“Why Colleen, I’m touched.”
“Screw you,” she mutters, and heads off on the western fork.
We’ve gone maybe fifty yards when I get a whiff of something, metaphorically speaking. It’s as if a car has driven by with the windows open and the stereo blaring. A snatch of sound, a shiver of almost-recognition and poof!, it’s zipped on by, leaving me standing on the curb playing Name That Tune.
Ahead of me on the trail, Colleen realizes I’m not right on her heels. She turns back and gives me this look. “I think I heard something,” I say.
“You think you heard something?”
“Yeah. Like a snatch of music. Only it wasn’t music, exactly. It was, uh, something else.”
She sighs. “Would it totally kill you to be coherent once in a while?”
I sigh back. “That way.” I nod down the trail toward the West Virginia-Ohio border.
We continue scouting to the west. We find nothing, however, except a few stray folks picking wild grasses and herbs in the woods. They take a speedy hike when they get an eyeful of my bodyguard. I’d beat it, too, if I saw Colleen the Barbarian coming at me out of the bushes wielding her wonder-machete.
We shout after them about lurkers and loudly suggest they head south, into Grave Creek. They flee due north.
Colleen insists we track them down and warn them properly. This takes some time off our clock. It also sets Colleen to kvetching at me about the fact that we’ve been out here for hours with no more than the merest hint of anything peculiar. When she decides we’ve gone far enough west, she plops herself down to rest before we head back to town. We’re sitting under a tall but twisted cedar (with comfortingly normal-looking needles) when this little tune pops into my head and starts running in circles up there. I start humming the little tune. Next thing I know, there are words, too. Words calling the poor, the wounded, the huddled masses to refuge.
“ ‘I lift my lamp beside the hidden door.’ ” Hauntingly familiar, and yet …
“Must you?” Colleen asks, and gives me a look that tells me her exact opinion of my vocal stylings.
I stop noodling on the song, which I have just grokked is a sort of lyrically mutated musical version of Emma Lazarus’s inscription for the Statue of Liberty. Appropriate-everything else around here is mutated. And the song won’t leave. It’s circling in my head like it’s got no place to land-words, music, chords and all.
I look at Colleen. She’s just sitting there, back to bark, eyes closed. There are leaves in her sawed-off hair and a streak of dirt down the side of her nose. I decide not to inform her of any of this.
“You hear that?” I ask.
She opens one eye. “Hear what?”
“You tell me. What do you hear?” I watch her with all my senses.
She looks around. People always do that-you ask if they hear something and they look for stuff.
“Wind,” she says. “Leaves rustling-uh, tinkling. Crows-I hear crows. And a stream. What’m I supposed to hear?”
“Huh. Nothing, I guess.” I lean back against the tree trunk.
Colleen can’t hear the music, which means one of two things. Either I am missing my meds worse than I thought or this is not natural music. It’s something else.
I get up.
“Where’re you going?” Her eyes are still closed, but her hands are snugly around the hilt of her machete.
“Gotta take a leak,” I lie, and head off into the woods. I’ve got a bead on this thing and I am homing in.
I walk for about a half mile when I come to a ridge. Below me the twisted woodland drops away below into a streambed. I stop and wonder where to go next. That’s when I hear the music. It’s below me, down in that teeny, tiny river valley.
I slide down the scarp on my butt, ending up feet first in the creek, which is shockingly green and cold. I wade across, doing my laundry on the fly, you might say, climb up the bank on the other side, part a couple of little cedars, and there he is.
The first thing I notice about my music man is that he’s playing a very cool guitar. It’s a jumbo blond maple cutaway with a cedar top, mother-of-pearl perfling around the sound hole, and inlay all up and down its rosewood fret board.
Very cool.
He’s fingerpicking this gentle blues thing to which he is singing the lyrics I’ve been hearing in my head. He has a harmonica in one of those wire neck braces, and every now and then he toodles a riff that reminds me of trains going through sleepy little towns late at night. It’s a sound that tugs at the soul, that says there is a Place, a Safe Haven, a Refuge that I will find if only I go where the music takes me.
I disengage, tingling. The music is laced with a power that tickles my brain, stands my hair delicately on end, and makes my skin itch.
This is when I notice two other things about my Bluesman. One is that he has an audience. A handful of human people of various shapes and sizes are following him, smiling and looking farmisht and punchy, as if what’s floating out of his guitar is an industrial strength euphoric. He’s smiling, too, and his chocolate skin is gleaming with sweat.
The other thing I notice is that there is a flare hovering winglessly over his dreadlocks. A flare-like Tina. She- definitely she-is about the size of a twelve-year-old girl, and she is making a magic of her own that drapes a sequined mosquito net of aqua energy all around her musician friend.
This is no parlor trick. Not the sort of flashy crap I do to impress the natives. This music has a power I can feel deep down in my bones. Is that what’s keeping his flare from being sucked out of real time back to the Megillah?
I join the Bluesman’s audience, hoping to get a better look at the flare-hoping, against all odds, that it is Tina. I shuffle up beside the guitarist, copping the same beatific smile everyone else is wearing, and I look up at his floating friend.
The moment my gaze touches her, she feels it and looks back through eyes like topaz purie marbles; like suns. I swear to God, it’s as if she’s walked in through my eyeballs, taken the cook’s tour of my psyche, and made herself right at home.
She’s beautiful. Her hair, short and wavy, fans out in a pale titian halo within her nimbus of light, which cycles vivid, translucent hues-aqua, azure, violet. Her ears come to a graceful point amid the strands. She’s a mermaid or a mist wraith or any one of a hundred beautiful, mysterious, and impossible creatures that are not supposed to exist in the here and now. She wears what looks like a white silk Chinese lounging outfit, trimmed in red and gold. Not standard mermaid issue, by any means.
And she’s not Tina. This is not a child; this is a woman.
I wonder what she was like before. I wonder why she changed. I wonder why she’s providing arcane sun block for her friend, and I wonder how far I will have to walk to find out.
I stay in lock step with the others, noticing that several more folks have come out of nowhere to do the same-a mother towing a scrawny little boy in tattered clothes, a girl of about twelve whose eyes are empty windows.
We’ve traveled maybe a half mile when a hand clamps down on my shoulder and I’m dragged unceremoniously into the bushes.
FOUR
COLLEEN
Damned idiot took more than a leak. He took a freakin’ hike. It was a good five minutes before I realized what he’d done. Fortunately, he wasn’t trying to cover his tracks.
When I caught up with him, he was shuffling along in the wake of some guitar-playing Pied Piper with a gaggle of other music lovers. I swear, except for the guitar, it looked like something right out of an old grade-B zombie movie.
Okay, there was another difference-these folks all looked blissed, as if whatever this guy was singing was laced with eighty proof Jamaican rum. Don’t get me wrong, it was pretty music, and the guy was massively attractive in a Rastafarian sort of way, but I didn’t get why everybody was so gaga over it.