by Marc Zicree
Cal, Colleen, and Enid leap in harmony to stop me from killing the little shit. They loosen my fingers, but he continues to scream like a reject from Gremlins.
“My eyes! My eyes! Light hurts!”
I so want to wad Howard Russo into a little blue-gray ball and shoot a three-pointer into the toilet, but the others prevail, tearing me away from him.
He scuttles into a corner, eyes wide and blinking. “What? Wha’d I do? She’s a hooker, for chrissake! Doin’ a job. I’m just a fuckin’ customer.”
Poor choice of words. I leap again, but Enid and Cal’s arms are tangled around me and Enid’s voice comes tight and low in my ear: “Ignore him. He’s a stupid shit. He’s just a stupid shit. Let it go.” I’m not sure which of us he’s talking to.
We are like that-an off-balance human pretzel-when Magritte screams. The sound wrenches me inside out and spins all of us around.
Her face is frozen in terror, mouth open, eyes sightless and wide. She hears the Storm’s countless Voices, sees its long shadow, feels its dark hands. I know, because I feel it, too. The Storm is rising in my head-in my soul-and if I don’t move fast, it will literally tear Magritte and me apart.
Freed, I cover the space between us in two strides, but she is being lifted toward the ceiling, the Storm’s dark fingers tugging at her. I leap and lock my arms around her; her hands tangle in my hair.
We fall.
Enid sings, desperately, as if his life depends on it. Which it does. No less does mine. I concentrate everything I have on holding Magritte, on shielding her, dragging her so deep inside Herman Goldman that the Source will lose her and I won’t. The Voices shriek at us to let go, to give up and give in.
To come home.
Maggie shudders, her back arching, and screams again, obscuring the beat of her heart-the sound I’m focused on.
“What is it?” Colleen is shouting. She has a crossbow in her hands-useless against this.
Cal and Doc are frozen, watching. They know what it is. They also know they are defenseless against it. Only Enid and I are armed for this enemy.
When I think we’re too late, Magritte relaxes and goes nearly limp in my arms. The darkness subsides; the predator growls and returns to its lair. Where? God, we could be right on top of it.
When I can breathe and think again, I’m still lying on the floor with Magritte trembling beneath me. I’m trembling, too, because I’ve felt that black, slimy touch before and because we now know how much a momentary lapse of concentration can cost.
I utter uncounted I’m sorrys to Magritte for having abandoned her in a careless moment of rage, but she blames herself. “Wasn’t thinking,” she murmurs over and over. “I let go. I let go.”
She can’t stop shaking, and nothing either Enid or I can do seems capable of erasing the terror in her eyes. It bleeds all over both of us, making us quake inside and share furtive, guilty glances.
We commandeer Russo’s bedroom and install her in it on his ludicrously king-size bed. Enid vows he will sit up all night and sing to her if he has to. Sitting cross-legged on the floor by the bed-guitar in his lap, harmonica in his pocket-he’s ready if she needs him to sing. I pick a deity and pray he won’t have to sing-again. And that the notes he’s let loose already haven’t found a living target.
I lie down beside Magritte, not touching her, but close enough to feel her warmth. I’m afraid to touch her. Remembering Russo’s filth is one thing, but the Source, I know, reaches beyond the body and lays hands on the soul. But from where?
She doesn’t sleep, but she seems to drowse, even to dream, her eyes moving behind the nearly translucent lids.
Time passes. Enid mumbles to himself, trying to stay awake. His fingers brush the strings of his guitar now and again, sending up a yearning whisper of notes. I prop myself against the headboard, and get lost in memories- mine or Maggie’s; they’re indistinguishable. They’re dark memories, gray memories, punctuated by periods of colorful, inexplicable elation and stark, bleak pain. As I sort my way through them I look down at her and find her watching me.
“Enid,” she says, without looking away. “Go get some sleep.”
He shifts position with the squeak of strings. “Mags, I promised.”
