Magic Time: Ghostlands (36 page)

THE PARAMETERS OF ABSOLUTION

S
tumbling down the mountainside, bitter with the cost of their survival, the winter wind stinging their eyes to slits and icing their lashes, they might all have appeared blind ones to a passing observer, although only one of them truly was.

Do you think there’s forgiveness in this world, Mr. Griffin, or just atonement?
Mama Diamond had asked Cal on the moonlit roof of the dormitory back in Atherton.

From the safe distance Mama Diamond’s act of courage had bought them in their confrontation with the butchered, reanimated buffalo, Cal had seen the merciless black shape wrapped in storm cloud swoop out of the darkling sky to seize her up and carry her off into the gale.

Whatever that dark messenger had been, there was no telling where Mama Diamond might be now. Still alive? Cal could only hope. Lost, certainly, to the Storm. Would she forgive him, wherever she was? Could he ever atone for bringing her here?

Or any of those that had followed him: Magritte, Mike Olifiers…

Goldie.

Enid Blindman had been a Pied Piper to lead others to sanctuary, Cal reflected. But what had
he
led them to? He
looked over at his sister, the glowing halo of her floating, changed self casting illumination on the night-dark path ahead.

He knew there was no point in flagellating himself. He had done what he’d had to, as had the rest of them. The world turned every moment, it hurtled through space; stillness was no more than an illusion, a cunning self-deception. Every action, even inaction—
especially
inaction—was a choice. And the assumption that one held responsibility for all the wild vagaries of the universe was simply arrogance.

I am the captain of my ship, not of the sea….

Cal had listened to the voice within him, and taken the wise counsel of others. It was
right
to be here, a testament to their tenacity and courage and will—which didn’t lessen the ache of loss in his chest.

Still, he had Christina with him; he had kept that promise, at least. And in doing so, he’d forced changes on himself perhaps even greater than those imposed on his sister, albeit more subtle, less telling to the eye.

He came to an awareness that his sister was scrutinizing him with her strange, opalescent eyes. He smiled at her, and she gave him the ghost of a smile back.

They had traveled through bleak, uncharted territories, the two of them, both together and alone, and had neither safety nor security now. But then, safety and security were illusions, too; everyone died, that was the way of things.

Gravel and the dust of ages crunching beneath his boots, Cal reflected that if the journey of his life were marked by two ports of call, one of them fear, the other love, he knew at which destination he had arrived.

His sister was beside him, and that was enough.

As they struggled along the looping, switchbacked path of Route 40, thick grasses twined and stretched to grasp at their legs; prairie rattlers and bull snakes uncoiled out of their winter sleeping places to leap snapping at them; slumbering hordes of grasshoppers and mosquitoes and katydids swarmed up to envelop them. The night and land were alive,
suffused with a muted, blue St. Elmo’s fire that pulsed and writhed over all that rose to meet them at the bidding of the Thing unseen.

Christina drove them back with her luminosity, Enid and Papa Sky with the heat of their music. And what they couldn’t deflect, Cal and Colleen, Doc and Inigo and Howie and Shango stomped and hacked to bits with boot and sword, machete and knife.

Inch by inch, yard by yard, mile by mile…

How much farther now? Hard to tell in this blackness. Thirty miles? Twenty-five? An infinity.

They were coming down out of the Black Hills onto the Badlands now. The snow, with its odd taste of defilement when it brushed their lips, was abating, giving way to a cruel, unrelenting wind that had teeth in it, that chilled them clean through despite the many layers of clothing they wore. Their teeth chattered, and their limbs shook as they pressed on in grim silence. Tina alone seemed untouched by the cold, serene and enigmatic in her weightlessness.

The attacks appeared to be lessening, becoming more sporadic, less intent. Perhaps whatever lived at the Source drew in upon itself as night came on; perhaps even
It
needed to sleep sometimes.

Cal hoped so.

Alongside the roadway, rows of white metal signs banged a percussive rhythm against their wooden poles in the fierce wind. Cal could see the triangular signs all bore the same scolding admonition—
THINK
.

Following his glance, Inigo came up beside him. “That’s to show where someone died here. You know, in an accident.”

We may die here, too,
Cal reflected.
But it won’t be any accident.

To the boy, he said, “Are you from around these parts? Before the Change?”

Inigo nodded. “Came here when I was ten. My dad worked at Ellsworth for a time, the Air Force base outside Rapid. Then he got a job in the mountain….” The boy’s face darkened in the gloom, remembering. “We didn’t see him much after that, my mom and me.”

“What happened to them, your folks?” Cal asked. He realized he was speaking low, so none of the others could hear, although he couldn’t have said why.

