“So you’ll give her a chance?”
“It’s what I’m doing, isn’t it?” It came out harsher than he’d intended, but when he and Trix got out of the car he smiled at her, and she nodded. She knew him so well, and even with everything that was happening, she’d know that Jim would struggle to hold on to reason. Though an artist, he was also a pragmatist, an atheist, and a skeptic when it came to the supernatural or anything associated with it.
“She’ll amaze you,” Trix said. “Come on. She’s going.”
They followed Veronica along the street, and Jim was surprised when Trix clasped his hand. He took great comfort from the contact, and as he realized it was because she was afraid, he acknowledged his own fear as well.
Entering the shop, breathing in warmth and the familiar smell of new books, he wondered what they would find.
It was almost as if he had walked this way before. He had, of course, many times in the past. He and Jenny were both big readers, though their tastes differed-she loved thrillers, historical novels, and real-life stories, while he preferred biographies and science fiction. When they came into town they often spent an hour in one bookstore or another, enjoying watching Holly browse the books, buying a couple here and there, maybe progressing to the cafe for coffee and a shortbread, and sitting to check out their purchases. But this time was different. Veronica had said only a few sentences about Holly and Jenny being here, but the picture conjured in his mind was complete. He was walking in his missing family’s footsteps.
Breathing deeply, Jim moved past the counter and approached the children’s section.
Trix had let go of his hand as they walked through the front doors. Perhaps she’d felt the tension growing in him, or sensed that his mind wasn’t quite in the present as he tried to relive that moment, following Jenny and Holly’s path.
“Here,” Veronica said. She’d gone ahead, and as if following a guide of some kind, Jim and Trix had stayed a few steps behind. Now he saw her swaying slightly, and he reached out hesitantly, not wanting to touch her but worried that she was about to fall. If she drops dead here, now, just what the fuck will that mean? But she didn’t fall, and when she looked back at them he saw a strength in her eyes that he hadn’t noticed before. Something was affecting her, challenging her. But she was fighting back.
“I’m not sure,” Trix said. A strange thing to say.
“Do you feel it, Jim?” Veronica asked.
He frowned and looked around at the book stacks-the splash of colors and textures, words and names jumping out at him, the spines of children’s books hinting at the stories inside, and books faced out tempting with elaborate and enticing covers. “No,” he said, not understanding what she meant, but even as he closed his mouth again he did feel something. He felt…
Someone passed him by, but there was no one there.
The front door closed softly, and he heard the distant jangle of keys, but when he looked back it stood open, warm-air curtain shimmering his view of the rain-slicked sidewalk outside.
It’s all so wrong! he thought, and a nightmare he used to have when he was young struck him for the first time in decades. It used to plague him when he was sick, and he’d never been able to describe it, not even to himself. It was an impression of terrible space, so wide, so endless, that it lessened him where he stood at its heart, smothered him, crushed him down with enormity and possibility. And now it impacted again, because everything he saw and felt around him seemed, for a moment, an infinity away.
He gasped in air that was too far away to breathe. Book titles on the shelving before him blurred, and he closed his eyes to the cold, staggering thought, They mean something else! He stepped back and Trix stopped him, hands on his waist and her chin resting against his shoulder. He heard her breathing hard, felt her heart thudding against his back.
“What is it?” she asked Veronica, voice loud in Jim’s ear.
He opened his eyes again, and the woman was staring at a bookshelf. It was four rows above the floor, a selection of hardback books for children-atlases, natural-history books, histories-and as she slowly lifted her hand and moved closer, Jim knew what she was doing.
“This one,” she said. She touched the spine of a book called People and Places. “It fell, but not here. It only fell there.”
“Where?” Jim asked. Anger flared and faded again just as quickly, because now, through the fear, he only felt a desperate need to know. “ Please tell me, where?”
“Where they went,” Veronica said. “They slipped through into another Boston, and this is where it happened. Here.” She tapped the book’s spine and looked around again, ignoring an inquiring look from a shop attendant. “It’s all closed up again now, though. The In-Between has receded; the wound is mended. But there are always scars.”
“I don’t understand any of this,” Jim said.
Trix held him tighter. “I think I’m starting to.”
Veronica froze, and it was that sudden stillness that made Jim realize just how alive she seemed. Even while sitting beside him in the car she had been a formidable presence-a person whose gravity was greater than most-and he imagined her being the sort who could command a room upon entry, if she so desired. But for that brief moment she became more immobile than he believed any living person could.
“Closing time,” the shop assistant said.
“Yes,” Veronica said, turning and breezing past Jim and Trix. “Good. It’s gone now. Come with me.”
“Where to?” Jim asked, pleased to leave that place. They were here and then they weren’t, he thought, and there was something cold about that shop, and distant, and he wondered why the assistant didn’t seem to feel it. She smiled indulgently as they exited the store, and he heard the jangle of keys as she closed and locked the door behind them.
“Somewhere special,” Veronica said. “I can tell you more in the car. Hurry.”
As the rain stopped, a siren wailed in the distance. They walked back to the car. It took Jim a couple of seconds to identify the sensation rising inside him.
It was hope.