“Enid, please. It’s okay. Goldie’s here.”
He stands, turning to look at her-at us. She returns his gaze and something passes silently between them.
“It’s what you want?” he asks.
Her eyes come back to meet mine. “It’s what I need.” Enid gives me the briefest of glances before he slips from the room and closes the door behind him.
“Why?” I ask, wanting to know before reason is completely blotted out by something much stronger.
“You know why.” She puts a hand up and brushes the tangle of hair away from my eyes so she can read them. “I want to be clean again. And so do you.”
“Maggie, I’m …” I’m what-unstable? Crazy? Dangerous?
“What I need,” she repeats.
Through the long night the words echo in my head, until I find myself speaking them, whispering them to her again and again. And somewhere in there, “need” transforms into “love.” Transforms like a lunatic turned wizard, or a hooker turned angel. And I half believe that what we do really is stronger than the Storm.
NINETEEN
DOC
During the frantic moments in which Enid and Goldie battled the Source for Magritte, Howard Russo slunk away into his office like a cowering animal. I found him there, barricaded behind his desk in a swivel chair that dwarfed him. He was reading in the dim glow of a lamp over which he had draped a sweater. The feeble light reflected in the lenses of wire-rimmed glasses balanced precariously on a nose barely capable of holding them.
My surprise did not escape him. He held up the book. “Dostoevsky,” he said. “Crime and Punishment. Reading helps me hold onto myself.”
I came a bit farther into the room, my eyes adjusting to the darkness. “Hold onto yourself?”
His face pulled into a rueful leer. “Didn’t always look like this,” he said. “Feel like this.”
There was a howl from the street, the sound of trash cans falling, rolling, followed by strange, guttural laughter.
Russo flinched visibly and bared his teeth. “Every night,” he said. “They come out. Not always so noisy. But I know. I feel them.” He chuckled, a gravelly echo of the laughter from the street. “Can Howie come out to play?”
I moved to sit on the sofa across from the desk. “And do you want to … go out and play?”
The street erupted with what might have been the yap-pings of wild animals… or something else.
Russo slanted a look at the window then turned his face to me. “I don’t want to become that.” The words were clear and deliberate. The voice almost fully human.
“So you read.”
He stroked the pages of the book. “My head clears out when I read. I feel… like myself.” He shrugged. “Probably only a matter of time, though … This place you guys came from-there are really people like me there?”
“Yes. And like you, they don’t want to become… something else.”
The door swung open then, and Cal stood in the doorway, light from the other room flooding in around him.
Russo blinked and shielded his eyes. “Do you mind?”
Cal hesitated, then closed the door and stepped into the office. “You have any preferences about where we sleep?”
Russo shrugged. “Anywhere’s fine. Sofas are pretty comfy.”
“Where were you going to sleep?”
“I sleep down below. In the daytime.”
“You said you knew how to get into the Bubble,” Cal said. “How?”
“There are people inside. They have to eat. Stuff has to go in. Wagons, whatever.”
“So, what-we just walk in?”
To this, Russo offered a broad leer. “Only if you have something they want, counselor. Which you do.”
Cal glanced at me,
then shook his head. “What could we have that they’d want?”
“Angelfire.”
“Magritte?”
Russo nodded.
I stood, cold to the core. “Why? Why would they want flares?”
Russo shrugged. “Don’t know. But I’ve never seen one turned back.”
Cal took a quick step toward the grunter, who flinched back as if he feared violence. “But you’ve seen flares go in? Angelfire. You’re sure? How many? When?”
“Some,” said Russo warily. “Now and again. I try not to go up that way. Messes with my head.”
“Messes with your head,” Cal repeated. “Meaning what, exactly?”
“Place sucks at you. Makes you itch.”
I thought of the Black Tower in my dreams and understood him. “You’ve seen flares go in. Have you ever seen one come out?”
He shook his head.
“What happens to them in there, Howard?” Cal asked.
