Magic Time: Ghostlands

by Marc Scott Zicree

  “It doesn’t matter,” it said finally. “Go back now…while you can.”

  Shango disliked the sound of the creature’s voice—like wind blowing through an empty house, making vowels of gutter troughs and consonants of loose shingles. It made him want to go back, to run far and fast and keep on running. But he had come this far—

  “I would be happy to leave,” Shango said. “But there’s something here I want.” Shango knew it to be true, but could not have given voice to what precisely that might be.

  “There’s nothing here for you.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  The Wishart-thing appeared to be growing brighter, the fog rapidly darkening, the night coming on in earnest. Shango saw that the mist about Wishart was spiraling in around him, like he was a drain emptying it of its energy and essence.

  “Take me in there,” Shango pressed.

  “I can’t….” Wishart stared more intently at him, and there was something blinding and frenzied behind its eyes, like a nuclear core running out of control, that made Shango squint and glance away.

  Seemingly in answer, the air around Shango grew thicker and hotter. Shango leveled his hammer, as much shield as threat. The head of the ten-pound sledge left vaporous phosphorescence flowing after it in its wake.

  Wishart took a step back, his eroded eyes widening, ravaged skin and clothes emitting their coal-stove light.

  I do have some power, Shango realized. He wasn’t entirely helpless.

  The wretched haunt tilted its head oddly, as if hearing a distant call, then straightened. “This isn’t a good place to be when the sun’s gone…for a man.”

  “Aren’t you a man?” Of course it wasn’t, but Shango wanted to see if there was any remnant of the man within this cobweb-thing, any echo of it.

  Hesitation, uncertainty, silence.

  “You don’t understand,” Wishart said at last.

  “Then explain it to me.”

  “We’re bound by what we set loose….” It fixed its gaze on him again, making it clear Shango was included. “All of us.”

  “What binds you?” Shango might as well have asked, What did you set loose? It was all the same thing.

  “I can’t answer that question.”

  Frustration and impatience flared in Shango, and he was surprised at its intensity. He had the sudden memory of his mother long ago with her church ladies in their white gloves and fancy frilled hats at the séances they would infrequently attend, despite their loud and long-professed piety, behind closed-shuttered, paint-peeling doors in the French Quarter. The dearly-departed and resummoned spirits invariably provided irritatingly oblique replies to the most direct questions, as if God would only allow them to quote responses from some Magic Eight Ball in the hereafter.

  Why can’t ghosties and ghoulies and things that go bump in the night ever give a fucking straight answer?

  And why can’t you, Dr. Fred Wishart, or whatever the hell you are now?

  Shango lifted the hammer to a present-arms position, his right hand up the shaft near the weighty steel head. “You need to stand aside.”

  Wishart said nothing, his dead eyes on Shango like banked suns, not giving way. The air was hot and simmered with red light.

  Shango hefted the hammer, prepared to swing it—

  Wishart held out one pale, bloodless hand—

  “And what?” Colleen Brooks demanded. The morning had slid effortlessly into afternoon as the five of them had sat listening to Shango around the gouged old table in the Insomnia Café with its ratty furniture and soft rock music, its litter of glasses.

  “I don’t remember,” Shango replied.

  “You don’t remember?”

  “Well—it might sound ridiculous.”

  “Are there any fucking skeptics left on earth?” Colleen retorted. Cal Griffin put a calming hand on her arm.

  “Just tell us what happened,” he said.

  “I closed my eyes and went to sleep,” Shango said. “It was kind of involuntary.”

  “And when you woke up?” That was Doc Lysenko, who maintained a watchful composure although he was on his fifth espresso.

  “I was lying in the dirt in an empty rail yard in some hard-luck town near the Mexican border.”

  “You don’t know how you got there?” Cal asked.

  “No, sir, I do not.”

