Magic Time: Ghostlands

by Marc Scott Zicree

  It was an impossible luxury for most physicians, he knew, but then Yelena’s father was high up in the Party, and it was the family retreat, had been since the days of Stalin and Molotov, before the Great Patriotic War and the frozen dead of Stalingrad.

  A seabird called from on high, and he looked into the rosy, lightening sky to see the gull hovering overhead, could make out the perfection of its outstretched wings, the ordered rows of its feathers. It floated bobbing on the currents of air, then folded its wings and plunged like a spike driving down, crashing into the water, sending a spray flying upward as it speared a fish and gobbled it down.

  I have seen that movement before, Doc thought, but it had been no bird and its prey no fish, but something of considerably more weight and moment.

  He tried to call up the image of those dark forms and found them elusive, could not summon them in his mind’s eye. It filled him with dread closing on panic. But even as the feeling speared up within him, he felt it damped down and muffled, as if from some will outside his own.

  Vague forms and structures moved within his mind, the towers of foreign buildings, faces he felt should be familiar but were alien and born of far lands.

  Not now, but belonging to another time, one that was paradoxically both future and past, in a time beyond the horror that was to come. It was all receding from him, misting away. He felt a sense of desperate unreality, and suddenly did not know whether it was the present moment or the insistent call of memory that was unreal.

  Yelena was studying him, the ocean breeze playing with her hair, and her smile was sympathetic and sad. “You look so weary, my love. It’s good you’ll be able to rest here.”

  And, dear God, he felt that, too. So good to be here, to release the grief, the demand of duty, of obligation to others. To relax into ease and comfort and belonging, like floating on the warm, forgiving sea.

  No, something inside proclaimed to him. You get your fucking ass out of there right now, Doc Lysenko.

  It was a voice that spoke in his heart, an American voice, a woman’s voice.

  Boi Baba…

  “I cannot remain here,” he murmured to the exquisite, serene woman beside him. He began stumbling away, along the lip of the ocean, his sandals pressing into the damp sand as the foam retreated back from him into the waves.

  Yelena moved quickly to overtake him, stood blocking his way. Her eyes were no less loving, but more firm as she held him in her gaze.

  “You had a dream, Viktor,” she said, not unkindly, “and in your dream we died, Nurya and I, and you were a refugee washed up onto a distant shore, and the world died, too….”

  “No,” he breathed, and could not have said whether he was denying that it was a dream or that it was so.

  “Is that the world you want, Viktor? A world of corpses? Or this, to be with the living?”

  But it hadn’t been just a world of the dead. There had been someone, someone who had brought him back to life, when he himself had been the walking dead.

  Why could he not remember her name?

  Yelena drew close to him, and he let her kiss him on the lips. He felt her living breath, felt the perfume of her, the promise with no hint of the grave.

  “It is no accident that we are here,” she said, and the emphasis she put on the word “accident” made him shiver and called up a distant echo of tires shrieking as they lost their grip on a rain-sheened road, the roar of a stream that was too swift, too deep, and too hungry, of two bodies he once had forced himself to identify.

  Her caress banished the phantoms. “We’re safe here,” she said. “No harm can come to us.”

  “And why is that?” he said, a tremor of cold running through him despite the warmth on his skin.

  “Maybe there is one who provides you sanctuary, whose name we cannot speak…but who wishes you well.”

  Wish…?

  Wishart.

  The name blossomed in his mind but meant nothing to him, although he felt it should.

  But named or not, that was how power worked, how it always worked. Without that protection, that favor, all you loved could be washed away as casually, as disdainfully as skid marks off a road.

  Sanctuary…

  He could stay here, wrap the sea about him like a winding sheet, entomb himself in safety within this eternal moment, embrace and become like these two he loved.

  But then, that was hardly a new sensation, a fresh novelty. No, if anything, it was the state that long years had made familiar to him, a decision he had chosen before the earth on two graves had grown smooth and cold.

  Before a young man and woman had sought him out to help a little girl, before they and a wild-eyed mystic had called him back from his torpor, back to an existence of uncertainty and hope and pain.

