Marc Zicree - Angelfire

I wondered if I still believed in spiritual things. I vaguely recalled that I once had. That Tina had. Or perhaps Tina was the believing part of me, and apart, I believed in nothing but Tina herself.

Doc was up and around on the second day of our stay, limping but mobile. By the end of that day he’d become a fixture. Surprise, surprise. He fit in here, the same way he fit in at Grave Creek; the same way he fit in on the corner of Lexington and Forty-second, the same way I have no doubt he’d fit in in the operating theater of any major urban hospital.

Doc Lysenko, chameleon.

I didn’t fit. So I put myself to work, mostly in the infirmary Doc was helping them piece together. A good place to gather information. There were moments I’d look up from a task and watch everybody fitting in, and I’d try to imagine what life would be like if we found Tina and brought her here. Would I fit then? If Tina was the part of me that believed, was she also the part of me that belonged ?

Colleen understood this. She didn’t fit in any better than I did. We were misfits together, Colleen and I. Where Doc could get absorbed in the Preserve’s medical needs, and Goldie could just get absorbed-period, Colleen stayed focused. That helped me stay focused.

“It’d be really easy to get sucked into this place, wouldn’t it?” Colleen said at the end of our first day in the Preserve. “Just too good to be true.”

I gazed down the long hill at the evening view from the veranda of the Lodge and realized that she’d put my feelings to words pretty much exactly. “Who wouldn’t want a haven like this?”

She laughed, and I could feel the warmth of her gaze on the side of my face. “You. You’re already planning our next move, and that sure as hell doesn’t involve hanging here.”

“No. Because you’re right, as it happens. This place is too good to be true. Mary says it’s locked in space and time. But it’s not locked. And it’s not safe. The world outside is going to keep changing.”

“Until someone or something stops the Source.”

I turned my head to look at her. Her eyes met mine- open, frankly questioning. Did she take that for granted- that if the Source was somehow conquered or dispersed, the Change would simply stop? I didn’t.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I hope so. I hope it’s that easy.”

She laughed again. “Listen to the man-‘easy’!.. Well, I guess there’s only one way to find out, huh? We just have to keep going until we get… wherever it is Goldman is leading us.”

“Looks that way.”

The moment stretched out between us, silent, as we stood eye-to-eye on the veranda in the soft light of fey torches. I wanted to lean into her, to touch her, to establish something constant between us.

But then she pulled her eyes away, looked back down the hill and said, “So what’s next?”

“Next,” I repeated, pulling my thoughts back from the edge. “Next, I get to know the flares.”

There were seven of them, all but one pulled from the Source’s radar at the point of Change. The one exception to that serendipity was Javier, who had changed while in the Adena mounds. There, he had apparently been protected from the Source by whatever power the place held. The same power, I suspected, that linked it to Olentangy.

Javier and his family had been vacationing in West Virginia when the Change came. He was thirteen. His mother and father were also here. They no longer spoke of making their way home; they now understood that to do so would mean leaving their son behind. They stayed. They fit in.

The flares liked the Preserve’s little chapel. It was the light, Magritte said-the way it slanted through the stained-glass windows, making rainbows in the shadows and tinting their auras with the vivid hues of flame, ice, and Saint Elmo’s fire.

They didn’t seem to mind when I crashed their little gathering the morning after our arrival. I perched on the edge of a pew while they arrayed themselves about the altar like kinetic votive candles. If the gathering was odd, so was the chapel. The altar sported the usual cross, along with a menorah, a Lakota ceremonial pipe, a doll-size Buddha, and some relics I didn’t recognize.

A Bible verse stirred my memory: And My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations . Maybe we were seeing the fulfillment of prophecy.

We talked about the Preserve, about Mary, about Enid. I mentioned the wind chimes casually, commenting on how many of them there were. The other flares turned to Magritte in eerie unison, and Magritte gave me a long, searching look and said nothing. And when I asked them about the Storm, there was a silence so deep I could hear the candles burning.

Then a girl with the unlikely name of Faun asked, “What’s to know about the Storm? It’s why we’re all here. That’s enough, isn’t it?”

“How did it affect you? How did it call to you? My sister talked about hearing a Voice or Voices. ‘The one and the many.’ Is that what you heard?”

They exchanged glances, and for a moment no one spoke. Then Javier said, “It wanted me to belong to it. The way I belonged to my family. It told me I belonged to it. It made me think…”

“Think what?”

“That it was where I was meant to be,” he finished. “That I wasn’t like my mom and dad anymore. I was… different. And I needed to be with my own kind.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t talk about it, Javy,” said Faun. “You know how it gets when you think on it too much.”

Javier looked from me to Faun and back again. “Your sister’s like us?”

“Yes. She wasn’t as lucky as you are, though. It found her.”

Auras rippled and shifted hues. Eyes, deep and mysterious as twilight, traded glances.

“When I was in the mounds,” Javier said, “I could feel it calling me. Somehow, I knew it couldn’t reach me as long as I stayed where I was. But after a while I wanted to leave the mounds. It made me want to leave. To go find it. Mom and Dad kept me there… and then Enid came. They were so scared. I’ve never seen them so scared.” He shook his head. “Then, I didn’t understand why.”

My blood chilled. “Do you now?”

He didn’t answer, but glanced over at Magritte, who hovered lightly above the pew on which I sat like a lump of coarse clay. “Should we tell him about Alice?” he asked.

Magritte’s expression went through a series of changes as she decided again how far she could trust me. “Enid found Alice up on Put-in-Bay Island. She was in the last of the Change and the Storm’d come for her.” She said the words as if they were dangerous. “Enid got to her just before the Storm did, and we barely made it back into the cave. But Alice… wasn’t very strong. When she’d hear the Storm, she’d listen. One night, she just left. She went back through the northern portal to the island and it got her. Enid followed, to try and bring her back, but it was too late.”

“What do you mean, when she’d hear the Storm? I thought you couldn’t hear it inside the Preserve.”

“Sometimes you can,” said Javier quietly. Terror and longing merged uneasily in his eyes, and I remembered Tina telling me that she wondered if she ought to just embrace the power tugging at her, heed the voices telling her how perfect a union it would be.

I remembered, too, as clearly as if I lived it again, our last moments together in the Wishart house in Boone’s Gap. The simple white board structure had held something too complicated and paradoxical for me to comprehend: two men, one less than a man, one more than a man. Bob Wishart, crippled, disintegrating. His brother Fred- Doctor Fred Wishart-a cocreator of the Source. Coauthor of the real Doomsday Book.