A Sudden Wild Magic

“Make for Herefordshire the usual way. He’s still heading there.”

Paulie slammed the little monster into reverse and went grinding backward up to the road. She made further piteous cries as soon as she got it into forward gear. “God, Mark, we’ll be lucky if this gets us to Gladys by tomorrow! It won’t go above forty! I’m not sure it’s intended to!”

“Just keep going,” he said patiently. “Your acquaintance doesn’t know we’re following him, and he may not hurry. He thought too little of me to notice I got a link to him.”

“I don’t understand how you can be so calm!” Paulie said. “When I think how much that car of ours cost—!”

She repeated these remarks at intervals over the next thirty miles. The little car got caught in the beginnings of rush hour, and it took them an hour to cover that much. Mark sat with his arms folded, and endured. Most of the time he was wondering, and not for the first time, why he had come to marry Paulie when he disliked her so much. He could not remember ever liking her. But she had looked after him in those early days, and it had seemed quite natural, as if she were what he was used to…

And from there to Zillah, who was and always would be the only one he wanted. Up to now he had not dared to let himself consider how easy it would be to find her. He had not even dared to ask if Zillah was indeed the sister Amanda had living with her, though he had suspected it for some time. Somehow he had known it would do no good. For no reason that he could fathom, Zillah had closed him out, dropped the bar on him as if he were a game of pool in a pub, and he knew she was not about to reconsider. But now it was out in the open. Amanda, in her agitation, had said Zillah’s name on the phone. He could let himself think of her and of her habit of ducking out and of Amanda’s precognitive fear that Zillah was in deep trouble. If he could find her and rescue her, then he might for the first time have some hope.

The little car chugged on like an ineffectual terrier running at a rathole. An hour later, luck turned Mark’s way.

“Ah!” he said. “Your friend’s stopped. He’s run out of gas. I was hoping for that.”

Paulie put her foot down. The small monster roared. “Tinker with our car then. Make sure he can’t start it again.”

Mark sat back after five minutes of effort. “No good. He’s got protection on it I can’t break.”

“We’ll never catch up!” Paulie wailed. “Oh, I hate this car!”

Five minutes later, Mark said, “He still hasn’t gone on. We may be in luck.”

“Probably seducing the cash girl,” said Paulie. “I hope she gives him AIDS!”

For whatever reason, Tod remained stationary for the next hour and a half. By this time, Paulie had entered straight roads in the chalk country, which she knew well. And the little car seemed to have warmed to its work. Though its sloping hood showed a tendency to rise and then clang back into place, like a terrier snapping at flies, and its parti-colored wings kept up a continuous rapid flapping, as if it entertained the illusion that flight was a possibility, it attained sixty miles an hour and kept that speed up. Mark watched a stormy yellow sunset gather among big indigo clouds against the wide western horizon and began to think they might actually catch the man. He blocked out a buzzing headache, which was probably due more to the gathering storm than to the noise of the little car, and concentrated on drawing in all the power he could muster. He was going to have to use Paulie’s power, too, in order to defeat Tod. This part of England was a network of old, strong places. Mark could draw on those, but by the same token, so could Tod.

It puzzled Mark that someone of this man’s power had not made himself known before. It was as if a sudden wild magic had come into their midst from somewhere else entirely. And he could not understand his own reaction to it. Why had he, Mark, who was normally secretive and circumspect to a degree that irritated everyone, not only Paulie, even himself at times, felt compelled to babble of Gladys and Amanda in front of this man? When he saw the fellow cheerfully stealing his car, he had felt a jolt of horror that had nothing to do with the theft. He had known his nemesis. He had known that if he could not stop this rogue magician reaching Gladys, he, Mark, was finished. And that was hard to understand too.

Tod was moving again, though not so fast. “We’re closing on him,” Mark told Paulie. She nodded. They roared along a nearly empty road that seemed at the top of the world.

“Do I need lights yet?” she said. “I’ve no idea how they go on.”

The yellow sunset was being sucked away inside the advancing storm clouds, leaving a twilight trying on the eyes, gray road merging into gray- green downs on either side. “I’ll get them on for you,” Mark said.

He was leaning forward, fiddling with a knob that turned out to be the heater, when Tod suddenly and inexplicably swung northward, perhaps mistaking the route. Mark sprang upright.