Gypsies by Robert Charles Wilson
“Late to be out,” the man said.
Michael nodded. “I didn’t plan it this way.”
“Caught in the storm?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You could die walking around in those clothes.”
The man’s accent was odd, Michael thought, like a combination of Dutch and French. The tone was cautious and neutral. Michael said, “Well, you know how it is.” There was no plausible excuse for his clothes.
“From out of town?” the man asked.
“Yes.”
“Going far?”
“Not much farther.”
“Give me an address. I can take you there.”
But he didn’t have an address. He hesitated. “I don’t know the number,” he said, “but I could give you directions.”
“Good enough,” the man said.
They drove in silence for a while. Michael watched as a huge, steaming snow plow passed them in an intersection, blue light whirling on its roof. Overhead wires hummed and clattered in the darkness. The buildings outside were odd, tall structures that looked like the pictures of Tudor houses he had seen in geography books; the ground-level windows were shop displays. This gave way to larger warehouse-style buildings and a few stone or concrete towers with false marble columns and gargoyles leering from the cornices.
Not a good place, Tim had said. But not necessarily a bad place, either. Home, he had said.
But Michael shivered against the cold upholstery and withheld his judgment.
“Left,” he said, following his instinct. “And right. Up here. Maybe a block or two …”
This new street was broader and hemmed in with tall obsidian buildings. Trolley wires were strung overhead. The rumble of the tires on the street suggested there might be cobbles beneath the snow. The growing sense of familiarity both excited and worried Michael. How could he have known which way to come? It was strange. But he had known. The instinct was strong, powerful…
“Here!” he said suddenly.
The car rolled to a stop.
There was a moment of silence, no sound but the snow hissing into the windshield.
The building was huge. There was a stone wall that opened into a courtyard. Engraved above the gate was the stark image of a pyramid and a single, staring eye.
“Government building,” the driver observed.
Finding his way here had been the easy part.
Michael had been awake long after his mother and Laura fell asleep. He was so utterly awake in that San Francisco hotel room that he thought he might never sleep again. His thoughts ran like overheated machinery. He was thinking about Tim.
Thinking about Aunt Laura following Tim back to the Novus Ordo.
He understood what she meant to do. It made sense. She distrusted Tim and she wanted to be sure about what they were getting into. Michael knew she was frightened and it was probably a brave gesture, her offering to go.
But it didn’t make sense. The more Michael thought about it, the less sense it made. If a scouting trip was necessary, why go with Tim—why trust him even that far? He supposed Laura would not have been able to find this place by herself… her talent was not immensely strong and she had only been here once, decades ago, as a child.
But, Michael thought, I can find it. He had felt it already. In a curious way, he had been able to feel it through Tim. Maybe this was how the Gray Man was able to find them: this faint but discernible sense of a road taken, a presence past. It wasn’t something you could put a word on. But he felt it in that hotel room in San Francisco.
There was also the question of physical distance— it was a city most of the way across the continent—but Michael had come to understand that this was not a substantial barrier either, that in the vortex of possibilities distance was as mutable as time. Washington or Tijuana, Paris or Peking: it didn’t really matter.
He stood up in the darkness without waking his mother or Aunt Laura. He dressed in the heaviest clothes he could find. Now, he thought. There was no reason to wait. Laura was planning to leave tomorrow —so Michael would go first, would make her trip unnecessary. Just to have a look, he told himself, just to get a sense of the place. And then come back. Be back before morning. They wouldn’t like it, of course. They wouldn’t approve. But he was the man of the family. The responsibility fell to him.
Half a step sideways, a quarter turn in a direction he couldn’t name. It was almost dismayingly easy. And then he was standing in a dark street up to his ankles in snow, flagging a ride to a building he had never seen, following an imperative so intense that he wondered whether he had ever really had any choice.
The odd thing was that the building was not better defended.
It looked like a fortress, iron gates and guard posts, but the big courtyard was open and deserted. Michael moved self-consciously through the drifting snow, his shadow multiplied by the harsh sodium-vapor lamps, shivering against the cold. He paused once and looked back through the open gateway. The car that had brought him here was still waiting, parked there, the motor cooling, and he thought that was strange. But it didn’t matter. He pressed on toward the main building, a huge slab of stone and brick with random, cell-like windows. Sheets and veils of snow fell all around him. It was like being contained in snow, wrapped up in snow. The cold didn’t feel so bad now.
The instinct or the compulsion he felt had grown very strong. He followed it to the central slab-iron door of this building, which was slightly ajar. And that was odd, too. But Michael didn’t think about it. A gust of wind carried snow down his collar, pushed him forward like a hand. Inside, it seemed to say. All right, Michael thought, that’s where I’m going. That’s where I want to go.
He entered the building.
The corridor was deserted. Half the overhead fluorescents were dark or flickering and a miniature snowdrift had accumulated inside the door. Michael pushed the door closed behind him; the clatter of it echoed down this tiled hallway like a handclap.
He thought, What is this place?
Home, he thought. The word was there in his mind. But not really his own thought: it was Tim’s word. It sounded like Tim’s voice. Or Walker’s.
Michael shook his head and proceeded down the corridor.
