The Stone War (34 page)

Read The Stone War Online

Authors: Madeleine E. Robins

Tags: #Fiction

BOOK: The Stone War
11.96Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
For hours Jit sat in his tunnel, sharing his anger, honing his weapon.
Tietjen did not see Barbara for the rest of the day. He wondered if she was avoiding him, but that seemed so un-Barbara-like. More likely their tasks just took them in different directions. He stopped late for dinner and wandered into the dining room when most people were finishing up. As he took his plate, Beth Voe stopped him to ask where Barbara was.
“I haven’t seen her since this morning,” he said.
There was a breeze stirring: Beth pushed a strand of hair out of her mouth. “She was going to come plot out the winter garden with me today. It’s not like Barbara not to show up.” She shook her head and walked away.
Bobby Fratelone had come downstairs for dinner. He was still on crutches, and his broken leg appeared to have set badly. Tietjen ate with him and Bobby worried loudly about the state of their fighters now that he was not training them.
“Hey, where’s Miz McGrath?” Bobby asked at the end of the meal.
Tietjen shook his head. “I don’t know. We had an—argument—this morning, and I haven’t seen her since.”
Fratelone looked Tietjen up and down. “You be nice to that lady, Boss. She’s the best thing we got here. And she’s crazy about you, so just be nice, okay?”
Tietjen nodded. Be nice. That sounded simple enough. He pushed himself away from the table. Time to find Barbara and be nice.
It wasn’t simple. She wasn’t where she would normally be at this time of day—in the dining room, in the kitchen, taking advantage of the relative cool of the early evening to work in the garden. Tietjen checked there. She was not in the infirmary, not in the laundry room. Most of the people he asked said they had not seen her that day; a few said they had, but could not remember where.
That left her room. Tietjen climbed the stairs slowly. What to say? And what would he do if she was not in her room—where else could she be? As he went down the hall to her room Tietjen began to feel light-headed and scared. “Don’t be an idiot, John.” he said aloud, and knocked on the door.
No answer.
He knocked again. Again, no answer. Gingerly, Tietjen tried the door; it was not locked. “Barbara?” He stepped inside, looked around. No one there. Her bed was neatly made, the few clothes folded on a chair. Something fluttered under the bed, scraps of fabric stirring in the breeze.
Again downstairs, Tietjen started asking everyone he could find about McGrath. Finally someone knew something.
“She said she was going for a walk. She said she needed to clear her head, now that it was cool enough to go outside again.” The woman looked unconcerned. “Sure, she looked okay. Just said she was going out for a bit.”
Un-Barbara-like, Tietjen thought. But the whole damned day had been un-Barbara-like. Maybe the kindest thing he could do was to wait for her, let her set the pace. He owed Barbara kindness.
He checked again in an hour. Nothing. An hour after that, the watch said, Yes, McGrath had come in. “I told her you’d been looking for her. She said she needed to clean up first. I guess she’ll be up in her room.”
Tietjen nodded and went back to his room, wondering if he should go to her or let her alone. What he really wanted, he realized, was to ask Barbara for advice. “There’s this woman,” he wanted to say. “And I handled it badly, you know what a jerk I can be, and what do I do now?” Only he couldn’t do that. It was dark now, hot and humid. The breeze that stirred the trees to whispering did not cool the air. There was a film of sweat on his cheekbones and forehead. Until the thing with Barbara was settled, he couldn’t sleep, so he sat in candlelight knitting a singlet, the way Barbara had taught him.
“You wanted to see me?” Barbara was framed by light from the hall lamp, a silhouette with her voice, her halo of white hair.
“All day,” Tietjen said. “Come in, Barbara. I want to apologize—”
“Why, John?” Her voice was sweet. Tietjen wished he could see her face better. “There’s nothing to apologize for, is there?”
