Magic Time: Ghostlands (12 page)

Bomber Jacket worked up his courage, and hesitantly approached his deliverer.

“Something to add?” the man that was not a man asked, and in his casualness sounded oh-so-threatening.

“Um, the schematics…they’re clear, but…challenging.”

Smoke eddied about the visitor, the wind whipping it into mist devils, enshrouding him as though he were a phantom paying a call, death on vacation.

“It’s not anything I can’t do—in
time.
” Fear and nervousness made Bomber Jacket gabble in relentless staccato, machine-gun bursts of words. “But an
assistant,
a Pretorius, if you will, if one of them could just come out for a day or two, not more, surely not more, to provide some guidance, I mean, just to elucidate some of the physics, untangle a cat’s cradle, a string or two—”

Bomber Jacket stopped abruptly as he caught the low sound coming from the other.

He was chuckling.

The man in black extended a hand palm up and affected a quavering voice that was an obscene mockery of a child’s.
“Please, sir, can I have some more?”

Then he dropped the hand, and his voice was his own again. “They could send someone but, trust me, you wouldn’t have the furniture.”

He stepped through his curtain of smoke, brushing it aside, glowering down at the trembling young man. “Hit your mark, say your lines, get off the stage. Now, is that so hard to do?”

“N—no,” Bomber Jacket blurted, backing away. Inigo could tell he didn’t have the foggiest notion what the man in black was talking about.

But then, Leather Man’s message hadn’t been for
him.

Unobserved, Inigo slipped off into the night and, within minutes, was miles away.

GRIFFIN BEFORE DAWN

T
he snow no longer falling, Cal sought out a spot thirty yards behind the Sears Automotive Center, given over now to the wind and a solitary gray owl circling overhead in a last foray as the night wore down. Big stacks of worn-out truck tires provided a windbreak there, and the ground was soft enough to bury Big Mike deep and away from the predations of men or beasts. Doc expertly closed the dead man’s wound, then Mike Kimmel and Flo Speakman washed the body and found enough discarded garments left in the Big and Tall Men’s Shop to lay Olifiers out in fresh, if musty, new clothes.

From Manhattan to Boone’s Gap to Chicago to the Fun Place in Iowa,
Cal thought. Another Kodak moment. Another funeral.

As he helped Kimmel and Doc and Colleen enfold the body in a king-size silk sheet recovered from Macy’s (in their travels, it always surprised Cal the incongruity and illogic of which items were scavenged and which remained), Cal surveyed Olifiers’s beefy, innocent face, saw the release, the look of serenity there.

Big Mike had paid his life out, sacrificed it in a moment, for him, for Cal.

And why?

They need you,
he had said, or tried to, in his last dying moments.

“I don’t have the answer,” Cal had pleaded with him earlier that night.

And unshaken, Olifiers had simply replied, “Nobody else even seems to know the question.”

No more running for Olifiers, no more fear. Just, at the end of the road, certainty.

The moon dipped low over the powdered earth as the long night waned, and they lowered Big Mike into the ground by the light of Goldie’s spheres, lowered him with the lengths of chain their attackers had brought to drag Big Mike and his kindred back to slavery.

Free now.

All of them stood along the gravesite, Al Watt and Krystee Cott and Rafe Dahlquist and the others, and they looked to Cal to say something.

But what was there to say?

The man with the question…

Unfortunately, Olifiers had never gotten around to discussing with Cal just what that question might
be.
Certainly there were any number of tantalizing items on the menu, mouthwatering delicacies laced with cyanide….

What dark mentality lay at the heart of the Source? What was stealing away flares?
Why
was it stealing them away? What integral piece was Fred Wishart in that equation, or the other scientists on the list Agent Shango had given Cal in the woods of Albermarle County—Marcus Sanrio or Agnes Wu or Pollard or Sakamoto or any of the rest?

I don’t know how to beat it,
Cal had told Colleen.

But standing in the fierce November wind looking down at the hole gouged in the earth like a bloody wound, Cal knew the question the currency of Olifiers’s death had purchased him.

How
do we beat it?

Cal’s eyes moved along the somber, calm faces of Olifiers’s mourners. The fact of any of their deaths was no surprise to them, given the lives they’d been living, only the specific time and place of it.

Rafe Dahlquist, the physicist; Krystee Cott, who had been a soldier; Al Watt, who knew how to find information; so very many of them…

With the skills he would need.

