At the window, she stood with her hands against the sill and her eyes resolutely fixed on the campus. “Hold me down,” she said. “I’m dizzy. Anchor me.”
Tentatively, Theo stood behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist, as he had longed to do on so many days past.
The heat of her was shocking. He pressed himself against her.
She watched through the window for Jeff.
His own pain increased, along with a foggy sleepiness that became irresistible. After a time he slid down to the floor, his arms still loosely wrapped around Melissa’s feverish ankles, and closed his eyes.
When he woke, she was gone.
In his panic, Theo looked to the window. But the window was still sealed. He saw his own reflection in the glass. Saw the whiteness of his eyes, the gray maggot skin, the glinting sharp teeth. The image was mesmerizing, and appalling.
His mind felt blunted, and he wondered with a thrill of fear how much longer he might be able to think.
Even now, words were coming more slowly to his mind, like hieroglyphs carved in sandstone being eroded by the wind. Words fading to a fine, flat geometric plain.
Outside on Philosopher’s Walk, he saw that the glowing sea of infection had settled, muted down to cover each surface like a coating of Christmas flocking on a tree. He spied a figure shambling away from the physics wing, and knew from the shape of him and the familiar way he moved, favoring his right leg, that it was Jeff.
And hurrying to catch him, half running, half floating over the eerie, arc-lit blue of the grass, was Melissa.
As she reached him, he turned to her.
Seeing him fully now at last, she began to scream.
FIFTY-TWO
OUR STRANGE MAN
“Dig it,” Colleen Brooks said balefully, scowling at the Ghost Dance Shirt she held up before her. “I don’t dance.”
Months earlier, May Catches the Enemy had known that if any of them were going to get anywhere at all, she would need some warriors, a few musicians and a natural-born leader.
Now, looking out at Cal Griffin and her other new comrades as they stood on the grassy plateau of Cuny Table, the sky a searing cold blue above them, not a cloud in sight to the end of the world, she knew she had gotten her wish.
The snow had melted off mostly, and the land was a dusty green where foliage grew and cracked brown earth where it didn’t. Minutes before, she had signaled Walter Eagle Elk, a frail elder with a sun-lined face like the Badlands themselves, to open the earth to let them emerge out onto the land.
Which was risky, she explained to them, as it could draw the attention of the Sick Thing at the Source…but vital, nonetheless.
She’d handed each of them-with the exception of Ely Stern and Christina Griffin, who watched from the sidelines-a Ghost Dance Shirt, which she herself now wore, and requested they don them. And they all had done so, even Howard Russo and Inigo, looking like kids trying to wear Daddy’s clothes.
All except Colleen Brooks. A real pain in the ass, that gal, and a ballbuster to boot.
But when the chips were down, May reflected, that might not be such a bad thing.
Doc Lysenko sidled up to Colleen, gave her a playful nudge. “Come, Colleen, you don’t want to be a wet blanket, now do you?” The fringe on the arms of the white leather shirt he wore rippled in the breeze.
“Viktor, what the hell are we doing here? I want to kick some Source Project butt-not boogy on down.”
May Catches the Enemy came up to her, gestured at the breathtaking vista about them. “Crazy Horse said, ‘My lands are where my people are buried….’”
“Yeah? And where’s that get us?”
May saw that Cal Griffin was studying her intently, a contemplative expression on his face. “Maybe nowhere,” he murmured. But she could tell from his tone that he intuited what she had in mind.
“We pray for all living things,” May Catches the Enemy said to them all, by way of preamble. “We pray through all the spirits of the world, through the two-legged people and the four-legged people, through the animal people and the bird people and the fish people, and especially the tree people. We pray through them to the Great God Creator. The spirit world is the real world.”
She fixed her gaze on Cal Griffin, and said in a quieter tone, “And when we speak to the dead, we say, ‘We shall see you again….’”
