End Time (63 page)

“Magic rabbits,” Cheryl said, completely dumbfounded.

“Wouldn't mind carrying one of them around in my back pocket for good luck,” Beatrice agreed.

Very quietly, the large woman stroked Peaches' head, trying to digest what they had just witnessed and not really coming up with an answer. Her game leg still throbbed, and the pinpricks behind her ears felt like an angry burr, but the dog's head under her hand seemed to have a calming, peaceful effect. Beatrice felt a subtle change in everything. A kind of hopefulness she hadn't felt since … since forever.

The wind shifted, a season turned, tipping the balance of the world. The great descent finally arrested, and now matters stood at equilibrium—a great pause—now, they would either crawl out of the abyss, or slide the rest of the way down. When Big Bea looked at her lady copper friend, she smiled a little. “I'm glad
we both
saw this, Gorgeous.”

Cheryl felt it too, as if a great weight had lifted. “I don't think I'll ever get used to that nickname, but you just keep on. Good for a girl to hear it every so often.”

The sun faded from the morning; wind from the north brought the scent of snow. Cheryl, Beatrice, and the dogs returned from their weird interlude to find Guy and Lauren sitting on the front steps of the pretty gabled house, their bug gear folded like laundry, neatly at their feet.

A young lady sat between them.

The girl wore a blue dress with puffed sleeves and a white starched smock, at least two petticoats under her dress; then tights, and high-button shoes. In addition, she wore a bright green quilted down ski jacket over her shoulders. Sort of like a child extra in
Hello, Dolly!
waiting to go onstage—an odd mélange of old and new. She sat on the front steps, her knees pressed together, face creased in concentration; the diary with the bright pink lock sat open on her lap. She held a dark-colored pencil in her fingers and pressed it into the book, drawing something, drawing very hard, face scrunched as she worked the difficult lines.

“You guys see the rabbits?” Cheryl wondered.

Guy and Lauren shook their heads no. Corky and Peaches wagged themselves inside out, rushed over to the little girl, and began licking her face. She laughed for a moment, but pushed them away.
No, no! Stop it!
Then going back to drawing in her Horse Friends diary.

“I'm Cheryl. What's your name? Can I see what you're drawing?” How had she missed the girl sitting in the big Honda? Maybe the tinted glass? “Were you sitting in the back and I just didn't see you?”

The young lady glanced up, smiled briefly, and then covered the page with her arm, frowning with concentration.
Very private.

“Her name's Alice,” Lauren tried awkwardly.

Suddenly Lauren felt the need for some kind of explanation—after all, the girl had indeed ridden with them. She looked to Guy, but he shrugged. If somebody asked something as simple as where she came from, what do you say?
Oh, 1855. We think she's my great-great auntie-granny.
Good luck with that. She glanced crossly at her husband, as if to say,
You got a better explanation?
Guy chuckled, rose from the steps, and went toward the gabled house, taking the two dogs with him.
All yours, Sweety.
Worse than useless.

Lauren swallowed hard, thinking of the right reply.

“She's uh … she lives near us in Fairfield,” Lauren said finally. Guy paused at the front door, impressed.
Not bad, Darling
.

Inside the house, the nice hospital orderly named Mr. Washington lay stretched out on the parlor couch, a pillow under his head. Eleanor found an afghan in one of the patient's rooms and tucked the blanket under his legs to keep him warm. His dark skin had gone gray, and he shivered. Eleanor poured him some pink Pepto-Bismol in a teacup while still clutching Janet's ashes. “This is for now. Do you think you can get it down?”

Mr. Washington made a face; he would try.

Everyone from the porch came inside. Cheryl, Bea, and Lauren stood awkwardly around the parlor. Mr. Washington smiled wanly and waved hi to the newcomers. For a few moments, no one said anything, as if embarrassed. A dead woman sat quietly in an armchair near the coffee table, making the parlor seem slightly overcrowded.

The dead lady had been working on one of those M. C. Escher puzzles: a busy little scene of stairs and segmented worms crawling up and down. Mr. Washington had thrown a sheet over her like covered furniture. Dots of blood bled through in patches. The poor woman in the chair seemed to have scratched herself to death. A hanging forearm showed her skin in tatters, the lady's nails broken. Mr. Washington breathed deep. “There's another woman upstairs with her lung coughed out.”

“Let's take care of this one first,” Billy said quietly to Guy.

