The Library at Mount Char Part 48

"Oh, you've got a guy all picked out?"

"I do. Actually, it's a girl. It took me a long while to find the right person. Now it's just a question of getting her trained." Carolyn didn't remember noticing at the time, didn't remember any of this, but Adam Black was looking directly at her as he spoke. Something about the look in his eyes stirred her mom's maternal instincts and she put her arm around Carolyn's shoulder. It would be the last time they ever touched.

Now, today, Carolyn sat alone in the heart of the Library with her jaw hanging open. Successor? Picked out? Surely he can't mean...

"Who's the lucky gal?" Carolyn's mom asked, ribbing her husband. Feminist issues were a source of mild friction in the marriage.

"Her name's Carolyn. She's a niece of mine-well, sort of. She's a pretty distant relation, actually. I see a lot of me in her, though."

"Oh?" her father said. "Weird coincidence. That's our daughter's name."

"You don't say." Adam Black rooted around in the grill with a spatula, flipping ribs.

Her father took a swig of his beer. "So what's the training process involve, exactly?"

"Actually, if you don't mind, I'd rather not get into too much detail. Trade secret and all that."

"Oh? Yeah. Sure, no problem, I understand." He obviously didn't.

"I can say, though, that the toughest part about it is going to be getting through it with her heart intact." Seeing the look on Mom's face, he added, "Figuratively, I mean."

"Tough business?"

"Oh yeah. Some of the compet.i.tion are real monsters."

Her dad interrupted. "Really? What exactly are-"

Adam Black let the interruption slide, but a little iron crept into his voice. "I'm not worried about that, though. She's like me. She'll do whatever's necessary-after I get her attention." He smiled, flipped a burger. His eyes blazed.

Mom gave a nervous smile. Dad, oblivious, sipped at his beer.

"The tricky part will come later-after she's won. When I was young, the war was everything to me." Father's gaze burned into her. "In the service of my will, I emptied myself. It was long and long before I understood what I had lost, and by then it was gone forever." He shrugged. "Perhaps she will be wiser." In the ancient, dusty recesses of her memory, he tipped her a wink. Now, today, Carolyn felt like fainting.

Her mom's eyes narrowed. She hadn't seen the wink, but this last exchange had pushed some mothery needle into the red. "Well," she said, "I guess we better get going."

"But I-" her dad said.

"We don't want to take up too much of Mr. Black's time, dear." Her tone had a distinct chill to it.

"Oh. Um, right." He smiled at Adam Black. "Well, thanks for the beer. You going to come down and join us? Maybe play some volleyball?"

Adam Black smiled. "I'll be along in just a minute. I want to get a good char on this pork first."

Carolyn's parents exchanged a look. "OK," said her dad. "See you later." He took Carolyn by the hand and they set off down the hill.

III.

In those days Garrison Oaks had a common area, a sort of park, in the spot that was the lake today. The houses of the neighborhood ringed it, which gave everyone the illusion of a three-acre backyard. The park was full of people, adults sitting on the picnic benches drinking c.o.ke or Sprite out of green gla.s.s bottles or smoking Tareytons. Children swarmed over the swing set and the wooden jungle gym. Adam Black's house stood on the highest hill in the neighborhood, so from there Carolyn, holding her dad's hand, had to pick her way down a moderately steep slope to get to the park. Her father's grip was gentle but not un-tight. At least once he saved her from a fall. When they reached the bottom of the hill she shook his hand off for the last time.

"Look, Dad, there's Steve!" She waved. "Hi, Steve!" Steve was a bit older than her. He's eleven, she thought, or maybe twelve. He was playing tag with a herd of other kids.

There was David, reaching down to help a younger child who had fallen in the gra.s.s. "You OK, Mike?" David said. His voice was kind. At the sound of it the younger boy, who had seemed on the verge of tears, got to his feet and smiled. David smiled back, then tagged him and said, "You're it!" They ran off together, laughing.

Margaret was there as well, she saw. She seemed a bit older than the rest-nine or ten, perhaps? She was jumping her way across a hopscotch grid laid out on the basketball court in yellow chalk. Her pigtails flopped in the suns.h.i.+ne as she hopped. Her skin glowed from the exertion, pink and alive.

"Hi, Carolyn!" said Steve.

Something inside her jumped at the sound of his voice. In those days Steve lived across the street from her. Our parents were friends. Sometimes we all ate dinner together. I thought he was "cute." Once, she remembered, she had taken a crayon and written his name and hers together on pink construction paper and then encased the two names with a heart. She never told anyone this.

