Magic Time

Chapter Sixteen

NEW YORK

Patrick Francis listened to the night.

It was silent outside now, which was a relief, considering the crescendo of shattering and screams earlier. He hadn’t even ventured to look through the window, just hunkered in the darkness, cradling Oreo as the little black-and-white terrier trembled and whined, stroking him and assuring him that it would all be okay.

Not that Patrick felt any such assurance himself.

He’d been up when the earthquake, or whatever it was, had struck, had been up all night, in fact, working on the De Vries documentary, running the tapes. This latest stuff was terrific. Patrick had begun the questions innocently enough, something on Crime Boss, then had led the elderly director into the more sensitive area of his marriage to Velinda Lane, the greatest of his leading ladies, and the most tragic. And incredibly, Anton had opened up, revealed details he’d never told anyone before.

It was all so incredibly rewarding, this journey he’d embarked on a year and a half ago, set in motion by a chance meeting at a dinner party. The one-eyed old man in his wheelchair had been so taciturn at first, so glitteringly acid. But as they had come to know each other, as trust had been painstakingly built, Anton had opened to him like a puzzle box, revealing mystery upon mystery. The great noir director, unspooling his visions of a world in chaos, a universe of random, cruel coincidence. Chance meetings that led to anguish and death.

He wondered what Anton would have to say about today’s events. Thank God he was at that festival honoring him in Lausanne. Patrick hoped and trusted that it was out of the danger zone, but, thanks to the phones being out, he had not been able to confirm it.

But Anton was a survivor, as the Nazis had discovered before he’d ventured to Hollywood and nine wives had learned since. He could hear that familiar, Hungarian-accented croak now, chiding him, “Worry about your own ass.”

Okay, he’d do that and tell himself the current situation was just a speed bump on the road, nothing to get too bent out of shape about. Thankfully, he’d had the computer off when it had hit, lost none of his notes or transcripts.

Oreo was staring up at him now, an acute, querying look in his eye. It had been hours since they’d ventured outside, and the little dog was long past due. Patrick cocked an ear toward the door. All quiet on the western front.

Quickly, he leashed Oreo up, threw open the door and stepped out into the warm night air. Instantly, the terrier pulled to the nearest minute square of grass and let go. Blissful relief. Dogs were so simple, they brought things down to the basics-love and need, hunger and fear. Pure primal emotions, the same as in Anton’s films. Black and white simplicity.

Oreo continued, intent, inquisitive, drawn by the panoply of scents. Patrick grew nervous as they drew near a familiar gingerbread grotesquerie, its windows black fathomless eyes. Sam Lungo was the last thing they needed tonight, erupting like some demented figure from a cuckoo clock, ranting and cursing.

Patrick drew Oreo to the far side of the street, breathed a sigh as they cleared the property. The little dog paused at a railing, seemingly magnetized, again lifted his leg.

He stopped abruptly. Hackles rising, he began barking wildly.

“Sign says curb your dog,” a voice behind Patrick purred, husky as a semi engine. “But I guess it’s too dark to read.”

Startled, Patrick turned and found himself craning his neck up at a dark, angular face. He gasped and stepped back. At first, he thought it might be a mask; no face could truly look like that.

But as he peered closer-Oreo pulling madly on the leash, barking crazily-Patrick saw it was real, indisputably so, even in the moonlight.

And God, it looked evil. The bones of the man’s face were spiking out from under the skin, and the skin itself erupted from eyes and nose and mouth in reptilian patterns like bizarre, relief-map tattoos. His shiny black hair flared in a wild spray off his head, scales interspersing it like the devil’s own cornrow.

Patrick began edging back toward his apartment, dragging Oreo. The dog kept up an insistent growling, barking and baring of teeth at the other, who broke into an easy stride behind them.

“This your regular route?” he asked in an offhand tone.

“Yeah,” Patrick fought to keep his voice even, not stopping. Oreo was ballistic, a wolverine. Primal emotions, pure simplicity.

“Good,” the other said ominously. “I just wanted to be sure.”

A world of chaos. A universe of random, cruel coincidence.

Patrick stopped and turned, facing the nightmare. “Listen,” he said over the ear-ringing, staccato yelps. “I live right over there. I just want to go home.”

