It was amazing, Cal thought, that here, surrounded by the forces of darkness, cut off from anything that might bring reinforcements or aid, she could so effortlessly, so simply summon up hope. Her certainty, her self, was like a golden spike driven straight through her to the center of the earth.
Cal felt something inside him come alive and warm. And for the second time since he had entered the Ghostlands, he felt he was home.
With a start, he realized he was staring at her. She lowered her eyes. “I didn’t mean to make a speech,” she said.
“It’s okay,” he answered, then added, “I like your world.”
She brought her eyes up to him once more, and he floated in her gaze. “The big circle of everything,” she concluded. “The four quarters, four winds, four directions, four races…all balanced in unity.”
Unity? At this last, Cal found his mind rebelling. What about the Evil inside that mountain?
As though answering his thought, May said, “No such thing as the Devil, only a sickness at the heart of things, an imbalance.”
She bent to him, kissed him lightly on the head. “Pray to see what’s real, Mr. Griffin…and you will.”
Cal wasn’t aware of having fallen asleep, but he was awakened by the rumble of the earth opening up and daylight pouring in.
A man stood facing him from the gaping mouth of the land, a man all in black, his gleaming black hair pulled into a ponytail and held in place with a white gold clasp.
“You may have wondered why I’ve asked you here,” the man said with a voice like acid-scraped rock.
Cal’s eyes darted to where he’d lain his sword in its scabbard. Christina was no longer there. He dove for it, rolled and came up fast.
The man was sauntering up to him, his face and body melting in the morning sun like candle wax, shifting and reforming into black iridescence, into truth, into reptilian splendor.
He laughed as Cal drew his sword.
“You don’t want to kill the man who saved your sister,” the dragon said.
Cal lowered his sword.
“I didn’t think so.”
A figure appeared from behind the dragon, walking on spindly old legs, her tan, lined face like the land itself, with its patience and wear.
“We’ve got a good deal of catching up to do,” Mama Diamond said, putting a hand on Cal’s arm.
Together with Stern, she took him to where the others waited.
FORTY-NINE
THE KING OF INFINITE SPACE
Now, this is really interesting, Herman Goldman thought.
In the terrible moment when he’d tried to leech the life force out of the blazing projection of Marcus Sanrio and found it to be a horribly misguided style choice (much akin to all those Blind Dates of Dr. Moreau he’d gone on in his college days, when his aberrant behaviors could be fobbed off as merely the excesses of youth), Goldie had assumed that he’d pretty much bought the farm.
And what the hell was he gonna do with a farm?…
But no, seriously, he thought he’d cashed his chips, sounded the trumpet, kicked every bucket from here to Poughkeepsie.
In short, that he was dead meat. In fact, in that one, endless, eternal second, he’d fast-forwarded through every damn Kubler-Ross stage of dying-denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance-and all seven dwarves and thirty-one flavors, to boot.
But most of all, he saw his entire life. Not flashing before him like some preposterous VCR playback on crystal methamphetamine, but rather the shape of it-a multidimensional object rendering every action, intention, memory into a complete and seamless whole.
And being his life, its form was naturally…unusual. Gaudy and eccentric; sort of like the entire universe laid out as a bird of paradise, all bright colors and odd angles.
It was all there, in hyperrealistic Technicolor. Every time he’d fallen on his face, ranted when he should have whispered, sang when he should have stayed mute-and that last, impetuous jete with Sanrio, when he’d failed big-time.
But he could also discern that there was honor there, and forthrightness and valor; the attempt, at least, to render on the canvas of his existence something worth doing.
All in all, it was a life he could live with.
Which, surprisingly, was exactly what he found he was doing.
The abstract construction of his life winked out, and Herman Goldman, Esquire, didn’t.
He was still alive, still conscious, still experiencing things.
It was just that things happened to be, well…kinda funky.
For one thing, he didn’t exactly seem to have a body. No hands, feet, mouth, nose-in fact, none of the parts you’d need to have a complete Herman Goldman collection.
Just a rather nebulous consciousness, an ongoing, stable (as stable as he ever got, that was) awareness of self. He felt like a helium balloon floating through the clouds, untethered, unconnected to anything.
Yet for some reason, he felt okay. He also felt damn certain this was not some wacky expression of the Afterlife. After all, he’d read pretty damn thoroughly on the subject, and this wasn’t it.
So just where the hell was he?…
“Welcome to my world,” said a voice in his mind.
Then it introduced itself as Fred Wishart.
Herman Goldman had met Fred Wishart before, in the desolate and devastated house in Boone’s Gap, West Virginia, when Wishart had almost nixed the whole town in an attempt to keep his twin brother, Bob, alive and incidentally keep himself out of the clutches of the ravenous Gestalt Entity at the Source that was equally bent on reeling him back in.
But back then, Wishart had possessed a physical manifestation, a sort of uberbody made up of starlight, glowing nuclear embers that flared and extinguished themselves and were continually replenished out of the life energy of everything around him.
It was a description that jibed with the way Shango described Wishart when he’d encountered him on his first delightful little jaunt into the Badlands.
