Magic Time Page 16

  Stern cocked his head, eyed him with a lawyer’s caginess. “And what’s your percentage?”

  Sam’s heart thrilled. As a child, he’d seen The Thief of Baghdad and for years after had fantasized about having its huge, forbidding genie at his command, to do his bidding. What is thy wish, O my master?

  Sam plunged a hand into his pocket, withdrew the dog-eared notepad, one of so many, with their hundreds and thousands of notations, all the days and weeks and years of outrage and insult.

  “There’s some people I’d like you to meet . . .,” he said.

  Cal found himself swimming against a tide of humanity, every cross street hopelessly clogged with folks making their way toward Central Park, drawn by the glare of the huge propane lamps of the National Guard encampment there.

  Cal darted into an alleyway behind some restaurants. It reeked of rotted vegetables, spoiled meat, but mercifully there was no one in sight. He dodged spilled trash cans, leaped over rubbish, picking up speed.

  “Yo, Ginsu!” The voice echoed off cold brick. “Where’s your girlfriend?” The alley was pitch dark, but there was no mistaking the haircut in the reflected candleglow from a window above, the shirt with its grinning death’s head.

  Cal slowed as Misfits swaggered toward him. “Get a load of this,” he said. He extended a hand.

  The trash at Cal’s feet quivered, whipped about as in a sharp wind, and Cal felt himself gripped hard, pulled by a powerful suction. He struggled, but there was no fighting it. It swept him up, hurled him toward the open hand, which caught him by the throat, squeezed tight.

  Misfits bared ragged, nicotine-stained teeth in a delighted grin. “Magnet Man, just like with the gun. Didn’t know I could do it till tonight. Been wastin’ my time in vocational school.” He winced. “Man, my ribs hurt.”

  He raised the police automatic, held it an inch from Cal’s face. “Am I glad to see you,” he said.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Wait!” Cal shot out a desperate hand. Misfits fired. But there was no bang. Instead, the gun gave off a weak spark, like a lighter not quite catching.

  While Misfits was still doing a double-take, Cal reacted, stomped the younger man’s instep. The youth doubled over. Cal twisted in his grip and elbowed him in the mouth.

  His advantage was momentary. Misfits lunged back at him with a kick that knocked Cal sprawling and drove the breath from him. Conditioned by years of TV and movie fights, though, the young man couldn’t give up the idea of a gun. Instead of advancing, Misfits fired again.

  And again, the fizzy little flash, the ping of a bullet falling out of the muzzle.

  Cal rolled to his feet and fled, stumbling on his first stride but then leveling into speed he hadn’t thought himself capable of. Misfits fired after him: pht-clink, pht-clink, pht-clink. Feeble flashes in the dark.

  Leaning against an alley wall later, belly hurting more than he’d thought possible from the youth’s kick, Cal thought about the encounter.

  Magnet Man, didn’t know I could do it . . .

  Had he really seen what he’d seen?

  Defective gun? But he’d seen the spark. And it hadn’t jammed, he’d heard the bullets fall.

  One defective bullet, maybe, but all of them?

  The gun moving along the pavement . . .

  Being dragged into the young man’s grip . . .

  Planes falling out of the sky.

  He took a deep breath, straightened up. His palms were bleeding from hitting the pavement, and his elbow was bruised from Misfits’ teeth.

  The image of Tina came flooding back to him, and the horror and chaos of Roosevelt. Cal hurried up the alley, jogging at first until the pain in his belly eased, then running full out again, like a man pursued by the darkness he’d all his life tried to outrun.

  WEST VIRGINIA

  They still don’t know, thought Wilma, her long stride keeping easy pace with Shannon Grant’s hurrying feet, with the small scuttling Marcia duPone. They still don’t understand.

  She didn’t understand either, not exactly. She would have been hard put even to explain the suspicions and speculations that circled through her mind. But she knew to her marrow that what had happened wasn’t a power outage.

