Indigo Springs (7 page)

Astrid’s throat closed. “Already? Dad’s only been dead…”

“Albert’s been gone a year, Astrid,” Sahara said. “That’s long enough if Olive likes the guy.”

“There you go,” Jacks said. “The expert speaks. Anyway, I took off the watch to wash my hands and saw Albert’s note, and I started thinking it couldn’t be a coincidence.”

“That was the end of the run of luck?” Astrid asked.

“Unless you count my missing the scene with Ev.” He was glowing, and she knew why—bad luck had kept him out of art school for years.

And he showed up just when I was going to tell Sahara everything, Astrid thought, staring at their excited, awestruck faces.

“Anyone else still hungry?” Jacks asked.

“Me,” Sahara said. “Let’s grab some grub and plan our next move.”

“You threw a party?” I shouldn’t be shocked, I know. It is only in hindsight that their discovery seems unworthy of celebration. Still, I feel outrage that Astrid was partying as my orderly world began to fray.

“Best night of my life,” she says. “Sahara started coming up with names, people she wanted to see. ‘Call this person. Call that person.’ Mostly people from high school, because she and Mark left right after Grad. Jacks thought of people too—folks I’d gotten to know after I dropped out of school, my ex-girlfriend. He invited his gang, guys he played poker with, hiking buddies—”

“How did Sahara feel about his inviting people?”

She doesn’t answer, but a painting of the three of them gathered says it all—the wary lines of Jacks’s and Sahara’s bodies show them clearly at odds. “We told everyone to meet us at a local bar, the Mixmeander….”

“Did they come?”

“Sure. It was Saturday night, and town’s pretty dull. Eineke Glassen started giving me a song and dance about how she couldn’t make it, so Sahara dropped the mermaid pendant around my neck. But it didn’t work on the phone. Which was fine—forcing someone to come seemed…”

“Creepy?”

“Yeah. I took it off right away.” She scratches her neck. “Sahara loved the mermaid. She named it Siren.”

“She can’t still have it?” Ever since Sahara escaped from Indigo Springs, she has been wooing people to her cause, not forcing them.

After fleeing Oregon, she’d appeared at a women’s music festival in California, arriving on a flying carpet she’d purportedly woven herself. There she proclaimed an Age of Miracles and founded the Alchemite cult.

Audience members with camcorders filmed her as she worked magic for the incredulous crowd. She’d healed the sick and disabled, created baskets of fruit and flowers from thin air. She read minds, and immersed herself in the waters of a nearby lake for over an hour without drowning. Clumsily playing a harmonica along with the festival’s headline band, she spread what witnesses described as “a feeling of safety, goodwill, and utter peace.”

Sahara clinched her claim to godhood by bestowing mystic items upon her most zealous would-be worshippers. She gave a pair of shoes to a runner that helped her sprint at about sixty miles an hour—until they wore out, anyway. A midwife from Sacramento got a plastic pill bottle that relieved women’s labor pains. Sahara gave a private investigator a book that helped her locate the bodies of long-lost murder victims. A musician got the harmonica. Indigo Springs’s own Jemmy Burlein was there, and she got a set of tweezers that could short out anything electronic.

As the California State Police converged on Lake Shobogan, Jemmy killed their cars, computers, and communications equipment. Before the law could regroup, Sahara told her followers to scatter.

Within twenty-four hours, footage of Sahara’s so-called miracle-working was spreading across the Internet. She was dropping in on raves, playing the harmonica, trancing out the crowds, and preaching. The private investigator was calling in tips on open murder cases to TV stations around the country.

A week later, people could download Alchemite podcasts, purchase T-shirts and philosophical tracts, and even get a CD of affirmations recorded by Sahara herself. Police arrested the Sacramento midwife when one of her patients was admitted to hospital with postnatal complications; they claimed the pain-relief chantment may have caused the bleeding. A mob almost broke her out of jail.

In early July, a month after Sahara’s first appearance at the lake, pilgrims were headed in the thousands to  the forest outside Indigo Springs, where a grove of trees near a sewer outfall had begun growing to a height of five hundred feet. They’d see Sahara there, it was rumored. So many people showed up looking for their goddess that police barricades couldn’t contain them.

Savvy marketing: her success has been frightening. But if Sahara had the magic mermaid, she could simply force people to join her, couldn’t she?

“Sahara doesn’t have Siren anymore,” Astrid confirms.

“What happened to it?”

“I’ll get to that.”

“What was
your
favorite chantment?”

“At that point? I’m not sure I had one.”

