City At The End Of Time (41 page)

All stopped.

Everything became unnaturally still. Any motion was difficult—painful. He blinked muddy rain from his eyes.

The downpour, the lightning, all of the weirdness—over. For a moment—deep quiet. Nothing but a soft hiss of rising steam and a light, ominous crackle like crushed cellophane. The van had wrecked in a residential neighborhood. Old houses, square and neat, ascended a low hill below a water tower. The houses had blackened—not burned, but converted to a dark, glassy substance, like obsidian. The water tower sprayed liquid from all its seams. Knee-high shining black spikes filled the roadway. As Jack stood by the curb, more spikes shot up, shoving aside his feet, kicking the van around and piercing two of its tires.

The air sparkled with an absence of color, absence of sense. It smelled burned, as did Jack—burnt by a cold, timeless fire.

Inside the van, Glaucous was gasping for air between harsh, guttural yells. The yells became an awful, continuous screech.

Then—nothing.

Everything that Jack looked at hurt his eyes, his brain. The muscles in his neck twisted, fighting over which direction they would or would not turn. He flung up his arm.

Against his better judgment, he looked again.

The not-colors had been filled in like gaps in a coloring book, but the burnt smell remained. The water tower gurgled and spewed its last few thousand gallons. The spikes melted into the asphalt. Rainwater cascaded from overflowing gutters.

The houses had returned to a kind of normality.

Shaking out a bruised shoulder and favoring a wrenched ankle, he lurched toward the van. He knelt by the shattered windshield. Wet and unable to fly, the last of Penelope’s wasps crawled along the crazed edge of glass, twitching and buzzing. Each cast flickering duplicates that peeled away, then returned to merge again.

He looked at his hands—the same stuttering shadows. Something huge had just happened. Time was vibrating like a plucked string.

Jack peered into the van. The driver’s seat was empty.

Both seats were empty.

Nobody left to save.

CHAPTER 51

Ellen drove Miriam’s old Toyota. Agazutta rode shotgun. Farrah sat in the back with Ginny, who watched a necklace of amber beads swinging from the car’s rearview mirror. They turned up one wet street and down another, searching for someone—someone young and male, Ginny gathered from spare snippets of their talk.

Even now, water slopped along the gutters and spilled from over-passes and off-ramps, slowing their progress.

Things had once again crossed the line from puzzling to inexpressibly weird. She was surrounded by spooky, middle-aged women. They were all so
curious
, but however much they seemed to care, however much they seemed to have a plan, they were just as reluctant as Bidewell to answer big questions. Too many
wait and see
moments. She felt tied to their destinies in a way that made her suffer like a caged animal.

The storm had been hunting. That’s what the women had argued about before taking the West Seattle Bridge. Storms didn’t do that, of course.

Agazutta looked over her shoulder. “What do you feel?” she asked Ginny. Ginny shook her head. There was nothing ahead but a frightening solidity—a flat, looming blankness.

“You tell me. I’m just riding along.”

Ellen said, “The storm might not be the only unusual event today. You might be able to help us save someone else, someone as important as you. So please, Virginia—tell us what you feel.”

“We’re like a log that’s fallen out of the fireplace,” Ginny said, then dropped as low in the seat as she could, miserable and scared.

Farrah rubbed her nose. “It
does
smell burned.”

“Are you
really
witches?” Ginny blurted.

Agazutta snorted. “That’s a joke, dear. If we had any
real
powers, do you think we’d have allowed this to happen?”

Ellen said, “If anyone has magical powers, it’s probably you, or Bidewell. Not that we’ve seen much evidence of it lately.”

“Those books,” Farrah said.

“Fabricated,” Agazutta said.

“They’re old,” Farrah countered.

Ellen made a sound between a tosh and a splutter. “We have to trust him. We don’t have a choice. And we have to trust Ginny.”

“She’s sullen,” Farrah said.

“So were you, in the beginning,” Agazutta said.

“Hell, I’m
still
sullen,” Farrah said.

