01. When the Changewinds Blow (2 page)

Sam always said she wanted to be an actress; she'd been in the drama club and was set for a pretty good part in the class play coming up in April, but she had few other real interests. Setting off for Hollywood on impulse just wasn't her style.

It was hard for Charley to imagine Sam out there on her own in any event. Hell, she was scared to go out alone most times. Like, she was even scared of thunderstorms. Well, maybe she'd find out now.

Charley had gone through the day confused and depressed and then went straight home. She'd gotten the mail and found a small envelope addressed to her and postmarked locally with very familiar handwriting and she'd torn it open. Inside, on a piece of notepaper in Sam's handwriting, had been a nervously scrawled message.

Dear Charley-Sorry to get you into this but I got noplace else to go. Can you meet me at the mall at seven o'clock? Just go browse at Sears. Look normal, then at seven go back to credit like you was going to the ladies room. Don't tell nobody or let them see this note. Don't let nobody follow you. I'm OK so long as you don't bring nobody. Love and kisses, Sam.

Charley was afraid at first that she wouldn't make it in time. . Her Dad had a bunch of stuff to talk about and wasn't in any mood to let her out, but she'd convinced him it wouldn't be long and that she really needed to pick up something for school tomorrow. She barely had time to change into an outfit more appropriate for the mall-the satiny blue pantsuit and the mid-calf boots with the fold-down leather fringes. And it'd been like six-thirty when she'd gotten the okay, and while it was only a ten-minute drive to the mall she had to park and go to Sears and spend some time browsing, too, so it'd look natural when she went to the jane. There was also the level of paranoia the note induced.

"Don't let nobody follow you. . . ."

Like, who would be following
her?
Well, okay, the cops, maybe-if they figured one runaway teen was worth a stakeout. Or, maybe, whoever scared Sam so bad. They might figure it like O'Donnell and keep an eye on her best friend, right?

Damn it, she's got me seein' cars and mysterious people in trenchcoats!

The worst part of it was, she had to wear her glasses and she hated that. Made her look like some dumb librarian. But she was fairly nearsighted and needed them to drive, and she'd had her contacts in all day at school. Not like Sam-Sam only needed glasses to read close up, and she'd look like an idiot, face at arm's length from a book, rather than wear them in school.

The mall was pretty crowded for a winter Wednesday, maybe because it was unusually warm tonight for this time of year, and Charley saw one or two kids she knew, but the time didn't allow for her to be anything but single-minded. If somebody was following they'd just have to follow, that's all. What the hell could happen in a place crowded like
this,
anyway?

She made her way to Sears, then went and looked at some of the clothes mere. She knew she didn't have Sam's acting talent and she probably was giving the most unconvincing show of her life, but she had to try. She glanced at her watch-five after seven! Past time to go to the bathroom.

Had she delayed long enough? Had she delayed too long? She went on back to the business office and then around the corner toward the restrooms. You sure knew where
they
were in a big mall. Most times the biggest department stores had the, only bathrooms in the place.

The restrooms were near the end of a corridor that wound up at an "Employees Only" door to the warehouse part, and there was a branch corridor just before them leading to some offices. She went into the bathroom expecting Sam to be there, but it was empty. She wasn't sure if she should just stay there or not, but she sure as hell wasn't gonna stay there all night. She really did have to go-this Jane Bond shit didn't really make it at all-and so she decided to just do everything normal. Maybe Sam wasn't there tonight. Maybe something happened, or Sam figured the note would come earlier, or maybe this was just a way for Sam to check and see that she wasn't being followed.

She gave it fifteen minutes, during which one pregnant lady came in and nobody else, and men decided to get out of mere. She opened the door and heard, behind her, in a loud whisper, "Charley! In here-quick!"

She turned and saw a small, chunky figure in boys' blue denim jeans and matching jacket holding the employee door open. She hesitated a moment, then went to the door and out just before the pregnant lady exited.

