Ghostlands mt-3

by Marc Scott Zicree

  Only the likelihood that today would be like yesterday and the day before. Forecast: solitude, with more of the same.

  She liked to sit on her porch and read in the afternoon, now that Burnt Stick was a ghost town.

  Or at least “depopulated.” All the people had gone away, or died, after the Change. Without pumped water, Burnt Stick was simply too dry in the hotter months to keep a population. These days, you had to know how to find water, how to carry it, how to store the rainfall-skills only a scavenger rat like Mama Diamond readily possessed. She was not exactly the only living thing in Burnt Stick-she had seen coyotes in packs, pronghorn, mule deer, and those things, not quite human, that shambled through the streets now and again after dark. The only living ordinary human person, that she was. Well, maybe not “ordinary” in the old sense. But un-Changed. Human flesh. All too.

  She lifted her canteen, sipped tepid water, squinted her good eye at the book she’d carried out. It was a Tom Clancy novel from the Benteen Avenue lending library, more pages than pebbles in a quarry. It would last her a good long time. There were no new books anymore. But Mama Diamond didn’t figure she would run out of books, not before her eyesight failed altogether.

  The pace of the novel was slacking now. Everybody was lecturing the President about some crisis. Boys, Mama Diamond thought, you didn’t know a crisis from a wood louse.

  In these silly, diverting books that wiled away the time, virile men were always saving the world. But her dusty long experience had taught her that no one ever saved the whole world, not really, only their own little part of it. And truth to tell, it was more often the women doing the saving than the men, whatever the history books said.

  All those submarines and aircraft carriers must have shut down at the Change, just like the TV stations and the automobiles. Maybe there were aircraft carriers still floating at sea, all the sailors long since starved to death. Had they taken to cannibalism as a last resort? Or would they have scattered to open boats and made for land, trusting themselves to the whims of wind and fate? As everyone now had, really. Amy Hutchins, who used to run the grocery store across the street, had had a boy in the navy. Amy was long gone now, of course. Everybody was gone.

  The train whistle sounded again.

  It was a train whistle, unmistakably so. The old-fashioned kind, not that bleating honk the freighters made; a whistle that called over the chill range land like a lost love, that brought strange, dark carnivals in its wake and disarranged time.

  Mama Diamond stirred uneasily. She dropped the paperback and stood, bones creaking almost as loudly as the old pine planks. She shuffled down Parkhill Street to the old Burnt Stick railroad station, to where she could get a good long look at the tracks.

  The depot had not been active for twenty-five years. Freight used to come through every couple of days, low-sulfur coal hauled from the Hanna mines in Carbon County. But the freights never even slowed at Burnt Stick. The depot was a relic, all flaking paint, planks and beams bleached by sun and cracked by cold. She guessed it was the smell she liked best. Old wood, wind-whipped, giving up ghosts of pine and creosote.

  The old Union Pacific tracks cut due south into the Medicine Bow Range, north into the gray sage foothills of the Shirley Mountains, then east across the Laramie Range, where ages ago sharks the size of sperm whales had settled down to die, later joined by maiasaurs and T. rex. The call had come echoing off the hills, and Mama Diamond turned, facing their heights, squinting up her good eye against the ruthless slate light. But if there was a train, she couldn’t see it.

  She watched for a time, patient but vaguely alarmed.

  Now came the whistle again, closer, almost taunting (no need, surely, to blow a whistle in all this emptiness). Mama Diamond had the unsettling thought that she should climb down off the platform and paste her ear to the steel track like the Indians in the old matinees. She’d probably pull a muscle if she tried it-get stuck there, and the train (if there was a train) would split her head open like a cleaver splitting a vine-ripened tomato.

  But there was no need to listen to the tracks, because here was the train itself, suddenly visible winding out of the foothills like a black millipede scuttling from a crevice in a basement wall. It was blurred in the distance, so she couldn’t be certain if it had topped the ridge or actually burst out of the earth itself. She tried to resolve the shape of the thing, peering into an ice-breath of wind that made her eyes sting and water, but all she could at first make out was a featureless assemblage of rectangular boxes, like a subway train.

