by Marc Zicree
I plow, heading for the source of the dancing light. The narrow passage widens out and jogs right. It meets a broader corridor with a ceiling so high it seems to connect with outer space. There are torches here, stuck in crude sconces along the rough walls. To the left, the corridor descends farther into the earth; to the right, it rises. The sound of rushing water comes from the lower branch; above, I hear something that’s almost music.
I swing upward to the right, passing so close to a torch that it should’ve singed my hair. It doesn’t, because it’s putting out no heat. It’s also completely silent. Someone here has gotten the faux-glow thing down to a fine art. I touch a finger to the flame.
“You’re one stubborn son’vabitch, aren’t you?”
I wheel to find the flare, Magritte, floating about five feet up the passage from me in a wash of pale violet light. She throws me off balance, like misjudging a step.
“So I’m told,” I answer. “The Preserve, I presume?”
She tilts her head, looking me up and down with those amazing golden eyes and making me acutely aware of my sartorial shortcomings. Reflexively, I try to shove hair out of my face.
“The doorway to it. A doorway,” she amends. Her voice is soft and carries the lilt of the bayou. “You shouldn’t’ve come here. Mary don’t want people to come here without they been invited.”
“Sorry. I don’t mean to gate-crash, but it’s very important for me to understand how Enid protects you from the Source.”
“I know.” She seems sincerely empathetic. “But I don’t think you can understand it. It’s just something he does. What you do gotta understand is that Mary’s built this whole world here, and she’ll protect it.” She floats closer. So close I can see the subtle wrinkle of concern between her pale brows. “You should go.”
“I can’t. I need to talk to Enid. I need to at least try to understand what he does-how he does it. Maybe it’s something I can learn.”
She shakes her head. “No one’s been able to learn it. Not even Kevin Elk Sings, and he’s a medicine man and a musician. You gotta turn back around and get outta here, before you get caught. She’ll do whatever it takes to protect this place from the wrong sort of people.”
“We’re the right sort of people, Magritte. I promise you.” “Nice words,” says a new voice, “but cheap. How do I know I can afford to believe them?”
If Magritte’s voice is cloud, this one is rock, iron, steel. The woman it belongs to doesn’t even come up to my shoulder, but even at first glance I can see she suits her voice completely. She’s what they used to call a handsome woman-strong-featured, with a square jaw and pale eyes that could cause chilblains with prolonged exposure.
Before I can answer her question, which I suspect is rhetorical, two large and very substantial gentlemen appear on either side of her, making trust irrelevant.
“Mary McCrae?” I bow slightly. “Goldie, a.k.a. Herman Goldman. I see I have some convincing to do.”
“You’re welcome to try, Mr. Goldman, but I can only promise to listen.” She gestures for me to move up the slope past her. I’d be crazy to decline the invitation.
The cave broadens out into a large rounded room with a natural stone pillar at one end. There’s a sooty niche in the center of the formation-someone’s been using it for a can-dleholder-and faded graffiti on the walls.
There are grunters here, squatting on their haunches and doing grunter things: chowing down on something unrecognizable, guzzling from steamy clay mugs, and leering at us out of their milky, slug-trail eyes. I can’t contain a shiver.
Mary is amused at my squeamishness. “We are not what you’d call an elite society, Mr. Goldman.”
“Really? I somehow got the idea you were only interested in ‘the right kind of people.’ Um, what kind are those, exactly?”
She stops and drills me with those pale, miss-nothing eyes. “The kind who need refuge, a community, a place to belong. The kind who want a chance to maintain a grasp on their humanity. Can you understand that, Mr. Goldman?”
Do I understand? My years of being looked past, stepped over, and even spit on are not so long gone. I remember someone we encountered in our first days out of New York. A boy named Freddy. At least, before the Change he’d been a boy. After, he was alone, scared, and no longer completely human. In an alternate universe, Freddy might have come west with us to find this place, but he’d run off because he was no longer like us.
“I do understand,” I tell her, and change the subject. “Do all the mounds connect to the caverns?”
She gives me a sidewise glance out of the corner of her eyes. “At times.”