“Did you wear the lipstick to the party?”

She blushes. “I wiped it off. It made Jacks babble.”

“Did Sahara wear it?”

“She didn’t know it was a chantment—I’d given her the impression it wasn’t. Neither she nor Jacks knew.”

“Didn’t you tell them?”

Once again she chooses not to answer. “When we got to the Mixmeander, a yowl rose from the back. I saw two dozen people jammed in the booths across from the bar.

“Sahara was in her element. In ten minutes she’d weaseled us an invitation to a camping trip in August. She signed me up for a softball league. She had talk going about book clubs, dinner circles, movie outings. Penny Gonzales needed people to help with a fundraiser for the hospital and we volunteered. I’d said I wanted a social life and she tossed one together like it was salad.”

“And Jacks?”

“Surrounded by women, as usual. He was trying to avoid the pack, but gracefully.”

“Was he avoiding Sahara too?”

Astrid flushes: the friction between Sahara and Jacks is clearly a sore point. “He’d run into the guy who owns the store next to the Mixmeander.” She points to a photograph on her wall—herself at age seven or eight, standing with her parents beside a bicycle, posing in front of a concrete building. Its paint looks like it might once have been bright blue, but has faded to an uneven gray.

“And?”

“Once or twice a year some kid sprays dirty words on that wall. Then the
Dispatch
crime report carries on like that one act of vandalism means we’re headed for a school shooting. Jacks had been wanting to paint a mural there, and he was making his pitch.”

“He caught the owner in a receptive mood?”

“Perfect timing,” she says. “Nathan was nodding and smiling and agreeing to buy him paint. People gathered around, telling them both how brilliant they were.”

I scan the scattered cards with their painted images, but there is no picture here of the gathering Astrid describes. I wonder: If she lies to me, will the painted images back up her story, or reveal discrepancies?

Then I see a party scene on the card in her hands.

“Did your mother come?”

“Yes. She asked Jacks about those papers of Albert’s—the clippings—but she did it without making a scene. And she talked to our next-door neighbor.”

“You’d invited your neighbor?”

“Sort of. She had a job washing dishes in the Mix kitchen. She was this ancient Native woman…this must be in your files. Mrs. Skye?”

“Oh, of course.”

“When Mrs. Skye’s shift ended, Ma lured her out of the kitchen. She knew her, a little, because she used to deliver her mail. Ma had a gift for that—gallantly befriending old ladies.”

“That was thoughtful of her.”

“Ha! That’s what I thought—and from what I’d seen, Mrs. Skye needed friends. But it was just Everett Burke playing games. Ma interrogated her about how much Albert was around Mascer Lane—whether he’d gardened at all.”

“Mrs. Skye didn’t find that strange?”

“She’d have been happy to have anyone to talk to. She was lonely, you know? I remember Sahara saying, later, she thrived on attention.”

“What about you? What were you doing?”

“After Jacks had finished up his mural negotiations, he cajoled me into sitting up on the bar. We were telling stories about Olive and Albert’s hand fasting. Everyone was laughing. I wasn’t drinking, but I felt drunk, almost. Not sleepy—overstimulated, hyperaware. Edgy. Wired, y’know?”

I lean back. “You were in the spotlight.”

“Nothing wrong with wanting that once in a while.” Her eyes roam over the card.

“You usually avoid attention.”

“It was a special night. And sitting there with Jacks, telling stories…it felt normal. Comfortable. Almost like being a couple.”

“Did Sahara mind that it was you in the limelight?”

A stony glare. “She wasn’t like that.”

“Wasn’t then? Or isn’t now?”

“Wasn’t then. Magic amplifies your flaws, Will.”

“Is that what you call what’s happening to your mother? Her
flaws
have been amplified?”

She rubs her eyes. “You want me to say Sahara was a saint before everything happened? She wasn’t. But magic is a curse.”

“Would you say you and Sahara are still friends?”

“Does it matter?”

“Do you think she cares now whether you live or die? Is she grateful you’re taking responsibility for her crimes? That is what’s happening here, isn’t it?”

“Grateful, Sahara?” She presses her palms into the couch, chuckling bitterly. “You’ll have to ask her.”

“Astrid, do you want me to believe you’re clairvoyant?”

“It’d help matters.”

“Tell me where Sahara is.”

She exhales, lips tight and bloodless, and my skin crawls as she flips over a card. It shows a familiar traffic exchange, darkened by a distinctive winged shadow. “On her way here.”

I blink. It has to be a lie, a joke. There has never been any hint that she would consider ratting out her friend.

