Marc Zicree - Angelfire

“So, I gotta meet the little shit on his turf? Well, so be it.”

We woke Mary and the others then, in the deep, dark heart of the night, and told them what we’d found. When the telling was over, we sat in silence for a moment, listening to the newly set fire roar in the grate while Doc fed it wood and Colleen poked it into submission.

It was Mary who ended the hush, her eyes on me. “My God, it’s like something out of somebody’s Book of the Dead. So you think if Enid goes to Howard and confronts him with the changes in the contract, he could get out of it?”

“If this legal twist parodies real law, yes.”

“And that will cure him?” She glanced at Enid, worry darkening her eyes. “That will keep these … side effects from happening?”

“I can’t be sure, but it seems to me it’s the only chance he’s got. Unless he stops playing music altogether.”

Enid stared at me. “I can’t do that. Music’s in my blood. In my soul. If I stop playing, I lose myself and…” His eyes moved to Magritte. “I lose everything, everybody I care about. There’s no way in hell I can do that. No, I gotta follow this thing through. I’m going back to Chicago, and I’m gonna settle this-” He hesitated, looking to me again. “Chicago wasn’t where you were headed.”

“Enid, I’m not exactly sure where we’re headed. We follow Goldie’s lead in that. Chicago may not even be out of our way.”

“It’s not,” said Goldie quietly.

I glanced over at where he sat, perched on the arm of a chair, Magritte hovering beside him. “What? Something about Chicago we should know?”

He shook his head, his eyes on the frayed knee of his jeans. “Don’t know.”

This was really the wrong time for Twenty Questions. “Did you… see something? Hear something? What?” “Nothing I saw. Or heard. Just… a feeling.”

“Convenient,” murmured Colleen.

Goldie glanced at her, then met my eyes. “Look, if we expect Enid to help us free anybody from the Source, we need to free him first. That puts the Windy City on our itinerary, wouldn’t you say?”

He was right; Enid wouldn’t survive the trip otherwise. “And of course, Magritte is going with us.” Colleen stirred the fire absently, not looking at us.

“Sure she’s going with us,” said Enid. “Why wouldn’t she go with us?”

Colleen gave the logs a sharp jab. Sparks shot up into the flue. “Because if she does, you’ll have to shield her. And if you shield her-”

Magritte’s aura flashed azure and violet. “I gotta go with you,” she said. “I gotta protect Enid.”

“If he doesn’t play, there’s no reason to protect him,” Colleen argued.

“No, you don’t understand,” Enid said. “If Mags doesn’t cover for me, Howard gets control.”

I shook my head. “Gets control?”

“Of me. Of my music. He pulls me to him. He … Look, you know that old story about the red shoes?”

Know it? I lived with it. I used to tease Tina that she practiced as if she wore those damned slippers and that if she didn’t take them off once in a while she was going to dance herself into a coma. “One of my sister’s favorite stories,” I said. “You put the shoes on, you can’t stop dancing.”

Enid nodded. “Howard gets a hold of me, I can’t stop playing. I can’t control what I play. And I can’t control what the music does.”

“Well, considering what it does when you do control it,” said Colleen, “that’s a damn ugly thought.”

Damn ugly. I wondered how many more dire revelations Enid had tucked away in his guitar case.

He sank to the sofa, eyes on his hands. When he spoke, his voice was barely above a whisper. “I’ve turned trees to glass and rocks to powder. I’ve turned water to blood and I’ve made rain burn. And worst of all, I’ve twisted people , and those people know what I done to ’em. My songs are supposed to soothe souls. To lift them up. D’you know what it feels like to have them…” He lost his voice and struggled to recover it. “I gotta get free of this thing, dammit! I’ll do anything to get free of it.”

“Well, I always say,” said Goldie, “when God opens a door, He closes a window.”

Enid ignored him. “Every time I use the music outside the Preserve, I have this dream. There’s a chain around my neck and there’s a chain on my guitar. And the chain leads to this tower. I try to pull myself off the chain, but the Tower says, ‘You can’t go, boy. You belong to me. Your songs belong to me and your soul belongs to me. Read it.’ And then this wind comes up and the pages of that contract dance all around me while I try to gather them up. But I can’t lay a hand on ’em.”

A chill from the heart of a Manhattan January had risen up out of my breast. “A tower?” I repeated. “What was it like?”

Other voices echoed mine. “Was it shiny and black?” demanded Colleen, and Doc asked, “Did it glisten, as if wet?”

“Sweet Cherry Garcia.” Goldie, half standing, sank back to the arm of his chair, his face ashen.

I could see it in their eyes. “We’ve all dreamed…” Everyone spoke at once, fear and discovery tumbling out into the room. I raised my hands. “One at a time! Doc?”

He nodded, flashing a haunted look, before he turned his face back to the fire. “In my dreams of Chernobyl, the Black Tower is there. It watches everything I do. I, too, wear chains.”

“Marionette strings,” murmured Colleen. “We’re all connected to it by marionette strings and it’s making us dance.”

Goldie picked at a frayed patch of denim on the leg of his jeans. “I’m inside it. Or maybe it’s inside me.” He kept his eyes averted. “I try to get out, but there is no way out. Except to die.”

“I’m inside it, too,” I admit. “I’m trying to find Tina, but instead of finding Tina… I lose all of you.”

“I…”

The whisper of sound drew every eye to where Magritte hung, still, in the air next to Goldie. Her usually bright aura seemed smudged and muted, and she had wrapped her arms about herself like a cocoon. She quailed a little under our collective gaze, gliding backward. Goldie reached out a hand to her, stopped just short of touching her. Soft light seemed to pulse between them, or perhaps I imagined it.

“It calls to me in my dreams,” she said. “It has my uncle Nathan’s voice, and the voice makes pools of black, like oil on a road. I try not to, but I fall into a pool and it gets all over me. It gets inside me.” She looked at Goldie then, and I realized that her aura had completely taken him in. “And I drown,” she finished.

The fire made sounds that should have been comforting. Then Doc spoke the words we’d all been thinking: “What does it mean? That we’re being called? All of us? By what? Is this the Source? Or is it something else?”

“It can’t be the Source,” said Colleen. “The Source is in the West.”

“Chicago is west,” murmured Goldie.

“Yeah, North west. You never said it was in the North west.”

“I never said it wasn’t.”

I cut across the argument. “ Is it, Goldie? Is the Source in Chicago? The last time you talked about it, you said something about the Badlands.”

“I said, ‘what if.’ What if it’s in the Badlands.”

“We’ve all dreamed about the same place. Are we going to find it in Chicago?”

He shook his head. “I wish I knew. But I don’t know. I won’t know until we’re moving again. Maybe it’s the Preserve. Maybe it distorts my Source sense just like it distorts the space around it. I don’t know. All I know is, I’ve dreamed of that tower for weeks. In all that time, I never thought of it as an actual place. I thought…”