  Wouldn’t you rather be with the living?

  Yelena stroked his cheek and smiled again. “I’ll make you breakfast. We’ll rouse Nurya. Wouldn’t you like that?”

  He made to speak, to voice a question, but suddenly there was a tearing sound, and he turned from her to look outward.

  There was a woman there, clothed in scaly black leather garments, a black helmet crowning her. She held a machete, and a multiplicity of other weapons draped across her back and hung from belts and bandoliers. Behind her, a ragged tear in the sky was sealing up. He supposed she had done that with the machete.

  She was standing on the ocean.

  And in that moment, Viktor felt a door close in him, and it was a good closing, not a forgetting but definitely an ending. He let out his breath, a release, and felt himself relax into ease and comfort and belonging, like floating on the warm, forgiving sea.

  “Time for me to go,” he said to Yelena, and it surprised him only a little how easy it was to make his decision.

  He found that he himself could not walk on water, so he splashed out to the ludicrously armored woman in the warm surf. He grabbed her hand, and she hauled him up to her level.

  Before she led him out of there, he felt a giddy urge to turn back to Yelena (who still stood there watching him, and had not yet changed into a Gorgon or the goddess Kali or any other improbable thing that was indisputably not Yelena) and shout back, This is my American girlfriend!

  But he only had so much tolerance for the absurd.

  FORTY

  GOLDMAN IN THE GLORY

  “Save your hate for the Source,” Magritte had told Herman Goldman way back when, in Howard Russo’s dusky apartment on the outskirts of Chicago.

  Her subsequent, pointless death had given him formidable reason to build that hate into an edifice more towering than the fortress deranged Primal had erected against the Source; to nurture and preserve it as a focal element that could unleash his power in all its terrible wrath.

  Now at long last, he was finally where he could do something about it.

  Scant moments before, the place had looked precisely like New York. But it wasn’t New York; hell, he could’ve told that with his eyes closed, could have told it Ray Charles blind, because the music of the Source, that jangly, Village-of-the-Damned, ninth-level-of-Hell swarm of voices, that white-hot electric wire that had been jabbed into his brain and reeling him in ever since before the Change, was shrieking like God Himself was Ethel Merman being tortured.

  Radio Goldman was definitely on the air.

  He had been saving up his pennies, putting any number of items into his portmanteau of juju, for just for this occasion.

  Now he just had to zone in on the insane, beating heart of it, really put the home in homicide.

  When Tina and Cal’s mock apartment did its little rumba number and sent him flying Adidas over Stetson, spinning him round and round like a Protein Berry smoothie in a Jamba Juice blender, the lights had gone out for the briefest instant, only to come up again like a curtain rising on this fresh and utterly diverting little vacation spot.

  Still South Dakota, he told himself, even if it looked anything but…

  Nevertheless, he did not recogni
ze the new digs. Unlike the Manhattan apartment, which he knew must’ve been derived from either Cal’s or Tina’s memory, this scenery was nothing cobbled from his database.

  Postcard lovely, though, with its beachfront of faded grand hotels like a chorus line of dowagers, the bulky forties American cars plying their way down the streets, the olive-and-cocoa-skinned men and women bustling along the sidewalks, the lilt of Spanish floating from every window.

  Somewhere in the Tropics? Undoubtedly…but not any time around now. This was a scene from fifty years ago, and more.

  “Quaint…but I call it home,” a voice behind him said languidly.

  Goldie turned, and commanded himself not to drop his jaw.

  The face was familiar, and the horns, too, not to mention the tail.

  Better the Devil you know…

  He looked exactly as he had when first he’d appeared in Goldie’s classroom dog years back, when he’d levitated the classroom and engaged Herman Goldman in a week’s worth of frothy debate and badinage.

  With one staggering difference—that particular fallen gentleman had been a projection of Goldie’s mind, he knew that, had even somewhat known it at the time, no more a distinct individual than a ventriloquist’s dummy or an American President.

  But this Red Boy, well now, he might look the same, but what was under the hood was another story altogether.

