Angelfire mt-2

by Marc Zicree

“The Change is selective, Mary. You know that better than anyone. It chose Goldie and Enid, but not me or Doc or Colleen.”

  She was nodding. “Or me, for that matter. In my past life…” She paused, smiled. “Listen to me, sounding as if I’d died and been reincarnated. In my past life I was conversant, Mr. Griffin. I spoke the language. I knew the drill. I could perform because I knew the rules of engagement. There is a new language; I don’t speak it. There are new rules; I don’t know them. I don’t know the drill anymore-I’m winging it. It’s as if I’ve gone suddenly blind and Enid is my seeing-eye dog.”

  “And Goldie is mine.”

  “Your what?” Goldie was standing in the doorway of Mary’s office, looking from one of us to the other.

  “Lucky rabbit’s foot,” said Mary wryly.

  I decided to cut to the chase. “Goldie, Mary would need you to stay here and take Enid’s place if he comes with us.”

  He was unsurprised. “Sure. Makes perfect sense, except that you’d be in dry dock without me.”

  “You’re that sure?” Mary asked.

  Goldie nodded. He wandered farther into the room, coming to squat by the coffee table.

  “You couldn’t show them on a map?” she pressed him.

  He chuckled, his eyes picking over the odds and ends on the tabletop. “Mary, I don’t know if you’ve tried using maps lately, but they can be awfully unreliable. Things aren’t where they belong. The Ohio is a whitewater theme park ride, and there are invisible corridors between Ohio and West Virginia. And it’s still changing. Isn’t it, Cal?” He glanced up at me, his eyes ice-pick sharp, reminding me that the Change hadn’t left me completely untouched.

  If I were to twist suddenly, I wondered, what form would I take? I turned the thought aside.

  “So you can’t just divine where it is on a current map and let them extrapolate?” Mary asked.

  He picked up the rattle and fiddled with it, turning it over in his hands. It responded with a soft scrape of dried beans. He seemed fascinated by it. “I could point to … oh, South Dakota and say it’s there. I could even point to the Badlands and say it’s there. But the Badlands covers a hell of a lot of territory. The reality is: I feel a pull; I take a step. If it’s the right step, I feel the pull get stronger. If I take the wrong step…” He shrugged. “Right now, all I know is that the pull is coming from somewhere west of here.”

  Mary sat back in her chair and looked at me. “So, that’s it, then. I can’t let Enid go. And you can’t let Goldie go. An impasse.”

  I looked down at my hands. They were clenched, knuckles white. I relaxed them with effort. “Mary, I know you care about the people here. I understand that you want to protect them. But they’re a handful of people out of the millions- maybe billions-who are homeless, helpless, confused. When we left New York, it was coming apart at the seams. People were dying-worse, they were killing. Even people who didn’t change behaved like animals.”

  “And your point?”

  I looked up at her. “If Enid stays here, he can save a handful. If he goes with us, he could save billions.”

  Mary flushed to the roots of her hair. “You overstate your case, Mr. Griffin. We have no way of knowing how widespread-”

  “Did you hear what I said? We came here from Manhattan. We can vouch for the fact that the Change has affected New York, West Virginia, Ohio. Planes have fallen out of the sky, there’s no electricity, and the landscape in some places is as twisted as the people. You came here from farther west. Is it any different on this side of the Ohio?”

  “Don’t push me, Mr. Griffin. And don’t try to manipulate me. Perhaps you think because I’m a woman you can do that. You’d be wrong. I can tell when I’m being jerked around.”

  “Cal doesn’t jerk people around, Mary,” Goldie said quietly. “Right now he’s just trying to get you to look at the big picture. If we get to the Source and unplug it, which Cal believes we can, then it doesn’t just help your folks, it helps everybody.”

  Her eyes struck me with the force of an arctic storm. “Why? Why do you believe you stand a snowball’s chance in hell of doing anything against the Storm? You saw it- what it did, what it’s still doing. What makes you think you can do anything?”

  I had to smile. How many times a day did I ask myself that question? “Would you believe me if I told you I had a vision?”

