Ghostlands mt-3

by Marc Scott Zicree

  But looking down on this scene, it seemed to her as if everyone else were errant birds and she alone were human, and could name these gaunt welcomers for what they were.

  Scarecrows.

  Merely that and nothing more, and even less substantial. For with her dragon eyes and dragon heart, Mama Diamond could see clean through them as if they were tissue paper, or dandelion pollen on the air, or ripples in the water revealing clear hard stone beneath.

  What crop were they protecting from marauding eyes, what precious bounty? And could her stolen treasure be part of it?

  She could see, far below in the valley, the jeweled fairy-light of the town, and even at this distance could discern that the steady illumination was not wood nor candle nor oil light, but electricity, pure and simple.

  Oh, there were mysteries to be revealed….

  They closed upon the phantom corpses now, the ghastly sprawled obscenities. The horses drew back, eyes rolling.

  “Easy now, my Brave One. Easy, Fair Beauty…”

  And then they were through, like clean fresh water coursing from a mountain fissure, and the bodies were gone. The horses steadied, and Shango let out a low, slow breath.

  “You certainly know how to show a lady a good time, Mr. Shango,” Mama Diamond said in the common tongue, no longer needing their shared vocabulary of silence.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Shango said, and his smile mirrored hers.

  Then Mama Diamond spied the glint of the big tourmaline half buried in the dirt, and her smile vanished.

  “Is it one of yours?” Larry Shango asked.

  Mama Diamond squatted by the big stone and shone her lantern on it, throwing off gemfire from its surface. A good many of her semiprecious rocks were as familiar to her as the creases on her palms, the age spots on her brow. But this one had been reworked and faceted in an odd way, turned to some new purpose.

  “I can’t truly say,” she replied.

  At first, upon approaching the stone, Mama Diamond thought someone had just buried it here, and not done a very good job. But now she saw it was wired up in an elaborate, curious way to an electronic device of some sort. The whatchamacallit was about the size and shape of a Game Boy (like the one Herbie Ganz always lugged about with him before his folks had up and pulled stakes out of Burnt Stick), the guts of it worked around an odd, triangular piece of what looked like black leather but which gleamed with iridescent highlights of green and red and black.

  Mama Diamond shivered; she’d seen hide like that before…or at least something that looked a good deal like it.

  And this was not the only such object. It was wired up to dozens virtually identical to it, stretching across the slope of the valley like an electrified fence barring their way. As she held her lamp high, its beam caught answering refractions on each device, like the multihued eyes of watching wolves, but which Mama Diamond knew were gemstones.

  She remembered now how the dragon Stern had first looked like a man when he’d stepped off that train-I couldn’t decide what to wear…so I thought I’d give you a choice-and how she herself had cast a false consuming fire that had deceived the wolf pack and its panther king.

  A good trick, to fool the eye and ear and nose…

  And how different, really, was the illusion of a man or a flame from a landscape of dead bodies? Merely a question of scale.

  It was a dragon trick, and did the dragon have to be here to do it?

  Or just some pieces of him…?

  Mama Diamond faced Shango. “We’re in the right place,” she said.

  Which was just when the voice behind her piped up.

  “Excuse me, ma’am,” the man with the gun said. “I’ll be asking you to please stand away from that.”

  To a casual observer, the scene might have appeared a good deal more challenging than the last altercation in which Agent Larry Shango had found himself. True, there were only three men this time rather than four, but these had guns, oddly jewel-adorned ones, and from the way they hefted them it was a good bet these weapons still worked (even if none anywhere else in the world seemingly did).

  But these men made a mistake their predecessors had not: they spoke before they had Shango in hand.

  Time did what it always did on these occasions for Larry Shango. It slowed infinitely down to a filament of elongated, elastic moments strung together like the gel-filled beads on a baby’s chew toy. More than enough time, an absurdly generous amount, to observe and plan and act.

  Shango’s mind settled into an easy stance, like the low, solidly balanced crouch he assumed at karate and aikido and jujitsu sparring sessions, and all those bone-crushing events in the real world between-from the bare-knuckle brawls in narrow alleyways between mausoleums in French Quarter graveyards when he was a boy to the more recent, polished performances along the waterfronts of D.C. and Bombay, the glittering terraces of the Rue de Rivoli and reeking slums on the outskirts of Rio. Anywhere his Commander-in-Chief might choose to go, and Shango’s duty compel him to follow. In the old days, at least, when that Commander was alive, not abandoned and betrayed.