“Who doesn’t?” the other’s voice was affable. He gestured toward the flat. “Be my guest.”

Hauling Oreo, Patrick hurried toward the brownstone, his eyes fixed on the other, who stood motionless. Finally, he reached the building, turned to the door.

There was a rush of sound behind him, Oreo screeched in frenzy and fear, and Patrick felt a wet agony in his back, a slashing that severed skin and meat. He heard the crack of bone and gave a truncated cry, fell crashing onto the pavement.

It’s like a movie, he thought, and felt the absurdity of it, and the truth. Oreo’s cries sounded distant now, muffled, as sensation faded, the last frame threaded through, the projector light damped. And then his mind and heart were stilled.

Stern rose from his work, exultant. To begin a thing and end it, to conceive and execute. It was delightfully straightforward, elegantly simple. And best of all, it was just the beginning.

The little dog was howling mournfully, backed against the doorframe. Stern stepped over the broken, wet form on the concrete and approached it. Its eyes grew huge, and it pressed itself back into the wood, dropped its voice to a whimper. Stern extended one long, clawed hand, dripping glistening red.

“Nice boy,” he said and patted the dog’s head.

Colleen Brooks gripped the rough iron railing on the fire-escape landing across from Doc’s warehouse, glaring out at the night. Below, the shadowed street angled off toward the faint sheen of the Hudson, and everything was so still it was as if she were in a model of the city, not real at all.

“Why’d you tell me this? Why the hell are you telling me this?”

Cal Griffin stood behind her, saying nothing. But then he had said enough.

The Magnet Man. Bullets falling like little turds. .

She wheeled suddenly, reaching toward his head. He caught her wrist, stopping her.

“I want to see how hard that guy hit you,” she said.

He released her, scowling. “Not that hard.”

“Yeah, well, maybe we oughtta have Doc Moscow be the judge. . Jeez, Cal, don’t you know how this sounds?”

He nodded somberly, and somehow his very seriousness made her all the more angry.

“Shit.” She turned from him again, considered the night. Dawn was coming on soon, the sky was inching lighter. She caught a silhouette of movement, discerned a hawk hanging in the air, its wings spread like great fingers. Did it see a changed world, or the same one, as far as its needs were concerned?

All that had happened today tumbled through Colleen’s mind, the stalled elevators and blackened stairwells; the long trek past the miles of dead cars and trucks; hearing that cop’s bellows in the night and wading swinging into that mob; that weird, dark clump of odd-shaped kids-who-might-not-have-been-kids moving fast down shrouded streets. .

And the pale, delicate girl, whom she hadn’t really even met yet, on the mattress across the street, burning up with fever.

Colleen felt suddenly as she did in those dreams that assaulted her on so many nights, where she’d be working in a shaft atop a secured car and the joists abruptly gave way and she was falling, plunging into a bottomless shaft, back in that awful helpless child place where there was nothing she could do but hold on tight and fall endlessly into the blackness.

Was she angry because she didn’t believe him, or because she did?

She knew the answer.

So what to do now? Sit in the dark with the windows drawn, like Rory, shutting out the world? The world was always right there with you; you couldn’t outrun it, not really. By choosing or not choosing, you made your world, and your life. There was no standing still-or sitting still, for that matter, despite what Rory might say, there in his Barcalounger as the hours and days and years melted away.

And the image returned to her of the lobby this morning, before the storm came down, and the young man in the suit speaking up for her when no one would. And later, when he asked if she needed anything. And later still, when he asked without asking for her help.

Maybe she was falling; maybe they all were. But they could choose to fall together, perhaps somehow even stop the fall, or at least slow it.

“I DON’T NEED MORE CRAZINESS IN MY LIFE!!!” She shouted at the night, and it rang off the buildings.

But then, they hadn’t asked her, had they?

She turned back to Cal and was gratified to see his mouth hanging open. “Okay, I believe it, every last fucking bit of it.” She dragged her fingers through her short hair. “I mean, it’s not as if a lawyer would lie. . ”

He smiled then, and she liked what it did to his face.

