Indigo Springs (8 page)

What do I say? Magic is even more undemocratic than technology. But now I think: Was all that just have-not resentment?

It’s Granddad’s wedding ring. What am I supposed to do, toss it? And if it can help me get the kids back…

I slide it onto my finger. The words inscribed by my wife—
Forever begins today
, plus our wedding date—feel as if they are raised on the metal. I read them through my skin, and as the lie of them sinks into my consciousness I flail, momentarily, against rage.

Nothing happens.

“I’m ‘protected’ now?” I ask.

“I’d have to attack you to prove it,” she says, her voice almost playful.

“Never mind that.” I stare at the pool. “So this is the source.”

“Raw magic,” she agrees.

“Vitagua makes the chantments. Vitagua made the monsters in the rivers and forests.”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“Simple contamination. See this poppy seed?” She holds up a speck of black, then spits a tiny droplet of blue onto it. The seed explodes in a profusion of unfurling stems, leaves, and roots. Red poppies bloom in Astrid’s fist, and she drops the plant to the crumbly soil. Its roots grub downward. By the time I count to ten, the flower is as tall as I am.

“Hold your ring over the puddle,” Astrid says. I do, and it quivers. “See how it’s attracted to the chantment? Magic calls to magic.”

I withdraw my hand and the puddle settles. “Like magnetism. Put the north and south poles of two magnets close to each other, and they pull together.”

“Exactly.”

“Magic is a tangible entity.” This is certainly information Roche can use.

She produces a playing card from her pocket, leaching its color and then covering it in a painting of what looks like a blue amoeba. “Once upon a time, magic was an extremely rare living cell, just a component of the human organism. Magicules, they’ve been called. They had similarities to both plant cells and human blood cells.”

“Cells,” I parrot. A scientific explanation is the last thing I expected in this odd place. “And they did what exactly?”

“Responded to human will by bending or breaking the laws of nature. That’s what magic is, when you get down to it. Flying is defiance of gravity. Lead transforming to gold, seeing through walls. Properly channeled, vitagua can do anything.”

Her words hit like a hammer. “Anything?”

“If I can imagine it, I can make it happen.”

“You’re talking about power on a scale that’s—”

“I’m no god, Will.” She hands me the cell diagram and then holds both hands out over the vitagua. The fluid rises, as if to touch her hands…and then falls again.

“Unbelievable,” I murmur.

“Magicules respond to collective will,” Astrid continues. “In areas where most everybody believed in a given supernatural creature—say fairies—the particles made them come to be. They’d migrate into birds, or butterflies, and alter them. In Europe people believed in brownies, ghosts, werewolves, and demons. Magicules enter some female virgin’s horse, it grows a horn—presto! Unicorn.”

“What about this place you’ve brought me to?”

“People have always believed in invisible realms. Because they took their existence for granted, those realms came into being. We’re standing in one.”

“The unreal,” I murmur.

“That’s what Dad called it. Later, magic was driven out of normal people and the magicules came here.”

“Driven?”

She presses the paintbrush to the stone wall of the  gray cliff. Pictographs bloom on its surface like bruises, blue-black stick figures crowded in what looks like a stockade or a courtyard. Lines fill in the scene: an execution. In the center of the crowd a woman is bound to a stake. Ocher smudges at her feet suggest flames.

Making pictures. The same thing Astrid has been doing to the playing cards, but on a greater scale.

An image paints its way across another outcropping, a village of long houses and totem poles, its people beset by disease. They lie in attitudes that—despite the simplicity of their forms—suggest coughing. Elsewhere on the cliff, a mob watches as a man is drawn and quartered.

“Magicules were diffuse once, Will. Most everyone carried a few. Rare people had none, and others had extra, enough to make them mystics, prophets, healers. There was a time when they were honored for it. But eventually…” She gestures at the woman on the stake.

“You’re saying that the Inquisition…that they were burning real witches.”

“Sometimes, yes.”

