Magic Time: Angelfire (10 page)

“We could go that way,” I say.

His eyes hit me so hard I feel stung. “
Could?
How about
should
?”

Cal’s monumental patience is wearing thin. I wish I could say something that would reassure him, but the truth is, someone’s closed the door again and the music is just a memory.

“He seems to be angling toward the river, yeah.”

Colleen pounces on the ambiguity. “
Seems?
God-bless-America, Goldman! We’ve been weaving around these woods for the better part of a day and the best you can do is
seems
? Have you forgotten how dangerous these picturesque woodlands can be after dark?”

“I haven’t forgotten. Yeah, let’s head for the river.”

I sound less than convincing; a look passes between Cal and Colleen.

I stand, take up my horse’s reins, and turn my attention up the trail. The cold, green smell of running water is heavy in the breeze. Waning sunlight pierces the fluttering crystals and shatters into a billion separate fragments of glory. I let them dance in my eyes and try to fan the song-memory into something more, but it resists. I find the whispered harmony of the leaf-chimes intruding. It surrounds the memory, winds through it, and alters it somehow.

“Goldie, where are you going?”

Cal’s voice at my back stops me. I have started walking without realizing it—following something I didn’t even know I’d heard. My horse, Jayhawk, nickers and nudges me with his head, as if to ask where I’m leading him. I’m not sure, but at least I realize that the song is not just a memory.

“He left a trail,” I tell Cal. “I didn’t hear it before, but I think I can track it.”

Cal’s face betrays his uncertainty for only a moment. “Then let’s move.”

We move. I sit atop Jayhawk with my eyes half out of focus, but my sonar is right on the money. The Bluesman’s music shimmers in the glassy leaves. It’s as if they’ve absorbed and refracted it, the same way they refract light. I
guide the horse without really thinking about it, and we are heading due west, no longer angling.

We don’t reach the Ohio River by sunset, but we do reach a stream. Mist has gathered and rain threatens and we are seriously nervous about who or what we might be sharing our camp with. Our options are dual and opposite: we can huddle in complete darkness and hope not to attract attention, or we can light our campsite up like a Christmas tree and hope the heffalumps and woozles will be scared away.

We choose darkness, with emergency recourse to light. We put the stream along one flank and a large rocky outcropping along the other. That takes care of two sides and gives us a sheltered corner in which to tether the horses. We lay three campfires across our exposed side, well packed with kindling and armed with extra wood. We set oil lanterns in the gaps between. We are armed to the teeth with weapons I have very little confidence in.

We decide to stand watch in shifts—two up, two down. Colleen and I draw first shift, and as fate would have it, it begins to rain. While Doc and Cal curl up in their little tent, Ms. Brooks and I try to cover the neatly laid fires with tarpaulins. Then we hunker down behind the central fire pit under a tarp—she with her crossbow, me with a machete that I suspect is more dangerous to me than it is to anyone or anything I might try to use it on.

We’re silent for a long time, thinking private thoughts. I’m thinking about the flare—about her huge, bottomless, gold, cat-slit eyes—when Colleen says, softly, “You got people you wonder about, Goldman?”

“Wonder about?”

“Yeah. Like where they are, what they’re doing.
How
they’re doing.”

“Yeah. Some friends in the tunnels. Some of the guys at a flophouse I lived in for a while.”

“A flophouse?” she says incredulously.

I smile at the memory. “In the Bowery. Ten bucks a night, six-by-six room—but it was
my
room. I even had a guinea pig—Einstein. Anyway, I wonder about some of the guys
there. I’d worry about them, but frankly, I think they’re probably more suited to the life we have now than to the one we had. They’re used to extremes in weirdness.”

“What about your family?”

She had to ask. “Them, I try not to think about. And I seriously doubt they think about me. I doubt they even know I’m alive.”

“Ouch. Don’t go there?” When I’m silent, she says, “Okay, then, what about the folks underground? D’you ever think about that family you told me about—Gino and Agnes and… Rachel, was it?”

I’m surprised she remembers. “Yeah. I do think about them… a lot.”

“Can I ask you something? How did people like that end up in the sewers? For that matter, how did you?”

“Subway tunnels, Colleen, not sewers. Some got into drugs or alcohol. Some just stopped believing in what they were doing. Some just couldn’t manage what we laughingly call real life, and we stopped trying. Some… just weren’t equipped to manage in the first place.”

“And you?”

“Let’s just say I had a disagreement with Mom and Dad about my college curriculum. So, I did what any red-blooded, Jewish-American boy would do—I ran away from home to find myself and… and got lost. That was a lifetime ago.”

“What curriculum did you have in mind?”

“Art. Music. Religion. Mom protested that those were not practical pursuits. When I persisted, she got my father into the act. They’d put me through college if I wanted to study— you’re going to love this—law.”

She laughs. “Herman Goldman, Esquire, huh?”

“Over my dead body… almost.”

I could just see her turn her face toward me in the uncertain moonlight. “Lawyers make good money.”

“Uh-huh. And you’ve seen what it’s done for Cal. Ely Stern had him whipped and he hated himself for it. Besides, I’m a musician at heart… or a monk.”