The sound of a metal door creaking open echoed down the corridor of street, drew their attention. Doc stood in his doorway far below, bidding them return.

They descended the iron stairs, as the second day began.

Sam just didn’t know what to do with himself.

Pacing in the airless, cluttered living room, so alive with shadows and ghosts, frozen in time, he awaited Ely’s return.

A genie. His genie. To do whatever Sam commanded. And what had he wished for, so ardently desired, after the endless humiliations, the long, yearning years of frustration?

He had fantasized so many times in his loneliness, scrawled tiny, cramped miles of notes. All the shifting population of his life, the denizens of his street who swarmed like rats. How delicious, how dreamily satisfying to kill them all, one by one, ever so slowly, to maim and mangle them and, at last, at last, to make them pay. Judgment day.

But now here it was. And when he had shown Ely the infinity of notepads, indicated the offenses and slights, babbling his cherished daydreams, he found his exhilaration cooling to. .

Fear.

This was no fantasy now; no, no, this was real. And to really do what he had longed for, why, why. .

It would be monstrous.

He had tried to backpedal then. He just wanted Ely to scare them, really, to make them feel small and helpless and ridiculous, as they had made him feel so many, many times.

But Ely, towering over him like some gaunt god of scarecrows and desolation, had merely snatched the pad from him and chuckled. Then he had risen like an avenging angel and departed.

Sam contemplated running after him, overtaking him in the night-splashed street. But then the image of the one who had chased down Ely before, whom Ely had seized and sent hurtling to break against a wall, came to him with sickening vividness and shattered his resolve.

He fidgeted in his room in an agony of waiting, unable to be still, sweat gleaming on his brow and lip, saturating his armpits; his own smell disgusted him.

Then, after ten, fifteen minutes at most, he heard the frenzied barking, the awful shriek of what he knew must be a man, and other appalling sounds-like someone cracking wish-bones, but much louder. Terrified, furious, he tried to block it out, tried to convince himself that whoever it was, they deserved it. But the conceit wouldn’t hold. A dreadful nausea stole over him, and the room tilted, strobing pinpoints of light flashing before him in the darkness. He sat down on the velvet settee, breathing hard. Then he gained control of himself.

He might have gone to the window, gained final certainty, but there was no need. He knew.

Now a heavy trudging sounded, and Sam realized Ely was returning. Sam’s heart raced, his breath came fast and shallow, and suddenly he remembered the rest of Thief of Baghdad: how the genie, once released, had proven malevolent, how it had been impossible to get him back into the bottle, how what he had wanted to do more than anything was to kill.

For the first time in forever, Sam desperately wanted Mother there, wished he could summon her hard, merciless spirit back from the grave, to stand between him and this malignant force he had so recklessly invited into his home.

Outside, the porch slats groaned as Stern stepped onto them. Sam was seized with a wild urge to rush to the door, throw the bolt, lock it tight. But that would only make Ely angry, and it wouldn’t stop him.

The footfalls ceased. Silence, only the crickets in the night. Sam held his breath.

The doorbell rang.

Under it, another sound erupted in the room, and Sam was laughing, giggling hysterically.

Ely was one for details, oh, indeed he was, such a precise touch, so taunting, so scornful… and so clearly a summons.

The cruel meaning of it fell in on Sam like the roof collapsing, like the weight of rafters. Here was no liberator, no deliverance, merely another tormentor, the crowning one, without peer. Oh, it was funny, to die for. .

Tears sprang to Sam’s eyes, stinging, and he found his laughter turning to shrieks, which he stifled, panic blossoming like a wound in him. His feet leaden, he walked to the door, threw it open.

Stern stood on the threshold, his incredible bulk filling the doorway. He stepped through, ducking his head under the frame. Sam moved aside, making room, and then eased the door shut.

He saw that Ely was holding something out to him. A leash, a short leash.

“That pooch can run with the wolves now,” Stern said. Taking the leash, Sam found it sticky with congealing liquid. Then he spied Stern’s carmine-soaked hands.

“I’ll try not to touch anything,” Stern mocked.

Crazily, needing to say anything to stop from screaming, Sam found himself murmuring, “Bloodstains are a terror to get out.”

