Marc Zicree - Magic Time

Seeing it in his mind again, the way he’d walked a thousand times.

Remembering.

God knew whether the passageways would still be open. Roof falls had a way of spreading. But he knew in his bones they would die, waiting for rescue by the shaft.

“You okay, Hank?” Ryan asked him, the first time they stopped and lit a quick flare to take their bearings. That was when they reached the first of the old caved-in submains. Hank blinked, flinching from the light, raising his hand against it.

“Put that out,” he said. “I can remember how it goes better in the dark.” Somehow the memories were clearer, and the light confused him, hurt him.

“Okay.” And he heard in Ryan’s voice a note that hadn’t been there before.

Shock. Shock and fear.

“Hank. .”

“I’m okay.”

Long silence. Whatever the boy had seen by the brief quick blinding light, Hank knew he didn’t look okay.

Hank added, “I’m just real tired.”

“Sure,” agreed Ryan.

What the fuck had he seen ? “Everybody still with us?”

“I think a giant maggot got Gordy.”

“Good.”

“Hey, I saw this movie once where there’s these things in the sewers of New York City. .”

They moved on.

Crosscuts. Old vent shafts. Submains and rooms whose entrances were now simply rubble walls. Hank remembered them with the odd ease of one recalling that a pool hall used to stand where a parking lot was; it was like walking to the old elementary school on Front Street, though he hadn’t done that in over forty years. Clearer and clearer the memories came, the awareness of where walls lay in the dark, the sense of changing air, of shifting smells. Sometimes it seemed to him that he could see the walls, see the passageways they passed.

And looking back, he was both shocked and not shocked to see the men behind him. Dimly, and with a sense that was not exactly sight. Black with coal dust, running with sweat under their grimy hardhats, their useless headlamps, eyes moving, shifting blankly, hands linked in a chain. Ryan, Greg Grant, Roop, Lou. Llewellyn with a frown between his brows as if he were trying to work out in his head what was going on. Al Bartolo with tears running down his face, fighting not to sob with fright. Hillocher. .

Dear God!

In the darkness Hank wasn’t sure if he was seeing correctly-if this were a dream or a hallucination. But somehow he knew it wasn’t.

And somehow he understood that, in a way, he was seeing what Ryan had seen in the brief flare of the light.

Dear God, did he look as bad as Hillocher?

He realized he himself was slumping that way, slouched forward in a way that should hurt his back but didn’t. In fact it hurt him to stand up straight. Had his hair gone wispy, thinning away like that?

Did his eyes look like that?

And across the darkness, for a moment his eyes met those milk-white bulging eyes with mutual recognition, mutual sight.

He turned his head quickly. No , he thought. No .

Hallucination, fever, headache.

But he found his way unerringly in the dark.

There was a crosscut to the mains that had been made in the seventies, where the seam dipped sharply upward and narrowed to a few feet in height. It was over a thousand feet, and Hank crawled in the lead, groping in the darkness that was no longer quite so dark, and behind him the men crawled, each holding onto the ankle of the man in front. That was almost the worst, with the rock scraping their heads or their butts if they raised up even a little, and the smell of the coal dense and choking around them.

Voice echoing in the tiny tube, Gordy Flue started to sing.

You’d have thought it would be something like “Dark as a Dungeon” or “Sixteen Tons.”

But Gordy Flue took up “Doo Wah Diddy,” and everybody joined in.

After about three hundred years and a thousand miles and a zillion choruses of “Doo Wah Diddy” the shaft widened out again, and Ryan cautiously lit up his little torch and counted heads. Hillocher was gone.

“Fuck, he was right behind me!” cried Gordy in distress. He turned back to the gaping throat of the tunnel, wet pony-tail hanging like a dead onion top on his shoulders. “I thought he was hangin’ onto my pant leg!”

“Even if he let go,” pointed out Lou, “he couldn’t get lost. It ain’t like there’s a lot of places to go. Andy!” he yelled back down the shaft. “Andy, you okay?”

“He didn’t look good,” said Ryan. “He was bummin’ aspirin all the way before we started crawlin’.”

“I’ll have a look for him,” said Hank. “You wait here.”

“I’ll go,” said Ryan. “You sit here and rest.”

Hank moved instinctively back from the flame of the torch. He could see, in the mirror of the boy’s eyes, what he must look like.

Ryan crawled all the way back down the shaft, over a thousand feet. The young man was so skinny that Hank, crouched at the top, could always see the glimmer of the light he held out ahead of him. Could see it growing brighter and brighter as he crawled back.

Hillocher wasn’t in the shaft. Hank felt no surprise. “What happened to him?” Ryan kept asking, “What happened?” It was as if Hank knew something in his marrow that the others didn’t know and couldn’t know.

“Put that out,” he said. And he led them on, into darkness.

NEW YORK

As the sun set and the royal blue of evening muted into black, Cal finally opened the blinds. Now the two of them sat on the couch he had repositioned by the window, gazing out at the night.

No rock music blared, no salsa. None of Bill Lundy’s show tunes filtered up from beneath, nor was there the echoing, omnipresent cackle of sitcoms. Below, not a soul was on the street, and cars stood where they had stopped, untended and still. Opposite and all around, voices wafted through open windows flickering with candlelight or glowing with the steadier flame of a Coleman lantern. Intimate, intent, companionable.

Beyond, the familiar outline of skyscrapers stood against the stars, flat as cut-out posterboard. There were few lights in their soaring heights, and small wonder. Here on Eighty-first, the brownstones were all five stories or less. It would take a hardy soul to climb those darkened stairwells to the twentieth floor, or the fortieth.

“Maybe God just got bored, wanted a change,” Tina mused, sipping lukewarm lemonade. Her fever seemed to have eased a bit, after her rest. She stretched a leg with easy, unconscious grace, working the ache out, her foot in a straight line with ankle, knee, thigh. “I mean, why should TVs work? Why should anything?”

She turned to Cal, curling the leg back under her. “Think you’re out of a job?” Finally, finally , she lifted the sandwich beside her and took a bite.

Cal shrugged. “Mr. Stern was pretty shaken up. Maybe it’ll slip his mind.”

Leave, and you’re terminated . Stern had been unequivocal, and the words had felt like a cleansing rain. But no need to get into that now.

“If you go to work tomorrow. . Hey, what if there’s no school tomorrow? What if there’s no school ever ?”

Cal smiled. “Don’t count on it.”

Tina pretended a pout, and then the dark thought came. “They wouldn’t close the SAB? I mean, there’d be no reason to.”

Cal felt the tightness in his stomach. If his premonitions were even half right, then when the School of the American Ballet might again hang out its shingle-

“Well, I dunno. But you’d have to take a day or two off anyway. You’re a sick little cookie.”

“No. I’m fine.” She was adamant, almost angry. “I can’t miss practice. I’d never catch up.”