So I’ve seen. I start to ask who designed her “drawbridge” when we reach a concrete stair that spirals upward. I’m reminded of my dream-stairway to oblivion and experience a moment of sharp, clear panic. But this stair goes up into sunlight. Not that wishy-washy post-rainstorm stuff, but golden, unambiguous sunlight. I hold my breath and climb.
At the top of the stairs I stop dead. Before me is arranged a campground of sorts about a large irregular sward of grass laced with neat graveled paths. Among the encircling trees are cabins, summer cottages with canvas walls, travel trailers, campers, RVs, and tents. Directly upslope there is something I have trouble wrapping my mind around. It looks like a little Wild West town complete with saloon, assay office, church, train station, and jail. All is bathed in a golden glow, as if I’m looking through a cinematic filter.
Reality check, please.
The world pauses to watch me. My hostess also watches, an unreadable expression on her face. There is a pleasant ringing in my ears-the music-not-music I’ve been hearing since I got here. It seems to come from all around me. Everywhere there are people, both natural and processed. I see a few more grunters plying the sunny clearing, wearing shades or carrying umbrellas and bundled up as if to keep any exposed skin from being touched by ambient light.
Sounds cute, huh? They are not cute. They are creepy. There are also some tweaks here I’ve never seen before.
My breath catches in my throat. I see another flare-a white-haired boy, who stares at me through azure eyes as if I’m the oddest thing in this picture. An instant later he darts behind a tree.
Mary is watching me closely; she doesn’t miss my reaction.
“How many…?”
“The fireflies? Seven now.” A shadow crosses her face and is gone. She gestures toward the one-horse town, urging me forward.
The town ambles up the hill, at the top of which is a large lodge with smoke curling cozily from its several chimneys. Picturesque in the extreme, but nowhere-nowhere-is there a single burial mound of any kind.
“Where am I?”
My hostess sweeps a strand of graying hair out of her face and smiles. “Not where you expected to be, apparently.” “Where are the mounds?”
“About two hundred miles southeast of here.”
My brain tilts and I do a full 360, taking in everything around me. She’s not joking. The landscape is similar- karst topography, in geologese-but the trees are of different varieties and-behold! — they are not made of crystal. In fact, they’re still green.
But the dead giveaway is the sign. It is posted not more than fifty feet from where I stand and it doesn’t say one word about the Adena mounds or the Delf Norona Museum. It says: OLENTANGY INDIAN CAVERNS, DELAWARE, OHIO: ORIGINAL CAVE ENTRANCE. There is a chunk of exposition beneath this in charmingly rough-hewn letters that have been chiseled out of the wooden plank and painted yellow. I don’t have time to read it, except to note that it speaks of the religious ceremonies of Wyandotte Indians, and of oxen falling down holes. I’m being ushered to the Lodge.
As we pass through the campgrounds, I see where the musical aura of this place comes from. There are wind chimes everywhere-in the trees, on the buildings, and on clotheslines strung between. The chimes are made of glass, metal shrapnel, bits of fired pottery, hollowed-out wooden tubes.
Clearly, this is more than a
fashion statement. My musician’s ear notices something else about them, too: they seem to be playing the same scale of notes so that, in the whole gentle cacophony, there is never a note out of tune. There is only harmony. And if that isn’t rare enough, they’re singing away without a breeze to stir them.
Okay, so why hang wind chimes everywhere, then go to the trouble to tune them and keep them moving even when there’s no wind? And how? I hope Mary McCrae likes to play Twenty Questions.
We pass a cleared area marked by concentric circles of logs laid out on the ground. At the center of the area is the smoking remains of a large fire. Clearly a gathering area of some sort. We bypass the Wild West town, cutting straight up the hill. I see only the backs of buildings. Faces in windows.
The Lodge is an archetypal construct of wood and stone and slate shingle. It looks quite perfect sitting there among the trees-serene, rustic. I’m ushered into an office on the first floor-a pleasant room with knotty pine walls and red and green plaid furnishings that trigger a ghost-memory of summers long ago when I was almost happy. A cabin in the Catskills, a white-haired old gent who laughed a lot and who had my mother’s smile.