May nodded at Walter Eagle Elk, and to his grandson Ethan, whom he’d been training (the playfriend who, as a child, May had tauntingly called Ethan Ties Shoelaces Together). They began to beat their drums and chant in a mournful, hollow tone that rolled out over the tableland, drawing lilting responses from the cowbirds and meadowlarks, and the wrens who had not fled the brute winter.
And maybe this had once been a dance only for men, May realized, her pulse quickening with hope and excitement, and maybe only men had once been the warriors….
But this was no time for such distinctions.
May Catches the Enemy, who was sometimes called Lady Blade and who had once been May Devine, drew her knives and, circling, began to dance.
One by one, the others followed suit-including, at the last, a grumbling Colleen Brooks.
Griffin’s sister Christina was moving now, too, flowing in the air with deft motions that left streaks of entwined color and light in her wake. May Catches the Enemy found herself staring openmouthed at the fairy girl, knowing that her soul was that of a dancer.
Watching May and doing what she did, moving to the beat, Cal came up alongside Enid Blindman and Papa Sky. “Play with all you’ve got,” he called to them. “Play to wake the dead.”
They set to it with a will. Their music swirled and spiraled around the drumbeat and voices, gained assurance and majesty, filled up the sky and the land.
And from the Black Hills, from the rotted, cancerous Thing at its core, an answer came.
Angry black clouds spread out like a carpet unrolling, suffocating the sky, and from within them flared blinding flashes like worlds exploding.
The lightning rained down.
Howling, Stern took to the sky, breathing flame up at the heavens, deflecting the raging death strokes. Christina, too, extended her radiance, twisting the sizzling current away from the dancers to scorch prairie grass and barren trees scant yards away.
The lightning bolts increased their fury, pounding down like blazing fists, ravaging the land. Tortured, unthinking animals, summoned by the Mind that could not be denied, streamed out from the hills, shrieking maniacally, launching themselves with fang and claw, to be immolated on this killing ground.
“Keep dancing!” May called out to the others, and Cal took up the cry.
Slowly, barely perceptibly, the lightning began to die off, the clouds took on colors of red and blue and gold within the blackness, moving like the breath of a living thing.
The thunder came.
It boomed out like the universe clearing its throat and issued, not from the sick core of the Hills, but from somewhere deeper, and older still.
“The Thunder People!” May Catches the Enemy shouted over the roar. “The Thunder People summon their children!”
It reverberated through them and went on and on, rattled their bones and teeth, shook the ground beneath their feet, tumbled rocks and raised great plumes of dust into the muted and shrouded air.
“Son of a bitch!” Colleen Brooks exclaimed.
The land about them was rippling, turning over, like a rumpled sheet being reversed on a mattress. The ancient soil cracked, vented, bent away….
And where it folded, something rose up from below.
Shadow forms, many hundreds of them spreading over the land, wraiths of smoke and ember and will.
As one, they turned toward the dancers and advanced on them.
Larry Shango slowed in his gyrations, edged up to Cal. Their eyes were locked on the coming forms.
“Is this a good thing,” Larry Shango asked in a low voice, “or a bad one?”
Cal G
riffin considered the figures, drifting toward them like fog. He could see now that some were shaped like men, and some like horses.
“A good thing,” he said at last.
The others had stopped dancing now, the music fading off and the thunder banking down to a low rumble.
The shadow ones stopped before them.
“Hua kola…” the warrior in front said, and his voice was shadowy, too. He was no more than smoke and vapor, but Cal could see he stood well-muscled and tall, and the shadings of color within the smoke revealed curly brown hair and pale gray eyes. He wore a single eagle feather and behind his ear, a stone. Painted on his chest were a lightning bolt and two shapes that, in time, Cal would learn were hailstones.
Ely Stern had come to ground beside Cal, and Christina floated down silently, in awe. The others, too, gathered around him to face this newcomer and his brothers, who had been called forth by the thunder and not the Storm.
May Catches the Enemy stepped up to them and smiled. “I’d like you to meet my ancestor,” she said, and introduced them to the one some had called Curly, and others Our Strange Man.
The one most had known as Crazy Horse.
