Inigo shook his head slowly. “It would burn you up in the turnstile, It does that.”
Goldie nodded solemnly, fortunately accepting (maybe thanks to the connection they’d just had) that he was telling the truth. No way in, no argument, and no talking about it, either.
It would burn you up.
Suddenly, from far down one of the corridors, came a sound like a marathon of barefoot runners, moving fast, growing in volume and then diminishing again, passing them by.
Inigo gave it all a furtive look.
“That something you can talk about?” Goldie asked him.
And fuck it, they were so worn out, and both oddly thrown together in this brutal journey neither had invited nor relished, that Inigo told him.
“Little gray brothers, I guess you call ’em—us—grunters…” He shrugged, and said simply, “They’re digging across the country.”
Goldie looked like Charlie Brown after Lucy yanked away the football, agape.
“Old mines,” Inigo continued. “Subway tunnels, storage facilities, caverns, anything underground basically. They’re connecting them all up, so they don’t have to go out in the air much, where there’s sun and stuff.”
Goldie, who’d had diarrhea of the mouth only moments before, was speechless. Then he rallied. “That’s nuts. I mean, Buddha on a Popsicle stick, do you know how many homunculi a stunt like that would take?”
“A friend of mine”—Inigo studiously avoided naming Papa Sky—“says maybe one in seventy-five turned into gray guys, maybe one in fifty. That makes somethin’ like two, three million of us, just here in the States alone.”
“Yeah, but not every one of you—”
“More and more of ’em diggin’ in every day, least that’s what I hear. I mean, I’ll tell ya, that UV’s a bitch.”
“It’s not possible. The whole country?”
“Well…” Inigo hesitated. “When they hit something they can’t go though, they find a way…around. There’s guys like you.”
Goldie’s eyes flashed, and there was that crazy scary determination again. “Guys like me. You mean, who can do some of the stuff I can do?”
Inigo nodded. On the road to Atherton, he had heard of Goldie’s knack with portals. And while portals could be finicky and selective—the more so depending on who wielded the power—they certainly cut down on travel time.
“Some are volunteers, some are drafted,” Inigo said of those with the gift. Captured he meant, held as slaves, like Olifiers and his group, but with different masters, to a different purpose.
Goldie was squeezing Inigo’s shoulder again, hard now. “Who’s the best you know?”
Inigo couldn’t tell him the best he knew, not personally. But he could tell him the best he’d heard of.
And fearing that Goldie—or the part of Goldie that was nothing like the rest of him—might change his mind and turn the juice on, Inigo showed him how to get there.
Moving quickly through dark passages, Goldie could sense the telltale membranes, the fading shut doorways where the connective tissues of the world were particularly permeable. For a time after they were opened, even those without the special gift, without the power to make things part, might still be able to pass through the doors.
Inigo led him to exactly the right spot, where the wall glowed in just exactly the right way. The boy was too terrified to pass through, but Goldie still had that strange connectedness to him, the vibe that let him know the boy had led him true, was pulling no shell game of bait and switch.
He let the boy go, and Inigo took off running full-out, back the way he came, all too glad to be let off the hook.
Goldman, however, pressed on.
He passed through the shimmering portal to parts unknown, felt the queasy, familiar sensation of being transported to someplace far from the point of origin, hundreds, perhaps thousands of miles away.
The best you know…
The Man with the Power. And Goldie would need that power, would need every trick he could glean, every skill and talent he might derive.
Emerging through onto the other side, he found himself in a dark corridor, the only sound the mausoleum-knock of his footsteps. He willed another globe rolling brilliant onto his hand and crept forward.
Then froze in his tracks.
Ahead of him, as far as the eye could see, metal spikes projected diagonally up out of the wall.
With heads stuck on them.
Big heads, far larger than any human would have—any normal human, at least.
His stomach lurching, throat in his mouth, Goldie forced his feet to move, forced himself to approach the nearest of the hideous trophies. He reached out and felt it, found to his relief and amazement that it was not flesh but rubber instead.
