Magic Time: Ghostlands

by Marc Scott Zicree

  Extinguished, destroyed? Cal thought so, but then…

  He couldn’t be sure.

  But this much he knew—either way, Sanrio had been dead a long time, soul dead….

  Let go of the dead, and attend to the living.

  He turned his attention to the others that orbited about him…and repeated what he had said before.

  You’re human. Be human again.

  He summoned up all the power that was within him, within the scientists and the lost ones and the flare children, the power he could draw from the flood coursing out of the rent in the universe, felt it suffuse him and erupt and flow outward in a great, warming deluge….

  You’re human. Be human again.

  And it was so.

  The first thing Cal realized as he sat up groggily on the scorched tile floor was that he had a body again.

  The second was that he had no more power than an ordinary man.

  May Catches the Enemy was there, helping him shakily to his feet.

  “Not bad, Griffin,” she said, smiling broadly. “Not bad at all…”

  Cal looked about him, and saw that the room was a shattered wreck of what had once been a laboratory, the walls chiseled out of bare rock. It was what it had always been, at least since the Change, at least in reality.

  “Christina…?” Cal croaked out worriedly, and his sister floated up to him. Still a flare, not human, but thankfully, not harmed. In her glow, Cal could make out Inigo and Howard Russo huddled concernedly about him, still grunters, as well. Colleen stood close on, Enid and Shango silent and watchful alongside, Papa Sky and Mama Diamond there, too.

  “Man, you sure know how to throw a party,” said a voice behind him.

  Cal turned and—even though he knew the man was generally leery of human contact—hugged Goldie until he nearly turned blue.

  The shadow warriors and their horses were gone, May explained, fled back to the Spirit Realm. But then she led Cal to where Doc Lysenko stood ministering to Fred Wishart and Agnes Wu and the other Source Project scientists, human again, who sat blinking and moving like sleepers gone far from the world, awakening at last from unquiet dreams.

  Of Marcus Sanrio, there was no sign.

  “What about the flares?” Cal asked.

  May led him through the Hall of Records to the staircase beneath the watchful, ruined heads of Mount Rushmore.

  In the autopsy room at Atherton, beside the ravaged body of one that was not Ely Stern, Doc had told Cal that the dragons, and the grunters and the flares, were not inhuman, but rather alternate humans….

  Pray to see what’s real, Mr. Griffin….

  Humans, all of them, in all their forms, in the world as it truly was.

  From his vantage point high atop the Black Hills, which had been called He Sapa since time out of mind, peering over the Badlands as they lay timeless under a rising sun and a cloud-wracked sky, Cal had to admit that the glow of the multitude, flying home to all four corners of the land, was spectacular indeed.

  FIFTY-NINE

  OLD MAN WAITING

  In these recent days of miracles and wonders, Garrett Lambert had seen some freaky things, truth to tell and no fish story, my man.

  But it went without saying that the cobwebby dude sitting on the bench by the dead old train depot was right up there with the contenders.

  “What’chu doin’ there, old-timer?” Garrett ambled up to him in the noonday sun only mad dogs and Englishmen would dare sashay out in. In his era, Garrett had been a pretty mad dog hisself, and once upon a time had been enough of a blueblood to pass for a Brit on a five-buck dare, if need be.

  “Waiting for a train,” the old dude exhaled, his voice as silken and insubstantial as cobweb, too. His skin was pale, faded parchment locked away in a tomb, and his hair and clothes were leeched of all color, too, diseased somehow.

  Garrett squinted hard at him; what with the glasses he’d misplaced in Laredo, and the four Dos Equis he’d quaffed as his morning Breakfast of Champions, he was having a hard time getting a lock on this particular member-in-good-standing of AARP. He seemed to go in and out of being, somehow; appeared MIA in the crevices and shadowy places of his face and form.

  Bullshit. There was enough spookiness in this world without planting some where there wasn’t fresh manure.