  As it approached, however, it seemed to take on complexity and ornamentation, and she wasn’t sure if her eyes were playing tricks or-crazy thought-the train was actually changing as it drew near, deciding how best to present itself.

  It came chuffing down toward Burnt Stick, and Mama Diamond stepped cautiously back into the shadow of the depot. Her mouth was dry again, but she had left her canteen on the porch, the chill air turning its surface cold as a tombstone as it lay atop the Clancy paperback.

  The train began to slow.

  Sweet Jesus, Mama Diamond thought, what dark miracle is this?

  It was no ordinary train-as if she needed convincing of that, in a world without machines. It now clearly revealed itself as a single engine with a long string of passenger cars. The engine was antique-looking but shiny clean, like a coal-burner dragged out of a museum. The passenger cars were rounded and streamlined like the old transcontinental sleepers. Both the engine and cars were a carapace black, and the passenger windows, too, held the same darkness, no light piercing through. The insides, Mama thought, must be cold as a freezer. And who in their right mind would paint a passenger car that kind of black? If it was paint; the whole thing looked cast in onyx.

  The train slowed, came huffing to a stop like something out of a dream, and Mama Diamond began to wish she had taken the trouble to hide herself, began to wish she had not even come here, that she had stayed inside like a sensible person. Though she suspected there was no hiding from whatever the train carried.

  She thought about how peaceful it had been just a few minutes ago, when she was alone with her book and the sleepy hum of the town.

  The train halted, hissing hot breaths of steam. Mama Diamond tried to get a look at the driver. But the cab windows were blacked as well.

  From within the cars, Mama Diamond discerned a new sound, of movement and bodies, and a burbling of voices that might have been men or beasts or something in between. Her stomach tightened, she felt the bristly, gray-steel hairs on her neck rise.

  A passenger door slid open on the first coach and Mama Diamond jerked her head in that direction.

  A man climbed out. A man with long black hair pulled hard back and held by a white-gold clasp, wearing black fathomless shades, black shirt and slacks and belt with a white-gold buckle, his long black coat fanning out behind him. He held a dark cigarette with burning red tip, and smoke curled from his cold thin lips.

  As he walked toward her, Mama Diamond knew this contained, silent man had not been one of the brute voices within. His voice would be as clear and sharp as a stiletto.

  She stood watching as he came near, and in the merciless gray light it seemed as if he suddenly shimmered like ripples on a storm-wracked lake and changed, growing bigger and bonier, like strata shooting up out of a rock face. His black leather cloak altered, too, stretching out long fingers, gaining its own powerful architecture, becoming…

  Wings, leathery wings big as box kites, supported by vast pebbled shoulders, which in turn supported a scaly head, ridge-boned and hard-angled, with eyes set deep in burnished sockets, eyes golden as Kazakhstan amber wrapped around a Jurassic spider. The cigarette was gone from his taloned hand, but a memory of smoke still curled from between his dagger teeth.

  I’m too old to run away, Mama Diamond thought. Probably crack a hip if she tried, and then what? № 911, no ambulance out of the county clinic.

  Anyway, she thought, when Death comes fo
r you with bat wings and golden eyes in a black impossible train, running probably isn’t much of a strategy.

  Her knees trembled. She hoped they wouldn’t buckle on her. The dragon drew up close to her now-slowly, smoothly, with the invisible majesty of great power-and fear bubbled through Mama Diamond like a dizzy drug.

  The dragon-thing, this grotesque that had been a man-no, merely seemed a man-moments ago, stood glaring down at her.

  “I couldn’t decide what to wear…so I thought I’d give you a choice.” His voice, clearly New York/East Coast, held the precision of a keen blade, plus a resonance potent as a boulder rolling down a rocky slope.

  A choice, Mama Diamond thought. Like the train itself, changing as it drew near, somehow taunting, threatening.

  “Which is the truth?” Mama Diamond asked, and was surprised at how level her voice sounded.

  “Both…but this is the latest model.”

