The Third Magic (34 page)

It was probably not a very large device, because the land around the Sanctuary had not been dug up. The well had been dug directly beneath the house, through the floorboards. The setup was rather like the old farm spring houses, in which vegetables and other perishables were kept cool by being set into a running stream at the bottom of a trap door in a building.

So the device would be small, Titus reasoned. Small enough to fit into a cement enclosure. Small enough to take away without notice.

There were problems, of course. The thing might be destroyed by the explosion. It might be radioactive. It might be wired to an alarm system, or contain a failsafe by which anyone who tried to tamper with it would be electrocuted or subjected to poison fumes or blown to kingdom come. There was no way to know.

Titus set the bomb, then enclosed the exposed cement with a thick blanket before retreating into the woods again.

"If anything untoward happens, run for the car," he said.

Pinto shifted his eyes to one side.

"'Untoward,'" Titus explained, "means unexpected. Like if an alarm goes off, or if the place bursts into flames."

"Okay," Pinto said, somewhat resentfully. "You could have said that in the first place." They hunkered down, waiting for the thunder.

When it came, Titus detonated the second explosive. Water sprayed up in a fountain. The men waited for ten seconds before Titus spoke. "Now," he said.

The cement casing, now lying in rubble, had been built around another cement box. This, too, had been affected by the explosion. One corner had been blown off, and a large crack ran up from it across an adjacent side.

"This might be what we're looking for." Titus thrust his fingers through the mud to grab hold of the cement cube. It came up from the mud with a sucking sound.

"Bastard of a storm," Pinto said.

Titus was cheerful. "I promise you, this will be well worth the discomfort, my friend." He adjusted some components of the weird weapon he had used to kill the guard, then aimed it at a corner of the concrete box and fired. The box shattered into popcorn-sized pieces.

"Jesus, that's some kind of gun," Pinto said. Unable to restrain himself any longer, he reached tentatively for the weapon. Titus looked at him from beneath his wet brows. Pinto withdrew his hand.

Inside the rubble of the box was the last thing Titus expected to see. Not a high-tech device, but a simple small bowl made of some greenish metal he had never seen before. There was nothing impressive about it. It was dented and out of round, too small to be useful as a container, too ugly to be decorative. It was the sort of thing one might find at a garage sale, along with a dirty embroidery of daisies or a set of plastic coasters.

Titus picked it up and examined it slowly, thinking all these things about it, not noticing for some time that, while his mind was racing to understand the meaning of the homely cup that someone had taken the trouble to encase in cement and hide in the bottom of a well, he was, meanwhile, experiencing a sensation of profound well being.

His arms and shoulders, sore from digging, felt suddenly rested. A headache that had grown with each explosion and boom of thunder and had finally blossomed into full-blown agony with the murder of the guard instantly subsided.

Slowly he reached up to touch the place on his neck where he had once been wounded, where the water from the stream had healed it without a trace.

Pinto was looking at him. At the place where the wound had been, then at the cup.

Before he could speak, Titus picked the gun up off the ground and fired it into Pinto's thigh.

Pinto sucked in air. As the sound formed in his throat to scream, Titus ripped open the pant leg and thrust the cup onto the wound.

The blood, which had shot up in an arc from the bullet hole in Pinto's flesh and cascaded down his leg, stopped flowing. Pinto closed his eyes as warmth from the cup throbbed throughout his body like a second heartbeat. He gasped as the cells of his bone and muscle began to regenerate with such speed that he could actually feel himself mending.

The two men watched with fascination as the wound healed before their eyes from the inside out. First the opening knit together, extruding white cells. Then the top scabbed over, lightened, and then faded away, leaving skin that was at first pink, and then, a moment later, indistinguishable from the rest of the leg. Hairs grew out of it. The healing was complete in less than thirty seconds.

Pinto looked over to Titus with a look of childlike gratitude. "That cup . . ."

"It can keep you alive forever," Titus said. Then he stood up, wiped the rain and some splashed blood from the barrel of the gun, and shot Pinto in the heart.