“Oh, it’s true.” Blue liquid rolls through her eyes.

I pick up the card and carry it to the nearest camera. “I’m looking at the interchange where the I-5 meets Helensville Junction. Sahara appears to be heading northwest. If this isn’t clear, send someone in for the card. I can make out one of the Alchemite Primas in a car in the lower left corner of the image.”

We wait, listening for the clank of the suite’s steel door, but there is no response. At last I return to the couch. “Thank you, Astrid.”

Smiling oddly, she lays her hands overtop of mine.

Suddenly I am sitting on a hump of soil the color of slate. Around me stretches a box canyon—azure walls hundreds of feet high, with rock formations of robin’s-egg blue that look more like clumped wet snow than like stone.

“How’s
this
for a parlor trick?” Astrid tilts her face up to a sky filled with azure clouds. “Welcome to the unreal, Will Forest.”

Fuzzy dirt roils around me as I spring to my feet.

“Roach is checking my tip about Sahara,” she says. “He won’t notice if we flicker off his screens for a frame or two. Time’s funny here.”

“Time…is…funny,” I repeat, and when she steps away I catch her arm. “Where are we?”

“You want me to trust you, right? So trust me. Come look around.” She doesn’t pull free, just starts walking. Curiosity gets the better of me; I fall in beside her.

We stroll off the dune and around a pillowy crag. Floating tumbleweeds the size of sparrows drift past, bobbing out of our way. The air tastes cool, almost minty, and there is a dripping sound.

We round the outcropping and I see a cord of blue fluid, blood-thick, twisting like a beheaded snake in an otherwise dry riverbed. Droplets splash off its flying ends, striking the rocks. They roll, slow and blood-heavy, to rejoin the writhing fluid.

“I’ve seen that flowing through your eyes.” My heart is hammering, and my eyes strain against the perfectly adequate light, convinced by the palette of blue and gray that it must be too dark. “It’s the alchemic contaminant that was on your roof this summer.”

“It’s called vitagua.” Her shadow falls on the fluid and it congeals into an asymmetrical puddle, deeper and wider on our side of the creek bed. “Liquid magic.”

“You’re going too fast for me.”

She peers into the rippling cobalt pool. “When Sahara, Jacks, and I found the chantments, it was clear they were magical. We should have been loony bin candidates….”

“Because magic isn’t supposed to be,” I agree, but not because I’ve had any difficulty accepting the truth. The ease of it, the way the human backbrain embraces the fairy tales we learned as children, is just another peculiar aspect of the new reality.

Astrid nods. “But where had the chantments come from? Jacks and Sahara weren’t thinking about that, but I’d mulled it over a bit. Dad spends his life chasing estate sales, flea markets, auctions. There was a phrase he uses when shopping: ‘Gotta find a little sparkle.’ My first theory was Albert was buying things that were already enchanted.”

“Were you right?”

“No.” She kicks a pebble into the vitagua and it vanishes without so much as a ripple.

“What was he doing, then? And what does it have to do with this?” I point at the lopsided puddle.

In response, she slides the wedding ring off my finger. “By ‘sparkle,’ Will, Dad meant an object that was receptive to spirit water.”

“Astrid, before you do something we’ll both regret—”

“Dad was making the chantments.” Warming the ring between her hands, Astrid bites into her tongue.

“That’s enough.” My tone is sharp; I’m not about to let my witness start cutting herself.

“It’s okay. Vitagua has to come through me—into the body, out through a break in the skin.” As she speaks, blue liquid gushes from the bite, welling over her lips and drizzling down her chin. It drips into her palms, pooling in my wedding ring. The ring swells, like a sponge. There’s a sucking sound and the vitagua vanishes.

Healthy color floods Astrid’s normally pale face.

“What did you do?”

“I bonded the vitagua with a receptive object. It’s a chantment now.” She holds out the ring, which is dry and cool and properly sized again. “Go ahead, put it back on.”

I don’t move. “That belonged to my grandfather.”

“I didn’t damage it, and it won’t hurt you.”

“What is it?”

“Protection.”

“You think I need protecting?”

“You’re planning to go after Sahara’s goons, right?”

I pick the ring off her palm, hold it up to the nonexistent sun. It looks normal.

For weeks now I have had nothing on my mind but  retrieving my family. If that has meant finding the source of the magic and destroying it, so much the better. It is an attitude of which Roche heartily approves.

In her public statements, Sahara has said that alchemic contamination makes her better than ordinary people. She argues we should follow her because she knows what’s best for humanity, for the world.