A howling like wolves, like the winds of winter-like ghosts lost along the corridor from one world to the next. The mists around her grew dark with a darkness her night-sighted eyes could not penetrate, and the clammy air grew colder. Walking forward, Wilma saw a bicycle lying beside the road, a young man’s body tangled in its frame. Stepping close, she recognized Bruce Swann, whom she’d taught English only a few years ago. Trying to leave town? Trying to come back along the Charleston road?
She shivered, alone in the mist and the darkening silence.
A blue flickering in the darkness, a sudden roar. Hornets, she thought, terrified. Swarms of them-she saw the flash of phosphorus reflecting off their wings as they swirled toward her. She ran, desperately keeping to the road. The insects veered and swerved in a pursuing cloud, trying to run her off the pavement, she realized. Trying to make her enter the crowding shadows among the trees. Fingerlets of blue flame licked up through the asphalt, singeing her hiking boots as she fled. More lines of blue flame crept down the trunks of the trees, crawled toward her, and she ran harder, breath coming in sobbing gasps.
A hornet caught in her long gray hair, stung the side of her scalp, the pain a red-hot needle. Under her feet she thought the pavement was moving, rippling, shifting and cracking, but she didn’t dare look down. Ahead of her the road had changed, and she couldn’t tell where she was: it looked like the squalid unpaved roads that led up to the hollows, like something out of the last century, muddy and narrow. Yet she felt pavement still under her feet. Another sting on her wrist, and she ran still harder knowing a swarm could easily sting her to death. The insects’ maddened roar filled her ears, and above it, behind it, she sensed still greater desperation.
Something was in the woods, she thought. Something terrified, frantic, insane. Something that wanted her to leave the pavement and run into its darkness, down its throat.
Lights burned gold before her. The flame behind her roared up, and the hornets howled against it like black hail. Shapes waved and closed in through mist and darkness. Then the vapors thinned, and the shapes became definitely human, holding out their hands to stop, seize, calling her name.
“Wilma!” yelled a male voice, raised a weapon-a spear.
“Wilma!”
She stumbled, panting, and looked around in the charcoal mists of evening. She could hear the hornets buzzing sullenly somewhere in the darkness behind her; her head and her wrist throbbed from the two stings. Her hair had come out of its habitual pins and hung down in a scraggly colorless mane over her shoulders, and she trembled where she stood, almost sick with shock.
“Are you okay?” asked Hazel.
She was back at the corner of Blackbird Street.
She had not turned around. She knew that. Had only run forward, continuing in the direction she’d been going. .
And had emerged from the mist at her starting point, where Shannon and Hazel and Ryan awaited her.
She turned, looking back into the fog that was now dyed with darkness. A voice cried something-words in a language she did not understand-and far away, it seemed to her that blue flames crawled along the ground and then sank out of sight.
She supposed that there were worse things than coming back out exactly where she’d gone in.
She straightened up, still clinging to Hazel’s shoulder for support. “Well, whatever it is,” she said, “it doesn’t want us to leave.”
Chapter Twenty-One
NEW YORK
With an urgency born of despair, Cal tried to tell Goldie of Tina, as soon as they had gotten clear of the snare and the pandemonium of the retreating nightcrawlers had faded to nothing.
But Goldie, implacable, waved him to silence and beckoned him deeper into the darkness.
Making sure no one was following, Goldie led Cal down echoing corridors, past tracks splitting off into lightless infinity, ancillary current rooms, blast-relief shafts. They eased between the rusted, stilled blades of huge fans, stepped lightly over corroded duct work, moved through silent power substations where ceramic transformers twelve feet high loomed lifeless as stone gods. Rats swarmed everywhere, and the darkness stank of raw sewage and the un-buried dead.
At last, a narrow service stair opened onto cavernous space. Neither Cal’s Coleman lamp nor the dim gray reflections of far-off daylight from some unseen grating could pierce its immensity, but the hush of the place spoke to its size. In the nearer reaches of wall, the lantern picked out surprising details: cracked, exquisite remnants of Florentine tile, twisting Nouveau railings, brass cuspidors. High overhead, a monumental chandelier of delicate crystal and gilt glinted in the lamplight. Elegant, top-hatted men, women in fine silks and embroidery had lingered here, certain in themselves and their time. Then the station, magnificent as a treasure room, had fallen to ruin, abandoned, forgotten.
Goldie turned to Cal, smiling. “Home,” he said.
He threw what looked like part of a chopped-up dining table onto a smoldering campfire, and it flared again, its flickering warmth going a long way toward dispelling the chill that had crept into Cal’s bones. Skewered meat cooked on a spit over the flames, skin crackling, the aroma of succulent juices thick in the air.
Now at last, Cal was allowed to speak. The words poured out as from a burst pipe, emotion choking his voice.
Goldie settled in an oak rocker by the fire, began meditatively strumming a guitar. “Bummer about your sister, man…”
“Can you help me?” Cal entreated.
Goldie’s eyes grew bright. “Can I help you? Get a load of this.” He stood quickly, guitar gripped by the neck, scooped up Cal’s lantern with his free hand-and threw it on the fire.
“No!” Cal leapt for the lantern, but it was too late. The glass shattered, there was a whoomph of ignition. Cal felt the heat flash on his face, his eyes dazzled. Then, incredibly, the flame passed over him, dissipating, spreading like a ripple on a lake, and was gone.
The campfire guttered, nearly going out. Cal sat back on the ground, stunned. Wordlessly, he touched his brow and cheeks, felt nothing more than a tenderness like a mild sunburn.
“Where-” He swallowed, mouth dry. “Where’d it go?”
Goldie removed the spit from the fire, started eating off the skewer. “Good question. Somewhere else. When anything reaches a certain temperature, it just vanishes. Like something’s drawing it off. . to power other things.”
“What things?”
Goldie shrugged, held out the skewer with its blackened meat. “Hungry? You should try this. Not bad.”
Cal hesitated. Around them hung a ring of smoke where the flame had spread, now misting away to nothing. “What is it?”
“Track rabbit,” Goldie said through a mouthful.
“Track rabbit?”
“Rat.”
Cal grimaced. Goldie laughed and settled back in the rocker. “Old-style thinking, my man. Thems on bottom gonna be on top now.” He tossed another chunk of wood on the fire, throwing up a shower of sparks that danced in his melancholy eyes. “No more Invisible Man.”
“Goldie,” Cal began and suddenly felt absurd. “The other day, you said you could foresee things. Can you-can you see my sister?”
Goldie’s eyes glided over to him. “Cal, I can see everything.” He glanced about, as if to be sure of their privacy, then leaned forward in a conspiratorial whisper. “It was like this a long time ago. All the myths are true. Everything is true.” He paused, then added, “Ask me how I know.”
“How do you know?” Cal found that he too was whispering.
Goldie peered into Cal’s face gravely, scant feet apart. Then the corners of his mouth lifted in a grin. A chuckle bubbled out. It grew. In the hushed blackness, a roiling, uncontrollable laughter spewed forth, raucous and loud. Goldie spasmed, held his stomach, bent double with hilarity.