Pinto tried to raise his hand, as if to grasp the cup again, but Titus shook his head. "This is where we part ways, friend," he said.

He left Pinto in the mud as he went inside to distribute the rest of the plastic eggs. There were seven of them. After they were detonated, it would not matter a whit where any of the bodies had been placed. Nothing would be left of them, anyway.

STORMWALKER

G
wen was becoming worried
about her mother.

Ginger had probably left with "Bob," or whatever this latest stud's name was, but it wasn't like her to stay out so late on a weekday. Of course, she had been particularly enamored of this one, apparently—she'd even tried to make everyone believe that he was Gwen's father! Leave it to old mom to find a new twist on the classic shotgun wedding. The marry-me-'cause-I-was-pregnant-seventeen-years-ago ploy.

Naturally, Ginger hadn't bothered to remove the rapidly decaying Finny from the fishbowl before going on her joy ride. She'd left that for Gwen, the same way she'd left the vacuuming and the laundry and the dirty dishes from last night.

Damn her, Gwen thought, tossing on her pillow. She wasn't going to waste another minute worrying. So what if her face was too black and blue for her to go to work in the morning? It was time little Ginger grew up, maybe stopped going to bed with men five minutes after meeting them.

Oh, that's right, this one was different. She'd known old Bob for years, isn't that what she said? It was probably more like the time it took to drink a bottle of beer. The nerve of her, saying that he was Gwen's father!

Gwen punched her pillow. That went beyond shallow. Didn't it ever occur to her that her daughter might not like being known as the town bastard, that maybe a father was a special thing that was worth more than a line on a date?

The worst thing was that the guy sort of did look like her. For a moment, Gwen had actually believed it might be the truth. She had been angry about it at first, just the sheer surprise of it all, but it had been exciting, too. He had seemed pretty bright, even though he'd killed their fish. He might have been an okay father.

But then, after she'd had a chance to think about it and clear her head, Gwen realized that it was just another stupid thing her mother was saying. Another date, another pain-in-the-butt man who'd send her back to the battered women's shelter sooner or later.

"Damn you!" Gwen shouted, and realized that she was crying.

She made herself calm down and checked the clock. Nearly two in the morning. Outside, flashes of lightning illuminated the heavy rain. Thunder boomed so loudly that it seemed to rock the whole house.

The battered women's shelter was a long walk from their house: through the park, and then across Miller's Creek and the Germantown Pike, and then over the big meadow and into Dawning Falls. An hour at least.

"The hell with her," Gwen muttered, squeezing her eyes shut. Besides, Ginger might not even have gone to the shelter. Her car was still in the driveway, so she wasn't driving.

She might have gone to the hospital.

Gwen would call. That was it. She would call around, find out where her mother was. At some motel, probably.

Hi, honey, Ginger would say sleepily. Oh, didn't I leave a note? I'm sorry you had to worry, but I'm having a fine old time.

Gwen got up, looked up the number of the shelter, then picked up the phone.

It was dead. "Oh, hell," she said.

Annoying, but no big surprise. The cul-de-sac where they lived was always losing power of one kind or another. The neighbors would not have phone service, either, not that she would have invited any of those nosy cretins to listen in on her conversation with the shelter.

As she stood in the kitchen, the lights went out. Great, she thought. This makes it perfect. She felt her way for the junk drawer where the flashlight was. That is, where it would be if her mother had not used it and left it lying somewhere else.

She was in luck. The flashlight was in the drawer, and the batteries hadn't died. The first thing the light shone on was Finny's tank. And beside it, Ginger's handbag.

Gwen felt the first stirrings of panic. No woman ever left her house without her bag. Quickly she went into her mother's room and scanned the closet with the flashlight. Ginger had been wearing a red silk robe. It wasn't hanging among her clothes. It wasn't in the hamper, either, or in her dresser. She checked the bathroom. No red robe on the hook.

She wouldn't leave wearing a bathrobe, Gwen thought. Not unless she was running for her life.

Four huge bolts of lightning glowed like spider legs through the window. Then a sudden gust of wind blew through a crack near the bottom, making Gwen's scalp shiver, and she knew.

