirth in it. It ends in a strange little hiccup.

  I glance at her face and surprise something both bitter and desperate in her expression. “Was it painful?” I ask. “Tina was in physical pain up until… well, until it was over. After, she seemed … relieved … released. I think there was a different kind of pain, then.”

  She grimaces, her sharp little flare teeth making her seem feral. “Sounds like sex.”

  Well, that catches me napping. I’m speechless, and what’s left of my lust flares (you will pardon the pun) then shrivels right up.

  “I don’t know what I’d’ve done without Enid,” she says in a voice like the rustle of dry leaves. “Out of the frying pan, into the fire… Uncle Nathan always said that about me.”

  She turns her face away; the flames paint it gold and red, even through her aura of rippling light.

  “How close did you get to the Storm before Enid—” “Struck by lightning,” she murmurs. “You ever been in a tornado?”

  “Ah, no … an experience I’ve managed to avoid, living in Manhattan.”

  “Stay in this part of the country long and you won’t be able to avoid it. Tornado just sucks up anything that gets close. Even at a distance, you can feel the power of it. Like a magnet, pulling at you. You see it; it dances in your eyes. You know it’s a quick trip to hell, but it’s so powerful, so beautiful, that part of you wants to walk right up and touch it. You want it to take you.”

  She pins me with her eyes, suddenly dark as the underbelly of a thunderhead. “Storm was like that. One minute I was dancing for him, the next minute I was dancing for the Storm.”

  I recall someone a lifetime ago talking this way about cocaine. She got struck by lightning, too, in a manner of speaking. One night, in a cranked haze, she walked right onto the third rail in our tunnel.

  “Dancing,” I repeat. “For Enid?” I’m trying, I realize, to wrap my mind around their relationship, as if it matters.

  “No, not Enid. Enid is my friend.” She lays subtle stress on the last word. “He was there to save me from one thing, and ended up saving me from something worse.”

  �
�You knew him before the Change?”

  “He played at the club I worked before his manager got him a break. After, he’d come back to check up on me, make sure I was okay, talk about getting me out of there. He tried to get me out of there.” She shrugged, spilling radiance into the air. “When all the weird shit came down, he was there for me. In the wrong place at the right time, I guess.”

  Darkness flitters across her face again like the shadow of wings. It’s the same look I glimpsed earlier when she asked if we’d abandon Tina. I have the sudden conviction that Magritte knows a lot about abandonment. I fight the urge to stroke her cheek. Did I mention I’m a lousy fighter?

  She doesn’t flinch away from my touch as I expect. Instead, she turns into it, fixing me with her whiteless topaz eyes, wrapping me in a tingling veil.

  From my fingertips, gold-white light fans out across her cheek and bleeds into her own vivid aura. A luminous mist glides over my hand, my arm, my head. It envelops her, too, and in a moment we’re engulfed in a veil of something kinetic that is both hers and mine. The world is shut out. I hear no shimmer of wind chimes, no snap of flame, no life-noise from the camp outside, not my own breathing, not even my own heartbeat. I am aware only of our mutual amazement.

  The opening of the kitchen door pulls us apart. The combined aura explodes soundlessly and the outside world rushes back in. I am dispossessed.

  “Council wants to see you,” says Enid, and if he is aware of having interrupted something, he hides it.

  The Council meets in a large parlor I suspect was once the staff lounge. There is a huge braided rug around which sit nine people on chairs, bench seats, and pillows. They are an interesting mix, five women (including Mary), four men. They are racially mixed, too—three blacks, one Hispanic, one Asian, two Native American. Mary is the sole Caucasian. They are old and young. Fresh and worn.

  Their clothing suggests diversity of social strata, as well. The Asian gentleman wears a sweater that is obviously cashmere, but his L.L. Bean boots are muddy and scuffed. The Hispanic woman next to him is dressed in ill-fitting overalls and a man’s flannel jacket—Kmart wardrobe. They both have very clean but very chapped and callused hands.

  In the once real world, clothes said something about who you were. Now I think they might only say something about where you’ve been. The Change has been a great equalizer, I suppose, whatever its faults. Perhaps it’s true that no evil happens that does not bring good in its wake. If there was ever a time you couldn’t judge a man by his clothes, it’s now.

  I smooth the loose tails of my own gaudy purple and green plaid flannel and await their verdict.

  “Enid has explained what you’re proposing,” Mary says. “On the surface, it sounds ideal. Like Kismet. You have a way of tracking the Storm; we have, just possibly, the means of freeing its slaves and an underground railroad ready to receive them.”

  “But?” I prompt.

  “Mr. Goldman,” says the Asian gentleman, “we have had a number of people approach Enid during his sojourns with an interest in using his talent. Ultimately, they wish to seek advantage from it over their unfortunate fellows. Machines such as we once relied on for services no longer work. There is only one means of replacing them that does not require arcane talent.”

  “Human machines,” I murmur. The ambient temperature in the room drops a few degrees and I shiver.

  He is nodding at my reaction. “In a word, slaves. So you see, there are people in our new world who have a need, and others who will attempt to fill it. Commercialism, Mr. Goldman, at its most despicable. Out there, human beings are once again becoming a commodity. I think you will understand how some would find Enid’s talent attractive in that context.”

  “I do understand. And I understand that your mission is to protect all of this. I don’t know what I can do to convince you that my friends and I are no threat. Look, um, maybe if I tell you what we know about the Change and the Storm, you’ll understand our mission.”

  They exchange glances, then all eyes go to Mary. She nods.