“Witches, unicorns, and…”

“And Fairyland.”

I let out a breath. “You’re saying we’re in the land of the fairies?”

“I think that’s what this realm was, at one time.” She nods. “Then the witch burnings caused a shift in collective will, creating a fear of enchantment. People didn’t want to be tainted, because they’d be murdered. Their native magicules migrated away, concentrating in people who weren’t scared. As the number of friendly hosts diminished, magic had to go somewhere else.”

“To the unreal. To Fairyland,” I repeat. The latter concept seems safer, like something out of my kids’ books. “Are there fairies here?”

“No.” The blue puddle is drizzling along behind us, following Astrid like a dog. “The fairies are dead.”

“It’s just you, me, and the vitagua?”

“Well, there aren’t any fairies.”

Begging the question. Every criminal has her own way of lying. Astrid’s evasions seem disarmingly honest.

She gazes up at the painted cliff, voice dreamy. “Microscopic bits of magic, Will. They had to go somewhere. The witch-burners thought they were establishing a monopoly over enchantment. Instead, they drove it here. The physical pressure became immense. Magicules got concentrated, like crude oil.” She points at the cobalt fluid. “One drop of that stuff contains as much magic as ten thousand people might carry. There are oceans of it here, seas of enchantment. Before this summer, it was trickling back into the world a drop at a time. Now, though, the dam’s been blown.”

“Sahara blew it.” I stare at the blue hills, the puddle, the burning figures painted on the slate wall. It is too much—so I grope for something I can fasten on. Bad guys. Sahara. Caroline. And…“What people, Astrid? Who are these shadowy villains who pushed the magic out?”

She shakes her head. “Time’s up.”

Suddenly we are back in the apartment. I’m in my appointed place on the love seat. Astrid starts poking through the cards as though they are a collection of photos, pausing to admire images of Jacks and her mother. The portraits of Sahara she sets to one side. She selects a half-painted image, a tall man rendered in the style of the cliff paintings I just saw in the unreal. He is muscular and surrounded by clouds of smoke, a powerful, dangerous-looking figure.

“Nicely painted,” I say.

“Someone’s showing off,” she says with a sigh. “We were talking about the party at the Mixmeander.”

“I remember.” I suspect she wants to see if I’ll terminate the interview, tell Roche about our escape to the unreal. But there’s plenty of time for that. “You were telling jokes and your friends were—”

“Sahara was watching my mom,” she says. “Everyone else…Well, word was spreading about Jacks rescuing that kid earlier in the afternoon.”

“The one who fell off his balcony?”

She nods. “I found Aran—the
Indigo Dispatch
editor—trying to interview him.”

“Trying?”

“Jacks wanted a trade—Aran was supposed to write something about a famous fire that took place a couple hundred years back. Jacks believed local townspeople had burned out a Native potlach to settle some land dispute.”

“This is what he’d been fighting with his father about.”

“Yeah. Aran wasn’t interested, so Jacks refused to give the interview.”

“A journalist not interested in a story?”

“Aran’s a chicken when it comes to controversy. Nobody ever talks about that potlatch fire.”

“Not even descendants of the survivors?”

“Mrs. Skye and her niece are all that’s left.”

“I see. So Jacks was trying to enlist this…Aran, in his private fight with his father.”

She frowns. “Not that I think the Chief read the
Dispatch
. He called it a rag. But he prided himself on knowing everything that happened in town. He talked to people. Gossiped. Town hero, y’know—everybody loved him.”

“Everybody except you?”

She runs a hand over her eyes. “I guess if Aran had run the story, somebody would’ve told the Chief.”

On another playing card, two tangled sets of arms and legs are knitted in a position that is distinctly carnal. The picture is unfinished, the invisible brush moving hesitantly, and I can’t see the lovers’ faces.

Clearing her throat, Astrid takes up the tale again.