But it was nothing like what presented itself as Wishart now.
For one thing, this manifestation had no body whatsoever, no more than Herman Goldman himself had. Instead, it was merely a cloudy presence, a distinctness apart from the generalized hazy nothingness about them, just as Goldie himself seemed merely an apartness rather than a physical presence.
Which he supposed made them, in the inimitable words of Stan Laurel, two peas in a pot….
“Um, how’s it hangin’?” Goldie asked.
“You’re in great danger,” the Wishart cloud replied.
Oh, marvelous.
“Yeah, well, that’s not exactly a surprise,” Goldie replied. It had essentially been his general state, waking and sleeping, for a good long time now, and he certainly didn’t need Mr. Cumulus here to point it out to him.
“I tried to protect the Russian one, the doctor,” the Wishart consciousness continued absently, as if to himself, “I drew a place from his mind, a place of serenity, to shield him…but he wouldn’t stay put.”
“Yeah, well, that’s Doc, always antsy.” Goldie realized that neither of them was exactly talking-a good thing, considering their notable lack of tongue, teeth and larynx (not to mention anything that could even remotely hang…). “Say listen, you think you could point me toward an exit?”
And while you’re at it, maybe a body?
“There’s no leaving,” Wishart responded dolefully. “And no hiding place, once He awakes…”
“He? He who?” Goldman asked, although he felt reasonably sure he already knew. Despite his total lack of a body, he shuddered nonetheless.
Sanrio…
“Yes…” Wishart replied, and Goldie realized the other could read his thoughts. Or, he amended, his private thoughts, the ones he intended for himself.
It filled him with dread, a sense of violation. Wishart, or what was left of him, seemed to mean no harm. But Wishart wasn’t the only teddy bear on this here picnic, and the casualness with which he inv
aded Goldman’s mental garden of verse gave a hint of darker things.
Fuck it, I’m outta here, Goldie thought and, spurred by his fear, felt his consciousness plunge forward-
Which happened to be right through Fred Wishart.
Goldie felt a sudden rush of memories and sensations, a headlong tumult of images and sounds and smells and feelings. Little League and Stanford and the movie house in Beckley, and that fishing trip with Bobby when they were both teens, the two of them with Wilma Hanson along, all three of them laughing their asses off, even though she was older, of his mother, Arleta, and his doctor father, who died young…
The memories that were the totality of Dr. Fred Wishart.
Oh God… Goldie thought, and he’d have tossed his cookies right then and there, if he’d had cookies to toss or a stomach to toss them from.
“Where am I?” Goldie asked.
“You know that, don’t you?” Fred Wishart said.
Yeah. Yeah, he did….
Beyond Wishart, he could sense murmurings, harmonies and cacophonies of other minds. He extended his consciousness outward, tentatively brushed the other dominant psyches held in thrall there. Sakamoto and Agnes Wu, St. Ives and Pollard, and the other names he knew full well from Larry Shango’s list.
And out beyond them, like an asteroid belt or Oort Cloud of mentalities, lesser minds, banked down, orbiting, tethered fast.
Thousands and thousands of them…
The flares.
He could sense them distantly without even trying, sense their variant stories, their divergent histories, each an individual who’d once been human, once had a family.
Trapped here.
No leaving, and no hiding place…
He could invade them, pick the lock on the strongbox of memory, pilfer their thoughts and keepsakes, just as Wishart had done with him, and he with Wishart.
But beyond them, within them, he sensed another thing, resonant and myriad….
“The flares hold all the minds they have touched,” Wishart said, discerning his thought. “Even those who have gone before.”
Oh sweet Lord, Herman Goldman thought, the impossible, wild hope born suddenly within him. He extended his mind like a great hand stretching out, passing through the multitudinous awareness like a mighty wind striking many trees as it roared through a forest.
And at last, at last, at last…he found her.
Magritte.
Not alive and whole, not all of her, but the essence, the core, preserved, held pristine.
He inhaled her, embraced and enfolded her, took her into himself and made her inseparable, as he had once recognized the one he’d labeled the Devil as himself, as he had once welcomed madness.
The part of him grown bitter and mean since her senseless, pitiless death-that had jettisoned mercy and nearly tortured a poor innocent grunter boy in the missile silo back in Iowa, and had tried so desperately to kill Marcus Sanrio, that Thing who was no longer a man-dissolved like thirst in quenching waters.
For the first time in his life, and despite the fact that he had no body, Herman Goldman knew that he was whole, and healed, and sane.
Then everything outside him fell away, and all was Fred Wishart’s futile, terrified warning.
“He rises!”
And a mind at center, all the other wills revolving about it and lending it certitude and power, brought its scrutiny to bear on Herman Goldman.
YOU KNOW A GOOD DEAL I CAN USE, it thought at him, utterly remorseless and cold.
Marcus Sanrio went into Herman Goldman’s mind and emptied it, turned it inside out and shook it like a pocket on a pair of jeans.
The pain was appalling, and went on and on. Goldie screamed and knew there was nothing he could hold back, no secret he could keep, no sanctuary set aside.
It was crazy badness, and it was only going to get worse.
