Marc Zicree - Magic Time

No one and nothing came into the town. No news, no hikers, no supplies. On the third day Gordy Flue dug a garden in the ground that had been cleared for the housing development, planting beans, potatoes, peas: anything that would grow into late fall. Within days a dozen, then a hundred, followed suit. Hazel got the town council to push through emergency measures pooling and rationing foodstuffs and regulating water. Lookouts were posted daily with binoculars, scanning the blue summer sky above the white wall of the mists.

By Dr. Blair’s count, thirty-five children were taken with the same malady that gripped Tessa Grant, that terrible symptomless silence. The night Deanna Bartolo slid into a fathomless coma despite all her mother’s attempts to keep her from the void, Chrissie Flue cried out, in her sleep, screaming, “Don’t! Don’t!” before lapsing into absorbed contemplation of nothingness from which she could not be roused.

That night, Wilma walked the streets of the town in the darkness, until dawn stained the sky. Watching, listening, searching, though for what she did not know.

Shannon had brought her the news about Chrissie. Shannon, haggard, gray-faced with exhaustion, almost as gaunt as her daughter, who like every other one of the affected children had whimpered and struggled at the same time Chrissie was deadened. It’s spreading , thought Wilma, after the young woman left her again, sitting on her porch in the darkness. And it’s getting worse.

She put on her jeans and sweatshirt and set out on a patrol that had become almost routine to her, checking what she mentally termed the Hotspots of Boone’s Gap. She met no one. Everyone locked their doors and shuttered their windows with the setting of the sun. This was partly for fear of the grunters, though at her suggestion, the town council laid out rations for them near the mineshaft and for the most part this had ended their raids on individual houses.

On her nightly prowls Wilma always had the hope-or the fear-that she’d see Hank, but so far she had not. Worry for him, and the aching sense of what could have been, settled in the back of her mind like a constant, like the arthritis in her wrists that had somehow vanished that first night of the Change.

But other things, too, now walked the nights.

Where Shenandoah Drive crossed Main Street, even the unimaginative saw blue lights flicker and bob. Some, like Ryan, said they saw what seemed to be human figures, or skeletons, dancing or writhing, and heard their cries. Only Wilma, evidently, could see the Indian women and their dead children clearly, could smell their blood thick in the night air. But she always wondered about the dead grunter Gordy Flue found there one morning on his way to weed his crops, the one they had all recognized, despite how dreadfully he had changed, as Joe Rance, who’d worked at the garage on Front Street and had disappeared that first day.

And on the unkempt streets leading to the old Green Mountain shaft Wilma saw nightly the ghostly shapes of the rioters of ’37, heard the shouting of long-dead policemen, the crack of rifles and the slap of mahogany on flesh. Sometimes she had to take cover from the swirling cyclones of maddened hornets that whirled through the darkness, but not tonight. Sometimes there were other things, dark small things like clots of hair and bone and mist, impossible to see clearly. Sometimes only green crawling streams of energy that flowed up from under the soil, or out of the dark maw of the mine.

Tonight as she watched the trickling streaks of light from an alley behind a gutted store building, she felt the tension in the air explode and saw strange ghostly fire erupt in one of the abandoned cars that still littered the streets. Sparks ignited a blowing newspaper, carried the blaze into an empty saloon. Wilma turned and ran, pounded on the door of the city watch headquarters in the old high school. The fires spread, but never grew: instead they burned with the queer slow smoldering that everyone had become aware of in these changed terrible days. While the Fire Patrol was putting them out, others burst spontaneously into being nearby.

And beyond the fires, energy flowed and swirled.

She could see it, almost. Smell it, ozone sharp in her nostrils. Hear the crackle of it in the dark air, shouts and wailing and gunshots that blended into a deep soft rumble, like a monster breath. She didn’t need to follow it. She knew where it went.

Only near dawn did she circle back, after visiting every one of those places in the town-and there were nearly a dozen of them-where she sensed energy of some kind was being drawn out of the ground, out of the mine, out of the past. Silently flitting from shadow to shadow, night-sighted eyes probing the darkness, she returned home, to catnap and rest for a day, to lie in the sun and wash, which she did with dampened facecloths six or seven times a day, not because she needed to but because it made her feel better. And in the darkness, as she turned the corner of Applby Avenue, she paused as she always did, shivering though the night was warm.

Shivering at the sight of the white house. At the smell of it. At what she knew from her dreams was inside.

Whatever it was, it was drawing energy, drinking it from every corner of the town. Drinking it desperately, frantically, racked and crucified and twisting in terror and in pain. Grunters had made another attempt to break into the house, and one of them could still be seen-Eddie Dayton, it had once been- dead just outside the porch, strangled with the garden hose. The smell was appalling even at night.

Did the grunters know something about it she didn’t? Was that why they tried to kill it, making attempts that they had to know would only lead to their deaths? She wished she could find Hank and ask him. Wished, more than anything, that she knew where he’d gone, and if he was all right.

Whatever it was, she thought, it was definitely generating a chaos of old pain, old horrors renewed.

And unless it was stopped, Wilma knew in her bones, it would destroy the town and everyone in it.

NEW YORK

Cal draped a canopy over the passenger section of the pedicab so that, once inside, Tina could not be seen. The rough blanket was thick and dark, and what little of her illumination leaked out along the edges appeared no more than the glow of an oil lamp. Disappearing into its folds as it sat in the living room, Tina seemed thankful to be out of sight, shielded by this fragile barrier.

They would keep her hidden as much as possible. There was no telling how many might be like her. Cal had seen at least one other “flare”-Colleen’s joking reference was sticking, he reflected-in the tunnels under Fifth. But as they traveled on their odyssey south, they would draw unwanted attention as it was; any stranger would, in this perilous world. The more they could avoid attention, the better.

In the gray chill of morning Cal, Doc and Colleen wrestled the pedicab down four flights of steps, and everyone in the building helped them carry duffels and backpacks and water bottles down. They strapped the provisions onto the rusty old bikes Goldie brought from his underground treasure trove- or trash heap, depending on one’s perspective. Colleen had ridden shotgun to fetch them. On their return, neither had spoken of what they’d encountered on their mission. But Cal had noted Colleen’s relief at being aboveground, and the dark stain on her shoulder of blood that was not hers.

Goldie was unusually quiet this morning, limiting himself to terse replies when pressed. Cal observed, too, that he had jettisoned his familiar multilayered electric wardrobe in favor of somber browns and blacks. Protective coloration? Cal wondered. Or was Goldie afraid to be striking out into the unknown, too?