The Stone War

by Madeleine E. Robins

  Then one of them jostled him in passing. Tietjen was turned clear around by the impact, not hard but unexpected, and watched the black phantom march purposefully along the path to the trees on the far side of the lake. As he stood watching, another one bumped into him, and then another. Tietjen turned and saw a crowd of half-solid shadow-men bearing down on him like a stream of people through a rush-hour doorway. He began to move forward again, threading himself through the crowd, bumped and jostled again and again, as the shadow-men grew more solid and took on faces of their own, the sorts of faces he might have seen on any day on his way to work, carved out of something as dark and unreflective as night.

  Dodging through the crowd, he finally rounded the shell of the old amphitheater and followed the slope downhill to the access road. The crowd began to thin around him, but the shadow-men who came toward him seemed more and more solid. More than that, at last they seemed to see him. One gestured to him, pointing back toward the east; another shook its head, dark eyes that were simply another shade of black against the blackness of its face, meeting Tietjen’s. Finally, one stopped in front of him and grabbed his arm, gesturing frantically.

  “What?” Tietjen asked. I’m talking to shadows, dammit, and Barbara is waiting. “What do you want?”

  The shadow-man kept pulling on his arm, his hand sweeping urgently eastward. His face was as real as Tietjen’s own now, frightened and angry. Tietjen turned to look behind him at the shadow-men who were dissolving at the edge of the horizon, come to life just to frighten him, their lives measured in the time it took for them to stride from clearing’s edge to clearing’s edge. What would happen to them if he turned back west; would they live? At least until the sunrise?

  “I can’t,” Tietjen said. “Someone is waiting for me, I’m sorry. I can’t stay.”

  The shadow-man grasped Tietjen’s arm with both hands now, pulling so hard he had to brace himself to keep from being dragged down the path. Looking east, he saw another figure fade into dark. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “I have to go on. What if you—what if you just stayed here? Don’t walk east? Would you live?” The figure stepped away from Tietjen, dropped its arms and turned east, hopelessly. “Wait,” he said. He put his hand on the shadow’s shoulder, felt it sink into lush darkness for a moment before resting on solid warmth. “Don’t go. Stay and see.”

  The shadow-man did not turn to look at him. It shook its head sadly, pulled away from Tietjen, and started walking. Tietjen turned back toward the West Side and walked a few paces, but couldn’t keep from looking back again. The sparse crowd of black figures behind him rose and fell like an uneasy sea swell; as each reached the edge of the trees, the shadow-men simply faded into the moonlit air. Tietjen thought he saw the one who had stopped him disappear that way, and felt bitter and angry.

  “Why give something life if you’re just going to take it away? Did you think they would stop me? Did you want to choose between their lives and Barbara’s? What are you doing?” He spoke the words aloud, but there was no answer.

  Tietjen crossed the access road and found the thickly grown path to Eighty-first Street. He was alone again, as suddenly as that. As he walked, the compass pull reasserted itself, as certain as if someone had taken him by the hand: he was going to the Museum of Natural History. It was an old friend, home ground: Tietjen could envision the enormous whale, the elephants and lions, the immense barosaurus skeleton in the lobby. Chris had loved the elephants—African and Asian—and Davy the dinosaurs. That was a sweet thought: he could imagine his boys’ voices, their pleasure as they darted through the museum halls. The warmth of the memory leached out of him when the images changed. Tietjen imagined the elephants rioting, the barosaurus smashing him into a wall with one careless sweep of its skeletal tail. He sagged against the Park wall, weak as water.

  “Weak as water?” Now he heard Barbara’s voice—imagined it, but it was a true imagining, full of her humor and ginger. “Water isn’t weak, you idiot. Think what you saw of SoHo and Wall Street. Water levels cities.” He felt a tide of longing for Barbara, his good companion. With her voice he imagined her, not as he had seen her last, but as he knew her day to day, neat and practical and funny and lovable. He felt a twist of shame that he had hurt her—then discarded that as self-pitying.

