Pray to see what’s real, Mr. Griffin…and you will.
Cal felt the gestalt mind tremble and hesitate, felt the wills of the others pull back, tenuously rebel.
“You’re human!” Cal pleaded. “Be human again!”
But then, like a relentless tide flooding back, Cal sensed Sanrio gaining mastery once more, reeling them in again.
They’re not strong enough, Cal thought despairingly, they need a leader….
Take me! he thought at It, with the same fierce will that had driven him across this devastated, phenomenal land; that had gathered together Goldie and Doc and Colleen to follow him, and Enid Blindman and Lady Blade and the escaped slaves off the farm at Unionville; that had defeated Primal, and Fred Wishart, and Stern, in their time; the will that might also be called love.
Take me!
He opened himself to It.
He felt his body fall away and dissolve like dying, felt himself swept up and plunged into a heaving, boiling mass that was pure thought and memory and being, that held no time and all time at once, that was pure now with no past or future in it, a moment held frozen and eternal.
And that moment was terrifying….
Blurred streaks like blood smeared on a mirror. Men, women, booted, hooded, gloved in white, running, shouting. Machines spinning, pinwheeling sparks, a thrumming rising to a whine and then a wail. This is not right, this is not how it’s supposed to be. A rectangular door lined with lights. A gateway. And something emerging, slashing into existence, all colors and none, a whirlpool blaze of pure, savage power. The men, the men and the women all tumbling over each other, pitching headlong to get away, but the whirlpool surges up, seizes them and spins them back into itself. Faces shrieking as they melt together, a chaos of eyes and mouths, not dead, alive, not many but one, frozen in that horrified moment, screaming, screaming-
As Cal suspected, the gestalt mind was frozen, locked into that molten instant of horror and fear. No wonder it had taken the actions it had to safeguard itself, to wipe every contrary will like chalk off a blackboard. The lesser minds had given themselves over to Sanrio, to guide them, to keep them safe. Crazy and paranoid, and no wonder. Madness maddened, and turning the world mad, too.
But now there was a new sheriff in town….
Cal found himself floating in the blackness. But he could sense the other minds there, could hear them like voices in the night.
Come to me, Cal thought. Come to me and I’ll be your sanctuary.
He felt Goldie first, sensed him surge up and lock on. Then Fred Wishart, who had tried, he knew, to keep them safe when they had first invaded this realm, and who had turned Shango away when he had trespassed, too, before Sanrio could discover him.
And Agnes Wu, who had protected Inigo when his own mother could not, when he had been forsaken and transformed.
Cal felt Marcus Sanrio then, felt him attack with a consciousness like a knife, felt his own mind scream as Sanrio tried to cut him to pieces, to gather the others to shred him like wolves tearing apart a deer.
But Cal was on the inside now, and Sanrio couldn’t hold them.
Hesitant at first, but with growing determination and velocity, Bernard Sakamoto and Stan Monteiro, Agnes Wu and the others reached out to Cal, holding on, giving over their will to him. He felt their dread and their longing, felt them gain stability as he soothed and reassured them. He felt himself grow with power, felt it fill him like hot air in a balloon, felt himself expand and extend his dominion.
Sanrio fought it, then fell back and fled.
Cal reached out with his mind, pursuing….
And sensed, beyond him, the flares in all their multitudes, heard them like a plaintive, echoing chorus.
Then, as Sanrio diminished further still, Cal caught on the distant edge of perception, barely detectible, like a whisper in another room, a whisper wrapped in cotton…
Something else.
Minds…
Not from this side, Cal could feel it…. Other, unimaginably other…
And behind them, a boy, somewhere in this world, a boy with a mind like no other, a boy who had been a boy for a long, long time…
Then, like a door slamming determinedly shut, the awareness was gone.
Cal was in the blackness, surrounded by the countless minds held captive here, pleading that he help, pleading that he act….
And Cal realized that, at last, his long-ago dream had arrived.