“Plenty, I think. I was stupid and dense and insensitive—”
She laughed, a brittle, silvery laugh. “You’re always stupid and dense and insensitive, John. Is there something else you want to apologize for?” Something was wrong, more wrong than the words or even the unpleasant coquetry of Barbara’s tone. She moved farther into the room, and the wan candlelight washed over her. Barbara swaggered, one hand on her hip in a parody of seductiveness; the other hand floated up and down along the placket of her sleeveless blouse, toying with buttons, gliding on the sweat that Tietjen saw beading at the top of her breasts. He was unable to look away from her hand, and memories of the damned dream from the night before came back again, overwhelmingly. He should look away, Tietjen thought. Barbara wouldn’t want him staring at her chest like a horny teenager.
“Staring at my breasts, John?” she asked, still too sweetly. “Mustn’t do that. Someone might think I was attractive. Someone might think I was capable of sexual feelings. Besides, you don’t want to stare at my breasts, John. They’re
old.
”
Tietjen remembered the dream, the weight of her small breasts, the pale freckled skin, their responsiveness. Horrified, he realized he was aroused. He looked away. “Barbara, what’s going on?” he asked. “I wanted to apologize for this morning; I hurt you, I know, and I’d sooner cut off my arm—”
“Than deal with it,” she finished. She sounded delighted, as if she had supplied the missing word in a trivia game. “Sooner lose a leg than let someone close enough to know that they mattered. Sooner lose Ketch and ignore the little bump that made in your life than to figure out how she was important to you and to tell her.” Barbara opened a button on her blouse, revealing the lacy top of her bra. Tietjen looked away again.
“You’d sooner cut off my leg than tell me directly,
Oh no, thanks, you’re too old for me, Barbara.
Telling me directly would be too messy. Can’t take responsibility for that. God, John, you’re such a coward. I even thought that was lovable for a while, d’you believe it?”
Tietjen felt like he was caught in a black hole, falling forever toward the event horizon, unable to move, listening to McGrath pour out a depth of rage and hurt he had never suspected. Not for him—for God’s sake, it had nothing to do with him. He cleared his throat. “Barbara? Barbara, what do you want? What can I do?”
She smiled. “You can’t do a damned thing, John. That’s the point. Love comes to you and you push it away, you stick something in between it and you—between you and Irene, or Ketch, or your damned kids. Then you get romantic and remorseful about it, but you don’t stop hiding. I just don’t feel like being romanticized. You hurt me. I want you to rub that into your skin and die a little bit every time you think about me, because you made me feel like shit, old plain dependable Barbara shit. Because you couldn’t love me.” She did not say it as a complaint but a statement of unassailable fact.
“If anyone—any goddamned one staggered in off the street and volunteered to help with this place, you loved them a little—not enough to remember their names, or what had happened to them, but you loved them a little. It’s the people who want more you can’t deal with.” Barbara’s voice got higher, more strident; the sexy drawl was gone. “If a kid walked in from Central Park tonight and wanted you to take him in, you’d call him a city-killer and push him away. You’re worse than Gable, you’re worse than anything, you push anyone away—”
Tietjen stood up and grabbed Barbara’s shoulders. He shook her. “Barbara, what are you talking about?”
A light, something he had thought was reflected candlelight, went out in her eyes. She looked at him blankly for a moment. “Too tired to make sense,” she said lightly. “Or too senile.” She pulled out of his grasp and turned away, toward the door. “Don’t worry, John. I won’t bother you anymore. I’m gone.”
And she was gone, moving quickly out the door with a quiet, Barbara-like movement. Tietjen felt as if she had taken the air in the room with her. When he realized he had been holding his breath he began gulping in air, making himself dizzy with it. Nothing made any sense. He sank back on the bed and let the guilt and horror wash through him, because she was right: it was his fault, had been his fault his whole life. He’d never had a relationship he hadn’t run from, ever. Taking the blame, accepting the blame, made him feel perversely good, as if he were doing something right, really playing the hero at last.
That made him stop. He might almost have heard Barbara’s voice, asking dryly if he wasn’t taking himself too seriously. Life as an opera, and himself as the tenor. That was no better. What, then? He sat up on the bed, staring at the flickering light cast on the far wall, thinking.
