Magic Time: Ghostlands

by Marc Scott Zicree

  The folks here used plague, the illusion of it, to summon up terror and keep visitors away.

  “Where should we drop you, Mr. Siegel?” Cal asked their passenger.

  “Call me Theo.” He was sitting up straighter now, propping himself up with a hand on the back of Doc’s bucket seat. “Left at the stoplight, it’s the only one.”

  Cal made the turn and saw that laid out ahead of them were the homey brick structures of a college. A row of wire-strung power poles stood evenly spaced on either side of the street, fanning out from the campus to the rest of the town. Closer now, Cal could see that each of the poles was arrayed—like the rifle Theo had wielded, like the engine of the El Dorado—with gleaming bright gemstones. They glimmered in the illumination from the lamps overhead, and cast multihued refractions.

  Cal pulled up to the Student Union.

  “Thanks,” Theo said. “Hey, listen, how ’bout you come in a minute? There’s a couple friends I’d like you to meet.”

  Doc shot Cal a questioning look. Cal nodded confirmation. The two of them climbed out of the big boat of a car and helped the pale young man shakily to his feet. Cal’s hand brushed the back of Theo’s neck, and he was surprised to feel a hard bump under the skin.

  It was just about exactly the size and shape of one of those stones lining the streetlamps.

  Theo, trying to put weight on his left leg, cried out in pain.

  “Broken, in all possibility, or badly sprained,” Doc said. “What I would give for a—” Then a remarkable look dawned on his face, as he cast his eyes on all the streetlights ablaze.

  “You would not by chance have a medical center?” Doc asked, and Cal caught the tentative eagerness under the words.

  Supported by them on either side, hobbling all the way, Theo led them there. But not before Cal retrieved his sword from the Cadillac, buckled it around his waist, and handed Doc the rifle.

  SIXTEEN

  SILO

  It made Inigo’s stomach hurt having to lie to Christina’s brother. But if he hadn’t, Cal Griffin would never have left him to go into town.

  Still, Inigo’s mother had told him never to lie. But then, she had said she was only leaving him for a week or two, that he would be perfectly safe with Agnes Wu (make that Dr. Wu, if you please, though it had always seemed odd to Inigo that someone who pushed elemental particles around had the same title as a guy who gave you a tetanus shot), that she would be back before he knew she was gone.

  And that had all been a lie.

  So where did that leave him?

  Telling Cal Griffin he would stay put, when that would be the most dangerous thing he could do for any of them.

  No, he had to be in and out, before the Big Bad Thing got a whiff of it, in plenty of time to watch Christina dance on the corner again, to listen to Papa Sky belt out those mournful blues, to have the Leather Man not say a word or bat an eye.

  Because shit, if you crossed that crazy dude, he’d say more than a word and bat more than an eye.

  That scary lady with the crossbow and the knives hauled him up on her horse—Big-T it was named, was that some kinda joke, like Tyrannosaurus or what?—and held tight to him all the way to the towering grain silo where the other happy campers were stowed. That funny, schizzy guy with the black curls rode alongside them on his buckskin horse, staring at him all the way, without ever looking directly at him.

  Creepy, that.

  Even when they got to the silo, Xena Warrior Princess kept him walking ahead of her, breathing down his neck, never letting him get so much as a yard away.

  Oh brother, they were making him work….

  Once inside, though, things took a serious upswing. Biker Girl and Hippie started talking to the rest of the gang, making sure they were warm, the fires well stoked, everybody with enough food in their gut and no grumbling from anybody. Plus they had to hip them to what Cal and Dr. Russian were up to.

  A lot of ground to cover, chores to attend to. And finally, finally neither Goldie nor Colleen was watching him, and Inigo was able to slip out the door and into the night.

  To where the other silo was waiting.

  Since his transformation—and long before that, actually—Inigo could move on swift cat feet, covering a ton of ground making no sound at all, like wind rippling on the air, and nobody, not even an owl or a wood mouse, getting the least hint he was there.