But Goldie had known craziness before, and he could ride this wave, even as it shattered him and blew him apart.
With the last bit of will he could muster, he envisioned a board beneath his feet, a board he could ride.
The board was Magritte.
FIFTY
THE DRAGON’S TALE
Soon you’ll be past the pain…where no one can touch you, Ely Stern had said.
It had been night then, too, but not bone-cold like this, no, sticky-hot and humid, where the summer air plastered your clothes to your skin and all you wanted to do was shear a hydrant clear off its base so the cooling geyser would give you some momentary relief.
Not that he’d been wearing clothes by then…unless you counted the pebbled, iridescent black leather that was a second skin to him; his appalling, magnificent dragon’s hide.
He had flown up to perch atop the night-wreathed tower overlooking the dying city that had been New York. Flown up with the delicate mutating girl whom he had fancied his guest, although other, less generous souls might have dubbed her his captive. She was shaking, wracked with delirium, blue devil fire eddying about her, altering her cell by cell, remaking her into something new and strange and fine.
Incredible that, at that point, she’d been the only one he’d seen touched by the hand of destiny like himself; he’d even fancied the two of them might be the only such in the world. Now he knew there were thousands, millions like them; the post-human beings.
Not that the knowledge made him feel any less alone.
In his fear and impulsiveness and solitude, he had seized her away from her home and the brother who raised her, the one who had once been his employee, and brought her to this barren rooftop to complete her metamorphosis, not merely into this new, inhuman form, but into his companion, his confidante.
What madness.
He had worried she might be frightened, but if she was she’d masked it and-in spite of her fever, of the pain coursing through bone and muscle and flesh-had substituted defiance.
“‘What monstrosities would walk the streets were men’s faces as unfinished as their minds,’” he’d exulted, quoting the philosopher Hoffer, and adding that, to him, they wouldn’t be monstrosities but rather masterpieces, rendered beautiful by their undeniable truth.
Then he’d offered her the world.
“I don’t want your world,” she’d replied, and ran staggering to fling herself off the building.
What fire, what glorious certainty and contempt.
She hadn’t known then-couldn’t have known-that in time, like him, she’d be able to fly. And at that moment, still more human than not, she couldn’t have; she’d have plummeted a thousand feet and died.
She would have, too, if not for the timely arrival of her brother, with his bravado and ridiculous sword, intent on saving her from the monster.
From him.
So he and Cal Griffin had gone on their wild ride flying through the black skyscraper canyons of New York, the aerobatic danse de mort that had culminated in his big-shouldered reptilian self getting skewered like a shish kebob at a sidewalk falafel stand.
A night of surprises all round, as he, not the girl, had fallen eighty stories to the unyielding pavement below, to hear his bones smash like a bag of glass and have nothingness enfold him like leather wings.
Then, like a tentative touch on his shoulder, rousing him to agonized half-consciousness, the sound of echoing light footsteps, a tapping cane.
And the querulous words “How we doin’ there?…” in a voice that crackled like autumn leaves.
“I’ve had…better days,” Stern had croaked through the pain, which elicited a laugh that had no meanness in it, that shared a wealth of understanding and suffering.
“Well, you just take it slow,” Papa Sky had answered, putting a gentle hand on his bloody, broken hide. “We gonna see what we can do about that.”
The old blind man had been a fool. To take him in, to nurse him back to health. What could it possibly bring him, except the likelihood of an abruptly shortened life and painful death?
Not that Stern would have wa
nted that; it was just the way things tended to sort themselves out. It was a violent world, and to survive one had to take violence on.
But that wasn’t how things had worked out.
Immobilized, lying in Papa Sky’s ludicrously cramped flat, in his absurdly small bed, Stern had found himself with nothing to do with his time but talk.
And Papa Sky had been more than willing to listen.
Not that Papa seemed to have any agenda, nor even any judgment-or at least, judgment he expressed.
And absurdly, impossibly, after a dozen pointless years of therapy, in which the only discernible change to his life Stern had perceived had been the financing of a yacht and any number of Caddies for the sedentary quack who’d sat silently listening to him those interminable hours, with none of the empathy nor wisdom this old black music man brought to bear…
Ely Stern found himself changing.
Not that he didn’t still have that same burning rage that drove him to smash and destroy, to lash out blindly…
But now there was a new thing within him, like Papa Sky’s gentling hand on his bloody, fractured self, urging him to pause, to reconsider, to look at the world with fresh eyes.
Incredibly, Papa Sky, that old blind man, had given him new sight.
He could choose to be the destroyer, could act upon his blazing dark impulses, and be utterly alone.
Or he could try another path, one far more dangerous to him, exhilarating and fraught with peril.
But did the world, at this absurdly late stage of the game, allow the possibility of such change?
Silly question.
The world of late had been nothing but change.
Which left him with the question of who he was, and what precisely he was going to do with the rest of his life.
As Papa Sky served him hot chicken soup and serenaded him with soaring saxophone medleys of Gershwin and Irving Berlin and Cole Porter, Ely Stern had looked into himself for an answer, for meaning, and to his amazement discovered…
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