Marc Zicree - Magic Time

“What are you looking for?”

“A friend who put himself in harm’s way for me.” She shoved back her disheveled hair, managed a smile. “As you and your friends just did.” She extended a hand. “I’m Wilma Hanson.”

“Cal Griffin, from New York.”

“Well, Mr. Griffin, I’m afraid now that you’ve entered-” Her eyes grew alarmed as she glanced past him. “Stop her!”

Cal spun and saw that Tina was running hell for leather toward town. He took off after her, his legs kicking up the dirt, the cold air whipping at him. But Colleen, Doc and Goldie were ahead of him. They caught hold of her, dragged her to a staggering halt. She cried out, struggling, tearing at them, but there was no strength in her. She relapsed to stillness, her eyes on the dark, the unseen town.

We couldn’t have done that if her tank wasn’t on empty , Cal thought worriedly.

“Keep hold of her,” Wilma Hanson said. “There’s something in town that gets into them, makes them do things.”

Cal looked up sharply at this, caught his own look mirrored on Colleen’s face, and Goldie’s, and Doc’s.

Something that gets into them. Into Tina and Stern and that pitiful boy in the woods, and all the twisted, anguished ones. That beckoned them all the way from Manhattan. That blighted their waking hours, made a horror of their dreams, infected their souls.

Welcome to Boone’s Gap.

“Do you know what it is?” Cal asked quietly. “No,” Wilma replied. “But I know where it is.”

To Cal, the Wishart house looked like nothing so much as a pale reflection seen within dusky glass, a wavering mirage, elusive and then gone.

And yet he was staring right at it.

Peering out the window in Wilma Hanson’s front room, the crackling pine in the fireplace banishing the fog chill from his bones, Cal sensed or imagined-he couldn’t be sure which- shame emanating from that house, a shrinking from even the moon’s fading light.

Behind him, Goldie sat cross-legged in the corner, welcoming Wilma Hanson’s regiment of cats as they brushed against him, burnished him, while Doc and Colleen stood by the hearth with Wilma. Their voices were soft, their conversation banal. It was a breathing space, a tiny harbor in a great, unyielding storm.

Leading them to her home over rutted dirt paths, through the slumbering dark of town streets, Wilma had told of the comatose children and the old ones, the sense of their being drained like rivulets of water coursing to the sea, drawn inescapably toward the Wishart home.

“Even the power held in the land is being fed on,” Wilma had said, on the move, tensing against the pulse of the night that only she could sense, “the ghosts of this town’s history….”

Cal let the voices behind him blur to a comfortable drone, let himself float on the scent of woodsmoke, the taste of mountain air, the homey warmth of the room about him; all the subtle sounds and smells that brought home back to him. And he was a boy again in Hurley, his infant sister dozing in the far room, his mother a watchful presence to shield them from the chaos of the world.

Then he heard a soft shifting above him and looked toward the attic. Toward Tina.

They- he -had locked her there.

After her emergence from the fog, her headlong flight toward town, she was passive, seemed hardly aware of them. She allowed herself to be led to Applby Lane, not even glancing at the Wishart House as they passed it, only slowing almost imperceptibly.

But Cal noted her radiance growing ever brighter, her tread barely brushing the ground. She was regaining her strength, would soon have it all, and then none of them could hope to stop her.

So, in this brief span while she still mutely acquiesed, Cal agreed to imprison her in the one room with no windows, with a door they could bar.

While the house next door shimmered and waited.

From above, another thud, louder than before.

He turned toward the hearth, saw his companions in the Rembrandt light of the fire. His glance caught the photos on the mantel of Wilma’s sisters and their families, of her students.

“Have you lost many you were close to?” he asked.

“Well, it’s a very small town.”

“Those men,” Doc said. “The changed ones outside. Why did it kill them?”

“One of my friends, the one who-” Wilma stopped as though about to reveal more of her heart than she wished. “He said something got into his mind, was telling him to kill Bob.”

Bob Wishart. Bob, whom Wilma had thought should be dead already, dead when the machines went down. But who, at least in the minds of the changed ones, was very much alive.

“And you’re sure Dr. Wishart hasn’t been here in months?” Cal asked.

Wilma nodded as Colleen broke in, “But why the stay-at-home brother? The handyman? Why kill Bob, if he isn’t dead already? What could he have to do with draining the town?”

“Somehow,” Wilma said, “I have a feeling that whatever’s compelling those attacks doesn’t care about the town, about any of us.”

Cal began, “But why would the changed ones-”

“Because,” Goldie broke in from his cat-contented corner, “it told them to. Because you open yourself to it, and the world falls away.”

Cal stared. It was what Tina had said, in the fog. Goldie turned to him, somber. “There’s two pieces to this. Here and the big one. The real one. It’s not here your sister’s being pulled. It’s through here. To the other. The maw.”

Cal looked again at the Wishart house, as though he could see it now, even through Wilma’s walls. The brothers used to speak via computer; was Bob some secret whiz kid who had something to do with the Source Project without anyone’s knowing?

But Wilma had known the twins all their lives, and Bob had shown no such aptitude. Fred had been the brains of the two, Bob-with his over-keen sensitivities-the heart.

Besides, Bob had been in a coma for months , long before-

Another thud from above-loud, startling. Through the doorway to the dining room, Cal could see the hanging lamp shudder.

Then a crash. Tina, unseen, thrusting herself against the barred attic door.

Answers or no, they were out of time. Cal had to get into that house now , to see .

Hurriedly, he said to Wilma, “We’ll need something to use for shields-and the most direct route through the house to Bob.”

Wilma was shaking her head, even before he’d finished speaking. “You don’t understand. You have no way to know what it can do.”

Cal reached out, grasped her hands. “You had nothing but speed, no protection. And those poor dead ones out there, they had nothing at all. Besides-”

From above, another crash. Cal winced, but his voice was strong. “We have no options.”

The cats’ eyes, huge and yellow and haughty, followed Wilma as she rose and fetched paper to draw the floor plan.

From her station on the second-floor landing, Wilma could see Cal Griffin and his companions moving slowly toward the Wishart house. The moon hung low in the sky, its light glinting off the makeshift shields they carried, fashioned from the corrugated tin of her storage shed, the leather straps from her scrap room.

The impacts resounding from the attic just above her were coming with less frequency, less force. Wilma had volunteered to stand guard over Griffin’s sister, and, at first, the child’s blows against the thick oak walls and door had been so frenzied that, special powers or no, Wilma had felt certain the girl was harming herself. Now, with the sounds weakening, Wilma hoped it was a sign of resignation rather than serious injury.