by Holly Lisle
“Bar-r-r-ney... this is important.”
Barney tried to figure it out. “I can think about the chocolate,” he said. “Even when it isn’t here, I know just what it’s like. So I can make it. But I guess — I guess my feet hurt so bad I don’t remember what they felt like when they didn’t. So I can’t fix them.”
“That’s magic?” Jamie sounded disappointed, almost like that wasn’t good enough.
“You can’t do it.”
“Maybe I can. I was trying to remember magic spells, like ‘hocus-pocus,’ but those didn’t work.” Jamie frowned. “I’d like a hot dog, I think.” He sat cross-legged on the mattress beside Barney, and squinched his face all up, and knotted his fists into tight little balls. “Hotdog,” he muttered. “Hotdog. I want a hotdog.”
Barney watched him with interest. He didn’t think he looked anywhere near so silly when he did magic.
No hotdogs appeared.
Barney grinned. “You have to smell it cooking — and you have to taste how it tastes when you bite it. You have to feel the hot in your mouth. You have to vision biting it so much you think you already have it—”
Jamie yelped and spit something brown and round out of his mouth. “Too hot!” he yelped, and sat there panting with his tongue hanging out like a dog’s.
Barney laughed. “You got to vision it in your hand, dummyhead — not your mouth.” And then he realized his big, poophead brother had done magic, and he grew quiet. It wasn’t fair — after all, he was the littlest. He needed magic. Jamie didn’t.
“Let me practice,” Jamie said, and sat on the bed for a while, making ice cream and chocolate and cake and icy cold cans of Coca Cola that turned out to be impossible to open because Jamie had never paid very close attention to how those pop-tops worked.
And then Jamie bent over and looked at Barney’s feet. “I know what they’re supposed to look like,” he said. “Maybe I can fix ‘em.” He stared, and his face grew thoughtful, and suddenly Barney felt warm, wonderful tingling where before there had only been pain.
Jamie stopped after a minute. “I’m tired,” he said. “Do they feel better?”
“Lots.” Barney bent his leg to look at the sole of one foot. It had interesting scars on it — but the red and the bleeding and the gross yellow stuff were all gone.
“I’m gonna quit, then,” Jamie said. “I need a nap.”
In the far corner of the room, Carol suddenly shrieked. “I did it!” A butterfly, bright orange and purple, like nothing Barney had ever seen before, fluttered around her head.
Barney eyed her, disgusted. She could do magic, too? It just wasn’t fair.
Nothing was fair, he thought darkly.
“You know what I want more than anything in the world?” Carol whispered.
“You want to go home,” Barney growled.
“That we could have, I mean.”
“No. What do you want?”
“You know the crystal ball in The Wizard of Oz? The one Dorothy sees Aunt Em in?”
Barney nodded.
“I want one of those. So we can see Mommy.”
Barney was still grouchy. “Then make one. I’m not going to.”
She glared at him. “Stinky boy,” she said. “If I have to make it by myself, I won’t let you look in it.”
Barney wanted to see Mommy, too. He sighed, and got carefully to his feet, and gently stepped on them. They worked okay, he thought. Suddenly he was a little bit glad Jamie could do magic. And Carol, too, he decided. He guessed he could be generous — and besides, Carol had the good idea about the crystal ball.
Barney and Carol sat beside each other. “We should hold hands,” Carol said.
Barney shrugged. “Okay.”
“We have to both tell this so it will work. I think it’s a big ball—”
“—big as a basketball—”
“—okay — and the glass is real green an’ shiny—”
“—and all you have to do to make it work is look in it and say what you want to see—”
“—and it’s on a pretty stand so it won’t roll, or break—”
“There it is!” Barney whispered. “There it comes!”
Carol dropped his hand and hugged herself. “Oh, yes! Isn’t it beautiful?”
The magic crystal ball grew in front of them, shimmering into existence beneath the busy glow of the tiny firefly lights. And when the firefly lights vanished, it glowed anyway — beautiful, beautiful.
Barney and Carol looked from the ball to each other. “You first,” Carol said.