  “There was a government project code-named ‘the Source.’ I don’t pretend to understand the physics behind it, but I do know that it went pretty horribly wrong. We … met one of the scientists who’d worked on that project. He’d been changed by the disaster—not like anyone we’d ever seen. Not like anyone we’ve seen since. We suspect that when the project went south, something terrible was born. You call it the Storm; I call it the Megillah; I’ve heard it called other things. It’s powerful. It’s sentient. It sees. It senses. It hungers.”

  Even at a distance, you can feel the power of it.

  “And for some reason it’s most hungry for flares, people who were twisted like Magritte was. Like my friend’s little sister, Tina. She was twelve when the Storm took her. Look, I don’t want to sound like, um, like Mr. Sob-story, but since you seem to be in a position to decide my fate, I think you should know the kind of person Cal Griffin is. He’s been taking care of Tina since their mom died and their dad ran out on them. Well, not quite in that order, but it’s a complicated story. The point is, he’s spent most of his adult life protecting her. But he couldn’t protect her from the Change or from the Storm.” I glance at my musician friend, where he leans against the door frame. “Cal wasn’t as lucky as Enid, or maybe the legal profession just doesn’t lend itself to sorcery, but there wasn’t a damn thing he could do to stop what happened to her. It was like Magritte said, a—a tornado just sucked her away from him. Since then, we’ve been on a sort of quest—Cal, Colleen, Doc, and me. Cal is determined to find Tina and free her and the other flares the Source has taken. More than that, he intends to find some way of defeating the Source.”

  A ripple of surprise circles the room.

  Mary watches the reaction of her fellows closely then turns to me. “And you and your friends accompany him. Why?”

  I pause to consider this. “Before the Change, I lived on the street. People stepped on me, over me, and around me on a daily basis. Most of them took me as just another crazy. While insanity is a great defense against all sorts of abuse, I … I admit I slip in and out of reality more easily than the average guy. Cal always treated me like a man, even on my bad days. Sometimes he even treated me like a friend. So when he says we can find the Source and do something about it, I believe him.”

  “Why?” Mary asks.

  How to describe Cal’s possession by this mad vision that we four merely human beings can confront and conquer the unknown? That we must do it. “Because he believes,” I say at last.

  The Native American fellow, who appears to be in his early fifties, leans forward, eyes intense. “This Doc you mentioned, he’s a real doctor? A medical doctor?”

  Duh. I should have my head examined.

  I nod eagerly. “Yes. Yes, he is. He was a surgeon in Russia, but he knows a great deal about general medicine, and he’s absorbed bookloads about herbal remedies. He’s had to.”

  I neglect to tell them that before the Change, Doc was peddling hot dogs on Manhattan street corners.

  Mary says, “I know what you’re thinking, Delmar, but I’m not sure we can afford to let ourselves be seduced by need.”

  I’m not much of a seducer, but it doesn’t hurt to try. “If you need a doctor, Doc Lysenko will be only too happy to assist. He can train nurses, medics. He might even be able to recruit some doctors from Grave Creek.”

  Mary draws a deep breath as if I am taxing her patience mightily. “Mr. Goldman…”

  “Goldie.” I give her my most winsome and lopsided smile. It even worked on my mom… when I was ten.

  She grimaces. “Goldie. We are charged with protecting these people and with adding to their number. Right now, I can’t send anyone out through that portal because your friends are camped right in front of it. From what you’ve told me about Cal Griffin, I suspect he’s not likely to leave without you.”

  She’s right. Stunning thought. Being left and leaving, I realize, had become rather a lif
estyle for me.

  “We could bring them in,” says Delmar.

  “And then what?” asks the Asian gentleman. “It doesn’t sound as if they intend to stay.”

  “We could stay long enough to help with your medical needs.”

  “We need a doctor, Mary,” says a black woman with tight, graying cornrows. “Even a temporary doc would help.”

  “We need more than that, Letty.” Mary looks at me. “Well, Mr. Goldman, you’ve given us a lot to think about. Enid, why don’t you and Magritte show Goldie around while we try to come to consensus here?”

  We stroll outside—or at least Enid and I stroll; Magritte swims the air between us like a sea wraith. I congratulate myself that I’m no longer a prisoner. Now I’m a tourist.

  I peer into the forest as we make our way down the hill in front of the Lodge. It seems to go on forever, blurring to a misty green in the deepest reaches. A thin haze rises up from the far treetops and forms a shining bowl overhead. In a trick of the eye, the sky looks more golden than blue. The temperature is almost balmy.

  They give me the cook’s tour. I see vegetable gardens, windmills, a water tower that catches rain and flows it out to the cabins and vegetable patches. The Lodge and some of the larger outbuildings are on wells. There’s a waterwheel, too, snuggled up against a deep channel cut from a fast-running stream. It’s nearly complete. It will be a working mill, Enid tells me, used to grind wheat, corn, and various seeds and nuts into flour.

  “That’s something else we gotta go outside for,” says Magritte. “We haven’t been here long enough to harvest much.”

  “Mary said she wasn’t sure why it was cut off from the outside. Any theories?”

  “I sure as hell don’t get it,” says Enid. “That’s more up Maggie’s alley. She’s got a kind of sense about these things. It’s got something to do with the old tribal magic, I think. That it, Mags?”

  “Mags” nods. In the sunlight she looks like an archangel, sans plumage. Her hair is pale flame and her skin gleams like opal. She makes me hurt inside.

  “There was Wyandotte Indians around here,” she says. “They used the caverns to protect them from the Delawares. Sort of a hideout. There’s an old Indian Council Chamber and some other places they used to have ceremonies. Power’s real strong down there. Real strong. Some folks even say they seen ’em. Or their ghosts, I guess. Especially in the old Council Chamber.”