Magic Time: Ghostlands (22 page)

WONDERFUL WORLD

T
he girl was asleep in the bed that looked like her bed, in the apartment that was like her apartment. For one night, no dreams visited her, and it was as close to heaven as life, waking or sleeping, could ever be now.

The old man stood over her, watching her with blind eyes, his face gentled, the dark lines etched like furrows in old bark, there in the darkness.

“Thought I might find you here,” the voice behind him said in a whisper.

Papa Sky turned. He had heard the boy coming, of course, padding into the room on light, quick feet; nothing ever surprised Papa, nothing in the world of sighted men, that was.

Now, in the realm of their
minds,
that was a different story….

He led the boy out into the hall, softly closed the bedroom door. “Glad to see you back in one piece,” he said, without the slightest hint of irony.

“Where’s—?” Inigo didn’t have to finish the sentence; they both knew who he meant.

“I don’t rightly know. He’s a wild one, my wandering boy.”

“They’ll be coming soon, I think,” the boy said, and there was excitement under his words, and fear.

“That’s good, real good. You hungry? Carnegie Deli might still be open.” Neither of them added,
If it’s there at all; rather the copy of it, replicated, abducted from memory, and not gone back to mist and yearning…

They exited out onto the street, which tonight at least retained its solidity, the paving stones arrayed in orderly fashion, the walls standing upright. The air was warm with a mild breeze, perfect for a late-autumn night, with none of the humidity that so often cursed the city nor the frosty promise of coming snow. This was an idealized New York, not a real one, after all—a fact that was further confirmed as Papa Sky caught the lovely roller-coaster trill of the opening strains of Pops’s magnificent “Potatohead Blues” playing out of some phonograph from a distant window a street or two north. He knew this had been lifted out of his mind, it had to be; Papa Sky had actually played with Louis Armstrong once, along with Kid Orry and some of the other great old cats, fifty years back, on a paddlewheel steamboat, at Disneyland, of all places. Life was full of things so odd you had to laugh not to cry, it always had been.

Papa Sky knew where all those cats were now, under the sod, where by all rights he should be. He wondered what became of that paddlewheeler and the rest of that place.

Well, maybe I’ll just go there, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, if I ask the Powers That Be real nice, pretty please with sugar on top….

Nah, don’t even go there, Old Man, not even for funnin’. You play with fire, you get burned, even if you’re eighty-three years old and blind as a stone.

“He was like her, like Christina,” the boy beside him spoke up without prompting, bringing Papa’s thoughts back to the street here and now, where he was tapping out an easy rhythm with his cane as he turned from Eighty-first onto Columbus and headed south (all this being an unspoken agreement, you understand, to assign the familiar names and directions to these passing mirages, these phantasms).

“That so,” Papa Sky answered.

“Quiet, and strong,” Inigo said. “And patient, too.”

“Fine, that’s fine.” Papa thought back on when he’d first
met Mr. Cal Griffin and his entourage, in Chicago, in Legends, when he’d been a traveling man, even at his age, a man on a mission. “He still with that Russian doctor, and that girl with the spiky hair?”

“How you know her hair’s spiky?”

“Just sounded like it would be, is all.”

“Yeah, he’s still with them.”

“And how about that other cat, the twitchy one? Mr. Magic?”

“Goldie, yeah. He’s there, too.” Papa caught the tightness in the boy’s voice, sensed something hurtful there, but he didn’t delve further. You respect people’s pain, and give it room.

“And what about Enid…Enid Blindman?” Papa Sky ventured, and it was his turn to feel a spear of pain in his chest, like a warm blade slipped between his ribs into the soft place beneath.

“Nah, I didn’t see him.” Inigo replied offhandedly. And why not? He’d never met the young bluesman, who could work his voice and four-reed chromatic harmonica and guitar of finest maple into a sweet honey sound, into miracles like angel wings.

Just like Papa Sky could blow his horn on the soft autumn nights and warm summer days, and during wintertime and springtime, too. It was a gift, one both of them had long before any Storm blasted through this old world.

It had been hard, bonechill hard, for Papa Sky to meet up with Enid in Buddy Guy’s club there on the South Side, along with Griffin and the Russian and the rest, and pretend he didn’t know him, act like he was just another stranger, blown in from off the street like a discarded playbill.