  Mama Diamond studied the razor claws, the teeth like a tyrannosaur. “If this is what I have to deal with, I’d just as soon see it.”

  “You’ve got sand,” the dragon said. “Or I could say grit…or stones.” Mama Diamond knew he was toying with her, playing his cruel games as he had no doubt often done even before the world had turned over, before he had become what he’d always been within.

  Mama Diamond said nothing. Silence, she knew, could be a blade, too. Or at least a tool to make folks get to the point.

  “Good of you to meet me,” he said, and even in the gray light of winter coming, his black scales held an iridescence like the peacock pyrites she’d once hawked to city dwellers who’d only seen those colors in grease streaks on tarmac.

  “I have to confess I didn’t know you were coming.”

  “But you did. On some level. We know a lot of things we don’t think we know. You are Judith Kuriyama?”

  Not for a long time, not really. “People call me-”

  “Mama Diamond.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Proprietor, Rock and Bone?”

  “Yes. And you are-?”

  “Ely Stern. Attorney-at-law. Once upon a time.”

  “What do you want, Ely Stern?”

  “We’ll start,” the dragon said, “with a look at your shop.”

  Arnie Sproule, an old friend of Mama Diamond’s, dead since ’92, used to tell this joke:

  What’s the difference between a dead lawyer in the middle of the road and a dead snake in the middle of the road?

  And before you could answer, Arnie would grin and say: There are skid marks in front of the snake.

  An old groaner, and not a particularly funny one. But now here was Ely Stern, combining perhaps the worst aspects of the two, lawyer and serpent. Any skid marks in front of Ely Stern would surely have represented a fevered attempt to brake and flee.

  The worst part, Mama Diamond thought as she slow-walked with the dragon down the main street of Burnt Stick, was how calming his presence was. Not reassuring-oh no, definitely not-but calming the way an oil slick calms a wind-whipped sea; calming the way a dose of Thorazine calms a lunatic. The energy, the madness, is intact, but it can’t be expressed. Something about Ely Stern slowed the heartbeat and thickened the tongue. One was not permitted to panic in his grand and overweening presence.

  Mama Diamond walked in the dragon’s shadow.

  “How ’bout you tell me,” Stern asked in a conversational tone, “just why you’re called Mama Diamond?”

  “The native kids call me that.” She was startled by the sound of her own voice, insanely chatty. “Called me that. They’d bring in dusty old quartzite now and again. I’d clean and tumble it for ’em. Making diamonds, they called it.”

  “But that wasn’t your stock-in-trade-quartz.”

  “Surely not. No, I’m a rock hound and a purveyor of semiprecious stones.” Her good eye glanced sidelong at his pebbled hide and vast muscles, the rough protrusions along his frame proclaiming the brute skeleton beneath. “And also bones…”

  They turned off Parkhill onto Vaughan, and Stern halted abruptly. They had reached her shop now, and he peered at it, surprised-yes, he could actually be surprised-and impressed.

  “The thing I so love about travel,” Stern said, “is there’s a wonderment around every corner….”

  No zoning commissioner in his right mind would ever have allowed Mama Diamond to build it, of course. Nor would the Geographic Society nor the Paleontological Research Institute nor Friends of the Earth nor the Sierra Club. Everyone from Robert Bakker to Jack Horner would have pitched a fit. And the press-at least, in the old, pre-Change days-would have had a field day.

  But then, she hadn’t built it. Old Esperanza Piller, grandmother of Mildred Cummings Fielding, from whom Mama Diamond herself had bought the place in ’81, had hired the working men and former slaves who had quarried and assembled this structure ninety years back and more, before anyone had the least notion to raise an objection.

  Back when farmers round here were still turning up triceratops skulls in their potato beds.

  The Rock and Bone, Mama Diamond’s fossil and lapidary shop, was a house built of dinosaur bones.

  It had weathered the Storm-also called the Change, the Upheaval and the Big Friggin’ Mess-without so much as a quiver.