There had been a drip in the house from the beginning, a low gurgle in the walls, audible only in rare quiet moments. Astrid was faintly aware of the sound as she lay in her bedroom with the kaleidoscope, guiltily spying on the next-door neighbor. Tonight Mrs. Skye was pacing through her house, talking out loud to nobody. Once she paused, head tilted as if she heard a response.

We’ll invite her for dinner, Astrid thought. I can ask Ma if she has any family. We could get her a pet….

The stuttering rhythm of falling droplets prickled her consciousness.

New house, new noises, she thought—get used to it. Burrowing into her blankets, she let her mind drift. It was good to have a place of her own, good that life was finally moving forward. Mostly it was good to have Sahara back….

She was dozing when Sahara’s radio, next door, shut down with a click, filling the house with cottony silence. Astrid’s legs twitched and she was awake again.

She drew a breath in, let it out slowly. No problem, she thought. Bad timing, that’s all. Outside, an ambulance wailed briefly, probably heading up Boundary Lane to the hospital. She sipped air, smothering growing dismay. Insomnia had filled her nights too often in the year since her father’s death.

On the other side of the hall, bedsprings squeaked—Sahara, rolling over.

Now Astrid could hear a whole nighttime orchestra: cats yowling beyond the yard, the distant murmur of a conversation outside, wind rattling the willow next door…and the drip. Trying to hang on to the vestiges of sleepiness, she rose and slid the window shut.

Ignore the noise. Idly, she picked up the kaleidoscope again. Downstairs, she found Jacks haloed by the amber glow of the streetlight outside his window. His chin was dark, stubbly. Jealousy tickled her: he was fast asleep.

Plan the garden, she thought, watching his chest rise and fall. She hadn’t had her hands in dirt since Sahara arrived. Now she pictured the yard of her new home. Start under the fig tree. Bedding plants for the summer, and in the fall I’ll load it with bulbs—crocuses, daffodils, tulips to go with the hyacinths already flourishing there. There are iris bulbs in the shed….

She squeezed her eyes shut as Sahara rolled out of bed, tried not to hear the footsteps padding down the hall.

I’m tired, honest. Sweet peas by the fence…

She heard the squeak of weight on a soft part of the kitchen floor.

Don’t listen. Relax. Think about honeysuckle, about where to plant a clematis.

In the kitchen, water ran in the sink and stopped. Silence. Then the drip sounded again, and Sahara cursed.

Climbing out of bed, Astrid scrambled down to the kitchen. She found Sahara on hands and knees, with her head in the cupboard under the sink. Her panty-clad bottom peeked out from under an orange T-shirt as she ran her hands along the pipes.

“You’re blocking my light,” she said, and Astrid dutifully moved. “
This
is why you’re not charging me rent.”

“You can pay someone to fix the taps if it’ll make you feel better.”

“You know Mrs. Skye said the house is haunted?”

“No. She didn’t say this to Ma, did she?”

“’Fraid so. According to her, the previous tenants hanged themselves. The owner before that killed his twin daughters and is institutionalized—in Switzerland.”

“Just what I needed. Ma’s probably halfway to Geneva.”

“Don’t be hard on Mrs. Skye, Astrid. Her niece is paying some doctor to come certify she’s too deaf and senile to live alone anymore.”

Astrid thought of the old lady wandering the house, muttering. “You don’t think she’s that bad?”

“Just overtired. She lost her driver’s license, so she’s walking to work. She just needs a ride, basically, but the niece is taking advantage….”

“We could help with that, right? Find a carpool.”

“Yeah. People are such assholes.” Backing out of the cupboard, Sahara blinked at Astrid with reddened eyes.

Crying over Mark again. “You okay?”

Sniffing, Sahara nodded. “Pipe’s dry. Bottom of the cupboard too. I don’t think our leak is down here.”

“Doesn’t sound like it.” The drip spoke up obligingly and they canted their heads.

“Bathroom?” Sahara jerked a thumb in the direction opposite the sound’s apparent source.

