Marc Zicree - Magic Time

“I. . wasn’t supposed to tell,” Hank said.

Then, breaking into a shriek like the offended dead, they attacked.

Hank yelled, “ No !” and flung himself at them, iron pipe slashing through the air. “Wilma, run!”

“Hank, I. .”

“ Run !!!”

Three of them darted around him, snatching at her, and she had no choice but to fall back into what looked like a little band of the mist, like a projection of it.

She heard the confused shouting of Hank and the other grunters muffle and fall away, the clang of metal pipes and the wrenches they used as clubs. Then the slap of bare feet on the hard dirt came to her, and she knew the grunters-a maddened few, at least-had dared enter the fog after her.

She broke into a run but grew aware that the footfalls of her pursuers were slowing, becoming uncertain as the fog enfolded and disoriented them. They stopped, were silent a moment-and then their screams began.

Wilma plunged away, through darkness her night-sighted eyes could not pierce. She stumbled on what felt like a chunk of old machinery-something in the Simmonds yard, she thought-struggled up, clutching twisted, rusty metal that cut into her. Gasping, the sick-damp air leeching the breath from her, she pressed on.

Something blue and flickering rushed at her from among the trees, driving her deeper into the mists. The ground grew rougher, sloping under her feet. Vines and creepers grabbed at her ankles. Lights flickered among the underbrush, fire-balls, she saw, rolling slowly, steadily toward her along the ground, the sight of them lifting the hair from her nape.

All behind her was stillness now. She turned, speculating about heading back the way she’d come, but knowing that whatever had silenced her pursuers still lay between her and town.

Then she heard it. Coming for her, its panting breath sawing the darkness, the crunch of its feet on last year’s brown leaves. Its phosphor-green light, like a swarm of disease mold, punctured the mist, growing larger and more distinct as it approached.

It had no smell, no reek of decay, no tang of electrical discharge, nothing, and somehow that was the most alarming of all.

The thing reared out of the darkness, and she saw it now in all its malformed detail. Not a grunter, no, nor one of the spectral, massacred Indian women. It peered at her with burning, malign eyes like the Wishart house itself, and its flesh writhed.

Gaping up at it, Wilma forced down the cry that threatened to burst from her, channeled that frenzied energy into her legs, twisting away, bolting off blindly through the mist and dark.

She heard it tearing after her, didn’t risk looking back. Deadfall branches clawed her; she stumbled again in potholes, in cold rivulets of what had to be Boone’s Creek.

And, running full out with all the blessed, feral strength humming through her veins, she knew that the thing at her heels was gaining and would have her.

“Oh, man, this doesn’t belong here.”

Goldie had been the first to see it as they had rounded the bend of the two-lane, under the gaunt September moon. The fog stretched across the road like a prison wall, flat and gray and impenetrable.

He pulled his no-speed to a halt and clambered down as Cal, Doc and Colleen drew up alongside. Tentatively, he approached the barrier, inspecting it as wispy tendrils reached out like beckoning fingers.

The others dismounted and joined him. “What do you mean, it doesn’t belong here?” Cal asked.

Goldie shook his head slowly, never taking his eyes off it.

Sparkling illumination like starlight shone from behind them, dusting the surface of the fog, and Cal realized that Tina had emerged from the pedicab. She floated to the edge of the mist, contemplating it with trembling agitation, breathing in quick gasps, keen and brittle. Cal had observed this mood rising in her over the past days as she had struggled against the growing clamor in her mind, seen it become as much a part of her as the leggings and too-large denim shirt she wore, the globe of swimming light that emanated from her.

She hovered beside Goldie, peering into the coiling vapor, both of them tantalized with dread.

“Maybe if we wait till morning, it’ll melt away,” Colleen said without conviction, and Cal knew that no one had to tell her it wouldn’t.

Nor that on the other side of it, two miles down the road, lay Boone’s Gap.

Shango had given them a name, and their maps the particulars of distance and direction. But as to what might reside there, this thing that had put the name Wishart into Tina’s mind, that somehow dwelled both to the west and to the south, they knew neither its nature nor its weaknesses. Only that it called ceaselessly to her, ravenously.

They had set off along I-64 that morning, their backs to the rising sun, passing Covington, making good time. Just over the state line, east of White Sulphur Springs, they had encountered the empty husk of a Cadillac El Dorado, scorched and crumpled, with perforations like big teeth marks scoring either side of it, amid the pink flowerbeds of the median. Its license plate read, “West Virginia-Wild, Wonderful.”

But beyond that, the day’s journey had been uneventful. No shadow had swept over them as they headed southwest, no sound of leathery wings had assaulted them. Caldwell and Lewisburg and Smoot had blurred by like dreams. And whatever mysteries lurked in the Lost World Caverns, nothing had emerged to overwhelm and drag them within.

The land had lain like a thing insensible. The sound of a bird or sight of a rabbit had proved a rarity, and no person crossed their path. At Sandstone they had dog-legged off the interstate onto State Route 20, skimming south along the spine of a mountain and then dipping down to Hinton, an old railroad town, wheeling past white-washed churches and rotted old barns and hillsides blazing red with sumac.

In the roar and spray coming off the Sandstone Falls, they had paused to fill their canteens.

“Night’ll be coming on soon,” Cal had said, scanning the horizon. “Best we camp here, push on at dawn.” By his reckoning, Boone’s Gap was still a good twelve to fifteen miles off.

He’d begun unloading a tent from the pedicab when a touch like a whisper stayed him.

“Let’s finish it,” Tina had said.

So now here they stood, before this gray expanse like a slammed door.

Locking us out, Cal wondered, or something in?

Colleen caught his glance. “It’s your call.”

Why my call? He rebelled at the responsibility for a moment but he knew the answer. Because I brought them here.

Let’s finish it.

But looking at his sister, at her aqua gaze held on the fog, he hesitated. With every mile they had drawn nearer, the voice-voices-had been louder in her mind, a wordless tumult that deafened her, rendered his own voice a mere whisper under it.

Back in Manhattan, he had felt so certain that their only chance lay in confronting this siren force before it grew stronger, while it was still in turmoil, fractured, to know what they were fighting. Now, as his heart battered in his chest, he wondered if he had been wrong to bring her here, if they should have fled, even though he’d been sure there was no hiding place.

Could Nijinsky have fled his God, no matter where he’d run?

No.

But how do you kill a god, even a false one?

You start by stepping through the door.

Cal fetched the Coleman lantern from the pedicab and, lighting it, led them into the fog. The light bounced off the mist, rendering it opaque.

Holding the lantern before him, Cal struggled to see the path, to stay on it, while Doc and Goldie walked the four bikes, Tina floating beside them. Colleen stowed her cross-bow over her back-little use it would be in the fog-and drew out her big knife.