Magic Time Read online

  “How would you know?” yelled Anne Flue, in tones at least an octave lower than the mine supervisor’s.

  “And destroying the elevators in attempting to clear the downcasts would only halt production and put everybody out of work for weeks.”

  “Like them dying down there wouldn’t put ’em out of work for longer?”

  Wilma stood back from the crowd, arms folded, watching the faces of her friends and neighbors and feeling oddly detached. The sky still held its light-drenched blue brilliance, but, with the setting of the sun behind the green spine of Pigeon Ridge the valley that held Boone’s Gap was beginning to fill with shadow, and twilight was, she found, having a curious effect on her.

  With the coming of dusk the world seemed to take on different colors. The company compound, with its clutter of green-painted buildings, its tall angular pithead, its cyclone fences strung as though to keep the crowding woods at bay, looked strange to her now. Over the scents of coal and mud and machine-oil other scents tickled and whispered and murmured in her brain. Scents of the woods. Scents of the night.

  “. . . wait another few hours and everything will be all right. We’re overdue to hear from the power company. . . .”

  “Overdue?” hooted Ulee Grant. “My nephew just got back from biking down to Beckley, and he tells me every-thing’s out there as well. And he says you can see smoke in the sky, off from Charlestown and way off in the north towards Wheeling, and you know what else? He says the whole day, he didn’t see one airplane, one helicopter; he didn’t see one working car on the road.”

  “To hell with this!” Hazel Noyes, Wilma’s next-younger sister, planted a booted foot on the edge of the porch and hoisted herself up to stand at the same level as Mullein. “So we can’t get the elevators out of the shaft? I guess that means we’ve got to go in some other way.”

  “Now, wait a minute!” protested the supervisor, looking as if he might shove her off the porch in sheer irritation.

  “Everybody, get food, get water, get blankets, and get all the candles and lamps you can,” Hazel went on. “Meet me over at the old Green Mountain pithead.”

  “That’s company property!”

  Hazel raised her eyebrows and mimed a moment of stunned surprise. “Gosh, and here I thought all these years you’d turned it into a state park when you were done with it!” Hazel had had her nose broken by Applby’s goons on a picket line when she was fifteen: Norman Mullein did not impress her. She turned back to her friends. “It’s a slant mine, not a shaft. Candy, can you meet us there with maps?”

  “Those maps are company property!” protested Mullein. “Miss Leary, I forbid you. . . .”

  “Oh, button it,” snapped Candace, springing up the steps and pushing past him. “I quit, okay?” She went into the office.

  “Get water,” Hazel was repeating. “Get lamps . . . Blankets . . .”

  Wilma slipped away into the shadows, dusk swallowing her up as the crowd scattered.

  Dusk did strange things to her thoughts. She was conscious of movement everywhere, of wildness in her heart and in her veins. As she passed the cars and pickups, stopped wherever they’d been at 9:15 this morning, she felt an odd indifference, as though such things meant nothing to her anymore. It was the time of night when she’d ordinarily have started thinking about getting a flashlight, but she knew there weren’t any and it didn’t bother her. She had no trouble making out shapes—in some ways they were clearer.

  In all the shabby little houses along Front Street, people were lighting candles, waiting for moms and dads, husbands and wives, to get back from the pithead with news. Half of those houses had only had electricity for fifteen or twenty years anyway, and many of them still had wood stoves: the company had built those houses back in the forties, then sold them in the seventies to the miners who’d rented them for decades.

  She turned the corner, climbed the long hill of Applby Street.

  And slowed her steps at the sight of the big white house on the corner amid the honeysuckle.

  Or at the non-sight of it. For a moment it seemed to her that all that was there was a kind of shadowy vacancy. Then she saw it again, but she saw, too, Boone’s Gap’s single patrolman, Glen Abate, making his methodical way down the street. Checking on houses, knocking on doors.

  He walked past the Wishart house as if he didn’t see it. Didn’t remember it was there.

  Didn’t remember that there were people in it who hadn’t been accounted for, that a man he’d gone to school with lay in a coma in the downstairs bedroom, dependent on machines that had to have failed when everything else did.