  “Ain’t no train passing through here, my friend.” Garrett came up close, so his body’d cast a shadow over the seated one, grant him some shade. “No train passing anywhere, come to mention it.”

  The other rose then, like a heap of sticks conspiring themselves upright. Garrett was surprised to see that the old dude was taller than himself.

  “Don’t I know it,” the old man sighed, again in that voice like a night wind passing.

  “Where you goin’?” Garrett asked.

  The old man looked out uncertainly beyond Garrett, at the orphaned land, and the flat horizon, and whatever mysteries lay beyond. For the first time, Garrett got a good look at the man’s eyes, saw they were pale white, too.

  Sweet Lord of Contagions, he’s flat-ass blind.

  “You got any people?” Garrett ventured, with growing concern.

  “A boy…” the other answered vaguely, the sound all dust.

  “He know where you are?”

  “No…. But I know where he is.”

  “Well, lemme just help you there,” Garrett said, stifling a fruity belch. Damn that fourth brew, and the damnation heat, and the friggin’ gnats that accompanied you everywhere, swarming like your own personal wedding veil. He extended a hand. “I’m Garrett Lambert.”

  “Call me Marcus…” said the other, and though he was blind his hand reached out and clasped Garrett’s firmly.

  It was all cobwebs, and dust and ashes, with not a living thing in it.

  And as his life flowed out into this blind, ravenous seeker after one certain, most special boy, Garrett Lambert had time for just one final, piquant reflection….

  Man, he’d thought that concert in ’68 with the Lizard King was pure stone weirdness.

  But it wasn’t a patch on this.

  In the time of early morning, Enid Blindman emerged out onto the porch of the house May Catches the Enemy had secured them outside Pine Ridge—part of the housing tract, she’d explained, that had been built after the twister had come through and cleared out the trailer park that had been on this land, just after the turn of the new century and before the Change. Since then, most of the people had cleared out, too, so there were plenty of places on which you could hang a VACANCY sign.

  Enid found Papa Sky sitting patiently there, shaving a reed for his Selmer. He marveled as the old man’s fingers moved deftly from long practice, not needing the distraction of sight.

  Enid settled next to him, began tuning his guitar.

  “Pretty brisk for you to be out here,” he said.

  “Hadda say me some goodbyes,” Papa Sky replied. “Ely went winging off back East.”

  “I’da figgered you’da gone with him, the two of you being so long on the road and all.”

  Papa Sky was quiet a bit, mulling the days of their time together. “Nah…. He needed some alone time to think on things, get comfortable with who he is ’stead of who he’s been.”

  Enid gazed off past the low buildings to the gentle rise of the valley and the snow-dusted plain beyond. “Way I hear Cal tell it,” he said, “Stern was one mean hombre once upon a time. Took some major cojones, you takin’ on reforming him.”

  “Well…” Papa Sky shook his head dismissively, then raised the Selmer to his lips and started in, mournful and lovely, on “Someone to Watch Over Me.”

  Enid joined in, fingering the maple jumbo with complexity and grace, and Papa would’ve sworn it was Django if he didn’t know better, only even finer, truer still.

  Finally, they came to a stopping place and let the last of the sweet sound drift off into the dawning air. A meadowlark trilled far off, answering their song with his own.

  You gonna come
clean, Old Man? Papa Sky asked himself. Or you just gonna let your axe do all your talkin’?

  He felt his heart pounding like a kettledrum fit to burst. But he knew it wouldn’t, knew he had a good many years yet left in him, even if he could remember back to when the only sound movies had in them was what music you could make with your own two hands.

  “Don’t you go thinkin’ I was no saint or nothin’, son,” Papa Sky said with a fierce rumble more intense than he intended. “I took on Ely Stern ’cause maybe I figgered, after all the wrong he done, all the folks he hurt, if he could earn a second chance…well, maybe I could, too.”

  Then Papa Sky told Enid Blindman just who he was, and who Enid was, too.

  SIXTY

  THE SOUND OF RAIN

  Dawn came with tumbled clouds and spitting rain.

