Magic Time: Ghostlands

by Marc Scott Zicree

  Sitting on the tracks, black as a starless, abandoned sky—but somehow also throwing off a dim glow that allowed her to see along the tunnel—was a long train with featureless cars and an ominous, vast locomotive, huffing steam like a dragon waiting.

  And on either side of it, scurrying about and crawling over each other, shouting and shoving and hissing in all their foul glory, were thousands and thousands of grunters, like a Shriners convention of gargoyles.

  It’s not a great bet, Inigo had said.

  You got that right, Blue Boy.

  Making not the slightest noise (Enid holding tight to the bells worked into his dreadlocks, to make sure even they would not betray their presence), the eight of them hurriedly edged back the way they came.

  “Now what?” Shango asked once they’d gotten clear of the passage.

  “Maybe it’s time we got clear on exactly where we are,” Cal offered. “I mean, past all the illusions and false starts. Something more specific than that we’re in South Dakota.” He turned to look questioningly at Inigo.

  “We’re…kinda inside a mountain,” Inigo responded hesitantly.

  “Great,” said Colleen.

  “Beyond that tunnel,” Cal asked, “what are the ways out?”

  “Um, well, a lot of them are knocked out,” the boy answered, “since the, y’know, thing or Storm or whatever. The only way I ever got out was that tunnel. But I’ve heard there’s another place, only I couldn’t tell you where exactly…. It’s called the Hall of Records.”

  “What’s it look like?” said Cal.

  Inigo shrugged. “It’s sorta long and squarish…and it’s got these things in the walls with words on them, like you make plates out of.”

  Colleen was dumbstruck. “I’ve seen it.”

  “Honey,” Mama Diamond said, smiling, “you surely do get around.”

  We have been buried alive, Doc Lysenko thought as they hurried along the stone passageway, and now at last we are clawing our way to the surface.

  In the far distance, he could see a bright rectangle of light and knew it for what it was—the doorway out to the open air.

  In the glow cast from Christina’s nimbus, he glanced over at Colleen and gave her the faintest smile. She returned it, uneasily.

  Almost there…

  Abruptly, the walls and ceiling and floor beneath their feet trembled and rocked, and he could hear a rumbling, an enraged roar that grew quickly and filled every corner of his mind.

  NO!

  It was Sanrio, he had detected them. Doc could see his own look of fear and alarm mirrored on the faces of the others.

  Cal picked up his pace, broke into a full-out run, motioning for the others to follow him. But as they sped toward the light at the end of the tunnel, Doc could see an illumination rising up from behind them, reflected on the backs and shoulders of the others.

  He looked back and saw a roiling, riotous mass of shifting color filling the chamber and rushing at them, felt its obscene heat speeding toward them.

  Fire, fire made up of flares.

  “Tina! Enid!” Cal shouted, not slowing.

  Christina concentrated, and her aura intensified, spread out to enclose them. Enid grabbed up his guitar from around his back and began playing for all he was worth, incredible, gorgeous riffs of power.

  The hungering wall of flame rebounded as if striking a barrier, then came on again, slower but not stopped. It was clear to Doc that, fast as they might run, they could not possibly reach the doorway before the fire engulfed them.

  The reactor would have them….

  Silently, he said a prayer as he felt the ferocious heat pursuing him, his ears full of the echoing percussion of their footfalls, the triumphant roar of the flame, the wild beauty of Enid’s guitar.

  And then, something else…

  Faint, at first, barely perceived, but then louder, more assured, weaving around Enid’s magnificent, fierce chords.

  An accompaniment.

  Low and throaty, and every bit as intricate and skilled. The two formed elaborate harmonies and counterpoint, danced and built upon each other, driving the flame back.

  He could feel its hellish warmth retreating. He dared to glance behind him, saw the churning wall of rainbow fire folding back.

  And impossibly, emerging out of it and walking toward them, a man…

  Playing a saxophone.