  Mama Diamond watched the dust motes floating in the light shining through the big front windows. It was a hell of a yarn, better maybe than the one about the old stone-and-bone lady and the dragon who paid a call, the dragon that took her treasure and left a secret thing between her and the animals, a secret gift of tongues.

  Where was Stern now, whom these new companions of hers had known, and Dr. Fred Wishart, and Cal Griffin’s vanished sister, Tina? All sitting around some table like this one, somewhere else in God’s creation?

  It was ridiculous, of course, but no more implausible, really, than the unlikely assemblage of the six of them sitting here. Mama Diamond marveled at the complex tapestry of loss and event that had knit them together.

  Where might those threads, those lengths of time and chance that had so entwined them, had brought and bound them together here, draw them next…

  And with whom might it further entangle them?

  Cal Griffin leaned in toward Shango, his chin resting in his hands, his elbows propped on the table. In his spare efficiency of frame he seemed about one-third the heft of Shango, with none of the other’s broad muscularity. But Mama Diamond noted that they both shared the same unspoken ease of command, the same instinct of decisiveness. Both of them had long been used to relying on their own judgment.

  Two Cats Who Walked Alone…but were doing so no longer.

  “You ready for a rematch?” Cal Griffin asked Shango.

  For the first time that entire day, Shango smiled.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  THE MAP OF THE FLESH

  The sign on the building said MARRIED STUDENT HOUS-ING.

  I’m neither, Colleen Brooks thought sardonically, and not likely to be anytime soon. But even so, she was grateful for the soft bed and running water.

  And Doc there with her.

  After their time with Larry Shango in the Insomnia Café, the afternoon found them in the quarters Jeff Arcott had assigned them, beyond the physics building and the student store, past the sculpture garden with its Rodins and Henry Moores and Degas ballerinas, to the utilitarian block of apartments where Melissa Wade led them and then—with a delicacy Colleen appreciated—quickly departed.

  The two of them dropped their dusty packs just inside the front door and divested themselves of the crossbows, machetes, cutting blades and other miracles of lethality each favored (although Colleen always kept her big Eviscerator Three close by, while Doc retained the straight razor in his boot).

  Colleen got the water in the shower running, waiting for it to heat. Doc was in the bedroom now; through the open bathroom door she could see him hiss with pain as he worked to remove his scuffed and sun-faded leather jacket.

  She glided over to him, helped him off with it, hung it in the closet, where there were wooden hangers.

  “I groan like an eighty-year-old man,” he commented.

  “No, just like a forty-five-year-old with mileage.”

  “I’d say, rather, the truck that dragged me has the mileage. I fear my odometer broke long ago.”

  She smiled. She was down to his blue denim shirt now and worked undoing the buttons. But the blood from the numerous cuts he’d sustained in the lovely grunter vacation spot that evening had dried and adhered to the inside of the shirt.

  She ushered him into the bathroom, foggy with steam from the showerhead. Wetting a wash towel she found hanging on the door, she bathed the wounds as she gently peeled away the fabric. His torso was olive dark, long and lean with muscle, and as ever she admired it for its efficiency and its strength.

  But she pitied it, too, for its many scars, and saw the night’s work wo
uld add to them.

  “Geez, Viktor,” she said, “you’re starting to look like a map of Bosnia.” (Not that she herself was without significant marks from any number of beings human or otherwise.)

  “I have never been one for scrapbooks, so I carry my keepsakes here.” He pointed to a long gash running alongside the base of his lowest rib, by the abdomen. “Here is where you saved my life in Greenwich Village,” and another, higher, “here where you saved me in West Virginia, here in Illinois.” (He pronounced it in his thick accent “Ill-in-noy-is,” which oddly charmed her, though she couldn’t say why.)

  “All these almost deaths,” he added, melancholy eyes smiling, “all these fates deferred. You swoop in like Lady Liberty—”

  “Or Mother Russia?”

  “Or an avenging angel, sword held high, and cheat finality at every turn. You challenge my pessimism, Boi Baba.”