The heads, the heads were all masks, huge and grotesque, of mice and dogs and tigers and bears, of dwarfs and a rootless boy who led other Lost Boys.
Incredibly, he knew them, or at least recognized them from childhood years sitting planted in front of the TV screen. With a sense of disorientation and homecoming, he began to suspect just where he might be.
Continuing on, he discovered a stairway that led up to a closed metal door. He opened it, and it swung outward, surprisingly silent. A balmy night wind met him as he stepped onto level ground, with no hint of Midwestern chill.
Everything was dark, of course, and some of it was far different than he remembered it from long ago, when he had come here with his parents.
There was no Skyway, no Rocket to the Moon.
And, most significantly, no people.
At least, none of the human variety…
The puny, gnarled creatures scurried this way and that in their huddled groups, muttering nastily to themselves, one group chasing down a rat, pouncing on it with teeth and claws, consuming it alive.
Sounds like needle jabs drew Goldie’s attention, and he realized that it was demented, high laughter. He spied a bunch of the loathsome little curs swinging on the unmoving arms of the familiar framework he recalled from his youth. They clambered up into the fiberglass cars so artfully formed into the shape of grinning, flying elephants.
They were everywhere, had overrun the place, claimed it as their own.
A real E-ticket ride…
The grunters in the Magic Kingdom.
NINETEEN
THE NEW PHYSICS
Arcott called the place a boulangerie, but Cal discovered in reality it was nothing more than a funky new-old coffeehouse named Insomnia, crammed with thrift-store sofas and sagging bookshelves, stained oak tables with irregular legs, and scruffy college types poring over dog-eared texts.
And oh yeah, John Lennon and Bob Dylan blaring out of the speakers, laptops blazing atop every surface, and the microwave heating croissants to buttery perfection.
Nothing out of the ordinary.
For last year, that was. But for right now, a drop-jawed astonishment, as with everything else he and Doc had seen since crossing the city limits.
Not to mention why these students would be so casually bothering to study instead of scattering to the four winds in search of kin, or taking up a useful trade such as farming or necromancy or wandering samurai-for-hire.
A Cheshire Cat, Arcott settled himself into a scuffed leather wing chair flanked by Theo Siegel and Melissa Wade, opposite Cal and Doc. He signaled five fingers to the peroxided, pierced and tattooed waitress, who promptly brought over five steaming lattes.
“It’s on me,” Arcott said expansively.
“What do folks do for money around here?” Cal asked.
“Well,” Theo piped up, “paper money’s no good, obviously, though most folks are holding on to it in the hopes it someday will be.”
“They trade services,” Melissa added, “or whatever else might have concrete value.”
“Such as gemstones?” Doc asked.
Arcott smiled. “We put those to other use.”
Cal noted how Arcott used “we”: a royal pronoun for himse
lf when making decisions for the town; a reference including everyone else when it was something Arcott himself needed. Casting a glance about the café, Cal saw that that everyone gave Arcott a subtle deference that might be respect or fear…or both.
The two deputies—clearly part of Arcott’s security force—stood blank-faced and watchful just inside the door.
“My, this is a treat,” Arcott said, sipping his latte. “We don’t get many visitors.”
“Not with that bubonic horror show you’ve got running on the perimeter,” Cal said. “And for those that can’t read the writing on the wall, you’ve got these.” He nodded at the gem-encrusted rifle perched on Doc’s leg.
“We haven’t had to use them inside the town…as yet.” Arcott’s eyes glittered with that sharp watchfulness that stripped you bare as a chemical peel, the corners of his lips curled in an insolent smile. “So tell me, just what do you do? Doctor, lawyer, Indian chief?”
“Correct on the first two,” Doc said. And as for the third, Cal reflected, if they’d brought along Enid Blindman, well, he was half Lakota Sioux, if not a chief, as far as Cal knew.
