Magic Time: Ghostlands by Robert Charles Wilson, Marc Scott Zicree Read Free Book Online Page B

cake in Great Expectations, the symbol of abandonment, and broken promises, and time stood still. Even when she was little it had disquieted her, seemed an anomaly brutishly inserted onto this ordered street of brownstones with their weathered stoops and muted foliage.
    It wasn’t like this every day. Sometimes the lot showed nothing more than blackened timbers and twisted wreckage, smoke curling up and choking the air, the way the house had been after disaster had befallen it on that riotous, murdering night.
    Other times it wasn’t there at all—just the houses adjoining on either side, butted up against one another.
    Lungo himself never made an appearance. But occasionally, his front-porch glider would rock with the slightest motion from the wind, in the shade of his scraggly jacaranda, and his twisted walking stick, like an arthritic, broken finger, would be resting against the rail.
    The realest people here are the ghosts, the Girl thought, and turned onto Columbus.
     
    She caught the sweet liquid sound from far off, way around the corner, like the smell of menthol, and honey on your tongue, and the azure sky at sunset when the stars were just peering through.
    Then the husky, lulling murmur of the saxophone paused in mid-phrase.
    “Well, if it ain’t Anna Pavlova….”
    The blind black man turned his milk-sheened, useless eyes toward her and smiled with that smile that was like sinking into a warm bath. How he could know she was there before she spoke was always a mystery to her, and it felt right.
    He was not young like the third blind man in her dream, nor pale like the other, malign one. His skin was a deep burnished brown, like old, oiled furniture, and when the light hit it just so, it showed a subtlety of gray, like a fine coating of ash.
    “How they treatin’ you today, sweet girl?” Papa Sky asked.
    “Okay,” she replied, and both the question and the answer soothed her, although she couldn’t have said who she thought “they” were.
    “Well, you just hang in there. You got friends in high places. What you wanna hear today?”
    She shrugged, which was a request in itself. Dealer’s choice…and when the dealer was this good, it was all flow.
    Papa Sky put the shaved Leblanc reed of the 1922 Selmer alto sax (this instrument that was almost, but not quite, as old as he was) to his wetted lips, and it was an incantation and supplication in one.
    The glorious sounds poured out, smooth perfection, throaty and soaring and exultant.
    The Girl recognized the tune. The last time he’d played it, the old blind black man (the half cubano as he called himself) had told her it was called “Night and Day.”
    She closed her eyes and let the melody fill her, began to move to it. And this was no longer just going through the motions, nor feigning interest in the arabesque and pas de deux that had once been her universe.
    Night and day, you are the one….
    She gave herself over to the river of harmony, let its cool voice fill every pore, engulf eye socket and fingertip, ankle and neck, liberated into expression and movement.
    The way it had been before, when Luz Herrera had taken the photo (so exactly like the one atop her night table now) of her as Giselle at the March recital in mid-jété, enraptured, effortless.
    Freed from the pull of earth, and its cares.
    Weightless.
    Before weightlessness had become a curse and a shaming, and a constant source of danger…
    But that pang of memory was not for now; if that waking-dream existence lingered in her it was pushed far down and away, like a sliver imbedded and grown over with flesh, like venom lurking in a vein.
    Let it go….
    There was only this moment, this gift, here and real and fine if she just held on to it….
    As she twirled and swayed, inseparable from the tumble of exquisite notes one on another, the image came to her of Nijinsky as the Faun and the Rose, posed with that excruciating, incredible mix of delicacy and power that only he could attain,