Gypsies

by Robert Charles Wilson

Part One

LAND’S END

Chapter One

Alone in her bed, Karen White dreamed a familiar dream.

There are dreams that are like capsules of life, that sum up a thing and define it. Karen’s dream was one of those. A bucket from the dark well of her past, it came up brimming.

In the happier part of her life the dream had recurred very occasionally; now—with all the trouble —it came more often.

The dream never changed. She might have invented all or none of it. It recalled a time in her life in which illusion and reality were more fluid, when certainties were few—a frightening time.

After midnight now—Gavin gone for good and Michael still not home—she dreamed the dream again.

In the dream she is a child, coming awake before dawn in her bedroom in the old house on Constantinople Street.

The room is dark. A summer night. The window is open and a welcome breeze rivers through the fly-specked screen. On an impulse, or drawn by some; sound, she rises, pads barefoot across the floor, and pulls the gently hissing curtains back.

The air feels good. She yawns and blinks, then gapes in startlement: Laura and Timmy are out on the lawn.

They are her younger brother and sister. Karen herself is nine—two years older than Laura and four years older than Tim. She imagines she is mature: how childish they seem, tiptoeing through the high dandelion-specked grass by moonlight. But it’s late. Past midnight, not yet dawn. What are they doing out at this terrible hour?

As she watches, they see her at the window.

Laura, the impetuous one, points, and Karen feels suddenly spotlit.

Tim, who turned five last December, waves her away. Go on, he seems to be saying with his hands. You don’t understand. Go back to sleep. She reads disgust in his small round face and is tempted just to give in… whatever they’re doing, does she really want a part of it?

But Laura is signaling, too; Laura is smiling “Hey,” she calls out hoarsely, a kind of whisper: it drifts up through the open window. “Hey, Karen! Karen, come on!”

Frightened, but feeling a tickle of curiosity, Karen tiptoes down the dark stairs. Mama and Daddy are asleep. Heavy presences in the deeper darkness of their bedroom, the door ajar: she feels as much as sees them. Daddy is snoring; she sees the outline of his shoulders, his eyeglasses abandoned on the night-stand. His snores are labored and masculine.

He’ll be so mad, Karen thinks, if he catches us. She resolves to scold her brother and sister. Tim especially: he’s the troublemaker. A bad streak in him, Daddy says. At five, he already reads ferociously. Devours comic books off the rack, because Daddy won’t let him buy them or bring them home. The man at the drugstore always yells when he catches Tim reading that way. Tim, predictably, doesn’t care.

Tim is behind all this, Karen thinks.

The house on Constantinople possesses a postage-stamp backyard which abuts a gully. It’s an old Pittsburgh row house on a hilly street. Some light filters through from the front. Beyond the back fence, with its rusty iron scrollwork, fireflies dance at the beckoning verge of the ravine. It’s dark, it should be scary—it is scary—but Tim and Laura are already prizing open the twisted coat hanger which latches shut the old wire-mesh fence.

They have been told not to go into the gully.

Breathless and feeling fragile in her nightclothes, Karen comes abreast of the younger children. She wants to demand an explanation, shepherd them back to their beds. You’re the oldest, Daddy has told her, you bear the responsibility. You have to look out for them. But Laura holds her finger to her lip, smiles a furtive smile as Tim jimmies the gate.

One by one they file across the lane and down a moist path into the dark of the woods. They navigate by moonlight and intuition. Karen guesses at the path and watches Laura’s pale shape in front of her. Walking, she realizes she is shoeless. The damp pressed earth shocks her feet; trees drape clammy leaves against her cheeks. The house retreats with all its warm reassurances until it is invisible behind them.

“Here,” Tim says finally, his high-pitched voice strangely authoritative. There is a clearing in the wood, a weedy gap between two stands of elm. They stop and wait.

The waiting does not seem strange. There is an electricity in the air, a humming in the earth. Karen can see stars now, obscured by a haze of city light but shining, rippling. There are night motions in the underbrush. Raccoons, she tells herself. A sow bug crawls over her foot.

“Do it now,” Laura whispers. “Now, Tim.”

Tim cocks his head at her—so adult-seeming in this light that he resembles a wizened old man—and nods.

He raises his hand.

Karen thinks for a moment he is playing band conductor: it’s that kind of gesture, dramatic and a little bit childish. She shakes her head and peers closer.

But he is not conducting. She should have known.

His hand radiates light.

Solemnly, he draws a big upside-down letter U in the air. An arch, each leg grounded in the dewy soil, as tall at its apex as a five-year-old can reach. His hand moves slowly and his face is screwed into a fierce knot of concentration. It would be comical, except that a miracle is taking place. As he finishes the arc the air enclosed within it seems to ripple.

Tim steps back now, mopping his forehead.

The cold light fades. But the U shape remains: a wedge of darker darkness.

“I told you,” Tim says, addressing Laura, sparing not even a glance for Karen. His child’s voice is merciless: “Apologize.”

“Sorry,” Laura says. But she’s not contrite. Her voice betrays her fascination. “Can we go through? Really?”

“No!” Karen says suddenly. Her voice is loud in the darkness. She knows what this is; she knows what Daddy would say. Bad bad bad. “Nobody go near it!”

She hears the sound of her own panic.

Tim regards her contemptuously. “You shouldn’t even be here.”

It makes her angry. “Go back to bed!”

She is nine. He is five. He ignores her. “You go back to bed,” he says.

The coldness in his voice shocks her.

Laura looks between them. Laura is the younger sister and—Karen has acknowledged it—the prettier. Laura has big eyes and a child’s full lips.

Karen, at nine, is a little bit pinched, somewhat narrow of face. Mother says it’s a worrier’s face.

My little worrywart, she says.

“We’ll all go,” Laura says decisively. “Just a little way.” Her small hand closes on Karen’s arm. “Not far.”

And before Karen can stop it—before she can think about it—they step through the arch.

It’s hard for her to understand. A moment before they were deep in the wooded ravine; now they’re in some dark, hard place. There are cobbles underfoot and the sound of her breathing echoes back from narrow walls. An alley. She blinks, aghast. There is garbage collected in steel barrels. A rat—clearly a rat and not a raccoon—noses through the litter. Streetlights at the mouth of the alley cast long unpleasant shadows.

“The ocean,” Laura says to Tim. “You said we could see the ocean.”

“This way,” her brother says.

Karen’s heart pulses against her ribs. That’s crazy, she thinks, what ocean, there’s no ocean, we live in Pittsburgh. In Pennsylvania. She retains a vivid memory of her school geography. The only bodies of water around Pittsburgh are the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers, mingling to create the mighty Ohio. She has taken a boat ride; she remembers the old steel-girder bridges and the awe they inspired in her. There is no ocean here.