  Melissa Wade awoke from a troubling dream in which she was changed into a thing of wisps and luminance.

  Then, looking at her hands gleaming in the darkness of the room, she knew it was true.

  She began to weep softly, and rocked herself as she floated in the air above tumbled covers.

  She looked about her and did not recognize where she was. The bedroom was mostly bookcases crammed with paperbacks, a few pieces of IKEA furniture, a computer. The room was dim, the blinds closed against the dawn, but she could see clearly enough in the light that sheened off her own body. Atop the desk beside the computer, she discerned a framed photograph of herself; of the way she had been.

  The door opened and Melissa turned away, wiped her eyes quickly.

  “I heard you moving around,” Theo said behind her, and his voice had an odd roughness.

  “Where am I?” Melissa asked vaguely, still coming out of sleep.

  “My place,” Theo said apologetically. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  She turned to him then, and was surprised to see how dazed he looked. Not to mention scratched, cut, beaten, disheveled and shell-shocked.

  And that didn’t even take into account that he was no longer human.

  She saw that he had moved to block her from seeing the photo by the computer; embarrassed, he turned it facedown behind him. Melissa smiled to herself, feeling warmed for the first time. It was still Theo, after all.

  “Do you remember what happened?” he asked tentatively.

  She searched her memory, found painful shards there.

  “Jeff…?” she asked.

  He nodded, neither of them wanting to say the word. Tears welled in his luminous big eyes. “I’m sorry, Melissa. I’m so sorry.”

  “What about the others?” she said when she could, and her voice was high and thin as birdsong.

  “Made it back,” Theo said. His mouth twisted into a melancholy smile. “Guess the good guys won….”

  The good guys. Melissa didn’t even know who the good guys were anymore.

  But no, she realized, thinking back on the evening before, that wasn’t true.

  Theo was a good guy.

  Theo, who had followed her and found her, who had held tight to her against the worst ravages of the Storm…

  Who had killed Jeff to save her.

  Theo loved her, had always loved her.

  Had Jeff loved her?

  She thought he had when he’d sewn that dead stone into her flesh, when he’d delayed her becoming what she truly was.

  But was that to save her…or merely to save what he needed her to do?

  She knew the answer. And what she had held within to warm herself for so very long turned dead as that stone.

  Theo spoke then of incidental things, of the town’s power being down, the gems lifeless and possessed of no miracles now. Their cozy enclosed universe of electric lights and gasoline engines had collapsed like a spent balloon.

  Eventually, he said, they might be able to turn it around. But only time would tell.

  She was studying him closely now in the glow of her own being; his sensitive features despite the change, his delicacy.

  “Do you know what you’ll be doing next?” she asked him.

  He shook his head. “Maybe an extended sabbatical. Head out in some direction, see where I fit in.”

  Melissa nodded at that, and felt something born in her different from what she had felt for Jeff, for every man of a certain kind since her father.

  It was a change beyond what had turned her into a flare, far deeper, and it opened up something new in her, a world of possibility.

  That might in turn grow into…what?

  Only time would tell.

  Rain beat against the room’s single window. She found her way to a chair beside him and settled into it, although it took her more effort than to hover above it.

  “I’d like it if you could stay awhile,” she said.

  Theo said nothing, but his eyes were all the answer she needed.

  “The rain’s coming down harder,” Melissa observed after a moment. The window rattled as she spoke.

  “I always did like that sound,” Theo said, and the two of them sat quietly and listened to it for a time.

  SIXTY-ONE

  MAGIC TIME

  Life is loss, Cal Griffin had once told himself, amid the drifting flakes of ash coming off Magritte’s funeral pyre, by the waters of Lake Michigan. But he might as well have said, Love is loss, for the many lessons his life had given him.

  Looking about him now, though, around the big table in the flickering candlelight redolent of vanilla, as they all shared a final dinner together—his sister, and Inigo, May Catches the Enemy, Larry Shango and Mama Diamond, Colleen and Doc, and Enid Blindman and Papa Sky—he felt confident he could add, And sometimes, it’s not.

