Black Swan Rising

by Lee Carroll

  “What the hell is that?” I queried Will again.

  “Hell is right,” he said, but now squeezing my hand reassuringly. “Discord at its worst. The demon’s put down a force field, an invisible barrier, at Ninety-sixth Street, and then Dee’s draped a fog over it so oncoming southbound drivers can’t see it or the wreckage in front of them. So the crashes keep on coming. The demon’s either not potent enough yet to block both sides of the road, or it’s got a worse catastrophe in mind for when there’s a big enough backup northbound. We can’t afford to wait to find out, though. Can you call 911 while we detour?”

  “Detour?” I replied, my eyes widening. The deserted southbound side of the highway looked appealing for a U-turn detour to the southbound exit, but access was blocked by a four-foot-high wall between the lanes. To the right were the bare trees, shadowy grass, and graffitied lamps of Riverside Park; none of the paved walkways were wide enough to allow a car access.

  I tried 911 as the driver pondered the detour dilemma as well. The number was busy, something that was never supposed to happen again given the circuit expansion after 9/11 . . . I didn’t want to speculate on how many disasters could be happening now around the city, given that we had encountered one on just our one small route—tens of thousands of calls were certainly required to fill up the circuits. Then Will’s patience with his driver lapsed. He jerked open the partition between the front and rear seats, ordered the driver one seat over, and clambered legs first through the partition opening, nimbly as the sleekest of jaguars. He floored the gas pedal while steering sharply to the right, maneuvering the Rolls between several cars in the middle and right northbound lanes in a way that seemed impossible, and jumped the curb into the park with only the slightest of bumps. Then he maneuvered on grass with surprising smoothness, between the gaunt, winter-stripped trees, as effortlessly as if he had been out there in the park jogging.

  At one point, though, for all his dexterity, I thought we were about to smash into a majestic oak that appeared in our path as if out of nowhere. For a fleeting instant I had the impression that the oak had in fact slid into our path, its roots sliding like coiling legs beneath the frozen ground, the twigged ends to its branches featuring tiny eyes that allowed it to position itself properly. I cringed and closed my eyes, bracing for an awful impact. And in that moment of closing my eyes, I felt an enormous wind sweeping through the car, sending us all hurtling into a void deeper than darkness; when I opened my eyes again, I couldn’t see a thing. The temperature seemed to have plunged massively, but the only motion in the total darkness was my own shivering; the wind had vanished. I briefly heard the faintest of high-pitched whining sounds. The thought came to me that I was now reduced to subatomic size and was standing on the chilly nucleus of a single atom, listening to electrons whir. I even located the atom, near the edge of the universe. Without warning the reality of the car then returned—for a moment it seemed to be still spinning itself, though it hadn’t crashed—and then Will was calmly driving it back over another curb onto Riverside Drive heading north. He made a right onto West Seventy-sixth Street as blithely as if he were driving to the Fairway supermarket on Broadway, then a left onto northbound West End Avenue. I remained speechless with relief and astonishment. When we stopped for a light behind a long line of cars—no doubt there was significant overflow already from the trauma on the highway—Will nodded to the driver, got out of the car, and then they both took the seats they’d started up the West Side Highway in.

  “What on earth was that?” I asked.

  “Transmigration of atoms,” Will said casually. He smiled, and there was a sense of triumph in his smile.

  “And what is that?”

  “As I mentioned on Governors Island, I can’t exactly fly but . . .” He draped his left arm over me and gave my left shoulder an affectionate squeeze. “Atom-transit can be the next best, or an even better, thing. You have already experienced a waterpower similar to it with Melusine, but atom-transit belongs to the air. I was initiated into it long ago by one of the fey, but not quite correctly, and thus I always invoke it with mixed results. In any event the intensity of will—no pun intended—required for it is enormous, and so it can only be resorted to in the direst of emergencies. The malevolent tree attacking us, manipulated by Discord—a tree which was one of the French botanist Jean Robin’s experiments that got away from him, its seed blown here on a transoceanic wind current centuries ago—certainly qualified. Especially with Dee trying to destroy New York City in the background. But even under the most dramatic of conditions, it doesn’t always succeed. I’ve had both sorts of outcomes with it over the years. Anyway, it’s benign when it works—we all slept right through it. Just as well. Those trillion-mile journeys can get a little dull.” He laughed as if he’d been on one too many.

