Magic Time: Angelfire (28 page)

I shook off a tremor of real fear and put my mind to the business of preparation.

Mary had maps. I got one and did the math. Assuming that Chicago was where we’d left it, we were looking at about a 250-mile trek, as the crow flies. None of us being crows, and given that we’d no doubt have to take evasive action to skirt Indianapolis, the journey could easily exceed three hundred miles. At an average of twenty to thirty miles per day, that gave us road time of ten days or more. At last report from the northern portal, it had begun to snow.

Almost against my will, I also checked the map for “anomalies.” They abounded. There was some sort of ragged edge around Indianapolis. What it was, I couldn’t tell, but I had a sharp if fanciful vision of the city perched on a towering scarp, below which wild rivers raged. Or at least I assumed they raged; under my fingertips, they felt just as the Ohio had, rough and spiky.

I decided the best route would be to take Highway 317 northwest, swinging far to the north of Indianapolis and passing close to towns with such charming names as Arcanum and Nineveh. I found myself wondering if the Biblical story of Jonah was neither myth nor metaphor, but rather the way the world operated then. Maybe a man could live inside a giant fish. Maybe there was a God—one with a peculiar sense of poetic justice. And maybe the Source was something that had always been with us. Something that had just been trapped in another dimension for uncounted centuries, or locked up in a celestial prison house until human intervention had caused an inopportune jailbreak. Maybe Jonah had known the Source and simply called it by a different name.

I straightened from my map reading. “Doc, you’re pretty familiar with the Bible, right?”

He glanced over at me from where he sat, cutting various sized bandages from freshly washed but irregular hunks of fabric. “I am familiar with it, yes.”

“Isn’t there something in the Revelation of Saint John about God locking Satan up someplace and then letting him loose at the end of the age to torment the world?”

His gray gaze was contemplative and level. “That is metaphor, my friend. The seemingly simple words speak a complex truth, which they can either illuminate or obscure, depending upon who reads them.”

“And how do you read them?”

“I understand them to mean that what torments the world is man’s insatiable thirst for control.”

I nodded. “I guess the prophecy applies either way, doesn’t it? It sure seems as if someone let Satan out of jail.”

“I thought you were plotting our course.” This came from Colleen, who was bundling barbs and arrows on the floor near where Doc sat. “What’s that got to do with the devil?”

I rubbed my eyes, feeling suddenly light-headed. “Must be getting punchy. Maybe I’ll take a break.”

“Good timing!”

Goldie entered the cabin on a wave of kinetic energy, rubbing his hands together fast enough to make static.

“I was just going to suggest that you
all
take a break and come for a little walk underground.”

His face was flushed; his eyes were overbright, and for a moment I had the sickening thought that he was on something, or worse. He stopped in front of me and I realized that his jeans were soaked from the knees down.

“Well, don’t everybody move at once. Just line up in alphabetical order and file politely out the door.” He made a shooing gesture with both hands.

“Where would we be going on this little walk?” Colleen asked, not even preparing to move.

“I told you: underground. There’s something I want you to see.” He imitated a praying mantis again and giggled. “You’re gonna love this.”

I exchanged glances with Doc and Colleen. Both looked 
uneasy. Doc rose slowly and put his bandages aside. Colleen, taking the cue from him, followed suit.

“Please, show us,” Doc said, and smiled.

Goldie rolled his eyes, shook his head and laughed. “Jeez, you guys are a piece of work. Fine, if thinking that poor old Goldman is about to leap out of his head will get you into the caves any faster, so be it. Walk this way.”

He did a creditable Igor, hunching his back and dragging one foot behind.

I wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to laugh or cry, so I did neither. I just followed, Colleen and Doc close on my heels.

Ten yards from the door of the cabin, Goldie straightened and shook himself all over. “Man, that gets old fast. How’d Feldman do that through an entire movie?”

He cocked a glance back over his shoulder. “Oh, there you are.” He crooked a finger and took off again.