“Lucky for us, I guess.”

I like the thought. “Yeah, you’re right. Huh. Imagine that. I’m in the right place at the right time. First time in thirty-five years.”

“I wonder if that’s what makes you more sensitive to the Source.”

“What—being a musically inclined monk?”

“No, being… different. Thinking differently, I mean. Seeing things in the world—in people—that most of us don’t.”

Whoa. I am taken with the absurd idea that Colleen Brooks has just paid me a compliment, but before I can get all self-congratulatory, she says something that totally screws the mood.

“What’s it feel like? When the Source… when it whispers at you, or whatever it does?”

Deep inside, something dark pushes up toward consciousness. I press it back down. “It feels like hell. That’s, um, not a metaphor.”

She won’t give up. “You hear voices? Actual
voices
?”

I breathe out, watching the steam from my mouth dissolve into nothingness.
Be here now
. “I hear, I feel, I see. It’s … complicated. You ever watch
Star Trek
?”

“Uh … yeah.”

“Well, it’s like the Borg. All those voices, coming out of nowhere, coming into your head, pulling at you from someplace dark and cold…” I see her shiver and add: “It’s like I’m Unit Four of Unimatrix One, and the Source is the Borg Queen.”

“You’re putting me on, right?”

Actually, I’m putting her off. “You ever think about your ex?” I counter. “What was his name—Grumpy?”

“Rory. And that’s a dodge,” she accuses me. “If you don’t want to tell me, just say so.”

“So.”

We talk for a while about the things we miss about so-called civilization. Oddly enough, we discover that we have the same number one item—truly hot showers.

The rain has let up and our conversation has degenerated into a laundry list of Most Missed when the horses suddenly get the yips. Words curl up and die on our tongues. We’re on our feet then, and I quickly realize why Colleen kept shifting her position under the tarp.

“Should we wake them?” I whisper, nodding at Doc and Cal and trying to shake the cramps out of my legs.

“Not yet. Let’s make sure it’s worth waking them first.”

Colleen moves to the horses—possibly to read their grapefruit-size equine minds—while I squint into the misty woods, hoping
not
to see fiery eyeballs peering back.

“Shit,” I hear Colleen growl above the whinnying, then, “Wake up! Doc, Cal! C’mon, c’mon, come
on
!”

Behind me they stir, they stretch, they come to befuddled wakefulness, they realize where they are and bolt from their bedding. They are taking up weapons and stations when I see the first pairs of eyes. I glance behind me and wonder if the rocky outcropping before which our very nervous horses now quiver will be help or hindrance.

Lanterns flare at the periphery of my vision. I rip the lid off my fire pit and light up. The flames are sluggish, but they go. To my right and left I hear the rustle of tarps being whisked aside. Flames leap.

“Doc, stay with the horses.” Cal’s voice comes from my left. “Keep them calm. If the twists get past us, take them across the stream and get as far away as you can.”

Doc argues, albeit unsteadily, “We should all leave. If we move now—”

“We could be separated,” Cal finishes. He dumps wood on his fire; it spits bright cinders into the air.

On my right, Colleen hunkers down behind her own column of flame, crossbow locked and loaded. None too soon. Dark shapes materialize out of the shrubbery. As we watch, they go from solid to vapor—black on black, smoke on ink. They may not be able to surround us, but they can easily push us up against the rocks or into the creek if they attack.

They don’t attack. They just melt into the trees and watch us. All we can see of them is those burning red eyes. After
about an hour of this, they glide into a different formation. I can feel all four of us clench, expecting an attack. None comes.

Another hour ticks by. We speak in whispers, keeping each other alert. Cal wonders aloud what they’re waiting for. I don’t want to find out, I seriously don’t.

“Just pray they don’t start singing,” Colleen says.

I take that as an order.

It occurs to me that we could be sitting here till dawn, and I wonder if our fires and lamps will last that long. We are destined to find out. My pile of wood is dwindling and Cal is dropping on his last log when Colleen swears.

“Dammit, the lamps.”

They die as we watch. Then it begins to rain again. It’s a gentle rain but it’s killing our fires, and the dimmer the fires get, the closer the menace moves. I recall that Colleen theorized our shadowy friends were afraid of rain. I could say “I told you so,” but decide it would be exceptionally bad timing.

The twists begin to make a sound that’s less like singing than like wind through high-tension wires. Then they move, oozing toward us like sentient oil slicks. Like the thing in my nightmare. Our pathetic horses are freaking. I can hear Doc desperately trying to calm them.

“Torches!” yells Cal, and lights one. Firelight gleams down the wicked length of the sword he readies in the other hand.

The twists dance at the edges of the light, shapes shifting, now solid, now ephemeral, always distorted, as if they’re dressed in clothing that twists and deflects sight. They advance, they retreat, they keen and wail, they eddy like candle soot. And I realize that they’re more than just
sensitive
to the light. They’re terrified of it.

The fire I shelter behind leaps no higher than my thighs. I drop the machete and hold out my arms—palms up, eyes closed—and imagine four people and six horses inside a snow globe. My palms tingle. My eyes open to a veil of blue-white light.