“But what I remember is that run. Spotting his stroller and just going full tilt after it. Nothing mattered but getting there. I’d never run like that before. Never in my life. But I wish—”
She faltered suddenly.
“I wish,” she said, “I could run like that again.” Laura said gently, “Maybe you can. Maybe you have to.”
Karen looked at her sister, trying to make sense of this.
“Maybe he left here on his own,” Laura said, “or maybe he was taken. Either way … I don’t think we have any choice but to follow him.”
“Follow him where?”
“The most obvious place would be the world Tim was talking about. The Novus Ordo. But that’s hardly specific. We have to know where he went—we have to feel it.”
“Can you do that?”
“No. I want to! I’ve been trying. But it’s like trying to follow smoke—I can feel him but it just goes away into the air.” She focused on Karen. “Maybe you can do it.”
But that was absurd, Karen thought. I don’t have any talent at all. She told her sister so.
Laura said, “Karen, I know better. I know you’ve been trying to live a certain kind of life. And I know it’s been a long time. But you were as strong as I ever was—all those years ago.”
“We were kids!”
“It doesn’t change.”
“It does change!”
“You tell yourself that. But it was only ever a lie. Karen, do you understand what I’m saying? Because this is important. If you don’t at least try to do this— well, maybe we’ve lost him. The Gray Man wins. Maybe we don’t get him back ever.”
And Karen thought, My firstborn son. Michael!
But I can’t, she thought. Laura is mistaken. It’s been too long.
But she sat in the silent hotel room with her sister’s eyes on her, and all she could think about was that sprint, running after the stroller, Michael lost in the crowd. She had found him then. And how good it had felt—to run.
Michael? she thought. Was he out there now? Was it really possible to reach for him, to find him?
She felt a faint, sudden electricity … a kind of dizziness, as if the room had fallen away around her.
But that was bad. She knew that for a fact. It would be very bad to allow this back into her life, to give in to it now, to do the wrong thing. She thought of Willis Fauve. She saw his face in her mind, and it was the way he had looked twenty years ago, cropped hair still dark, his eyes like rain clouds under those huge brows. A bad and dangerous thing.
But Willis was just scared, Karen thought. Willis was scared and in the end Willis had lost his children: they had run out of his life altogether. And now Karen was scared and Michael was gone. Maybe that was how it worked. Maybe it was inevitable, like a wheel turning.
All these thoughts flashed through her mind. But he’s out there, she thought. That was the fact of it.
He’s out there and maybe Laura’s right: maybe I can find him.
So she closed her eyes and put away the thought of Willis once and for all and opened herself in a way she had almost forgotten. All you have to do is look, she thought. Worlds out there like petals on a flower. How long since she had done this last? A quarter of a century? But it was easy, and maybe that was the essential secret she had kept from herself all these years—the easiness of it.
And oh, Karen thought, how much she had forgotten.
Energy coursed through her body. Doors and windows, she thought, like a prism, like peering into a kaleidoscope and seeing it shift and change with every motion of your wrist. Every shard of colored glass a door, every door a world. And through one of them she would find Michael. She would spot him from a distance. She would run.
He had passed this way not long ago. Her eyes were squeezed tight, but she saw a city, a dark complex of winding, snowbound streets, pale sunlight filtered through massed clouds, noisy automobiles and horses breathing steam.
She saw a dark building behind dark stone walls. Instinctively, she reached out for Laura. “Take my hand,” she whispered. “Now! I don’t know how much longer I can do this!”
Felt Laura’s fingers twine into hers.
It was as simple, she thought, as stepping over a threshold. You moved—but it was not quite a motion —in a certain direction—but it was not exactly a direction. Here and here and here. And then—
The cold air bit into her skin. She opened her eyes and saw the stone walls, prosaic and quite real, right in front of her. The walls were high and unassailable. But Michael was behind them. She could feel it. And she was lucky. The big iron gate was standing open.
Chapter Twenty-one
1
Cardinal Palestrina was awakened at dawn by the brash clattering of the telephone. Disoriented, he scrambled the receiver to his ear. The hotel switchboard announced Carl Neumann. “Put him through,” Palestrina said wearily. Neumann’s voice across the telephone exchange was shrill, piercing. “It’s happening,” he was saying. You should be here as soon as you can.” Palestrina sat up. “So soon?” “Right now, Your Eminence. As I speak.” The boy?”
“The boy. And not only the boy.”
Plucked out of thin air, Palestrina thought dazedly. From a world beyond the world’s edge. It was—in its own way—a sort of miracle. “All right,” he said. “I’ll be there.”
“Excellent,” Neumann said.
Cardinal Palestrina dressed hastily and drew a heavy fur coat around himself as he left the room. He stopped in the hotel lobby to buy a coffee in a waxed-cardboard cup—so hot it scalded his lips—and then hailed a taxi from the icy margin of the street.
2
Laura could not say just when or how she became separated from her sister.
It simply should not have been possible. The words repeated in her head like a cracked record: not possible. They had been together… she had been holding Karen’s hand. It was like that time back in Pittsburgh when they followed Tim into what she guessed now was some distant corner of the Novus Ordo. They were like kids, clinging to each other.
After they arrived here they had moved through the snow to the black iron gates of this ugly building through the long morning shadows across the courtyard. Michael was inside, Karen said. Laura couldn’t feel it but she took her sister at her word. Find him and get out, she thought. Because we can do that: we can step sideways out of here anytime we feel like it.
It was a reassuring idea.
But then, if that was true, why hadn’t Michael come home? How had they contrived to hold him?
But it was an unanswerable question. Just push on, she thought. On down these twining corridors now, corridors like the roots of some immense old tree reaching deep into the earth. The air was stale and smelled like anesthetic, with some cloying scent laid over that, like cloves. Turn and turn and turn in the dim light. It became automatic.
And then she paused and looked for Karen and Karen wasn’t with her.
The loss troubled her, but maybe not as much as it should have. She moved on in spite of it… not quite aimlessly, but without any goal she could name. It just happened. It was like sleepwalking. She felt asleep. She felt drugged.