“Are you a lesbian?” Ginny blurted.

A brief but chilly silence followed. “There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding,” Farrah said.

“Someone explain to the girl.”

“Fundamentally, it doesn’t matter,” Ellen Crowe said. “Except for me—”

“Except for
her
,” Agazutta emphasized with some resentment.

“…this group is sworn to celibacy,” Ellen finished.

“Which explains why we drink so much and read steamy novels,” Farrah said.

“Why aren’t
you
celibate?” Ginny asked Ellen, craning her head forward.

“It has nothing to do with magic, but a lot to do with fishing,” Agazutta said. “You’re not the bait, my dear.
Ellen
is the bait.”

“No one believes me when I say it’s all—” Ellen began, but Agazutta interrupted.

“Is that him?” she asked.

Ellen peered through the windshield at a skinny young man walking with slumped shoulders and drenched hair over uneven sidewalk. The Toyota slowed. Despite herself, Ginny sat up. The young man was unaware of their presence—or working hard to ignore them.

“Such a bedraggled puppy,” Agazutta said.

From behind he looked like the one Ginny had seen riding a bike through the Busker Jam. As soon as she could see his face, she cried out, “Stop!”

Ellen braked the car with a short squeal. This caught his attention and he looked sharp left, then broke into a run.

“You scared him,” Agazutta said.

“Well,
excuse
me—”

“He’s getting away!” Farrah cried. “We’ll lose him. He’ll jump!”

They all seemed to know what that meant. Agazutta was glancing up and around as if expecting a 747 to fall from the sky, or a tree to march out in front of them.

“He can’t,” Ginny said.

“Can’t what?” Ellen asked.

“He can’t
escape
,” Ginny said, recognizing something in the young man’s posture, in his sad response to their presence. “He’s run out of places to go.”

The car caught up and Ginny rolled down her window. “Wait!” she called. The young man glanced left again. A raised block of sidewalk caught his toe. With a startled
yawp
, he fell on his hands and knees. Ginny banged on the door with her fists. “Let me out! Let me help him!”

Ellen stopped the car.

“Child safety lock,” Farrah reminded her, and she
hmmed
and pushed the release button. The door swung wide and Ginny spilled out. She straightened, held her head high, and approached the young man slowly, as if he were a wounded leopard. He rose to a squat and glared at her. Something about his outline wavered for just a moment—he fogged and shivered.

“Please don’t,” she said. “Please stay.”

His outline firmed, and he faced her with fingers and arms flexed. “Why?”

“We’ve met before,” Ginny said.

Jack glared at her.

“The storm was chasing you, wasn’t it?” Ginny asked.

“I don’t know,” Jack said.

“We can’t escape,” she said. “There’s a warm place and friends—I think they’re friends—not far. Come with us.”

“Your car is full,” Jack observed. “Unless you want me to ride in the trunk.”

Farrah opened her door and thumped her hand on the roof. “Squeeze in. You’re skinny.”

“Get out of the wet, Jack,” Ellen said. She waved with a reassuring smile. Jack stood and peered through the windshield. He pushed aside his wet hair. “Now you’re scaring the hell out of me.”

“I met most of them today,” Ginny said.

“Who are
you
supposed to be?” Jack asked.

“I don’t know,” Ginny said. “Not anymore.”

CHAPTER 52

The Green Warehouse

Jack stood behind the warehouse gate, staring at the gray ghost of First Avenue South and shivering in the ashen chill that oozed through the chain-link fence. Ellen had parked the car and the women had gone up the ramp into the warehouse, leaving him to stand by the fence. He told them he needed a moment to adjust.

Ginny had returned to watch from the door.

In just a few hours, in what passed for personal time, the city outside the green warehouse had turned into a flickering forest of shadows. Clouds roiled too quickly, colliding and shooting up to vanish in the gray sky.

On the way back from West Seattle—theirs was the only car on the road—they had witnessed people walking, echoing back, starting over, half aware. Some seemed to catch on to their awful dilemma, enough to be frightened.