Not to mention Goldie and Doc and Colleen.

Cal had been laboring so hard to find excuses to jettison those traveling with him, to safeguard them, to shield himself from responsibility and guilt and loss.

But if he was going to accomplish anything, if Olifiers’s life and death were going to have any meaning at all, Cal wouldn’t have time for such luxuries.

The one he needed to jettison was himself.

Print the Legend….

He saw that Colleen was watching him intently, almost as though she could read his mind. And why not? She had been the first to throw in her lot with him, before Goldie, before Doc. Before any of the warriors and wayfarers and holy fools that had accompanied them for a time.

He realized he would need many of them back again before this was done.

“Big Mike was the first of you to die,” Cal said, by way of eulogy. “But if you follow me, he won’t be the last.”

Then he told them everything he knew about the Source.

Cal found Goldie in the heart of the mall, squatting at the top of the escalator, peering into the darkness, the nothingness of the vast, brooding space. Since he had dispatched Perez’s magic man, pulverized or transported him to parts unknown, killed or banished him, Goldie had said little, done what was asked of him, kept his distance, deeply shaken and withdrawn, and folded in on himself.

“‘Your old men will see visions…’” Cal intoned softly, climbing the stilled metal steps until he stood just below him, his face level with Goldie as he crouched.

“‘Your young men will dream dreams,’” Goldie completed the quotation.
Revelation,
what Goldie had said to him on that day of days, just before the world had come
spinning to a halt and they had been thrown together, launched on this mad, uncertain trajectory.

“It’s a bitch to be lead dog,” Cal said.

Goldie nodded. “Canary in a coal mine’s no Swiss picnic, either.”

“Got any line on what you did with Eddie back there?”

“Nope. Just did it.”

“Are you getting better at this, Goldie…or is it getting the better of you?”

“This multiple choice?”

“I’ve got this twitchy feeling we’re getting close real soon, ready or not.”

“Yeah, I’ve got that feeling, too.”

“We’ll need every trick we can muster, every reinforcement along the way.”

“Portals aren’t a snap to open, Cal; it’s not like making a call. Correction, like making a call—”

“Used to be, I know.” Cal sighed. So much of their associations were what
used
to be, as if they themselves were lingering ghosts who didn’t know when to depart. “Look, I’m not asking for miracles…okay, I guess I am. Get as good as you can, as fast as you can. Ask for what you need. Don’t be a solo act.”

Goldie was staring off into the darkness again, enclosed in solitude. Cal grabbed his shoulder, forced his attention. “We’re family here, Goldie,” he said, and meant it.

“I’ve done family,” Goldie replied darkly, in his unshared, black memories. He turned to Cal at last, and smiled wanly. “What you’ve worked up here trumps it, believe me.”

Then he added, “I’ll do my best, Cal, really and truly. But take some advice from the unsettled set—have a fallback plan…. And if you need at any propitious moment to ditch me as thoroughly as Jerry Lewis dumped Dino, then you do it, and do not look back. You got that?”

Cal nodded, hoping he wouldn’t need to, not knowing if he could.

They sat a long time in the dark, sharing the silence.

While Colleen and Doc took morning watch, Cal returned to the gutted Waldenbooks with the torch Perez had discarded. What remained of the stock was patchy, but sufficient to Cal’s purpose.

Extinguishing the flame, he settled himself beside a crack in the wall where a shaft of dawnlight filtered through, and began to read.

He started with Martin Luther King, Jr.’s
A Call to Conscience.

Soon enough, he would move on to Sun-Tzu’s
The Art of War.

Cal didn’t realize he’d fallen asleep until an awareness of a nearby presence startled him awake, adrenaline surging in him. He threw himself back and grabbed for the sword at his hip. But the misshapen figure didn’t move.

It stood watching him silently in the shadowed part of the room, away from the shaft of daylight, the dust motes dancing in the air.

From its shape, Cal could tell the creature was a grunter, and for an instant he thought it was Brian Forbes, the one he had liberated from Perez, and who had asked to join him. (Curious how a small minority of the grunters, like Howard Russo and Forbes, lacked the viciousness of their brethren, sharing only the same air of forlornness and pain.)

But then Cal saw that this grunter was smaller. And even though he
was
smaller, even in the dimness, Cal could glean from his body language and the expression on his face and a thousand subtle other things that he was far more formidable than either Russo or Forbes.