But it was different in its details, there was clamor and chaos, but not the sounds of battle, of metal on metal, of metal tearing flesh. And no sword for him to claim…
These had only been the symbols of things, the metaphors, of confrontation, of power….
Cal could sense Sanrio coming back, drawing on the power of the void itself, on the power of the Source.
He was returning to reclaim what was his.
Cal felt the power of the others within himself. Like Sanrio, he could draw upon the raw power of the Source, too.
The flare minds called to him.
He stood at the black heart of the tumult as they cried their anguish, their despair, demanded, pleaded-
That he act.
But act how?
He reached out with his new, expanded awareness, felt the tenebrous borders of the rent, the tear in the universe….
And he knew with utter conviction that he could seal it, plug the hole, cut off the torrent of the Source.
But it would take drawing upon all the force at his command. It would take bringing the mountain down in on itself, cascading tons of rock crashing down on their heads, crushing them.
In the lighthouse beacon of his mind, Cal could make out the frail, delicate form with hair fine as white spiderweb and eyes a scorching blue….
Christina.
And the others beyond her, among the multitude of souls…
Colleen. Doc. Goldie. May Catches the Enemy. Inigo. Papa Sky. Mama Diamond. Enid Blindman. Howard Russo. Larry Shango.
Cal knew he could do this, stop the energy that had flooded the world, and destroy Marcus Sanrio, too….
But it would kill them all.
And would it change the world back, back the way it had been?
Who could say?
With the will that had brought him here, the will that could also be called love, Cal made his choice.
He brought his vast attention to Sanrio and blasted him back, sent him hurtling, tumbling away, before Sanrio could regroup, draining him as he went, bleaching his bleached, cadaverous soul, inhaling the fiercesome wildfires as they burst out of Sanrio like nuclear mandalas of psychotic glory made flesh and lightning strike, and then blowing them back at the albinic stick figure, vomiting forth the torrent of withering black-star corruption to scour raw this child’s scrawl of phosper dots and malignity, until only the barest remnant of the being remained, a tenuous loose affiliation of particles that had once been a man, had once been known and known itself as Dr. Marcus Sanrio.
Cal tried then to draw the entity back in, to hold him still and mute and captive.
But with the last bit of power that was his, Marcus Sanrio fought to evade these filaments, to slip from Cal’s grasp. There was a moment of fierce struggle and then, in a searing implosion of mind and will, Sanrio winked out, spiralized and compacted to nothingness, vanished from distance and time, and was gone from all awareness.
Extinguished, destroyed? Cal thought so, but then…
He couldn’t be sure.
But this much he knew-either way, Sanrio had been dead a long time, soul dead….
Let go of the dead, and attend to the living.
He turned his attention to the others that orbited about him…and repeated what he had said before.
You’re human. Be human again.
He summoned up all the power that was within him, within the scientists and the lost ones and the flare children, the power he could draw from the flood coursing out of the rent in the universe, felt it suffuse him and erupt and f
low outward in a great, warming deluge….
You’re human. Be human again.
And it was so.
The first thing Cal realized as he sat up groggily on the scorched tile floor was that he had a body again.
The second was that he had no more power than an ordinary man.
May Catches the Enemy was there, helping him shakily to his feet.
“Not bad, Griffin,” she said, smiling broadly. “Not bad at all…”
Cal looked about him, and saw that the room was a shattered wreck of what had once been a laboratory, the walls chiseled out of bare rock. It was what it had always been, at least since the Change, at least in reality.
“Christina…?” Cal croaked out worriedly, and his sister floated up to him. Still a flare, not human, but thankfully, not harmed. In her glow, Cal could make out Inigo and Howard Russo huddled concernedly about him, still grunters, as well. Colleen stood close on, Enid and Shango silent and watchful alongside, Papa Sky and Mama Diamond there, too.
“Man, you sure know how to throw a party,” said a voice behind him.