Russo regarded him silently for a moment, then looked down into the pages of his book, fingertips stroking the print. “I don’t know.”
Cal sank to the arm of the sofa. “We’re going in there blind.” He looked at me, the expression in his eyes cloaked by the darkness of the room. “We have no way of knowing what will happen to Magritte if we take her in there.”
“If? We have no choice, Calvin. We must take her in, and hope that Goldie can keep her safe.”
“Safe?” Russo’s smile was feral. “Ruby City’s never safe.”
In the hours before dawn, I lay awake on the sofa in Howard Russo’s office, listening to the city, to the building, to the sounds of the others sleeping, to the beating of my heart. This bespelled place was not silent; it was merely secretive. In the walls and in the corridor beyond the locked and bolted door there was movement, sly and questing.
It was these sounds that awakened me, jolting me up out of uneasy sleep to a soft chuckle from across the room. It was Russo, perched not behind his desk, but upon it. Reading.
“Don’t worry, Doc,” he said now, his voice a rasp that recalled Poe’s raven. His malformed head was silhouetted against the wan light that crept in through the blinds behind him. He canted it to listen, and the light caressed the wire rims of his glasses. “Just some acquaintances wondering who’s company.” He glanced back at me, stroking the pages of the book. “It’s okay. Don’t think they’ll try to come in.” He adjusted his glasses, looking at once familiar and alien, then poked his nose back into the book. “You sleep.”
But I couldn’t sleep any more than could he. The furtive sounds seemed to work on both of us alike. They beckoned to him, while he barricaded himself here, armed against them with books, clinging to what was left of Howard Russo. I, on the other hand, was afraid of something I could not name.
After a while of reading, he got up and paced the rooms, so quietly he seemed to vanish. I paced, too, but mentally. I had already, this night, worn a rut in the hardwood of the upper hall, crossing and recrossing it to the room at the back of the building where our night watch kept guard on the courtyard below.
While I was engaged in this, the office door lock clicked and the door opened, allowing a slender shadow to enter. It made its way with care past me to the living room door and in.
I heard their voices then-soft whispers exchanging information about time and activity … and perhaps more. Then they emerged into the office together.
“I’ve had plenty of rest,” Cal said softly. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to fall asleep at my post… Sarge.”
“I’m more worried about you falling down at your post,” murmured Colleen. “The windowsill’s the best place to sit watch, but with the casement busted like that, you could easily take a header into the picket line.”
I could almost hear Cal smile. “I’ll be fine. I’m wide-awake.”
He leaned into her and their forms merged briefly. She said his name beneath her breath, and they parted, he to take the final watch, she to stand immobile at the foot of the sofa where I lay, pretending sleep.
“Oh, hell,” she whispered, then wheeled and disappeared into the parlor. She was back a moment later to unroll her sleeping bag on the floor between the sofa and desk and curl up within it.
I forced my eyes closed and was surprised to find sleep. I drowsed until the sun finally poured out its weak amber light to ooze around Howard Russo’s shades. I woke, told myself I was not comfortable lying on my back, and rolled onto my side. My glance, disobedient, fell to the floor.
The transition between the fleeting look and the gaze was seamless. One moment I was staring into darkness, the next I was watching Colleen sleep, ruddy, predawn light flowing around her. The thoughts I was struggling not to entertain; the sensations I was fighting to ignore; the emotions I did not want to name-they, too, threatened to be illuminated in that toxic spill of light.
Dear God, but I was tired. Yes, that was it. If I could only get adequate sleep, this would pass. If. If I could only comprehend the disease, I could find a cure. If I could wipe out the memory of that moment in the barn when I discovered the impossible lurking in my soul. If I could erase the feeling of her hands slipping from mine in the numbing flood.
Time rippled, and I was transported to a rain-slick road near Kiev. There, in a brief flicker of seconds, I had a dark epiphany: the life I had lived for the past fourteen years revolved on the instant I drew Colleen from the water. I had done for her what I could not do for Yelena and Nurya.
I didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t want to know what it meant. So I struggled with the angel of revelation and called him “Deceiver.” I forced his wings to fold. I begged him for mercy, for sleep. There was still time before we must rise and travel. I would simply close my eyes and no longer see Colleen.
But before I could close my eyes, she opened hers. I was unable to move, to dissemble, to hide. She held my gaze for a moment, then smiled, closed her eyes, and returned to her dreams.
The struggle was over, instantly, leaving me with nothing but a peculiar wash of relief. Her smile-that warm, sleepy, child-like smile-had said to me that she yet saw in me a friend. Regardless of what I felt or imagined I felt, I would always be that-her friend, her confidant. This, I would let nothing change.
I slept then, and for the first time in many days did not dream of Chernobyl.
The sun was fully up when we rose. The rest was regenerative. I felt, if not content, at least acquiescent. Whatever coil of melancholy had wrapped itself around my heart had released it. Colleen, for her part, reacted to me no differently than she had before. She was still easy in my presence, and I determined that I would be no different in hers.
What had changed this morning was something I might have missed were it not for Howard Russo. Almost from the moment they appeared, he tracked Goldie and Magritte with his large, milky eyes, reminding me of a cat that has caught a bemusing scent.
Goldie was not unaware of this intense regard. To say it irritated him would be understatement. He avoided Russo, turning away whenever he felt the little man’s eyes on him, engaging his attention fully in our task of tucking away the supplies Enid and Cal ferried up from the courtyard against our foray into the Loop.
“Little shit’s giving me the creeps,” he murmured as we sorted sealed food packets into neat piles on the credenza behind Russo’s living room sofa.
I glanced over my shoulder at Russo and received a sly smile. “Yes? Why does he find you of such interest, suddenly?”
He shrugged, concentrating on the Army-issue food packets he was counting out. “Only the Shadow knows.”
It was, ironically, because of shadow that I saw it.
Howard Russo could not abide even the weak sunlight that wedged its way into his rooms through gaps in the blinds and curtains. Goldie had undone his careful tucking of the parlor curtains the night before, and now Russo took his eyes from the objects of his attention just long enough to seal the gap with safety pins.
In that initia
l darkness, Goldie gleamed as if his skin had been dusted in gold and burnished. He had a noticeable aura, like Magritte’s, if slightly fainter. More than that, the two of them were connected by a bright conduit of flare radiance.
My first impulse was fear. “Goldie,” I said, perhaps too sharply, “Goldie, look at me.”
He turned, his eyes going wide with surprise as I trapped his head between my hands to peer into them. They were comfortingly brown, with normal, round, human pupils. Had they always been that large, I asked myself, that luminous?
His brow furrowed. “Doc, what…? What is it?”
I put a hand to his forehead, brushing aside the tumble of thick curls. No fever. “Close your eyes,” I told him.
He did, grinning nervously. “C’mon, Doc, you’re scaring me.”
Cal had come into the room and caught the exchange. He dropped the packs he carried and hurried to us. “Something wrong?”
As certain as I could be that Goldie’s eyelids showed no sign of increased translucence, I stepped back and shook my head, meeting Cal’s worried eyes. “I had a moment of concern. The aura is so much stronger this morning.” I indicated the distance between Goldie and Magritte, which she had closed since I began my examination, her own face eloquent with distress. The closer she drew, the brighter became the trail of light that connected them.
Cal followed the trail with his eyes. He turned back to me, his face going pale. “You thought he was changing.”
Goldie took a startled step away from us, then caught sight of the radiant cord and blushed violently. “Oh, that. It, uh… I guess the longer we’re together, the stronger it gets.”
He laughed. “I thought maybe I was breaking out in manic hives or something.”
Ah, sarcasm. Dostoevsky called it the last refuge for the soul whose privacy has been invaded. At times it makes excellent camouflage. At others it simply advertises what one wishes to conceal.