  They had weathered the Storm together, beaten it back and emerged with the only treasure that really counted, the human one.

  Over in Iowa, Atherton was sweeping up after the whirlwind, and here outside Pine Ridge, Walter Eagle Elk and the other survivors were emerging out of the Stronghold into the good, fresh air, secure that nothing lurked any longer within the Six Grandfathers to steal away their lives and souls.

  “Hey, quit hoggin’ the oregano,” Howard Russo demanded of Colleen, reaching across the table with his spidery grunter arm.

  “Tell me,” she said, slapping his hand away, then sliding him the jar, “are you this rude because you’re an agent or a grunter, or both?”

  “Lay off the grunters,” May Catches the Enemy shot back, laughing and warmly eyeing her son. “Can’t we all just get along?”

  Inigo had chosen the place for their last meal and, being a kid, it stood as no surprise that he’d selected the Pine Ridge Pizza Hut. It had been shuttered since the Change, but Morris Cuts to Pieces had opened the place up for just this occasion, had fired up the woodstove and managed to cobble together a pretty decent pizza, all things considered, although chunks of buffalo steak were still a pretty sad substitute for pepperoni.

  Odds were damn good he’d be seeing his fair share of business from now on, Cal reflected, considering that Rafe Dahlquist and Theo Siegel and Melissa Wade and the rest of the physics team from Atherton were now ensconced within the mountain (thanks to a portal opened up courtesy of Herman Goldman, bachelor-at-large), working alongside the rehumanized scientists of the former Source Project.

  Ironic that, considering Theo and Melissa were now a grunter and flare respectively; two of the posthuman species, working alongside untransformed men and women to unlock the secrets of this fierce new universe.

  Only dragons were unrepresented. But then, none of this would have come to pass if not for Ely Stern’s intervention.

  Would they ultimately manage to tame the Source Energy, perhaps seal it away again?

  Who could say?

  But, whatever the outcome, it would no longer be magic; it would instead be what it had always been, truthfully—merely a further realm of science.

  “You look thoughtful,” Colleen said to Cal. “Quit it.”

  Cal grinned, and took another slice of pizza.

 
Later outside, Cal found Christina peering up at the night sky. Now that the moon was on the wane, Venus and Mars shone out clear and bright, in this sky that was as black as Lady Blade’s gleaming hair.

  It was a mild night, and Cal realized that whether the winter was gentle or fierce, spring would soon enough be here. He wondered if the seasons would return to some semblance of normalcy, or if they would remain as unpredictable as they had been of late.

  “The future’s just a ghost, you know,” Christina said, aware of Cal without turning back to look at him. “What you think you’re gonna have, how you think it’s gonna be…Just some mirage that waves at you in the heat, but you can’t ever touch it.”

  Cal nodded, and thought of the life he once thought he’d have back in Manhattan, working for Ely Stern, watching Tina rise through the ranks of the American Ballet Theatre or some other preeminent company.

  A phantom, nothing more, that had haunted and eluded them, like the future Jeff Arcott had envisioned of the Spirit Radio bringing a new birth of freedom to the land, with himself as its guiding spirit and patron saint. Arcott had pursued that illusion until it had destroyed him, rendered him a ghost, if he remained anything at all.

  And all of them one way or another had been driven, shadowed and bedeviled by the memories of ones they’d lost, or never had at all.

  Past and future, phantoms all…

  Time to let go of all the ghosts, Cal thought, and at last come out of the Ghostlands.

  Which was the whole world, until we let go…

  “I can still be a dancer,” Christina said, to the night, to the stars. She turned to Cal, her feet never touching the ground, smooth as liquid. “Just a different kind, a new kind.”

  “How’d you get so smart?” he asked her, drawing near.

  She wafted to him, the only ghost her smile. “I was raised by smart people.”