"Oh, Mom." She sighed. She had to go.

She pulled on a pair of jeans, a Rage Against the Machine T-shirt, and a black oilcloth rain jacket. Then she walked out into the rain.

Oddly, she felt immediately better. Gwen had never feared thunderstorms. It felt good, the coolness of the rain and the icy electricity of the lightning.

She wondered if that was a sign that she was crazy. You were supposed to be afraid of weather—rain, snow, heat, wind. Whatever it was doing outside, most people didn't seem to like it.

Gwen did. She had always felt more at home outdoors in the elements than inside buildings. Even if she were uncomfortable, there was a wildness about the natural world that she loved. She could feel the pull of the moon, she could smell rain coming, taste the metallic tang of lightning storms.

Not that she felt no fear: The unpredictability of storms was part of its appeal. It always felt as if she were in the presence of something far larger than herself and the paltry little dramas that made up her life. In the midst of a storm, she was certain that there was a God.

The first time she had walked the length of the park during a storm, with the black sky lit up by white veins of lightning that looked to her like cackling, shrieking banshees flying overhead, she had been terrified. Gwen had almost decided to swallow her pride and go back home when she saw a group of kids she knew from high school dashing toward the exit with their jackets pulled up over their heads. They were part of the clique, the rich, popular, attractive kids who, of course, only hung out with one another.

As soon as Gwen spotted them, she straightened up, fixed her face into a mask of proud disdain, lifted her chin, and sauntered past, making it clear that she was entering the park as they were running out of it. And after, when she was a short distance away, the popular kids laughed loud enough for her to hear them, but not very convincingly. They knew they were cowards. Gwen felt like the queen of the world.

By the next day, the rumors were already circulating around the school. Gwen did something by herself in the park in the middle of thunderstorms. She was a witch, a punk, a weirdo. She was burying babies as part of some kind of blood cult. She was a vampire. She was crazy.

That had always struck her as funny that she was called crazy for wanting to be a part of nature. It was at odds with her appearance, she supposed, but that was a different matter entirely. She didn't want to look like them, like the kids in her school, like everyone who lived in Dawning Falls. She didn't want them to know her.

And they didn't. That was why they called her crazy, she supposed.

During the first half of her sophomore year, she had been scheduled to see the school psychologist for an hour every Monday. It was part of a county program. The psychologist traveled around to all the schools in the county talking to crazy kids—kids who'd been busted for drugs, kids from alcoholic families, kids in foster homes, that sort of thing. Gwen knew as soon as she found out about the traveling head shrinker that she would be on the list. Kid of the town roundheels, yeah, she'd qualify. And, true to form, the shrink had asked all the predictable questions. Why do you wear all that makeup? Do you mutilate yourself? Which rock groups do you listen to?

A waste of time. Gwen just lied to her, anyway. After a while, the shrink had not even pretended to be interested.

She thrust her hands into the pockets of the oilcloth coat she was wearing. Her hair was plastered against her head, channeling rain into her eyes. She blew it away and kept closer to the trees, where there was at least a little shelter.

Few people ever came to the park, even during the day. Gwen supposed it was because it had no activities—no seesaws for little kids, no pool, no baseball diamond, not even a bench. The park used to be part of the Miller farm, but it had been sold to the township for taxes sometime in the eighties, and had never been developed.

Certainly no one else was around now, she thought as a horizontal bolt of lightning shot across the sky. With some surprise, Gwen noticed that there were no longer any trees above her, which meant that she had walked out of the park and onto the grounds of Miller's Creek. The rain was falling much harder here. Lightning zigzagged around her, making the hair on her arms stand on end, the incipient electricity crawling over her skin in a slow, exploratory burn.

And so it was that she felt, rather than saw or even heard, the explosion that came from the creek. It was a vibration, like an earthquake, that shivered across the bottoms of her feet.

At first she had panicked. The sensation had been vaguely electric, like what she imagined the first intimations of a lightning strike must feel like. Gwen held her breath, certain that she would die. The only question would be how much pain she would feel. Was death by lightning swift and merciful? She'd never read about people who had been executed by electrocution screaming their heads off, so she assumed it would be a fairly painless way to go.