Charley stared at the other. "Christ, Sam-is that really
you?"

"Yeah! Come on!
I
want to get us out of here and someplace where we can talk. Hurry up!"

As close as she'd been to Sam she wouldn't have recognized her from any distance. Gone was the long, straight black hair, replaced with a slightly curly sandy brown cut, extremely short, like a boy's, and combed straight back with a side part. She was also wearing a man's style rose-tinted pair of glasses and dressed in the stiff denim that completely concealed her figure and some cheap sneakers and high black socks. It was a fairly simple disguise but by its subtlety very effective. No fake beard or shit like that that would never be convincing. The fact that Sam was one of those people whose face by itself could be either male or female depending on the hair and body and the like helped, too. It was also a natural disguise-her voice was already unusually low, and it didn't take much effort to get it low and raspy enough to sound like maybe a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old boy.

They wound up outside, then walked across the parking lot to the theater entrance. Sam bought two tickets to the newest Disney cartoon, knowing that for the late show there'd be very few people there and none they would know. Not with a "G" rating.

Sam was right. There were like a dozen people in there for the Wednesday late show. They took seats on a side aisle near the back, away from the rest. Sam put her arm around Charley. "Just act like we don't care about the movie, which we don't," she said. "Nobody ever notices much about a boy and a girl makin' out in the back of a theater."

"Okay, I'll play along," Charley whispered back, "but what the hell is this all
about?
Why'd you run? Where you
been?
Everybody's worried sick. ..."

"Long story," Sam responded. "I'll tell you as much as I can. Some of it'll sound crazy and maybe I am, but it's damned
real."

It hadn't been all that sudden, only the final act. For months, almost since moving out west, she had been having strange experiences. First it was the dreams-lots of them, long and elaborate, sometimes several nights in a row with no break, and always involving the same things although never quite the same.

Charley knew about the dreams. The most frequent one involved the demon and Sam, who was always driving a red sports car around a twisting mountain road along a coast, "although Sam couldn't drive and they were hundreds of miles from any coast.

It always began with a dark figure, sitting alone in a comfortable-looking room that none the less resembled more a medieval castle than anything modern. There was a low fire in the fireplace and a few goblets about, but everything was indistinct, as if in a dream. She saw his form, but not really his face, masked in shadow, but it was a strange form of a fairly large man in flowing robes and wearing what might have been a helmet with two large, crooked horns emerging from each side. She saw him, though, not as a vision, or a completed scene, but as if she were there as well, sitting opposite him in a chair of her own, looking at his dark form with her own eyes. Somehow, she was aware that the goblet near her on a small table had until recently contained some kind of drug, and that the dark figure's mysterious, hazy, dark presence was partly due to that.

Suddenly there was a rumble and crackling, more like an electrical short circuit than anything else, but it seemed to overwhelm them, to carry them, not physically but mentally, through a dizzying, blinding, multicolored ride like an out of control carousel, although the dark form in the chair was still there, silhouetted against the swirling maelstrom.

And then there had been darkness, with scenes illuminated now by flashes of lightning and accompanying clashes of thunder, and a view from a great height down to a frothing ocean below beating itself against black rocks, and a low range of mountains forming a jagged and serpentine coastline, and, in the distance, two small lights approaching along that coast. They were not the storm, but they were of and with the storm, and they moved swiftly inland to a point where storm and lights must meet.

And now she saw herself driving that red sports car, but not from the point of view of the driver. Rather, she saw herself from the height during the flashes of lightning, and now they were nearly on top of it, and the dark, horned figure whispered fearsomely in a tone that somehow still cut through the noise of storm and surf, "Now! I was correct. The equations are perfectly in balance. She is the one we seek and she sleeps in the stupors of over indulgence. Minimum resistance, maximum

WHEN THE CHANGEWINDS BLOW
11

flow, calculated odds of success in the ninety-plus percen-tile. . . . Now!"

