A Sudden Wild Magic

He was fairly sure he had lost her now, but he did his best to eat the pie. Anxiety caused it to form a hard lump, with corners, in his stomach. He watched Gladys encase herself in a transparent plastic mac and sort through a floppy purse for money.

“You can come too if you like,” she told him. “I’m still thinking — and I’d like you to see this girl anyway. Coming?”

He nodded and followed her out into the soaking garden, where he was not particularly surprised to see the taxi that had brought him here once again drawn up outside the tumbledown gate. He climbed into it after her and sat curled up around the square pie in his stomach, wondering whether to feel hopeful or simply wretched.

4

It was clear that Gladys knew her way around the hospital. She waddled swiftly ahead, encased in her ectoplasmic mac, down an interminable corridor and into an elevator. Mark thought, following her, that only the raindrops on the surface of the plastic showed that she was not in fact being manifested by some medium or other. He was not surprised when none of the people they passed seemed to notice her. He was putting out the same kind of Don’t see, but with an effort. Hospitals always bothered him acutely. They were so full of pain, and of pain’s obverse, cheerful insensitivity — or was cruelty the word?

Gladys turned to him in the elevator. She looked intent and busy, almost cheerful. “They brought this girl in around five in the morning,” she said. “The poor thing was hurt bad, and she put out a call. Only one call. Then she stopped and drew everything in — as if she’d made a mistake. Anyway, she needed everything she’d got just to stay alive with. Luckily I managed to hitch on when she called. I’ve been monitoring her ever since, and there’s something very peculiar there. As a matter of fact, when you turned up, I was sure it was going to be someone come about her. You gave me quite a surprise. I’m not often wrong that way.”

Mark only nodded. The elevator shaft was like a section through the varied pain of the hospital. The lift carried him past the blinding worry of a parent, the grinding of a broken bone, the eating acid of an internal growth, fever dreams, and for a short — mercifully short — instant, the vivid agony of a knife slicing anesthetized flesh. He had to fight to shield himself.

It was still as bad when he left the elevator and followed Gladys down further corridors where they passed beds. This hospital was on some kind of open plan. Every few yards or so, a corner with windows held a cluster of beds. There were wrung faces on pillows. Women here and there sat up and, in the concentrated egotism of mortal sickness, greedily ate chocolates or stared while visitors harangued them. When they came to the place Gladys was looking for, that was a corner too. You could have taken it for a corner where equipment was dumped, had there not been a bed there. And here was relief. It was such blessed silence from the insistent pains of the hospital that Mark did not understand at once.

Gladys nodded at him. “Feel that? Did you ever know such shielding?”

Only then did Mark associate the silence with the bed around which most of the equipment centered. Silly of me! He marveled that the occupant of the bed seemed so young and small. Anyone who could block out that amount of pain while being so sick as this girl must be a powerful adept indeed. He thought he knew everyone throughout the world who had this kind of strength. But the thin, scraped face among the equipment was not the face of anyone he knew.

“Now, who are you, my darling?” Gladys wondered aloud. Her fat, freckled hands fastened on the girl’s free arm, tenderly, gently. Her breathing grew heavy as she concentrated. “She’s come from a long way away,” she said. “Bad, bad. That car that ran into her crushed her in all down the other side, poor dear, and they haven’t given her enough painkiller, the fools. There. There, Auntie Gladys has put in a few blocks for you, my love, so you can spend your strength on getting well.” She turned over her shoulder to mouth at Mark, “What do you make of the color of her?”

Mark considered. The scraped, half-raw little face had the mauvish tinge of someone badly in shock. Carefully avoiding the abrasions, he put his hand to the sharp, unconscious corner of the girl’s jaw. Mordant blue- gray pulsed from the contact, sickening and strong enough to make his stomach heave. He removed his hand. “She’s been poisoned. It’s no kind of poison I know.”

“Me neither,” said Gladys. “Worse and worse. Those fool doctors haven’t even noticed. Give me your hand and we’ll see what we can do.”

She snatched his hand as she spoke. For a while they both concentrated in silence, drawing off the blue-gray sickening waves and feeding them to whichever of the various sumps would accept them, drawing again, casting the venom, drawing — until no more would be accepted.