More frightening still, most couldn’t tell the difference.

Somehow, the stones in their boxes, and now the warehouse, smoothed things and protected them all—once they had ricocheted off Terminus. That was what Ellen had called it in the car—Terminus. The end, yet not exactly; more like a ball slowly bouncing and rolling to a stop. The sadness Jack felt was almost beyond bearing. Out there, so many confused, lost people, trying to reclaim their lives in a stuttering time that kept drawing them back, that would ultimately—when the ball stopped bouncing—press them down…Ignorant and immobile, like so many flies stuck in tar. It had happened so suddenly—but not without warning.

Ginny finally could wait no longer. She walked down the ramp and stood beside Jack, arms wrapped around her shoulders. She was younger than him, maybe eighteen, but the look in her eyes told him she was no mere girl. They hadn’t spoken two words since the end of their fitful, gray journey back to the warehouse.

“How did the storm find you?” she asked.

Jack shrugged, embarrassed. “I called a phone number,” he said. “A man and a woman bagged me. After that—I’m still trying to figure it out.”

“It was the Gape,” Ginny said.

“Gate?”

“Gape. It’s what happens when you meet the Queen in White.”

“Who the hell is that? Another old woman?”

“I don’t know. Just one of her names. Let’s go back in. It’s warmer, and you should talk with Bidewell.”

The air in the green warehouse was sweet with the smell of dry wood and old paper. Jack looked around the high walls, unpainted slats lathed over studs, thick beams carved from the hearts of grand old cedars. High windows and skylights cast a gray, filtered light. Stacks of crates and cardboard boxes rose everywhere. Ginny followed him like a little sister as he explored. He didn’t like that at first. He stepped up to the broad metal door and tapped it with his knuckles. On the other side, the book group women were talking with an older man. He couldn’t make out what they were saying. He glanced at Ginny. Her eyes glistened with a quick shyness, like a yearling deciding whether to bolt. “What’s on the other side?” he asked.

“That’s where Mr. Bidewell keeps his office and his library.”

“More books?”

“Lots. Old ones, new ones. He has crates of them shipped from all over the world. Some are impossible. I don’t know where he finds them. I was—am—helping catalog them. The ones who kidnapped you…what were they like?”

“The man called himself Glaucous. There was a big woman—huge. I think her name was Penelope.”

“Another pair came for me back in Baltimore. I got away, but they followed me here. Dr. Sangloss sent me to Bidewell as soon as I arrived.”

“You’re lucky. These two used wasps.”

Ginny’s eye narrowed. “Wasps?”

“Yellow jackets.” He waved one hand, fluttered his fingers. “They buzzed after me when she opened her coat.”

“Oh, my God.”

“What about yours?”

“A man with a silver coin. A skinny woman who started fires with her fingers.”

“I’ve always known things were odd,” Jack said, “but not like
this.
Not as weird as my dreams.”

“What do you remember about your dreams?”

“Not much,” Jack said. “Do you dream, too?”

She nodded. “All fate-shifters dream. That’s what Mr. Bidewell told me.”

Jack sucked on his teeth and tried to look calm. “Fate-shifters?”

“You and me. We shift when the odds aren’t in our favor.” She drew her hand across the level of her shoulders. “Sideways. You know that, don’t you?”

“I didn’t know it had a name,” Jack said.

“But it doesn’t make our lives easy,” Ginny said. “I still make mistakes. Sometimes I think…” Again the furtive look.

Jack began pacing the perimeter of the warehouse. Ginny followed, uninvited. “Why wasps?” she asked.

“There’s no way out of a room full of wasps. The odds are against you everywhere.” He did not feel like describing the world-line he had been forced onto, or how that might have distracted the storm—the Gape. “What are they talking about? Us?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

They completed a circuit to where Ginny had made her little square among the boxes, and she lifted the curtain she had hung for privacy, inviting him in. Jack sat on a small crate, reluctant to take the single wooden chair—more reluctant to sit on the bed. He crossed one leg. “I’m a busker,” he said.