Magic Street (27 page)

Look at it one way, and it was a blessing, a miracle. Mack knew their dreams and he saved them.

So was Mack saving them? Or profiting from their terror and gratitude? Ophelia McCallister was in her living room telling every visitor how beautiful it felt to have that coffin lid open and Mack Street and Grand Harrison lift her up out of the grave. "It was a rehearsal for the judgment day. For the rapture!" she told anybody who came by.

And then Word came back down to the church and spent the day thinking and praying and reading the scriptures. All day he'd been telling himself that the stuff that happened in Baldwin Hills had nothing to do with the Christian miracles here in this church last night. But now he knew it wasn't true. Now he knew that it was all part of the same thing. Whatever had crept inside him, this woman knew what it was, or who it was. She claimed that Mack Street was somehow already her husband.

So by preaching to the people, was he advancing the cause of that vile man who took Mack Street out of his parents' bedroom in a grocery bag? Or opposing it? Whose side was he on? What was good?

Good was that baby being saved last night.

Good was the way Rev Theo greeted him with a hug when he came in this morning, and told him, "The blessing of God is on my house again, thanks to you."

"Thanks be to Jesus alone," said Word to him, and meant it. But now... now he just didn't know.

Was it Jesus? Or was Jesus just... something like Mack? Or something like Word? Possessed. Or some divided-off part of his "father" who wasn't in heaven at all?

He went back to the office door and knocked on it. Hard. He didn't care what they were doing.

He needed answers more than they needed to consummate their marriage in the pastor's office.

He opened the door. Neither of them was inside. The windows were still closed. The door had been locked. Word had never been out of sight of the door.

But all their clothes were lying on the couch as if they had simply disappeared while embracing each other.

Frustrated, angry, afraid, Word went to the window and opened it and looked down at the hundreds of people gathering in the street. No way would they all fit inside the church.

How could he come down and say, What happened last night, that was evil. Because it wasn't evil. It was good. It was healing, and blessing, and it had to come from God.

If I preach to them tonight, just so they won't be disappointed, there'll be an even bigger crowd tomorrow. And bigger, and bigger, because these blessings work. Everybody can see it. Not some vague or phony miracles like a medicine show. He didn't have somebody out working the line, learning facts about these people in order to fake up a mind-reading act. Whatever possessed him was going to change their lives. Some of them, anyway.

How could he say no to that?

"But I don't love you," he said. "I don't even know you."

"Never knew a man to be bothered by that," said Yo Yo. "Men always find out they love me, as soon as I do this." She kissed him.

"I'm not a man," said Mack. "You said so yourself."

"That's right," she said. "You don't have to love me."

"I didn't know I'd feel this way. I just thought it would be... like the guys at school talk about.

Getting laid."

"Not with me."

"I don't want it to be nothing," he said. "I want it to be real. I want it to last."

She giggled. "Well, if it just went on and on, you'd never get anything else done."

"Yo Yo," he said. "I want to love you forever."

"What do you think I want?" She pulled him down to sit by her on the couch. "Think I imprisoned you in the underworld because I hated you? No, I loved you. I loved this part of you. The Mack Street part. Sure, the other part was fun, the contest between us was... entertaining. But you never let this part of you out. This is the part you hid away, and now you threw it away, but you're wrong, Oberon, this Mack Street part of you is pure love and light."

"No I'm not," said Mack. "I'm not part of something else, I'm me."

"I know it, Mack," she said. "You don't know how important it is that I know you, and you know me."

"It's just spying to you."

"No, Mack. It's discovering. It's making something. It's the love of my life."

"I don't want you to be the love of my life," said Mack. "I want to love someone who thinks I'm complete by myself."

"Then that someone would believe in a lie. Because you aren't complete. You're the best part of someone great, marvelous, powerful, and addicted to cruelty. You don't know that side of you, but I do. What I never got to know was this part of you. Oh, Mack Street, don't hide yourself from me any longer."