Down in the cavern, he led us through the Indian Council Chamber, then took a left-hand passage rather than the more or less straight-ahead one that led to the Adena portal. After a silent walk of about twenty yards or so we came to another branching of the ways. Again Goldie took the left-hand trail.

Colleen, just behind me, tapped my shoulder and whis-

pered, “This is the one that goes to Put-in-Bay cave.” Goldie turned back with a finger to his lips. “Ssshhh.” “Now he thinks he’s a librarian,” muttered Colleen. “Quiet, Miss Brooks,” said Goldie. “We don’t want to do

detention, do we?”

Colleen fell back, muttering obscenities under her breath.

Yards of faerie-lit tunnel slid by around us and I found myself internally oohing and ahing at the sheer beauty of the glittering rock formations. God’s jewel box. Another passage opened up in the left arm of a Y junction. The lights continued to the right; Goldie ducked under a diamond-studded curtain of limestone and forged into the darkness of the leftmost branch.

I hesitated.

Behind me Colleen protested, “Goldman, you lose your compass or something? It’s that way.”

A shower of gold light cascaded down the left-hand passage from Goldie’s hand and rolled into the junction where the rest of us stood in confusion.

“Nope. It’s this way.” He beckoned, releasing the ball of light into the moist air, then turned and led on, a second tweaked lantern floating above his head.

The passage twisted and turned a bit, then opened up into a huge, sandy-bottomed chamber from which I could hear the gurgle of running water. The golden light did not touch the walls on the far side of the room, giving some indication of its size, but it sparkled like stars in the waters of a tiny lake.

It was into this body of water that Goldie plunged up to his knees. He splashed across to the other side, where Kevin Elk Sings sat cross-legged on the floor, flute in hand, wearing the same gray look of exhaustion that Goldie did beneath his flush of excitement. Mary McCrae stood behind him, looking bemused. Magritte hovered at her shoulder. Goldie’s light globes and smaller, starlike motes of gold floated about them, casting luminescence over the glistening floor.

“Good, you’re here,” said Mary. “Cal, do you have any idea what this is about? They’re all being annoyingly mysterious.”

I shook my head. “I haven’t got a clue.”

“I am not wading through that,” announced Colleen from behind me.

“It’s the only way across without going all the way to the end of the chamber,” said Goldie. His voice echoed strangely off the walls.

I sighed and plowed through the flood, gritting my teeth against the bone-jarring cold. On the other side I found myself facing a curving wall of pale flowstone that glittered as if set with jewels. It blended upward into a vaulted ceiling that was lost in the void.

“Okay,” said Goldie, “everybody stand just so.” He 
arranged us all in a semicircle behind Kevin. “Maestro?” Goldie nodded to Kevin, who rose in a single, fluid movement and began to play.

The melody was familiar, but twisted. Appropriate, I suppose. It took a moment for me to recognize it as a piece from the Who’s rock opera,
Tommy
. Rolling out of Kevin’s flute, it had an ageless quality, as if generations of Lakota Sioux might have played it.

At almost the precise moment I placed the song, Goldie’s face lit up in a brilliant smile and Kevin began to move toward the wall, still playing. He strode up to the wall and stepped through it as if through a curtain of stars. The music echoed momentarily, then faded.

“Pretty slick, huh?” Goldie asked.

It was, indeed, pretty slick. “Uh, yeah,” was the best I could manage.

Mary put a hand over her mouth, her eyes wide. “Kevin did that? Himself?”

The music faded back in and Kevin reappeared. He stopped playing the moment he was clear of the wall. Behind him the stars winked out.

Goldie, Mary, and Magritte broke into spontaneous applause, and Kevin bowed, grinning and flourishing his flute.

“Now,” said Goldie, “the really slick part. Kev is going to take you all through the portal.”

He did, too. Instead of passing entirely through the sparkling wall, he stood, half in and half out, and literally changed his tune. The wall no longer seemed quite solid. It looked like a slightly cheesy special effect I’d seen in countless old science fiction films—a filmy veil of sequins through which our heroes would step into…?

