Marc Zicree - Magic Time

In the dust gloom of the attic, they contemplated how precisely they might destroy something that only one of them had even been able to glimpse. But to Cal, it was not the doing of the thing but the act itself that disquieted him. For in annihilating what dwelt in that shattered house, might they possibly destroy not just the illness but the cure?

“No,” he said at last to the others. “We need to know more.”

“Right,” said Colleen. “We’ll commission a study.”

“Like you said, it’s all guesses,” Cal replied. “Only doesn’t it feel like Goldie’s right, that Wishart’s fighting the same fight we are, that we’ve got a common enemy? And even if that guess is wrong, Wishart’s still our only link to- what did you call it?”

Cal’s eyes were on Goldie, but it was Doc who responded, “ ‘The real one.’ ”

“Look. I want to shotgun this nightmare out of existence, too. But we’ve got to try another way.”

He added, with the certainty of a decision already made, “What Tina felt, and what I felt from Fred Wishart once we got close, was fear. Panic. And you don’t approach that with aggression, you approach it with-”

“Hold it, hold it.”

“ Colleen. .”

“Tina also came up with ‘crazy,’ right? Any hands here on how we should be approaching that ?”

“Sometimes,” Goldie murmured, “you talk to a crazy like he’s okay, and he can become okay.”

“No, no, no -”

Cal cut in over Colleen. “Fred Wishart is terrified and he’s alone. . so alone is how I need to go in there.”

“Cal?”

The soft voice turned them all. It was Tina, eyes barely open. He knelt quickly beside her, taking her hand. It felt cold, but her fingers tightened about his.

“You okay?” he asked. She nodded and snuggled against him.

Wilma leaned close. “Cal, you’re tired, and you’re not thinking. I went in only with concern, knowing them, and totally unescorted.”

“I know.” Cal stroked silken hair. “But it’s not just aggression that fuels fear, it’s. . well. Wishart wanted to scare you, and he did.”

Doc asked, “Calvin, are you imagining you’re going to be able to go back in there and not be afraid?”

“Hell, why would he be afraid? “ Colleen answered for him. “Our boy here likes the idea of wearing a Frigidaire for a hat.”

Cal turned his gaze back to Tina. Her exhaustion appeared to have brought her back to herself, and him, at least for now.

“Tina?” His voice was almost a whisper. “Tina?”

Her eyes fluttered open.

“We’ve never broken our word, have we?”

Her expression clouded.

“I need to break it now. I need to try something that may mean I won’t be able to come back to you.”

“That’s not the deal,” she said in alarm, drawing back, rousing herself. “I can help you, like in the fog with the hornets.”

“Tina. .”

“You need me, to talk to Dr. Wishart. To get through, beneath. I’m the one plugged into Mutant Central.”

She had heard them, all of them, talking, he realized. But had she forgotten, was she unaware of her imprisonment in the attic?

The others were silent, empty of suggestion. Wilma drew Cal away from Tina, out of earshot.

“I can’t tell you what to do. That child, though… she has a gift. Maybe she has it for a reason.”

“If that thing gets hold of her-” Cal protested.

“Something’s got hold of a lot of children in this town. They’re dying of it.” Wilma sighed. “I can’t tell you, but I can ask: Give all those other children their chance.”

Her hand in his was warm in the night air, and weightless. A dragonfly, Tina flowed beside him toward the Wishart house. The light about her had returned, its pastel mists veiling her.

At the perimeter of the gouged, ravaged front yard, Cal halted and released her hand. The scattered, butchered remains of the grunters lay cold and insensate among the weeds.

Deliberately, Cal drew his sword and stuck it point first into the damp earth. Then he unclasped his belt and scabbard, laid them alongside it. He straightened and looked at his sister, into the sapphire flame of her eyes, saw her disquiet and her resolve. He took her hand, turned back toward the house.

“Dr. Wishart, please. We need to talk with you.”

He had tried for a normal tone, but his voice sounded harsh to his ears, invasive. He tensed, waiting. But all was stillness, save for the cicada hum.

We’re not going to hurt you. Cal aimed the thought toward the house, made a mantra of it. He pressed away what Wishart had tried to do to him , locked his fear behind a door in his mind.

He took a hesitant step onto the ruined lawn.

NO. The word, forceful and blunt, came at them. Cal flinched, and he saw Tina wince with it, wondered how much louder it seemed to her.

The body pieces of what had once been the sons and husbands and fathers of the town did not stir. Warily, Cal moved past them and, with Tina, climbed the broken steps of the porch.

In the porch, the battered, bloodstained corpses of the books heaved and fluttered as if blown by a breath but did not fly at them. There was a sound, a deep creaking groan, like the whole house shifting on its timbers. A sense of watching, of waiting, rose from the walls, from the air about them.

They crossed the porch, stepped through the place where the kitchen door had been torn from its hinges, and entered the house.

Wilma had finally gotten the Russian doctor to agree to lie down, but only when she had positioned her sofa by the front window so that he could monitor the progress of Griffin and his sister toward the Wishart house. Under his guidance, Wilma had redressed his wound-the impromptu bandage was soaked through-and washed the blood from his face, the doctor all the while protesting impatiently. But now, at last, he lay quiet and watchful.

Wilma glanced out the window, saw that Griffin and his sister had crossed the Wishart porch with nothing rising to bar their way. A promising first step. She said a silent prayer as they vanished into the house.

Wilma stepped onto her own porch. Goldman and the Brooks woman stood rigid, gazing toward the Wishart house, seeing only darkness, hearing only the vague sounds of the fading night.

Pausing behind them, Wilma caught a scent on the air, or thought she did, distant and elusive, of coal and earth and blood, heard a soft rustling in the woods that might have been wind. It brought Hank to her thoughts. Since they had been attacked, since he had thrown himself at the grunters and yelled for her to run, she had heard nothing of him, seen no sign. Had they killed him? Or had he managed, through the ferocity of his attack and his fleetness, to get away?

She had seen no blood at the site, and that had heartened her. But thinking on it now, it seemed strange. Hank had been outnumbered, surrounded. Surely they would have drawn some of his blood, or he theirs. In all their previous attacks, they had proven unrelentingly murderous. If they spared him, what possibly could have been their motive?

Puzzling over it, Hank’s struggled words came back to her. They know I led the men out of the mines, they’re looking to me to-

To what?

And then, with a chilling certainty she could not have explained, Wilma thought she knew.

To lead them.

Hank, with his cool head and audacious nerve, his relentlessness and grit. The voice in his head had been working on him, striving to fill him with an irresistible desire to kill Bob Wishart. What if it had overwhelmed him at last, as it had Joe Rance and Eddie Dayton and the others like him? But more than that, what if Hank-who alone had kept his wits about him even as he changed and had led his team, what remained of them, to the surface and safety-what if Hank retained his ability to strategize?