“Shhh.” Listening hard, Astrid turned to face the cavernous living room. “Maybe the chimney?”

Sahara sprang up, bounding past Astrid to the massive blue-painted fireplace. In the curtain-filtered glow from the Mascer Lane streetlights, it looked less blue, less like an artifact from the honeymoon suite of a tacky hotel. The copper inlay on Dad’s urn glinted in the dim light.

Stopping in front of the hearth, Sahara traced the mortar seams before laying her ear against the stone.

Drip-drip.

“You’re right—it’s louder. Put your head here.”

Astrid set the kaleidoscope next to her father’s urn and reached up the chimney, tinkering with the flue. “Rainwater maybe, trapped up there?”

“Could be. We could light a fire, steam it out.” Sahara’s eyes danced—she loved a good blaze.

“If the water’s falling, where’s it ending up?” She ran a finger along the inside of the fireplace, coming up sooty but dry; then she laid her hand flat under the grate.

Drip-drop.
Faint vibrations buzzed her palm.

“What is it?” Sahara crowded in beside her.

“Someone’s sealed the bottom of the fireplace.”
Drip-drip
and she felt it again, minute impacts under her hand. Like someone was tapping from beneath the sealed surface.

Sahara pulled the grate free, sprinkling grit and ash everywhere, streaking her T-shirt. Henna, who had been about to squeeze between them, hopped sideways, sniffing as Sahara leaned the grate up on the hearth. She brushed away soot, revealing a grid of bricks grouted against the bottom of the fireplace. It was an odd but solid job, thick mortar sealing the stone into place. It raised the level of the hearth by almost an inch.

“Must you stomp on my ceiling?” Jacks appeared in the basement doorway, wearing nothing but a pair of shorts and his magic watch. He looked sleepy and harassed.

“Underwear model look suits you, Eligible.”

“Shut up, Sahara.”

“Sorry, Jacks,” Astrid broke in. “There’s a drip—”

“It can wait until morning.”

“But look at this.” She tapped the bricks.

He sighed. “Another inept Albert repair job. Maybe the hearth was cracked.”

Sahara laid a cheek on the smudged brickwork. “What about the sound? It’s coming from underneath.”

“You’re never going to get down there,” Jacks said. “Let it go. Bad pipes, bad tiles…”

Drip-drop,
agreed the house.

“This brick’s attached funny,” Sahara said, tugging at the edge of the hearth. “I might work it loose—”

“To what end? Sahara, leave the property damage for daytime.”

“Do we have a screwdriver?”

“I don’t think so,” Astrid said.

“We could try the Crumbler,” Sahara said.

“What?”

“You know. The magic pocketknife.”

“You want the roof to collapse?” Jacks said.

“Right, bad idea. But this brick’s loose, I swear.”

He pointed at the kaleidoscope. “Look down and see what it is.”

“Hmmm,” Sahara agreed, still worrying at the brick. “I just need some leverage.”

“It’s probably too dark….” Astrid reached for the kaleidoscope.

There was a scrape of stone on stone and a deep liquid belch from under the floor. Sahara’s cry of triumph was cut off as a rush of something bright and blue splashed out of the hole, driving the hunk of brick into her forehead. She fell, Astrid catching her awkwardly as the stuff geysered out. Warm, syrup-thick, redolent with lilac and strawberry perfume, the gout of liquid sprayed them both. The remainder hit the ceiling with a wet
splud.

Astrid flinched as the fluid soaked her hand and face. Her eye was tingling and the room was filmed with a faint blue haze. She saw a splatter of blue on Sahara’s throat, centered around the mermaid pendant. A red mark in the middle of her forehead showed where the brick had struck her; its corner had gouged a tiny slice of skin loose. Blood welled from the center of the injury.

The smell…cloying, flowery…somehow familiar.

Astrid remembered the broken perfume atomizer from Albert’s sack of junk. It had been oil-wet, slick with an unidentifiable fluid….