Barbara was right. He had hurt her, and he hated that and wanted to fix it, and knew that there might not be any chance of it: the hurt might run too deep. He wanted, with a deep, childish wanting, to take it back, be allowed a second chance. He hated the unreasonableness of a universe in which time wouldn’t roll back and allow him to do it all over again. He went back and forth between anger and guilt for a long while until finally, lulled by the candles’ flicker in the dark, Tietjen dozed off.
When he woke it was still dark, and he wasn’t sure that he wasn’t dreaming. The candles were guttering out; the light they cast was dark gold and did not cut the darkness but simply drew pictures on top of it. For a few minutes Tietjen thought that the face he saw on the wall was a trick of light. Then he closed and opened his eyes and the face was still there, a narrow, pale face with dark eyes, a shock of dark hair, sharp-set bones. He had seen the face before, but could not remember where.
Then he did remember. The kid he and Barbara had talked to in the street one night. Scrawny and shy; Barbara had given him her coat. Tietjen blinked. The face still flickered against the wall, watching him, as if it was waiting for him to speak. What time is it? Tietjen wondered. Must be late; I’m dreaming.
Then the face on the wall spoke. The voice was a boy’s, husky but with cracks in it. The way he spoke—it was not like any New York accent Tietjen knew, or maybe it was a combination of all of them, lowspeak and street talk, East Side and West.
“Tee-jin, Tee-jin,” he taunted. “Old woman she mine now.” The face smiled.
Tietjen sat upright. “What?”
“You push her. She come to me. She hate you. Pushed away. Like me—”
“Like you?” Tietjen prompted.
“Old woman she mine,” the voice repeated. “I keep her.”
“Where’s Barbara?”
“Stupid Man,” the voice said. “She come to me. She be mine now. Unless …” It took a sly tone. “Unless you want get her. I give her you come, Stupid Man.”
“Where are you?” Tietjen asked.
“You want her, Jit help you find her.”
Jit?” It was the boy’s name, Tietjen remembered. The boy with the coat.”We gave you a coat, right?”
The voice changed. “God, John, you’re such a coward.” It was Barbara’s voice and intonation, the words she’d used earlier that night. Tietjen went cold at the sound. “I even thought that was lovable for a while, d’you believe it?” The voice changed again, to the husky boy-voice. “You want her, you find Jit, Stupid Man.”
“Where?” Tietjen asked.
The head shook disapprovingly. “You know where. Like with Gable’s people—”
“You’re at Grand Central?” Tietjen asked.
“You’re not getting the point, John.” Barbara’s voice again, calm and reasonable. It was still the kid’s face that Tietjen saw. “How did we know to look at Grand Central? What told us the monsters would be there?”
Tietjen remembered. Sitting in a room, dimly lit, talking; each one of them had known some part of the puzzle, and when the pieces were fit together it worked—more than that, they had all known absolutely that the answer was … the answer. “I’ll know?” It was unsatisfactory, too slim a reed to hang Barbara’s life on.
“You know,” the boy’s voice agreed.
The face watched Tietjen somberly for a few moments without speaking. Then, slowly, it began to fade into the guttering candlelight. The image was almost gone, no more than a whitish smear, when he heard Barbara’s voice again. “Get some rest, John. You’re going to need it.”
BARBARA
was gone. Tietjen woke completely out of a sound sleep knowing that, and knowing it was up to him to get her back. It was still dark out, but the moon shone on the face of the building across the street, and his room seemed filled with light. He pulled on shoes and, after a little thought, put a penlight and his pocketknife in his back pocket. Then, walking gingerly, he left his room.
The Store was asleep. Tietjen moved through silent halls lit with the thin, buttery glow of camping lanterns. The air was hot and unmoving, even with dawn several hours away. No one stepped out of their rooms to see what the matter was. Downstairs in the lobby, the sentries at the front door straightened in their chairs and patted the pistols that lay across their laps, but both of them nodded Tietjen unquestioningly through the door. That made him frown: they should have asked anyone leaving the building at three A.M. what his business was. Barbara would have asked, Tietjen thought. Barbara would have stopped him.
