The Multitude
Chrysler and Empire State buildings still pierced the northern sky, despite the boulder she’d tossed into Herod’s pond.She blinked.
Taxi cabs honked their horns.
How could this be? Without Christianity, the dominoes should have fallen in a different direction. The Crusades would have been avoided, other wars waged, alliances formed, treaties broken, different babies born, Columbus never conceived.
Gabriella hurried to a specific address, Seventy-nine Broadway. One of the city’s oldest architectural monuments.
Trinity Church still pointed its spire to the heavens.
She caught her breath.
That insane fool of a king hadn’t used the information she provided.
Unless…
Perhaps God had spoken again, this time in anger, using a flick of an almighty hand to deflect her feeble attempt at changing the past.
Gabriella lowered her head, awaiting the inevitable lightning bolt to strike her down.
An airplane buzzed high above. Two children laughed as they played marbles in an alleyway.
Come to me.
God’s anger couldn’t have been clearer. He snapped His consonants and elongated His vowels. The voice she’d waited a thousand lifetimes to hear now seared her heart to blackened coal. She choked back a sob.
Come to me.
He spoke from the direction of the Hudson River. She trudged forward, an ineffective, outcast angel, summoned by a Creator who no doubt despised her now.
Legions of women rushed by, hurrying to offices where they’d been filling the shoes of their overseas men. Vendors hawked their wares. Traffic clogged the streets. Apparently, news about Hiroshima hadn’t reached across the ocean to plunge these people into a mood as dark as hers. But given the lack of proof she’d changed anything, the bomb surely had fallen. Ninety thousand people had perished. Asura was gone.
Come to me.
Perhaps God planned to aim the lightning bolt at the water’s edge so no one else would be hurt when He struck her down.
The crowd thinned in Battery Park. A few sailors loitered with their girlfriends. Two young women pushed buggies side by side, chatting, giggling, unaware a shocking event in Japan surely portended a time of despair for their unborn children. Mankind would never stop with a single bomb. Apocalypse beckoned civilization like a moth to the flame, and her act had done nothing to stop it.
Gabriella reached the shore and waited. Slow minutes passed.
Nothing happened.
She gazed across the brackish waters at the Statue of Liberty in the distance. “How do I even begin to ask forgiveness?”
The statue held her tongue, but a tugboat hauling a battered warship to a repair yard tooted a laugh, and the river stank of fish. These were not favorable signs. She turned away.
A rumble sent her spinning back.
The water bubbled, steamed, and lifted in reaction to something pushing up from below. Only an object of great mass could create such a disturbance—an impossible event, such as a meteor returning to the cosmos as explosively as it had arrived eons earlier.
Although the turbulence roared like a waterfall, no one seemed to notice. Longshoremen used pulleys to load a ship with containers from a nearby dock. Taxicabs beeped their way around Wall Street traffic. The voice of a boy hawking newspapers rose above the clamor.
A shadowy shape far less massive than befit the initial ruckus lifted out of the water. Soon, a mere sheet of smoke hovered a few feet above the surface, rushing from bottom to top with dizzying fury, each end curling into itself like a scroll.
Gabriella trembled.
“Hiroshima!” the newspaper boy hawked.
A tugboat blasted its horn again.
The smoke drifted toward her.
The hand of God?
CHAPTER 3
Tense moments later, still in Manhattan, August 6, 1945
No sulfurous hell fires.
Gabriella savored the aroma of fish in the Hudson, car exhaust, factory smoke, hot dogs, and a hundred other city smells. God hadn’t struck her down with an angry hand.
She turned her back on the roiling curtain of smoke and headed uptown, if not walking with a spring in her step, at least enjoying a strong measure of relief. But anguish over the day’s earlier events soon closed in on her again, tightening her throat and watering her eyes. She walked faster. To where, she didn’t have a clue. Away.
The smoke tagged after her like a lonely puppy. Just as before, nobody noticed an impossible, three-foot-high column softly murmuring like a distant waterfall. Not the sailors on leave in their smart white uniforms, the women hurrying this way and that in a city whose young men were still mopping up the war overseas, the shoe-shine boy beckoning customers, or the street vendor lording over a steaming cartful of hot dogs. In the chaos of New York, was almost anything taken in stride?
No. More than likely, she was dealing with somebody’s idea of a joke meant only for her. In Gabriella’s worries over retribution for a failed blow against Christianity, she’d mistaken simple illusions for a heaven-sent message. A prankster toyed with her.
Henry Stoddard came to mind.
Like those few others of his kind, Stoddard spent most of his time living as a hermit in the World of Mortal Dreams. His breed of wise men—some might say sorcerers, but she knew better—possessed three gifts that set them apart from ordinary mortals. And these were grand gifts, indeed. Each of these men knew how to freely travel back and forth between the waking world and the World of Mortal Dreams without losing awareness of one side while visiting the other. Each enjoyed an excessively long lifespan. And each had the ability to draw on the collective imagination stored in mankind’s infinite collection of dreams to create staggering illusions.
Gabriella had a destination now. Not Uptown or Midtown or across the river to the next borough. Not inside or outside or up or down. Within. She closed her eyes, freed her mind, and crossed from the waking realm to the World of Mortal Dreams.
Henry Stoddard kept his castle where most dreamers didn’t tread. Gabriella trudged across a forbidding fantasy of badlands and cliffs, her unwelcome smoke cloud in tow, until she caught sight of the white tower rising above the rocky hills.
She hesitated. The wise man