The Crystal City Page 0,27

He dozed fitfully, waking from nightmares in which children died under his hands. And the worst nightmare of all, a vision of Dead Mary's mother filled with invisible disease, walking about giving people the yellow fever just by bumping into them or speaking to them or whispering in their ear. Tousling the head of a child, she'd move on and the child would drop dead behind her. And each dead person would turn to Alvin and say, "Why did you save her and let her walk around to kill us all?"

Then he'd wake up and search out more heartfires dimmed by disease and try to repair their ravaged bodies.

It never occurred to him not to reach first for those nearest to where he was at the moment. But the result was that deaths from the fever increased in direct relationship to one's distance from the orphanage. It was as if God had put a blessing on the place that spilled over to neighboring houses.

Or, as the marchers outside the house were broadly hinting, it was as if the devil was protecting his own.

That night there were more stones, and marchers with torches, and drunks who threw bottles that crashed. Children woke up and cried, and Papa Moose and Mama Squirrel led them into the back rooms of the house.

Still Alvin lay on his bed, reaching out with his doodlebug to heal and heal, concentrating now on children, saving all that he could.

Arthur Stuart dared not interrupt his work-or wake him, if by chance he was asleep. He knew that somehow Alvin blamed himself for the plague-he understood the grim relentlessness of Alvin's labors. This was personal; Alvin was trying to undo some terrible mistake. That much he had hinted at before he went completely silent. And now Alvin was silent, and Arthur Stuart was on his own.

Arthur had no power to heal anyone. But he had learned some makering, and thought now to use it to protect the house. It was something Squirrel said that triggered his action: "What I'm a-feared of are the torches. What if they try to burn us out?"

So he reached out to the torch-bearing men and tried to get a sense of the fire. He had worked in metal before, but little else. Wood and cloth were organic and hard to get into, hard for him to feel and know. But soon he found that what was burning was the oil the torches had been soaked in, and that was a fluid that made more sense to his half-blind groping doodlebug.

He didn't know how fire worked, so he couldn't stop the burning. But he could dissipate the fluid, turn it into gas the way he had turned metal into liquid. And when he had vaporized it, the torch would soon go out.

One by one, the torches nearest the house began to go dark.

It wasn't until Papa Moose said, "What's happening? God help us, why are the torches going out?" that Arthur Stuart realized that he might be doing something wrong.

There was fear in Papa Moose's voice. "The nearest torches are going out."

Arthur Stuart opened his eyes and looked. Me had blacked out about a dozen of the torches. But now he saw that the remaining torchbearers had backed away from the house, and the street was now littered with the discarded sticks, scattered about like the bones of some long-dead creature.

"If they ever wanted proof that this house was a cursy place, this was it," said Mama Squirrel. "Whoever came near, his torch went out."

Arthur Stuart was sick at heart. He was about to confess what he had done when the crowd began to move away.

"Safe for tonight," said Papa Moose. "But they'll be back, and more of them, what with one more miracle to report."

"Arthur Stuart," said Mama Squirrel. "You don't think Alvin would be so foolish as to douse their torches like that, do you?"

"No ma'am," said Arthur Stuart.

"Let's get the children back to bed, Mama Squirrel," said Papa Moose. "They'll be glad to know the mob is gone."

Only after they left the room did Arthur Stuart see through the window the dark shape of one man lingering in the street, not particularly watching the house, but not leaving it, either. From the way the man moved, shambling like a bear, with pent-up energy, he thought he recognized him. Someone he had met recently. Someone on the riverboat. Abe Lincoln? Coz?

Tentatively he reached out to the heartfire. Not being deft, like Alvin, he