  Into the silence that followed, intruded a soft, rhythmic thudding. A peculiar vibration tingled under my feet. Goldie obviously felt it, too, because he put down the rattle and stood, looking puzzled. Mary raised a hand, as if to command silence, and sat listening to the eerie drumming. It seemed to come from everywhere, to be in the room with us.

  When the vibration ceased, Mary rose. “Excuse me. I have to go. I’m assuming you won’t be leaving right away.” She was gone in a wash of tension I swear pricked my skin.

  Goldie and I stared at each other for a moment, then I asked, “Is it in the Badlands?”

  He gave me a look he could probably patent. “Now I’m a travel agent? How the hell should I know?”

  We moved by unspoken consent to stand on the Lodge’s broad veranda. Down the hill, mellow afternoon sunlight tumbled through trees that were still green into an odd, gleaming mist that seemed to fit the forest like a woolly, translucent bonnet. It reminded me of Boone’s Gap, but this mist seemed benign, like a child’s favorite blanket. There were no angry ghosts in it. It was pleasant here, from the clutter of cottages and tents to the song of wind chimes. If it were not for Tina-no, if it were not for the Source-I’d consider staying. God knows, we all had talents we could put to use in a place like this.

  “Bagel dog with kraut,” Goldie murmured.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Things I Miss Most. Your turn.”

  “You have to ask?”

  “Now now. This is supposed to be a lighthearted exercise in distraction. The category is Things We Miss Most About Life as It Once Was.”

  “Okay. Um… Starbuck’s … double latte, tall, vanilla.”

  “Figures. Low fat milk, too, I’ll bet,” he said, and when I nodded, he added, “Yeah, I figured you for a low fat kinda guy.”

  “But if I had to do all over again? Whole milk and hazelnut.”

  “You devil.”

  “Could you learn to do what Enid does?”

  He sobered and his eyes dropped to his feet. “Tried it. That’s what I was at this morning before Doc came around. I don’t get it.”

  “Maybe it just takes practice.”

  “Practice? Practice what?”

  “Okay, trial and error, then.”

  “Look, you remember the light-globe I used to scare away our Shadow friends?”

  “How could I forget?”

  “It’s a form of visualization. I imagine the globe; that somehow gathers the photons together and it’s there. That’s roughly the way Enid makes his shield around Magritte.”

  “All right, so you understand the mechanism. So far, so good.”

  “No. No good,” he said, shaking his head. “I work with light. Enid works with sound. They’re two different types of energy-at least so far as the Change is concerned. Enid creates a sonic shield around Magritte, so the Source can’t hear her. I could create a light-globe, but all that would do was keep her from being eaten by the local wildlife. It wouldn’t block her from the Source.” He paused to chew on his lip and pick at a knothole in the porch railing. “It’s not just Enid. It’s Magritte. They do it together.” He made a spasmodic gesture with his head. “The shield, the jamming thing.”

  “Wait. You’re telling me … What are you telling me?” He shrugged. “They’re a duo. A team. Batman and

  Robin, Scully and Mulder, lox and bagels. You can’t have one without the other. Symbiosis. And no room for cream cheese.”

  “You and Magritte don’t have symbiosis?”

  He glanced away from me so quickly, if we were standing in a courtroom, I’d have smelled guilt.

  �
�What?” I prompted.

  “Nothing.”

  “Something.”

  He wagged his head back and forth and sighed. “Magritte and I … we have some sort of … rapport. We connect. Or maybe she just makes me hot. I don’t know. But we don’t have what she and Enid do. Besides which, he needs her protection as much as she needs his. Protection from this Howard guy.”

  “Howard? Refresh my memory.”

  “His manager. The guy he’s hiding out from here. Irrelevant at the moment. The point is, I just don’t seem to have it-whatever it is.”

  “Full circle. We’re back to Enid.”

  He shook his head. “You heard Mary. He’s their lifeline.” “She said something about a battery-the thing that pro-

  tects the flares while Enid is gone. What did she mean?” He gave me an odd look and held up a finger. “Listen.” “To what?”

  “Shh! Listen.”

  I heard a dog barking down the hill, water gurgling and splashing, a chorus of wind chimes. Goldie started humming. It took me a moment to realize that the tune was in perfect harmony with the wind chimes.