  And you challenge my despair, she thought, but did not say. All the losers she had been with, all the Rorys and Eddies and Jacks—not to mention the ones she’d blown off from the get-go, the pond scum even lower on the food chain, if possible, than the bottom-feeders she’d selected. All the guys more likely to be in a police lineup than at an awards dinner, whose only distinguishing feature was their cynicism, the only bar they set the one that held their beers and chasers.

  Looking back over the long line of these specimens—like an evolutionary chart that never got much beyond Australopithecus—Colleen reflected that the only thing she could count on with them was that she couldn’t count on them…and that, whether they stayed or went, she knew she wouldn’t have much taken from her because she never gave them the keys to her heart.

  Not so with her sad, competent, loving father, whose face she knew as well as her own, even after all these years. In dying he had left her, and torn away a piece of her that was precious and core.

  That was when she had first learned that love was a wound, and without ever putting it in so many words, even to herself—especially to herself—had determined to lock her heart away from further harm.

  And yet, she marveled, here she was all over again. With a man so admirable, so much finer than herself…and so dangerous to the self-protection she so prized.

  Love was a wound, and an enduring, foolish risk…but then, hell, so was everything now.

  She kissed the scars on Viktor’s chest, and on his rib cage and his arms, and drew him with her into the shower, then to the bed, where for a time it was sweetness and immediacy and flow, and neither of them thought of the future or of the past.

  As day eased into night, she released herself into his keeping, and slept.

  Later, when they were both awake, he held her in the darkness, skin touching skin.

  “What was it like,” she asked softly, “there in the reactor?”

  He was silent a time, thinking of Chernobyl, and then he said, “I never was in the reactor. I only saw those who were. They paid out their lives, knowing they were dead men already, keeping the hoses trained on the core, buying others time. I cannot conceive of such courage.”

  And yet you have it, Viktor, she reflected, I’ve seen it so many times. How can you not know that? But then, she supposed, it was always most difficult to see one’s true self.

  “Why do you ask this?” he said, and she could make out his eyes in the dark, studying her.

  “Once, when we were talking about the Source, you said, ‘Into the reactor.’ I think we’ll be there soon….”

  He held her tighter, and nodded. “Yes, I think so, too.”

  “Funny, you know, I can’t wait…even though it’s gonna—”

  He put a finger to her lips. “Shh…” No need to say it would assuredly kill them; they both knew.

  Later still, she said, “I always figured I was kinda like a toaster. It shorts out, it’s done, it goes in the trash. It doesn’t move on to some higher plane.”

  “Your resemblance to a toaster is somewhat remote.”

  “Don’t be obtuse.” She fingered the cross on the chain around her neck, the gift Viktor had given her long months back, after he had saved her in the frigid waters en route to Chicago. It was the only thing she wore now, along with the dog tags, and the dragon scale he had returned to her. “Do you believe in an afterlife, Viktor?”

  He pondered it. “I would like to, yes. But who can say? I’ll know when I get there…or I’ll never know.” He kissed her on the head. “Or perhaps I’ll merely be a toaster beside you on the shelf.”

  That begged the question, but she didn’t press him further. Anyway, it wasn’t really the question she’d wanted to ask….

  The one that spoke in her heart, that thrust like sheared metal off a car wreck, like the screams of a mother and daughter dying in the frigid waters of a swollen stream outside Kiev.

  If there were an afterlife, who would you choose to be with?

  Feeling his lean, scarred arms around her, lying back against his wounded self, Colleen Brooks felt haunted by a woman she had never known.

  TWENTY-NINE

  DRAGON SKIN

  “I want you to take a look at this,” Doc Lysenko said.

  They stood beside him in the morgue, Cal and Colleen and Goldie, in the hour before dawn, on their second night in Atherton. (Mama Diamond and Larry Shango were still getting some shut-eye up in their separate rooms in what had formerly been the Ramada.)

