Magic Time: Ghostlands (37 page)

THE KING OF INFINITE SPACE

N
ow, 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 his 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…”

“He? He who?” Goldman asked, although he felt reasonably sure he already knew. Despite his total lack of a body, he shuddered nonetheless.

Sanrio…

“Yes…” Wishart replied, and Goldie realized the other could read his thoughts. Or, he amended, his
private
thoughts, the ones he intended for himself.

It filled him with dread, a sense of violation. Wishart, or what was left of him, seemed to mean no harm. But Wishart wasn’t the only teddy bear on this here picnic, and the casualness with which he invaded Goldman’s mental garden of verse gave a hint of darker things.

Fuck it, I’m outta here,
Goldie thought and, spurred by his fear, felt his consciousness plunge forward—

Which happened to be right
through
Fred Wishart.

Goldie felt a sudden rush of memories and sensations, a headlong tumult of images and sounds and smells and feelings. Little League and Stanford and the movie house in Beckley, and that fishing trip with Bobby when they were both teens, the two of them with Wilma Hanson along, all three of them laughing their asses off, even though she was older, of his mother, Arleta, and his doctor father, who died young…

The memories that were the totality of Dr. Fred Wishart.

Oh God…
Goldie thought, and he’d have tossed his cookies right then and there, if he’d had cookies to toss or a stomach to toss them from.

“Where
am
I?” Goldie asked.

“You know that, don’t you?” Fred Wishart said.

Yeah. Yeah, he did….

Beyond Wishart, he could sense murmurings, harmonies and cacophonies of other minds. He extended his consciousness outward, tentatively brushed the other dominant psyches held in thrall there. Sakamoto and Agnes Wu, St. Ives and Pollard, and the other names he knew full well from Larry Shango’s list.

And out beyond them, like an asteroid belt or Oort Cloud of mentalities, lesser minds, banked down, orbiting, tethered fast.

Thousands and thousands of them…

The flares.

He could sense them distantly without even trying, sense their variant stories, their divergent histories, each an individual who’d once been human, once had a family.

Trapped here.

No leaving, and no hiding place…

He could invade them, pick the lock on the strongbox of memory, pilfer their thoughts and keepsakes, just as Wishart had done with him, and he with Wishart.

But beyond them, within them, he sensed another thing, resonant and myriad….

“The flares hold all the minds they have touched,” Wishart said, discerning his thought. “Even those who have gone before.”

Oh sweet Lord,
Herman Goldman thought, the impossible, wild hope born suddenly within him. He extended his mind like a great hand stretching out, passing through the multitudinous awareness like a mighty wind striking many trees as it roared through a forest.

And at last, at last, at last…he found her.

Magritte.

Not alive and whole, not all of her, but the
essence,
the core, preserved, held pristine.

He inhaled her, embraced and enfolded her, took her into himself and made her inseparable, as he had once recognized the one he’d labeled the Devil as himself, as he had once welcomed madness.

The part of him grown bitter and mean since her senseless, pitiless death—that had jettisoned mercy and nearly tortured a poor innocent grunter boy in the missile silo back in Iowa, and had tried so desperately to kill Marcus Sanrio, that
Thing
who was no longer a man—dissolved like thirst in quenching waters.

For the first time in his life, and despite the fact that he had no body, Herman Goldman knew that he was whole, and healed, and sane.

Then everything outside him fell away, and all was Fred Wishart’s futile, terrified warning.

“He rises!”

And a mind at center, all the other wills revolving about it and lending it certitude and power, brought its scrutiny to bear on Herman Goldman.

YOU KNOW A GOOD DEAL I CAN USE, it thought at him, utterly remorseless and cold.

Marcus Sanrio went into Herman Goldman’s mind and emptied it, turned it inside out and shook it like a pocket on a pair of jeans.

The pain was appalling, and went on and on. Goldie screamed and knew there was nothing he could hold back, no secret he could keep, no sanctuary set aside.

It was crazy badness, and it was only going to get worse.

But Goldie had known craziness before, and he could ride this wave, even as it shattered him and blew him apart.

With the last bit of will he could muster, he envisioned a board beneath his feet, a board he could ride.