“My name is Inigo,” the grunter boy said.

Having seen
The Princess Bride
on countless occasions—it was a ritual with Cal and Tina to watch it together on her rare sick days, in the close times before her life had been consumed by ballet and his by law—Cal half expected him to complete the statement with, “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”

But thanks to the deeper education his mother had given
him before her death, Cal also knew of another Inigo, Inigo Jones, a renowned British architect of the Renaissance, who had studded the realm with glorious palaces, churches and halls.

So which Inigo’s spirit would this inhuman boy embody—the builder…or the destroyer?

“There’s somewhere you need to go,” he told Cal.

DIAMOND DOGS

F
amiliar as these ancient hills were to Mama Diamond, even they had changed some since the world lost its way in recent days.

Physically they were the same: the expelled marrow of volcanoes a million years extinct, the compressed effluvia of what must once have been the floor of a primordial sea…and couldn’t you just feel it here, the weight of those centuries stacked one atop another like the laminar striations in a canyon wall?

I’m just one more fossil now,
Mama Diamond thought.
The difference is, I happen to be breathing.

A half-moon lit the chilly sky. She understood that she would have to find a place to make camp before moonset. Cope and Marsh, her horses, stepped lightly and a little nervously along a trail Mama Diamond had first explored thirty years ago. The train tracks were periodically visible, looping up a gentle incline from the east and crossing a canyon on a steel trestle. Mama Diamond had followed the tracks most of the way from Burnt Stick. But the horses disliked that high trestle and she had accommodated them with this back route.

In the distance she heard the howling of wolves—a great many of them, it seemed to her. That tribe had prospered
since the collapse of technology drove human beings out of these hard lands. They feasted, she thought, on our leavings. Now they were getting hungry again.

It was late, but Mama Diamond felt remarkably fresh. She wondered how that could be. The encounter with that dragon, with Stern, had left her sore and dispirited…but life had crept back into her over the course of the day, maybe
too much
life, a strange euphoria.

Why did she feel stronger rather than weaker? Was it possible the Change had not left her untouched after all? But Mama Diamond disliked that thought and dismissed it from her mind.

She was able to avoid the trestle because she knew these hills, knew them perhaps even more intimately than the surveyors who had laid down the rail routes way back when. And she doubted the extra time would put her far behind Federal Agent Larry Shango, who was depending on pedal power and force of will to carry him up the incline. But some difficulties she could not avoid…such as the upcoming tunnel that was blasted through the most difficult rock face these eroded hills had to offer. A half mile of darkness by day or night.

Mama Diamond considered making camp this side of the tunnel, but she didn’t want to lose the time or make a habit of postponing unpleasant obstacles, particularly when she felt so well. This was why she had packed a quality oil lamp. She had anticipated this passage.

Still, the sight of the tunnel mouth with its stained concrete lintels, like the entrance to a demonic temple, was disheartening. “Not everything is easy,” she whispered to the horses. Marsh sidled uneasily. Cope blew a gust of breath through flaring nostrils.

Mama Diamond lit the lantern, closed its mantle, and tried to draw some confidence from the flickering light. After all, Shango must have come this way already. And come out the other side…unless, of course, Shango was lying dead in the darkness next to his ridiculous rail bike, an image on which Mama Diamond preferred not to dwell.

The moon hovered just beyond the near peaks of the Laramie Range, watchful.

“Hey-up, Marsh,” Mama Diamond said, and the animal stepped into the shadows with an almost palpable reluctance, Cope hanging behind at the end of his rope like a counterweight.

Ambient light faded instantly. Mama Diamond’s lantern was too feeble to cast more than a narrow circle of illumination around her. Darkness enfolded her like a blanket. But she could see the tracks well enough to follow.

She disliked the smell of the tunnel. The tunnel stank of damp stone and rusting iron and cold cinders and limestone. And animals had been here—were still here, perhaps.

Were
definitely
still here, she decided a few moments later.

More wolves, most likely. They kept out of her circle of light, but she smelled them and heard them moving parallel to the tracks, keeping pace; heard their wet tongues slopping out of their mouths.

Marsh and Cope sensed them, too, probably more acutely than Mama Diamond did, and she had to speak to the horses to soothe them, faking a confidence she didn’t feel. Had it been a mistake to attempt this crossing tonight? But when would have been better? Daylight? There was never daylight in here.

