She gazed at me for a moment. “So he said. No one else can do that?”
“The Change is selective, Mary. You know that better than anyone. It chose Goldie and Enid, but not me or Doc or Colleen.”
She was nodding. “Or me, for that matter. In my past life…” She paused, smiled. “Listen to me, sounding as if I’d died and been reincarnated. In my past life I was conversant, Mr. Griffin. I spoke the language. I knew the drill. I could perform because I knew the rules of engagement. There is a new language; I don’t speak it. There are new rules; I don’t know them. I don’t know the drill anymore-I’m winging it. It’s as if I’ve gone suddenly blind and Enid is my seeing-eye dog.”
“And Goldie is mine.”
“Your what?” Goldie was standing in the doorway of Mary’s office, looking from one of us to the other.
“Lucky rabbit’s foot,” said Mary wryly.
I decided to cut to the chase. “Goldie, Mary would need you to stay here and take Enid’s place if he comes with us.”
He was unsurprised. “Sure. Makes perfect sense, except that you’d be in dry dock without me.”
“You’re that sure?” Mary asked.
Goldie nodded. He wandered farther into the room, coming to squat by the coffee table.
“You couldn’t show them on a map?” she pressed him.
He chuckled, his eyes picking over the odds and ends on the tabletop. “Mary, I don’t know if you’ve tried using maps lately, but they can be awfully unreliable. Things aren’t where they belong. The Ohio is a whitewater theme park ride, and there are invisible corridors between Ohio and West Virginia. And it’s still changing. Isn’t it, Cal?” He glanced up at me, his eyes ice-pick sharp, reminding me that the Change hadn’t left me completely untouched.
If I were to twist suddenly, I wondered, what form would I take? I turned the thought aside.
“So you can’t just divine where it is on a current map and let them extrapolate?” Mary asked.
He picked up the rattle and fiddled with it, turning it over in his hands. It responded with a soft scrape of dried beans. He seemed fascinated by it. “I could point to … oh, South Dakota and say it’s there. I could even point to the Badlands and say it’s there. But the Badlands covers a hell of a lot of territory. The reality is: I feel a pull; I take a step. If it’s the right step, I feel the pull get stronger. If I take the wrong step…” He shrugged. “Right now, all I know is that the pull is coming from somewhere west of here.”
Mary sat back in her chair and looked at me. “So, that’s it, then. I can’t let Enid go. And you can’t let Goldie go. An impasse.”
I looked down at my hands. They were clenched, knuckles white. I relaxed them with effort. “Mary, I know you care about the people here. I understand that you want to protect them. But they’re a handful of people out of the millions- maybe billions-who are homeless, helpless, confused. When we left New York, it was coming apart at the seams. People were dying-worse, they were killing. Even people who didn’t change behaved like animals.”
“And your point?”
I looked up at her. “If Enid stays here, he can save a handful. If he goes with us, he could save billions.”
Mary flushed to the roots of her hair. “You overstate your case, Mr. Griffin. We have no way of knowing how widespread-”
“Did you hear what I said? We came here from Manhattan. We can vouch for the fact that the Change has affected New York, West Virginia, Ohio. Planes have fallen out of the sky, there’s no electricity, and the landscape in some places is as twisted as the people. You came here from farther west. Is it any different on this side of the Ohio?”
“Don’t push me, Mr. Griffin. And don’t try to manipulate me. Perhaps you think because I’m a woman you can do that. You’d be wrong. I can tell when I’m being jerked around.”
“Cal doesn’t jerk people around, Mary,” Goldie said quietly. “Right now he’s just trying to get you to look at the big picture. If we get to the Source and unplug it, which Cal believes we can, then it doesn’t just help your folks, it helps everybody.”
Her eyes struck me with the force of an arctic storm. “Why? Why do you believe you stand a snowball’s chance in hell of doing anything against the Storm? You saw it- what it did, what it’s still doing. What makes you think you can do anything?”
I had to smile. How many times a day did I ask myself that question? “Would you believe me if I told you I had a vision?”
Into the silence that followed, intruded a soft, rhythmic thudding. A peculiar vibration tingled under my feet. Goldie obviously felt it, too, because he put down the rattle and stood, looking puzzled. Mary raised a hand, as if to command silence, and sat listening to the eerie drumming. It seemed to come from everywhere, to be in the room with us.
When the vibration ceased, Mary rose. “Excuse me. I have to go. I’m assuming you won’t be leaving right away.” She was gone in a wash of tension I swear pricked my skin.
Goldie and I stared at each other for a moment, then I asked, “Is it in the Badlands?”
He gave me a look he could probably patent. “Now I’m a travel agent? How the hell should I know?”
We moved by unspoken consent to stand on the Lodge’s broad veranda. Down the hill, mellow afternoon sunlight tumbled through trees that were still green into an odd, gleaming mist that seemed to fit the forest like a woolly, translucent bonnet. It reminded me of Boone’s Gap, but this mist seemed benign, like a child’s favorite blanket. There were no angry ghosts in it. It was pleasant here, from the clutter of cottages and tents to the song of wind chimes. If it were not for Tina-no, if it were not for the Source-I’d consider staying. God knows, we all had talents we could put to use in a place like this.
“Bagel dog with kraut,” Goldie murmured.
“Excuse me?”
“Things I Miss Most. Your turn.”
“You have to ask?”
“Now now. This is supposed to be a lighthearted exercise in distraction. The category is Things We Miss Most About Life as It Once Was.”
“Okay. Um… Starbuck’s … double latte, tall, vanilla.”
“Figures. Low fat milk, too, I’ll bet,” he said, and when I nodded, he added, “Yeah, I figured you for a low fat kinda guy.”
“But if I had to do all over again? Whole milk and hazelnut.”
“You devil.”
“Could you learn to do what Enid does?”
He sobered and his eyes dropped to his feet. “Tried it. That’s what I was at this morning before Doc came around. I don’t get it.”
“Maybe it just takes practice.”
“Practice? Practice what?”
“Okay, trial and error, then.”
“Look, you remember the light-globe I used to scare away our Shadow friends?”
“How could I forget?”
“It’s a form of visualization. I imagine the globe; that somehow gathers the photons together and it’s there. That’s roughly the way Enid makes his shield around Magritte.”
“All right, so you understand the mechanism. So far, so good.”
“No. No good,” he said, shaking his head. “I work with light. Enid works with sound. They’re two different types of energy-at least so far as the Change is concerned. Enid creates a sonic shield around Magritte, so the Source can’t hear her. I could create a light-globe, but all that would do was keep her from being eaten by the local wildlife. It wouldn’t block her from the Source.” He paused to chew on his lip and pick at a knothole in the porch railing. “It’s not just Enid. It’s Magritte. They do it together.” He made a spasmodic gesture with his head. “The shield, the jamming thing.”
“Wait. You’re telling me … What are you telling me?” He shrugged. “They’re a duo. A team. Batman and