They slipped through, Trix thought. She was sitting in the backseat again, heart thudding, and as Veronica lowered herself gently into the front passenger seat, Trix said, “They’re somewhere else.”
“Yes, dear,” the woman replied. Jim was walking around the front of the car to the driver’s side, and for an unsettling moment Trix felt complicit in something of which she had no knowledge.
“But you can help us find them?” she whispered.
“I can help you.”
Jim opened the door and climbed in. He slipped the keys into the ignition and placed his hands on the wheel, ten to two. “So will you start telling me now?”
“I will,” Veronica said. “Now that I know for sure, I will.”
“Good. Where to?”
“The North End,” Veronica said. “Home.”
“We’re going to your house?” Trix asked.
“Like I said, dear. Somewhere special.”
Trix stared from the window and watched Boston passing them by, and thought about who they were with and where they were going. For some reason she’d never imagined the Oracle of Boston even having a home. Her grandmother had told her that story when she was barely into her teens, and the Oracle had taken on the hue of someone mystical and mysterious, one of the city’s own shadows, a breath of Boston’s unique air, a ghost. The story had been remarkable and felt very real, and Trix had always believed it was this, more than a thousand childhood dreams and a love of books, that had given her the open mind she had grown up with. She’d toyed with various prescriptive religions before settling into the comfortable embrace of her own beliefs. She’d once heard a ghost, and remembered the way sadness had settled around her for a brief, shattering moment as the wraith walked by. And now here she was in a shiny new Mercedes with the woman who knew Boston, and whom Boston knew.
“A long time ago, there was a man called Thomas McGee,” Veronica sai
d. Her voice had changed somewhat, as if she used different tones and inflections to relay stories, and Trix felt herself settling in to listen. “He was the Oracle at the end of the nineteenth century,” the older woman continued. “The first Irish Oracle, in fact, since the Boston Brahmins had dominated up until then.”
Trix frowned. “Brahmin” was such an outmoded word to describe Boston’s first families and their English Protestant ancestors. She wondered how old Veronica really was, and how long she had been the Oracle.
“By all accounts McGee was a proud man,” Veronica continued, “an older Irishman who’d seen his countrymen struggling toward equality against a background of bigotry and resentment. Since the middle of that century they’d filled most of the unskilled-labor jobs in the city, household domestics and the like, but as the years went on they became the backbone of Boston’s industrial boom. Yet they were still looked down upon. They lived in squalor in the North End and other areas. The all-Irish neighborhoods housed whole families living in single rooms. McGee grew up through that, and after he took on the mantle of Oracle he became more determined than ever to ensure that his people lived better lives in the future.”
“But as Oracle, weren’t all Boston’s people his people?” Trix asked. Maybe she had a rose-tinted view of what being Oracle meant; maybe she’d set Veronica on a pedestal higher than the position justified. Just because it was a little beyond and outside the perception of most normal people, did that mean that being Oracle implied perfection?
“Of course,” Veronica said. “But McGee… well, no one becomes Oracle without maintaining hold of his or her earlier experiences. We are a product of our experiences after all. He was as human as I, and I’m as human as you, dear.”
“So what happened?” Jim asked. He was driving quickly, paying close attention to the road, hands gripping the wheel tightly. He’d moved the rearview mirror back to its original position, and Trix had to lean to the left to catch sight of him now. But he was no longer glancing back to see if she was all right. His focus was elsewhere.
“The longer he remained Oracle, the more he witnessed events in the city around him, the more determined McGee became to ensure that the Oracle of Boston was always Irish.”
“Are you?” Trix asked.
“No,” Veronica said. “My father was English, my mother Italian. I do have some Irish in me, many generations old. But if Thomas McGee were alive today, he’d view me as his…”
“Enemy?” Trix finished for her.
“Perhaps,” Veronica said, smiling enigmatically.
“What does any of this have to do with Jenny and Holly?” Jim asked. Trix knew that tone; he was barely holding back his impatience. She’d heard him like that a few times before-usually when Holly was being difficult and deadlines pressured him into being a lesser father than they all knew he was.
“Plenty,” Veronica said. “Didn’t I say I’d tell you what was happening?”
The car was silent, and neither of them responded. And she shut down his rising anger just like that, Trix thought, seeing how much more loosely Jim sat in his seat.
“Well, then,” the woman continued. “Thomas McGee spent a long time planning how to pass on the responsibility of Oracle. It’s not a title, as such. It’s not a position that you can interview people for, or place an ad in the newspaper for when you feel your time in this world is coming to an end. The Oracle is you, as much as you are the Oracle, and it makes decisions through you.”
“It’s something separate?” Trix asked.
“Yes and no. The Oracle shares the soul of the city. It exists within me just as my own soul does. Though the city does not control the Oracle, it influences.” Her voice was lower, darker. “It becomes a corner of your own soul, when your soul has no corners.
“McGee was the city’s heart and soul for over forty years. In that time he saved countless lives, settled hearts, calmed ghosts, protected the city from dangers. He was, as far as I can tell, a good man. But he also spent a long time studying magicks that no Oracle should ever need. Druid ceremonial chants, Native American magic, Chinese and Eastern European spells, and much, much more. He accumulated a whole library of texts and parchments, purchasing them when he had to, procuring them by other means if he could. Though he could never leave the city, he sent people out to fetch what he sought. He studied and planned, and made it his aim to secure the Irish lineage of Oracles from his life forth.”