“Really?” Arcott sounded impressed. “Professional men. And what brings you to this far-flung outpost of the empire?”
“How is it you have the power up and running?” Cal asked flatly.
“Ah, you’ll show me yours if I show you mine.” Arcott chuckled. “Very well, we have no secrets here….”
Cal caught the uneasiness that bloomed in Theo’s eyes. Bullshit, it screamed in glowing neon letters. Cal saw that Melissa Wade had noticed this, too; uncertainty flickered momentarily in her eyes, then was replaced, with an effort, by neutrality.
“A question, Mr. Griffin.” Arcott leaned on the small round table, which had barely enough room for the five cups and his elbows. “Why precisely do you think the world came crashing to a halt?”
“Because all the machines stopped running.”
“Obvious but, I would posit, dead wrong. It stopped because most everyone assumed the rules had changed, when in actuality all that happened was a new addendum was included.”
Cal thought of the miles of crushed, scorched aircraft he had seen on his journey alongside Larry Shango, when Shango had been on his odyssey to find Jeri Bilmer and her errant information; of the hundreds, thousands who had plummeted to their deaths when the jet engines had abruptly cut out…and beyond that the uncounted millions who had suffered appalling injury and worse when the hideous power of the Source Wave spread out from its unknown point of origin somewhere in the west and carpeted the whole wide world.
An addendum…
“So what are you saying?” Cal demanded. “That something was added rather than taken away?”
“Yes, exactly,” Arcott responded airily. “The rules that governed the Einsteinian universe are still the same, with just an addition to the cosmology that funnels energy to a fresh purpose. A new physics, some might say, but more accurately the old physics with a twist or two, a new wrinkle. Perfectly explicable, if you merely apply a clarity of observation, some logical thinking. And once you bring that scrutiny to bear”—he waved at the computers, the electric lamps, the espresso machine with its screeching din—“you can introduce a governing principle into the mix that restores balance to the situation.”
“And this is what you have done?” Doc inquired. “You are, what? A graduate student, like Ms. Wade and Mr. Siegel here?”
“Until last year, when I got my doctorate, then I was promoted to associate professor. I was hoping to land tenure eventually….” He smiled that Cheshire smile again, glanced around the room at the steady stream of light, the computers, the works. “But since landing the brass ring, they might just give me the town.”
“And you came up with this all on your lonesome?” Cal asked.
Arcott betrayed only the slightest hesitation. “Yes, the initial theoretical underpinnings. Fortunately, it was a parallel area of research to studies we’d been doing prior to the Change, examining different strategies utilizing precious and semiprecious stones to contain elusive energies, initially in an attempt to harness fusion.
“Or putting it more simply,” he added airily, warming to the topic, “we learned there were certain assemblages, specific combinations of gems, that set up a spectral interference, jangled the harmonics of the post-Change sieve effect, withholding the energy from being siphoned away to fuel the hoodoo and beasties and things that go bump in the night, and keeping it where it rightly belonged—in the matrices of the electrical and mechanical devices it had originally been designed to run.”
Arcott’s eyes were gleaming now, as though he himself were filled with electricity. “Once I got the basic principles down, I built the practical equipment along with Theo and Melissa here. They in turn oversaw a team of undergrads to do the scut work.”
He gestured at those in the café. “We’ve convinced most of the student body—and practically all the town—to hang tight until we get the kinks out. Then we can teach others, restore the U.S. grid. But for the time being, we’ve got to keep to ourselves, for security’s sake. Can’t risk some invading force of yahoos thinking they can take over the whole flea circus.”
It sounded reasonable…so why, Cal wondered, was it giving him the creepy crawlies?
“And what about the illusion of plague?” Doc asked. “That is, as you say, quite the new wrinkle.”
“A little serendipity along the way.” Arcott shrugged. You set out to make a solvent and you discover Nutrasweet.”
“I would like to study this Nutrasweet of yours a bit more closely,” Doc noted.