Outside the Store there was a soft breeze blowing. The street was as silent as the Store had been; only the rattle and whisper of dried leaves and paper tumbling across pavement made a noise. Tietjen stood for a moment, waiting. Then, with a sense of rightness, he turned toward the Park. At the corner he turned north, up Fifth Avenue. What Barbara had said was true: he knew now, bit by bit, where he had to go. It was coming to him, the pull as strong as the panicked call back into the city he had followed months before. This time, however, there was a loosening in his chest as he relaxed and followed the tug of his internal compass. He was scared: he had no idea what he would find when he reached the end of his walk. He was also relieved to be doing something—anything, after what suddenly seemed to him to be months of inactivity. I missed this, he thought, and realized that “this” was the wordless pull that led him through the streets.
At Seventy-ninth Street Tietjen stopped and looked into the silvery darkness of Central Park. He had not gone back into the Park since the day he had crossed it, coming back to the city. In the dark it looked like a web of silver and black shadow; moonlight shone dully off the Metropolitan Museum up Fifth Avenue ahead of him. Tietjen wondered what had happened to the curator who’d gone crazy and had tried to capture him there. He and Barbara had sent an armed party back to explore, but they had found the museum deserted, without a trace of the curator or his prisoners. Remembering Barbara with her hands tied behind her, calmly explaining to him how they would escape, made Tietjen grin in the dark. He held that image in his mind as he crossed Fifth Avenue and braced himself to walk into Central Park.
It was better than he had expected: the prickly wrongness he remembered no longer hung over the Park like a mist. Still, something, perhaps only the silvery moonlight on the branches and leaves over his head, made Tietjen think of the word
enchantment.
He was in an enchanted wood, a place where magic lived. Not the evil he remembered or the good magic of fairy tales; the Park breathed a kind of power that was heady and frightening because it was for itself and not for good or bad.
On the path under the trees the moonlight didn’t penetrate; he made his way through the shadows more by feel and instinct than by sight, although when he looked ahead the mass of Belvedere Castle shone with moonlight, and the moon reflected across the surface of Belvedere Lake, stirring like ribbons in the breeze. Not only was the Castle still standing, but the graffiti that Tietjen recalled had covered every spare inch of the Castle was gone—what he saw was plain gray stone lit by the moon.
He was so busy looking at the Castle that he didn’t see the man walking toward him until they were almost nose to nose. Tietjen jumped aside and the man continued on without stopping. Tietjen drew a breath and looked after the man, and realized that he wasn’t a man at all but a shadow, man-sized and shaped, moving intently down the path toward the East Side. After all these months, the weirdness could still creep up on him, Tietjen thought. His hands trembled, and he jammed them into his pockets. In the moonlight he was not sure which was more frightening to him: the shadow-man’s insubstantiality, its determination, or the thought that he himself might be just that determined and just that insubstantial.
When he looked west again he saw two more shadow-men coming toward him. It took nerve and concentration to stand there and watch them come, but Tietjen did not duck aside this time. He stood his ground and let them walk
through
him; the sensation was strange, hollow-feeling and cold, but not frightening. He turned to watch the shadow-men melt into the darkness under the trees, their shadow forms fraying into grayness at the edges, the grayness spreading inward until the men blinked out against the black of the tree line. He stood watching, and only knew by the sudden sensation of hollowness and the sight of another dark silhouette trudging eastward that another shadow had walked through him. When he turned back to the west there were dozens of them on the path, walking toward him. For a few moments he just stood there, letting them move through him, wondering what it felt like to them, where they were going. They were going nowhere: as they reached the eastern edge of the field the shadow-men dissolved, fraying into the darkness until there was nothing left. Looking eastward, Tietjen felt more of them walk through him: the hair on his arms and legs stood up and there was a taste of metal on his tongue. He had the idea that if enough of them walked through him he would build up an electric charge that would keep him rooted where he stood.