  He was a good way from the grain silo now; it was the barest silhouette against the night sky. The terrain spread out before him was a featureless expanse of mottled snow and high grass.

  In the normal scheme of things, he wouldn’t have been able to see anything at all, wouldn’t have been able to find the hatch set flat in the ground. But this was far from the normal scheme of things, and he wasn’t a normal anything anymore.

  Generally, he hated being the stunted, twisted freak he was—the bonsai distortions the Storm had laid on him made him studiously avoid mirrors. But for once, he was thankful for the milky, big, egg-membrane eyes of his that could pierce the darkness like a night-vision scope and better. It was a snap finding the big steel hatch, lifting it effortlessly with those long, lean superhuman arm muscles of his.

  He peered into the deep, black hole. Hot air rushed up out of it like the exhalation of the biggest junkyard dog in the world. Cloaked in the night, Inigo could spy downward with perfect assurance, see the dead elevators, the emergency handholds set at regular intervals in the wall down the endless length of the shaft.

  This would be the hardest part of all, harder even than hanging on to that shrieking hell-train as it screamed underground and punched up into the air like the Devil himself being born. But Leather Man had coached Inigo thoroughly, given explicit directions. There’d be a lot of hard traveling, and he’d have to move fast, but if he was really on his toes, kept a sharp lookout, he could find shortcuts, doorways on the fade that hadn’t winked out yet, that he could still squeeze through.

  And, of course, he’d have to keep clear of the lurkers in the dark, the smilers with the knives, the dark little men who would cut him open and eat him raw without the least hesitation….

  Man, he hated being one of them.

  Leather Man would leave that last back door open for him, or else he’d never get back, not in a million years of Sundays—the door that almost nobody else could get through, certainly no human, certainly not Cal Griffin. The Big Bad Thing would sense a thing like that for sure, and crush anyone flat before he so much as drew a breath.

  But a little gray guy, particularly under just the right protection and at the right moment, might just slip on by, be taken for one of the ground crew, one of the staff.

  Because as Leather Man and Papa Sky had drilled into him and into him…

  Grunters It drove crazy (except for him, for the time being), flares It swallowed whole to fuel the furnace, and dragons—

  Well, dragons were another thing entirely.

  Time to go home. Or at least what had once been home, and now was—

  “Hold it right there, you lying little creep.”

  The voice came from behind him, stunningly close. Inigo turned around slowly.

  Colleen Brooks stood there, not ten feet off, her crossbow aimed right at him.

  He hadn’t heard her coming at all.

  Damn, she was good…for a human.

  “You wanna talk about it?” Colleen glared at him. “No? Suits me just fine, because most sphincters I run into just want to yak and yak. C’mon, we’re heading back.”

  Busted. He took just one step toward her, when abruptly someone dashed up from behind and to the right of him, grabbed him hard and threw him down into the snow.

  Which was the only thing that saved him, or his hypersensitive sight at least, because right then there was this explosion of light around him, and Colleen Brooks screamed.

  When the light cleared enough for him to look up, Inigo thought for one terrible instant that she had been melted to nothing right there on the spot. The
n he saw to his relief that she had just dropped to the ground and was rolling around in pain, holding her eyes and cursing, blinded—temporarily, he hoped.

  Then whoever it was behind him grabbed him again.

  “Move,” the voice said, and shoved him toward the open shaft. The two of them crawled in quickly, hanging from the handholds.

  “The hatch, grab the hatch,” the voice commanded.

  Inigo grabbed the heavy iron door by its inner wheel, pulled it down secure.

  “Now dog it. Hard.”

  Inigo twisted it, then gave it an extra turn no ordinary mortal could undo.

  The two of them slid down the walls of the shaft like lizards, like the geckos Inigo had seen on Kauai when his folks had taken him on vacation, in the good time before his dad had gotten the security job at the Project.

  It seemed to take forever, the two of them descending in silence, but finally they reached bottom. Breathing hard in the echoing blackness, Inigo faced the one who had saved him.