The board was Magritte.

THE DRAGON’S TALE

S
oon you’ll be past the pain…where no one can touch you,
Ely Stern had said.

It had been night then, too, but not bone-cold like this, no, sticky-hot and humid, where the summer air plastered your clothes to your skin and all you wanted to do was shear a hydrant clear off its base so the cooling geyser would give you some momentary relief.

Not that he’d been wearing clothes by then…unless you counted the pebbled, iridescent black leather that was a second skin to him; his appalling, magnificent dragon’s hide.

He had flown up to perch atop the night-wreathed tower overlooking the dying city that had been New York. Flown up with the delicate mutating girl whom he had fancied his guest, although other, less generous souls might have dubbed her his captive. She was shaking, wracked with delirium, blue devil fire eddying about her, altering her cell by cell, remaking her into something new and strange and fine.

Incredible that, at that point, she’d been the only one he’d seen touched by the hand of destiny like himself; he’d even fancied the two of them might be the only such in the world. Now he knew there were thousands, millions like them; the post-human beings.

Not that the knowledge made him feel any less alone.

In his fear and impulsiveness and solitude, he had seized her away from her home and the brother who raised her, the one who had once been his employee, and brought her to this barren rooftop to complete her metamorphosis, not merely into this new, inhuman form, but into his companion, his confidante.

What madness.

He had worried she might be frightened, but if she was she’d masked it and—in spite of her fever, of the pain coursing through bone and muscle and flesh—had substituted defiance.

“‘What monstrosities would walk the streets were men’s faces as unfinished as their minds,’” he’d exulted, quoting the philosopher Hoffer, and adding that, to him, they wouldn’t be monstrosities but rather
masterpieces,
rendered beautiful by their undeniable truth.

Then he’d offered her the world.

“I don’t want your world,” she’d replied, and ran staggering to fling herself off the building.

What fire, what glorious certainty and contempt.

She hadn’t known then—
couldn’t
have known—that in time, like him, she’d be able to fly. And at that moment, still more human than not, she couldn’t have; she’d have plummeted a thousand feet and died.

She would have, too, if not for the timely arrival of her brother, with his bravado and ridiculous sword, intent on saving her from the monster.

From him.

So he and Cal Griffin had gone on their wild ride flying through the black skyscraper canyons of New York, the aerobatic
danse de mort
that had culminated in his big-shouldered reptilian self getting skewered like a shish kebob at a sidewalk falafel stand.

A night of surprises all round, as he, not the girl, had fallen eighty stories to the unyielding pavement below, to hear his bones smash like a bag of glass and have nothingness enfold him like leather wings.

Then, like a tentative touch on his shoulder, rousing him
to agonized half-consciousness, the sound of echoing light footsteps, a tapping cane.

And the querulous words “How we doin’ there?…” in a voice that crackled like autumn leaves.

“I’ve had…better days,” Stern had croaked through the pain, which elicited a laugh that had no meanness in it, that shared a wealth of understanding and suffering.

“Well, you just take it slow,” Papa Sky had answered, putting a gentle hand on his bloody, broken hide. “We gonna see what we can do about that.”

The old blind man had been a fool. To take him in, to nurse him back to health. What could it possibly bring him, except the likelihood of an abruptly shortened life and painful death?

Not that Stern would have wanted that; it was just the way things tended to sort themselves out. It was a violent world, and to survive one had to take violence on.

But that wasn’t how things had worked out.

Immobilized, lying in Papa Sky’s ludicrously cramped flat, in his absurdly small bed, Stern had found himself with nothing to do with his time but talk.

And Papa Sky had been more than willing to listen.

Not that Papa seemed to have any agenda, nor even any judgment—or at least, judgment he expressed.

And absurdly, impossibly, after a dozen
pointless
years of therapy, in which the only discernible change to his life Stern had perceived had been the financing of a yacht and any number of Caddies for the sedentary quack who’d sat silently listening to him those interminable hours, with none of the empathy nor wisdom this old black music man brought to bear…

Ely Stern found himself changing.

