Peter Beagle - The Line Between

She didn't see the old woman until her chair creaked slightly, because she was sitting in a corner, halfway hidden by long hanging garments like church choir robes, but with symbols and patterns on them that Angie had never seen before. The woman was very old, much older even than Lidia, and she had an absurdly small pipe in her toothless mouth. Angie said, «Yemaya?» The old woman looked at her with eyes like dead planets.

Angle's Spanish dried up completely, followed almost immediately by her English. She said, «My brother … my little brother … I'm supposed to ask for El Viejo. The old one, viejo santero? Lidia said.» She ran out of words in either language at that point. A puff of smoke crawled from the little pipe, but the old woman made no other response.

Then, behind her, she heard a curtain being pulled aside. A hoarse, slow voice said, «Quieres El Viejo? Me.»

Angie turned and saw him, coming toward her out of a long hallway whose end she could not see. He moved deliberately, and it seemed to take him forever to reach her, as though he were returning from another world. He was black, dressed all in black, and he wore dark glasses, even in the dark, tiny shop. His hair was so white that it hurt her eyes when she stared. He said, «Your brother.»

«Yes," Angie said. «Yes. He's doing magic for me — he's getting something I need — and I don't know where he is, but I know he's in trouble, and I want him back!» She did not cry or break down — Marvyn would never be able to say that she cried over him — but it was a near thing.

El Viejo pushed the dark glasses up on his forehead, and Angie saw that he was younger than she had first thought — certainly younger than Lidia — and that there were thick white half–circles under his eyes. She never knew whether they were

somehow natural, or the result of heavy makeup; what she did see was that they made his eyes look bigger and brighter — all pupil, nothing more. They should have made him look at least slightly comical, like a reverse–image raccoon, but they didn't.

«I know you brother," El Viejo said. Angie fought to hold herself still as he came closer, smiling at her with the tips of his teeth. «A brujito —little, little witch, we know. Mama and me, we been watching.» He nodded toward the old woman in the chair, who hadn't moved an inch or said a word since Angie's arrival. Angie smelled a damp, musty aroma, like potatoes going bad.

«Tell me where he is. Lidia said you could help.» Close to, she could see blue highlights in El Viejo's skin, and a kind of V–shaped scar on each cheek. He was wearing a narrow black tie, which she had not noticed at first; for some reason, the vision of him tying it in the morning, in front of a mirror, was more chilling to her than anything else about him. He grinned fully at her now, showing teeth that she had expected to be yellow and stinking, but which were all white and square and a little too large. He said, «Tu hermano estdperdido. Lost in Thursday.»

«Thursday?» It took her a dazed moment to comprehend, and longer to get the words out. «Oh, God, he went back! Like with Milady — he went back to before I … when the letter was still in my backpack. The little showoff — he said forward was hard, coming forward — he wanted to show me he could do it. And he got stuck. Idiot, idiot, idiot!» El Viejo chuckled softly, nodding, saying nothing.

«You have to go find him, get him out of there, right now — I've got money.» She began digging frantically in her coat pockets.

«No, no money.» El Viejo waved her offering aside, studying her out of eyes the color of almost–ripened plums. The white markings under them looked real; the eyes didn't. He said, «I take you. We find you brother together.»

Angie's legs were trembling so much that they hurt. She wanted to assent, but it was simply not possible. «No. I can't. I can't. You go back there and get him.»

El Viejo laughed then: an enormous, astonishing Santa Claus ho–ho–HO, so rich and reassuring that it made Angie smile even as he was snatching her up and stuffing her under one arm. By the time she had recovered from her bewilderment enough to start kicking and fighting, he was walking away with her down the long hall he had come out of a moment before. Angie screamed until her voice splintered in her throat, but she could not hear herself: from the moment El Viejo stepped back into the darkness of the hallway, all sound had ended. She could hear neither his footsteps nor his laughter — though she could feel him laughing against her — and certainly not her own panicky racket. They could be in outer space. They could be anywhere.

Dazed and disoriented as she was, the hallway seemed to go soundlessly on and on, until wherever they truly were, it could never have been the tiny Santeria shop she had entered only — when? — minutes before. It was a cold place, smelling like an old

basement; and for all its darkness, Angie had a sense of things happening far too fast on all sides, just out of range of her smothered vision. She could distinguish none of them clearly, but there was a sparkle to them all the same.

And then she was in Marvyn's room.

And it was unquestionably Marvyn's room: there were the bearded and beaded occultists on the walls; there were the flannel winter sheets that he slept on all year because they had pictures of the New York Mets ballplayers; there was the complete set of Star Trek action figures that Angie had given him at Christmas, posed just so on his bookcase. And there, sitting on the edge of his bed, was Marvyn, looking lonelier than anyone Angie had ever seen in her life.

He didn't move or look up until El Viejo abruptly dumped her down in front of him and stood back, grinning like a beartrap. Then he jumped to his feet, burst into tears and started frenziedly climbing her, snuffling, «Angie, Angie, Angie," all the way up. Angie held him, trying somehow to preserve her neck and hair and back all at once, while mumbling, «It's all right, it's okay, I'm here. It's okay, Marvyn.»

Behind her, El Viejo chuckled, «Crybaby witch — little, little brujito crybaby.»

Angie hefted her blubbering baby brother like a shopping bag, holding him on her hip as she had done when he was little, and turned to face the old man. She said, «Thank you. You can take us home now.»

El Viejo smiled — not a grin this time, but a long, slow shutmouth smile like a paper cut. He said, «Maybe we let him do it, yes?» and then he turned and walked away and was gone, as though he had simply slipped between the molecules of the air. Angie stood with Marvyn in her arms, trying to peel him off like a Band–Aid, while he clung to her with his chin digging hard into the top of her head. She finally managed to dump him down on the bed and stood over him, demanding, «What happened? What were you thinking?» Marvyn was still crying too hard to answer her. Angie said, «You just had to do it this way, didn't you? No silly little beginner spells — you're playing with the big guys now, right, O Mighty One? So what happened? How come you couldn't get back?»

«I don't know!» Marvyn's face was red and puffy with tears, and the tears kept coming while Angie tried to straighten his eyepatch. It was impossible for him to get much out without breaking down again, but he kept wailing, «I don't know what went wrong! I did everything you're supposed to, but I couldn't make it work! I don't know … maybe I forgot…» He could not finish.

«Herbs," Angie said, as gently and calmly as she could. «You left your magic herbs back — " she had been going to say «back home," but she stopped, because they were back home, sitting on Marvyn's bed in Marvyn's room, and the confusion was too much for her to deal with just then. She said, «Just tell me. You left the stupid herbs.»