  I pondered whether to tell him that I hadn’t quite been asleep—or else my moment on the surface of the nucleus had been a dream, but it had seemed real—when a titanic boom from a nearby explosion shook the car and brought both traffic and thinking to a halt. Slowly, as my eardrums reestablished equilibrium, I shook all my limbs to make sure they were still attached to my body. They were. There was no sign of blood on my coat, either, always a good omen for surviving a disaster. My companions looked unhurt and the car seemed undamaged, though the boom had exploded through the car just as overwhelmingly as the wind of transubstantiation had blown through it minutes before. As best I could tell, the sound had come from farther north on West End Avenue, a bit to our left, either on the west side of the street or nearby on an intersecting side street. But far enough away that we hadn’t been hurt. Except traffic was once again at a standstill. Another victory for Dee.

  Fire engines were already racing up the southbound side of West End Avenue, against traffic, causing a number of southbound cars to pivot wildly or seek refuge on the northbound side. It looked like it could be a while before the confusion got sorted out. And it looked as if Despair’s and Discord’s mayhem would only escalate as we were further delayed. Perhaps New York City was going to be taken apart tonight, road by road, block by block. I dreaded what incidents like this boom or the car pyramid meant for their immediate victims. But I dreaded even more the momentary despair in Will’s eyes as he directed an agonized glance at me. Had he run out of ideas?

  “The tower entrance is ten miles from here,” he said. “We’ll never get there.”

  It was the first moment since I’d met him that I’d known him to seem without hope. Mournful, yes. Regretful, yes. But never hopeless. “Trans—what is it—migration?” was all I could think of in response. Maybe he needed me to encourage him to get to the necessary level of will. If it could work once, why couldn’t it work twice? The trip around the tree had taken no more than an instant, really, but if I’d been right about the location of the atom I stood on midtrip, we could have gone anywhere in that instant. It’d been pretty cold wherever we went, but it held nothing like the pain of entering water with Melusine. I didn’t know the physics of the other world well enough to guess what the problem could be.

  Then my thoughts were interrupted again when, several blocks to the east—perhaps above Central Park West—I could see a huge arc of white and gold flame suddenly sear the sky, dropping sparks and what looked like tiny flaming cylinders everywhere. A low boom resonated seconds later, like thunder following lightning. The very sight of the fire was so intense that it stirred a blood memory of my time with Ddraik, as if we had formed an ashes-to-ashes bond beneath City Hall. A wave of heat coursed through my veins as if my flesh could actually catch fire. I shuddered; certainly we didn’t have a moment to lose in getting away to the north. But the next words out of Will’s mouth were not encouraging.

  “I’ve just never known it to work twice within a short period of time. And I have tried it.”

  The fiery reflection of the conflagration to the east highlighted Will’s features as he turned to me while speaking. His flesh took on an eerie cast, as if the silve
r tint of his skin were merging with bronze in an alchemy of Discord. He observed the tremor in my expression and tried to sound more hopeful. “We could try calling in my helicopter, but I didn’t like that fog on the river.”

  A particularly loud, flaring thump echoed then from the roof of the car, which I thought might have been falling debris from whatever had happened near Central Park West. But then I was astonished, and elated, to see Lol’s tiny face appear upside down near the top of Will’s passenger-side window. She started to crawl down from the roof while jabbing a finger at him along the glass, gesticulating wildly, and jabbering at him continuously. Slowly, as if reluctantly, he lowered the window. She flew into the backseat and hovered in the air, wings whirring faster than a hummingbird’s, and went on lecturing Will in adamant fashion.

  I pulled on his sleeve to get his attention. “What’s she saying?”

