As for inside, from the moment he’d beheld it as a boy three decades back, the long, rectangular room with its ruined, eighteenth-century opulence had been his ideal of a banquet hall. The addition of dozens of candles flickering in the chandelier and along the walls did nothing to diminish the effect.
The dead ones still sat in their places around the table but, being automatons of ghosts rather than the real thing, they did not move any longer. At the head of the table, a massive gilt throne was positioned, and in it sat the Man with the Knack…which was the real surprise.
“Well now…” she said. “Look what the cat dragged in.”
The dozens of grunters lining the walls all chuckled in that ugly, low way that sounded like blood pulsing from a wound.
She was twenty-five, if that, long and lean in a feline way. Her legs, which went up to here, were stretched out and perched casually on the table. With her hair like flowing black mercury and sparkling green eyes, she looked a whole hell of a lot like the Evil Queen he’d first seen in that feature-length cartoon, the one that had virtually single-handedly propelled him into puberty. I mean, after all, she was the real babe in that movie, not that priss of a title character who hung out with the seven vertically challenged nonunion mine workers.
But just right now, Herman Goldman was thinking there wasn’t a damn thing sexy about the sociopathic personality, not when you were camping out on the other side of the mirror with it.
“My name’s Herman Goldman,” he ventured. “What’s your name?”
“Queen Bitch.”
“Right…” Why did the Source have to make everyone a comedian, and power mad to boot? “Nice little place you got here,” he added.
She smiled at that, and stretched languorously. “For a while, I thought I’d pick Universal. But hell, this has its own castle. Sometimes I do that, sometimes I do this. Depends on my mood.”
“Well, it’s nice to have a choice.”
She nodded, then said, “I found the crate, you know. The one everyone said was down here.” Her face clouded. “Unfortunately, he’d thawed.”
“Bummer.”
“Mm.” She regarded him contemplatively. “I like you better than most of the folks they bring round. But then, you’re alive.”
“Yeah, well, that kinda adds to the charm factor.”
“Just don’t blow it,” she cautioned, her mood darkening like a storm front. Another appreciative chuckle bubbled up from the peanut gallery. This was like being on American Idol with Madame DeFarge in the front row.
Okay, okay, Goldie told himself, don’t get rattled (or anyway, more rattled), get to the point. “I, um, hear you’re pretty adept at opening up doorways.”
“Wanna go to Orlando?” She glanced at the heavy oaken door at the end of the hall. It glowed bright around the edges, then flew open, revealing a night-drenched lakefront, the water’s silver iridescence against the sand.
“Or how about Tierra del Fuego?” she taunted saucily, and glanced over her shoulder at the near door. It too burned radiance around its lip, grunters shrinking back from the light. The door banged open, showing another, similar beach, but one thousands of miles removed.
The Bitch Queen blinked her endless black lashes just once. The twin doors slammed shut, the light extinguished.
“Sweet,” Goldie observed. “There anywhere you can’t go?”
“Can’t go across the ocean, maybe ’cause of the water, I dunno, that’s just the way it is. But North, South and Central? Most every place but one…and, from what I hear, I wouldn’t want to go there.”
She meant the Source, Goldie realized, and the words Inigo (who looked so much like the vicious little fiends glaring at him now, but who was so different in spirit) said on the way here exploded in his mind like artillery shells in the night.
It would burn you up in the turnstile, It does that.
But even so, everywhere but one was a good sight better than what Herman Goldman, late of Manhattan and the tunnels beneath, could pull off.
But how precisely to get Queen Bitch to share her delightful special skill set? She didn’t exactly seem like the plays-well-with-others type. More like runs-with-scissors…
Or plays well with grunters while they all run with scissors.
Of course, as they say, The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Unless she also happens to be my enemy…
Orlando was looking pretty good along about now.
“So how about you, Hermie?” Her words cut into his thoughts like a scalpel. God, he hated to be called that, it always reminded him of that little weenie from Summer of ’42. “Bet you can do a trick or two….”