  For while the face was familiar, filched from the well-fertilized fields of Herman Goldman’s frontal lobes, the Foul Fiend smiling back at him was a complete and utter stranger.

  Not the real Devil, certainly, any more than he’d be the real Santa Claus or Easter Bunny (though they might be arriving on the scene anytime now, no telling). And the fact that he was smoking what Goldie’s finely tuned nostrils identified as a Pall Mall and gazing at him with blind, milky-white eyes (although he seemed perfectly able to see him) only gave further proof, if that were needed.

  “Who’s in charge here?” Goldie asked.

  “Batista,” the other replied, gazing out at the passing parade. His voice held the faintest trace of accent, cultured and lilting, caught more in the rhythms than the pronunciation.

  “Very funny,” Goldie said. “You wanna tell me whose past we’re looking at here?”

  Somewhere a band was striking up “Manteca,” a jazzy little Afro-Cuban number Goldman had first heard on a musty Dizzy Gillespie LP his dad had stowed long ago in their attic. The other inclined his head, as if to catch it better.

  “Quantum physics teaches us that the space between particles is more real than the particles themselves,” the apparition said dreamily. “That everything material is an illusion, beauty included, especially beauty.”

  He drew the smoke deep into his lungs and held it there, gestured out at the buildings with his cigarette. “An elegant façade, nothing more…one that can be blasted apart by a hurricane or an errant thought.”

  He brought his cold coffin eyes to look on Goldman once more. “I was a busboy here, in the Hotel Nacional…being spat on, cleaning the vomit of the turistas Americano, when their bored wives—as high strung and finely bred as racehorses—were not giving me their loving attentions…while their husbands practiced free trade in the casinos.”

  “Y’know, I just can’t see the Prince of Darkness moonlighting as a busboy,” Goldie observed. “Howzabout we take off the mask?”

  “I will if you will, Mr. Goldman.”

  Now, that sent a Popsicle straight up the old backbone. Not that it should be that much of a surprise, though, if this clown could peruse folks’ gray matter like strolling the aisles at Wal-Mart….

  Only how much has he been shoplifting?

  Goldie tried for an offhanded manner. “Mine doesn’t come off, try as I might.”

  The other shrugged as if discarding an overcoat draped over his shoulders, and with no seeming transition he was suddenly human, or appeared so; a pale, lean man with sickly white hair and long, nicotine-stained fingers holding the same cigarette, appraising the world with the same blind eyes.

  “How’d you get from here to South Dakota?” Goldie asked, figuring he might as well advance a few more feet along the tightrope, try to glean as much as he could.

  “An itinerant lecturer passing through on sabbatical recognized this untouchable, this invisible one with the phenomenal gift for numbers, for abstract thought. Was it any more unlikely than Einstein working as a patent clerk? No, although I was somewhat more striking than dear Albert, more compliant…. And so I was spirited away to Cornell and the Ivory Tower.”

  Goldie found his mouth was dry. He licked his lips, tried to keep his voice level. “You know my name…” he prompted.

  The corner of the other’s mouth lifted in the barest trace of a smile. “In life, I was known as Marcus Sanrio….”

  Bingo, a moniker right off the list of Source Project mucky-mucks, director of the whole nine yards, in fact.

  It may not have been Hawaii, Goldie realized, but he felt a vibrating certainty within himself (like that endless chord on Sergeant Pepper’s) that odds-on he was talking to the Big Kahuna himself. No floating green head with a man behind the curtain, but the man himself.

  “So I’ll ask again,” Goldie repeated, striving to sound casual, to sound anything but what he truly was. “Who’s in charge here?”

  Sanrio looked off into the distance and considered; not the answer, Goldie realized, but whether to answer at all. He parted his lips, and let the ghost vapor of the cigarette curl lazily from his mouth, the smoke gray-white like his empty dead eyes.

  “It’s a collective, of a sort,” he said languorously, at last. “But as for the governing aesthetic…you could say that it’s mine.”

  Bingo again.

  So the only question now, Herman Goldman knew, was how best to kill him.

