Marc Zicree - Angelfire

He didn’t answer.

I crossed the intersection on a wave of adrenaline, my eyes reflexively following his. At the bottom of the long city block, people strolled the sidewalks; a variety of wheeled vehicles moved through the intersection; there were street vendors. All eerily normal by any previous standard of normalcy. It was as if we’d stepped back in time to a Chicago that had not yet been through an industrial revolution.

Beside me, Goldie murmured what I took to be a quotation: “ ‘She is always a novelty, for she is never the Chicago you saw when you passed through the last time.’ ”

GOLDIE

Twain’s words fall off my tongue into a vacuum. I don’t hear myself say them, because there are wild animals in my head. They’ve been there since just after I went around the corner. It is as if a door has opened, letting in something that makes me doubt my already questionable sanity. In a New York minute, I’d get down on my knees and beg Cal to high tail it back across the Jackson Street Bridge, collect our horses, and get the hell out of town.

An absurd thought. I don’t allow it access to my tongue. I pretend I’m utterly fascinated by the flow of people in the next cross street. Under the weird, hazy, demigloom of the Bubble, they float like varicolored motes back and forth across the intersection.

“You nuts, boy?”

I look up, wondering if I’ve inadvertently leaked mental chaos onto the sidewalk, to find Enid in my face. I realize I’ve walked about a quarter of the way down the block without any awareness of having moved. My quaking threatens to go public. If this is the beginning of a manic episode, the timing is cosmically bad.

Nuts? “That’s the rumor,” I mumble.

Enid plants one hand firmly in the middle of my chest.

“What’re you thinking? You don’t even know where in hell you’re going.”

An interesting choice of words. An unwanted chuckle bubbles out of me. I swallow it. “Sorry… um, just curious, I guess.”

Colleen is at my shoulder, peering into my face. “Oh, jeez, Cal, look at his eyes-he’s only half here.” She grasps the sleeve of my jacket, digging in her little cat claws. “We’re not natives in Oz, Dorothy. Try not to wander off, okay?”

“No need to be snide,” I tell her. “I get the picture.”

Cal turns to Howard, who’s standing a little away from us, trying to hide in the shadow of a mailbox. “Fill us in, Howard. What can we expect here?”

Howard snuffles a little and looks down the hill. “Dunno,” he mumbles. “Haven’t been in for a long time.” “Welcome to terra incognita,” I murmur.

Cal fires a glance at me, then swings back to Howard. “What do you know?” Even I can tell his patience is fraying. “Angelfire’s welcome here.”

Cal looks down toward the busy intersection. “We just go?”

Howard’s face puckers as if the question perplexes him. “Sure.”

Cal nods and turns to Magritte. “Before we go anywhere, I have to know what you sensed back there just now, Maggie. You said it was like the Storm. Is it … How, like the Storm? How much like the Storm?”

Maggie and I trade glances. She has gotten hold of herself, of her fear. She shames me and buoys me up in that look. She knows I know.

“It has the same … texture,” I answer for her. “It… uh … sounds like the Source, as if it’s, I don’t know, speaking the same language.”

They all stare at me, and Cal sweeps a hand through the luminous web that binds me to Magritte. “You were half a block away from her.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Describe it.”

“Confusing. Anomalous. I don’t have words… It’s like a … a stew of energies, sounds, voices, textures. A kaleidoscope. Dark. Sentient. Aware.”

Cal’s eyes are narrow cat slits. “One voice, or many?” Maggie quivers. “One voice,” she says, and I shake my head, unwilling to let the half-truth slip by.

“In front of many,” I add.

“ ‘My name is Legion.’ ” Doc had probably not meant to be heard. He blinks as if our sudden regard is blinding, and shrugs. “The Gospels. Christ casts a demon out of a young boy and asks its name. That is the answer it gives: ‘My name is Legion.’ ”

“Well, I’m freaked out,” says Colleen, hugging her crossbow to her breast. Her tone is light, sarcastic, but she means it. If only it were demons.

“Like Fred?” Cal asks me. “Was it like Fred Wishart? One of the Many? A shard? A piece of the Source? Or was it more?”

Fred Wishart was working on Uncle Sam’s little science project when it derailed. We had met him, after a fashion, in Boone’s Gap. Or at least we had met what was left of him before the Source finally tied up all its loose ends. Fred was just that, a loose end, an appendage to the Source. And he had drawn his considerable powers from it.

A piece of the Source. “I don’t know. I can’t tell.” “Don’t know? Or don’t want to know?”

I’m stopped by the look on Cal’s face. I realize what he’s asking and it stuns me.

He steps closer, penetrating my defenses for the second time today. Perimeter alarms go off all over the place. “You said it yourself-it costs a lot to let the Source in. I wouldn’t blame you for blocking it out by any means you could.”

“No, but I’d blame myself.” I wipe sweaty palms on my jeans. “Okay, let’s do this.” I close my eyes and arm myself to sample the strange, chaos vibe. To listen to the whispers in the air. But when I let my guard down, there’s nothing to listen to. There is a wall. And whatever we sensed has gone behind it. The Source has never closed itself off to me. I am the builder of the barricades; it possesses none.

And yet… “It’s like it’s hiding from me. If this is the Source, Cal, it’s playing games.”

Colleen turns to Cal and says, “If the Source is here, will we be ready for it?”

“We have to be,” he tells her. “Enid, what do you need to do to jam Magritte from human sight? The way you did when Colleen first saw you.” Mentally, he has already moved on. I try to follow him.

“I gotta sing out loud.”

“Out loud?”

“Don’t look at me, man. I don’t make the rules, I just play by ’em. I can jam the Storm by just thinking music. I can’t jam people’s eyes unless they can hear me.”

“Okay. If we get into real trouble, you may just have to make Maggie disappear.”

Enid’s dark face goes to ash. “Whatever it takes.”

I snag Magritte’s tether and we head down toward the intersection of Jackson and Wells and our first close encounter with local life-forms. Howard hobbles along in front while the rest of us try damned hard not to look like a troop of tourist commandos. It’s difficult to appear nonchalant and harmless with a machete dangling at your hip.

Not a single soul glances our way as we approach the intersection. It’s as if they can’t see us. The weirdness of this makes me turn back the way we’ve come.

Anyone who’s watched a lot of horror flicks (or lived them) knows better than to do this, but I am forgetful of these mundane details.

I catch Cal’s arm and turn him around so he’s facing our back trail. “Have you wondered why there are so many people down here on Wells and none up on Franklin?”

“That’s … interesting,” Cal says, because behind us Jackson Street disappears into an opaque cloud of lumpy red. Well, less like a cloud and more like dense cotton candy. My fear that we’ve entered a trap escalates, but Cal is not panicking. “Not real comforting,” he adds.

“Maggie,” I say, “look up our back trail.”