I shake myself. Mary is asking if I won’t please be seated. I do please, taking the middle of the plaid sofa. She perches across from me on the edge of a large desk. The substantial gentlemen both leave; Magritte stays. A moment later Enid comes into the room looking almost sheepish. He sidles to a chair on my right where Magritte is in restless hover, but he doesn’t sit, he hovers, too, in a manner of speaking, half leaning against the chair.
“Enid tells me you tracked him here,” says Mary.
“I did. We did-my friends and I.”
“Why?”
“He didn’t tell you?”
“I’d like to hear it in your words, if you please.”
“We have a rather special interest in Enid’s music.”
“You wouldn’t be the first. Enid’s ability is quite exceptional and rare. What’s your particular interest?”
“One of the men I’m traveling with-Cal Griffin-has a twelve-year-old sister who is now a flare.”
“A what?”
“Like Magritte,” says Enid quietly. “A firefly. The Storm got her, too, he said. Like in Chicago.” He lowers himself to the arm of the chair.
Mary’s sharp eyes soften just a bit. “I’m truly sorry, Mr. Goldman. But if the Storm got your friend’s sister, how can Enid possibly help her?”
“We’re headed west to where the Source-what you call the Storm-is gathered. If Enid really can shield flares from the Source, maybe he could help break them free of it.” Maybe, I think, he could do more.
Now Mary’s eyebrows shoot straight up into her fringe of salt and pepper hair. “You’re tracking the Storm? How?”
“It’s a little talent I have, I guess. I’m like a compass. It- um-pulls me.” And the sign on that door says: Do not enter.
Mary nods and glances at Enid. “And your ability to see through our defenses-to walk through our defenses-is that also a ‘little talent’ you have?”
“Ah … apparently.” I don’t like the way this conversation is going. Especially since I now suspect that the others aren’t right behind me after all.
“You’ll understand, perhaps, if I tell you this concerns me.”
She slides off the desk and meets me eye-to-eye though I’m sitting. She is shorter, I realize, than Tina, but her stature is not a matter of physical size. This is One Big Woman.
“Usually, people don’t come here without an invitation,” she tells me. “In fact, since Enid and Maggie and I came here, no one has come through that portal that we haven’t led through. This is a place of refuge, Mr. Goldman. A preserve of human life. And your ‘little talent’ could put its very existence in jeopardy.”
I look over at Magritte. Her eyes are wide with what I think is concern (though flare eyes can be hard to read, and that little puckering between her brows could be annoyance). Enid is examining a knot in the floorboards. No help there.
“I’m no danger to you, Mary.” I try to reassure her. “My friends are no danger to you. All we want is to talk to Enid in the hope that maybe he can help us.”
“This compound”-she makes a sweeping gesture with one arm-“is locked in a vault that is somehow folded up in space. We don’t understand how. All we understand is that to keep it hidden, we have to bar the doors and windows and mind the locks. You picked my locks, Mr. Goldman. How many more like you are there at home?”
Several things flash through my mind at once. One is Mary’s choice of words; these are her people, her place, her locks, her gates I have crashed. Second is a quandary: Do I tell her there is one of me or many?
I opt for the truth. “There aren’t any more like me. At least, not among the people I’m with. None of them saw Magritte until Enid let them. None of them can see through your defenses or pick your locks.”
“No?” She turns on her heel, starts to pace. “But you could let them in.”
“I was kind of hoping you’d do that.”
“So they can talk Enid into leaving us to find this Source?”
“Not necessarily. He may be able to share his talent with us in another way. He might know something we don’t, something we can learn. Pardon me, but I kind of got the idea from Enid that helping people in need is your shtick.”
“My shtick.” A smile lifts one corner of her mouth. “Well, it’s a nice story, Mr. Goldman. It touches the heart.”
Her pacing brings her back into my face. “I have over 120 souls here. And more coming, by invitation, every day. What if you’re not what you advertise yourself to be? What if you have other motives that I can’t begin to divine? Or even if you’re sincere, what happens if the only way Enid can help you is to go with you?”
I hold up my hands in surrender. “Fine. I’ll leave.”
She grimaces. “So you can gate-crash again with reinforcements? Try to put yourself in my place. Would you trust you?”
Well, now. Given what the world is coming to, she has a point. Lesson number one in post-Change reality is that if it was ever true that nothing is what it seems, it now goes double.
“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, followin
g 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.”
