Ghostlands mt-3

by Marc Scott Zicree

  Cal stood up slowly, beating a swarm of carpet beetles off his hair and skin and clothes. He was bruised where the body of a crow had struck him and scratched where another bird’s talons had raked across his face, but he was basically all right. He had managed to keep his grip on his sword, one hand curled around the hilt.

  He turned back to the others, breathing hard, fighting to keep his legs from giving out under him. They were staring at him in awe, all but Stern and the wraith warriors, whose expressions were unfathomable.

  “Let’s finish this,” Cal said.

  Stern led them deeper into the mountain.

  FIFTY-SIX

  THE LUMINOUS DARK

  Jeff Arcott was dead, to begin with.

  But Theo Siegel didn’t have time to ruminate on that, or agonize over it, or ponder the fact that no one would ever call him Theodore again.

  Or even wonder if the life choices he’d made that had led to the inevitable moment of bashing in Jeff’s head with a steel pipe had been better, say, than going to vocational school or joining a cycle gang or simply running away to become a snake handler when he was ten.

  Because although Jeff-or rather, the tragic, mangled, power-riddled vessel that had been Jeff-was no longer a threat to Melissa or Theo or anyone, the dark sensibility at the heart of the Source very much was.

  At this given moment, It was summoning back every bit of the sickly, glowing energy It had disgorged out of the Spirit Radio onto the pavements and streetlamps and upright brick structures of Atherton, drawing it surging and splashing back the way it had come, like a tidal wave receding into the sea….

  And drawing Melissa Wade with it.

  Jeff Arcott had tried to whisper something in his last living moments, as Theo had crouched horrified over him.

  But before Theo could discern what that might be, he’d heard Melissa’s wailing cry on the wind and spun to see her blown whirling away like a paper doll on the wind, engulfed in lambent dark energy.

  She was twenty, forty, seventy yards from him now, blasting toward the ruined shell of the Nils Bohr Applied Physics Building and the portal within.

  “Melissa!” he cried, and vaulted after her on thick powerful legs, through the churning emerald-topaz radiance that could buffet him and prick him like a thousand needle-hot wasp stings, but couldn’t possibly stop him.

  Legs pounding, leaping over great swaths of concrete, Theo drove forward, cutting down the distance. He sensed dimly about him that, as it retreated, the luminance left behind only arid stone and dead foliage, leeching out every last ounce of life force, stealing it away for other, urgent use.

  But not Melissa; it had taken everything else, had ravaged and perverted Atherton, corrupted and destroyed Jeff-

  But it wouldn’t have her.

  He could see the twisted skeleton of the physics building ahead of them now. What shone out from the interior of the building was not light but a kind of luminous darkness, a viscous black of such intensity that it made Theo want to shut his eyes.

  Instead, he let out a savage cry and gave a last Olympian leap high into the air, reaching out with great wiry arms….

  He struck Melissa midair, seized her by her frail midsection, held hard to her; close now, he caught the scent of her sweat and her Changing, pure and bitter, like some exotic herb.

  But the compacted weight of him was not sufficient to bring the two of them down; they were still driving through the air, the momentum of his leap speeding them even more rapidly toward the inhaling maw.

  Ahead of them, scant feet from the physics building, he caught sight of a splintered power pole, frantically stretched a long gray arm toward its gem-encrusted crossbeam. His fingers wrapped tightly around it, and the force of the wave carrying him pulled him horizontal as it tried to tear him away from the pole. But he held fast to it, and to Melissa, until his fingers on the faceted stones and rough wood were bloody, until his bones wanted to crack.

  He howled his rage and his pain against the Storm.

  He was still howling when the roof of the Nils Bohr Applied Physics Building came apart in an explosion of beams and tiles and rebar, plywood and brick and drywall. Pieces of it fell about the two of them like hail-some pieces big enough to crush them, though they were spared. Oddly, there wasn’t much sound. Only the soft initial thrump, and the pattering sound of debris raining down on Philosopher’s Walk.