…her head, already achy, began to pound. And suddenly there were whispers, a rhythmic, almost singsong grumble she couldn’t make out….

Looking faintly scalded, Henna licked a glob of blue off her belly. Only Jacks was untouched—he had stepped away from the hearth just in time. Had the watch moved him? Did that mean the liquid was dangerous?

He reached out to steady Astrid. “You okay?”

“I think so.” She blinked hard, and the tingles in her eye became needle sharp. She turned her hand over. It was stained blue, colored by the fluid but already dry.

“Look.” Sahara pointed at the ceiling.

Astrid expected to see the rest of the strange blue fluid pooled up there, about to dribble back down on them. But its drops were flat and mobile, sliding together near the light fixture to form one big pool.

Sahara giggled nervously. “Well, I think we’re ahead. I don’t hear the drip anymore, do you?”

“Not funny,” Jacks said. “What is this stuff?”

Astrid’s stomach did a slow roll, as if she were upside down. She ground a fist against her throbbing temple, and the pain spread across the right side of her face.

Grabbing an ash-shovel from the fireplace, Sahara scooped at the puddle. As she neared it, the puddle stretched in her direction, and she scooped a few spoonfuls into the shovel.

“Maybe it’s a chemical spill. We should call a hospital. God, Astrid, it’s all over you.”

“This isn’t pollution, Eligible, relax.” Sahara brought it down, flipping the shovel so they could peer at the stuff. The fluid immediately launched itself at her neck, spattering the mermaid before sinking into her skin.

“Sahara!”

She peered up at it. “Do you think it’s attracted to the magical objects?”

“If so, why’s it up there?” Jacks demanded.

“Because…” She jittered up and down on her toes. “Because Astrid’s room is above this part of the ceiling, and there’s a bunch of them in her desk!”

“Great. You’ve got the answers, tell us what it is.”

“What do you think it is, dummy?”

“Frankly, I don’t care,” Jacks said. “A handful of weird luck charms was one thing. Flying blue…whatever that is…that’s too much.”

Sahara’s eyes sparkled within her blue-stained face. “Maybe we can get it into a jar. Hold the mermaid underneath the glass, pull it in?”

“And what if it’s carcinogenic?” Jacks said.

“Magic carcinogens? Come on, Astrid and I have both been splashed and we’re not dead.”

“If that’s supposed to be a rationale for more exposure—”

“It is, yeah.”

“That’s like saying you want to swim in radioactive waste because you survived a chest X-ray!”

“I didn’t say it was a good argument,” Sahara said. “This stuff is magic, guys. Like the widgets.”

“Chantments,” Astrid corrected, wincing as their voices rose.

“It may be magical, but that doesn’t make it safe.”

“If it is dangerous, that’s all the more reason to bottle it. Come on, Astrid, can you really say no?”

And of course she couldn’t; she never could.

“No more touching it,” she ordered, trying to placate Jacks and instead sending him into a low fume.

“Sure, no touching.” Sahara snatched a jar of nails from the windowsill, dumping them onto the hearth.

“Give it to me.” Jacks took the jar.

“Why, ’cause you’re the boy?”

“I’m taller and I’m more careful.”

“Fine.” Sahara was watching the blue puddle. Then Jacks reached for the mermaid and she stepped back, startled. She opened her mouth to object, but he put a finger to her lips.

“You shouldn’t be wearing it anyway. Not around us.”

Sahara looked to Astrid for support.

“He’s right, Sahara.”

“I fell asleep with it on, that’s all.” Yanking the pendant over her head, she slapped it into his palm. “I would never use it on you.”

“That’s good,” Jacks said. “Because if you ever so much as try, I’ll take a blowtorch to it.” He clapped the mermaid underneath the jar and raised it to the ceiling.

“Nothing’s happening,” he said.

“Come on,” Astrid muttered.

Rippling with miniature waves, the large pool flowed obediently into the glass container, leaving a big blue stain on the ceiling.