  FORTY-ONE

  THE TIME OF BLOOD AND STORM

  It’s like tearing through different flats on a theater stage, Cal Griffin thought, ripping away layer after layer of illusion.

  Along with Inigo and Tina (who still stared blankly at him, seeming not to recognize him at all), Cal had managed to utilize his armor to burst through the barriers and reunite them with Colleen and Doc, then reach Mama Diamond, Howard Russo and Enid Blindman. As he suspected, they weren’t far apart at all, just separated by walls of different settings, like themed rooms at some fantasy hotel.

  So now here they were, Cal and Colleen in the lead, bursting through tiers of unreality in search of Larry Shango and Goldie.

  “Cripes, what’s the deal here?” moaned Howie. “I mean, why not just kill us and get it over with? I do not need to be seeing that 1976 production of The Fantasticks again.”

  “Old Devil likes his games, Howie,” said Enid. “But don’t you be dissin’ it. We still breathin’ here.”

  “It seems to be rooting around in our minds,” offered Mama Diamond. “Searching out the threat to it there.”

  True enough, thought Cal. But given what Doc and Colleen had told him of their forays in mock Russia and Thailand (Mama Diamond pointedly choosing not to share what picture postcard had been summoned from her memory; Cal’s quick glimpse of it revealing only that it looked like some kind of prisoner camp), the answer seemed more complex, the motivation and purpose of what set the scene and manipulated the players more diverse. Perhaps the Consciousness at the Source was not simply homogenous malaise in a bottle; maybe there were majority and minority opinions at work here, discrepancies and deviations….

  “You got an opinion on this?” Cal asked Inigo.

  Inigo looked furtive, hunched his shoulders. “I don’t ask questions.”

  “Yup,” Howie agreed, “that’s always served me pretty well, kid—leastways, till now….” He shot Inigo a grin.

  Cal caught the look of gratitude on the boy’s face, of recognition; the two grunters were outcasts both, even among their own kind.

  Abruptly, they punched through to Goldie. He was standing beneath the swaying palms
on a bustling, old-fashioned resort street, talking to a lanky old man blanched as an albino.

  Cal heard Inigo suck in his breath. “Aw, man…” He sounded profoundly dismayed.

  “It’s the second blind man,” Tina murmured, gazing at the old man. She turned her face to Enid and whispered enigmatically, “You’re the third.” Cal wondered who the first might be, and had an inkling he just might know.

  “Who is that?” Cal asked Inigo.

  “Sanrio,” Inigo said.

  Cal shot Doc and Colleen a glance; they all knew that name from the list.

  “Is he real?” Doc asked.

  “That’s kinda complicated,” Inigo replied. “But yeah, mostly. Listen, we gotta get outta here before he spots us.”

  But it was already too late. Cal saw that Sanrio had raised his head and spied them. Sanrio canted his head upward, as if in silent supplication, both a prayer and a summons.

  A tumult rose up from ahead of them, insane shrieks of rage and belligerence, growing in volume.

  Cal motioned for Colleen to flank him. “Get behind us,” he told the others; his and Colleen’s armor would help shield them from whatever the flare matter formed itself into.

  “Goldie, get over here!” Cal cried out. Goldman seemed frozen in place beside the pale figure.

  Abruptly, the buildings and sky and people shivered, and hunched, muscled figures burst through, screeching hideously and rushing toward Cal and the others.

  Grunters, hundreds and hundreds of them.

  “Hoo boy, some time for a family reunion,” moaned Howard Russo.

  “They’re real,” said Inigo.

  “Yeah, I figured that,” Cal said, drawing his sword while the others unslung their rifles and Howie pulled the Tech Nine from his belt. Cal glanced over to Goldie, just in time to see him rush up to Sanrio and embrace him.

  Cal heard him scream as the world exploded in light.

  Too late, far too late, Herman Goldman realized that something was terribly wrong, that he had miscalculated and this pillar of fire he was embracing, this mocking dark entity, was not Marcus Sanrio at all, at least not his physical self, but merely a projection, like the voice at the end of a telephone line, and Goldie could no more kill him than smacking a receiver against a wall would give the caller a concussion.