“What makes you think that?”
“You wouldn’t be standing here still talking if you couldn’t.”
That was true enough. All right then. He rolled his shoulders to get the kinks out, extended his hands palms up. “Get a load of this, Your Highness….”
Tendrils of light spilled out of his open palms, spelled out letters of fire in midair as he sang like an incantation, “M-I–C…K-E-Y…”
“Oh, put a lid on it,” she spit out venomously. “I hate that little rat.”
Oh great, mouse envy. Then you sure picked the wrong place to land, lady.
“What else can you do?” she asked.
He thought to tell her about some of the rest of his bag of tricks-like that nice little stunt he’d pulled propelling Eddie into the Next Life, or at least a whole new point of view-but thought better of it. This was, after all, their first date.
“That’s really my encore number,” he said. “It’s pretty much downhill from there.”
“You better have something else to tell me, Hermie,” the Bitch Queen cooed.
Cold-sweat city. So he went for broke, told her the whole enchilada, about the Source, their quest, everything. Then he invited her to join their little band of merry men, and a few stout women.
The enemy of my enemy, and all that jazz.
Hey, it was worth a shot.
When he was done, she mulled it over a good long minute.
“Gee,” she said at last, “that sounds like a really bad idea.”
Then she did another great trick.
She made the ghosts fly out of the pipe organ and swarm all over him.
TWENTY-TWO
GOLDMAN IN THE POWER
“Little gray guys,” Inigo said. “A lot of them.”
He could smell them, thick and foul and musky everywhere about him. Their traces lay on the paving stones and hitching posts, on the sign heralding GENERAL STORE and the horse-drawn fire wagons dormant in their station, on every ratty, gone-to-mold plush toy in the Emporium and amid the broken glass cases of the candy shop and the rusting stools of the ice-cream parlor.
He wondered if he smelled like that to the others he’d brought along with him, felt sure he didn’t…at least, hoped he didn’t.
“So where are they?” That was Colleen, whose eyesight had completely returned. Goldie’s lightning burst may have been intense, but fortunately its effects had proved shortlived.
Not that twenty-twenty-the human version of it, at least-was much good here in the balmy autumn night. But at least there was a moon casting its silver radiance.
“More importantly, where’s Goldie?” Cal Griffin added. Across his back, he carried the gem-emblazoned rifle he’d retrieved from the El Dorado, the one he could carve a dragon-shaped notch in if he so desired. One-Shot Griffin, with the dragon carcass now moldering in the high grasses to prove it. One thousand miles or more to the east, and two time zones away.
Thank heavens the portal had still proven malleable (if spongy), or Inigo could never have gotten them here.
Welcome to Southern California….
When Inigo had burst in on them at the grain silo, Colleen had been suspicious, and Doc cautious. But Cal had instantly seized the moment. Assigning Krystee Cott and a party of three to keep tabs on Jeff Arcott as he consulted with Rafe Dahlquist over the schema
tics, Cal demanded Inigo lead them to where he had taken Goldie.
Inigo sniffed the air, pointed to the distance ahead, where Main Street opened onto a once-manicured, now-weedy circle of parkland that branched off to the various lands, like a roundabout. He inclined his head to the left, toward the frontier land.
“They’re down there. All of them…” Inigo breathed deeply through his nose, speculatively, weighing the subtle, variegated constituencies in the air. “And one other…human, I think, and wearing…” He tried to place the scent, recalled it from long ago, in the time before the Change, when he and his mom and dad all lived in Ithaca, and Janet Hirschenson’s mother had come along on a field trip, and he’d asked the name of her perfume. “Shalimar.”
“So it is a woman,” Doc noted.
“Or a guy with gender issues,” Colleen countered.
Cal unslung the rifle, held it at the ready. “Off to work we go….”
Taking point, Cal advanced cautiously, the others falling in behind. The cheery, ruined buildings looked on as they passed, and nothing beyond the four of them moved.