The corridor smelled of Lysol and charred insulation. Some of these doors were open and some were not; the open ones revealed dark, windowless offices with gray metal desks. Periodically the corridor would turn left or right or fork in two or three different directions. There were no numbers and no helpful signs. Michael walked on regardless now, feeling the imperative inside him, following it, circling closer and closer to the heart of the building—as if it had an actual warm, beating heart—to whatever was waiting for him there.
It occurred to him that he ought to be scared.
Snow had melted into his clothes. His hair was cold and wet against his neck. His feet were numb. His sneakers made wet, rubbery sounds with every step. I should be scared, he thought, because none of it was the way it should be. Something was obviously wrong and he was the center of it; this empty building existed, in some sense, entirely for his benefit.
But there was no question of stopping or turning back. He could not even contain the thought; it didn’t cross his mind. And that should have frightened him more than anything else—but in place of the fear there was only a faint disquiet. Just the outline of fear: as if the fear had been buried, as if the snow had covered it up.
He closed his eyes and walked with uttermost confidence. He came to a stairwell and followed it down, he could not say how far, but the air was warmer when he stopped. It was a hot, stale, enclosed air; it drew the moisture out of his clothes and it constricted his chest.
He arrived at a room. The room possessed a big steel door, but the door eased silently open at Micheal’s touch.
He stepped inside.
The room contained one wooden chair; otherwise it was empty. A bank of lights glared down from overhead. Michael was alone in the room. He had arriv
But his sense of direction evaporated suddenly, and with it the inhibition that had locked in his fear. Suddenly he was scared, badly scared, profoundly scared. It was like waking up from a nightmare. He felt a panic boiling up in him. What was he doing here? What was this place?
He turned back toward the door but discovered with a dawning horror that he could not move in that direction. He tried but simply could not; his legs refused to function; he couldn’t lift his feet. He could not even lean toward the door; could not make himself fall in that direction.
He felt the way a person trapped in a collapsed building must feel: impotent and utterly enclosed. He wanted to scream for help but was afraid of the attention he might attract. But then, he must already have attracted attention. Why else was he here, unless somebody wanted him here?
There was a motion in the doorway and Michael shrank back into the wooden chair. He gripped the mitered edge of it and stared wild-eyed into the unattainable corridor.
A man stepped into the room with him.
It was the man from the car—the man who had driven him here.
The man stepped closer. He smiled. He seemed genuinely happy, and that was terrible in itself—he just radiated happiness.
“Hello, Michael,” he said. “My name is Carl Neumann.”
Chapter Twenty
“Maybe,” Laura said, “he went out for a walk.”
Which was at least plausible. It was obvious from the state of his open suitcase that Michael had dressed before he left. So, Karen thought, yes, that was a possibility. He could have slipped out sometime after dawn. Maybe he would be back.
It was a reassuring idea and at the end of a quarter hour she had almost convinced herself of it, at which point she became aware that the hotel room door was still locked and, worse, still chained—from the inside.
So he had not left the room after all. Not in this world.
Odd that it was possible to be calm at this revelation. She pointed out the chain lock to Laura, who said, “Goddamn,” and punched out a flurry of numbers on the telephone. It was the number Tim had left. “Room 251,” Laura said tightly, and then, after a long pause, “Fauve—Timothy Fauve… He what? Oh, Christ… No. No, that’s all right. Thank you.”
The receiver rattled down.
“He’s gone,” Karen interpreted.
“Checked out this morning. Damn!”
So Michael was gone and Timmy was gone.
They have him now, she thought. He was the one they wanted and they have him now. That’s what this means.
But Michael had only been gone a few hours at most. It was hardly any time. She wanted to reach back for him … unwind the clock until he was here in the room and she could grab him and hold him, hold him so hard that no one could take him away.
“One time,” Karen said, “when Michael was just two years old—it was a couple of days after his birthday—I had him in a stroller and I was doing some shopping. We were downtown. It was almost Christmas; the stores were crowded. I was bending over a shelf and my back was to him. I was looking for that scented soap I used to send Mama every year—she loved that soap so much—but they didn’t have it, so I was picking through the merchandise. It was like, well, there must be just one, it must be behind something. So I spent a lot of time rooting around, with these crowds just pushing past me. And they still didn’t have what I wanted. So finally I stood up and I looked for the stroller. But it was gone. Gone with Michael in it. And I didn’t panic. I just went cold. It was like the bottom had gone out of everything. I was dizzy but I was very systematic. I called out for him. I asked people, ‘Did you see a stroller—a yellow flowered stroller?’ And I worked my way down the aisle.
And then I saw it. It was like radar—I picked out that stroller in the crowd. It was way off down by the escalators. My heart started to beat hard. I ran over there. I pushed people out of the way—I didn’t care. It was like the hundred-yard dash.
“And when I got there it was just this very confused old woman pushing Michael around. She had spotted the stroller and grabbed hold of it. She thought she was back in 1925 or something. I pried her hands off the push bar and she just looked at me, and there was such confusion and, I guess, grief in that look, I couldn’t be angry. Five seconds earlier I was ready to tear her apart. But I just said, ‘I’ll take care of him now,’ and she said, ‘Oh. Well, all right. Thank you,’ and went wandering down the escalator.
“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 peerin
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.”