Quicksilver(72)

“God spare me from a place like that,” Sparky said.

In the east, a prairie falcon glided in a gyre; whether it might be the same one we had seen before was impossible to say. Panthea’s gaze had shifted from the crest of the slope to the bird. Her dark eyes were silvered by the reflection of a sky so pale blue it was almost white. If she saw the winged predator, she also saw something beyond it, saw into the past and into the heart of Bodie Emmerich, perceived what had been and what might have been.

Her voice softened almost to a whisper. “He was always a little misanthropic, though he didn’t realize it. Most people frustrated and repulsed him, and on some deep level he repulsed himself. He meant to undertake a noble enterprise, create a retreat that was a fountain of intellectual stimulation but also a garden of earthly delights. However, those he brought into his inner circle were for the most part there because of his wealth, hangers-on and leeches whom he mistook for true friends—because he himself was incapable of genuine friendship. He didn’t know himself at all, his deepest, truest desires. He thinks that intellectually and morally he has progressed beyond all the negative influences that shaped humanity’s troubled past, thinks he’s beyond error and excuse and superstition, when in fact he’s the embodiment of humanity’s darkest impulses.”

Her stage whisper mesmerized me, so that I startled when she stopped talking. She pivoted away from us and went to the back of the Mercury Mountaineer.

When we joined her at the liftgate, she opened her ammunition case and took from it spare magazines for her gun and for mine.

“What are we walking into?” I asked, as I pocketed the spare.

“Nothing more than the very thing we were born to confront,” Panthea said. She was carrying her pistol in her open purse, and she advised Bridget to do the same. “Quinn, Sparky, untuck your shirts and conceal your guns as best you can. If we encounter someone and we don’t appear to be armed, there’s at least a chance we can fake them out. Deceit is preferable to bullets.”

“Last night,” I reminded her, “when you spoke of this place, you said you didn’t want to die here.”

“I don’t want it. But everyone dies somewhere. And we have only two choices.”

I said, “We can go down there now or not go right away.”

“That isn’t the choice properly expressed,” Panthea said. “We can go down there and put an end to him, free those he oppresses, before one more rape, before one more murder—or not go down there, and by not going become in time like the Nihilim.”

Sparky spoke up to explain if not defend me. “The boy means that he thinks this situation should be analyzed, a plan developed, strategy and tactics.”

Panthea was unmoved. “Our strategy is righteousness. Our tactics are surprise and relentless action.”

Still explaining me, Sparky said, “The boy has matured a lot since he crashed in on us two days ago. But he’s still an innocent soul. He doesn’t quite realize how much he cherishes that innocence, how much he hopes to hold fast to it.”

I was mortified to hear Sparky justify me to Panthea. I looked at Bridget and saw that she regarded me with an intensity that was humbling to behold, regarded me with love, I thought, but also with a keen eye of assessment.

“It’s not that he’s a coward,” Sparky continued. “He isn’t. He killed those two ISA agents who seemed certain to kill me and take Bridget only God knows where. But he killed them with a car, before he quite realized what was happening, killed one in self-defense and the other half by accident. If it comes to gunplay and worse—and it will, I speak from some experience—then he’ll have to squeeze the trigger with cold intent. That’ll be the end of whatever innocence he hoped not to forfeit, and he knows it.”

To my surprise, he’d expressed what I felt but didn’t know I felt, a sadness arising from the necessity of soon having to admit that I was fully of this beautiful but dark world no matter by what strange means I had been brought into it, that I was as vulnerable to corruption and as capable of evil as anyone. I, like everyone, would conduct my life on a high wire in the circus of this world, trying my best to retain at least a thin, bright filament of the incandescent innocence of childhood, always aware that I might not be the same person when I reached the far platform, and in fact might be someone I didn’t like. The best friend I’d ever had, Litton Ormond, died while still an innocent, little if at all corrupted by any acts of his own. But even if I could have continued living for decades in my studio apartment, writing sweet human-interest stories for a regional magazine, eating at Beane’s Diner, watching favorite movies again and again on my days off, taking my dry cleaning to Dirty Harry Clean Now, and yearning chastely for a romance with Sharona Shimski, philatelist and granddaughter of Julius, I couldn’t hold fast to the virtues of childhood and remain a fair-hearted boy forever. Considering what I would have to do at the Oasis and in places like it yet unknown, if I were eventually to encounter Litton Ormond in a life beyond this one, he would never recognize me by my unstained soul. I would be profoundly stained. I might even have changed so much that I had become a stranger to him, which seemed to be a terrible thing.

Panthea poked my chest with a finger, as if aware that I needed to be refocused by an insistent prodding. “Does Frodo mean anything to you?”

“The Lord of the Rings. I loved those books.”