We passed through gingerly—like a bunch of cats on snow—and emerged into another cave. Silvery light poured down onto us from somewhere up a gently sloping passage.

I hesitated a moment, then climbed up and into the light with Mary beside me. A cold wind slashed through my wet jeans and sucked the air out of my lungs. Tiny ice crystals 
brushed my face and swirled in little eddies over the ground. Visibility was poor, but in the murky distance I could see that we were surrounded by a group of hillocks.

The others emerged behind us and stood gazing about. “I’m confused,” I admitted. “These can’t be the Adena mounds.”

“Blue Mounds,” said Kevin. “About twenty miles southwest of Madison, Wisconsin.”

“Madison? Damn.” Colleen was obviously impressed.

“So, have I been productive enough?” Goldie asked me.

I opened my mouth to answer, then realized Magritte had come through the portal with us and was treading air near Goldie. The chill wind moved into my heart. “Should she be out here?” I asked him.

Goldie’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. “She has to come out here, Cal. She doesn’t have a choice.”

I watched the expression on Magritte’s face as she glided a little farther from the mouth of the cave, was aware that Goldie’s eyes were on her, too. “Do you feel… anything?” I asked. “Hear anything?”

She nodded. “I hear it—the Storm. Like far-off wind.” “Does it hear you?”

“Maybe not yet, but it will.”

Goldie took a step closer to her and for a moment they seemed to be enveloped in a veil of light. I’d seen the effect before, and thought Magritte’s aura had simply expanded to take in Goldie. Now my imagination tried to tell me that Goldie had a faint aura of his own.

“Right now we’re in a sacred place,” said Kevin. “There’s power here. Outside…” He shrugged and fingered the flute.

“Let’s go back into the cave,” said Goldie. “I’m freezing my ass off out here.” He turned back, Magritte moving in unison with him. The aqua-gold halo remained intact.

Back in the comparative warmth of the cavern, Goldie stepped us through his trail of discovery. “It hit me the day the Storm got in—at the waterwheel. Kev’s music allowed me to see the … the patterns of power around the water. When I touched the flute, I could see the same pat
terns around other objects. Even after he stopped playing, I could see them just by touching the flute. I realized the same thing happened, to one degree or another, whenever I picked up one of Kevin’s or Delmar’s ceremonial artifacts.”

“Transference,” I said. “You talked about that when we were trying to figure out Enid’s contract.”

He pulled my Parker out of his jacket pocket and clicked it. “This,” he said, “is how we figured out where that portal ends up. Transference. You have this little thing going with maps. Kevin can see portals. In fact, he found this portal himself. I sat him down in front of it with a map and this pen. It was kind of like dowsing. The transference allowed him to sense where on the map this puppy opened up.”

“We transferred the ability to open portals the same way,” Kevin said. “Goldie learned to play my flute well enough to—how to describe it—endow a tune and then the flute itself with—well, ‘Goldieness,’ I guess you’d call it.”

Colleen snorted.

“Hey, don’t laugh,” said Goldie. “It works. Like I’ve always said, a little Goldie goes a long way. It took a lot of woodshedding, but I got to where I could play the portal open with Kev’s flute. Then he took over and worked until
he
could play it open.”

“I thought you couldn’t do sound,” I said.

“Ah!” he raised a finger. “True. I
can’t
do sound. But I
could
visualize the notes. I converted them into light.” He laughed. “I can convert music to photons! They couldn’t even do that on
Star Trek
. All they could do was make Tachyon fields.”

“Yeah,” said Colleen, “but at least their Tachyon fields always work.”

I shot Colleen a glance.
Don’t step on him. Not now
. “You said you used a map,” I said to Goldie. “You still have it?”

Goldie pulled it out of his jacket pocket and handed to me. I unfolded it, found the Blue Mounds, and traced the path southeast toward Chicago. I looked up at the others.