“We’ll see,” Arcott said, and Cal knew his meaning was the same as when parents said it. “Now. I’ve shown you mine…”
“My sister was kidnapped,” Cal replied. We’re searching for her.”
Siegel and Wade registered surprise. Arcott’s eyes narrowed. “On your own?”
“With some friends, who are waiting back at camp for us.”
“Ah. I won’t ask exactly where that might be, not yet at least. But you could be so good as to tell me what they do.”
You’re fishing, Cal realized. You need something…or someone. Unbidden, Doc’s words on the roof of the mall came floating up to him.
You cannot know what you will need at your ultimate moment of truth…nor whom. So given that, it is a good idea to bring as wide a variety of dramatis personae as possible.
“We have a former naval lieutenant,” Cal said. “An Internet geek, a few laborers…and a physicist.”
Arcott sat up at that. “What’s his name?”
“Dahlquist. Rafe Dahlquist.”
Theo Siegel and Melissa Wade recognized the name and were clearly impressed. But the most dramatic change was in Arcott. There was no insolence now, no mockery.
“Take me there, I’ll come alone,” he said. “I need to talk to him.”
TWENTY
CAT AND ROCK AND BONE
For hours, the windsong of the grasses was their sole companion as, an invasion force of two, Shango and Mama Diamond soldiered on into the heart of Iowa.
Then, as dusk drew its cloak across the land, Shango pointed out a black speck in the east, moving across the sky like torn fragments of leather lifted on a storm wind. Black, and distant, and purposeful. Mama Diamond could barely make out the telltale crenellation of the distant wings.
It was a dragon, though by no means necessarily Ely Stern.
It dipped below the level of the horizon and could not be seen anymore.
A sound came rippling though the air to them, like a distant crack of thunder.
The dragon rose, was visible for just a moment, then dipped down out of sight again. A second, identical sound pierced the night, and Mama Diamond realized it wasn’t thunder but rather something that would have been as out of place and astonishing to a Styracosaurus or Australopithecine in their day, had they the sense to know it.
It was gunfire.
When M
ama Diamond and Shango reached its point of origin—and it didn’t take all that long at full gallop, having chosen to stow the bike and its payload behind—they didn’t find the gun or the shooter.
But they did find one hell of a big dead dragon.
Not Stern, Mama Diamond observed with some disappointment, very clearly not Stern.
Shango crouched by the huge carcass, lamp held high as he investigated the killing mark smack dab between the creature’s eyes. He studied it until he was certain, and then stood again.
“A bullet wound,” he said, leaving unspoken the vast panorama of all that might imply.
Hoofprints led in one direction away, and tire prints another.
The path of treadmarks lay along a road that dipped into a valley. Peering down into it in the dying remnant of the light, Shango gasped and his face betrayed that rarest of emotions for him—fear.
Mama Diamond followed his gaze and was perplexed, seeing nothing that would draw such a response. But then she understood that what she perceived bore no relation to what Shango was seeing.
And Mama Diamond knew it wasn’t because of what in the old days (the pre-Stern days) had been her rusty old vision, the cataract on her left eye and what she jokingly referred to as her “good” eye on the right, the sight that had remarkably become acute. No, this came up out of the part of her that was her dragon soul, that could tell the difference between false and true.
Mama Diamond spoke low and calmingly to Shango, reassured him and in due time got him moving forward into the valley, against the evidence of his eyes, his nose and all his other knife-sharp loner instincts.
Beneath the killer moon, the Rock and Bone Woman and the Cat Who Walked Alone descended into the waiting arms of the town called Atherton.
Leather Man will have my hide, Inigo thought anxiously as he stood at the crossroads, in what the Great Unwashed, the normals, laughingly thought of as darkness, breathing hard from the running and the fright, standing bent over with his hands on his thighs, trying to catch his breath and decide just exactly what he should do.
Magic Time: Ghostlands Page 19