  They had reached the portal now and plunged through, into daylight and fresh air. Doc saw that they stood on a broad landing set high in the rock face, a twisted stairway descending from it.

  They were all out on the landing now, the sax man included, a cool wind blowing their hair. From within the corridor, the flame still swirled and pursued them.

  The sax man stopped his playing. “Close that door, sweet girl,” he said to Christina.

  She glanced up at a boulder above the doorway, and with her mind brought it down. It landed with a resounding impact, squarely sealing the door.

  The old bluesman smiled then, turned white, cataract eyes toward Enid Blindman. “Am I glad to see you, son.” His voice shook, and held such a depth of emotion that Doc realized there was something profound and unspoken, a mystery there.

  As if remembering himself, Papa Sky addressed the others, adding, “Mighty glad to see the rest of you, too.”

  Which was a figure of speech, of course, because of all of them, he alone could not see where they were.

  On reflection, Doc couldn’t say whether that was a blessing or a curse.

  But regardless, the old man could certainly hear it.

  Above them, at the summit, a geyser of incalculable power shot up from the heart of the mountain through an opening that had undoubtedly been blasted out of the rock itself months ago, at the exact moment of the dark miracle called the Change, the Storm, the Megillah….

  That miracle was clearly continuing. The dazzling geyser of energy pierced up into the sky, into twisting, undulating black clouds that rippled out to the horizon in all directions. A reverse whirlpool, a centrifuge throwing off power to the four corners of the world.

  And it was clear, too, that the first eruption of this force must have been horrendous, for the rock face all about them had melted and reformed, into appalling, grotesque new shapes.

  Even so, they could all still recognize the summit nearest them for what it had once been, and at last they knew exactly where they were.

  “My God,” murmured Larry Shango, and it occurred to Doc that he had never heard the man so shaken.

  Once, the massive portraits had been distinct and recognizable, shaped lovingly with jackhammers and dynamite, each grandly resplendent in their various accoutrements of powdered wig, beard, pince-nez….

  But since then, the four gigantic stone heads had melted, oozed together, lost all definition as individuals, and resolidified into one loathsome visage that was a tumble of gaping mouths and horror-filled eyes.

  “Mount Mushmore, Goldie would have said,” Colleen remarked, and there was loss and pain in her voice.

  Helping the old blind man along, they made their way down the stairs and onto the rubble field, descending to the sacred Black Hills beyond.

  FORTY-THREE

  THE UNQUIET DEAD

  “Them’s some powerful riffs you got there, Old Man.”

  The first words Enid Blindman uttered once the group of them had cleared the shadow of the ruined, disfigured monument were addressed to Papa Sky. The next were to no one in particular.

  “This is one scary-ass place.”

  True enough on both counts, Mama Diamond reflected. But the statement of more burning urgency was clearly the latter.

  Because everything was bound and determined to kill them.

  As they struggled their way along the melted and reformed face of the mountain and down the rubble field (the stones of which still bore the jackhammer gouges made when Rushmore was first carved, sixty years ago and more), great ragged boulders tore clear and pounded after them. Blasted, bu
rned vestiges of ponderosa pine came alive and snatched at them with blackened branches like spearpoints.

  Her companions fought back the onslaught, shattering rock and shearing wood with light, and sound, and blades of keenest metal.

  But the party was just getting started.

  It’s not nice to mess with Mother Nature….

  Only this wasn’t Mother Nature. No, she and Mama Diamond had enjoyed quite a cordial relationship over the last seven decades, as Mama sought out a good deal of the fine lady’s bounty, prying it lovingly from earth and stone and riverbed.

  No, if Mama Diamond was to understand the information Cal Griffin and Agent Shango had shared with her, this was Dr. Marcus Sanrio at work—Sanrio and whatever else held sway there inside that mountain.

  Mama Diamond had thought until now that dragons and their little gray workforce were about the worst this world had to offer.

  Old Woman, you had no idea….