  Something had changed. Whatever had driven her out of Arleta’s house—and it was a consciousness, a blinded screaming hammering rage-filled Something—wasn’t part of a world where power outages or earthquakes or cave-ins, or even nuclear war for that matter, were what you had to worry about.

  She carried a two-and-a-half-gallon bottle of Allegheny Spring Water and a canvas bag filled with candles, lamp oil and three disassembled colored-glass oil lamps. Anyone who lived for any length of time within driving distance of a dozen Appalachian craft fairs picked up colored-glass oil lamps: impractical for the most part, but an inevitable gift at Christmas-time. Shannon had two in her satchel, plus another, burning, in her hand. Marcia brought only one, having decided that food was more important.

  “It’s only been since nine this morning,” pointed out Shannon, eyeing the old woman’s collapsible shopping cart of canned tuna and bags of day-old bread.

  “I grew up in the Depression, honey,” announced Marcia, in case Shannon had somehow neglected to assimilate a statement she’d heard four times a day since birth. “And I know there’s nothing worse than being hungry. If I feel that way, and my Gus feels that way, and God knows my Tommy feels that way, you know half those men down there feel that way.”

  Shut up, thought Wilma, not in impatience, but because her new awareness brought her sounds from the darkness around them. Her mind snapped away from uneasy concern about Arleta and Bob as she thought she saw something run, dodging nimbly between the stranded cars, across the bottom of Applby Lane in front of them. There was a ruffle and scurry in Gerda Weise’s lantana bushes to their left, and a smell.

  Coal and ground water. Tobacco and grime.

  Alien flesh.

  “Mother used to take all of us down to the bakery, where they’d give us day-old bread for a nickle, and we’d all bring our pillow cases. . . .”

  It was impossible to hear, but Wilma thought they were being paralleled on the other side of the street as well. Her night-sighted eyes could see nothing, but sounds came to her from the other side of the dark houses, the crunch and skitter of stooped bodies slipping through backyards, the creak as something heavy went over Carl Souza’s fence. The muffled grunt-grunt-grunt of snuffling breath.

  “Marcia,” she said softly, touching her friend’s sloped shoulder, “could you be quiet a minute? I think I hear something following us.”

  Marcia stopped in her tracks. “What? Following us? What the hell would be following us? For God’s sake, everybody in this town is in the same boat.”

  “What is it?” asked Shannon, stopping and holding up her lamp.

  “Middle of the street,” said Wilma, hearing it coming, fast, through the dark screen of the Souzas’ overgrown yard. Her two companions looked around blankly while she saw—and clearly they did not—the clotted mass of hedge and laurel jerk and twitch, heard the slash-slash-slash of running feet and smelled trampled herbage and wet-coal stink, sweat stink, alien stink racing toward them through the undergrowth. “Middle of the street!” she yelled again, grabbing each of the other women by the arm and thrusting them toward open ground.

  “Wilma, what the . . . ?” Marcia planted her feet, then let out a shriek as the slumped grubby thing burst out of the dark of the hedges and grabbed for her throat.

  If Wilma hadn’t already been shoving her, the older woman would have been killed, for the thing’s hands, clutching at her shoulder as Wilma yanked her clear, were hugely strong. As it was, Marcia screamed again in shock and terror and pain, and something else raced out of the shadows between the Ure and Dixon houses across the street, grunting as it reached for them with apelike arms. Wilma saw round, huge blinking white eyes reflecting the flare of Shannon’s lamp and went for them instinctively, her hands ben
t to claw.

  Fast, fast, scratching at the face of the thing that was tearing at Marcia and her parcels, grabbing with her hands and raising a foot to dig at the belly. And when the thing reeled back and fled, she turned, pounced, clawed at the second attacker. The next second it too was running, for Shannon had sprung forward, swinging the lamp. The glass chimney came loose and fell with a ringing smash of glass, and for an instant the flame, streaming long and yellow like a ribbon, showed all the women what only Wilma had seen in the darkness: feral faces, hairless heads, bulging white eyes filled with sullen hunger and rage.

  Then they were gone. Wilma stood up, panting, blood under her nails and a weird singing exultation in her heart, as if she’d tasted forbidden fruit and found the taste divine.