Her father looked down at her, bemused and perhaps just a tad apprehensive. He waved at Steve. "Hi."

Steve waved back. "Hi, Mr. Sopaski!"

"Daddy, can I go play with Steve?"

"Oh, honey, Steve doesn't want-"

"It's fine, sir," Steve said, and Carolyn's eight-year-old heart soared. "Wanna go over to Scabby Flats and shoot a few?"

"Sure!" Carolyn said.

"Go where?" said her dad.

"The basketball court," she said. "That's just what we call it." She and Steve had made-up names for a bunch of stuff in the neighborhood. The basketball court, paved with a mixture of black asphalt and rough gravel, was Scabby Flats. In her room there was a map, hand-drawn in crayon, with these and other names. The woods at the end of the road were Missing Muttland. The stream in the woods was Cat Splash Creek after an amusing accident. And so on.

"Oh," her dad said. "Right. Well...you guys have fun."

They walked together over to the basketball court. Steve bounced a ball as they walked.

"How are you?" she asked, a little apprehensively. She hadn't seen him in months. The day after school ended, Steve's dad had been in a car accident. Mr. Hodgson was in the hospital for a week, and then he died. Steve and his mom had spent the summer with his grandparents in Wisconsin.

"I'm OK. It's good to be back." He bounced the ball on the asphalt. "Good old Scabby Flats."

He didn't sound OK. Carolyn didn't blame him. Having her dad die was about the worst thing she could imagine. When she tried to picture something similar happening to her it felt like a bottomless hole opened up in her mind. "Really?"

"Yeah. I mean, it sucks. But you adjust."

She looked up at him, awed. To Carolyn, eight years old, that one sentence seemed to contain all that might ever be known of courage. "You do?"

He nodded.

"How?"

"You just do. You can adjust to anything if you don't give up." He smiled wanly. "That's what my dad used to say, anyway."

"Oh."

"Hey, do you mind if we talk about something else?"

"Sure." She tried to think of something to say, but anything that might have come was swallowed by the bottomless hole. After a long pause, she said, "Like what?" in a small voice.

Steve chuckled. "What have you been reading?"

Steve was the only kid in the neighborhood who was as bookish as she was. They didn't read much of the same stuff-he liked s.p.a.ces.h.i.+ps and superheroes; she was more into animal stories and Beverly Cleary-but they both enjoyed talking about what they'd read, and every so often there was some overlap. "A Wrinkle in Time," she said. "Have you read it?"

"Yeah! It was really good. Did you know there's another one after that?"

"What, like with the same characters?"

"Pretty much, yeah. I'll bring it if you want."

"Thanks!"

"Sure," he said, reaching into his pocket. "But meantime, I brought you this one. I think you'll like it."

She examined the cover. "Black Beauty. It's the one about the horse, right?"

"Yeah."

"Is it sad? Margaret said it was sad."

"A little. Well, sort of. At the end-"

"Don't tell me!"

"Sorry." Steve raised the ball to shoot, then froze and c.o.c.ked his head, listening. "Do you hear that?"

"Hear what? I don't-" She broke off then, because she did hear it, a whistling in the sky that grew louder, an approaching sound. She looked up and saw a long, thin, arch-shaped contrail. When she first saw it, it was very high in the sky, but it drew closer as she watched, then closer still.

"I think it's coming towards us," Steve said.

She saw that he was right, and for some reason that made her afraid. She reached out to take his hand and- ...everything...

...stopped...

I have wrought the Crafte of alshaq shabboleth, Carolyn thought now, which maketh the slow things swifte. To the children it seemed as if the world had frozen in place. She saw her dad talking to Mr. Craig from down the street. Dad's mouth was frozen open, midsentence. Mr. Craig was blowing out a puff of cigarette smoke. It hung in the air, motionless.

The leading point of the contrail was frozen above them. It hovered motionless about a hundred feet over their heads. Well, not quite motionless. As she watched, it moved down an inch or so, then another.

Her young eyes saw what was coming for them. She thought at first it was a s.p.a.ce capsule, like the kind she had seen on TV. But as she examined it a bit closer, she realized that wasn't right. It was too small, for one thing, too small to hold a man. And there were no windows. But it was shaped a bit like a s.p.a.ce capsule, a plain cone of metal. It had an American flag and some writing on the side. USAF-11807-A1. Below that, hand-painted in bright red, was a smiley face and the words "Hi 'Adam'!"