  The man reached out a hand palm-up, and a glowing ball appeared in it, a flawless globe of shimmering blue fog. Inigo squinted painfully against the light.

  The figure adjusted his straw cowboy hat with the five aces, set it right.

  “Now you’re gonna tell me a thing or two,” Goldie said, neither his eyes nor his mouth smiling, in his own way every bit as terrifying as Leather Man could be.

  There was nothing funny about him at all.

  SEVENTEEN

  THE TRIANGLE AND THE STONES

  Back in the good old twentieth century when Einstein was the latest word in all things physical, the Astronomy Department had set up this telescope—a Meade Starfinder situated in the cupola atop what had once been the Atherton Agricultural College, next to the newer Physical Sciences Building—for long-term use by its faculty and student body.

  But Melissa Wade was the only person who came here anymore.

  The retractable domed roof of the cupola had been donated by a wealthy alumnus, a tool-and-dye tycoon with a stargazing fetish. Melissa hadn’t expected a clear night, considering the long snowy day. But the sky had opened like a treasure box just after dark. And so, alone between dinner call and lights-out, she had come here and cranked back the roof.

  The room was stocked with scope accessories—digital imagers and trackers—but Melissa left these alone. They were an unnecessary draw on the community current, for one thing; moreover, Melissa wasn’t here to do research or even serious observing. She just liked the place. It was conducive to thought. It was her aerie. Crossing the night-lit room, she caught her reflection in the curved glass of the dead monitors, and quickly looked away. Not that she was unattractive; quite the reverse. She got her curves from her mom; her wide, radiant smile from her dad; and that glowing, perpetual-tan skin from the mixture of both, the sweet gift of having one parent white, one black. Whenever she traversed the quad, she was aware of heads turning to watch her; the men, and women, too, as if she was something quite extraordinary.

  But she wasn’t, she knew; at least, not that aspect of her. It was merely something she’d been given, not something she’d earned. And so she chose not to dwell on it, not even in reflection.

  And anyway, her looks had no effect on Jeff.

  Melissa plopped herself down in the plush leather chair and stared up at the expanse of stars through the open dome, gemstones scattered across black velvet. She put her eye to the viewfinder, and the scene leapt to dazzling intensity.

  Some astronomy plebe might look at that array and see only constellations and nomenclature; man imposing his arbitrary meaning on nature, and rendering himself blind.

  But Melissa’s focus of study had never been astronomy, and what she’d learned by rote in those required classes she’d mostly forgotten. Of all the celestial bodies in the night sky, she could still identify only the moon, Venus and Mars, the Big Dipper, Polaris the North Star and a smattering of others.

  But none of that mattered. She didn’t have to name them. She loved them much more simply than that.

  With all its optical gear and tracking equipment disengaged, the Meade was little more than an expensive amateur scope. What was different since the Change was the sky. Less pollution to block the view. No competing light from automobiles or cities or towns (except here in Atherton, and then only before curfew). Melissa had grown up in Los Angeles, where the night sky was generally blank as slate. Out here in the boonies—and since the Change—the sky was a river of stars.

  She bathed in it.

  Stars were suns, very far away. The fuzzy ones were galaxies—whole clusters of stars. And even after the Change they had not varied in their courses. Maybe that was what she found so reassuring in this immensity, the fact that all this scary terrestrial stuff was less than a fleabite against the somber rotations of the sky.

  Still, it didn’t change the fact that the natural laws—at least locally, in galactic terms—had become a whole ’nother ball game.

  Melissa had been a physics major, specializing in quantum mechanics, but had soon found that her real skill was as a grease monkey. She’d always messed around with motors and engines. Her dad had been a first-rate mechanic—a weekend hobbyist mainly, but a good one—and he’d let her fool around with tools and equipment from before she was riding a bike minus the training wheels.