“That’s okay. I’ve done lots of magic. You can go first.”
Carol smiled. “Okay,” she whispered. “I want to see Mommy.”
The inside of the ball grew brighter and brighter. Then a picture grew in the middle of the green fire, and some of the brightness died down so the two of them could stand to look.
Barney could see her. Mommy. She was coming for them — and she had guns.
“All right, Mommy!” he said under his breath. “Get ‘em.”
CHAPTER 12
Minerva dreamed of her children, and her husband, and her home; of her life before it fell apart, or more correctly was ripped apart — but when she woke, nothing remained of the dream but the tattered ghosts of voices crying, “Mommy, come get us.”
Minerva uncurled from her place on the seat of her buggy and stretched. Her entire body ached. The burned places on her skin were little islands of terrible pain in a sea of duller hurts. Her right cheek felt hot and swollen — she had discovered an antiseptic cream in Darryl’s emergency kit and used that, but it didn’t seem to have helped much.
I must have passed out after I applied the goop, she thought. She wondered how long she’d been out.
Her clothes were damp, and the faintest of lights pinked the horizon in front of her. She had been, she thought, traveling east. Which would make that faint light sunrise... and that would mean she had survived a night sleeping in the open. Lucky. Getting underway as soon as possible seemed a prudent idea. Luck had a nasty way of running out when counted on.
Murp, of course, wasn’t in the bag anymore.
“Murp,” she called softly. She heard no catlike sounds. If Murp were around and safe, she should have no difficulty bringing him to her. The cat was fond of his stomach and had formed an almost spiritual attachment to Tender Vittles. The sound of one of those paper wrappers tearing ought to bring him on the run.
She magicked up a couple packets of the cat food, and while she was at it, a sizzling hot plate of steak and eggs for herself, and some classy silverware to eat it with. Might as well live a little, she couldn’t keep herself from thinking. No telling how much longer I’ll have the opportunity.
A bathtub would have been her next creation — she felt scrungy and disreputable. She suspected she smelled. But the idea of submerging her burned skin in water made her stomach twist into knots; and, too, the faster she got underway, the sooner she’d reach the children.
Murp appeared at her side before she’d even torn the first wrapper. He leapt onto the seat of the buggy next to her and studied her steak with a gimlet eye. She opened the cat food and waved the paper packet under his nose, but he remained unswayed. Murp had apparently decided after what he’d been through, he deserved to live a little, too.
Minerva scratched him between the ears and conjured him up a nice little steak — raw — and sliced it into tiny pieces. He gave her a grateful look before he inhaled the meat, and she felt gratified.
She decided to plan ahead a bit. No one was on the road near her — she could detect no signs of danger. She had no intention of making another roaring-across-the-country-out-of-control joyride. The previous day’s sketch of her vehicle was long gone, of course. She sketched another on her final sheet of vellum, and added an automatic gearshift that included reverse and additional markings on the speedometer, in ten-mile-per-hour increments. “No sense making that same mistake twice.” She also added a dash mount for
the compass, so she could see where she was going and where she needed to be at the same time. The improved buggy appeared behind the first.
“Let’s get a move on,” she told the cat. In front of her the sky had pinked up, and the scars on the earth around her were becoming visible. She stared at the black, burned gashes and torn ground that formed a perimeter around her buggy, and shivered. “We made a mess last night, cat. We are damned lucky to still be here.” Murp looked up at her, round-eyed and unconcerned, and mrrrped. God, I’m glad the cat’s here. If I didn’t have him, I wouldn’t have anyone at all to talk to—
That wasn’t quite right anymore, though, was it? Hadn’t Darryl found some way of speaking with her? She seemed to remember that, although the memories might have been false, created by her distress and her wish that such a thing were possible.
“Darryl? Are you there?” she asked. She got no response. She took a deep breath, and said loudly, “Darryl, if you can hear me, say something!”
“Sh-h-h-h-h-h!” She heard him plainly. She nodded thoughtfully. He was there — but this was evidently not a good time. She considered for a moment that he did not have her luxury of being alone in the wilderness — some luxury. Hah! Nevertheless, she could talk to him anytime, whereas she could see he would have to watch his moments.