They weren't sitting on the couch anymore. They were sitting on a moss-covered stone, cool but not cold, and the sun was shining through the canopy of leaves and warming their naked skin. He did love her, just as she had told him he would. In fact, he discovered that he already knew her body in ways that he had not imagined. They were not strangers. They were husband and wife.

He wondered if he actually looked like Oberon, or if things like that didn't matter. What was she seeing when she kissed him and held him?

Not Mack Street.

But here, in her embrace, naked among the trees, he didn't care.

Word and Rev Theo carried their whole PA system out into the street. Once this had been a thoroughfare, and these storefronts had been full of business and the streets full of people and cars, but now hardly anybody drove along here, and if some cop came up he'd see it wasn't a riot or a demonstration, it was church, it was religion. Nobody would interfere.

Because the thing that possessed him wouldn't let them.

It doesn't rule me. If it tries to turn this thing to evil, I won't let it. I'm still Word, the same man I've always been. I searched for God and this thing came instead, but that doesn't mean it wasn't also an answer to my prayers. Couldn't God have sent this to him? Given him this power in order to fulfil a mission from the Lord?

Wasn't this what it felt like for Jesus, when the multitude came to listen to his word, and then he reached out and healed them, and gathered up their children and blessed them?

"No collection today," Word said to Rev Theo.

"You're joking, right?" said Rev Theo. "This ministry could use a shot of cash."

"You can set up baskets by the door. Let them come up if they want to contribute. But it can't look like people are paying to get healed. Afterward, if they want to contribute. But nothing gets passed around."

"That's just crazy," said Rev Theo.

"Please," said Word. "Don't ask for it. Let them give it out of their own hearts."

Rev Theo studied his face. "You think we'll get more that way, don't you?"

"I have no idea," said Word.

"Rev Theo, I know your ministry takes money. But money didn't buy what happened last night."

"Money paid the rent on the roof under which it happened," said Rev Theo. "Money paid the light bill and paid for the benches and the doors and the locks on the doors that keep the vandals out.

A lack of money tore my wife and me apart for a long time, and now that the Lord is bringing us back together, I got to pay for me and her to live decently. Don't despise money, Word."

"I'm just afraid that... I don't know if it will ever happen again."

"It happened last night and we had a collection, didn't we?" Rev Theo patted his shoulder. "But for you, tonight, we'll try it your way. A couple of deacons with bowls at the door, and those who want to walk up front and contribute, we won't refuse them. The others can do what they want."

"Thanks," said Word.

They lay entangled on soft grass, and still the sun shone overhead as though time had not passed, though it felt to Mack like infinite time, and it also felt like no time at all. It wasn't over because he still held her, and her heart still beat between her breasts as if it were his own heart, pumping his own blood. His hand rested there, and he never wanted to move.

"Did you get what you needed?" he asked her.

"Mm-hmm," she said.

"And me," said Mack. "Did I get what I needed?"

"You got what he needed," she said. "You were already perfect."

More silence. More birdsong in the trees. More petals from blossoms falling, as if in this glen it happened to be spring.

"Yo Yo," he said.

"Mm?"

"Why aren't you small."

She giggled. "What?"

"When Puck came to Fairyland he turned small. Tiny. Why didn't you?"

"Because I'm holding you," she said. "I'm joined to you. You keep me from shrinking. As surely as if my soul were freed from that jar you put me in."

"I didn't—"

"So if you were whole, you wouldn't be small."

"When I go wandering in the world, I go out like this. Wearing another body. Because mortals really couldn't bear to see me as I truly am. I'm very—"

"Beautiful."

"I'm too perfect to be seen by mortal eyes. It's not vanity, it's just the truth. So I go out incomplete, and while that's happening, the part that stays behind is like what you saw in the jar.

Dazzling, but very small. And when the part of me that's in your world tries to come back wearing this mortal body, then that body becomes small, too. Unless I have power like the power stored in you to keep me whole."