  So when she joined the Atherton lab as a grad student import from UCLA’s Large Plasma Device facility, she’d just naturally fallen into being the pair of hands supervising the building of Jeff Arcott’s own radically original version of the plasma zapper, hand-tooling the steel housings and mounting the big water-cooled bus bars, pumping all the air out of the hundred-yard cylindrical chamber until you had a near-perfect vacuum at barely a billionth of an atmosphere, then introducing argon into the mix. Theo Siegel had taken the lion’s share of fine-tuning the lasers and doing the other minute calibrations. And Jeff Arcott was the designer on high, the lord of creation, the big brain in a globe the mutants carried around.

  Nowadays, of course, the plasma zapper was just so much rusting junk; there were bigger fish to fry. Oh, she supposed they could summon up the raw energy to get it all sparking again. But the elusive Holy Grail quest for fusion power was Old Physics thinking now, when there was so much more of a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow if you started pursuing new lines of inquiry.

  At least, that was Jeff’s point of view.

  Sometimes—quite often, actually—Melissa felt like someone standing halfway up a mountain, unable to see anything over the top, while Jeff stood on the summit, gazing out onto immensity and rhapsodizing over what he saw.

  She just had to trust that what Jeff reported was what was actually there.

  And why should she doubt it? Why should she listen to the queasy, whispering little voices within her?

  Not long ago, she and Theo had discussed this topic, for he shared her—all right, call it disquiet; she was alone and, in this moment at least, could be candid with herself.

  What if Jeff was mistaken, what if he was drawing all of them into the darkness rather than the light? There was no evidence of that so far, given his triumphs here in town.

  And yet, there were still those whispers….

  In conversation with Theo, she’d betrayed none of these doubts, had instead hotly defended Jeff. “He’s doing something incredible,” she’d said, “and we can help make that happen. What’s this stupid life for anyway? You only have the people you care about, and if you’re not loyal to him”—she quickly amended it—“to them, then what do you have?”

  Theo had said nothing in response, had only grown abashed, and retreated.

  Which had been no mystery, for although by mutual unspoken consent they had never discussed it openly, had in fact barely alluded to it, Melissa was aware of how Theo felt about her, and equally aware of how nothing could come of it.

  Melissa knew herself well, knew the recurring patterns of her life. Every man that had held center stage in he
r life, from her professorial father on down, had been a distant star retreating, as cold and unreachable as the ones in the firmament, the ones she could spy through the opening in the cupola above.

  And Jeff, with his immense charm and charisma, that incredibly sexy air of assured genius (in her lighter moments, Melissa liked to fantasize about an infomercial for a videotape called Scientists Gone Wild), was merely the latest and greatest, the most brilliant and rejecting of all.

  And she cherished him more than the gems he had studded Atherton with, the treasures that had restored sanity to the town.

  Even now after so much had happened, when Jeff entered a room, Melissa still felt weightless.

  Which—as her father liked to say in his favorite colloquialism—was to laugh, because the only thing that made Jeff Arcott’s head turn, the only thing he had ever truly loved, was the quest for pure knowledge.

  So she mooned over Jeff, while Theo mooned over her. At present, she suspected Jeff held much the same affection for her that she held for Theo; if that wasn’t her projecting emotions onto Jeff, filling in the blanks. She could hope at least, knowing that sometimes affection bloomed into more, a great deal more. She’d seen that happen on numerous occasions…and not all of them just in movies and TV.

  Normally about this time of night, Theo would be seeking her out, asking if she might like some peach tea, or offering up a day-old Danish from the bakery the campus cooks still maintained despite all that had happened. He was as solicitous as a little brother, as kin, and she supposed in some odd way he was…given the nifty hand-tooled item just the two of them shared under the skin.

  Through the open cupola, Melissa heard footsteps and voices echoing from the sidewalk outside. Two of the voices she didn’t recognize, but the third she knew as Theo’s, though laced with a tension she thought sounded like pain.

  Theo cried out as he took a misstep, verifying her suspicion. Melissa looked away from the eyepiece and closed up the cupola.