  They’d reached a roughly level area now, a broad expanse of cracked concrete with a big oozy bowl shape at the center. Mama Diamond saw that it had once been an amphitheater, before—as with the mountain itself—it had melted like an ice-cream cone and then resolidified.

  Beyond the flat expanse lay a collapsed structure that Mama supposed had been an information center, a museum and a gift shop, but that now was so much fused wreckage of stonework, girders and glass. And out past that, rows of scorched granite stumps that (she knew from photos Katy and Samantha had sent from their vacation back in ’98) had once been tall, ordered pillars like something out of that movie she’d seen on public TV, what was it called?

  Triumph of the Will…

  There’d been a triumph of the will here, all right, but it wasn’t the U.S. government or Nazis, or anything particularly human anymore.

  The shards of glass and tortured sharp metal and smaller hunks of rubble quivered and launched themselves careening at them. Christina screwed up her face in concentration, extending her forcefield to encircle Mama Diamond and the rest. Enid and Papa Sky played duets for all they were worth, while everyone huddled inside the blazing halo.

  “We are still within the Source Project’s sphere of influence,” commented Doc.

  “I’d say you’re not gonna lose any bonus points on that one, Viktor,” said Colleen.

  “What the hell is the Source Project doing inside Mount Rushmore?” Howie piped up.

  “Originally Rushmore was conceived as a far grander project,” said Cal. “The Presidents were supposed to be full figures, not just faces, and there was going to be a huge museum and repository carved out of the inside of the mountain.”

  “How in the name of fried green tomatoes do you know all that?” asked Colleen.

  Cal shrugged. “Tina did a social studies paper once. Anyway, supposedly all they ever actually blasted out was the Hall of Records.”

  “That tunnel with the porcelain plaques,” said Doc.

  “Yes,” Cal answered. “But in actuality they must’ve carved out the rest of the mountain secretly…and put in the Source Project.”

  “Let’s hear it for American ingenuity,” said Colleen.

  “How far to the periphery?” Cal asked Shango.

  “I’d reckon fifty miles, as the crow flies.”

  “I hate to break this to you, Larry, but we’re not crows.” Colleen had to shout now over the din of the rocks and glass and metal crashing against the barrier. “More like paper targets, or soon to be chalk outlines.”

  “Really, Colleen,” Doc chided, “I wish you would try to be more positive.” His eyes smiled, and Mama Diamond saw some of the tension ease out of Colleen’s shoulders as she accepted the taunt.

  “Makes no nevermind if we reach the borderland,” Papa Sky added in his smoky cigarette rasp, lifting his lips from the bamboo reed set in the mouthpiece of his gleaming alto sax. “You try to pass through it into the world outside, why, it’ll just burn you clean away.”

  Mama Diamond saw that the boy Inigo was nodding somberly in agreement.

  “And how exactly did you get here?” Cal asked Papa Sky, but Papa only smiled inscrutably and would speak no further regarding his travels here, nor any possible companions, human or otherwise.

  Cal sighed, and let it go. “We can’t stay here, that’s for sure.” He let out a slow, considered breath. “Mary McCrae’s Preserve was in the Olentangy Indian Caverns of Ohio. A sacred site, that helped lend it its power. Now, the Source Project might hold sway here, but it’s smack dab in middle of the Black Hills—”

  Mama Diamond nodded; she knew the lore well. “The granddaddy of all sacred sites.”

  “That’s right,” Cal said. “So odds are it should have a power all its own, too.”

  “In theory,” Doc said. But theory was all they had now.

  They fell silent then, the only sound the fusillade of debris continuing to batter their defenses.

  Finally, Papa Sky spoke, his ancient, musky voice barely audible. “There’s a place I know…. Least, I heard tell of it. Rumor is some folks tried to get there once, long time back, old men, women, children…It’s called the Stronghold.”

  “Tell me it’s fifty feet from here,” Colleen said.

  “More like fifty miles,” he replied. Colleen groaned.

  “Where?” Cal asked Papa Sky.

  “A tableland just past the Black Hills…in the Badlands.”

  “Well?” Cal asked the others.