Inigo shrugged. “Dad ran off before things came down…. Ma went to find him.”

“They just left you?”

“Mom had this lady friend she put me with…. When the Storm came, I didn’t see that lady anymore.” He shivered, and added cryptically, “I didn’t want to.”

“Is that when you changed?”

“Around then, yeah. I kinda kept my head down, found stuff to eat…. You can do okay, if you don’t make waves.”

Yeah, but somewhere along the way you radically altered your operating philosophy, kid.
It occurred to Cal this was the longest conversation he’d had with the grunter boy, and the most Inigo had chosen to reveal.

“So how’d you get inside the mountain?” Cal asked.

Before Inigo could respond, his pale big eyes went wider still, as he saw something ahead in the darkness that made him stop dead.

Cal halted and peered into the blackness. Behind him, the others stopped, too.

Ahead of them, the night sky was lit with flashes that burst staccato across the heavens, like strings of immense firecrackers going off, or gigantic Christmas lights exploding.

The lightning was coming for them.

And beneath it, swarming across the vista of ragged terrain, the strobing stormlight giving their matted, wet fur fleeting illumination, packs of gray buffalo wolves, spat dead, reincarnated, up out of the earth. They were still many miles away, but the thunder carried their maddened howls echoing up the mountain face to them.

Christina brought her lambent protection around Cal and the others once more.

It’s going to get worse before it gets better,
Cal thought grimly, drawing his sword.

If it ever gets better…

They plunged forward to meet the storm.

Morning found the group of them weary, singed and bloodied, but still alive.

“It comes in fits and starts,” Cal observed. “Like the Source is pacing itself.”

“Ours not to reason why,” Doc added, applying a salve and bandage to a scorched patch on Colleen’s arm. “Merely to take respite where we can.”

They broke out the food from their packs, the few delicacies they’d brought from the Insomnia Café back in Atherton, and rested on tumbled boulders amid melting snow and mud, short grasses and anemic cacti. Cal saw that Inigo had pulled the hood of his jacket over his head, donned sunglasses against the light. Howie, too, had pulled his fedora low and affixed his Ray-Bans.

“I reckon we got maybe another fifteen miles or so,” Papa Sky commented between bites of Swiss on rye, his creased face turned southeast into the wind. Cal wondered anew how the old blind man could sense so much more than they.

“Funny thing, you knowin’ all about these parts, and me knowin’ diddly,” Enid said, rubbing his chin, the bells in his dreads jingling softly. “I was born here, y’know? Pine Ridge. My mama was Lakota.”

“I thought it was your father who was Lakota, not your mother,” Colleen noted. “I mean, that’s what Goldman said.”

“Yeah, well, ol’ Goldie didn’t always listen too good,” Enid replied. “Depending on the occasion.”

True enough,
Cal thought.

“I left here when I was a baby,” Enid continued, standing to stretch. “My mama married a real estate guy, and we moved to Decatur. Cancer got ’em both, way before the Storm.”

“Just as well you didn’t grow up in these parts, son,” Papa Sky said. “Folks round here sometimes got a bone in their craw ’bout black folks. Comes from the buffalo soldiers and all, in the Indian Wars.”

“Well geez, that’s hardly a week ago Wednesday,” Colleen observed. “Maybe it’s time to get over it.”

“First thing you learn about this land,” Papa Sky said evenly, “is history ain’t history. It’s pretty much the same thing as right now. Everything’s all mixed up together.”

“What about your real father?” Doc asked Enid.

Enid’s face grew stony. “Mama never talked about him. She figured what’s gone is gone.”

Like Inigo’s father, Cal thought, and his own, and Tina’s. Orphans, the lot of them; foundlings and scatterlings, abandoned to wind and storm.

Papa Sky said nothing, looking off at the horizon with empty dead eyes.

They moved on.

As morning eased toward afternoon, the fractious cloud cover broke, and a high, brilliant sun cast a clean, hard light over the land. Traveling along the path of what had once been Highway 40 skirting Custer, they passed Red Shirt along the 41 and transferred onto the narrow, rutted path of Route 2 stretching toward the Pine Ridge Reservation.

The Black Hills gobbling down the last of the daylight, Cal and his companions crested a plateau from which they could spy seventy miles in all directions under a fiery sunset, the soaring formations of the Mauvaises Terres striated with bands of red and brown and yellow, an ancient land of erosion and fossil bones in the crumbled, weathered earth. From far off came the cries of western meadowlarks and cowbirds, rugged survivors of this scourged, enduring land.

And like a brilliant, long nail pounded into the cross of the earth, the beacon of power bursting into the heavens, pinwheeling endlessly from the Source.

