Goldie picked at a frayed patch of denim on the leg of his jeans. “I’m inside it. Or maybe it’s inside me.” He kept his eyes averted. “I try to get out, but there is no way out. Except to die.”
“I’m inside it, too,” I admit. “I’m trying to find Tina, but instead of finding Tina… I lose all of you.”
“I…”
The whisper of sound drew every eye to where Magritte hung, still, in the air next to Goldie. Her usually bright aura seemed smudged and muted, and she had wrapped her arms about herself like a cocoon. She quailed a little under our collective gaze, gliding backward. Goldie reached out a hand to her, stopped just short of touching her. Soft light seemed to pulse between them, or perhaps I imagined it.
“It calls to me in my dreams,” she said. “It has my uncle Nathan’s voice, and the voice makes pools of black, like oil on a road. I try not to, but I fall into a pool and it gets all over me. It gets inside me.” She looked at Goldie then, and I realized that her aura had completely taken him in. “And I drown,” she finished.
The fire made sounds that should have been comforting. Then Doc spoke the words we’d all been thinking: “What does it mean? That we’re being called? All of us? By what? Is this the Source? Or is it something else?”
“It can’t be the Source,” said Colleen. “The Source is in the West.”
“Chicago is west,” murmured Goldie.
“Yeah, Northwest. You never said it was in the Northwest.”
“I never said it wasn’t.”
I cut across the argument. “Is it, Goldie? Is the Source in Chicago? The last time you talked about it, you said something about the Badlands.”
“I said, ‘what if.’ What if it’s in the Badlands.”
“We’ve all dreamed about the same place. Are we going to find it in Chicago?”
He shook his head. “I wish I knew. But I don’t know. I won’t know until we’re moving again. Maybe it’s the Preserve. Maybe it distorts my Source sense just like it distorts the space around it. I don’t know. All I know is, I’ve dreamed of that tower for weeks. In all that time, I never thought of it as an actual place. I thought…”
“That it was the Source?” I finished.
“No, that it was connected to the Source in some way. That it was … um … something the Source had put … in me.”
“Looks to me like it’s put something in all of us,” said Enid.
“Well,” said Colleen, “it really doesn’t matter, does it? Either way, we’re going to Chicago. Question still remains, if Magritte goes along to protect Enid, how do we protect her?”
“I’m strong,” protested Magritte. “I’ve got real good at jamming the Storm all by myself. Enid’s so weak sometimes, I’ve had to. Besides, you don’t have a choice. One way or another, I’m coming with you.”
Doc murmured something in Russian and sketched a gesture over his heart. He turned from the hearth. “And I am not,” he said.
Colleen stood, poker in hand, staring at him. “What? What are you talking about? Of course you’re coming with us.”
He kept his eyes on my face. “I am a liability to you, Calvin. Events have conspired to teach me this. This leg …” He patted his left thigh. “This leg will not let me go where you need to go. It has refused to heal as I might have wished. I am slow to move and I doubt I could sit a horse all day-”
“Then we’ll wait until you’re better healed,” I said. “We’ll rest more often on the road.”
He smiled without humor. “You see, already you are planning around my disability. On the road, I would only slow you down, Calvin. At best. And if you face the Source sooner rather than later…”
“That’s ridiculous. I’m sure we can deal with your-”
“Perhaps I don’t want you to deal with it.” His voice was harsh, ragged. He took a deep breath and went on in gentler tones. “Soft tissue damage is difficult to recover from. Aggravate it and you take a chance of causing a chronic injury. Something from which there is no recovery.” He lowered his eyes. “I have no desire to be a cripple.”
“Shit,” said Colleen under her breath.
Doc glanced at her, then said, “I shall stay here. Here, I can do something for the good.” He turned to Mary. “This place needs an infirmary. While the others go upon this quest, I shall help you build one.”
Mary said, “Doc, are you sure?”
“You need a doctor. Enid does not need a doctor. He needs a good lawyer.” He gestured at me. “Now he has one.”
Mary’s eyes moved from Doc to Enid to me. She nodded silently.
Now was the time to say that we had started this journey together and must finish it together. To give words to the sudden realization that Doc had somehow taken over the care and feeding of that tiny, cowering believer in my soul, the one I thought had disappeared with Tina. But I couldn’t say any of those things, because to do so would have been the height of selfishness.
I was silent.
Colleen gave the logs a vicious stab, then dropped the poker, scattering ash across the hearth. We locked eyes for a moment, her face frozen in an expression I couldn’t begin to read. I expected a sarcastic remark, an outburst of some sort. But she merely brushed past Doc without a glance and left the room.
After a momentary hesitation, he followed.
Goldie pulled the contract out from under my numb hands and handed it to Enid. He made his own exit then, giving my shoulder a light squeeze as he passed me by.
Irrelevantly, I realized he had kept my pen.
THIRTEEN
DOC
She was standing out under the trees behind the Lodge, looking to where, in an ordinary place in a normal world, the sun would eventually rise. I hobbled to her side, but she did not so much as look at me.
A soft wind, carrying the perfume of darkness, curled among the trees and stirred the chimes to song. Night birds chanted somewhere above our heads in branches I could see only as short strokes of midnight against the violet-brushed pewter of the Preserve’s perpetual cowl of mist. I listened with her for a time to the muted night music, watched as the moon marked its path in a pale blur across the watercolor sky.
“You are angry with me,” I observed finally.
She made an impatient noise. “I’m not…”
In the silence, the birds and I waited to hear what she was not.
“I’m not angry with you. That would be childish and stupid.”
“Then what?”
“I’m mad at life, at everything. I’m mad at Goldie for seeing that damn portal, and for prying into this place. I’m mad at Cal for following him in here, and I’m mad at me for following Cal. I’m mad at the Source and the government and Fred Wishart for doing all this shit-” She gave the universe a broad gesture of inclusion. “And I’m mad at God for letting them do it.”
“I thought you did not believe in God.”
“I don’t. I’m too mad at Him. It’s my way of getting even, I guess.” A smile tempted her lips; she spurned it.
“Ah. So I am the only person here you are not mad at. And you are pleased I will not be going west with you.” She turned to look at me. “I didn’t say that.”
“Then what did you say?”
Her breath sailed out on a banner of steam and she dropped to the grass, arms wrapped about her knees. “All right, dammit. I’m mad at you. There, are you happy?”
I lowered myself down next to her, taking great care to keep my left leg straight. “No. And you are mad at me because…?”
“Does it matter?”
“To me, yes. It disturbs me to have friends angry with me. Even if their anger is justified… or perhaps most especially so.”
“So, you think I’m right to be mad at you.”