Canine eyes peered out of the darkness, almost comically like a cut-rate special effect or a carnival-ride illusion, a Saturday matinee recalled in a nightmare.

But there was light ahead now, the faint but welcoming moon-bright oval of the tunnel’s far end. She trotted Marsh toward it.

However—

However, parked in that slat of moonlight was a single old gray wolf, a big gap-eared beast missing patches of fur, smiling its perpetual canine smile, black lips pulled back over yellow spearpoint teeth. It sat in Mama Diamond’s path coolly watching as she approached.

Mama Diamond rode until Marsh would go no farther. The horse simply stopped and stared, trembling, as if the motionless wolf were a writhing nest of snakes.

Mama Diamond spoke, meaning to reassure the horses, but she found herself addressing the wolf instead:

“Ho there, Old Dog. One old dog to another.”

The wolf seemed surprised, but it didn’t budge.

“What do you want from me, then, Old Dog? Do you plan to eat me? Well, that’s not in the cards—not tonight, anyhow. I’m feeling brisk and I’m feeling mean. Fair warning.”

And how powerful and assured her words sounded, even to herself! What made her speak so masterfully to a low animal like this one?

The wolf seemed abruptly uncertain of its intentions. It looked from side to side, licking its dark cracked lips.

“Oh, I know you have your tribe here with you. But they can’t protect you, Old Dog, nor you them. Not from me.” She raised her hand and her garnet rings glittered in the moonlight. More words spilled from Mama Diamond’s mouth: “But you’re not the boss, are you, Old Dog? You’re in charge for the moment, but the Big Boss isn’t here.”

The wolf whined and snapped its jaws.

“Well, Old Dog? What will it be? Fight or get out of my path?”

The wolf emitted a series of breathy barks, smacked its lips and drooled a string of spittle. But what Mama Diamond heard was:

You have no place here.

“Don’t tell me where I belong, Old Dog! Now stand back, or my horses will trample you.”

The animal rose uncertainly.

“
Move,
I tell you! Out of my path, Low Thing! Carrion-Eater! Haul your stinking carcass aside and tell your boss I said so!”

The wolf yipped and scuttled into the cavernous dark.

Mama Diamond led her horses from the mouth of the tunnel into moonlight and cold, clean air.

Now
that
was strange, she thought.

She caught up with Larry Shango a day later.

As she rode up, the government man squatted by the side of the tracks where the railroad divided a weedy meadow.
Shango was striking matches into a loose assortment of cottonwood kindling—more hoping for a fire than making one, Mama Diamond thought.

So intent was Shango on this task that he was visibly startled to see Mama Diamond and Marsh and Cope practically on top of him.

“Not very vigilant,” Mama Diamond observed, “for a government agent.”

“I made a career out of vigilance. Jesus! Those horses must have rubber-soled shoes.”

It did seem to Mama Diamond that she and her mounts had been moving with a certain stealth ever since their encounter with the gatekeeping wolf. Maybe that wasn’t just wishful thinking.

“I can help you with that fire,” Mama Diamond said. “You’re wasting matches. And unless you clear a break, you’re liable to start a brushfire while you’re at it.”

Shango stood up to his considerable full height. “Thank you, but may I ask what you’re doing here?”

The sun was low but the merest whisper of afternoon warmth lingered like an uncertain ghost. It would be a cold night. And a starry one, the air as clear as it was.

“There’s not much left for me back in Burnt Stick, you know. Not with my treasure stolen. Thought I might come along and keep you out of trouble.”

Shango’s expression remained stony. “You’re welcome to stay the night, ma’am. But I’m afraid I can’t let you travel with me. No offense, but I don’t need that kind of liability.”

“Of course not. All you need is some help with the fire. Oh, and I brought a rabbit we can cook, unless you have some game of your own. No? Well, then.”

The government agent sighed, looking at the rabbit with real longing.

They talked amicably enough over dinner, but not about anything substantial—jewel-thieving dragons, for instance, or the so-called Source Project. Mostly they talked about the
journey through the Shirleys and the difficult road yet to follow, though Shango was cagey on that topic, too.

It didn’t matter. They retired peacefully to their respective sleeping bags. The night was as starry as Mama Diamond had hoped, stars and planets so bright and crisp they showed their colors, Mars like a little pale ruby on the smoky throat of the sky. The air was cold, though. She tucked her knees up beside her and fell asleep listening to the small restless noises of Cope and Marsh and the rustling of wind in the weeds.