But by the time she had the presence of mind even to think these thoughts, the vibration had passed. And in the distance, through the darkness and the rain, she thought she detected movement.

All of the grass within a hundred yards of the creek had been worn away long ago by the crowds of tourists. Now it was nothing but slick mud. Gwen's shoes were so heavily caked that she felt as if she were standing in blocks of cement. She left gigantic footprints behind her.

Cupping her hand over her eyes like a visor, she squinted into the night. And then, perhaps because of the rain, or a sudden shift in the wind, she heard a
pop
that was like nothing else she had ever heard.

She walked toward the noise until she saw that there indeed had been movement. Near the house that the papers were calling the Sanctuary, two figures appeared to be kneeling in a pile of mud and rubble. As she walked toward them, she heard another
pop
that made her jump.

One of the figures fell over. The other rose and walked swiftly into the house.

There had been some kind of accident, she thought. Beside the house she could see the outline of the Jeep belonging to Mr. Santori, the security guard. Whoever had been outside must have gone in to ask Mr. Santori for help.

She hoped he would be able to do something for them, although she was doubtful. All the volunteers at Miller's Creek liked the old security guard, but it was common knowledge that his mind was slipping. Mr. Santori might not be the best bet in an emergency.

She ran, sweating through the tremendous effort of moving through what was becoming nearly ankle-deep mud, to where a man lay on his back in the midst of a pile of rocks and broken cement. Something had happened to the house—lightning, maybe—and this poor guy had been in the middle of it.

There was blood all over him. It looked black in the dim illumination of her flashlight. Tentatively she reached out her hand to him, thinking she would check for a pulse, but it was obvious that the man was dead. She shivered. She did not want to touch him.

She moved on to the house. Mr. Santori was probably tending to the second man, who had at least managed to walk inside. She looked through the window beside the door. "Mr. Santori," she called, wiping the glass. "Mr.—"

Gwen had raised her hand to knock, but it remained suspended in midair. On the floor were two bodies. One was Mr. Santori. The other was her mother.

Gwen froze in the spot where she stood.
No,
she thought as a low, wavering moan escaped from her lips as if the sound were not connected to her.
No, no, not my mother, not here! This is just something I'm seeing because I'm crazy, because it's dark, because...

Then Titus's face appeared at the window, looking first surprised, and then inexpressibly sad.

The next moments seemed to occur in slow motion: First, his eyes, casting about, behind her, questing, and then, as she backed away (so slowly, so painfully slowly), the window shattering, glass spewing pieces of light into the dark night. A towel wound around Titus's hand loosened and fell to the ground; and something beneath it now, some sort of gun that looked as if it had been made from an erector set, swinging up, then aiming directly at her, steady, holding steady ...

"Oh, God," Gwen whispered. She turned to run, but even then she knew that she could not make it back into the woods in time. As she tumbled outside she heard a third pop, this time behind her, and simultaneously a pressure thudding into the left side of her back, as if someone had pushed her so hard that she was propelled to the ground.

The pain was not instantaneous; it came a moment after the thud, the surprise, the sudden spray of blood, like an aerosol, from her burst lung through her mouth and out from between her lips. After all that, the pain shot through her like a burning pinprick of flame, causing even her feet to kick out wildly.

The door of the house creaked open. Then he was there beside her in what seemed to be no time at all. The horrible pain shooting through her chest one second, and then Titus's face above her the next. But then, she thought, more time must have elapsed. She was on her back, which meant he had turned her over, and he was kneeling beside her.

He was wearing a plastic parka. The hood was pulled over his head, but rain still ran down his face in rivulets. His expression was very concerned.

"Daddy?" she asked.

He looked down at something in his hand. Gwen by this time was seeing only dimly, but it appeared to be a little cup, or a bowl. She did not wonder at all why Titus would be holding such an object. She was at the stage of trauma where all realities were acceptable. An angel walking out of the park would have been every bit as possible to her as the appearance of an ambulance.