I would like to believe that, she thought, what Laura said. It was a nice idea, the world as an upward-turning place, at least the possibility of improvement. But it was equally likely that there was some kind of natural law, a conservation of misery. Pain doesn’t disappear, only gets changed into some other kind of pain.
If she had saved Michael from fear maybe it was only by taking that fear onto herself. Certainly she was frightened now. And it was not just the obvious fear, but a whole coterie of fears: mother fears, the fact that her son was in danger: and other fears beyond that, including the final and unavoidable one, that Michael had gone beyond her in some important way, that he was lost to her, a grown man, a separate creature, the last ties of blood and affection sundered by all this violence. That there was nothing more she could do to help him.
Not to matter anymore—surely that would be the worst thing?
But they had found a moment of peace in this curious place, the America Michael had found, and she allowed herself to sleep at last, lulled by the wind sounds and the rustle of an owl that had nested in the rafters.
3
Michael woke in the morning with his cheek pressed into the straw and a faint sunlight prying through the barnboards, and for a moment the only thought he had was that he was here, in the world he had begun to imagine in the old row house in Polger Valley. A safe place. And that feeling of security was so fine that he wrapped it around himself like a blanket and almost fell back asleep.
And then he remembered.
He remembered Walker; he remembered the hard stone prison of the Novus Ordo.
And sat up thinking, How do we run? Where do we run to?
—the only questions left.
He did not doubt that they would be pursued, were already being pursued, that their period of grace might amount to days at most. “They’ll kill you,” Tim had said, and Michael firmly believed it.
But he didn’t want to leave any sooner than he had to. This was a tiny, rural segment of the world he had imagined back in Polger Valley, but it was real— tangible, vast and complex and indefinably familiar. It felt like home.
“Home” had become a pretty ragged word and Michael was reluctant to use it even in his private thoughts, but it was the word he kept circling back on. Home, a place to live, a place to make a future.
Maybe.
Maybe.
Maybe sometime. Maybe even soon …
But he gathered up his Blue Jays cap and his spare shirt and hiked out to the highway with his mother and Laura behind him, a cool morning with frost coming off the casaba vines that lined this old stone wall, feeling nothing but the prospect of a warm day and a ride up to the market cities of the North—his mind empty but humming happily in the fresh sunlight— when suddenly a kind of sour electricity filled the air, and a man-sized space before him seemed to darken and then take shape, and it was the Gray Man, it was Walker, as inevitable as time and as real as the stones, standing there staring, his face looking somehow older and angrier now, his eyes wide and childlike as he reached out his big hands toward Michael.
Chapter Twenty-six
1
So he ran.
He took hold of his mother and his aunt and together they were gone, twisting down the secret corridors of the plenum as fast as he could take them.
2
White light and flickering darkness and this ceaseless motion…it was all Karen could do just to follow.
She felt Michael a step ahead of her and Laura a step behind, links in a chain, and the Gray Man in their wake, a dark presentiment, the shadow of a storm cloud.
She could not calculate the distance they traveled. There were no words for this kind of distance. The world—these worlds—had become a vapor, a mingled landscape too diffuse for the eye to comprehend. She felt disoriented, bodyless, lost in an indefinite betweenness, a fog of location. She felt stretched to the breaking point.
She closed her eyes and held on as hard as she could.
But it was exhausting. It was not only Michael’s effort but her effort and Laura’s. Exhausting, especially, because this was a talent she had not exercised since childhood; without Michael she would not have been able to do it at all. She felt a fatigue that was more than physical, an exhaustion of possibilities—it tugged at her like an anchor.
It was like that time in the department store, she thought, running after Michael. This same careless plunging into the unknown, down corridors and angles she had never dared imagine, a bursting through forbidden doors. But this time it was Michael who was doing the running, his skill or intuition. Periodically they lingered long enough to glimpse a landscape, some real and strange place, a grove of trees or a crowded lane; and she would think, He’ll find a place… somewhere the Gray Man can’t follow…
But the Gray Man was relentless behind them— she could feel him—and Karen was growing wearier by the minute. Worse, she began to suspect (and it was a grim, unwelcome intuition) that they were being somehow herded; that Michael’s running had a desperation in it now; that these increasingly dark and half-glimpsed worlds where they paused were not entirely of his own choosing.
Too much for him, she thought.
Clinging to his hand as if it were the only real thing in this chaos, she thought, Oh, Michael, I’m sorry—
Because the fatigue was numbing, the distance was too great to bear.
She put her head up helplessly and saw a cold moon sailing through a black sky, worlds and worlds away from home.
And then she stumbled.
She fell. It was prosaic. She was, momentarily, as embarrassed as she was frightened. Her hand slipped away from Michael’s; and she felt cut off, suddenly alone. But then Michael was with her, urging her up; Laura was lifting her.
Karen thought, I know this place!
She had slipped on the cobbled wetness of the alley. It was a dark night, wintry night, old gray moon in a black cheerless sky. Beyond the alley mouth she saw sooty Tudor-style houses with white ice bearding the eaves. A cruel wind came in from the sea.
It’s always cold here, Tim had said.
It was one of his places, a cloistered industrial town by the sea, and she had been here before—once in her childhood and often in her dreams.
It might be some part of the Novus Ordo, a port town there, or it might be some analogous but unconnected world. But this was where she had met the Gray Man and this was a place, she felt, where his power must be considerable. It was here that Walker had begun to lay the complex spells that had almost— but for Michael—trapped them.
Therefore, a dangerous place.
Michael tugged at her hand. “Hurry,” he said, but she could not; the fall had taken the last of her stamina. She looked at Michael helplessly and understood there was no need to explain; he had felt it in her touch. His eyes widened and then narrowed.
“Go without me,” she managed.
Laura put an arm around her. “I’ll stay. Michael, you go on. Maybe you can draw him away—”
“Just run,” Karen said. “It doesn’t matter, run.”
But then obviously it was too late, because the Gray Man was there with them, standing in silhouette at the mouth of the alley with the sea wind spitting at his back.