  “Oh, my God,” Shannon was gasping, her short dark curls tangled in her eyes, “oh my God, what are they? Did you see them? Did you see their faces?”

  Marcia, sobbing in a welter of dropped bread rolls and tuna cans and torn bags, was beyond speech.

  “Tessa!” Shannon cried. “I have to get back to my mother’s; I left Tessa there with her cousins.”

  “Tell them to light lamps there,” Wilma said quietly. “It ran from the fire. But get Beth Swann and Clare Greene and everybody else who isn’t at the mine already, get them together in one house, with all the light you can manage.”

  “But what are they?” demanded the young woman, hesitating, torn between her husband’s danger and her child’s. “Where did they come from?”

  “I don’t know what they are,” Wilma said, thinking of the strangeness of the night air and of the terrible thing that had attacked her on the porch of Arleta’s house. “But by the smell of them, they came out of the mine.”

  Shannon and Marcia left the rolls and tuna on the sidewalk where they had fallen and headed back to the neat little Front Street house where Shannon’s mother, Ardiss Hillocher, lived. Striding along Front Street toward the grimy collection of brown-brick buildings and abandoned filling stations that comprised old downtown, Wilma looked back to see the two women hastening up Appalachia Road to the trailer court, the gold spot of Shannon’s lamp outlining them in light.

  Before the women had gone a dozen yards, Wilma saw dark bent shapes creep from the Souza yard and start picking up the bread and the cans. She halted, standing alone on the sidewalk. She felt curiously little fear; she could smell and hear clearly and knew there wasn’t any danger near her. She heard them grunt to one another, gutteral noises almost like words. Then a scrunching, ripping crinkle of metal and the smell of tuna (divine greasy wonderment exploding in her hindbrain!). She’d seen the cans and knew they weren’t the little single-serving tear-opens but the big six- and nine-ounce size that required a can opener.

  She walked on. She heard, smelled, sensed others of the creatures moving through the night, heard their grunts and recognized the characteristic musky scent of their bodies and the fact that some of them smelled of coal and others didn’t. They smelled of engine oil, of dust, of industrial soaps. Of beer and cigarettes.

  Enough people were walking along Front Street through old downtown that the creatures didn’t attack there, though Wilma was aware of them scuffling through the grimy alleys, the empty lots beyond the range of the torches. She felt, as always, a stab of profound sadness as she passed the store where she’d bought her school clothes, its window painted dark green and transformed into one of the town’s sleazier bars; as she saw the drugstore across the street where she’d lovingly combed through the rack of paperback books every Saturday, closed down since the end of the coal boom in the seventies. The restaurant where she and Hank used to go for ice cream after school on Fridays was boarded up; the record shop, where she and Hazel had picked through stock for such rarities as Glenn Yarborough and Rod McKuen albums, had “Antiques” painted on the window but actually only sold junk.

  So much gone, she thought. So many places and people, vanished in that sparkling stream of time.

  And Arleta? she thought. What had happened to her friend, what had happened to poor Bob, when electricity had failed, when Power had seized the white house among the honeysuckles?

  There were about three hundred and fifty people gathered in front of the sagging cyclone fence that ringed the old offices, the rusted ruin of tippling shed and machine housings. The buildings were rankly overgrown, there’d been talk for years of rehabbing them for a “regional crafts market and antique mall,” but nobody’d come up with the funds to do so. The bobbing sea of candle and lamp flames passed across brick and concrete defaced by the scribbles of years of kids. The searchers, who’d straggled a little as they’d come out of the sorry squalor of old downtown, now bunched tighter at the sight of those plywood-covered windows, those chain-locked doors. Even after all those years the place stank of coal, the black dust dyeing the earth underfoot. Wilma well remembered the filthiness of everything west of Front Street in her childhood, before the union and the federal government had forced Applby to institute dust control.

  She remembered, too, her mother telling her not to go near the miners’ children because they were “dirty.” Remembered Sue Hillocher telling her in a whisper, “My daddy’s got black lung, and they say he’s gonna die.”