Not that he didn’t still have that same burning rage that drove him to smash and destroy, to lash out blindly…

But now there was a new thing within him, like Papa Sky’s gentling hand on his bloody, fractured self, urging him to pause, to
reconsider,
to look at the world with fresh eyes.

Incredibly, Papa Sky, that old blind man, had given him new sight.

He could choose to be the destroyer, could act upon his blazing dark impulses, and be utterly alone.

Or he could try another path, one far more dangerous to him, exhilarating and fraught with peril.

But did the world, at this absurdly late stage of the game, allow the possibility of such change?

Silly question.

The world of late had been nothing
but
change.

Which left him with the question of who he was, and what precisely he was going to do with the rest of his life.

As Papa Sky served him hot chicken soup and serenaded him with soaring saxophone medleys of Gershwin and Irving Berlin and Cole Porter, Ely Stern had looked into himself for an answer, for meaning, and to his amazement discovered…

Christina.

To find her, to protect her, that and nothing more, was all his soul desired.

Remarkable.

It was self-interest driving him, of course, as it always had been, but now bent to a different purpose.

He knew by then where she would be drawn, inevitably, and knew the only course that would lead him to her.

He opened his mind to the voices, to the One Voice, to the Source. The wind would carry him there, and the barrier he had seen in his dreams, the barrier that would burn lesser creatures, would not burn him.

He rose before he was properly mended, groaned with the effort…and found Papa Sky facing him on the doorstep.

“I figger you gonna need me around to keep you honest,” the old man said.

Stern laughed. Like his own monstrous self, it was the undeniable truth.

And as the two of them traveled their scorching road, Ely Stern found to his amazement that Papa Sky held within him not only wisdom but power, too, that he could more than
stand on his own two feet, as well as ride on the back of a dragon.

They made their way to South Dakota, and knocked on the Devil’s door.

“You really expect us to believe that?” Cal Griffin asked Stern, as he sat around the big circle with the others—Colleen, Doc, Mama Diamond, Papa Sky, Shango, Enid and Howard Russo, Inigo and his mother. Christina floated nearby like a bubble containing all the world’s rainbows, while the other inhabitants of the sanctuary, the Indian families and the shamans, the holy ones and medicine men, busied themselves in the deeper recesses of the cavern.

“No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to
die,
” Stern replied, in his best Ernst Blofeld
Goldfinger
impersonation. He crouched low in the vast cavern, wings tucked in against his body, arched cathedral-like above his demon head, a black thing in the blackness. He glowered at Cal, showing switchblade teeth. “You really expect me to give two shits what you believe?”

“Now, now, we not gonna get anywhere like that,” Papa Sky soothed. “We all on the same side here.”

“I must admit, I find that a challenging concept to accept,” Doc Lysenko remarked.

“Yeah, lizard boy,” Colleen added, “if you’re such a reformed character, how come you’ve been the Source Project’s delivery boy? What’s with all the smash-and-grab in those gem shops?”

Stern fumed, but Papa Sky said simply, “Tell the folks, Ely.”

Stern sighed, glanced at Christina, who hovered glowing nearby, her face a mask that betrayed little of her feelings. “It wasn’t going to let her
go,
that was certain from the gitgo, and It had half a mind to atomize Papa and my humble self right fucking there and then, it’s
touchy
that way….”

Stern looked off, and his eyes narrowed, remembering. “But then I realized—it was a potential
client.
So the pertinent question wasn’t what
I
needed but what
It
would need.
I had to put myself in
Its
shoes, even if It didn’t have shoes anymore, or feet to put them on.”

His eyes slid back to Cal and the others. “This was all surmise, you understand. I wasn’t really seeing
It,
just a manifestation, that fucking glowing scarecrow that changed from one to another to another….”

“And what precisely did you discern was Its need?” Doc asked.

Stern shrugged. “Even though It was growing in power, It still had limitations, vulnerabilities. It had plans, ways to safeguard Itself and gain primacy, but It needed someone to put matters into motion, and those gray mental midgets It ruled”—here he glanced at Inigo and Howie—“no offense, didn’t have, let us say, the
initiative
to run things on the ground.”