  And for some reason, Wilma wasn’t surprised.

  She climbed her own front steps, the cats curling and rubbing against her ankles as she came into the porch; walked down the hall to the kitchen and opened cans. Some-body—probably Eleanor of Aquitaine, who was a savage little huntress—had brought a dead mole in as a present, and for some reason the smell of the blood touched a chord in Wilma, not of disgust but of intent and savage eagerness.

  I’m not feeling like myself, she thought.

  But that was a lie.

  She felt more like herself than she’d felt since childhood. She felt light and springy, dazzlingly aware of small noises that she could identify with a weird clarity as tree mice, lizards, cicadas. And with each identification, she felt a strange delight and a dizzying impulse to go and catch them in her hands.

  Perhaps what had happened wasn’t entirely bad, if it freed the spirit like this?

  Across the yard, the white house appeared and disappeared in the dusk.

  Wilma sat on the back porch steps for a time and watched it. She could hear the birds whistling and calling their territories in every bush and tree of the vast thick-growing yards, and knew they were absent from the Wishart yard. The fireflies, which prickled the cobalt velvet of the summer dusk more thickly than they had in years, came nowhere near that house.

  There was light—or something that wasn’t quite light— in the window of Bob’s ground-floor bedroom.

  We’re all right here, Arleta Wishart had called through the door in a voice unlike her own. We’re all fine.

  And, Bob’s calling me.

  Bob, locked for weeks in the silence of his coma?

  He has to be dead, she thought. She knew that no battery in the town was working.

  So why that prickling down her spine, that animal sense of wrongness when she looked toward the house that Glen Abate apparently didn’t see?

  Wilma got to her feet, picked her way through the deep grass toward the house.

  The light in the window wasn’t fire. Nothing of the golden warmth of kerosene or beeswax or any flame. It was violet, cold and pulsing rather than flickering, and as she stepped forward into the rank beds of honeysuckle she felt a pressure, a tightness in her chest, as if the air around the house were suddenly hostile and alive.

  Anger. Anger and terror.

  Go away! Go away! Go away!

  She called out cautiously, “Bob?” Edged another step closer, her tall body crouching, limbs drawing together in a sort of lithe feral readiness, to spring or to flee. The air clawed and crinkled on her skin, and she prickled, nostrils twitching. Before her the honeysuckle stirred in the darkness, and from the leaves, from the thin glabrous flowers and the tough vines, came a kind of hissing, as if the plants themselves stirred and lashed against the ground.

  She saw it move, ripple and rise, and she thought, Stranglers. The very scent of the flowers changed to a warning stink, the pungence of blood and death.

  Slowly she withdrew. On the lawn behind her, Sebastian, Imp and Eleanor crouched in a line like three sphinxes, tails twitching slightly, huge eyes seeming to glow in the dark. Crazy with the craziness of cats in the night. Aware, as she was aware, of the lizards in the ferns, of the birds in the trees.

  The honeysuckle stirred again, and Sebastian opened his red mouth and hissed.

  Careful, soft-footed, alive to every whispe
r in the dark, Wilma circled the house to the path by the back door. Something in the house was aware of her. Something in the house followed her around the walls with its consciousness. Some- thing in the house crouched down into itself, gathering darkness.

  Arleta was in there, thought Wilma. Arleta and Bob—and Arleta was still alive even if Bob wasn’t. She had a momentary vision of them, the pale chubby, helpless little woman in her pink sweats, her soft fair-haired son helpless in the bed.

  Her friends, whom she could not desert.

  She edged down the path, tense and ready to flee. Under her feet the concrete shifted suddenly, the ground jerking, breaking. The two slabs of broken path yawned open, and she sprang back as they snapped shut like jaws biting at her ankle; the path jerked again, like a snake’s back rippling. Wilma leaped back, not even fully aware that she shouldn’t have been able to clear eight feet from a standing start. Her feet hit the ground, and she darted forward again in a long-legged springy run.

