Her sometimes affair with Emmett was pleasant. It would always be pleasant. But Karen was—and this had taken Laura by surprise—a chastening example. Karen had showed up with her compulsive conformity, her exaggerated regard for the “normal,” her fears all intact; but Laura saw the way she cared for her son—cared for him profoundly, wordlessly, wholeheartedly—and understood that her own passions were trivial by comparison; that her idea of love was something truncated and selfish. Karen loved Michael in a way that was genuinely beyond, further, deeper.
She felt a wave of vertigo from Emmett’s highly potent grass. The bed seemed to rotate backward. The night had closed in, suddenly, like a wall.
Love, she thought, is a very dangerous thing.
Emmett stretched out, moving toward sleep. He turned his head against the pillow. “You know,” he said distantly, “Mike was right… you are kinda spooky.”
But time passed, a week, ten days, and she began to think she had been unnecessarily alarmed, unreasonably paranoid… until the evening Michael came home ashen-faced and said he had seen the Gray Man out along the beach.
Chapter Seven
“Who is he?” Michael couldn’t restrain the question any longer. “Where does he come from?”
But his mother and his aunt only exchanged furtive glances, as if to acknowledge some mutual guilt, a contract whose terms had come due at last.
He had climbed up the bluffs once again, the same place he’d talked to his aunt a couple of weeks back.
Michael understood why she liked this place. Turn one direction and you could see Turquoise Beach laid out between its hills in clean, logical blocks. Turn back and there was the ocean, sunlight glinting off the whitecaps. The height made everything seem far away and very still, very schematic.
Today even the air was calm. He stationed himself so that he could see the sandier part of the beach north of here, where a few people had laid out towels to catch this burst of late October sunlight. He watched the distant shapes of their sand-colored bodies and plucked out aimless tunes on the flat-top Gibson. He was a little more nimble-fingered now; he’d been practicing every day. He played Beatles tunes and thought with some amusement how impressed Emmett would be. Hey, he thought, if we stay here I’ll be a songwriter; I’ll call myself Lennon McCartney.
He had been exercising his other talent, too, these last few weeks.
Laura had taught him a lot. She had shown him the importance of discipline, control. “You have a great talent,” she had said, “in the raw, but you have to learn to focus it—to aim it. It’s the difference between going where you want to go and being tossed around in a storm. You have to know where you’re going and you have to know how to get back.”
She was with him the first time he made a door. In an angle of beach between two big stones Michael opened a passage and held it open while the two of them stepped through. Stepped from Turquoise Beach into the deserted shore he had glimpsed through the window of his fingers, seal herds moving in dark masses along the sand. He came into the sunshine with Laura behind him, and the seals looked up all at once, bobbing their heads with a distant, oblique curiosity. Michael understood that no one had ever hunted these animals… knew without thinking about it that this was a planet empty of man.
Laura guided him back, congratulated him, and told him not to do it again.
He was startled. “Why?”
“Because it’s not a toy,” she said. “Because it might be dangerous. And there’s another reason. I don’t know for sure, but I think it might draw attention … I wonder if it isn’t a kind of beacon light.”
Because, Michael thought, unlike the seals, we are being hunted. She didn’t say it but that was what she meant. Someone is hunting us.
Standing on the promontory, alone now, he made a tiny window between his fingers. Surely this would not attract attention?
And he looked between his fingers down at the distant beach and felt a first tentative rush of energy inside him… and then he hesitated.
Something familiar down there…
And in the Circle of his fingers, Michael saw the Gray Man.
The shock was immense. He dropped his hands to his side, wiped them on his jeans as if he had touched something foul. He backed up slowly and then crouched down so the tall grass and the slope of the promontory would hide him.
He crept forward again, sweating.
The Gray Man, Walker, was still there, was down on the beach among the bathers in his gray overcoat and hat like a bad hallucination. Incredibly, no one paid him any attention. He was invisible, Michael guessed. It was magic. Walker could do that—make himself unnoticed in a crowd. None of this seemed unlikely anymore.
And now the Gray Man regarded him across that distance.
Michael felt exposed, naked. He sees me. He realized that Laura had been right, the Gray Man was drawn to his energy, maybe drawn whether he practiced it or not, drawn down through the hidden doors of the world; that he could be evaded but not ultimately escaped. He sees us, Michael thought.
He stood up. There was no longer any reason not to.
A communication had been established now, a contact. He peered down across the rocky beach at the Gray Man and the Gray Man seemed to swell and occupy the whole of his field of vision. Michael imagined he could hear the Gray Man’s voice inside his head, softly insinuating.
You deserve an explanation, the Gray Man said. I can give you that.
No, Michael thought. No bargain. He was being hunted; he knew that now. He would be crazy to accept any kind of offer… he was crazy to be standing here like this, hypnotized.
But the voice was very compelling.
I know you, Michael.
He felt the truth in this.
I know you better than they do.
Walker moved toward the headland now. His motion was cautious, delicate; his eyes were on Michael’s eyes. Even over that distance Michael felt the pressure.
The Gray Man said, Come with me. Where? Michael wondered. Where does he want me to go?
The answer was immediate. He blinked and in the darkness behind his eyelids he saw an ancient industrial town, cobbled streets, tall black buildings, a stone gate engraved with the image of an eye and a pyramid. Well, hell, Michael thought, I could go there if I wanted. He was proud of his new abilities. I could find that place.
We can go there together.
It wasn’t very far…
But he was distracted by a flicker of color on the beach. A little girl ran up from the shore, bright yellow one-piece bathing suit. She ran toward the Gray Man. She can see him, Michael realized. She was something his magic had neglected. She ran toward him and then hunkered down and stared at him, this mystery, the Invisible Man, or at least a man who wasn’t dressed for the beach.
The spell broke as Michael’s attention shifted. He gasped for air, realized that he had been on the verge of a terrible capitulation.
He felt the Gray Man’s irritation radiate up from the shore like a brutal heat. In a gesture that was almost casual, Walker waved his hand at the little girl, and the little girl fell backward out of time: a motion Michael could only barely perceive, out and away into some chaos of possibility. The girl had vanished silently from the beach.