Marc Zicree - Magic Time

In all the shabby little houses along Front Street, people were lighting candles, waiting for moms and dads, husbands and wives, to get back from the pithead with news. Half of those houses had only had electricity for fifteen or twenty years anyway, and many of them still had wood stoves: the company had built those houses back in the forties, then sold them in the seventies to the miners who’d rented them for decades.

She turned the corner, climbed the long hill of Applby Street.

And slowed her steps at the sight of the big white house on the corner amid the honeysuckle.

Or at the non-sight of it. For a moment it seemed to her that all that was there was a kind of shadowy vacancy. Then she saw it again, but she saw, too, Boone’s Gap’s single patrolman, Glen Abate, making his methodical way down the street. Checking on houses, knocking on doors.

He walked past the Wishart house as if he didn’t see it. Didn’t remember it was there.

Didn’t remember that there were people in it who hadn’t been accounted for, that a man he’d gone to school with lay in a coma in the downstairs bedroom, dependent on machines that had to have failed when everything else did.

And for some reason, Wilma wasn’t surprised.

She climbed her own front steps, the cats curling and rubbing against her ankles as she came into the porch; walked down the hall to the kitchen and opened cans. Some-body-probably Eleanor of Aquitaine, who was a savage little huntress-had brought a dead mole in as a present, and for some reason the smell of the blood touched a chord in Wilma, not of disgust but of intent and savage eagerness.

I’m not feeling like myself , she thought.

But that was a lie.

She felt more like herself than she’d felt since childhood. She felt light and springy, dazzlingly aware of small noises that she could identify with a weird clarity as tree mice, lizards, cicadas. And with each identification, she felt a strange delight and a dizzying impulse to go and catch them in her hands.

Perhaps what had happened wasn’t entirely bad, if it freed the spirit like this?

Across the yard, the white house appeared and disappeared in the dusk.

Wilma sat on the back porch steps for a time and watched it. She could hear the birds whistling and calling their territories in every bush and tree of the vast thick-growing yards, and knew they were absent from the Wishart yard. The fireflies, which prickled the cobalt velvet of the summer dusk more thickly than they had in years, came nowhere near that house.

There was light-or something that wasn’t quite light- in the window of Bob’s ground-floor bedroom.

We’re all right here , Arleta Wishart had called through the door in a voice unlike her own. We’re all fine .

And, Bob’s calling me .

Bob, locked for weeks in the silence of his coma?

He has to be dead, she thought. She knew that no battery in the town was working.

So why that prickling down her spine, that animal sense of wrongness when she looked toward the house that Glen Abate apparently didn’t see?

Wilma got to her feet, picked her way through the deep grass toward the house.

The light in the window wasn’t fire. Nothing of the golden warmth of kerosene or beeswax or any flame. It was violet, cold and pulsing rather than flickering, and as she stepped forward into the rank beds of honeysuckle she felt a pressure, a tightness in her chest, as if the air around the house were suddenly hostile and alive.

Anger. Anger and terror.

Go away! Go away! Go away !

She called out cautiously, “Bob?” Edged another step closer, her tall body crouching, limbs drawing together in a sort of lithe feral readiness, to spring or to flee. The air clawed and crinkled on her skin, and she prickled, nostrils twitching. Before her the honeysuckle stirred in the darkness, and from the leaves, from the thin glabrous flowers and the tough vines, came a kind of hissing, as if the plants themselves stirred and lashed against the ground.

She saw it move, ripple and rise, and she thought, Stranglers . The very scent of the flowers changed to a warning stink, the pungence of blood and death.

Slowly she withdrew. On the lawn behind her, Sebastian, Imp and Eleanor crouched in a line like three sphinxes, tails twitching slightly, huge eyes seeming to glow in the dark. Crazy with the craziness of cats in the night. Aware, as she was aware, of the lizards in the ferns, of the birds in the trees.

The honeysuckle stirred again, and Sebastian opened his red mouth and hissed.

Careful, soft-footed, alive to every whisper in the dark, Wilma circled the house to the path by the back door. Something in the house was aware of her. Something in the house followed her around the walls with its consciousness. Some- thing in the house crouched down into itself, gathering darkness.

Arleta was in there, thought Wilma. Arleta and Bob-and Arleta was still alive even if Bob wasn’t. She had a momentary vision of them, the pale chubby, helpless little woman in her pink sweats, her soft fair-haired son helpless in the bed.

Her friends, whom she could not desert.

She edged down the path, tense and ready to flee. Under her feet the concrete shifted suddenly, the ground jerking, breaking. The two slabs of broken path yawned open, and she sprang back as they snapped shut like jaws biting at her ankle; the path jerked again, like a snake’s back rippling. Wilma leaped back, not even fully aware that she shouldn’t have been able to clear eight feet from a standing start. Her feet hit the ground, and she darted forward again in a long-legged springy run.

She grabbed the back door handle, moving fast, dragging on it with all her strength. Though the door had never had a lock on it, not even a hook, it refused to budge. Some terrible strength pulled against her own, though she could look through the screen and see nothing in the dark dusty clutter of old couches and boxes of romances heaped there. Behind her she heard a rustle, a whoosing green-plant heaviness of moving air, and reaching up she slashed and clawed at the screen where it was loose on its crazy old nails, bringing it down in a great tearing curl.

With weightless strength she swung up, through and into the porch, hearing in her mind the screaming desperate voice, GET OUT! GET OUT! GO AWAY ! The darkness seemed to slam around her, a crushing fist, smothering. Dust and panic and something else, something terrible. Wilma dodged an instant before a cardboard box slammed heavily against the wall by her shoulder, the violence of the blow splitting the ancient glue. Paperbacks snowed to the plank floor, then rose up again like mad birds, flying at her face, shoving, suffocating. Wilma backed, dodged, nimble and very fast, instinct beyond words telling her to keep moving and changing direction, but whatever was in the porch with her was strong and fast as well.

Fear pounded on her, fear like a whirlwind-her own fear and a fear that seemed to come with that terrified scream. She grabbed the doorknob that would let her into the kitchen, and it was scalding hot under her hand. She jerked back, and one of the old couches swung at her legs like a battering ram. She sprang on top of it, up and over, ran as it tipped, plunged out through the window screen again. Fell, rolled, was on her feet and fleeing.

It was only when she sat once more on her own porch steps, panting and shivering and staring through the darkness at the white house that she could still see perfectly well-see with the preternatural clearness with which she still saw every leaf of the honeysuckle, every blade of the grass, through the night’s gathering gloom-that she thought, How the hell did I survive that ?