“Why do I so often feel I’m in Aliens 3-D?” Colleen inquired, warily surveying the awnings, corners and doors.
“Because you have selected a life of activity,” Doc answered.
“So that’s what you call it.”
“You know,” Cal said softly, peering at the silhouetted spires of the castle beyond, “I always wanted to come here.”
“Is it all you envisioned?” asked Doc.
“Less expensive,” Cal said, and tried to make it sound light. But in his heart he knew there were forms of payment more dear than money, and that before the night was out, he might give lie to his words.
Waving them to silence, he angled off, the others following. They passed through the gate of the fort, its perimeter wall of thick timbers still straight and relatively unchanged.
A sound of water drew his attention and he looked to his right, saw the artificial lake with its small island, the water choked with algae and the big paddlewheeler at anchor abandoned and listing to starboard.
“Where now?” Cal asked Inigo in a whisper.
The grunter boy started to answer, but there was no need.
For at that moment, from the square ahead, with its curclicued railings and its Spanish moss, from within the dark mansion fronted by gravestones, a wail rose up that stopped them dead and wrapped them in a cemetery chill.
It was the grunters, in their dozens like a nest of cockroaches, cheering for blood.
And one man, screaming.
Well, this is shaping up to be even worse than the first time I came here, Herman Goldman thought with a curious detachment as the hideous spectres tore at him.
But then, he’d always felt most removed from himself when in the deepest guano, and on this particular occasion it was looking like he had really painted himself into a brick wall.
There were maybe eight or ten of the damn things (hard to keep count when he was being thrashed about so), their grimy, dusty clothes in tatters, flesh rotting off their faces and limbs, death’s-head grins like the “before” pictures of scraggly, nightmare teeth in his periodontist’s office. At the Bitch Queen’s nod, they had vomited forth from the big pipe organ, flown shrieking at him, reaching long skeletal fingers that snatched at his padded electric-blue vest and Tommy Bahama shirt with its palm trees and China Clippers, yanked his tangle of curly black hair back hard, dug cracked sharp nails into his autumn-browned skin. They lurched him spinning up into the air as they gripped and twirled him like a maypole.
And geez, these weren’t even real ghosts, just stupid caricature animatronics, the repli-spooks of this ride that he had once upon a time been unprescient enough regarding what was someday to be his fate to actually think was cool.
The grunters on every side were stomping their feet, banging fists into walls, just eating it up-which, considering what they intended to eat next, Goldie supposed, could be called the appetizer.
“My little pals dig their meals,” that Bitch Queen in Goth regalia, with her weight of piercings, hoops that would set a metal detector yammering, her tattoos like the tendrils of amorous creepers reaching out to embrace her, called out over the cheers of the grunters. “But they had a request. They asked if I could turn the meat inside out, so they could get at all the juicy bits.”
She chuckled then. “We aim to please….”
That’s when the ghost-bots really went to town, like he was a big rubber glove they were intent on removing-reversing. And okay, so maybe in retrospect he could say it was all part of his plan (only it would be bullshit, because really what sort of plan could you prepare for something like this), that he was setting up a vocal tone like a meditation to focus his energies and chakras and whatnot.
But truth to tell, he was just squealing like a girl.
Which wasn’t to say he didn’t do anything, because in the middle of this delightful little Iron Chef vs. Norman Bates ringside event, Herman Goldman did have the presence of mind to marshal his forces and summon every bit of talent and juju at his command. And like a Holy Roller at the peak of his gyrations or some peyote-tweaked shaman in the smokiest of sweat lodges, he could really and truly say he saw flames shooting right out of his skin.
Which, of course, happened to be precisely the case.
Herman Goldman was his very own Fourth of July pinwheel, a whirling maquette on goddam hallelujah fire, consuming but not consumed, setting alight every soulless haunt that had dared lay hands on him, their clothes and hair and skin and eyes volatilizing into glorious, blast-furnace luminosity.
