Уолтер Мосли - Blue Light

“I know,” I said to the young girl. “I love you too.”

I did love her, as a child who was frightened and headstrong, who was inquisitive about everything, and who needed a story before she could go to sleep at night. But I also knew that she was the daughter of a strangeling god who had prophesied the beginning of an era heralding the end of mankind.

“I don’t mean like that,” Alacrity said. “I really love you. When I grow up I’m going to marry you and give you a big house and you can read books all day long and we’ll get a telescope and look at the people in the dark stars. The ones that Wanita said don’t have no bodies except just great big eyes in a cave.”

I sighed deeply and kept my silence. It was always disturbing for me to hear the child’s dreams for the future. She had inherited some of her father’s ability with words. I had to fight the nagging sense that her desires were my destiny and my marching orders.

“Reggie an’ Nita comin’,” she said.

Far up the sloping hill behind us the two other children were coming out of the woods. It seemed as if Reggie was skipping adolescence altogether, going straight for manhood. He’d grown almost as tall as me, and his shoulders were amazingly wide. His sister, Wanita, was still a child, though, round-faced and always serious. She and Alacrity were as different as playmates could be. While Alacrity climbed towering pines, Wanita would curl up by the roots and dream of Alacrity way up there in the wind an’ stuff.

Adelaide and I never questioned the children’s powers. It all seemed natural. This was not only because of our blood experiences. We had both been lost souls before we drifted into Ordé’s orbit. You’ve already heard my story. I learned of Adelaide’s experiences while we were on the run. It wasn’t a long tale, but it had trailed her for years.

There are many circumstances and minor characters in Addy’s story, but I don’t have to bother with them. The elements are a white Christian family, a girl becoming a woman, a boy with a black leather jacket and a knife, and a dark night in an alley off Ventura Boulevard where two boys struggled over their hormones and only one survived. Adelaide never told anyone about her knowledge of the killing. She closed up her heart, opening it only to those men who cared so much about their future that they would never be concerned with her past. I was the first person she had ever confided in. But we were on the run from Death, and very little else seemed important or worth questioning.

The children and their survival had become our purpose; their abilities were our religion. Believing in them, we erased our own suffering.

“It’s over that way for sure, Chance,” Reggie said, pointing south.

“You sure, man?”

“Yeah. It’s over that way.”

“How far?”

“I can’t tell exactly, but it’s pretty far. It’s hundreds of miles, but it’s definitely over that way.”

“And if we get there, you think we’ll be safe for a while?” I asked the young man.

“We’ll be safer. We’ll be safer, but that don’t mean we’ll be safe.”

The memory of Gray Man scuttled under my scalp. But lately the kids hadn’t seemed scared at all. All that time in the woods had healed the fear in their hearts. Reggie knew the safest place to be, or at least he thought he could find it; Alacrity just wanted to play with each of us in turn and run wild in the woods; and Wanita dreamed.

Adelaide and I thought that if Wanita had any powers of godhood like the others, it must have been the power of dreams. She often came to us in the morning with elaborate tales of visions from the night before. I started to get them on a toy tape recorder when I realized that she was somehow reporting on stories that were not of this Earth or maybe not even this galaxy.

Sometimes the little brown girl would wake up in the morning hardly remembering who we were. Even her brother was as unfamiliar to her as some far-off memory. After she’d come back to us, she’d say that her dream took so long that she’d forgotten who she was for a while.

That very morning she had stumbled out of her bunk bed bleary-eyed and confused. She sat at our rough-hewn table and ate her hot bowl of Wheatena in silence. Adelaide noticed the sleep in her eyes and bent down with a moist towel to rub the sand away. Wanita looked at the green-eyed redhead with bewilderment. She touched Addy’s hair, put her fingers to her own cheek. Then she began to speak as if she had already been in the middle of an explanation.

“... they started out really big, like that tower thing on top’s that hill—”

“Coit Tower,” Reggie said as he ate.

“— and they get smaller and smaller, but then they come awake and start to sing,” the dreamer said. “It’s like they was purple glass at first with hot stuff inside, but when they get real small, like a little Christmas tree, then they’s pink with little tears runnin’ down they sideses.”

“Who are they?” Adelaide breathed in the softest possible whisper.

“Like glass,” Wanita said again. “An’ they sing when they get little. Tinkle-like, humming-like, an’ nobody could hear it but them an’ me. All the animals and bugs that drink the little tears think that the glass sticks is just sticks, but they not. They be singin’ an’ laughin’. An’ you could hear ’em everywhere.”

“Where?” I asked gently, but I should have been gentler still.

By the way Wanita looked up, I could tell that she was coming out of the dream.

“Wanita!” I said sharply.

“Huh?”

“Where were the pink sticks made from glass?”

She shrugged and said nonchalantly, “In a place where the sun is blue and the sky is red. Not anywhere that we could go. Except if you dreamed it.”

“Can you go there in your dreams, Wanita?” Addy asked.

“I did last night. Can I have a apple?”

And so went the way of Wanita’s dreams. She traveled the universe at night while we slept. Her mind was gone for what must have felt like weeks or more overnight. Sometimes we worried that she’d be gone so long that she’d forget who she was completely, or even what she was. But that was the way of godhood, I supposed. All Addy and I could do was feed them and listen to them, groom them with our love and respect. And keep them safe from Death.

“There’s something out there, almost like it was music,” Reggie said. “But... but it’s something... it’s something else. Like safe. Safe.”

As soon as Reggie said it, I could hear it. Like a whole orchestra of brass and silver horns so far away that I couldn’t even tell what direction they were in. But when Reggie pointed I believed that sound might be coming from that way.

The extra senses I’d gained from Ordé had quieted over time. The stars still sang to me, the bands between the rainbow still revealed new colors, but it had become so normal that I hardly remembered what it had been like to have common senses. And my time around the children had disoriented those perceptions because I could always feel the Blues when they were near. It wasn’t a hard sensation, more like the feeling of a cloud partly blocking the sun.

Their light had hidden the music from me.

“Uh-huh.” Adelaide nodded while closing her eyes, holding her face up as if to feel the wind. “Yeah, I do feel something. It’s like sunlight through water.”

The children and I had gone back to the cabin. I was excited to tell Addy about what I felt. Addy’s senses had been altered by carrying Ordé’s child. She and I had somewhat similar powers, only she couldn’t hear and see things as much. Addy’s ability was more in intuiting what the children were feeling and thinking. They could come to her for advice and she’d interpret what they felt even though the needs of those small blue gods were often things that she had never known.