  Tietjen straightened and looked up at the museum again. His compass said that Barbara was in there, guarded by the dinosaurs and elephants and stuffed lions, and the pale, frightening boy who held her. It was time to go in and get her. For Barbara he would be as strong as water.

  Tietjen could not even guess what weapons the boy had or how powerful he was; his only hope was that logic was his weapon. So he began to reason out an approach to the museum. From where he stood it looked as if the planetarium on the north side had been smashed in; a crater extended out into the driveway, as if, fittingly enough, the building had been hit by a meteor. What was left of the glass and steel seemed to be thickly covered in ivy. A steady breeze stirred the leaves; he could hear the rustling from across the street, but Tietjen barely felt the air move. Now that he stood outside the Park again it was hot.

  No entry through the north way. There was an entrance on the south side, on Seventy-seventh Street, and the main entrance on the east side, with the statue of Teddy Roosevelt looking out over Central Park West and the Park itself. He was pretty sure the west-side staff entrances had been sealed years before, when the green there had become a shantytown. For some reason—the mysterious inner compass again—Tietjen was nervous about walking around to Seventy-seventh Street.

  So he would have to enter through one of the main doors on the east. Probably the boy would expect him there; maybe the kid had planted his unease about the southern entrance. What if he fought the pull? He tried an experiment. “I’ll go down to the south door,” he said aloud. He took a few steps toward Seventy-seventh Street. Immediately, he was filled with a terror that had him lead footed and shaky. In the warm breeze he was suddenly icy cold, and he kept shuddering, whole-body tremors that made it difficult to stand. It was like the sensations he had had when he went toward the East River, but worse. Behind the feeling, just palpable, was a sense of rage. Someone was very angry that he’d tried to disregard his clear instructions. Tietjen stopped, and the terror subsided at once. The boy hadn’t hurt him—and he could, that was obvious. He simply wanted Tietjen to go a certain somewhere, where Barbara was.

  He started toward the doors on Central Park West.

  Crossing Central Park, Tietjen had moved briskly. Now he approached the museum slowly. A few minutes before he had been chilled and trembling; now his neck was sticky with sweat, and sweat rimed his nose and cheekbones; it felt too hot to move any faster. The air felt thick. Despite the moonlight, the front entrance and stairs were in shadow. As Tietjen walked closer he realized that the statue of Roosevelt, astride a horse and flanked by Indian guides, lay on its side. Vines had overgrown the steps and twined around the granite horse’s legs. They covered the stairs and the statue and most of the ornamental stonework of the museum. When he got to the steps he realized it was not ivy, but some kind of dense leafless thorny vine. In places the growth looked deliberate and ornamental, as if a gardener had labored hard to produce the effect. Tietjen tried stepping over or around the thorns, but found all he could do was to step on them, beat them back with his feet. The vine grew steadily, fast enough so Tietjen could see it happening: he watched the vine cover Roosevelt’s statue completely in the time it took him to climb from the street to the doors. By noon the whole museum would be impenetrably covered with the black, thorny vines, which seemed to root into the granite of the steps. Trapped inside by the thorns: he wiped sweat from his hairline and the back of his neck. One of the revolving doors stood open.

  Maybe it was stupid to use the open door, but his internal voice was urging him through it, promising that Barbara would be safe at the end of the journey. The boy had brought him to the museum without killing him, so either there were lim
its to what he could do which Tietjen needed to understand, or the kid would not hurt him until he had had his say. Against logic, even against fear, the internal compass was a powerful force. Logic and fear trembled like heat mirages, insubstantial and unpersuasive in the dark.

  Tietjen rubbed the sweat off the bridge of his nose and stepped through the door.

  It was cool inside. At first Tietjen thought it was the cool that massive old buildings have. Then he realized it was so cold inside the museum that his breath plumed before him in the dark. The temperature outside had been in the high eighties, Tietjen thought. Inside it felt like low forties at best. He took a couple of steps into the lobby, letting his eyes adjust. The barosaurus still reared above the skeleton of an attacking allosaurus, protecting its young. He could not dismiss his imagining, of that tail whipping around to slam him against the wall: Tietjen hugged the walls tightly, out of range, he hoped. Once he was on the far side of the lobby the cold lessened a little, although Tietjen kept rubbing his arms fitfully against the chill. There were lights scattered around the lobby which gave off a dull orange light, just enough to throw shadows. Votive candles, Tietjen guessed, judging from the flickering. Then he realized they were battery-powered emergency lights. Surely they had not been shining since the day of the disasters, back in February?