"So you're taking power from the dreams of my neighbors."

"Their wishes. Yes."

"Then you—we—we're like parasites."

"No," said Yo Yo. "We're like artists. They don't make food, they don't make shelter. You can't wear a painting, you can't eat a poem, you can't put a song over your head to shelter you from wind and rain. But we feed them, don't we, because we love the picture and the poem and the song. Like we feed children, who also don't earn their place."

"We feed children because of what they can become."

"And mortals feed me on their dreams because only I, and others like me, have the power to make their dreams come true."

"Right, like Puck does."

"If I had my right power, and Puck too, I could keep him tame. His pranks would be nothing more than that. Not these monstrous things that Oberon is taking delight in."

"How do you do it? How can you collect a wish and turn it into—something in the real world?"

"Don't you understand? Wishes are the true elements underlying all the universe. Mortal scientists study the laws, the rules, the way the dominoes fall. But we can see underneath it all to the flow of wishes and desires. The tiny wishes of the smallest particles. The vast, complicated, contradictory wishes of human beings. If mortals had the power to see the flows, the streams of desire, if they could bend them the way we can, then they would constantly be at war with each other.

They stay at peace only because they have no idea of what power is possible."

"And why do you stay at peace?" asked Mack.

"Haven't you been paying attention? We're not at peace. We are at war. Only there are no more than a few thousand of us, and only a handful of us have great power. The kind of power that would be dangerous. We have rules of our own, too. And one of the greatest is, we don't mess with your world too much. Petty things. Entertainment. Like setting down a piece of paper, letting an ant crawl on it, and then moving him a few feet away. Watch him scurry. But we don't stamp on the anthill. We don't burn it."

"That's what he will do, if he can break free."

"Creating me, that was the first step."

"And riding that poor boy Word like a pony, that was the second," said Yo Yo.

"What's the third step?" asked Mack.

"What we just did," she said.

"What? We set him free?"

"We broke the shell of the egg, so to speak. Not that he was really in an egg. But you and I were uniting. A part of him with a part of me. It opens the door for him."

"So when you were doing all this in front of Word—"

"I knew he wouldn't stop us because it sets him free now, instead of waiting until he can form a fairy circle out of Word's new converts. It would have taken enormous power to break the chains we put on him. But by marrying us, another way was opened up. It'll still be a day or two. We have time."

"Time for what?"

"To get ready for him. To put him back down, only this time deeper. And this time without me and Puck being locked in jars in Fairyland."

"Can't he figure out that that's your plan?"

"Oh, he expects tricks. We've been at this a long time. What he doesn't expect is... power. For us to have real power."

"And where are you getting that from?"

"You," said Yo Yo. "You and all your friends. Your whole life, you've been gathering power without even knowing it. You're going to use it now to help us put him back down into the underworld."

"But I'm part of him. You're going to ask me to imprison myself."

"Yes."

"Why should I do that? Why would he let me do that?" discarded really is. He doesn't realize that it's the most powerful part of himself."

"What you mean is, you hope so."

"Well, yes, if you want to be accurate."

"And you might be wrong."

"Wouldn't that be a disappointment."

"And I might end up..."

"Being swallowed up in him again."

"And you might end up..."

"Locked away forever. Not just the part of me he already has in prison. This part too. I would be sad. And so would the mortal world. Because what then would stop him? His own goodness suppressed, and me not there to balance him from the outside."

"So the whole future of the world is at stake, all because we did this, and you didn't even tell me what I was risking."

"Of course I didn't," she said. "You wouldn't have done it."

"Damn right."

"But it has to be done."

"We put everybody at risk of something terrible. We don't have the right."

"That's virtue talking. The virtuous part of me agrees with you. But the practical part of me says, We'll be virtuous after we beat the son of a bitch."

"And if we fail?"

"The virtuous part of me will feel really bad for a long, long time."