  Mama Diamond felt she really shouldn’t have a vote. After all, despite the conviction she had felt that the others would need her along, thus far she’d been little more than baggage. She saw the others nodding their assent (reluctantly, of course; it would be fifty miles of long, hard road, a royal sonofabitch, and no two ways about it) and added her own.

  Cal took this in and rose, Mama Diamond and the others following suit. Slowly, fighting the whole wide world every inch of the way, they journeyed past the melted pillars and out through the parking lot, to the twisting roadway leading down to the Badlands.

  Enid Blindman and Papa Sky continued playing all the while. As they made their tortuous way, Mama Diamond touched Papa on the arm. “Those folks who tried to get there, a long time back, what happened to them?”

  Papa Sky stopped playing, and his face was gray under its cherrywood sheen.

  “They were on the run,” he said, looking out at her with troubled, unseeing eyes. “A whole lot of them got rubbed out. At a place called Wounded Knee…”

  Farther down the slope of the mountains, they found the terrain less ravaged than at its apogee, or rather ravaged by the natural sweep of earth and time; the flow and retreat of ocean, the exhalation of molten rock, the layers of stone that had rippled and overturned like blankets on a restless sleeper.

  All under a storm-wracked sky that held little sympathy, and a great deal of threat.

  The ponderosa pines were thicker here, and green-needled once more, the aspens speckled white and brown, not charred as by a dragon’s breath. The air presented a fitful, elusive intensity of humid heat radiating off the mountainside behind them; a whisper of the Source. But for the most part, the wind wore its winter coat, and chilled them despite their heavy clothes. Icy rain pelted at them, alternating with flurries of snow. Their legs felt leaden; Colleen longed for Big-T, her redoubtable steed whom they’d left stabled back in Atherton, and for Cal’s Sooner and Doc’s Koshka. She thought then of Goldie’s horse Jayhawk—whom he had renamed Later, in a predictable fit of Goldie-ness—and it brought her a fresh pang of grief and regret.

  As the afternoon waned, the assaults on them from all directions (rail fences flying at them, barbed wire coiling and springing like pythons) grew less determined and more sporadic, until they ceased altogether. Cal directed Christina to conserve her energies; in answer, her aura withdrew from about them until it encompassed only the pale, hovering girl herself. Papa Sky and Enid continued to play, but more softly, Doc leading the sightless old man with a gentle touch on his arm
.

  Walking alongside Cal, Colleen could sense his wariness. The cessation of attacks hadn’t lessened his anxiety; rather, it had served only to increase it. Colleen shared his concern. She had learned on her father’s knee that you pull back your ground forces to make room for the artillery bombardment.

  As their boots crunched on the newly fallen snow, she wondered what new hell they would soon face.

  She didn’t have long to wait for the answer.

  Descending, rounding a bend in the cracked highway amidst towering granite needles that (as Mama Diamond coolly informed them, as if they were nothing more than a nomadic tour group and she their seasoned guide) had been thrust out of the earth two and half billion years ago, they hit a level patch, a shelf on the slanting hillside.

  Cal drew to an abrupt halt, motioning the others to stillness.

  They were not alone.

  Cal drew his sword from its scabbard, and Colleen unslung her crossbow and nocked a bolt into it soundlessly. She saw the others readying themselves, too, although she felt certain they knew as well as she did that they had about as much chance as a canary at a cat convention.

  There were hundreds of them, arrayed along the hillside in the tall grass, amid the thick pines, snorting blasts of steamy breath from big nostrils, the snow like powdered sugar on their massive shoulders and heads. Some still grazed on the wheatgrass and bluestem, tearing up great hunks of sod, with blunt sounds like great machines gouging out the earth.

  Blood dripped from their diminutive mouths, and ran from their fathomless black eyes like crimson tears beneath vast horns like polished granite, black speckled in gray. Great gashes in their hides showed glistening meat with marbled fat and bone beneath; violence had been done to them, wantonly and on a grand scale.