But then, Papa Sky supposed he really
didn’t
know him, not this grown man, three decades down in his life.

No longer a baby, no, whose only music was the soft cooing he made as he lay rocked in loving arms.

The boy walking next to him stopped abruptly. “Why are you crying?” he asked in stunned amazement.

Papa Sky wiped fiercely at the wetness running down the
furrows that were like old bark in maple wood. “Just something an old man does,” he said. “Don’t mean nothin’.”

They continued on, the tapping of the cane their sole music now.

All the others were dead now. Pops and Kid Orry and Bix Beiderbecke, Wingy Manone, too. All of them, all but him. But Papa Sky knew there was a reason he was still aboveground. He had something to do.

And before it was done, he would see Enid Blindman again.

THE HINGED BOX

I
t took considerable coaxing and smoothing of feathers to convince the cops (especially the one with the spanking-new, hammer-shaped bruise to the belly) to let the big black guy and his Asian old-lady companion just sashay on into town. But then Cal Griffin put in the word with Jeff Arcott, and Arcott spoke with the cops, and that was all she wrote.

After all, Jeff Arcott was…well, Jeff Arcott.

In the old days, sports heroes and movie stars held sway, but now the one swinging the big stick was the guy who could get things done.

And say what you would about Arcott’s people skills—or notable lack of them—Theo Siegel had to admit that, without him, Atherton would look a whole lot less like it had in the old days and a whole lot more like the far side of the moon. Which was to say, barren and picked clean and utterly devoid of appreciating real estate values.

Even though dawn had come and gone, and he hadn’t gotten a lick of sleep, and his ill-used left leg was screaming like a caffeine-wired blue bastard, Theo Siegel was there waiting for them on the bench in front of the Nils Bohr Applied Physics Building when Arcott and Cal Griffin pulled up in the El Dorado, followed by a road-hardened assortment of men and women, several atop horses and others
pulled in a wagon they must have secured from some antique shop or Mennonite farm community along the road in their travels.

Melissa Wade sat beside Theo on the concrete bench. She’d sought him out around seven, brought coffee and fresh bagels, kept him diverted with airy conversation. It had been thoughtful of her, and Theo was glad of it, although as always it left him with a pang of privation, of longing.

Still, she was lovely to behold in the cool morning sun, her hair with its gradients of flame like warm coals glowing, of hammered brass and pale wood, her eyes dark-sparkling as the light sought out their subtleties. Her lips were slightly parted as she looked off lost in thought. She was lush in all the right places, but also fine-boned, delicate and fragile somehow; as always, captivating.

He knew, of course, that as soon as Jeff appeared she would hurry to his side and Theo himself would fade back in her consciousness to a shade, a wisp of memory, if anything at all.

Yet in spite of this, he held an unspoken wish, locked in the stronghold of his heart, alongside all the keepsakes he cherished of her, that Melissa might someday awaken from the spell of Jeff’s brilliance, might look around and see things fresh, things that were right in front of her face.

College romances could be like that, could ignite white-hot then burn out like roadside flares. He’d seen it a million times with his older brothers and sisters (scattered to the winds before the Change, who knew where they were now…).

Why couldn’t it work out that way in this case? Why the hell not?

Because wanting something, even wanting it with all your soul, almost never made it happen. Because there were lead actors in this world and supporting players, and Theo Siegel knew precisely which category he fell into.

Even if Jeff Arcott could never love anything as straightforward as a body sharing a concrete bench on a fall morning.

A memory of an old movie bubbled to the surface of
Theo’s mind, of Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson in
Key Largo,
of Bogart asking Robinson, who was playing Rico the mob boss, if Rico knew what he wanted.

“More,” Bogart told him. “You want more.”

Jeff wanted more. More knowledge. More power.

And what would he do with them when he had them?

As the Cadillac drew to a halt before them, he and Melissa peered at the faces of the newcomers. Theo spotted the bulky man first, there in the backseat of the El Dorado, looking much as he had in the profile
Discover Magazine
had run on him last spring before the Change, if a little more care-worn and rough around the edges.

He gave Melissa a nudge. “That’s him, Dahlquist.”

So it was true, after all. And it explained why Jeff had allowed all these new arrivals. Hell, for that level of experimental physicist, Arcott would’ve let the entire roll call of the Veterans of Foreign Wars parade into town. Not to mention chew off his own left arm. Or Theo’s, if it came to that.