  Enid used sound. “The wind chimes?”

  He grinned. “Cool, huh? I haven’t verified it yet, but that’s my theory. It would explain a lot. Such as why they’re all over the place, why they all play the same set of perfectly tuned notes, and why something keeps them moving even when there’s no breeze.”

  I looked up at the row of chimes along the eaves of the Lodge. There was no breeze, but they were rocking and sending out a sheer veil of song. “What keeps them moving?” I asked.

  “Don’t know. Haven’t had a chance to ask anybody who’d say anything more than, ‘Well, uh, they’re wind chimes.’ ”

  I grimaced. “I hope the answer isn’t ‘Enid.’ ”

  “What if it is?”

  “Then our job gets a little harder.” I put a hand on his shoulder. “There’s a way to do this, Goldie. If we can’t account for all of Enid’s talents, then we have to make Mary see that if we don’t shut down the Source, and shut it down soon, nobody will be safe anywhere. Not even here.”

  Goldie’s eyes met mine, grim, troubled. “Cal, there’s something you should know. Enid’s sick.”

  A cold fist wrapped around my stomach. “How sick?”

  “I don’t know. Magritte says it’s just that he’s doing too much. Maybe she’s right, but intuition tells me it’s something more. He’s pretty used up.”

  “Does Mary know?”

  “Would she admit it if she did?”

  Goldie was right about Enid-he was used up. It was hard to miss. He was right about Mary, too; she didn’t admit it, even when Doc offered to take a look at him.

  “Why? He’s just very tired, Dr. Lysenko,” she insisted. “He does an awful lot for us here, and with winter coming on outside, we’ve been keeping him especially busy. He just needs rest.”

  I tried to read her face, but she would’ve made a fabulous poker player; I couldn’t tell if she was lying, in denial, or telling the Gospel truth.

  I figured Goldie was in a better position to read that situation than I was. If Enid wouldn’t tell him, chances were good that Magritte would. She seemed to trust him-something he found bemusing, but which didn’t surprise me. In a matter of days they formed a peculiar triad: Goldie, Magritte, and Enid. Nothing sexual, except perhaps in my friend’s fulsome fantasy world, but something musical and-I don’t know-spiritual, I guess.

  I wondered if I still believed in spiritual things. I vaguely recalled that I once had. That Tina had. Or perhaps Tina was the believing part of me, and apart, I believed in nothing but Tina herself.

  Doc was up and around on the second day of our stay, limping but mobile. By the end of that day he’d become a fixture. Surprise, surprise. He fit in here, the same way he fit in at Grave Creek; the same way he fit in on the corner of Lexington and Forty-second, the same way I have no doubt he’d fit in in the operating theater of any major urban hospital.

  Doc Lysenko, chameleon.

  I didn’t fit. So I put myself to work, mostly in the infirmary Doc was helping them piece together. A good place to gather information. There were moments I’d look up from a task and watch everybody fitting in, and I’d try to imagine what life would be like if we found Tina and brought her here. Would I fit then? If Tina was the part of me that believed, was she also the part of me that belonged?

  Colleen understood this. She didn’t fit in any better than I did. We were misfits together, Colleen and I. Where Doc could get absorbed in the Preserve’s medical needs, and Goldie could just get absorbed-period, Colleen stayed focused. That helped me stay focused.

  “It’d be really easy to get sucked into this place, wouldn’t it?” Colleen said at the end of our first day in the Preserve. “Just too good to be true.”

  I gazed down the long hill at the evening view from the veranda of the Lodge and realized that she’d put my feelings to words pretty much exactly. “Who wouldn’t want a haven like this?”

  She laughed, and I could feel the warmth of her gaze on the side of my face. “You. You’re already planning our next move, and that sure as hell doesn’t involve hanging here.”

  “No. Because you’re right, as it happens. This place is too good to be true. Mary says it’s locked in space and time. But it’s not locked. And it’s not safe. The world outside is going to keep changing.”

  “Until someone or something stops the Source.”