  The three men approached slowly, with caution, clumped together (that was a mistake), weapons leveled but not aimed. Though ranging in age from late twenties to early forties, their coloring from dark to fair, they looked as if they’d all been baked in the same oven by a smiling, doting grandma-all with identical brown, ill-fitting uniforms of small-town cops, all paunchy and rumpled, not one of them hard or watchful or keen.

  In the luxurious, attenuated time sense as if he were watching a DVD on frame advance, Shango weighed his options. These guys wore no ornamentation of biker helmet or chains, no stomper boots, so they probably weren’t rogues, just standard-issue cops doing their job. But this was hardly a standard-issue town, with its ghastly deterrent of fake corpses, its enigmatic machines set along the perimeter.

  This postcard paradise didn’t want visitors, that was clear. And here he was, and Mama Diamond, too, bound and determined to pay a call.

  So what orders might these cops be under regarding trespassers? What orders would he be under, in like circumstances?

  Not to kill, these guys didn’t have that vibe. But not to run off, either. To contain, to imprison, to hold.

  But just as certainly as Larry Shango knew how to elegantly loop a Windsor knot and fieldstrip an M-16 blindfolded, he knew that wasn’t going to happen here, not nohow, not no way.

  So. Show them his government-issue ID, his pass from the President, or at least the man who had once been President and whose bone and flesh and hair were now dusting away in an unmarked grave?

  It might work…but the government as such was about as solid a concept, deserving the same respect in most parts, as paper money nowadays.

  And if it failed to impress…well then, adios, element of surprise.

  All this played out in Shango’s mind on the whole instantaneously, like a burst of data downloaded in toto, preverbal, hard-wired, known.

  As did the action he took next.

  Stepping in front of Mama Diamond to shield her, Shango dropped down, grabbed the ten-pound sledge from its resting place on his back, drew it from the straps that held it there, and threw the big hammer dead midsection at the cop in front. It hit the man square in the solar plexus, driving him back with a grunt of surprise and exhaled breath into the other two, who stumbled on the uneven ground and flailed to keep from falling.

  As Shango expected, the blow caused cop number one to drop his service revolver. Shango dove onto the cool wet grass, seized the gun and came up with it held steady in both hands and trained on all three.

  Okay, so it was a cowboy thing to do, but along with all those Shadow tapes his dad had brought home that long-ago flea market day back in New Orleans, he’d also brought some Lone Ranger.

  And if Mama Diamond didn’t look a whole hell of a lot like Tonto, well, that wasn’t to say the notion didn’t still hold water.

  The three cops were regaining their footing,
breathing hard, just getting a sense of the new situation.

  Now, let’s just hope none of them’s a hothead….

  “Gentlemen…” Shango began, but didn’t have an opportunity to get much further into the fine art of compromise.

  For just then, about the forty-eighth unanticipated, virtually impossible thing that day happened.

  A blaring horn shattered the night and twin headlights raked over them. Shango immediately looked aside, but his eyes were dazzled and he was momentarily blinded.

  The deep thrum of an engine roared up and Shango could hear big rubber tires turning off the nearby road and crunching onto the grass.

  And although Shango was no connoisseur of poetry, a snatch of Coleridge rose up in his mind.

  It was a miracle of rare device….

  From the corner of his eye, he saw that Mama Diamond had grabbed hold of the horses to steady them. Shango re-angled his stance to keep the gun on the three men and also on the newcomers.

  The door of the big Cadillac opened and its driver stepped out. Vaguely through the headlights, Shango could see others in the car, sitting watching them.

  The driver ambled up, a silhouette backlit by the brilliant light.

  “Mr. Shango,” the voice said, and he could hear the smile in it. “I was just thinking of you.”

  Then Cal Griffin stepped up and shook his hand.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  WONDERFUL WORLD

  The 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.

  TWENTY-SIX

  THE HINGED BOX

  It 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?