Magic Time: Angelfire (13 page)

“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
:
ORIG
INAL 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.