  Ahead were the African mammals, with a herd of elephants, some stuffed and posed, some holographic, standing on a plinth at the center of the hall. Tietjen half-expected the exhibits to come alive at any moment, but apart from the noiseless trumpeting of the holographic elephants, nothing moved. Were they running on batteries, or the kid’s goodwill, he wondered. He moved past the lions, the kudus, out of the hall and into a narrow gallery which was almost pitch dark. He heard nothing but the clicks of his shoes on the floor, faintly echoed. He followed the gallery into another hall filled with old-fashioned displays of warriors, hunters, gatherers in grass skirts. The few painted faces he could see in the darkness stared back at him. He moved as fast as he could without stumbling, hating the feeling of those blank, unwatchful eyes staring at him.

  At the end of that hall Tietjen turned right. Immediately he recognized where he was: in one of the South or Central American exhibits. The dull orange emergency lights shone on priapic stone fonts and wooden carvings. Tietjen’s inner compass told him he was near, almost there. He scanned the room from side to side, searching for something; he almost overlooked it when he found it. To his right there was an immense Olmec head, taller than Tietjen, its red stone cheeks glistening faintly in the orange light, its eyes watching Tietjen impassively, its smile close-lipped and enigmatic. At its base there was a bundle of clothes, including the coat Barbara had given the kid. Tietjen bent and touched the cloth, then went on.

  Twenty yards away he found Barbara, curled fetally against the cold, soundly asleep at the foot of a huge Aztec sun stone. Tietjen looked around, wary of a trap, then bent over her, shook her arm, called her name. She did not move. Fearful, Tietjen tried to find a pulse on her neck and could not—but felt the moist warmth of her breath on his wrist.

  “Barbara? Come on, we’ve got to go now. Come on, sweetie, wake up.” She did not stir. He tried again, shaking her harder. “Come on, Barbara. This isn’t a good place to be right now. Come on, honey.”

  She did not waken. Tietjen’s sense of urgency was growing steadily stronger; he wanted to be outside, out of the cold and the orange light. It would be close to dawn now. They could go home … .

  Awkwardly, Tietjen pulled Barbara’s arm around his neck and took her in his arms. She was lighter than he expected. He settled her quickly in his arms and started back toward the door.

  “Don’ go …”

  Tietjen almost dropped Barbara; his legs wobbled with the shock of the low, rumbling voice that echoed in the hall. Loud, like the voice of God. He looked around but could not see anyone else. He went forward again.

  The Olmec head smiled a serene, close-lipped smile before it spoke again; the stone lips moved slowly to shape the words. The voice rumbled. “Don’ go, Tee-jin. Leave old woman here … she mine now. Jit like to have her.”

  The smile broadened. “Tee-jin don’t have her now. She like Jit best.” The head displayed blunt round teeth in a huge, openmouthed laugh that echoed like a bell in the room. The laugh undid Tietjen: something in the undertones of it was more frightening than the stone head it came from. The laugh rolled through the room with a malevolent rumble, a hungry demonic sound—the tones in it made Tietjen want to howl, to drop down on the floor and roll around in misery.

  Instead he ran, Barbara still clutched to his chest, back the way he’d come, turning a corner and running through the dimly lit hall with the glowering African warriors. The rumbling laughter pursued him, and he thought he heard footsteps as well, though he couldn’t be sure in the echoing hall. There was a long, narrow hallway off to the left; he dodged in there, dropped Barbara’s feet to the floor so that he was dragging her, and felt along the wall for doors. The first he came to was unlocked. He shoved it open, put McGrath down as carefully as he could, and turned around to lock the door. Then he pulled a heavy table up against the door.

