Long Black Curl by Alex Bledsoe Page B

small single-engine kind with a lone propeller, flying over the mountains at night. She could smell fuel, and sweat, and a kind of hair product once known as pomade, something she recognized from sitting on her grandfather’s lap as he taught her chords on her tiple.
    She hadn’t been alone on the airplane, either. There had been a bespectacled young man, barely out of his teens, seated in the copilot’s seat. He’d gotten up and come into the back passenger section to speak with the others. One of those was a middle-aged man whose shoes gleamed even in the dim lighting.
    The other, in the cramped confines of the airplane, seemed to be a giant.
    His face was broad and strong, with the kind of jawline that defined superheroes in the comics, and he wore a leather jacket that made him look like a thug. But his left leg held her attention—it extended straight out, with only the slightest bend at the knee, and she could see the mechanism of a leg brace under his jeans, and the metal heel loop wrapped with duct tape to keep it from scratching floors when he walked.
    She couldn’t hear what they were saying over the drone of the engine, but they were smiling, so it couldn’t have been bad news. The fact that she was hovering like a ghost didn’t strike her as unusual. She frequently had dreams like this, and often found that what they showed her turned out to be true, if you compensated for the malleable dream-language of the images. She once thought it might be astral projection sending her out into the world, but too many times there had been true dream abstractions involved. Now she believed it was like a TV channel that your antenna could pick up only for those brief periods when the atmospheric conditions were exactly right, and even then there was usually some sort of static or distortion.
    Then she was traveling outside the plane, flying as a Tufa flew. The night must have been cold, since the bare spots visible on the mountains below were all covered with snow. But she felt nothing.
    Then she was looping around the plane in great swirling arcs, coming within inches of the propeller blades. It was incredibly dangerous, because not only did it mean she might get caught on a wing or other protrusion, but the pilot might see her and panic, too. But there was no denying the glorious freedom, this sense of moving with impunity through an element denied to mere humans.
    And then a gust of wind blew her sideways into the propeller, and she snapped awake just as the blades began to shred her.
    She went to the bathroom, brushed her teeth, and started coffee in the kitchen. As she waited for it to brew, she thought back to the dream, wondering what it was trying to tell her. Had it been a true vision from the night winds, or just her subconscious’s free-form choreography?
    Just as she thought about calling Mandalay, the phone rang. “Hello?”
    â€œBliss,” Peggy Goins said, sounding both tense and relieved. “Bo-Kate Wisby is back. And she’s … You won’t believe what she’s done!”
    Instantly Bliss put the dream aside. “Tell me what happened.”

 
    5
    Marshall Goins wheezed with exhaustion, the cold air tightening his lungs with every breath. The hike up to Rockhouse’s place was designed to discourage visitors, and he was definitely discouraged. But after seeing the severed fingers, he’d told Peggy he’d go up and check on the old man. So here he was.
    He’d gone a secret way, and wandered into something that ended up taking a lot longer than he’d expected. Now he was back on track, and in the grand scheme of the regular world, he’d lost no more than a few minutes. But the Tufa ability to slip in and out of time always took a lot out of him, and lately he’d found the transitions harder and harder. He knew the reason: He’d lived in that regular world so long, and so thoroughly, that it had begun to rub off on