Magic Time: Ghostlands

by Marc Scott Zicree

  “No!” Cal cried, but the boy paid him no heed.

  Seeing him come on, the woman dropped into a defensive stance and pulled a long, deadly blade from its scabbard.

  Drawing near, the grunter boy cried out, “It’s me! It’s Inigo!”

  The woman’s mouth opened in soundless surprise, her eyes astonished. She threw the knife aside into the snow as he leapt for her, and she enclosed him rocking in her arms. They sobbed, the two of them, for all the time lost, for this meeting.

  Inigo’s words were muffled in her embrace, but Cal caught them as they drifted on the night wind to him.

  “Mom…Mom…”

  In time, she rose, and with her boy’s hand in hers, walked up to Cal. She extended her free hand, and Cal took it.

  “I’m Cal Griffin,” he said.

  Her eyes reacted with surprise; something raw and primal flared there, and was quickly suppressed.

  “May Catches the Enemy,” the Lakota woman replied by way of introduction, and led them into the waiting earth.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  MUSIC AND STEEL

  It’s like descending into a grave, Cal thought, and knew it was not the first time he’d had such a thought in the journal of his adventures. In truth, more than anything, his life had become a collection of experiences and exploits he never dreamed he would have, and more often than not would have preferred forgoing.

  His body anchored with weariness, muscles singing with the ache and bruise of the long trek and its travails, he staggered into the heart of the earth. Christina drifted shining beside him, Colleen and Doc half supporting each other, Howie limping along while Shango and Enid helped guide Papa Sky down the sloping terrain. Inigo and his mother, still holding hands, followed close upon.

  The gateway of soil sealed up behind them, entombing them in the massive space beneath. Cal tensed as it closed, then detecting a like anxiety in his companions, forced himself to relax.

  The air underground was fresh and moved with a cool breeze from several pathways. The pungent, pleasant smell of burning sweetgrass and sage wafted on the air. May Catches the Enemy led them to low tables with soft cushions, where buffalo stew and flatbread and strong, hot coffee were served up. Cal ate greedily, for the first time aware of how hungry he’d been, and felt considerably better.

  Inigo’s mother came and crouched nearby, studying him keenly, as if trying to weigh who he might be by the way he chewed his food, how he sipped his coffee.

  In time, she said, “We were told you were coming, but not who you’d be.”

  “Yes?” Cal replied. “By whom?”

  She hesitated, and her eyes darted to Papa Sky, who sat across the table, nodding his head in time to a beat only he could hear.

  As if he’d caught her glance, the old blind man said, “By my special friend…”

  A shudder ran through Cal. He thought of the first time he’d heard Papa Sky use that phrase, back in Buddy Guy’s club when he’d given them the dragon scale that had come from his mysterious, unseen traveling companion.

  “That the same friend who sent you to us in Chicago?” Cal asked.

  A smile spread across Papa Sky’s face, like honey on good dark bread. “That’s mighty sharp of you, Mr. Cal…. But then, my friend always said you were bright.”

  Colleen started to speak, but May cut her off with a raised hand. “The white people joke about Indian time…but we like to wait till everyone’s here who’s s’posed to be. We still got one or two coming. There’ll be time for talk. But right now, y’all need some rest. You come a long, hard way.”

  Colleen looked questioningly at Cal.

  Yawning, he rose. “Show us to our suites.”

  The others were led to various alcoves where warming fires blazed, given sleeping bags and blankets from Wal-Mart and Prairie Edge and wherever else folks had been able to scrounge supplies before they’d been locked in here, trapped in their tiny enclave of safety from the encroaching, malign power at the Source.

  May Catches the Enemy found Cal and Christina a cozy place in a shadowy corner away from everyone, where Cal was surprised to find fluffed pillows and a goose-down comforter and thick buffalo robe waiting. The woman withdrew, and Cal settled into the robe, wrapping its lush dark fur around him as he lay on the dry, hard earth. Christina floated onto the comforter and grew still, closing her eyes, her aura fading to faintest eminence as she eased into rest.

  Her eyes fluttered open and focused on a distant spot, to the darkness where Doc and Colleen lay unseen. “Things are different,” she said drowsily.

  “Uh-huh,” Cal said.

  “She’s with him now, huh?”

  “They’re good together,” he said. “It’s a good thing.”

  “You’re different, too….” Her eyes came to rest on him. “Good different. You’re strong, Cal.”

  “I can’t move boulders with my brain.”

  She gave him the faintest smile, then her face clouded. “Goldie…” she said, and didn’t finish it.

  He nodded, feeling the loss, knowing there was nothing to make it right.

  “Maybe we’re alive in who remembers us, at least a little,” his sister said. “Maybe we’re alive in what we set free….”