“You should read Heloise,” Stern replied and swept through the living room toward the bathroom.

Woodenly, imprisoned, Sam fetched a pitcher of water, found Stern before the mirror, stripped to the waist, appraising himself in the glow of the oil lamp. Sam could see that he hadn’t been imagining things; Ely was even larger than he had been before running his dread errand, bonier and more muscular, his face continuing to extend, his skin to roughen. Skeletal projections erupted at surprising points all over his torso, and Sam noted odd protrusions beginning to press out below Ely’s shoulder blades. I’m becoming, Stern had said. He most certainly was.

Sam raised the pitcher over the basin and heard his voice, leeched of emotion. “Hands. Ely, your hands.”

“Hm? Oh.” Stern extended his hands over the basin as Sam poured. Water flooded over them, dripped off the thick nails that, Sam saw, were growing more like talons, true claws. The blood washed away, swirled down the drain.

“Quite the night’s work,” Stern mused. “How I put myself out for you.” There was merriment in his eye, ironic and mean. This is your doing, Sam, it said. Not mine. The genie doesn’t get the blame.

Ely was lording it over him, in his own house, because he could, for no other reason than that. Power, it was all about power, who’s top dog, who rules the roost. Just like everyone else, just like Mother when she had been here, and even after.

A raw heat of outrage ignited in Sam’s chest, shot into his cheeks and eye sockets. For one mad moment, he almost took the pitcher and smashed it into Stern’s grinning gargoyle skull. But the fear, the years of obsequiousness and invisibility, stayed his hand, and the moment passed. He bowed his head, shame and regret choking him.

“There now,” Stern said, as the last of the defiled water fled down the drain. “All gone.”

Numbly, Sam set the pitcher beside the basin, held out paper towels. Stern patted his hands dry.

Stern’s eyes returned to the mirror. He ran a hand along his craggy, saurian chin. “Used to have the worst five o’clock shadow. Looks like I won’t have to shave for a while.”

Sam was only half-listening now, rooting about in the hall closet for the item Mother had put there so many years ago. Why keep that? he had complained to her. Who will ever use it? But she had saved it as she had saved everything, and, in this at least, she had been right.

“Here, Ely,” Sam said in a hushed tone, returning to him. “It was my father’s. He was six-five.” He unfurled the heavy material in his delicate hands.

Stern felt the faded terry cloth between his fingers, drew it from Sam. The robe was as soft and shapeless as the man who had once inhabited it. Stern shrugged into it, glowered down at Sam. “What was your mother? A circus dwarf?”

Sam felt the blood in his cheeks, averted his eyes. “We all have our shortcomings.”

Stern turned back to the mirror. “Gotta develop a thick skin,” he said.

Mother had called it the guest room, though they’d never had any guests. Sam had always thought of it as the discard room. But now he had a guest, one that he could not discard.

Stern lay in the narrow oak bed, pulling the moth-eaten covers up, trying to get comfortable-impossibile given his size and shape. Sam hovered by the bedside oil lamp. “There anything else you need, Ely?”

Stern shook his head, then belched, a low rumble. He winced painfully.

“Still the heartburn?” Sam’s tone was solicitous, if flat. He found his thinking was musty, as though wrapped in cotton wool like the keepsakes Mother had so carefully placed in boxes and stored away in the recesses of the attic. He felt curiously withdrawn, as if moving through a dream. I’m trying to escape, he thought, I’m trying to escape in my mind. And in some hopeless core of him, that seemed the only way.

“I don’t get ulcers; I give them,” Stern mumbled. His searchlight eyes were at half-mast, and, as he stretched, groaning, Sam could sense the bone-ache weariness of the-man? Well, no, that wasn’t quite the word, not precisely, not anymore. Nor was guest, either, but that was how it was.

“You’ve had a busy night, Ely,” Sam said, patting him on the shoulder and feeling that it was someone else saying and doing these things. He blew out the lamp, plunging the room into darkness, the drapes drawn tight against the coming dawn. “Tomorrow’s another day.” He withdrew, closing the door behind him.

Stern turned toward the wall, drew his legs up until he was curled in a ball. He was warm here, hidden. The pounding in his head had eased back some, and he felt the tempest of the day’s events fading in his mind.