  The building was gone, and with it the light-darkness that had shone coldly out of it, and all evidence that the Spirit Radio had ever been conceived, built or activated.

  Except for the two of them, clinging trembling to each other atop a power pole, Atherton was silent and dead and dark.

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  THE SIX GRANDFATHERS

  The holy ghost legion drove on, into the heart of the mountain that had been named after Charles Rushmore, a lawyer from far New York, and had been called the Six Grandfathers for time out of mind before that. The great reptile beast that had been a lawyer king flew on beside them, and also the flame-girl that had been a ballerina, now speeding like a hummingbird. The boy Inigo and his blade mother, too, and the other mortal beings who had journeyed long and hard, holding their souls in their hands.

  They drove like a wedge, parting all that stood before them…for a time.

  Then the Thing at the Source gathered Its forces, and brought them down.

  “Where? Where is It?!” Cal was shouting at the top of his lungs over the clamor, the screams of the spectral horses, the cries and blows of his companions, the death screams of whatever ungodly nightmares were being thrown at them.

  They were in the great hall now, Cal was sure of that, but there was no way to see that, because the Big Bad Thing was reaching into their minds, summoning forth all their bleakest memories and best-beloveds, the cornucopia and totality of their lives, to shape into solid form from the unborn clay, the writhing power at its command-to hurl these bloodless facsimiles at them to rip out their hearts, to kill them stone-cold dead.

  The Ghost Dance Shirts Cal and his companions wore were growing less persuasive-perhaps there was a limit, a fading terminus to their power-and so they needed the added impetus of steel and grit and brawn.

  “Torment me not, you fraudulent things!” Doc was yelling, his English growing absurdly formal with the stress, as he flashed his machetes and cut to ribbons the pustulent, glowing radioactive forms in ragged uniforms and other trappings, the dead of Chernobyl whom Cal knew Doc had tried to save long ago, and failed. There were others, too, Cal saw, a willowy woman and small girl, who flung themselves at Doc.

  Doc could not bear to cut at them, but shoved them hard away; and Stern roasted them to whispers.

  Colleen, too, was up to her elbows in a rogues’ gallery of men and women summoned from all the hours of her life, who launched themselves hissing at her. Women in business attire and tatty thrift-shop dresses, men in overalls and T-shirts and work clothes-and most notable of all, a handsome, weathered simulacrum of a man in an Air Force uniform that Cal saw she had the hardest time of all slicing and taking down, but did so with grim determination, her eyes brimming with tears.

  It was the same for all of them, for Shango and Mama Diamond and Papa Sky, for Howard Russo and Enid, May Catches the Enemy and Inigo, Christina, too. A relentless, unceasing force cobbled up into the specifics of elderly Asians, young Nisei men in Army uniforms, camp guards, old black church ladies in their Sunday best, roadies and hophead musicians with dreamy grins and lethal hands, tribal elders and sun-wizened earth mothers, hot young gas station mechanics…

  And children, children like a maddened, stampeding herd, predator-crazed into blind, rushing panic, tousle-haired and rumpled, freckled and dewy-eyed, friends and schoolmates and neighborhood kids dust-deviled into solidity, driving at them to knock them down and trample them to death.

  As all about them, buildings rose and shifted and fell, the counterfeit sky wheeled and stormed and cleared and stormed again, mountains thundered up a
nd avalanched to dust, desert plain gave way to skyscraper canyon and black, turbulent shore, shearing off and re-forming from the evanescent landscapes in their minds.

  But not once, never once, showing the true form of what lay only yards beyond…

  “Where is It?!” Cal screamed again at Stern, as he drove his sword clear through the shape that was wholly his dead mother made flesh again, forcing himself to feel nothing, or as close to it as he could come.

  Stern tried to speak, but there were dozens of forms like humans flinging themselves atop him, bringing him down with their sheer weight, swarming. Some Cal recognized as replicas of Stern’s former clients and underlings, while others-beautiful, contemptuous women; elderly, corpulent men-he didn’t know.

  Stern flipped his hulking body and rolled on the ground, trying to extinguish them like flame. But then even more were on him.