“He wanted Boston to remain Irish forever,” Jim said.
“Yes. He witnessed the Italians flooding the city, lessening the Irish majority, and though he was the Oracle, I believe there was always a small part of him that was still too much of what he had been before. He’d suffered hardships and discrimination, and that twisted parts of him that not even being Oracle could completely erase.”
“I’ve never heard of him,” Jim said.
“Have you ever heard of me?” Veronica asked.
In the backseat, Trix smiled. That had been a question she’d asked her grandmother, all those years ago. If the Oracle’s so awesome, how come everyone doesn’t go to her? And her grandmother’s answer had stuck with her forever: She’s there to help people who come to her with open minds and open hearts, and who are truly in need. Others will never believe in her, and if they don’t believe, they’ll never find her.
“Fair point,” Jim said. “Which way?”
“Left here. Five minutes. I’ll show you more then, but for now all you need to know is this: McGee tried something that no one had ever tried before, and he failed. And his failure had dire consequences.
“He performed a ritual to try to secure Boston for the Irish, to make sure the influence of Irish culture would remain and that the Oracle would always be Irish. But he toyed with magicks far beyond his capacity to control, and his meddling splintered the city. No one since has discovered just how he did this, because everything he used in the process was destroyed. But his ritual created a schism, splitting Boston’s reality into three distinct paths: one where a Brahmin Oracle would exist, and the city reflected those influences; one where an Irish Oracle persisted; and one, this world we know, where the Oracle is chosen by the city, as was always intended.”
“What happened to McGee?” Trix asked, though she thought the answer was almost inevitable.
“I believe he died,” Veronica said. Trix hadn’t been expecting that. Doesn’t she know for sure? she wondered.
“And these Bostons,” Jim said, gesturing at the windshield as if to indicate all three. “What are they? Where are they?”
“They’re here and now, but beyond the reach of most,” Veronica said. “Alternate paths. Histories, presents, and futures created by McGee’s dabbling. He smashed reality and replaced it without most people noticing. It’s possible he changed things-thousands might have ceased to exist, and thousands more been dragged into existence, though there’s no way of telling.”
“But how could he do that and not change the whole world?” Trix asked. “If he changes Boston…”
“They’re alternate paths, and in the other Bostons the worlds beyond are subtly different, too,” the old woman said. “But only insofar as they’re affected by Boston. He split this city into three new worlds, but Boston is the heart of the change. Its differences seep into the wider world. He made it one of the most important cities ever, and most Bostonians don’t even know.”
“Jesus Christ,” Jim muttered. He stopped at traffic signals and glanced back over his shoulder, and Trix expected to see his weary cynicism souring his face. But he looked excited and hopeful, the emotions sheltered but definitely there. She knew him well enough to see that.
“You think Jenny and Holly have slipped through to one of these other worlds?” Trix asked.
“Our world, but an alternate path,” Veronica said. “And yes, that is what happened.”
“How?” Trix asked. “Why? In that bookshop? How come no one saw, or raised the alarm? Why them? What happened to them, do the
y know, will they… Will they be scared?”
Veronica turned in her seat, shifting sideways so that she could look comfortably at Trix. Jim glanced nervously at her, as if expecting her to do something terrible or unexpected. But the woman simply remained there, staring at Trix as something changed in her eyes. She’s seeking, Trix thought, unsure where the idea came from. But it seemed to fit. Veronica was in the car with them, but part of her was elsewhere as well.
“Trix, you were cold and wet and alone,” she said. “You tried to grab the branch, but it was slippery, wet from the rain and slick with moss. You tried for a long time, kicking against the current. Kicking against the depths pulling you down.”
Trix suddenly felt very cold. She gasped, shock stealing her breath.
“Every time you grabbed the branch you held on tighter, but when you tried to pull yourself out, it always slipped away. Because you weren’t grasping tighter, you were holding on weaker. You were fading. You knew it, but you refused to panic.” She leaned toward Trix, almost kneeling on the front seat now. “Am I right, Trix?”
“Yes,” Trix tried to say, but it came out as little more than a breath.
“How old were you?”
“Seven. My grandparents told me not to go too close to the river. We were on vacation in Baxter State Park in Maine. They were in the cabin getting dinner, and I… I went for a walk.”
“Too close to the river,” Veronica said.
“Yeah.” Trix remembered seeing the branch above her for the last time, shattered into a hundred slivers as she slipped below the water and sunlight glancing from the surface rippled her vision. Something grabbed her then and dragged her away, her limbs trailing through plants and weeds growing across the riverbed, though she could not grab hold of anything. She remembered wondering why, with hands so small and strong, nothing would let her hold on. And then after that things were dark and lost, until the sun prized her eyelids apart and her grandfather was crying above her.
“In the other Bostons… I don’t know if you drowned in that river at the age of seven, or died at a later age in an entirely separate incident. But in both of the other Bostons, you no longer exist.”
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