“No, mom,” Frannie said. “Look—the thing we could use most is if you can get hold of Saul and Truly, who are probably going to be driving in soon. But look.” She pressed her lips to her mom’s cheek. “I don’t regret being in all this. It feels like what I should be doing.”
Her mother’s fingers brushed her hair. “Shalom aleichim.”
Frannie and Newp stuck extra cotton in their ears and headed out the door at noon. As they walked along the flowery path towards the dome entrance, Frannie was struck by the normality of the scene—the feel of the grass under her feet and the smell of honeysuckle. As they got closer, Frannie regarded the curved entrance and saw more clearly the thousands of white birds, could hear the flapping, the whispering and form of them as they would flap and fold, aware of the rolling across the rooftop in occasional undulating waves of white.
Frannie looked at the few people still making their procession towards the dome and tried to match their expression—not blank per se, but expectant, curious, even hopeful. She reached the entrance with Newp and a bunch of followers of Penamue’s call.
Birds also covered the door, which was glass with steel struts below a deep awning, but if the birds counted as guards, they were the only guards. Frannie and Newp let a couple of people go by and let the doors shut with them still on the outside. Frannie ran her hand along the line of little birds next to the door, not touching them because she had a fear that somehow he would feel her if she did so. “When we have the chance,” she said, “draw out the box. Emmett, you still feel good about this?”
“I feel good about nothing,” the golem said. Frannie took the thing at its word. The aluminum door handle was cold to the touch as she grabbed it, ran her other hand over Newp’s neck for luck, and yanked the door open.
The dome was lit by the glare of paper, paper everywhere, dotted hundreds of times by the faces of the people who had answered the call.
Frannie, Newp and the golem on Frannie’s back stopped at one side of the great circle fifty yards wide. Human beings lined the inside walls, standing still; Frannie saw the two who had entered ahead of them stop halfway through the space in the center of the dome and freeze as if stuck by an unseen force. The pair, a man and woman in Bermuda shorts and aloha shirts, stared ahead at what Frannie could only think of as an altar.
“Oh my God,” Frannie said. At the far end of the great circular pace was a proscenium of white paper and on it stood the Blanks, the books tilted and open, and out of them flowed and flitted a steady stream of origami birds. And standing between the stacks of the blank books, in a cloud of paper, was Hooky Carmichael.
Chapter 51
But it wasn’t Hooky at all; it was his body, his skin, bronzed and beautiful but churning from within with the movement of the unholy parchment, the converted potentiality of the Blanks in the form of Penamue’s origami evil.
The pair in the Bermuda shorts looked up as the birds landed on their hands and necks, and then the man and woman were lifted bodily, angling limp from long tentacles of paper; they were flung back and placed against the wall with the others. They hung on the wall then, held there by flapping tendrils of paper, staring blankly.
The demon that bore Hooky’s face turned his eyes now to Frannie and Newp.
“Hello again,” came the voice, and no cotton in her ears would stop that coming through.
Frannie took Newp’s hand and she shouted, “We have suit with you, Penamue of the Fallen.”
The demon did not smile, but had something like amusement in his voice. “You think to blot me out with your Hebrew magicks. Is it not so?” He clapped Hooky’s hands together with mirth.
“Gey in dre’erd,” she hissed. “Go to Hell. Newp, get the…”
She was rocked back as a paper bird landed on her forehead with an audible thwack, its beak digging in instantly and she felt the warmth of blood and the buzzing in her brain.
“What are you, Frances Cohn?” the demon called, and he may as well have been whispering in her ear. “What are you to be? What can we see? What does the paper find, what is the potential of Frannie—you call yourself Frannie, don’t you? Let us look—”
A queen on a surfboard, no surprise there do I feel, a book and a magic lantern show, and the adoration of our kind, this could be your future— fame around the world, is this the costliest potential to lose? Is this the tastiest, let us look, let us look—
Or is it this Frannie, this Frances, whose eyes begin to wrinkle, in white hat and blue smock, and handling bottles of blood and needles and saws, a woman among dying men in a jungle—is this the future you will find most valuable, this Frannie who fixes warriors and sends the intact ones back into the fire, is this the most priceless and golden future, a Frannie who saves many and touches many, who clutches bottles of blood by day and poison by night to soothe and sleep—
All of this is nutrient to me, sustenance—
(Somewhere deep within the spell: but what am I without it?)
You rest—you rest—nothing but rest—nothing more for I will feed on it all—
Frannie saw with her eyes again, past the drizzle of blood, and turned her head to see Newp caught; still, mumbling something she couldn’t catch, not that it would matter. It would be particular and personal to him and all the future him there could be. “Newp,” Frannie growled, “It’s time to—”
You sit by so many bedsides, your soldiers and your patients and your father and your husband—is this him? Perhaps this is him, and I can take away all of that pain, I can consume it, and all beyond is gloriously quiet, gloriously empty.
“A beyze sho! An evil hour has come upon you!” shouted a voice from behind her and Frannie felt movement at her shoulder, and a weight had landed on her head.
The golem was leaping over her, moving fast. She saw it flip and bash the drilling bird off her forehead. Frannie staggered back, her hand at her brow as the golem stamped the bird against the tiles of the dome.
“You must partake of your destiny,” came the smoking words of the golem. “Thou shalt choke, you potentiality-eating devil.”
Slow motion, then, Frannie moved, swatting the birds away from Newp’s eyes—she ripped the box from the backpack and thrust it into Newp’s hands even as she began to shout and birds began to descend from all sides, swooping in at the three of them, she and Newp and the golem.
Emmett hissed, moving fast, stamping, and then he was surrounded.
“Newp, ready?” Frannie called.
Newp knelt with the box, ignoring the birds. “Ready!”
“Cursed shall be you in the city, and cursed shall be you in the field,” Frannie called, batting away birds as she shouted. She yanked her numerological medallion from her shirt and held it before her. “By the all-seeing God, by the Tetragrammaton, I—”
Birds sliced her hand and she grunted and kept reciting at the rapid cloud of birds that plunged at the golem.
For a moment, Emmett was lost in a ball of birds, paper lurching and flying. And then the room clapped with a crashing sound and the birds scattered and she saw smoke pour from the golem as he exploded.
Emmett lay looking at her, or rather his clay head did; the rest was bits, torn every which way. She grabbed the tiny still-smoking head and batted more birds with her other hand as he clutched Emmett’s head.