Guy nodded. “Why don't we just carry her outside in the chair, as is?” Billy offered Guy latex gloves from a box in his first-aid kit, which helped some, but they had trouble wresting the woman and the chair onto the porch without getting blood all over. The lady had really soaked the thing.

“Where are you taking Kay?” Eleanor asked adamantly, barely containing her agitation—her husband Bhakti, her best friend Kay, her daughter Janet—all gone. She pensively cradled the Nambe urn, as though wondering how a thing like a human body got into such a small vessel.

“Just outside for now, Eleanor,” Guy reassured her. “We'll bury her properly later.”

Outside, young Alice still sat on the porch steps working the drawing in her plastic Horse Friends diary. The young lady glanced at the two dead bodies nearby and didn't even blink. Dead bodies,
who cares?

Only the drawing on the diary page mattered.

Lauren came out on the porch. How to explain their little time traveler unruffled by dead bodies, diligently scribbling away?
Well, she's seen worse,
Lauren figured; sitting cross-legged for her family's cyanotype, Alice's dead parents dressed in their Sunday best, hands clasped together with a black ribbon while the child cradled her dolls. Maybe now they could find out what sister Eleanor remembered about Great-Auntie Whitcomb, or Great-Granny Whitcomb. Lauren vaguely recalled some family legend about a little Whitcomb girl disappearing and reappearing. Some hushed-up tale.

Alice looked up and smiled. A nice smile; you could tell she liked Lauren.

“Why don't you draw inside, sweetheart. It's warmer. C'mon.”

The sun had vanished, the sky now leaden and overcast. Large flakes of fluffy snow began to fall, settling on the carpet of red maple leaves. Along the edges of the wide lawn, faces appeared in the gorse bushes and in the long grass, dozens of them—here, there, everywhere. Tiny faces with twitching noses and long ears. Rabbit faces.

 

35

Room 3327

Only a few short hours earlier, in the dead of night, while the gaunt man indulged fantasies of rebreeding the world in his own image, the Piper's children were getting ready to leave the bunny hutch. Lila and Little Maria tugged on their parkas, then hoisted their packs which were stuffed with extra socks and long johns. The Kid dawdled in front of the Beatrix Potter mural. The two mice in their little burrow stared back at him with flat black eyes, now just pictures on a wall.

Grimly, Kid wrapped his cloak of anger around himself and the two girls. No souls for sale—not for Dalekto, lobster, or Nesselrode pie. Mr. P. wasn't God. At the far end of the apartment Kid could feel the tall man's mind occupied with great plans, busy-busy-busy, thinking great thoughts in the wood-lined study; first gloating over how to use the girls, then crippling the troopers downstairs with hysterical blindness. Mr. P. was too busy to notice their escape.

Only moments to get away.
Make them count. Do it now.

The three youngsters sneaked into the hall by the emergency stairs, quietly shutting the back door of the apartment. One of the stricken soldiers looked up at the sound of the shutting door, staring blindly through lifeless eyes. Too terrified even to speak, he gripped a metal stair rail for dear life.

Bhakti's ghost stood in the gloom of the landing under a dim lightbulb—their rescuer finally come to rescue them. The holes in his chest from his recent shooting seemed to glow on their own. A curious effect, as if Bhakti's insides were imbued with an extra radiance, wrapped in the translucent skin of a dead man. The Punjabi scientist flickered in the shadows, pixelating like the grainy images in an old silent movie. Perhaps as the world fell apart, the seen and unseen performed a kind of dance, trading partners and planes of existence, stepping out from the mirror. Perhaps as the world finally unraveled you got to see all the threads of now, forever, and maybe.

Bhakti's inner radiance, his inner glow, seeped from inside him and coalesced as a single glow. More than the aura of his soul, this incandescence seemed to form on its own. A benevolent presence. A guardian light.

“Mr. Singh?” Lila had slipped. No—
Professor
Singh from across the street in Van Horn. Bhakti lowered his dark eyes and put his fingers to his lips:
Shhhhhhh
 …

Silently, the dead man beckoned the youngsters to follow him, slinking around the stricken soldier. The benevolent light hovered at his shoulder.

Quiet as mice, the children tiptoed down another landing, then another, putting as much distance as they could between themselves and the apartment. At last they reached the ground floor and the lobby service door.