Cal turned and-even though he knew the man was generally leery of human contact-hugged Goldie until he nearly turned blue.
The shadow warriors and their horses were gone, May explained, fled back to the Spirit Realm. But then she led Cal to where Doc Lysenko stood ministering to Fred Wishart and Agnes Wu and the other Source Project scientists, human again, who sat blinking and moving like sleepers gone far from the world, awakening at last from unquiet dreams.
Of Marcus Sanrio, there was no sign.
“What about the flares?” Cal asked.
May led him through the Hall of Records to the staircase beneath the watchful, ruined heads of Mount Rushmore.
In the autopsy room at Atherton, beside the ravaged body of one that was not Ely Stern, Doc had told Cal that the dragons, and the grunters and the flares, were not inhuman, but rather alternate humans….
Pray to see what’s real, Mr. Griffin….
Humans, all of them, in all their forms, in the world as it truly was.
From his vantage point high atop the Black Hills, which had been called He Sapa since time out of mind, peering over the Badlands as they lay timeless under a rising sun and a cloud-wracked sky, Cal had to admit that the glow of the multitude, flying home to all four corners of the land, was spectacular indeed.
FIFTY-NINE
OLD MAN WAITING
In these recent days of miracles and wonders, Garrett Lambert had seen some freaky things, truth to tell and no fish story, my man.
But it went without saying that the cobwebby dude sitting on the bench by the dead old train depot was right up there with the contenders.
“What’chu doin’ there, old-timer?” Garrett ambled up to him in the noonday sun only mad dogs and Englishmen would dare sashay out in. In his era, Garrett had been a pretty mad dog hisself, and once upon a time had been enough of a blueblood to pass for a Brit on a five-buck dare, if need be.
“Waiting for a train,” the old dude exhaled, his voice as silken and insubstantial as cobweb, too. His skin was pale, faded parchment locked away in a tomb, and his hair and clothes were leeched of all color, too, diseased somehow.
Garrett squinted hard at him; what with the glasses he’d misplaced in Laredo, and the four Dos Equis he’d quaffed as his morning Breakfast of Champions, he was having a hard time getting a lock on this particular member-in-good-standing of AARP. He seemed to go in and out of being, somehow; appeared MIA in the crevices and shadowy places of his face and form.
Bullshit. There was enough spookiness in this world without planting some where there wasn’t fresh manure.
“Ain’t no train passing through here, my friend.” Garrett came up close, so his body’d cast a shadow over the seated one, grant him some shade. “No train passing anywhere, come to mention it.”
The other rose then, like a heap of sticks conspiring themselves upright. Garrett was surprised to see that the old dude was taller than himself.
“Don’t I know it,” the old man sighed, again in that voice like a night wind passing.
“Where you goin’?” Garrett asked.
The old man looked out uncertainly beyond Garrett, at the orphaned land, and the flat horizon, and whatever mysteries lay beyond. For the first time, Garrett got a good look at the man’s eyes, saw they were pale white, too.
Sweet Lord of Contagions, he’s flat-ass blind.
“You got any people?” Garrett ventured, with growing concern.
“A boy…” the other answered vaguely, the sound all dust.
“He know where you are?”
“No…. But I know where he is.”
“Well, lemme just help you there,” Garrett said, stifling a fruity belch. Damn that fourth brew, and the damnation heat, and the friggin’ gnats that accompanied you everywhere, swarming like your own personal wedding veil. He extended a hand. “I’m Garrett Lambert.”
“Call me Marcus…” said the other, and though he was blind his hand reached out and clasped Garrett’s firmly.
It was all cobwebs, and dust and ashes, with not a living thing in it.
And as his life flowed out into this blind, ravenous seeker after one certain, most special boy, Garrett Lambert had time for just one final, piquant reflection….
Man, he’d thought that concert in ’68 with the Lizard King was pure stone weirdness.
But it wasn’t a patch on this.