  I turned my head to look at her. Her eyes met mine- open, frankly questioning. Did she take that for granted- that if the Source was somehow conquered or dispersed, the Change would simply stop? I didn’t.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I hope so. I hope it’s that easy.”

  She laughed again. “Listen to the man-‘easy’!.. Well, I guess there’s only one way to find out, huh? We just have to keep going until we get… wherever it is Goldman is leading us.”

  “Looks that way.”

  The moment stretched out between us, silent, as we stood eye-to-eye on the veranda in the soft light of fey torches. I wanted to lean into her, to touch her, to establish something constant between us.

  But then she pulled her eyes away, looked back down the hill and said, “So what’s next?”

  “Next,” I repeated, pulling my thoughts back from the edge. “Next, I get to know the flares.”

  There were seven of them, all but one pulled from the Source’s radar at the point of Change. The one exception to that serendipity was Javier, who had changed while in the Adena mounds. There, he had apparently been protected from the Source by whatever power the place held. The same power, I suspected, that linked it to Olentangy.

  Javier and his family had been vacationing in West Virginia when the Change came. He was thirteen. His mother and father were also here. They no longer spoke of making their way home; they now understood that to do so would mean leaving their son behind. They stayed. They fit in.

  The flares liked the Preserve’s little chapel. It was the light, Magritte said-the way it slanted through the stained-glass windows, making rainbows in the shadows and tinting their auras with the vivid hues of flame, ice, and Saint Elmo’s fire.

  They didn’t seem to mind when I crashed their little gathering the morning after our arrival. I perched on the edge of a pew while they arrayed themselves about the altar like kinetic votive candles. If the gathering was odd, so was the chapel. The altar sported the usual cross, along with a menorah, a Lakota ceremonial pipe, a doll-size Buddha, and some relics I didn’t recognize.

  A Bible verse stirred my memory: And My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations. Maybe we were seeing the fulfillment of prophecy.

  We talked about the Preserve, about Mary, about Enid. I mentioned the wind chimes casually, commenting on how many of them there were. The other flares turned to Magritte in eerie unison, and Magritte gave me a long, searching look and said nothing. And when I asked them about the Storm, there was a silen
ce so deep I could hear the candles burning.

  Then a girl with the unlikely name of Faun asked, “What’s to know about the Storm? It’s why we’re all here. That’s enough, isn’t it?”

  “How did it affect you? How did it call to you? My sister talked about hearing a Voice or Voices. ‘The one and the many.’ Is that what you heard?”

  They exchanged glances, and for a moment no one spoke. Then Javier said, “It wanted me to belong to it. The way I belonged to my family. It told me I belonged to it. It made me think…”

  “Think what?”

  “That it was where I was meant to be,” he finished. “That I wasn’t like my mom and dad anymore. I was… different. And I needed to be with my own kind.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t talk about it, Javy,” said Faun. “You know how it gets when you think on it too much.”

  Javier looked from me to Faun and back again. “Your sister’s like us?”

  “Yes. She wasn’t as lucky as you are, though. It found her.”

  Auras rippled and shifted hues. Eyes, deep and mysterious as twilight, traded glances.

  “When I was in the mounds,” Javier said, “I could feel it calling me. Somehow, I knew it couldn’t reach me as long as I stayed where I was. But after a while I wanted to leave the mounds. It made me want to leave. To go find it. Mom and Dad kept me there… and then Enid came. They were so scared. I’ve never seen them so scared.” He shook his head. “Then, I didn’t understand why.”

  My blood chilled. “Do you now?”

  He didn’t answer, but glanced over at Magritte, who hovered lightly above the pew on which I sat like a lump of coarse clay. “Should we tell him about Alice?” he asked.

  Magritte’s expression went through a series of changes as she decided again how far she could trust me. “Enid found Alice up on Put-in-Bay Island. She was in the last of the Change and the Storm’d come for her.” She said the words as if they were dangerous. “Enid got to her just before the Storm did, and we barely made it back into the cave. But Alice… wasn’t very strong. When she’d hear the Storm, she’d listen. One night, she just left. She went back through the northern portal to the island and it got her. Enid followed, to try and bring her back, but it was too late.”