  He turned briefly to me, though she squawked loudly at his inattention. “She’s saying that if she helps, we can transmigrate a second time. She can’t go with us, as her knowledge and skills are required here to give what help she can in fighting the fires. But she can help the atom-travel. She claims she knows a part of the incantation I’ve never been able to obtain.”

  First of all I was relieved that Lol had recovered, and quickly, from Oberon’s brutality. And as to Lol’s offer, I didn’t have to give it any thought. “We can do it!” I shouted. And I was thrilled to say “we.” If this was a power we both could participate in, Will couldn’t be all bad, no matter what Oberon or Dee or the reputation of vampires or anything else claimed.

  Things moved quickly then. Will ordered the driver out of the car, and he disappeared into a throng of people streaming up West End Avenue toward the site of the explosion. No doubt the idea of expelling him was to lighten the molecular load. Will occupied the driver’s seat and had me sit up front with him. He lowered the driver’s-side window and Lol hovered exactly where the glass had been, ready to both transmit instructions into Will’s left ear and, I assumed, peel away at the last possible instant before transmigration. Will glanced at Lol, then took his right hand off the steering wheel to clasp my left hand tightly.

  “Don’t you need that to steer?” I asked, glancing from hand to wheel. But I didn’t take my hand away.

  He grinned. “If all it took were two hands on the wheel, we already would have toured galaxies, you and me!”

  He floored the gas pedal and veered into the now empty southbound side of West End Avenue. I was then jarred back into my seat by more acceleration than I’d ever felt in my life. My eyelids slammed shut. At the very last instant of sight I thought I saw Lol’s green and gold flash as she soared skyward in a different direction from our motion. I fastened on the idea of her scurrying through the air to fight the Central Park West fire by whatever ingenious means she had, then flowed once again into extreme cold and a sense of standing on a nucleus while electrons whirled faintly around it like distant planets, even though the entire atom including their orbits was an infinitestimal scrap of matter itself. But then the cold went away and for a searing moment I was standing on near-infinite, pulsing heat, vaster than the sun’s in a sunstorm, more akin to the original white-hot surge that created matter. Had we burned up this time? I couldn’t help wondering, while vertigo began to afflict me from watching the circling electrons. But if I was asking the question I was alive, and I could also separate and distinguish the warmth and life in Will’s grasping hand from the sudden sizzle of the atom.

  The next thing I knew the atomic landscape had vanished, and we had come to a bumpy stop. Rougher than the last landing, but I was all right even if the car, from a variety of groaning metallic sounds I had last heard in the accident with my mother, wasn’t. As my eyelids struggled open, I observed that another massive tree had split open the car’s engine block this time, the violent cleavage ending only a few inches from the windshield. I had the most fleeting sense of tiny eyes on the twig tips of branches sprawled all over the windshield like a spider web of wood. Much more important, Will was okay, a quick glance told me. He was already trying to open the driver’s-side door. The door only budged a few inches, but he then shattered the window glass with a sharp jab of his elbow, exiting through the shard-edged, empty window frame as lithely as he’d climbed through the car’s open partition earlier. He planted himself firmly on the ground, extended his arms to me, and gathered me up and lifted me out the window in one supple motion, with a delicacy that left me unscratched by the slivers of glass. Will had the strength in his forearms to split steel.

  “My aim was a little bit off,” he said sheepishly in reference to the car, as he settled me on the ground.

  We were in front of an entrance to Van Cortlandt Park near the Old Croton Aqueduct Trail, a sign told us. I didn’t know the neighborhood at all, but I was struck by how deserted the street seemed. I didn’t want to dwell on the possibilities for why, but certainly the bigger the disaster, the bigger the audience watching on TV at home.

  “Or else that tree splitting the car is a very recent arrival,” Will went on. “It certainly didn’t appear on the geoscreen I used in plotting the landing. If that’s the case, that’s a shame about Jean Robin’s capacity for error. I knew him and liked him way back when. But sometimes his botany could get a little out of control.”