In the time of early morning, Enid Blindman emerged out onto the porch of the house May Catches the Enemy had secured them outside Pine Ridge-part of the housing tract, she’d explained, that had been built after the twister had come through and cleared out the trailer park that had been on this land, just after the turn of the new century and before the Change. Since then, most of the people had cleared out, too, so there were plenty of places on which you could hang a VACANCY sign.
Enid found Papa Sky sitting patiently there, shaving a reed for his Selmer. He marveled as the old man’s fingers moved deftly from long practice, not needing the distraction of sight.
Enid settled next to him, began tuning his guitar.
“Pretty brisk for you to be out here,” he said.
“Hadda say me some goodbyes,” Papa Sky replied. “Ely went winging off back East.”
“I’da figgered you’da gone with him, the two of you being so long on the road and all.”
Papa Sky was quiet a bit, mulling the days of their time together. “Nah…. He needed some alone time to think on things, get comfortable with who he is ’stead of who he’s been.”
Enid gazed off past the low buildings to the gentle rise of the valley and the snow-dusted plain beyond. “Way I hear Cal tell it,” he said, “Stern was one mean hombre once upon a time. Took some major cojones, you takin’ on reforming him.”
“Well…” Papa Sky shook his head dismissively, then raised the Selmer to his lips and started in, mournful and lovely, on “Someone to Watch Over Me.”
Enid joined in, fingering the maple jumbo with complexity and grace, and Papa would’ve sworn it was Django if he didn’t know better, only even finer, truer still.
Finally, they came to a stopping place and let the last of the sweet sound drift off into the dawning air. A meadowlark trilled far off, answering their song with his own.
You gonna come clean, Old Man? Papa Sky asked himself. Or you just gonna let your axe do all your talkin’?
He felt his heart pounding like a kettledrum fit to burst. But he knew it wouldn’t, knew he had a good many years yet left in him, even if he could remember back to when the only sound movies had in them was what music you could make with your own two hands.
“Don’t you go thinkin’ I was no saint or nothin’, son,” Papa Sky said with a fierce rumble more intense than he intended. “I took on Ely Stern ’cause maybe I figgered, after all the wrong he done, all the folks he hurt, if he could earn a second chance…well, maybe I could, too.”
; Then Papa Sky told Enid Blindman just who he was, and who Enid was, too.
SIXTY
THE SOUND OF RAIN
Dawn came with tumbled clouds and spitting rain.
Melissa Wade awoke from a troubling dream in which she was changed into a thing of wisps and luminance.
Then, looking at her hands gleaming in the darkness of the room, she knew it was true.
She began to weep softly, and rocked herself as she floated in the air above tumbled covers.
She looked about her and did not recognize where she was. The bedroom was mostly bookcases crammed with paperbacks, a few pieces of IKEA furniture, a computer. The room was dim, the blinds closed against the dawn, but she could see clearly enough in the light that sheened off her own body. Atop the desk beside the computer, she discerned a framed photograph of herself; of the way she had been.
The door opened and Melissa turned away, wiped her eyes quickly.
“I heard you moving around,” Theo said behind her, and his voice had an odd roughness.
“Where am I?” Melissa asked vaguely, still coming out of sleep.
“My place,” Theo said apologetically. “I hope you don’t mind.”
She turned to him then, and was surprised to see how dazed he looked. Not to mention scratched, cut, beaten, disheveled and shell-shocked.
And that didn’t even take into account that he was no longer human.
She saw that he had moved to block her from seeing the photo by the computer; embarrassed, he turned it facedown behind him. Melissa smiled to herself, feeling warmed for the first time. It was still Theo, after all.
“Do you remember what happened?” he asked tentatively.
She searched her memory, found painful shards there.
“Jeff…?” she asked.
He nodded, neither of them wanting to say the word. Tears welled in his luminous big eyes. “I’m sorry, Melissa. I’m so sorry.”
“What about the others?” she said when she could, and her voice was high and thin as birdsong.
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