Magic Time: Ghostlands

by Marc Scott Zicree

  Who had left her, because he’d had to.

  So now she stood at Randolph and Dearborn, alongside Gabe, who at last had brought her the answers she had journeyed so long in search of.

  May reached inside her coat of many pockets, the black leather duster, and withdrew the folded paper she’d carried across three states and nine hundred miles. The wind caught at it and made it flutter like a bird frantic for release, but she held tight to it, strode across the broad street to the pile of stone that had been the final stopping place of the one that had shared her life, in the time before this time, when he had been a man and nothing more.

  She didn’t read the words on the paper, didn’t need to; they were written as surely on her heart, with a knife that had gone deep, the scrawl of words scar tissue within her now.

  May, Clay had written in that queer, spidery hand of his. Baby, I know you won’t understand this, but I’ve gotta get out of here. It’s not you or the kids.

  (How strange it seemed to May that he’d said “kids,” when only their son had survived past infancy. Linda, their delicate storm child, their boy’s adored younger sister, had barely lived past her first year, and then succumbed to the faulty aortic valve that had been her birthday present upon her arrival into this world. She had died literally of a broken heart. May understood broken hearts now, but incredibly, inexplicably to her at the time, she herself had continued on. Once, she recalled, she had come upon something Mark Twain had written in his autobiography. “It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live.” Curious, how Twain could know precisely her life when he had died almost a century before.)

  I love you. Always love you. But something’s happening to me. I don’t understand but it’s happening and I’ve got to go away. They know why it’s happening and I wish I could make them tell me what this is and what it means and if it’s good or bad. One minute I know it’s good and the next I know it’s bad just as hard. It’s power, May. But I don’t think I’m supposed to have it. If they find out I have it I don’t know what they’ll do, so I’ve got to go away. I don’t even know if I should be telling you this.

  So Clay fled east, leaving her and their boy safe behind, or so he thought.

  She had thought it safe, too, and so had left their son in the keeping of her friend Agnes Wu, whom she had met through Clay’s work. She and Agnes had gone to innumerable movies when Clay had pulled graveyard shift; they’d shared their unspoken stories, the wounds of their souls, long into countless nights. Like herself, Agnes felt torn from her nurturing lands, her kin, driven by duty and allegiance to this barren and secretive place. Even worse, the tight security blackout kept Agnes isolated away from the grown children in Ithaca she so loved; perhaps that’s why she’d become so fond of May’s boy—he’d reminded her of her own son.

  A good person to leave her boy with, May reasoned, this brilliant, homesick woman, to stow her son at Agnes’s spacious residence within the outer confines of the Project grounds.

  May had tracked Clay from South Dakota, determined to find him, to help him, following clues, trying to guess just how he was thinking.

  Then the Storm had come, and all bets were off…and she herself came to know a fair portion of what Clayton had felt.

  Clay had been born here in Chicago, had grown up here until he was nine, when that drunken butcher had performed surgery on his mother and she had died drowning in her own blood, and his father, a dead man living, had drowned himself in booze. Clayton had been a castaway then, handed off to relatives in far-flung places, thrown up on barren shores, homeless until he had found a home with her.

  So perhaps he had come to this city because it had once meant security to him, and sanity. He had tried to re-create that sanity, had failed, had died.

  May drew alongside the towering pile of stone, lifted one of the smaller pieces, slid the note into the recess within. She touched a finger to her lips, then to the cold rock. Rest in peace.

  “Okay,” she said, turning back to Gabriel. Time to go home now, back to her son. Then try to catch the trail of the one who had done this, to find his reasons, to bring him to justice, if she could.

  And having come to know a good deal of her nature by now, May felt reasonably certain that she could.

  A rough clatter down the street seized her attention.

  “Uh-oh,” Gabe said. “Outta time.”

  May could see them now, sliding out of windows, oozing out of doorways, coming up from holes in the pavement like angry ghosts.

  “Wreckin’ crew,” said Gabe. “I warned ya about this.”

  The scuzzy men and women were walking junkyards, armed to the teeth with chains, clubs, saws, knives, you name it, and armored with essentially anything that could be bent to that purpose. They were closing in from all sides, and to the silent observers who watched from behind their curtains and window shades it looked like the lady in the long leatherpiece and the guy in the chair—unless they could suddenly levitate—were pretty much toast.

  “Not that I hold a grudge,” Gabe said, “but if you’d like your last words to be an apology, I wouldn’t say no.”

  “In a minute,” May said for the second time, just as the mob let out a hair-raising cry and charged.

  Now, Gabe was a pretty cool customer when it came down to it, and in the moment before they rushed him, he’d locked his chair and gripped taut in his gloved hands the length of razor wire he’d brought along for just such eventualities. But he had to admit he was pretty well flummoxed that Little Mrs. Primal didn’t even bat an eye.

  She just stood her ground as they came on, noisy as a parade of drunken Shriners, and then she went to work. Spinning, rolling, slashing, throwing—a knife came from every one of those million pockets in her long coat, and she put every one of those gleaming beauties to best use.