Process had never been Arcott’s thing, nor patience. Results were all that mattered, the endgame. Which was a good thing, Theo supposed, if you wanted to have piping hot water and CD players and all the swankest luxuries this extremely post postmodern world could afford.

Now things could really get moving, in earnest—whatever those things might be. For although Jeff had allowed both Theo and Melissa a glimpse into some of the details of what he was building—the parts he needed them to machine and fabricate, the marching orders he required them to delegate to the rest of the work crew—he was playing a very close hand. No matter how much Arcott tried to conceal his inner workings, however, Theo had detected his frustration at how things were proceeding, knew the new work had grown becalmed, despite all Jeff’s best efforts. But Dahlquist would put an end to that.

More wonders of the New Science aborning…

Pandora’s box, slowly cracking open.

Theo knew that his own curse—beyond that of unrequited love, and loyalty beyond all reason—was an endless, insatiable curiosity to see what precisely would happen next.

Which, thanks to Jeff Arcott, in recent times and local environs, hadn’t been all that damn bad.

So why then, watching the big black car roll up like a hearse, did Theo have such a queasy feeling about the next day and the next?

He shivered, and felt the hairs on his neck rise, felt the cold dark lump under the skin there, the alien object that kept everything in check, that kept
him
in check.

Or at least, the him that he knew.

Theo envisioned all the evils of Pandora’s box flitting off, flying out into the greater world, as the Storm itself had spread. Then he remembered the one thing that had been left in the box when all else had fled.

Hope.

Looking now at Cal Griffin (who had literally saved him from the jaws of death, and from its talons, too) as he emerged from behind the steering wheel of the Caddy, Theo Siegel thought he might have just enough faith left in him to believe in something more than Jeff Arcott and Melissa Wade, and the siren call that beckoned them.

Melissa had bolted up off the bench, and ran to Arcott as he climbed from the passenger side. Now Theo levered himself up, working the crutches the medic had supplied him with as an auxiliary leg.

“Welcome home, Jeff,” he said. And although he couldn’t really march anymore, not on that twisted, dragon-mangled leg, he waited for his marching orders.

All the while knowing, too, that soon enough he would seek out Cal Griffin and his companions and have a word with them.

Virtually the first thing Cal Griffin asked Agent Larry Shango and Mama Diamond when he got them alone was, “What brought you here?”

And the first thing that astonished him was when they answered, “Ely Stern.”

The three of them sat in the Insomnia Café, along with Colleen Brooks, Herman Goldman and Dr. Viktor Lysenko,
sipping lattes and espressos at a table decoupaged with images torn from a Time-Life history of the twentieth century—Hitler and Eleanor Roosevelt, Joseph McCarthy and Mahatma Gandhi. These heroes and villains of the century past, gone, all gone, and their world gone with them….

“Lord, son,” said Mama Diamond, surveying Cal’s ashen face. “You look like someone just walked on your grave.”

“Not on mine,” Cal murmured, as the past unfurled like a banner bolted onto the present, shifting fiendishly in its weight and measurements.

He had thought Ely Stern most likely dead and long rotting on a Manhattan pavement, his lungs and hopefully his sadistic heart, too, skewered by the same sword that rested now against Cal’s thigh.

If anyone had deserved to die, it was certainly Stern, who had left desolation and murder in his wake; who had attempted to spirit away Tina before the Source had at long last succeeded; who had done his level best to kill Colleen and Doc and Goldie—and Cal himself, into the bargain—before he had finally been sent spiraling down into the darkness between the spires of New York.

Yet why had Stern stolen Tina in the first place? Cal had long wondered about that. True, he had clearly thought she was transforming into the only other one of his kind, but that wasn’t sufficient explanation.

From what Cal had learned since, it seemed obvious that whatever lived at the Source hungered for the flares’ unearthly
power,
and so had gathered them in Its net.

But as for Stern, the reason seemed more personal….

Upon Cal’s saving her and on the journey southward to Boone’s Gap, Tina had chosen to speak little of it. So Cal could only speculate from what he’d briefly overheard Stern saying to her on that distant rooftop.

There had been a tone in his voice Cal had never heard before, in all his years working for this pitiless man, before Stern’s dragon self had erupted outward and revealed him for what he truly was.