  Tietjen expected the room to be entirely dark, but as his eyes got accustomed, he saw that there were windows on the far side of the room, and a little predawn light spilling in around the edges of the blinds. He nearly tripped over McGrath on his way across the room, but when he opened the blinds there was just enough fading moonlight to see by. The room was cold, filled with stale, damp air; he was shivering. He pulled his collar closer, and went back to Barbara, who lay still unconscious, dressed only in a lightweight shirt and denim skirt, summer wear for the summer that was happening outside the museum. He had nothing to cover her with. In the thin light Tietjen thought that Barbara’s lips were blue, that he saw her shivering. He turned to watch the door, and slid backward toward the wall until he was sitting beside her.

  She lay still as a rock, no shivering. Tentatively, Tietjen stroked her hair back from her forehead, which was cool and dry. The white hair looked greenish in the dimness. After a moment, he put one hand under Barbara’s ear and lifted her head to pillow it on his thigh. Sitting like that, with Barbara curled beside him and his hand in her hair, Tietjen sat watching the door of the room. It seemed impossible to rest with his mind racing, wondering what to do next, but exhaustion won; he fell asleep still wondering.

  Barbara was still unconscious when he woke. His body ached in a hundred different directions, protesting the cold, the damp, the position, and the hardness of the floor. Tietjen cradled Barbara’s head in his hand again and moved it off his thigh, settling her gently on the floor before he let himself move. Standing up hurt like hell. The room was no warmer, but the greenish moonlight had changed to the pale watery light of morning.

  It seemed impossible to be too gentle with Barbara, too careful. Each time he looked at her, feelings welled up: guilt and pain and fear and love. He wondered if she would ever believe the last. He wondered if she would ever forgive him. If they ever got out of this room and back to the Store again.

  “John.”

  His back was to her; the hairs on the nape of his neck straightened at the sound of her voice. Then a knot he had not known was there untied itself in his stomach, and he turned to face her.

  Barbara had tucked her shirt neatly into the waistband of her skirt and smoothed the wrinkles out of the fabric. As he watched, she ran her hand through her hair and patted it back to its accustomed shape. “Where the hell are we?”

  “The Museum of Natural History. I got you away from him and brought you in here—”

  “Thank you, John.” She sounded formally polite. Angry with him? He hadn’t apologized yet, he realized.

  “Come here.” She held out a hand to him. And smiled. Something was wrong. “John?” she asked. A wounded edge to her voice. “What’s wrong?” There was something wolfish in her smile, he thought. Something peculiar and un-Barbara-like about the wa
y she watched him. “Hey, I won’t bite you. Unless you want me to.” The smile broadened. Tietjen wanted to recoil and fought the impulse, afraid to hurt her. If it was Barbara.

  “How are you doing?” he asked haltingly.

  “I’m fine. Don’t I look okay?” She held her right hand out to him, palm up. “What’s the matter, John, are you scared of me?”

  Yes.

  “No,” he said. “Are you warm enough?”

  “Come warm me up.” She reached her other hand to him, her arms open in a broad embrace. Her expression became hungrily sexual. Tietjen managed not to recoil, but he did not move toward her. Her smile slipped. “Don’t you owe me that much? A little warmth?” Her hands clawed up, and she ran her thumbs over her fingertips as if she were sharpening talons. “You made me feel like shit, John. Did you know that? Was it so grotesque to you that I wanted you? Am I supposed to be dead from the neck down because I’m twenty years older than you are?”

  “I never said that,” he blurted out, stung.

  “You didn’t have to.” Her manner was again flirtatious, airy. “It was quite clear. Poor John, you’ve got a face like a billboard sometimes: dismay, disgust, distress.” On each dis she took a step closer, poked her chin at him as if she could knock him down with it. “I thought it was me that disgusted you at first,” she said slowly. “Then I realized: you can’t handle anyone caring about you. Dismay, disgust, distress. So you pushed me away, and you, you poor bastard, don’t even know what you’re missing.” She smiled seductively, licked her lips and caught the lower one between her teeth in a parody of a courtesan’s gesture.

  From her left eye one tear launched and lazily slid down her cheek.