FIFTY-THREE
JEWEL AND WIND
To say that May Catches the Enemy had made a believer of her was to overstate the case.
But as Colleen Brooks stood among the legion of ghost warriors and their shadow horses, she definitely had to admit her skepticism had been put somewhat on hold.
As the daybreak star rose and the Moon of the Popping Trees set, May Catches the Enemy led the lot of them, phantoms and all, back into the big hole in the earth, and sealed it up tight behind them.
“So how’s all this getting us to Source Grand Central?” Howard Russo asked her.
May gestured toward one of the branching passageways. “These tunnels are uncharted extensions of Jewel and Wind Caverns, twelve hundred miles and more,” she explained. “Some of the Lakota believe human beings first came up out of Wind Cave…. We’re goin’ back down.”
Lovelier and lovelier… thought Colleen.
Stern stepped daintily to the passage mouth on ponderous feet, flexing his wings, limbering them. His nostrils stretched wide, drawing in the scent of what lay beyond in the darkness.
“What do you smell?” Cal asked, joining him.
“Death,” Stern replied, then cast him a narrow glance. “How’s your irony quotient?”
“Shoot.”
“Borglum, the guy who built Rushmore, back in the twenties was in the KKK.” Stern’s lip twisted in a mirthless grin, revealing piranha teeth. “At the top was an Imperial Wizard, running an Invisible Empire. Under him were Grand Dragons, and the grunts were called goblins….”
“Hilarious,” Cal said.
Stern nodded, and his hooded eyes regarded the passage again, and the unseen things within.
“Any goblins left down there?” Cal asked.
“Wait and see,” the dragon said.
Christina wafted up to them like a toy boat on a mild stream, regarded the tunnel with cool aplomb. Inigo followed close on, never taking his eyes off her.
“Might be best if you stayed here,” Cal advised her.
“No way. I’m going, Cal.”
“That’s a deal breaker,” Stern snapped in a tone that was…well, stern.
It’s like she has two fathers now, Cal thought, and felt a pang of jealousy, resented how Stern had insinuated himself into her life; knowing, too, that she would not be here if not for that fact.
Stern was glaring at Christina as she hovered high off the ground at his eye level. She gazed right back, not giving an inch.
“You lose, how much chance you think we’ll have that It won’t come for us?” she said evenly.
Stern blinked, knocked back. Cal smiled inwardly; how many times had he encountered that same remorseless drive, the raw determination that had fueled her back when the only fortress she assailed was that of ballet, bent on conquering it and bringing it to heel.
With a sigh, Stern shook his head, yielding. She held within her such delicacy, such fragility, he felt as if he could snap her like a match. But he knew it was not so. He thought of her on the precipice atop the tower in New York; she’d shown that same resolve.
I don’t want your world….
Well, now they were all sharing the same world, the lot of them-one with a monster lying in wait for them.
A monster that, for once, wasn’t him.
They would all die, of course, no matter how many fucking ghost Indians had their back.
Nevertheless, his heart felt ridiculously light in him, and he cursed himself for a fool.
He’d given up job security, and one hell of a pension plan. I mean, talk about eternal life-even if it did ultimately entail getting devoured by a grotesquerie bent on not just ruling the world, but being every last fucking bit of it….
It was laughable, and so that’s precisely what Ely Stern did.
Like a great gout of flame, the laughter erupted from him, went booming down the passageway, preceding them into the entrails of hell.
When his mirth finally subsided, he turned to Cal Griffin, who had once been his underling and now was a great deal more than his better (not that he’d ever dream of saying that).
“Let’s get this show on the road,” Stern said.
The ghostly warriors unslung their weapons, carbines and bows and arrows made of vapor, and climbed aboard their shadow steeds. Indian fashion, the war ponies had no bridles nor saddles, no stirrups. Their tails were tied in a knot.
May Catches the Enemy followed suit, clambering aboard a dappled gray made of mist, which supported her just as though it were entirely substantial.