“Talk to me when you get the chance then,” she said. And added as a wistful afterthought, “I wish you were here.”
He didn’t reply.
She started the buggy and followed the arrow back out to the main road, then east and south. She kept the buggy at about sixty miles per hour, and within a half hour was at a crossroads of sorts. The road she was on continued steadily southeast, its tarmac gleaming in the bright sunshine. Another road crossed it, an overgrown cobblestone-paved track that ran southwest and northeast. To the southwest it didn’t look too bad — not kept up, but there was nothing about it that worried Minerva. To the northeast, the road vanished into weeds and a copse of mangled trees, and the sky above the track hung low and glowering, shimmering with heatwaves and crackling with energy. Thunderheads piled on top of each other, their bellies full and dark and angry.
The compass pointed northeast. Minerva drove tentatively past the intersection, and the needle whipped backwards, almost with angry emphasis, to point at the road she was trying to leave behind.
Of course. It can never be the nice white house with the picket fence, can it? It always has to be the castle ruins on the hill with the booming door knocker and things in the dungeon.
She turned back, reluctance dragging at her gut, and steered the buggy onto the track. She crossed a line there; no sooner had the back tires left the main road that she felt as if she’d walked open-eyed through an enormous spiderweb. Beside her, Murp arched his back and hissed and spat at nothing. Minerva whimpered quietly in the back of her throat and rested one hand on the grip of the flamethrower.
She drove carefully, but as fast as she dared. She felt eyes watching her from the close overgrowth on either side of the road. From time to time as she came around a curve, she would catch sight of something shambling across the track ahead of her. Brush cracked around her, shadows lurked — and the spiderwebby feel of the air became thicker and more pronounced the further into the wasteland she penetrated.
The trees shrank, and became warped and hideous; tumored, gray-leaved. Bare patches of ground appeared — not rich dark earth, but hardscrabble, bleachbone white. Something had sucked the life out of this land and left its wraiths sobbing in the air. Minerva drove by an abandoned cottage, its hipped roof swaybacked, its windows empty and dark; shadows clung to the house like Spanish moss. A bit further on she passed another just like it, and then a clump of them all together; dead places, full of palpable ghosts — even in daylight. Her skin crawled. She constantly felt unseen things that touched her, licked at her skin with damp, slippery tongues, poked and pinched with invisible fingers.
The needle on her compass pointed onward — into worse. Barney and Carol and Jamie were somewhere ahead — and though she yearned with her whole heart to retreat, to find someplace safe to hide, there was no one else who could do what had to be done. Courage isn’t feeling brave, she thought. It’s going on when you’re scared shitless. She kept going.
Murp growled suddenly, stiffened on the seat beside her, and all his fur stood straight out. Then he streaked down to the floor of the buggy and squeezed himself into the duffel bag. This did not seem a cheerful omen to Minerva. She sensed nothing different in the air around her — the place was increasingly awful, but seemed to be growing worse at a steady pace, without anything that would suddenly spook the cat. Still, cats sensed things. She kept driving, trying to look over her shoulder and to both sides at the same time, goosing the accelerator at every straight stretch.
A low, shuddering wail reached out of the ghastly trees to her right and tore straight through her, into her bones. She had never heard a sound like it — and hoped she never would again. She wished for engine noise or road noise — anything to cover it. It went on and on, then died in an awful gurgling sob. That wail seemed to be a signal. From the dying lands to either side of her, shambling two-legged monsters from a demented artist’s post-holocaust nightmare dragged themselves forth. They stared at her, glared at her, while their hands reached out in threat or supplication, and their ragged, sloppy mouths emitted nerve-scraping keening wails.
Oh, no! Her heart pounded up into her throat. There seemed to be hundreds of them moving onto the narrow, weed-choked road. Her finger twitched on the trigger of the flamethrower, but stopped. Dead, dry grass and weeds surrounded her. The flamethrower might clear those hideous shambling things out of her way, but would give her an obstacle that was potentially worse.