  Still, he managed, with a wild gesture, to fling an arm out toward a space some feet behind Cal.

  Cal cracked the hilt of his blade into the face of the fourteen-year-old girl who’d been his first love, sending her flailing back away from him, and turned to face what lurked behind him.

  The air quivered about him; Cal had the strong sensation that whatever lay hidden there sensed his intention. The illusory stores and tenements and shacks about him gave way as the real stone walls on either side of him trembled, fractured and extended out in hard gray fingers, crushing together to form an insensate wall blocking him from whatever was sheltered and watching from within.

  Then the stone shuddered and reached out for him.

  Cal grasped his sword hard in both hands and braced himself. The blade had hewn steel, had cut the hell-bound train in two.

  But what about stone?

  Well, hell, he’d pulled it from Goldie’s towering trash heap in the tunnels under Manhattan, hadn’t he? Just like some postmodern Excalibur…

  But Jesus Christ, that didn’t make it Excalibur!

  It didn’t matter, none of that mattered, only that he see what was on the other side of that wall, see what was true.

  Pray to see what’s real, May Catches the Enemy had told him, and you will.

  In the instant before the rock could seize him and crush the life out of him, Cal turned to Our Strange Man and his followers, the sacred dead ones in the midst of the fray.

  “Brothers!” he cried out. “Help me!”

  They and their war ponies curled in on themselves, turned to vapor and surged over Cal like a cleansing stream, flowed past him along his arms into the holy blade, which gleamed and throbbed and sang with the power of the sky and the water and the land.

  Cal brought the sword down hard as the cold stone reached him, and there was a cry like every wild, crazed beast in the unseen places of the world, and the stone wall shattered to pieces and fell away.

  Cal saw what lay behind it, and gasped.

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN

  People, they had once been people, maybe a dozen of them, men and women, some old, some not, it was hard to tell. Melted together, flowing like wax into an obscenity that was all horrified, screaming mouths and nightmare eyes resembling nothing so much as the ruined, melted stone heads on Rushmore itself.

  But worse, indescribably worse.

  Vestigial limbs like unformed, aborted fetuses, patches of brittle black-brown, golden-white hair erupting higgledy-piggledy from blotchy, pitted skin with infection runneling down from uncounted, unsealing wounds.

  And most nightmarish, most unthinkable of all…it was still alive.

  The scientists of the Source Project, Marcus Sanrio and Fred Wishart and Agnes Wu, Sakamoto and Monteiro and the others, transfigured into this monstrosity when everything went wailing out of control and the energy they had endeavored to seize like Zeus with some lightning bolt had instead seized them.

  They had ripped a hole clean through to someplace unimaginably else, and that breach remained gapingly open-was, in fact, still flooding out its savage, ungovernable power from the point at which it had first come thrusting, erupting into this virgin world.

  Cal Griffin glared and squinted at the dreadful gash in existence just behind the quivering mass that regarded him with rolling, hateful, terrified eyes; the useless, foul body that housed the gestalt mind Stern and Inigo had called the Big Bad Thing.

  The light behind it was blinding black, all color and nothingness, a light that was not a light, not-beingness that was nothing of this universe, that was indescribably other, but that had been called forth into existence here, that had been torn out of elsewhere and was fed, replenished from the unthinkable, unknowable font.

  The Source.

  Cal couldn’t help staring at it, couldn’t bear seeing it. It was so alien, yet had become as all-encompassing, as much of this world, as the air about him, the fundamental pulse that had changed Stern and Inigo and Christina, Goldie, too-and the helpless multitudes like them.

  In that quick-flash moment of perceiving it, Cal sensed that he had been right, that the power itself held no consciousness, no agenda; it was like pure, primal electricity, like the nuclear forces themselves.

  But the baleful, nauseating creation regarding him from in front of the Source was another thing entirely.

  “Kill it!” Cal heard Colleen scream from behind him, and he raised his sword once more, whether to strike out at it, or-

  He felt it reach out with its adrenalized, myriad mind, felt it summon every last bit of power from its hostage flares, from the primacy of the Badlands, from all it had been able to leech out of Iowa, focusing, willing it to burn all these trespassers down.