  And he did die, the following year.

  Norm Mullein was still with them, presumably to protect the weather-worn sawbucks and rusted machinery from further vandalism.

  Candace Leary was there too, bless her efficient soul, and she and Hazel were already hand-copying portions of Candace’s big map by torchlight.

  “How we gonna go down there if we ain’t got flashlights?” asked Katy Grimes. “You can’t take no open fire into the mine.”

  “Same way the old-time miners did,” said Hazel. “One person out front with a canary in a cage, to check for gas. There shouldn’t be dust up at this end; it hasn’t been worked since ’77.”

  “But how’ll we find our way through to where they are?” asked someone else. “Wasn’t it all caved in?”

  “Most of it was,” volunteered old Mr. Swann, who should have been home in bed, thought Wilma, recalling his queer fit on Arleta’s doorstep that morning. “But there’s shafts and crosscuts left. I know, ’cause I helped retreat out of those sections. We can probably get through. Got to keep just one candle or so at a time, though, specially once we get down deep.”

  “Will they still be alive?”

  “We’re talking about . . .” Candy looked at her watch, then looked around her for help, since like nearly every other watch in the town it said 9:17 if it said anything at all. Every digital had simply gone blank.

  “About twelve hours,” said Theo Morrison, one of the two hikers who’d come into the town at around noon with word of fire toward Lynchburg. He snapped closed the silver pocket-watch he carried and put a worried arm around his wife.

  “There’s respirators down there on the walls,” added Candace. “And we got more up here, lots more.” She nodded toward the crates beside her.

  “What do we do if we meet more of those grunty things?” asked Ed Brackett, whose face bore the bruises and cuts of a fight. “They all but killed my boy Steve.”

  The boy, one of Wilma’s students, looked up at mention of his name, from where someone was bandaging a horrible gash on his arm.

  “It may not be enough to keep guard on the town,” added Carl Souza. He hefted his rifle. “We don’t know how many of ’em there are, or where they are, except they can see in the dark and they’re strong as the devil. What if there’s an army of ’em?”

  There was a fast, scared ripple of talk then, people trading experiences, showing wounds. They jumped out of the dark at me. . . . They was hiding in the Sawyers’ yard. . . . They took and tore my shotgun clean in half before I could get off a shot at ’em. . . . The terror in the air was volatile, like gasoline or alcohol, only needing a spark.

  She was not the only one, Wilma realized, who was beginning to understand that this was not simply a matte
r of a power failure, of waiting till the lights came back on.

  Someone was talking about monsters, another of invasion, and how the Communist Bloc had only pretended to break up and collapse. Someone said demons and God. Wilma thought, No. You’re wrong.

  She didn’t know what was right, but none of them had encountered the thing in the house on Applby Street.

  There was still blood and skin under her fingernails, and it occurred to her that that was the first time since childhood scuffles in the schoolground that she’d physically fought another living being. She’d always been mild-natured and aloof, shrinking from contact. Even Hank’s kisses—though she’d longed for the warmth of his closeness and the strength of his embrace—had been something she’d had to overcome her nature to achieve. And he’d felt it.

  Hank. The thought of him filled her with a piercing regret.

  And he was in the mine. With Ryan. With Lou. With men she’d taught when they were children, young men whose fathers she’d gone to school with, as she’d gone to school with Hank.

  “Looky here!” yelled Katy Grimes. “Look! They come out already!”

  And everyone ran to the rough blue-gray cliff of the old mine entrance to look.

  Around World War II, Applby had put in a donkey engine to drag skips up the mine’s steeply sloping tunnel, replacing the mules. At that time the tunnel floor had been paved for forty or fifty feet down, and what had been a huge cave cut into the mountain’s flank had been finished with concrete, so that it resembled an enormous culvert, strung with electric lights. Time and weather and a million pairs of passing boots had had their way, however, and the pavement was invisible again under a layer of mud.

  In the glare of the torchlight there was no mistaking the scuffle of fresh tracks, nor the print of men’s workboots.