  In truth, the house wasn’t wholly made of dinosaur bones; no, they were still held in their rock matrixes, the big blocks mortared into place. But it didn’t take one whit off their grandeur, and Mama Diamond loved the place as much now as when she had first glimpsed it tooling down the blue highway of U.S. 30 in the dwindling light of that long-ago spring day.

  Her Fortress, her Sanctuary, her Palace of Delights. Or, as the native kids only half-jokingly called it way back when, her Treasure Chest.

  The chill sun glinted on Stern’s gold-coin eyes as he canted his head and appraised the diplodocus bones flanking the doorway, the ribs of the house actual iguanodon and al-losaur ribs. Bones not too different from the dragon’s own, Mama Diamond reflected-at least, the therapods. And she realized, looking at Stern in his terrible saurian beauty, that he was as close as she would ever come to seeing an actual dinosaur walking. But then, they hadn’t flown or talked or breathed smoke.

  Not that anyone could really say.

  As if the dragon had somehow caught the sound of her thought and completed it, Stern said, “I wonder what energies ruled their world…the old or the new?”

  Mama Diamond said nothing-there was no answer-but she pondered, in the distant part of her mind held separate from the fear, if the Change might indeed be cyclical, like the great ice sheets that had once covered this land.

  Another gust of wind flared up, stiffening the seams of her face. The handmade wooden sign with the words STONE AND BONE suspended off the overhang of roof creaked on its chains.

  Mama Diamond opened her door and stepped inside.

  “Come in,” she said against her own better judgment, judgment reduced to a wheedling screech at the back of her skull, and she thought of Dracula inviting Renfield to step over the threshold of his castle. Only, the tables were turned in this case, she was inviting the monster into her lair, and she wondered how many before her had done this, and to what terrible consequence. She looked up at the molten-eyed, big-shouldered dragon. “If you can.”

  “I still know how to negotiate doorways,” Stern said in his dry furnace voice.

  The store was dim, but Stern blocked her when she reached for an oil lamp. Maybe dragons could see a little better in the dark than in the light, Mama Diamond considered. Or maybe they were just wary of fire.

  He put out a razored hand to stay her motion, casually; it barely brushed her shoulder. But a sudden snap of blue lightning spit from his fingertip, passing into Mama Diamond’s skin and bones, diffusing through her like smoke. There was a brief instant of her feeling like her insides were lit up, spectacularly energized and alive, then it was gone.

  She and Stern looked at each other with an identical expression, and Mama Di
amond realized that he was as surprised as she. For the first time since he had arrived, something had happened that he had not intended.

  Stern blinked, dismissing it, then cast his gaze over the shop, taking it all in, not pausing at the oreodont skulls, the smilodons with their saber fangs, the hadrosaur eggs spirited out of China.

  His gaze came to the faded photograph taped to the register, the snapshot of the blond child smiling by a riverside, her college chum Katy’s daughter back when Carter was President. Stern studied the girl closely, his eyes lingering.

  “She remind you of someone?” Mama Diamond asked.

  “Yes.” The dragon’s voice was oddly softened, as close to human as it might ever sound.

  “She safe?” Mama Diamond was surprised at her question; she hadn’t thought to ask it. But it had been sparked by the sudden awareness there might be something, someone, this thunder lizard actually cared about.

  The image came to her of the rough-hewn illustration from The Hobbit in her ratty thrift-store copy, the drawing old Tolkien himself had done, of the dragon Smaug wrapped around his treasure trove of gold.

  What might Stern hold as his treasure?

  For a long time, he said nothing, and Mama Diamond thought he wasn’t going to speak. But then the words came, as muted as the wind held outside the bone-thick walls.

  “In safekeeping…” the dragon murmured.

  Stern said it as in a dream, and he said it to himself, Mama Diamond felt sure. But still it had been an answer, if one she herself didn’t have the key to decipher.

  Then, as if a switch had been thrown, Stern was again scanning the cases and shelves with that nuclear-reactor gaze of his. Mama Diamond knew somehow that on his walk from the station, and his ruminations on her house and the weathered photograph, Stern had been on his own time, taking a break for reflection and diversion. But now he was back on the clock.