Tietjen turned west and took a step, then another. The shadow-men kept walking through him, two and three abreast now. As he followed the curving path around the lake toward the charred shell of the Delacorte Theater (had it burned down in his lifetime? Tietjen could not remember) Tietjen began to feel the weight of the phantoms press against him, as if he were walking into a stiff breeze. When he looked at the shadow-men rather than through them, he began to see features: beaky noses, jutting chins, hollow eyes. Comic-book likenesses, at first nearly identical, then more and more individual.
Then one of them jostled him in passing. Tietjen was turned clear around by the impact, not hard but unexpected, and watched the black phantom march purposefully along the path to the trees on the far side of the lake. As he stood watching, another one bumped into him, and then another. Tietjen turned and saw a crowd of half-solid shadow-men bearing down on him like a stream of people through a rush-hour doorway. He began to move forward again, threading himself through the crowd, bumped and jostled again and again, as the shadow-men grew more solid and took on faces of their own, the sorts of faces he might have seen on any day on his way to work, carved out of something as dark and unreflective as night.
Dodging through the crowd, he finally rounded the shell of the old amphitheater and followed the slope downhill to the access road. The crowd began to thin around him, but the shadow-men who came toward him seemed more and more solid. More than that, at last they seemed to see him. One gestured to him, pointing back toward the east; another shook its head, dark eyes that were simply another shade of black against the blackness of its face, meeting Tietjen’s. Finally, one stopped in front of him and grabbed his arm, gesturing frantically.
“What?” Tietjen asked.
I’m talking to shadows, dammit, and Barbara is waiting
. “What do you want?”
The shadow-man kept pulling on his arm, his hand sweeping urgently eastward. His face was as real as Tietjen’s own now, frightened and angry. Tietjen turned to look behind him at the shadow-men who were dissolving at the edge of the horizon, come to life just to frighten him, their lives measured in the time it took for them to stride from clearing’s edge to clearing’s edge. What would happen to them if he turned back west; would they live? At least until the sunrise?
“I can’t,” Tietjen said. “Someone is waiting for me, I’m sorry. I can’t stay.”
The shadow-man grasped Tietjen’s arm with both hands now, pulling so hard he had to brace himself to keep from being dragged down the path. Looking east, he saw another figure fade into dark. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “I have to go on. What if you—what if you just stayed here? Don’t walk east? Would you live?” The figure stepped away from Tietjen, dropped its arms and turned east, hopelessly. “Wait,” he said. He put his hand on the shadow’s shoulder, felt it sink into lush darkness for a moment before resting on solid warmth. “Don’t go. Stay and see.”
The shadow-man did not turn to look at him. It shook its head sadly, pulled away from Tietjen, and started walking. Tietjen turned back toward the West Side and walked a few paces, but couldn’t keep from looking back again. The sparse crowd of black figures behind him rose and fell like an uneasy sea swell; as each reached the edge of the trees, the shadow-men simply faded into the moonlit air. Tietjen thought he saw the one who had stopped him disappear that way, and felt bitter and angry.
“Why give something life if you’re just going to take it away? Did you think they would stop me? Did you want to choose between their lives and Barbara’s? What are you doing?” He spoke the words aloud, but there was no answer.
Tietjen crossed the access road and found the thickly grown path to Eighty-first Street. He was alone again, as suddenly as that. As he walked, the compass pull reasserted itself, as certain as if someone had taken him by the hand: he was going to the Museum of Natural History. It was an old friend, home ground: Tietjen could envision the enormous whale, the elephants and lions, the immense barosaurus skeleton in the lobby. Chris had loved the elephants—African and Asian—and Davy the dinosaurs. That was a sweet thought: he could imagine his boys’ voices, their pleasure as they darted through the museum halls. The warmth of the memory leached out of him when the images changed. Tietjen imagined the elephants rioting, the barosaurus smashing him into a wall with one careless sweep of its skeletal tail. He sagged against the Park wall, weak as water.