  When they made their delivery here, the work crew had been forced to improvise, shoving twelve tables together and rigging a block and tackle to hoist the big carcass up onto their surface.

  But then, nobody had said this would be easy.

  Observing him now, dressed in hospital blues, covered from head to toe in blood, Colleen Brooks reflected that her lover looked in all his equanimity like some maniac physician in a splatter movie—Dr. Bloodhappy, or Surgeon Kill-Scalpel, or something equally sanguinary.

  In reality, though, he’d merely been following a line of inquiry…which, among other things, just happened to involve taking a chainsaw to a dead dragon.

  Fortunately, Dr. Waxman and the rest of staff at the college Med Center, the nurses and interns and student volunteers, had been all too happy to provide Doc with the equipment and elbow room necessary to perform this most singular operation—or autopsy, to be more accurate—although the brute strength required to open up the body and heft the organs seemed more befitting butchers at work on a steer, or even some Hemingwayesque safari taking souvenirs off a fallen bull elephant, than your standard sawbones examining a cadaver.

  When Doc had first set about cracking open the rib cage and extracting and weighing the internal organs, the room had been filled to the rafters, SRO with medical staff and the panoply of grads and undergrads who had heard what was going on in the subbasement. It was the first such autopsy ever performed at this facility; possibly performed anywhere in the world, because dragons were rare as hen’s teeth and one gave them a wide berth when crossing their shadow. Besides, no one—not a man nor woman in attendance there as the bone and fluids, scales and gristle flew under the screaming metal blades wielded by the surprisingly serene Russian—had ever seen one of the big flying reptiles dead, or met anyone who had killed one. Incredibly, examples of both were in their town tonight, two miraculous visitations at once.

  Now, many hours later, the component parts had been disassembled and notated, placed in their separate receptacles of glass and metal and plastic. Young and old, accomplished and callow, hardened and untried, the observers had found themselves hushed and wide-eyed…and finally, one by one, had drifted away to pursuits less gaudy and brutal.

  Until Doc, alone and sure now, summoned his friends.

  He gestured at the enormous fretwork of the skeleton atop the joined tables. “Truly a remarkable structure, an edifice as elegant and durable as a Gothic cathedral.”

  “Yeah,” Colleen said, “but a cathedral rarely tries to bite your head off and swallow you whole.”

  “Only some of the clerg
y within do,” Goldie commented, but no one rose to the barb.

  “So what have you got for us?” Cal asked Doc.

  “Some preliminary data, Calvin, and some educated guesses. Upon close inspection, I verified several long-standing suspicions. See this structure, and this one here? They are human in their lineage, undeniably so. Oh, amended and built upon and added to; in some cases to an astonishing degree. But any knowledgeable scrutiny reveals that this is, in fact, a man—changed, most assuredly, capable of much a normal human being could not do. But still a man.”

  Doc leaned back against the wall and rubbed weary eyes. “The organs bear this out, too. And I feel certain the DNA resequencing I’m having performed will again verify these findings, down to the molecular level…. It confirms what we ourselves have seen firsthand, and although one must be cautious when drawing conclusions from only one sample, I would express a conviction that were we to cross-section another dragon, or any of the grunters”—and here Doc’s voice dropped down and grew more gentle, eyeing Cal—“or the flares, they would all be clearly derived from human beings; would, in the truest sense, still be human.”

  None of them spoke for a long moment, then Colleen said, “Okay, so that’s reasonably creepy…. Where does it get us?”

  “Do you recall the devices set into the ground at the edge of town? The ones we encountered when we returned and found Mr. Shango and his lady companion? They told me of their belief that these were the instruments that projected the appalling false landscape of corpses and plague.”

  Colleen shuddered, remembering the ghastly landscape that had nearly driven them away from this place before they had learned the wonders it held (which, of course, had been the whole idea); and she thought of her amulet, the dragon scale she wore, that had allowed her to pierce the illusion and behold the truth.