  He felt that power surge like hot fire needles along every nerve, felt its cancer invade every cell. He shrieked and fell to his knees, heard his companions screaming, too.

  He could feel them in his mind, Sakamoto and Wu and Brinkowicz, Corning, Feldstein, St. Ives, Pollard, Monteiro-every one of them, all the scientists on Shango’s list-could sense them in that tortured, sullied lump of flesh. And at the core, subsuming and commanding them, dominant and undeniable, leading them as he had always led them, Marcus Sanrio.

  DIE, Sanrio thought at them, DIE NOW.

  Cal felt as though a hand were squeezing him, but also inverting him from within, felt the wave of unbeingness washing over him, inviting him to release, to surrender, to die….

  But just then, he felt the grip release just a bit, felt the tide flow back by inches, and he sensed, distantly, a force in opposition. Weaker, but throwing all of itself against the greater mind, holding it back, if only momentarily, from dealing the final stroke.

  Cal reached out with his thought to seek it, to identify it-and found a name.

  Wishart.

  And, surprisingly, remarkably, one other…

  Goldie.

  Not dead, no, merely held, absorbed, enclosed.

  Cal felt his heart rush. Where he sat crumpled there on his knees, he still held the sword.

  He released it now.

  “Cal…no…” Pleading, moaning, a whisper behind him. Colleen, her life a flickering candlelight held in a breath.

  But Cal needed his hands free now, needed no sword. Fighting the agony, fighting to stay conscious a few seconds more, he withdrew from within his shirt the battered leather portfolio Goldie had brought him from the travels Cal had dispatched him on, when Goldie had returned with Enid Blindman and Howard Russo. That had not been Goldie’s only port of call, far from it.

  The Sanrio mind bore down, tore at Cal like a freezing river, stealing away his life force piece by piece.

  Hold on, Goldie, hang on, Wishart…. Just give me a moment more….

  With fingers grown numb, Cal worked to untie the string, to throw open the portfolio, to lay claim to the irreplaceable treasures Goldie had brought from the four corners of the land. His hands trembled; its contents spilled out onto the floor.

  “Light!” Cal screamed. “Give me light!” He sensed Tina behind him, battered an
d assailed. She willed it, and light flooded out, washed over him as he dove down and scooped up the varied flat paper shapes, held them out before him like talismans.

  The fleshy abomination was watching him now, gaping eyes brown black green blue, curiosity in them, the same curiosity that had driven them to slice open the world, insatiable curiosity that withheld the death blow.

  Cal held out one of the creased, shiny rectangles, colors and shapes parading across it.

  “Agnes Wu! Your son, your daughter!” Cal cried. “They’re safe, in Ithaca! They’re waiting for you!”

  Another photograph.

  “Bernard Sakamoto! Your wife is in a shelter in Baltimore! She’s there with your granddaughter!”

  Another.

  “Stanley Monteiro! Candace, she’s in the hospital in Hannibal! Her back was broken in a fall, but she’s healing! She needs you there!”

  And so on, through Brinkowicz and Corning, Feldstein, St. Ives, Pollard and the rest. All the names Cal had researched in Who’s Who in Applied and Molecular Physics, discovering their hometowns, their families.

  All the ones who had been kept apart from them due to the security lockout at the Source Project, prior to the Change. All those who might have a claim on them, on their hearts and minds, their allegiances beyond Sanrio.

  Who, alone of them, had no one he loved, or who loved him.

  They had not chosen to become this monstrosity, to absorb a world out of fear and madness; that accident had been visited upon them, that drive imposed on them.

  Perhaps only Sanrio, their merciless, killing leader, had ever wanted that, had hungered for it since his days of degradation in Havana, his powerlessness….

  Cal had learned at last, after all the long days and hard miles, the tortured road from Manhattan to Boone’s Gap, Chicago to here, to differentiate between the action and the actor, to jettison notions of evil and perceive only the fear….