He woke; he didn’t know how long later. Prickling danced over his skin, then erupted in a fierce blue energy. He didn’t need to open his eyes, he could see it through his closed eyelids. It surged over him, pulsed through his veins, filled his mouth and lungs. He fought to scream but was paralyzed, immobile as it whipped about and within him. And in that instant, that ferocity of being, he realized that he had known this feeling before, earlier, in the office. At the beginning. And he knew too that it had not gone and returned but had merely resurfaced, was always now with him. He was becoming, and this vast, elemental current was the medium of that becoming. He relaxed then, and the energy drew back into him, continued its patient work. He exhaled a long, slow breath and opened himself, accepting. He slept.

WASHINGTON, D.C.

It had been a damn long night.

Crossing the dew-soaked lawns to the buildings of the Old Executive Office-where every available bicycle had been stored-Shango felt the same tension that he’d known as a child in hurricane weather. He remembered clearly how it had felt to cross between the run-down brick buildings of the Washington Street projects when the first jagged gusts of rain would come in, cold and strange feeling in the summer heat. Rain and then still. Rain and then still, but in the stillness you could feel the storm to come. Seeing through every window all the TVs tuned to the weather, those colored maps and the crawling ribbon of warning across the bottom of the screen that said, IT’S ON ITS WAY AND IT’S GONNA BE BAD.

Why did he feel, at the end of this night of riot and fire and fear, that he’d only felt the first cold splatter of preliminary rain?

“At least we don’t have to worry about lugging guns,” said Czernas, very trim and sleek in black biking shorts and a microfiber shirt. His smooth, sculpted shoulders shifted under the straps of his backpack. “Or about being shot at.”

Word had come in fairly early in the night, about the guns. Shango had gone out behind the White House after he’d gone off-shift at midnight, and tested both of his personal handguns, the Browning and the P7, with the same results: nada. He remembered McKay’s reaction, when a Guard captain had told him about this.

Again, nada. He hadn’t been surprised.

“Might do for you to carry one all the same.” Shango halted in the dark area between the torchlight along the White House walls and the lighted perimeter, and fished his P7 from the holster at the small of his back. “Things changed once. They might again.”

Czernas obediently stashed the weapon in his backpack, where he couldn’t get to it in under a minute, but Shango said nothing. He guessed the aide was in his mid-thirties, a couple of years older than himself, but he found himself unconsciously thinking of him as younger. This might have had something to do with the other man’s boyish blondness, but Shango didn’t think so.

He was a rookie. He might know politics, and he might know campaigning, and he might know who was important and how to get things done, but he wasn’t hard. There was no core of iron inside.

“You have family here in town?” asked Czernas as they climbed the steps. “Someone to leave a message for?”

Shango shook his head. “You let President McKay check over any message you left, to make sure it doesn’t say too much?”

The aide looked surprised, then flustered. “Oh,” he said. “Oh, I guess-well, I left it with him.”

And if he was smart, he burned it, thought Shango, recalling what the President had said about not knowing who was behind the Source funding. In the face of a fuckup this monstrous-if that was what it was-the scramble for deniability would be lethal and thorough.

As Czernas showed the guard McKay’s authorization, Shango reflected that he was damn glad he’d kept his own life field-stripped. Even in ordinary circumstances he traveled with little more than he carried in his backpack this morning, and he lived the same way.

No photographs: not of parents, siblings or the house he grew up in. Now, there’s a Kodak moment that you never see on commercials. An advantage, when you had a job to do.

Even at this hour of the morning people were coming and going in the long main corridor where they stored the bikes. There was a guard checking papers there, too, by the light of a half-dozen candles. National guardsmen were bringing in more-commandeered from God knew where-even as messengers were taking them out. Shango picked thin-tired racing models over the heavier off-road bikes, checked to make sure the tires had been puncture-proofed, and got spare tubes from the guardsman in charge, while a makeshift moving crew- National guardsmen, regular Army, and whoever else had been rounded up from stranded office-staff along the Mall-moved computers, phones, and chairs out of the offices around them to make room for incoming supplies of water and food.