And from the cloud a great bolt of lightning shot out, and while it struck just ahead and on the ocean side of the road the car suddenly slammed on its brakes and spun, aided by the sudden rain, and . . .

All then was blackness.

That had been the first of them, repeated many tunes with little or no variation, but it had not been the last. At first she put them down as mere fantasies, as nightmares, maybe, or possibly even a sign of a good imagination, but then the dreams progressed and she began to see a pattern both in when the dreams came and in their progression.

Always in the night. Always when thunderstorms approached and then raged around her.

But during this season of the year she felt she'd almost licked it. No thunderstorms, no really bad dreams. Not until last Thursday night, when this freak warm front had moved in and clashed with the very chilly winter air and set off a rare winter one.

Charley frowned. "I don't remember a thunderstorm last Thursday."

"It was real early in the morning. Like two or three. You'd sleep through an atomic bomb anyway. You can check it in the papers, though. We had it-and I had another real mean one."

"You mean you're running from a
dream?"

"Not-exactly."

She had awakened to the sound and fury of the freak storm, and lay there, eyes wide open, feeling wide awake and afraid to go back to sleep, but even though the storm raged and she was fully conscious, through the thunder, through the roar of rain and hail on the roof and the rattling of windows by
heavy winds, the voices intruded and the room seemed to fade. It was also quite dark, but she was seeing through another's eyes, a visitor without influence or control; an interloper who should not have been there, wherever "there" was.

It was the hall of a medieval-tike castle, damp and somewhat dark, illuminated by torches and by a fire in the great fireplace. She sat in a large, lushly upholstered chair at the head of a long table, an elegant if greasy and overcooked meal in front of her. She knew it was a woman's body, and probably royalty; long, feminine arms reached out for food and wine,
with long, delicate fingers unblemished by any sign of work or wear, with crimson, perfectly trimmed and shaped nails so long they could not have withstood doing anything serious. There were others at the table. A large man with a full beard and shoulder-length hair, stocky and rough but dressed in fine clothing including a cape. Several others, mostly rough-looking men, some accompanied by young women dressed in satin and gold, were also there-and a few others.

One was a tiny, gnarled man who must have been no more than three feet high, dressed in gray and brown with a rich black beard that seemed to go down almost to his feet, sitting there on a very high stool to be at equal height to the others. Another wore a crimson cloak and hood but seemed to have a frog-like snout extending from it and two round, yellow eyes that never blinked but, cat-like, reflected the torchlight. Yet another had a long, distorted, puffy kind of face, huge round blue eyes, and a rhinoceros-like horn rising up from the center of his forehead, and a woman whose hairless head seemed covered by a bony gray plate and whose arms ended not in hands but in claw-like mandibles. There may have been more,
_
but the onlooker did not focus on them but rather on eating.

Finally the hairy man closest to her asked, "Highness, has the problem of the simulacra been disposed of?"

From behind her a voice,
that
voice, responded, "My Lord Klewa, we all know that nothing is certain except that the unthinkable must be thought, but there was little danger. So far we have found only a very few in all our months of searching that even slightly posed a danger and we are dealing with each in turn. The odds of that ever being a factor were always slim-the enemy would have to find a simulacrum and somehow transport before we could find and destroy them, and we had the only model for such loci searching anyway. You have no idea how many levels up we have gone and continue to go. Just when we believe it is no longer possible my storms find another, but so far away. . . . Even so, I shall deal with each.

"If you wish certainties, then kill yourself ," the strange one continued, "for that will produce a certainty in
this
world, at least. If you desire minimum risk, we have gone far further in that regard then anyone could imagine. But risk there will always be, and should be, for gain without risk would make a prize meaningless. So vast is our enterprise that we risk
disrupting the fragile fabric of our reality and might cause the changewinds to increase and turn on us as well, but consider the goals and the alternatives. Be at ease."