  It seemed like forever and no time at all, blood everywhere but amazingly not one of those bastards was killed nor even particularly amputated. They took off screaming, with a good number of new beauty marks to show off to the folks, and before you knew it there were just the two of them, May and Gabe—without a mark on them, except maybe a little sweat from exertion—out there on the street.

  But not for long. The whole neighborhood came pouring out of their makeshift homes and storefronts and businesses cheering, everyone wanting to make them kielbasa.

  May was gracious, but as soon as she could she extricated herself and set off west, leaving behind only a multitude of witnesses to spin the story, and one of her best throwing knives as a thank-you present for Gabe.

  She wasn’t the showy type.

  Just as she was on the outskirts of town, however, Gabriel caught up with her, rolling fast. “You don’t get off that easy, not without you telling me how you pulled that stunt.”

  It was a fair question, he had earned it.

  So May showed him the finely worked necklace of porcupine quills, of eagle talon and bear claw, passed down to her from her mother’s mother, who in turn got it from her own father, who had ridden with and been kin to the one known sometimes as Curly, or Our Strange Man, or Crazy Horse. May had always been pretty fast and alert, but since the coming of the Storm, the attributes had soaked down through her skin, and now she could move and sting and tear like nobody’s business.

  Gabriel listened in quiet solemnity, then she told him her fitting name.

  In the years to come, those who were there told their children and grandchildren what they saw, and called her Lady Blade. But her real name was May, and for a time she wore the name her husband had borne, which was Devine.

  But she had another name, handed down by her people. In the generations since her great-grandfather had been forced to go to the white boarding school and truncate his name, it had been Catches.

  But in this free and terrible time, May saw that it could at last return it to its full and fitting truth, and so she wore it along with her necklace of porcupine and e
agle and bear.

  They called her Lady Blade. But her real name was May Catches the Enemy.

  EIGHT

  LEAVING BURNT STICK

  Mama Diamond woke up in bed with her boots on.

  She didn’t recall falling asleep. Didn’t recall anything past her meeting with the dark-skinned federal agent, what was his name? Shango. Larry Shango.

  She recalled all too vividly her encounter with the dragon Ely Stern and the loss of her gems. The memory made her want to close her eyes and fade back into unconsciousness. It felt like a death, although she knew it wasn’t one, not really. Not like when Katy had nearly lost Samantha in ’73, and Mama Diamond had flown out to be with them, and she and Katy had spent three sleepless days and nights by the infant’s bedside in the ICU at Good Samaritan, listening to the hiss of oxygen and the child’s wet, tortured breaths. Nor even that moment when Mama Diamond thought she’d heard the whisper of the scythe coming for her, when Stern had threatened to take her own cantankerous life—and would have, too, had she given him the least excuse, she felt sure of it; there was the scent of murder in that leathered monstrosity.

  Still, the loss of what she’d thought of as her treasure weakened her.

  In recent times, even before the Change, Mama Diamond had found herself increasingly choosing isolation, withdrawing from the world of men, insulating herself with inanimate belongings, the glittering offspring of leveled mountain and evaporated sea.

  People could leave you, but not possessions; those were truly yours.

  And no, Mama Diamond lied to herself, she wasn’t thinking of Danny, who had fleetingly called himself her fiancé once in a century gone, when promises were something to be believed and credit given not just to customers but to lovers. Only a memory on the wind now, a faded snapshot locked in the depths of mind and heart.

  People left you.

  But now her possessions had, too.

  And what remained? Only the grinning skulls of Cretaceous and Jurassic dragons, seeming to mock her from their stone matrices in the walls of her home.

  She turned her head against the yellowed pillowcase and sighed.

  But she couldn’t sleep anymore. She stank of her own sweat. She ached in every part of herself—physical and spiritual.

  Besides, she could hear someone moving downstairs, in the shop, what was left of it.

  Climbing out of bed was an adventure. What was a body, that it should protest so vigorously a simple motion? Quiet, you bones, you sinews.

  Mama Diamond slept above the shop in the same room that housed her antique sofa, her rolltop desk, and a wood-burning stove that vented through the ceiling. Nothing but ashes remained in the stove. The chill of the night lingered. She was glad that whoever had put her to bed—could it have been that stiff-looking Shango?—had been generous with blankets. But it was morning now, the pale November sun glancing through the ivoried roll blinds.

  More bumping downstairs. Face the music and dance, Mama Diamond told herself.

  She took the stairs slowly, came into the body of the store and was greeted by the smell of hot coffee. It almost took the pain away.

  “You’re awake,” Shango said, entering from the back room where Mama Diamond kept her coal stove for cooking.

  “And you’re using my kitchen.”

  “You mind? You were asleep.”

  “I’m often asleep. It’s not an invitation to raid the pantry. But I guess I don’t mind…if you have a cup of java for me.”

  “You take it black?”

  “As God intended.”

  Mama Diamond had lived in and over this shop for thirty years. She had a fully equipped kitchen upstairs, gas stove, refrigerator, microwave, the works. Nothing fancy, but it had more than suited her. All useless, of course, when the natural gas ceased to flow and the AC outlets turned into holes in the wall. Since then, she had fixed most of her meals on this coal stove salvaged from Old West Antiques across the street. She had even set up this little back room with a Formica table and a couple of tattered pipe-and-vinyl chairs. One to sit in, one to put her feet on. She hadn’t expected company.