“I got us a survival-blanket apiece, and a first-aid kit.” Czernas came over, a bare-kneed superhero. “We may have to go beyond the airport to find her. Anything else we’ll need?”

“Just water and food.” Shango’s pack was already weighed down with those and he guessed his companion’s was, too. He kept his voice even but the sense of impending chaos pressed more closely than ever.

IT’S ON ITS WAY AND IT’S GONNA BE BAD.

“What about weapons?”

Czernas had a big hunting-knife sheathed on the outside of his pack-the National Guard was stockpiling the contents of every sporting-goods store they could reach. Bows and arrows, fiberglass crossbows, knives, hatchets were all being brought in, as well as horses from the wealthy countryside across the river: wagons, pleasure-buggies, harness, fodder. Shango had a couple of knives in his pack already, as well as one sheathed on the outside where he could get to it fast, but he knew a desperate man can go on fighting for a long time with a knife wound. And he’d never quite trusted guns. Only an idiot carries a gun, he remembered his father saying to one of his punkier uncles. All a gun’ll do is make you think you can handle something you can’t. Uncle Marquis had ended up shooting a cop in a panic and was probably still at Angola-Shango could guess what had happened there, and in other prisons, when the lights went out.

But he smiled at the recollection of his father.

John Henry Shango. He’d boxed weekends around all the small clubs in Orleans and Jefferson parishes and could double up a leather kicking-bag with one blow of his fist. When he’d first heard his father sing “John Henry,” Larry had seen his father as that doomed, wonderful, steel-drivin’ man.

So he said, “Wait here,” and hunted around for the utility room, where the guardsmen had put all the tools they thought they were going to need: axes and bolt-cutters and lengths of cable and chain. There was a sledge there with an eight-pound head, with a long enough handle to give Shango reach on a man with only a knife in his hand, heavy enough that a small man or an unskilled one couldn’t use it against him: it swung with his arm like a motherfucker.

He slipped it down through the hand-loop at the top of his backpack, so the head rested high between his shoulders.

He’d spent a day and a night watching people deal with the fact that everything had suddenly stopped working. Christiansen and the Army boys in a panic because no missiles would fire and maybe someone would be dropping them-which hadn’t happened so far. People in the Mall, on the streets, screaming for Metro transport and telephones. The corporate suits frantic because suddenly there was no power to run anything and no way of getting what they had to sell to people who wanted to buy it. Every guardsman and soldier holding his useless rifle thinking, What do I do if someone comes at me?

This was one item, thought Shango, that wasn’t going to quit working.

Czernas was waiting in the hall with the bikes.

“Ready to go,” Shango said.

Outside, horses neighed in the hot night. The White House looked dark in its ring of torches. Shango couldn’t see light in any of the windows, but he was willing to bet McKay wasn’t sleeping.

For eighteen months he’d lived his life as an extension of the President’s, keeping tabs on appointments, travel, people in his life; on likely threats or difficult situations. Sometimes he felt weirdly akin to those fixated “quarterlies” he and the other agents checked up on every few months, people who’d made threats against the President, some of whom could have told him where McKay was going to be and do. He remembered one woman in St. Elizabeth’s, back before Shango was on White House detail, rambling gently on about Hillary Clinton’s wardrobe and how certain of her dresses matched Bill’s ties.

As he and Czernas carried the bikes down the front steps, he felt a deep uneasiness. There were other agents on the job, good agents, he knew. Men he’d worked with for years and had trusted with his own life: Cox and Breckenridge and the others.

But he sensed he was leaving McKay in danger. More danger than even McKay realized.

He glanced sidelong at the young man gravely pulling on Pearl Izumi bike-gloves, adjusting straps on his airflow-grooved helmet. An idealist, as McKay was an idealist, but without McKay’s experience. A pain in the ass and possibly a danger on the road. But he was the friend McKay trusted to find Bilmer, to get her or her information back safely.

And it was Shango’s job to back him up. To make sure that the job got done, no matter what the cost.

He had been chosen because he was the best at what he did.

And because he was best, he felt disoriented to be riding away from the President into the darkness of pre-dawn and the smoke of burning that marked the rising of the new day.