She reached for the machine gun — and a sight caught her eye that left her stunned. One of the things held a bundle in its arms — a baby. Its other hand held the hand of a smaller creature. Mother and children. She took her hand from the weapon, and yelled, “Get out of the way!” She slowed just a bit, and the things cleared passage for her, though they still reached out to touch the buggy as it passed and left smears of themselves on the glass.
What happened to the people who had once lived in those desolate houses? Were they killed? Unwoven? Or were they the creatures who stood by the road, awaiting hope and salvation from any source?
“I’m going after the Unweaver!” she yelled. “I’m going to make things right!”
The gurgling wails and the hideous keening rose in pitch and volume. Minerva felt sick.
The nightmare creatures fell behind her, as did the last signs of life. She entered onto a sere and inclement plain where nothing grew, and the air, oppressive before, became parched and sand-laden. The road ran on, a cobblestone ribbon between two seas of dried mudflats; gray earth touched gray sky along a ribbon of billowing seething black that ran from one edge of the horizon to the other. Minerva had never seen anyplace in her life she wanted to go less. But the compass pointed on, so she went on.
Then the voices started.
“Mommy,” Carol whispered, “the crazy man says he’ll hurt us if you come here.”
“Mommy, Mommy, Mommy! I’m so scared! Come get me!” Barney wailed, then screamed — in terror or pain, Minerva couldn’t tell.
“Mom, this guy says you gave us to him because you didn’t want us anymore. He’s lying, isn’t he?” Jamie sounded weary, and hopeless.
Her children, her babies — that bastard was trying to destroy her by hurting them. But he could see her coming. He knew where she was every second — and he could hurt them, she suspected. She was afraid the threat wasn’t an empty one.
She stopped the buggy, turned it off, and stared ahead of her. What could she do? She would have paid good money for an easy answer.
Murp poked his head out of the duffel and yowled. He looked around him and sniffed the air, and his ears plastered themselves flat against his skull. He retreated to the inner world of the bag again. Minerv
a could feel for him. She wished she could retreat to a nice safe cocoon and still do what had to be done. She wished she could be invisible, or two places at once—
An idea occurred to her. “Darryl,” she said softly, “I need help.”
Darryl didn’t answer. He could still be in an awkward spot and not able to talk, she reasoned. Maybe if I just tell him what I need and let him know I need it fast, he can get to someplace private.
If the Unweaver could hear her whispered requests, she was doomed. Of course, if she couldn’t get through to Darryl, she was probably doomed anyway — and the kids, too.
Sitting in a parked buggy at the edge of a desert, with a hellish storm brewing, Minerva outlined her plan to an absent husband she only hoped could hear her.
* * *
Darryl heard her, all right. Her timing sucked. From what he could tell, there didn’t seem to be much she could do about that, though.
Dr. Folchek settled back into his seat, and scratched something on his notepad. “I see. So you were merely writing fiction, and reading the bits of it out loud to yourself. You did not hear voices speaking to you? That’s what you’re saying?”
“That’s what I’m saying. Look, Doctor. I was at my wife’s funeral yesterday. I know the score. We don’t have to keep dancing around this, while you act like I’m telling you deeply significant stuff.”
“But you are telling me ‘deeply significant stuff,’ Darryl. Do you realize in the hour we’ve talked, you have used all sorts of vague euphemisms relating to your wife and children, but not once have you come out and said the word ‘dead’? Your guilt over not having been at home during this tragedy is evident, as is your denial that they are all, in fact, gone.” The scrawny little bastard smiled slightly, and said, “There. You even have me doing it. I said ‘gone’ when I meant to say ‘dead’.” Folchek steepled his fingers and sighed. “Your responses evidence poor coping mechanisms, some neurotic tendencies, and grave instability. You are aware of the world around you, but you are not, for the moment, living in it.” He picked up his pen and tapped it on the pad. “I’ll point out to you, since you don’t seem to realize it — that writing fiction starring your dead wife is not an appropriate response to day-of-the-funeral stress. It smacks of denial.”