“I can see through things.” Maria's small voice was very frightened. “I think Mr. Bhakti and his little glow ball are helping me see through things, Lila. I can feel the men outside, and I can see them.”

“So how do we get out?” Lila whispered.

Little Maria shut her eyes and put her hand against the service door.
How to get out?
Soldiers stood in the lobby with gas masks and guns; this crew wasn't blind yet. But Maria sensed they would be soon. The main elevator reached the ground floor, the doors opened, and the troopers piled in. One of them stabbed the sixth-floor button a couple of times, and the elevator doors whooshed shut. The lobby now empty.

“Let's go, now!” Maria whispered. “While there's no one there!”

The youngsters tiptoed across the marble floor, pausing for a second over Farley the doorman, slumped in a corner. A couple of wire plugs stuck on his neck; he had been tased.

The children slowly pushed out the heavy ironwork door to the street. The deafening sound of falling ice drummed over the awning, battered the parked cars and military vehicles. Icicles were beginning to form on the accordion-wire barricades. A few soldiers still hunkered down in the street in various states of hysterical blindness, weapons pointed in every direction.

Quietly, Bhakti's ghost led the three youngsters out the front entrance; the children hugged the wall, scurrying along from shadow to shadow. Lila noticed the gentle light coalesced around the dead Punjabi scientist leading them on, a pale amber glow in the nighttime city street. Bhakti's guardian glow hovered beside a fire hydrant and beckoned them. The ephemeral glow moved again, a floating fairy light gaining momentum as they approached the south barricade. There was a narrow gap between the building wall and the accordion-wire barricade, maybe just enough to squeeze through.

Now or never.

In half a second, they slipped the gap and ran into the noisy, icy rain. Little Maria fell behind, the slush sloshing into her boots.

“I'll take her,” Kid urged. “She can ride piggyback. Take my pack, Lila.” He shrugged off his JanSport, and Maria climbed up. The pleasing amber glow danced ahead; determinedly they slogged toward it, but the children were not out of the woods yet.

Cohorts of looters emerged out of nowhere, picking storefronts or restaurants clean and scattering back into the city again. Sirens echoed off the concrete canyons, the dark buildings piled high with bulging and broken mounds of plastic garbage. Shattered window glass mixed invisibly with the falling ice, and trash fires burned at every intersection. Ambulances and fire trucks spun their wheels helplessly in the growing slush. Police cruisers came to help, and then were stranded in turn. Clambering over a heap of trash, the youngsters fled the chaos and kept on going.

Dawn came to the city.

The freaky icy rain began to stop for good, pink-and-blue slits parting the clouds.

A forty-block tramp left the youngsters cold to the bone. Clammy sweat soaked their parkas and longies, their boots sopped through, and the gray flat air chilled their lungs. The streets were quiet, no traffic, no plows or shovels scraping the sidewalk. Bhakti and his guardian light finally halted at the entrance of a large old building, the New Yorker Hotel. The pleasant, illuminated Bhakti passed through the hotel revolving doors and vanished. The youngsters paused a moment to glance at the commemorative plaque embedded in the building wall.

HERE DIED, ON JANUARY 7, 1943,

AT THE AGE OF 87—

They didn't finish reading; they were just too damn cold.

Lila, Maria, and the Kid pushed through the hotel doors; the gold-and-silver art deco hotel lobby enveloped them like the grand gallery of a royal audience hall. The hotel doorman, in his greatcoat, was curled up on the long leather couch in his stocking feet, asleep, galoshes on the floor beside him. The youngsters went to the reception desk and dripped onto the marble floor until a groggy bellhop appeared, buttoning his tunic. The fellow brushed a greasy lank off his forehead and measured the ragamuffins wetting his nice clean floor.

“Welcome to the New Yorker Hotel. Do you have a reservation?”

The bellhop chuckled at his own funny, then leered over the marble counter.

“Let me guess. You'll be wanting the Hungarian's room, won't you? Everyone's favorite. The thirty-third floor. Room 3327; it's open. Don't lock yourselves out; our key card coder is on the fritz. We change the sheets twice a week. No credit cards. We're four hundred a night, in advance. I'll be up for it later. And don't bother calling for room service. The noodle shop on the corner may still be open. Otherwise, we have a general scrounge in the Tick Tock Diner around noon, but we're not expecting deliveries today because of the ice storm. So it looks like Jell-O and Saltines and Sanka until we do.”