The grunters gasped and fell back, shielding their eyes from the glare. Then, as they saw through squinting slits just what was happening, they began to applaud.
Because these weren’t real ghosts, after all, just machine duplicates, and when everything was burnt away that could be burnt away, their metal armatures remained, still hanging from their wires in simulation of flight, still gleefully ripping away at him.
In what he supposed was his last coherent moment on this side of the veil, words came full blown to him that turned his shrieks to wild laughter born of hysteria.
Dinner’s on me, boys….
Then the head of the metal thing nearest him-which had only moments before been Marie Antoinette by way of Burke and Hare-exploded with a deafening thunderclap.
The other metal harpies instantly went dead and fell to the floor with a sound like a giant’s silverware set being dropped. Released, Goldie hit the ground with a thump, landing square on his tuchis.
The grunters let out a shout, and Queen Bitch sat knocked back in her throne, emerald and mascaraed eyes wide with surprise (and, of course, it was her being startled-not the spooks themselves-that had rendered them inert).
The haunted house had some new arrivals.
“Guys,” Goldie crooned, getting to his feet, “am I glad to see you.”
“This doesn’t have to get complicated,” Cal Griffin said, stepping deeper into the room, the still-smoking rifle leveled at the young woman on the throne. “We’re just here for him.”
Colleen and Doc flanked him, crossbow and machete drawn and ready now. Out of the corner of his eye, Cal could see Inigo hanging close behind Colleen, casting fearful glances at the grunters along the walls, who were staring daggers at him. Traitor, their eyes said, and it was clear to Cal that Inigo would not last long among his fellows here.
By now, Her Highness was beginning to recover a bit of her elan. “Well! Dan’l Boone’s got him a shootin’ iron! Better skedaddle on back to the Golden Horseshoe, Dan’l….” Her arms widened to take in the roomful of grunters, all glowering and baring hyena teeth. “Or go home, and come back with an Uzi.”
Growling low, the grunters started toward them.
Nausea surged in Cal’s stomach and he urged it down. You have been here before, if not in this specific place, in many a place like this. He went within himself, found that core of
certainty he was coming more and more to trust, that tranquillity where ego fell away and the static was quelled.
It was a purification of self or, more accurately, a selection of certain parts of self, those that could be big enough, that could open to a process of decision beyond deliberation where instinct held sway. Cal felt his attention focus in, like a deadbolt sliding into a lock plate. He was intensely present, aware in the moment.
In one fluid motion, he raised the rifle and fired.
The Punk Queen cried out as the bullet punched a hole like a big fist in the wall to the left of the throne. The grunters retreated a pace.
“That could as easily have been a foot to the right.” Cal spoke quietly, addressing the girl and her malformed legion. “Now, we disagree on a lot of things, but I think every one of us would just as soon survive the night. So chill, okay?” They seemed to consider it, or at least took no immediate action. Still holding the rifle in his left, Cal beckoned with his free hand. “C’mon, Goldie.”
Goldie took a step or two toward him, then, glancing at the Punk Queen, hesitated as if a thought had seized him.
“Um, just a sec.”
Oh no, Goldie, Cal thought queasily. No embellishments now.
But Goldie was Goldie, after all, as Cal well knew. Who but Goldie had seen the Storm coming? Who else cast spells out of rock oldies, laid snares for grunters in the tunnels under New York, kept Excalibur lodged in a junk pile in his sanctum sanctorum?
Only Goldie could summon lightning in his hands, walk through walls, lead them to this mad, exhilarating, insanely dangerous place.
And only Goldie would have the nerve, the improvisational knack for the inappropriate, the utter chutzpah to choose this moment to walk up to the Evil Queen and plant a long, lingering kiss on her Goth black mouth.
The girl sat bolt upright at the moment of contact as though a million volts were coursing through her, then eased back limply into the throne.
As for everyone else in the room, it wasn’t often that such a disparate group all wore the identical look of incredulity.
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