Bingo. Our boy Goldie was perched on a tree stump in front of a roaring fire, having a cozy fireside chat with the Bluesman himself.
I felt Cal’s eyes on my face.
Oh, yeah, and a flare. She was resting on a fallen tree next to the Blues Guy, watching Goldie through huge, iridescent eyes.
“Yeah, I see her,” I mumbled.
Cal pushed through the underbrush into the firelight, hand on his sword hilt. “Care to introduce your friends, Goldie?”
Goldie’s new friends didn’t want to be introduced. The Bluesman clutched his guitar and bolted into the bushes; his little flare friend shot skyward and vanished after him.
“Shit!” Goldman yelled, and followed without a backward glance.
Needless to say, Cal and I were hot on his heels. We were swallowed up in moments in a maze of hills and valleys. We turned right and left and right again, following Goldie’s lead. Every turn was a right angle that took us deeper into a place I expected to have nightmares about for weeks to come.
I’d caught up with Goldie and Cal when our quarry turned one last corner into what I would’ve sworn was a dead end. The broad, shallow clearing was long, straight, and ran smack into the bottom of a huge, flat-topped hill.
We had them. I was sure of it. But when we reached the bottom of the hill, what had seemed like a dark smudge at the base turned out to be somewhat more than a smudge. It was the mouth of a cave. The Blues Guy and his flare disappeared into it. And I do mean disappeared.
Cal, Goldman, and I came up short in a Three Stooges collision. The hole in the hill was filled with darkness so thick, I expected it to stick to my hands.
Goldman lifted a hand and blue-white light spilled out of it, rolling into the black and creaming it to a lumpy gray. We all pressed forward, straining to see into the pocket of fake twilight. All three of us expected, I’m sure, to see a passage-or worse, a bunch of passages-leading into the strange mound of earth, but there was no passage. The opening in the hillside was about the size of an elevator and went absolutely nowhere.
“Sonofabitch,” I said, and didn’t even feel the words fall out of my mouth.
We checked the little hole out thoroughly by Goldman’s ball lightning, thumping and prodding and kicking at the rocks and dirt. We got nothing for our troubles but bruises.
“Maybe our eyes were playing tricks on us,” Cal said. “Maybe they didn’t even come in here. Maybe they turned and scooted into those trees.” He nodded to the west where a grove of near-leafless trunks huddled in the gloom.
“They went in here,” Goldman insisted, just as he’d insisted there was a flare.
He’d get no argument from me.
Cal studied the rocky wall for a moment, then said, “I’ll go back for Doc and the horses. We may as well spend what’s left of the night here.”
He turned to Goldie, eyes glittering in the ghost-glow. “I hope you’ve got a really good story to tell.”
Goldie snuffed the twisted little ball of light. “I’ll be working on it.”
“This is getting to be a bad habit with you, Goldman,” I told him once Cal had sprinted away down the grassy path. “You get some wild burr up your butt and-pool-you pull a vanishing act.”
“Yes, and you were trying to convince Cal I was hallucinating random flares. I had to prove you wrong. Sometimes, Ms. Brooks, my perceptions can be trusted. I took a calculated risk and it paid off.” He squatted in the mouth of the cave, his back against the uneven wall. “So, you gonna say it?”
“Say what?”
“Oh, come on, Colleen.”
“Oh hell, fine. You were right-I was wrong. There is a flare. Happy?”
“Her name is Magritte,” he said.
We spent the rest of the wait in silence, peering warily into the mist and shadow, moving only when we heard the horses navigating the maze.
We made a hasty camp at the edge of the grove of semi-naked trees, lit a fire, and hunkered down around it. Then Cal got in Goldie’s face. He was angry, tired, and a little frustrated, and all of that bled into his voice.
“Why’d you run off, Goldie?”
“You want the long answer or the short answer?” asked Goldman in return.
“I want the truth, long or short.”
“Okay. The truth is, I overheard you and Colleen discussing my mental state and I wanted a chance to prove I wasn’t delusional… at this time.”
Cal sat back against his log. “I didn’t believe you were delusional.”
“Yeah, but if you’d talked to Doc, you might. Look, I’m a classic case, I know that. And my former lifestyle didn’t help any. Doc wouldn’t have had any choice but to tell you that I show a number of symptoms of someone ramping up for hypomania.”
Doc shook his head. “I would never have leapt to such a conclusion, Goldie. Nor would I have encouraged Cal to make a decision based on what might or might not be the symptoms of hypomania.”
Goldie leaned into the campfire, his big, glittering, dark eyes on Cal’s face. “It was like a door opened up in my head, Cal. Like the music was so close I was the one singing it. I had to go.”
“Without us?” asked Cal.
“I’m an impulsive bastard. Forgive me. But… the music isn’t always all that clear. It comes and goes. Tonight it came. I followed it. I knew you’d follow me.”
Cal looked off into the dark. “Put that way, it almost sounds logical. Okay, I think I understand that part of it. What do you know about them?” His head jerked toward the Doorway to Nowhere.
Goldie’s eyes lit up. “Okay. Um … his name is Enid. Enid Blindman. He’s half Lakota … on his father’s side. He’s a musician-we knew that-and the flare’s name is Magritte. Pretty, isn’t it?”
Cal rested his forehead on his knees, hiding his face. I’d bet he’d like to borrow a cup of patience right about then. I was fresh out.
“Spill it, Goldman,” I said. “Didn’t you get anything but names?”
Goldie’s eyes flashed briefly over the rest of us, then he said, “Before the Change-just before-Enid’s manager signed him to a contract with an independent record label in Chicago.”
“And what does this have to do with anything?” I asked.
“I’m getting to that. When the Change happened, his music got twisted. It affects people-attracts them. So, he uses it to gather refugees-lost sheep, he called them-and take them to someplace called the Preserve.”
Cal’s head came up. “Where’s that?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t get that far. He just called it the Preserve. He says a friend of his-a woman named Mary-runs the place. That’s where he takes all the people he collects.” “Why, Goldie?” asked Doc. “Why does he do this?”
“To save them. That’s what he said. To save them from what’s out here.”
“And this flare,” said Doc, “this Magritte-is she also called by him-held by his music?”
Goldie scratched around in his curly tumble of hair. “Well, no. Not exactly. They’ve got sort of a mutual protection racket going there.”
“Protection?” repeated Cal. “From what?”
“Well, he’s protecting her from the Source-they didn’t call it that, but they understand that it’s sentient and that it eats flares for breakfast. Enid said he saw a bunch of them taken in Chicago. He was there when it came for Magritte. That was when he discovered that his music could jam the Source. They’ve been together ever since. They fell in with this Mary and started working for her.”
“And the flare’s protecting him from …?” Cal prompted.
“Oh, yeah. That’s where the record deal comes in, sort of. It’s his manager, if you can believe it. Some guy named Howard.”
“Some guy named Howard,” parroted Cal. “Why? What’s this Howard doing to him?”
“Um, he didn’t get to that part. We were interrupted.” He had the absolute balls to give Cal a look of reproach.