  “Maybe,” he agreed.

  They were silent then, alone with the crackling fires, the weight of air.

  At last, Christina spoke again. “Back in the mountain, when I was…you know.” He sensed she couldn’t bring herself to say human. “It’s all fuzzing away now, like a dream when you wake up, I can’t keep hold of it. But the one you mentioned to Papa…he was there.”

  Cal felt chilled, within the warm embrace of the robe. Neither needed to say his name; they both knew. Cal was wide-awake now, his senses keen. In the distance, down the rock passages, he could hear the whistling of the wind, and a sound like something calling.

  Christina huddled deeper into the comforter, her pale fine hair fanned atop it. As sleep enfolded her, she murmured, “Inigo calls him Leather Man.”

  As night drew on, Cal found sleep eluding him. Restless, he moved off from his sister as she slumbered, not wanting to wake her. Wrapping the buffalo robe about him, he walked to the mouth of a passage, peered down it. Air swirled up out of it like a titan exhaling, and he heard a rhythmic, deep pulse. But it was dark as a coal miner’s esophagus. He felt like seeking out Inigo, with his night-sharp grunter eyes, and asking him to search out its secrets.

  He was weary of mysteries….

  Suddenly, he was gripped hard from behind, felt cold steel at his throat, the edge of a long blade.

  “I been a long time waiting for this,” the voice behind him said softly in his ear. It held music in it, and steel.

  He knew the voice.

  He’d placed his sword by the pillows and comforter; still, he had his short knife in its scabbard under his ribs. He could reach it easily, might be able to do something with it. Or he could call out to his sister. Rousing fiery awake, she could shatter this one’s bones where she stood, blast her to dust on the air.

  He did nothing.

  “You’ve got something to say.” He worked to keep his voice level, and as quiet as hers. “Or we wouldn’t still be talking.”

  She released him then, and came around to face him.

  “My married name was Devine,” May Catches the Enemy said.

  As the night waned and morning came on, Cal came to know that long months ago, nine hundred miles away in Chicago, he had killed this woman’s husband, and Inigo’s father.

  They drank coffee, just the two of them, beside a low fire, out of earshot of the others. The flames leapt and sparked, made light play in her raven hair, her emerald eyes.

  “He never wanted it, what happened to him,” May said, not looking at Cal. “He left to keep us safe. Maybe that’s what he was doing with them flares, too…. Then it all went to hell.”

  “Have you told your son?”

  “Not yet…I’ll tell him when the time’s right. We
got a lot of catching up to do. When I got back, I couldn’t get to him. With everything I could pull off, the farthest I could get was here.”

  Cal thought back to the deserted mall in Iowa, to his first encounter with her son, when he’d heard the boy’s name and recalled the line from The Princess Bride.

  My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die….

  Incredible, Cal reflected, the turns of fate, the dance of loss and grief and inexorable parting, of sins committed, and allies made….

  “That thing with the knife,” May said, “I just needed to get it off my chest.” Her eyes found him, held him pinioned there. “You did what you had to,” she added, an absolution.

  Nevertheless, Cal blamed himself, even knowing he could have chosen no other course, that Clayton Devine, in his guise as both Primal and Primal’s toady, would surely have killed them all had they not gained the upper hand.

  Guilt and necessity, that was the rule of the day. So what separated the pure from the defiled, the evil from the good? Compassion? Could that possibly be enough?

  Or did the old definitions, the dividing lines, no longer hold sway? Had they changed like everything else in this twisted world?

  “You have a busy head,” May Catches the Enemy said, intruding on his thoughts. She touched his hand, and he was surprised to find that her touch discomforted him more than the blade at his throat had.

  Catching this reaction, she smiled. It was the first time he’d seen her smile, and it transformed her, rendered her girlish and appealing. He saw she had a dimple in one cheek, the fire lending her skin a warm glow.

  “It’s a good thing you’re here,” she said, growing serious again. “Mostly, those who made it here are old folks, some kids. We only got one or two holy men, and that won’t be enough….”

  “For what?” Cal asked.

  May Catches the Enemy gave him another smile, but with mystery in it, and the promise of coming things.

  “Better get some sleep while you can,” she said, rising.

  “I haven’t slept much since the Change,” he replied.

  She gazed down at him. “The world hasn’t changed,” she said, “just revealed more clearly what it always was, so everyone can see it plain.”

  She fell silent, meditative. Then she murmured, soft as a feather touch, “Folks got so busy, everything so noisy and fast, they forgot who they were. Things had to get quiet again, so they could find the being in human being, get connected to the universe again, to the world, to their power….”

  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 Kübler-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 jeté 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 h
is 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 überbody 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…”