Marc Zicree - Angelfire

“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: ORIGINAL 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.

“Usually, people don’t come here without an invitation,” she tells me. “In fact, since Enid and Maggie and I came here, no one has come through that portal that we haven’t led through. This is a place of refuge, Mr. Goldman. A preserve of human life. And your ‘little talent’ could put its very existence in jeopardy.”

I look over at Magritte. Her eyes are wide with what I think is concern (though flare eyes can be hard to read, and that little puckering between her brows could be annoyance). Enid is examining a knot in the floorboards. No help there.

“I’m no danger to you, Mary.” I try to reassure her. “My friends are no danger to you. All we want is to talk to Enid in the hope that maybe he can help us.”

“This compound”-she makes a sweeping gesture with one arm-“is locked in a vault that is somehow folded up in space. We don’t understand how. All we understand is that to keep it hidden, we have to bar the doors and windows and mind the locks. You picked my locks, Mr. Goldman. How many more like you are there at home?”

Several things flash through my mind at once. One is Mary’s choice of words; these are her people, her place, her locks, her gates I have crashed. Second is a quandary: Do I tell her there is one of me or many?

I opt for the truth. “There aren’t any more like me. At least, not among the people I’m with. None of them saw Magritte until Enid let them. None of them can see through your defenses or pick your locks.”

“No?” She turns on her heel, starts to pace. “But you could let them in.”

“I was kind of hoping you’d do that.”

“So they can talk Enid into leaving us to find this Source?”

“Not necessarily. He may be able to share his talent with us in another way. He might know something we don’t, something we can learn. Pardon me, but I kind of got the idea from Enid that helping people in need is your shtick.”

“My shtick.” A smile lifts one corner of her mouth. “Well, it’s a nice story, Mr. Goldman. It touches the heart.”

Her pacing brings her back into my face. “I have over 120 souls here. And more coming, by invitation, every day. What if you’re not what you advertise yourself to be? What if you have other motives that I can’t begin to divine? Or even if you’re sincere, what happens if the only way Enid can help you is to go with you?”

I hold up my hands in surrender. “Fine. I’ll leave.”

She grimaces. “So you can gate-crash again with reinforcements? Try to put yourself in my place. Would you trust you?”

Well, now. Given what the world is coming to, she has a point. Lesson number one in post-Change reality is that if it was ever true that nothing is what it seems, it now goes double.

“If there’s anything I can do to prove we’re harmless…”