Marc Zicree - Magic Time

They advanced slowly, silence wrapping itself about them, hearing only the sounds of their breathing, their footsteps on the crackling leaves, amplified alarmingly back on them. The drifting dead grayness filled Cal’s eyes, and he saw nothing, save the ghost of a tree here and there, looming up and shrinking back, seeming to move and shift with the drifting fog. The clammy mist settled on his clothes and skin, bled through, passing its cold into him. He had a sense of being invaded, absorbed by the fog, and felt momentarily as if he were held trapped by it, frozen outside time and space.

Glancing about him, Colleen and Doc and Goldie looked bleached of color, wavered insubstantially. Only Tina blazed clearly. But as Cal watched her, he discerned the fog melting in and out of her nimbus, dancing patterns on its surface like oil on water. It enveloped her, held her in its embrace, seemed to draw her more quickly forward.

She was pulling farther ahead of Cal now, growing misty with distance, like a moon receding behind clouds.

“Stay close, Tina,” Cal called, but got no response. “Tina!”

Then he perceived that she had stopped. She was staring blankly ahead of her, and her voice, when she spoke, was a whisper.

“You open yourself to it, and the world falls away.”

Cal heard an intake of breath beside him and saw that Goldie had gone ashen at the words.

“What is it?” Cal asked.

But before Goldie could speak, they heard the thing running at them, heard its shriek roiling up in the night.

Colleen spun as the figure lunged out of the vapor, slashed wildly at it. Cal dove at her, grabbed her arm and yanked it aside as the body plunged past, smashing into Doc, taking both of them down, the bikes falling in a clatter.

“What the hell are you doing!?” Colleen cried at Cal. But then she saw that the sprawled figure was a woman, breathing hard, crazed with fear. She flailed at Doc in her panic, then halted abruptly as she made him out in the glare of the lantern. She looked about in stunned surprise. She was a big woman, of middle years, Cal could see, tall and solid, with steel-gray hair and clothes that would have been conservatively efficient if they hadn’t been bloody and torn. Rising, Doc tried to help her up, but she pulled free and sprang up with a boneless fluidity that Cal found unexpected and disconcerting.

She whipped about to face the way she had come, as a greenish phospor light exploded out of the mist and a buzzing roar assailed them.

And suddenly, Cal understood what she had been running from.

It towered over them, shambling forward. The living dead heart of it was something that had been a Confederate soldier once, an officer, that much was clear from the glowing gray uniform with the curlicues of braid at sleeve and throat, the brass buttons, the wild and flowing beard beneath burning eyes like the cores of green suns. Through his own terror, it came to Cal that West Virginia had sided with the Union, and that this walking specter might well have been one of the forgotten, unburied dead.

But the man-ghost of this creature formed only the frame, a basis upon which to heap amendment and ornamentation. Hornets swarmed over him in their thousands like a fresh skin, pulsing green as if irradiated, buzzing their rage. And playing over it all, electrical discharges of green-blue energy, snapping wildly like fallen high-tension lines in a storm.

Cal saw that Colleen was nearest to it, that soon it would trample her underfoot. He was on the move already, drawing his sword. Colleen stood her ground, whipping the crossbow off her back as the thing advanced on her. She loaded a bolt and fired. It passed clean through, sailed off into the fog.

The creature paused and regarded Colleen as if it had just grown aware of her. It raised its phantom gun and took aim.

Cal realized he wouldn’t reach them in time. He cried out, just as an enormous explosion rent the air and he was dazzled by a flash of light.

“No!” he screamed. But then he saw that Colleen stood unharmed, saw the apparition blasted away and dispersed to nothingness, the hornets scattering and vanishing into the fog.

Cal looked about him in confusion and spied Goldie standing just behind him, holding the musket he had carried here so lovingly, despite all of Colleen’s jibes. Sparks were still spitting from its muzzle and a golden light played over its surface, which died out as Cal watched. The weapon crumbled away, fell from Goldie’s hands.

“Okay, you win,” Colleen said to Goldie, still shaking. “I’m the asshole.”

“They’re coming back,” cried Tina, floating up out of the mist. The gray-haired woman became aware of her for the first time, and her expression was amazed and beatific. Cal noted-strangely, without surprise-that the illumination from Tina reflected off the woman’s eyes, like a cat’s.

Now Cal heard the angry buzzing, growing in volume, speeding toward them. The hornets. .

“Tina,” Cal spoke urgently. “What you did back at the creek, with that spearman- can you do it again? ”

“I don’t know. . I think so.”

“Get close about her, everyone!” They drew in around Tina. She concentrated, and the light about her spread outward to encompass them all.

Then the hornets were upon them, hurling themselves at the swirling light, immolating themselves. Cautiously, Tina moved forward through the fog as the insects pursued them, Cal and the others huddling close, feeling her Corona tingling on their skins as the fog had done, but with none of its frigidity.

Now other things were coming out of the mist and night at them. Hard spectral fingers tore up out of the earth; glowing blue stalks snaked from the mist and were repulsed.

Cal saw Tina’s aura flicker, begin to fade, read the weariness in her face. He gripped his sword, tensing for what might come.

But just as her light faded out, as she sank to the earth with a groan, they punched through the mist into the outskirts of town. No one was in sight, just a few tumbledown shacks, a scattering of weedy farm equipment in the moonlight.

Cal crouched beside Tina. Her hair pooled around her shoulders, her body earthbound now, with only the faintest twinkling playing over her skin. “You did it,” he said, but she didn’t seem to hear. She lifted her head and peered into the night, away from the fog, toward town. The tension had all fallen away from her, and her face held only a distant, contemplative serenity. It chilled Cal, pricked memory. Once, as a boy, he had passed the glassworks in Hurley, seen a frantic crowd trying to dissuade a hollow-eyed man from shooting himself. Aaron Barnes it had been, Cal went to school with his boy Cameron. Hanging back on the periphery, transfixed, Cal stared past dark-suited legs, the babble of scared, pleading voices engulfing him. It had looked as though they were swaying the man, when suddenly an expression of peace came over him, of vast relief, like an exhalation. . and he fired.

Cal made a move to gather Tina in his arms, to lift her, but she cut him off with an abrupt gesture, still gazing away, and struggled to her feet. Not weightless, not yet. Give her time to recharge and to come back to them.

Colleen, Doc and Goldie were checking out the bikes, seeing what was still attached after their flight. Cal looked beyond them, saw that the older woman had hurried down the dirt road to a derelict two-story house.

He walked up to her, found that she was staring intently at a spot on the ground where he could just make out a dark stain. Then she straightened, shaking her head. “Not blood,” she said with relief, and Cal wondered how she could be sure of that.

She scrutinized the tangled yard, the heaps of discarded washing machines, the labyrinth of trees farther on, seeing, Cal felt certain, far more acutely than he could, but not finding what she sought.