His words to Tina had held tenderness…and longing…and loneliness.

Previously at the office, whenever Stern had spoken in passing of women, it had always been with derision and rage. But here was a new thing, something Cal had only had moments to wonder at before Stern had turned his killing gaze upon him, and Cal had been forced to save himself and destroy Stern.

Or at least, so he thought.

Another passing player in Cal’s life, another purveyor of scars, physical and mental, safely relegated to the past, gone but most assuredly not forgotten.

But Cal knew now that Stern was
alive,
not a hideous ghost of memory but an active presence just out of sight, no longer in Manhattan but on the move, a restless wandering spirit like themselves….

But no, Cal corrected, not like themselves,
nothing
like themselves. He had stolen Mama Diamond’s gems, had brought them here, much the same way—Shango now informed him—that the scientists at the Source Project had coveted and accumulated such stones….

With Jeff Arcott utilizing the gems that Stern delivered.

But
why?
How had this come about, this unlikely alliance, this grand design whose architecture was so elusive?

And what was in it for Stern, that consummate manipulator of self-advantage? Whose interests was he serving?

Arcott or the Source…or both?

Certainly himself, that was always the case. But how, to what end?

No telling, at least not yet.

Stern had removed himself to parts unknown. While Jeff Arcott was closeted behind locked doors with his armed guards and his work crew and Rafe Dahlquist, the new resident genius on the scene, all speeding toward their goal.

While I don’t even know,
Cal thought bitterly,
where my goal is.

Until, that was, Agent Shango uttered the second astonishing statement that morning.

“I don’t know how to get there…but I know where the Source Project is.”

“It’s—you could say it’s an
unholy
place.” Larry Shango continued, scowling. “I saw things….” Shango’s face clouded with the memory.

“I was turned away,” he said finally. “I was turned away in a fashion I do not understand.”

“You tell me where it is,” Cal reassured him, “and we’ll figure out how to get there.”

“In the Black Hills, beyond the Badlands, outside Rapid City, South Dakota.”

Cal drew in a sharp breath, glanced over to Herman Goldman, who nodded agreement, sipping his Yogi tea. Hadn’t he once said it might be there, back when they’d been en route to take on Primal in Chicago, to win back Enid Blindman’s contract, and his freedom? But then Goldie had quickly added that he couldn’t be sure, that Radio K-Source was an unreliable font of information. Now they had confirmation, at last.

Shango noted that Herman Goldman had changed little in the months since he had last seen him; outwardly, at least. There was something much altered beneath, he could sense though not define it, a hardness there.

He noted, too, the new thing between Colleen Brooks and Dr. Lysenko, the relationship that had grown like a fresh sapling following the winter chill. A good thing that, something for them to hold on to.

And what of Cal Griffin? He’d retained all the qualities Shango had admired on their first meeting, that so reminded him of President McKay, the calm and the wariness, the qualities of leadership that could be honed but not acquired. He was, if anything, more impressive now that he was this much farther along his road; he wore his responsibilities with less doubt.

Griffin had sent his other acolytes to their new housing and to grab some food, leaving just his core of lieutenants to compare notes around the table.

With one addition—Mama Diamond looked about her at these warriors Larry Shango had told her about back in Burnt Stick and during their long journey here—when they weren’t fighting off wolves and panthers and marauders and cops, that was. It was clear from the old prairie rat’s expression that she found them far less formidable than his descriptions had led her to believe. But she’d learn soon enough, he knew. Not everyone was as mild as their appearance, as she herself had amply demonstrated.

Cal Griffin leaned forward, his elbows on the table, and looked deep into Shango’s eyes.

“I want to know what you saw…and how it turned you back.”

You cross the path of the Devil in your travels, li’l love, you keep right on walking,
Shango’s great-grandmother—whom everybody called Aunt Sally whatever their relation to her—had cautioned him nearly thirty dead years back. He sat on her lap then, small and attentive and anything but intimidating, as she shelled sweet peas with long fingers like hickory branches, the wind coming off the bayou like the hot wet mouth of hell had opened up somewhere in there and was breathing out low and slow.

“And you don’t tell no one who you met,” she added, her twisted strong hand caressing his cheek, leaving heat trails in his skin. “’Cause he jes might hear you and come right on back….”