  She eased into the nearest chair while Shango poured coffee.

  “There are eggs in the cold corner of the cellar,” she said, “if you’re ambitious.”

  Shango looked surprised and more than a little tempted. “You have eggs?”

  “Didn’t I just say that? I used to keep chickens, up until a week or so ago. Henhouse out back.”

  “What happened?”

  “Something broke in and ate the brooders.”

  Shango retrieved the eggs and cracked three of them into an iron skillet. Mama Diamond didn’t care for people who intruded on her privacy, but yesterday’s encounter with Ely Stern made Shango’s sleepover seem like a courtesy call. Why should she trust Shango? Did she trust Shango? Mama Diamond didn’t share the grudge so many of her neighbors had seemed to hold against Washington, D.C.—perhaps because her taxes had never been audited—but neither did a federal ID card render a person automatically trustworthy.

  Still, there was something to be said for a man who would fry her an egg when she ached in every joint and ligature.

  Shango looked hungry but waited for Mama Diamond’s invitation before he added a couple of eggs for himself. Mama Diamond let the inevitable questions wait until breakfast was finished. Then, over a second cup of coffee, she cleared her throat. “I hope it won’t offend you if I find it hard to believe that the U.S. government is still in business, much less that you’re interested in preventing petty burglary. I expect, over much of this great land of ours, petty theft has become a fairly common pastime.”

  “I don’t know about the government,” Shango said. “I hope there are enough good people left that our government may yet recover itself, when this is finished.”

  “When what’s finished?”

  “The Change, I’ve heard it called. The Storm, as well.”

  “You see that coming to an end soon?”

  Shango’s mouth tightened and something roiled around in his eyes, but he said nothing.

  “Is that the business you’re about?”

  Again, nothing.

  Mama Diamond sighed. She understood how a man might be reluctant to talk about himself in this day and age. But, dammit, those eggs should have earned her at least a little conversation.

  She tried a different approach. “You seem to understand what happened here.”

  Nothing.

  “So is it the dragon you’re after, or me?”

  “The dragon,” Shango ventured at last. “But I know a little bit about you, too.” He pulled a tattered blue notebook from the weathered backpack stowed in the corner. He found a page and read from it: “The Stone and Bone. Judith Kuriyama, AKA Mama Diamond, proprietor.”

  “Uh-huh,” Mama Diamond said, unenlightened and a little miffed to hear her old name from this man’s mouth.

  Shango said, “I’m sorry. I’m not trying to be obtuse. But maybe if I could ask you a couple of questions, it’ll be easier when I try to explain why I’m here. How’s that sound?”

  “All right, I suppose.” If you’re a man of your word.

  “Okay. Miss Kuriyama—”

  “Might as well just call me Mama Diamond.” That other name was long ago, far away.

  “Mama Diamond, you’re obviously a gem merchant.”

  “Semiprecious stones and minerals.” Not to mention fossils from the Devonian to the most recent Ice Age, but that wasn’t what this was about, what it had ever been about.

  “Right. When you were in business, did you keep records?”

  “My Christ, this is an audit!”

  “Obviously not.”

  “Is anything obvious anymore? Yeah, I kept business records.”

  “On paper or computer?”

  “You’d think an old bone like me would be ignorant of computers, wouldn’t you? Well, that’s not strictly the case. I had a very fine IBM machine only a little out of d
ate when the electricity stopped. Had my own website. Doubled my business over the old mail-order catalogue, too. Orders in and out the same day, MasterCard, Visa, PayPal…Did I keep the books on the computer, too? Yeah, but I printed copies of everything just in case the IRS came calling. Are you sure you’re not the IRS?”

  “Not even close. You still have those records in your possession?”

  “I believe so.”

  “May I look at them? I need customer transactions, mail orders in the last twelve months before the Change, especially any large-value orders that might have come through, or big repeat orders.”

  “I don’t deal in large volumes but I guess you can see the records. Lucky I didn’t burn ’em for heat. Will this get me my stock back?”

  “In all likelihood, no.”

  “Well,” Mama Diamond said, “at least the man is honest.”

  It pained her, and not just physically, to walk through the emptied store. Without its mineral cargo, the Stone and Bone was just one more looted storefront. She led Shango upstairs to the room Mama Diamond had once called her office.

  “I keep my sale records in chronological order here,” she said, indicating a battered file drawer, “most recent at the front.”

  Shango opened the drawer, surveyed the contents, then began to page through the files systematically.

  Soon enough, he found the invoices with the familiar place names, the Xeroxes of checks that could be cashed just as readily as if the signatures on them belonged to people who had actually existed. There were twelve different shell companies named (elsewhere, Shango had found as many as thirty), but most of the bulk of them were from a location in New Jersey.

  “Tell me about these,” Shango asked Mama Diamond, although he already knew the answer.

  Mama Diamond remembered this group of orders because of the cryptic letters and the extravagant offers they had contained.