  She grabbed the back door handle, moving fast, dragging on it with all her strength. Though the door had never had a lock on it, not even a hook, it refused to budge. Some terrible strength pulled against her own, though she could look through the screen and see nothing in the dark dusty clutter of old couches and boxes of romances heaped there. Behind her she heard a rustle, a whoosing green-plant heaviness of moving air, and reaching up she slashed and clawed at the screen where it was loose on its crazy old nails, bringing it down in a great tearing curl.

  With weightless strength she swung up, through and into the porch, hearing in her mind the screaming desperate voice, GET OUT! GET OUT! GO AWAY! The darkness seemed to slam around her, a crushing fist, smothering. Dust and panic and something else, something terrible. Wilma dodged an instant before a cardboard box slammed heavily against the wall by her shoulder, the violence of the blow splitting the ancient glue. Paperbacks snowed to the plank floor, then rose up again like mad birds, flying at her face, shoving, suffocating. Wilma backed, dodged, nimble and very fast, instinct beyond words telling her to keep moving and changing direction, but whatever was in the porch with her was strong and fast as well.

  Fear pounded on her, fear like a whirlwind—her own fear and a fear that seemed to come with that terrified scream. She grabbed the doorknob that would let her into the kitchen, and it was scalding hot under her hand. She jerked back, and one of the old couches swung at her legs like a battering ram. She sprang on top of it, up and over, ran as it tipped, plunged out through the window screen again. Fell, rolled, was on her feet and fleeing.

  It was only when she sat once more on her own porch steps, panting and shivering and staring through the darkness at the white house that she could still see perfectly well—see with the preternatural clearness with which she still saw every leaf of the honeysuckle, every blade of the grass, through the night’s gathering gloom—that she thought, How the hell did I survive that?

  Softly, silently, the cats padded up to her through the gloom. Clinton levitated in a weightless spring to her shoulder; Mortimer butted the side of her knee gently with his flat furry skull; Isabella coaxingly dropped a mostly dead bug on her foot and touched her with a gentle paw. Wilma scratched scruffs, stroked backs, rubbed chins, drawing from them the comfort of company, the uncomplicated love that never disappointed her, never made demands that she wasn’t prepared to fulfill.

  It seemed to her years since the morning whistle had sounded in the mine, since she’d taken her shower and opened cans. She guessed now what the others didn’t, that the lights might not be coming back on.

  Good thing I have a manual can opener.

  Except, of course, she thought, when we run out of cans. She looked across at the darkness of the Wishart house, at the eerie purplish phosphorescence flickering in its window, and whatever was there looked back at her.

  Voices in the street. Shannon Grant and Marcia duPone—friends and neighbors, reminding her that whatever else had changed, there were things that hadn’t.

  Wilma closed the back door and returned to the dark of her house, to gather up water, food, blankets for those who would need them. And she felt whatever was in the Wishart house aware of her as she stepped out the front door to join her friends.

  Chapter Thirteen

  NEW YORK

  Big Eddie was cooking, and that was that.

  Didn’t make no never mind if it was World War III or the biggest fuckup Municipal or the Man Upstairs had ever pulled. Nothing he could do about it. He’d just left that fucking Metro bus of his on Forty-second and Sixth where it had up and died, come home and hauled the barbecue right out onto the street. Now he stood like some black Moses in a chef’s hat and apron, keeping the coals red hot and dishing out the good stuff.

  He’d started the ball rolling by grilling whatever was thawing in his own freezer. Pretty soon folks from next door and down the block and around the corner were popping up with armfuls of burgers and dogs and chicken from their own kitchens. Better to cook it up than let it just rot. And some cats had gotten out their conga drums and saxophones and acoustic guitars, and it was sounding fine. Folks were scared shitless, hell yes, but it was also a damn good party. And not just the folks from the neighborhood: anyone could play; this was New York City. Big Eddie saw Asian dudes in pinstripe suits, a couple of them Orthodox guys, some Italian chicks still clutching their shopping bags from Bloomie’s and Bergdorf ’s. All mixing with the local talent, the brothers and sisters, Puerto Ricans and Vietnamese and just plain white guys. Everybody keeping it cool, right here, right now.