Colleen saw that nearby, Mama Diamond was speaking softly to one of the spectral mares, in a tongue only she and they could understand. Then she mounted it, with an effortlessness that was uncanny in a woman of her years, not to mention one that had endured such rough handling of late.
Colleen approached a pony that still remained riderless and recalled the words her father had said to her, of how he chose a dog.
I look in its eyes, and if I see a soul there, I take him home.
Cautiously, she drew near the creature’s head, looked it square in the eye…and found reassurance there.
She climbed aboard.
It sat her well. She pressed her knees gently into its sides and wove her fingers into its insubstantial mane.
Seeing Doc hesitate, Colleen called out, “C’mon, Viktor, it’s just like riding a bicycle.” She was careful not to add, One called back from the dead.
Enid mounted a sorrel mare, hauling Papa Sky onto its rump behind him. Enid had his harmonica secured on its holder around his neck, Papa his sax on its strap.
The others climbed aboard their horses, Inigo and Howard Russo; even Walter Eagle Elk and his grandson Ethan, too.
Cal was the last to mount, and before he did Colleen saw him stash the battered leather portfolio inside his Ghost Shirt; the portfolio Goldman had brought him upon returning from his mission to fetch Enid Blindman, that she knew held an enigmatic collection of photographs and notes.
“What do you say to make it go?” Cal asked May.
“Hoka hey,” she said.
“Hoka hey!” he cried, and the legion of them thundered off down the passageway, the horses’ hooves flying into the darkness.
It’s kinda instant replay, but not exactly, Inigo thought as he flew along the endless rock tunnel, down and down, back toward the place he’d lived in but never called home.
The last time he’d tried a stunt like this, he’d been clinging to the top of the hellbound train, plunging through the darkness to burst up out of the earth and deliver its gleaming treasure to Jeff Arcott and the waiting town of Atherton. Right now, he was holding on for dear life to the wispy mane of a nag that’d probably been bleaching bones on the prairie before Teddy Roosevelt was out of short pants.
This was better, if o
nly marginally; the wind whipped at him, howling like a lost soul-or an army of them, more precisely. But the real army was the one riding alongside him-the ghost warriors and the human ones; Howard Russo, who was a creature like himself; the dragon Stern; and Christina, ever fair and flowing. If necessary, Inigo knew she was a beacon he would follow to his own burning death, or beyond.
He was not alone in this. Her brother Cal had done the same thing. It’s what had led him to trust Inigo in the first place, despite the misgivings of his closest advisers; what had led him here, where’d he finally rescued his sister, only to return to the dread place of her imprisonment, in a wild attempt try to finish things up right.
Inigo realized that he liked Cal, he liked him a lot. And from the little he’d seen of the two of them together, so did his mom. Yet there was something else there, too, something troubled, that seemed to have a history in it. He didn’t think the two of them had met before, didn’t think they could have. Still, he made a mental note to ask his mom about it later…if there was a later, that was.
He realized his heart was pounding like a drum machine on meltdown, that he was scared right down to the soles of his leathery big feet. He forced himself to take a deep breath, tried to slow his pulse to a level below tachycardia.
Just then, the spirit horse banked around a sharp bend in the passage. Inigo yelped and clutched tightly to the beast’s compact, muscled body so as not to be thrown clear. There was a roar from up ahead, and a burst of hot air surged past him, tingling his face like sunburn.
It was Stern, flying fast at the forefront, exhaling great explosions of flame every minute or so to clear the road. It lit up the cave spectacularly, making Inigo wince with the glare, providing flashbulb brilliance to accompany the more muted light provided by Christina’s aura and the cool glow of the spectral warriors and their steeds.
Inigo wondered how long Stern could keep this up; did his flame come from some internal gas tank, or was it replenished from some other font?
We’ll see soon enough….
Apart from Stern’s warming blasts, the tunnel was cold but not freezing, and the air was fresh. Behind him, Inigo could hear Enid Blindman and Papa Sky atop their mount, playing full out over the wind. The music hardly echoed at all, which surprised Inigo.
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