She was unsurprised, when she woke in the morning, to find Shango and all of Shango’s baggage already gone. She imagined she could hear the faint squeal of Shango’s lunatic rail bike somewhere down beyond the thin line of the horizon.

She could have caught up easily if she had saddled the horses then and there. But she didn’t. She tidied up the campsite, made sure the fire was thoroughly doused, packed her saddlebags equitably and at last rode north at an easy trot. There was no talking Shango into this deal, Mama Diamond realized. Larry Shango would have to come to certain conclusions in his own way and on his own time.

For two more days she followed the government agent as the land rose and fell and the temperatures just fell. Both nights she showed up at Shango’s campfire with game she had trapped or shot with her Indian bow. Shango accepted the food and seemed not to object to the company—Mama Diamond learned a little about Shango’s childhood in the New Orleans projects, and shared some stories of her own—but he was adamantly silent about his long-term goals. Shango traveled alone. That was nonnegotiable.

He was a stubborn man. Well, Mama Diamond thought, that figured. Shango was a man on a quest, stubborn almost by definition.

Her fourth day out, Mama Diamond spent too much time stalking an elusive antelope. In the end the animal outmaneuvered her and she wasted an arrow on the prairie grass. By the time she had ranged back to the railway tracks, night had fallen. A fingernail moon shimmered through faint, high
clouds. The old moon in the arms of the new, she had heard it called.

Missed dinner, she thought, riding alongside the moon-silvered rails, and the night was darker than she would have preferred for this kind of traveling. She didn’t want Marsh or Cope to step in a gopher hole and break a leg. She would have preferred to have them watered and resting by now. Stupid old woman, she had miscalculated the time….

But at the next turn of the breeze, she smelled dinner ahead. Pork and beans, wafted on a southerly wind. She was surprisingly hungry. She had not had an appetite so voracious since she was a much younger woman—Mama Diamond had been a picky eater for at least a decade. Her appetite had come back to her on this trip like a welcome if demanding guest.

Then she saw Shango’s campfire flickering ahead of her, and she smelled something new, something she didn’t like, something akin to the reek of burning hair.

Distantly, she heard Larry Shango shouting. Mama Diamond urged Marsh to a trot, pulled her bow from her shoulder and nocked an arrow. A gust of howling and barking came to her on the wind.

The wolf,
Mama Diamond thought. That damned Old Dog!

The rank smell was the stink of singed fur.

Closer now, she saw that Shango, under siege, had thrown one animal into the fire. The government man circled the campfire warily, as if waiting for the next attack. He carried a weapon: a huge hammer, presumably liberated from his travel gear.

The burned wolf had escaped the flames and rolled in a patch of dust outside the circle of firelight. It howled its pain. The boss wolf—and it was indeed the Old Dog she had met in the train tunnel—stood bristling but silent at the front of a pack of some ten or fifteen other animals.

That wasn’t the whole story, however. The Old Dog wasn’t in charge tonight. Something else prowled the shadows, half seen, silkily invisible except for its motion. Something large, sleek and self-confident. Something that made
the horses tremble and dance. Mama Diamond climbed down from the saddle feeling frightened but oddly elated, energy coursing through her from her fingertips to the sockets of her eyes. She planted her feet firmly and said, “Stand back, you Beast!”

Her voiced boomed out of her, so loud and so resonant that it sounded alien even to her own ears. All that air, she thought; how had she drawn all that air into the leathery old marble-sacks that passed for her lungs?

The pack turned toward her, dozens of glowing yellow eyes. Shango, gap-jawed, also stared.

But in the shadows the Boss Beast prowled on, unimpressed.

Mama Diamond strode forward, fearless and ecstatic. Wolves fell back from her heels. She said:

“Carrion eaters, you! Kitten stealers! Leave this man alone! He’s a
good
man! Back away, mouse biters! Stand down, you louse-furred scavengers!”

The wolves whimpered and backed away.

“Good God,” Shango whispered, “is that
you?
”

His speech was nearly unintelligible to Mama Diamond’s ears.

Even the alpha wolf, Old Dog, ducked and drooled and moved muttering from her path. That prowling, pacing shadow, however—

“Behind you,” Shango said.