  “That smells damn good.” The voice behind him was a gutter rasp that made Wolfman Jack sound like a soprano. Big Eddie turned to see a long, lean figure hugging the shadows between two buildings.

  “Tastes better than it smells,” Big Eddie said. “So whyn’t you just come on up and get yourself some?”

  Unsteadily, the figure emerged from the shadows into the mellow light cast by the paper lanterns donated by the corner sushi bar. Eddie could see the guy was even taller than he, better than six and a half feet, a white guy with a dark complexion and really bad skin, wild black hair, and Ray-bans hiding his eyes. His black suit—looked like it had been expensive once—was torn to shit.

  “Man, what happened to you?”

  “Dunno,” Stern said vaguely. “I’m all turned round.”

  Even through the smoke curling up redolent of meat and juices, Big Eddie’s nostrils caught the tang of the dude’s odor, some funky dinosaur smell or weird shit.

  “Well, lemme get you set up here.” Big Eddie heaped chicken wings and a burger, some potatoes and corn on a paper plate, held it out to him. The dude’s hands had been jammed in his pockets, but now he had to pull one out to reach for the plate. Light fell across it, caught the glint of a white-gold wristwatch. Eddie saw long, rough-ridged nails and a hand all blotchy and bubbly, like it was erupting from within.

  Big Eddie yanked back his hand, dropping the plate. “Geez, man, you’re sick! What the hell you got?”

  “I don’t know,” Stern said with absent neutrality. Man, the dude was trippin’.

  “Well, keep your distance. You go over there, I’ll slide something to you.”

  Stern tilted his head, regarding Big Eddie, and an insolence bloomed on his face that made him at once seem more together and formidable. “I don’t take orders.”

  “You wanna eat, you better start.” Big Eddie kept his eyes on the other man, not backing down, as he assembled another plate.

  “Friend,” Stern said, and there was no friendship in it, “you can kiss your tip good-bye.” With a sweep of one big arm, he sent the barbecue tumbling, meat and spuds and cobs all flying, red-hot coals spilling out. Big Eddie yelped and fell back, swatting the burning stuff away.

  “Motherfucker!” Now others were coming on the run, yelling at the crazy sick asshole. “What the fuck is your problem?” More and more of them, surging together, tattoos and silk ties and brow studs and Versace, moving fas
t. “Mess him up, mess that fucker up!” Stern lurched away, broke into a run, sunglasses flying off his face.

  And they were after him.

  Sam Lungo heard the mob coming from behind his lace curtains and heavy oak door, screaming their trash talk, their obscenities.

  It had been a frightful evening, jumping at every creak of the old house, every distant crash and yell. The anguish and fury of the night had shrieked outside like a storm, shuddering windows and doors. Huddled in the dark, he had witnessed Patel’s being smashed and torn apart, seen the wild ones descend on that mounted policeman in all their hunger and fear.

  He had felt the briefest stirrings of sympathy, a fretful impulse toward action, but then Patel’s had always gouged, their prices twenty, thirty cents higher than any supermarket. And as for that policeman, well, the police never did a thing when you called them, never did their job.

  Then Cal Griffin and that dykey girl from down the street had appeared, driven the mob off. Sam had watched, silent and still, as they had helped the bulky old cop to his feet, murmuring like his own caring children, obviously solicitous, though Sam couldn’t hear the words.

  Sam’s heart had pounded so fiercely then that he feared it would burst his chest, be launched through the glass to land wetly at their feet, longing, longing. . . .

  To have someone care about him, to have a protector, to be seen and heard and known, not an outsider or pariah, excluded from all confidences and joys.

  The shouts and footfalls were louder now. Sam pressed his nose to the glass, squinting at the darkness. They were still around the corner but coming closer, and fast. The first one appeared, a huge, bony man in a tattered suit, gasping, stumbling, clearly frightened. Why, he was being chased.

  The first of his pursuers emerged behind him, rounding the corner, a big fat man with a baseball bat. The one in the suit turned on him just as Fat Boy swung the bat at his head. Incredibly, Torn Suit caught the bat in his hands, snapped it in two—crack—and cast the pieces aside.