“Weak as water?” Now he heard Barbara’s voice—imagined it, but it was a true imagining, full of her humor and ginger. “Water isn’t weak, you idiot. Think what you saw of SoHo and Wall Street. Water levels
cities
.” He felt a tide of longing for Barbara, his good companion. With her voice he imagined her, not as he had seen her last, but as he knew her day to day, neat and practical and funny and lovable. He felt a twist of shame that he had hurt her—then discarded that as self-pitying.
Tietjen straightened and looked up at the museum again. His compass said that Barbara was in there, guarded by the dinosaurs and elephants and stuffed lions, and the pale, frightening boy who held her. It was time to go in and get her. For Barbara he would be as strong as water.
Tietjen could not even guess what weapons the boy had or how powerful he was; his only hope was that logic was his weapon. So he began to reason out an approach to the museum. From where he stood it looked as if the planetarium on the north side had been smashed in; a crater extended out into the driveway, as if, fittingly enough, the building had been hit by a meteor. What was left of the glass and steel seemed to be thickly covered in ivy. A steady breeze stirred the leaves; he could hear the rustling from across the street, but Tietjen barely felt the air move. Now that he stood outside the Park again it was hot.
No entry through the north way. There was an entrance on the south side, on Seventy-seventh Street, and the main entrance on the east side, with the statue of Teddy Roosevelt looking out over Central Park West and the Park itself. He was pretty sure the west-side staff entrances had been sealed years before, when the green there had become a shantytown. For some reason—the mysterious inner compass again—Tietjen was nervous about walking around to Seventy-seventh Street.
So he would have to enter through one of the main doors on the east. Probably the boy would expect him there; maybe the kid had planted his unease about the southern entrance. What if he fought the pull? He tried an experiment. “I’ll go down to the south door,” he said aloud. He took a few steps toward Seventy-seventh Street. Immediately, he was filled with a terror that had him lead footed and shaky. In the warm breeze he was suddenly icy cold, and he kept shuddering, whole-body tremors that made it difficult to stand. It was like the sensations he had had when he went toward the East River, but worse. Behind the feeling, just palpable, was a sense of rage. Someone was very angry that he’d tried to disregard his clear instructions. Tietjen stopped, and the terror subsided at once. The boy hadn’t hurt him—and he could, that was obvious. He simply wanted Tietjen to go a certain somewhere, where Barbara was.
He started toward the doors on Central Park West.
Crossing Central Park, Tietjen had moved briskly. Now he approached the museum slowly. A few minutes before he had been chilled and trembling; now his neck was sticky with sweat, and sweat rimed his nose and cheekbones; it felt too hot to move any faster. The air felt thick. Despite the moonlight, the front entrance and stairs were in shadow. As Tietjen walked closer he realized that the statue of Roosevelt, astride a horse and flanked by Indian guides, lay on its side. Vines had overgrown the steps and twined around the granite horse’s legs. They covered the stairs and the statue and most of the ornamental stonework of the museum. When he got to the steps he realized it was not ivy, but some kind of dense leafless thorny vine. In places the growth looked deliberate and ornamental, as if a gardener had labored hard to produce the effect. Tietjen tried stepping over or around the thorns, but found all he could do was to step on them, beat them back with his feet. The vine grew steadily, fast enough so Tietjen could see it happening: he watched the vine cover Roosevelt’s statue completely in the time it took him to climb from the street to the doors. By noon the whole museum would be impenetrably covered with the black, thorny vines, which seemed to root into the granite of the steps. Trapped inside by the thorns: he wiped sweat from his hairline and the back of his neck. One of the revolving doors stood open.

Other books

Twin Fantasies by Opal Carew
Of Blood and Passion by Pamela Palmer
I Can't Believe He Spanked Me! (Kari's Lessons) by Zara, Cassandra, Lane, Lucinda
A Slice of Heaven by Sherryl Woods
Divorce Is in the Air by Gonzalo Torne
The Einstein Intersection by Samuel R. Delany