  I was too drained to ask for examples of Jean Robin’s “past errors.”

  But I wasn’t too drained for a kiss.

  The High Tower

  We entered Van Cortlandt Park and started along the Croton trail. As I followed Will’s increasingly fast pace on the wooded trail, I began to wonder what we were going to do when we found Dee. If Dee was so powerful that he could cause massive traffic accidents with invisible force fields, blow up buildings, and start huge fires, what chance did we have against him?

  “I don’t understand how we’re going to get to the High Bridge Tower from here,” I yelled to Will on a more immediate point. He’d stopped up ahead at a small, square, stone building and was standing in front of a boarded-up and padlocked door. “What’s this place?”

  “The Weir,” he said, leaning his shoulder against the door. The wood groaned, splintered, and suddenly just wasn’t there anymore. Through the dust of the shattered door I saw stone steps leading down into the ground. “We’re going underground,” Will said, taking my hand. “Come on. There’s not much time.”

  As I followed Will down the stone steps, I snapped my fingers to produce a small flame to see by. At the bottom of the stairs the flame danced off a sheet of black water, sending ripples of light up into an arched brick tunnel hung with stalactites. Tree roots snaked out of chinks in the brick, twisting across the arched roof in an intricate weave. It looked like the entrance to the underworld, but I had figured out what it was by now.

  “The old Croton Aqueduct,” I said aloud.

  “Yes. It leads straight to the High Bridge Tower.” Will stepped off the last step into the water, which I was glad to see was only a few inches deep. Still, I felt an innate dread of stepping into that dark water.

  “Come on,” he said, holding his hand out for me. “You traveled through the whole water system yesterday.”

  “As disembodied molecules,” I answered, stepping gingerly into the water, “and that was clean drinking water. This—” The water eddied around my feet, rippling in long ropes of black and white in the firelight. “This looks like it could have—”

  “Don’t say it!” Will ordered, grabbing my arm and pulling me into a fast walk. “As we get closer to Dee, we’ll be susceptible to his influence. He’ll pick up on any fears you voice—or even think—and make them real.”

  Great! I thought; I hadn’t said the word snakes, but now it was the only word in my head—except maybe for rats and giant mutant crocodiles. “I thought you said that Dee wouldn’t see us if we approached the tower underground.”

  “I’m hoping he won’t see us, but even if he doesn’t, he’ll have set some traps in
the tunnels. Don’t think about it—just stay close.”

  Will set such a fast pace that soon I didn’t have the breath to talk anymore. That left a lot of room for my imagination to roam over all the potential horrors that might be lurking in the underground, disused aqueduct. I tried to focus on the blinding white-hot anger I’d felt for Dee when I learned he’d killed my mother. I pictured him standing by the car fire, his face impassive and cold as my mother burned to death. But then, instead of feeling anger, I felt horror as I imagined my mother burning in that fire. I tried to push the thought away. It was the one image I had forbidden myself from ever picturing. She was already dead when the car exploded, I’d told myself. Or the explosion happened so quickly she wouldn’t have felt anything. But now when I pictured John Dee standing beside that fire, I heard my mother’s screams as well and knew that her last minutes on earth had been a living hell.

  “We’re almost at the bridge,” Will’s voice broke into the painful image. I was glad for the distraction, but when I focused on the scene ahead of us, my heart sank. The aqueduct sloped steeply downward and disappeared in a sea of fog. “This is the gate chamber that pumped the water upward to the bridge. Dee’s filled it with fog to make it more difficult to cross. We’ll have to be especially careful. There are dead ends and siphons that plunge down into the hillside. Can you use your flame to shine through the fog?”

  I held up my thumb and willed the small flame into a larger torch. The flame swelled up a foot high, but instead of lighting a path through the fog it revealed shapes in the murk—bulging blobs like giant amoebas, writhing, swelling, dividing . . . then swelling again.

  “What are they?” I asked, horrified to see that some of the blobs were acquiring the rough shapes of human beings.