Gypsies

But there were none. No doors or windows or angles here. Only the mirrors, like wells, drawing her down. She felt a surge of claustrophobic terror and saw the mirror-woman staring back at her wide-eyed, mouth opening in a scream; realizing all at once that she was trapped, that there was no way out and nobody here but herself.

3

Cardinal Palestrina joined Carl Neuma

The sense of excitement in the room was palpable. It showed, especially, in Neuma

Palestrina said, “The boy is here already?”

“We’ve had him in containment for hours.” Neuma

“When can we see him?”

“Soon. We’re waiting here until everything is in place. We have spells and geases twenty years in the making—and they’re all coming to a peak, right here, right now. God, you can feel it in the air.”

Cardinal Palestrina imagined he could. The air smelled odd, as if it had been singed in some vast, hot machine.

Neuma

The seers—the three dwarfish beings, who from the knotted closeness of their features must have been homunculi—sat staring into space. There was one for each of the three, Neuma

The homunculus gri

Palestrina said to Neuma

“We’re certain of it. This building is a cage—it’s been designed that way. Since that original escape we’ve contemplated the problem and designed what we believe is an impenetrable barrier. You understand, not a physical barrier.”

“Prison magic,” Palestrina said.

“Exactly.”

“Can you calculate that so precisely?” “We believe so.”

“It’s been said—please don’t take this the wrong way—the Americans have a genius for the profane sciences.”

Neuma

Cardinal Palestrina drew a second cup of coffee from the urn in the corner. Too much would aggravate his stomach, but he felt he needed the alertness. So much was happening here.

Good things, presumably. After all, Palestrina thought, Neuma

But it was impossible to look at these gri

He found Neuma

Neuma

These words, Palestrina thought. These cool, blank, terrifying words. Revised! “You mean surgery.”

“It’s delicate, obviously, but we’re more sophisticated than we were when we intervened with Walker. This is a faculty of the imagination we’re trying to capture. It’s like some fabulous rare butterfly. The trick is to contain it without killing or crippling it. Fortunately there are certain neural functions that can be localized, at least generally. With the right scalpel in the right place you can sever the will from the imagination, cauterize the one without destroying the other. We can make them work for us.”

“But it’s the boy you need… not the others.”

Neuma

“Tell me the truth.”

Palestrina was surprised by the tenor of authority in his own voice.

Neuma

“You’ll operate on them—you’ll fine-tune your surgical procedures.” (He thought, I know these words, too.) “You’ll mutilate them and then use them or kill them, as it suits you.”

Neuma

Cruelty and guilt, Palestrina thought. It amounted to Neuma

The door opened then; Walker entered. Cardinal Palestrina flinched away from the man. Walker wore his customary gray clothing and gray slouch hat and was looking at Neuma

Neuma

The homunculi gri

4

Karen was not aware that she had lost her sister, or at least the awareness was not enough to make her hesitate. Her mind was fixed on Michael.

She had seen him.

It happened not very long after they entered this building. The silence of these long stony corridors had been oppressive and she was reluctant to break it; there was only the sound of her footsteps against the ugly green tile… and Laura’s, until those faded. She moved steadily and purposefully, although she had never been here before, as if she possessed an instinct of direction, a cellular map. Michael was here somewhere. She knew it; his presence pervaded the building; the air was full of him. Somewhere very near now.

And then she saw him. She saw him at the end of this corridor, where it branched in an unequal Y to the right and to the left. Seeing him, she gasped and faltered. He looked oddly far away, an image through the wrong end of a telescope. But it was Michael. There was no mistaking his lanky figure, his untucked shirt and his baseball cap. He looked toward her but seemed not to recognize her; and then—agonizingly —he was gone again, retreating to the left.

Karen stumbled, then picked herself up and began to run.

She remembered the story she had told her sister, the old woman wheeling Michael away in his stroller and how she had chased after her. It should have been the same, she thought, this ru

The corridor twisted again and she followed it in a long downward spiral. She could not estimate how far she had come or how far she might yet have to travel. There was only the image of Michael in her mind.