She remembered thinking, They sent it for him. It's for Adam Black. But what is it? She knew now. David explained it to her some years later. "It's called a Pers.h.i.+ng missile," he said. "It's a weapon. It holds a lot of things called 'kilotons.' Mostly it's for blowing up cities. The Americans thought it might be strong enough to kill Father."

At the time, though, Carolyn had no idea what she was looking at-fireworks, perhaps?-but, whatever sort of show this was, she thought it was rather pretty. She remembered how a small crack had appeared in the thing hovering over their heads, how it glowed inside as if it were an egg about to hatch something magical.

She looked at Steve. He was saying something, or his lips were moving at any rate, but she could hear nothing. We were too fast, she realized now. The alshaq shabboleth made us too fast for sound.

The crack grew as she watched. The light inside spilled out like the sunrise breaking over the mountains. It ate away the metal on which the letters USA were written.

Steve clapped his hands over his ears and looked up the hill. A moment later she heard it too. The inside of her head rang with the voice of Adam Black. No, Carolyn thought. He's not Adam Black anymore. He's Father now.

"Those of you who would live may take shelter behind me," he said, not in the mild and amused old-man tones he had affected for her dad, but in his true voice, the voice that cracked mountains and called light out of darkness. It rolled through the children's minds like thunder.

At the sound of it Carolyn moved instinctively toward Steve for protection. That was when she noticed that something was different. When she moved, the parts of her skin that were exposed to the air felt hot, like the time she had held her hand over the outflow nozzle on a hair dryer and burned her fingers.

Now, today, she understood what was happening. Friction, she thought. Friction with the air. Under the influence of the alshaq their speed was such that even the air burned.

At the time, though, she knew only pain. She and Steve gaped at each other in soundless terror. Fifty meters over their heads a small bright sun was flaring into life.

She cried out to her dad, lips moving soundlessly. She took a step toward him, feeling that strange warmth on her cheeks again as she moved. Her dad was still as a statue, the beer Adam Black had given him held to his mouth.

He was directly under the fireball.

Later, when she learned to make the alshaq shabboleth for herself she understood why it worked on her but not him. The effects of the alshaq are felt first by the dead, then by the young, and last by the old. Her father was beyond help. Even today she could think of nothing that might have saved him.

She herself was in only slightly less danger, although she didn't realize it yet.

Steve figured it out, though. He shook her shoulder and pointed at the fireball overhead, eyes wide. Then he pointed at Adam Black-Father-waiting for them on the hillside.

Carolyn looked up at the ball of fire in the sky. It was growing. She nodded understanding and she and Steve set out toward the hill.

The real problem became apparent to them immediately. They set out together at a slow jog. She stopped after only two steps with a soundless cry.

Steve was gritting his teeth, but he did not cry out. He looked up in the sky. She followed his gaze. If the fire doesn't stop getting bigger, it could swallow us up.

She could see from his face that Steve understood this as well. His face was very red, and his hair was smoking a little. He looked back at her, eyes wide with fear and pain, then took a half-step forward, moving slow and languorous in air that had turned cruel.

She imitated him. When she moved in this way it was still warm, but not so hot as it had been when she ran, certainly not so hot that she cried out.

On the crest of the hill Father watched this. He said nothing.

Together they inched their way toward the hill. The other children had been affected by the call of alshaq in the same way, and were dealing with the same problems. Some of them had frozen with terror, or fallen to their knees weeping. A skinny boy about age eight panicked. His name is Jimmy, she remembered. He's not very bright. Jimmy took off running toward his mother-actually running, not just the light jog she had tried. After a few steps his skin blistered. He screamed, but apparently it didn't occur to him to stop. After three more steps his s.h.i.+rt was in flames. She looked away then.

She and Steve moved as quickly as they could without pain, but that wasn't very fast. They had a lead on the expanding ball of superheated plasma behind them, but it wasn't a large lead.

Some of the others were luckier. David and Michael's impromptu game of tag had carried them to the base of the hill. She thought they would reach safety well before the fireball reached them. She and Steve, on the other hand, had started out directly under the missile. They might arrive quickly enough to take Adam Black up on his promise of safety, but then again they might not.

The ball of light grew quickly, and it was gaining on them. By the time they reached the base of the hill it had touched the ground. There it claimed another victim, a sixteen-year-old girl who had started in a reasonably good position but, because of her age, had been a bit late to hear the call of alshaq. She was about to become the first person who Carolyn ever saw die. As the light drew near her skin boiled away. Her eyes widened in agony; her mouth opened in a silent scream.

It was this moment that would haunt Carolyn's nightmares in years to come. She notched up her speed a little bit, then a little more, her terror overriding the pain.