He looked at Christina, and his expression softened. “So I cut a deal with It. Reconstitute her as human, or at least
looking
human, before she was burnt up like coal in an oven, fodder like the rest of the flares, set her up in digs like she had back home.

“Round about then, I came upon
this
one,” he flicked a clawed finger at Inigo, “stuck like a fly in jelly. He couldn’t get out, but It didn’t seem inclined to pick him off, either. He was under the radar, It wasn’t paying attention to him. So I figured I’d give him a job….”

Colleen shook her head. “And you did all this ’cause you’re wearing the white hat now?”

Stern’s eyes blazed. “You may not have noticed, but this isn’t a comic strip.
Christ,
I am so
glad
I didn’t have to travel with the lot of you.”

“Now, now, Ely,” Papa Sky crooned. “We all gettin’ hot under the collar here. You remember your blood pressure.”

Stern nodded, and Cal could see him struggling to force calm.

“You’re telling us,” said Cal, “that you stole all those gems, helped set up the Spirit Radio, just to keep Christina safe?”

“Not just that…”

“What then?”

May Catches the Enemy spoke up. “That Thing in the
mountain, it’s crazy scared, wants to swallow up the four corners, swallow up everything, so it can be safe.”

“How do you know that?” Shango asked.

May Catches the Enemy shrugged, the firelight catching highlights in her black hair. “You feel it. It’s in the air, the water, in everything.”

“So eventually, there’d be no more dragons,” Stern added, “no more people or grunters or flares—just
It,
a totality of everything.”

He glared at Colleen. “So if you don’t want to believe I did this all to help
her
”—he nodded toward Tina—” you just tell yourself I did it for self-preservation.”

A tense silence descended over them.

“So It designed the Spirit Radio…” Doc prompted.

“Stuck here in the Black Hills, It knows It’s a target,” Stern observed. “But if It can open up conduits to other locales, exist simultaneously in a number of places—”

“No one thing can kill it,” Shango finished.

“Give the man a set of dishes,” Stern said. “The one in Iowa’s the first of many. There’s a bunch more in the planning stages all across the U.S. That’s why we have to move now.”

“Why didn’t you just kill It?” Colleen asked Stern. “I mean, Judas Escariot, you’re the one who can breathe fire.”

“It never let me close enough,” Stern replied, with a hint of ire. “I dealt solely with Its projections, all those images that look human. I saw It once, you know—what It
really
is, just for a second.” Stern shuddered then. “Just a blur, I couldn’t say exactly. Then It slammed the lid. But It could have killed me anytime it wanted. It doesn’t suffer fools gladly, or anyone, for that matter.”

“Wouldn’t it have been simpler,” Shango asked, “just to bring Christina back to Griffin, and tell us the whole deal?”

“Did people get
stupider
while I was away? I told you, It wouldn’t let her
go.
”

And maybe,
Cal thought,
you liked having her to yourself.
Sharing her only sporadically with Inigo and Papa Sky; a contained world of four.

“So you brought us here,” said Cal, nodding toward Inigo and Papa Sky. “Using them.”

Inigo began, “I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you—”

Stern cut him off, addressing Cal. “Had to play a close hand, bunky. The Big Bad Thing can get into your mind, read it like the morning paper—particularly little peanut
human
minds like yours. Couldn’t risk It getting the drop before you got here.”

Doc looked concerned. “But It
must
have…. After all, It closed the portal behind us.”

“Mm? Nah, that was me. I kicked the shit out of your damping equipment, let the whole thing run wild.”

There was an explosion of outraged protests. Stern shouted them down. “I didn’t
kill
anyone, all right? And that was a major bitch to manage, believe me.”

Silence settled again, like snow in winter light.

Finally, Papa Sky said, “Let ’em know the rest of it, Ely.”

Stern blew a contemptuous breath from his reptilian nostrils, but surprisingly Cal could detect something like regret in his gravel voice. “There’s what you might call a
downside….
We’ve kind of
jump-started
things. It’s spreading out there in Iowa, the Bad Thing’s power, Its control. Slowly at first, but once It gets a head of steam up, It’ll gobble up everyone and everything.”