He had gotten Christina back, Cal thought ruefully, but beyond that they hadn’t changed anything.

With night descending and the last remnants of their strength waning, they staggered across the flat expanse of tableland—which Papa Sky informed them was about halfway between Buffalo Gap and Porcupine, and was called Cuny Table by the locals. Finally, Papa Sky brought
them to a halt before a rickety, paint-peeled wooden stand, with the whitewashed words
ICE
-
COLD POP AND MORE
.

There was nothing and no one else in sight, as far as the eye could see in the wash of moonlight.

“This is the Stronghold,” Papa Sky informed them.

“
This
is the Stronghold?” Colleen asked incredulously. “Gee, and I coulda had a V8.” Cal was glad Colleen at least had the diplomacy not to add,
This is what happens when you let a blind guy lead you.

“Sir, are you sure—?” Cal began.

Then the land ahead of them rippled and shook and turned over.

The ground opened up, revealing a cavernous space beneath. Cal could discern torches burning within, and a multiplicity of passages branching off, and countless people gathered together.

“Hua kola!”
Papa Sky called out.

A lone figure backlit by torches stepped up the slope toward them, boots crunching on gravel and snow, emerging into the light cast by Christina’s glow.

Cal drew in a sharp breath. The figure was a woman clad in leather and furs against the cold, wearing more sheathed knives than he had ever seen on any human being. Her eyes were green and wary, her hair long and black and platted down the back.

Beside him, Inigo gasped as he saw the woman, and took off at run toward her.

“No!” Cal cried, but the boy paid him no heed.

Seeing him come on, the woman dropped into a defensive stance and pulled a long, deadly blade from its scabbard.

Drawing near, the grunter boy cried out, “It’s me! It’s
Inigo
!”

The woman’s mouth opened in soundless surprise, her eyes astonished. She threw the knife aside into the snow as he leapt for her, and she enclosed him rocking in her arms. They sobbed, the two of them, for all the time lost, for this meeting.

Inigo’s words were muffled in her embrace, but Cal caught them as they drifted on the night wind to him.

“Mom…Mom…”

In time, she rose, and with her boy’s hand in hers, walked up to Cal. She extended her free hand, and Cal took it.

“I’m Cal Griffin,” he said.

Her eyes reacted with surprise; something raw and primal flared there, and was quickly suppressed.

“May Catches the Enemy,” the Lakota woman replied by way of introduction, and led them into the waiting earth.

MUSIC AND STEEL

I
t’s like descending into a grave,
Cal thought, and knew it was not the first time he’d had such a thought in the journal of his adventures. In truth, more than anything, his life had become a collection of experiences and exploits he never dreamed he would have, and more often than not would have preferred forgoing.

His body anchored with weariness, muscles singing with the ache and bruise of the long trek and its travails, he staggered into the heart of the earth. Christina drifted shining beside him, Colleen and Doc half supporting each other, Howie limping along while Shango and Enid helped guide Papa Sky down the sloping terrain. Inigo and his mother, still holding hands, followed close upon.

The gateway of soil sealed up behind them, entombing them in the massive space beneath. Cal tensed as it closed, then detecting a like anxiety in his companions, forced himself to relax.

The air underground was fresh and moved with a cool breeze from several pathways. The pungent, pleasant smell of burning sweetgrass and sage wafted on the air. May Catches the Enemy led them to low tables with soft cushions, where buffalo stew and flatbread and strong, hot coffee
were served up. Cal ate greedily, for the first time aware of how hungry he’d been, and felt considerably better.

Inigo’s mother came and crouched nearby, studying him keenly, as if trying to weigh who he might be by the way he chewed his food, how he sipped his coffee.

In time, she said, “We were told you were coming, but not who you’d be.”

“Yes?” Cal replied. “By whom?”

She hesitated, and her eyes darted to Papa Sky, who sat across the table, nodding his head in time to a beat only he could hear.

As if he’d caught her glance, the old blind man said, “By my special friend…”

A shudder ran through Cal. He thought of the first time he’d heard Papa Sky use that phrase, back in Buddy Guy’s club when he’d given them the dragon scale that had come from his mysterious, unseen traveling companion.

“That the same friend who sent you to us in Chicago?” Cal asked.

A smile spread across Papa Sky’s face, like honey on good dark bread. “That’s mighty sharp of you, Mr. Cal…. But then, my friend always said you were bright.”

Colleen started to speak, but May cut her off with a raised hand. “The white people joke about Indian time…but we like to wait till everyone’s here who’s s’posed to be. We still got one or two coming. There’ll be time for talk. But right now, y’all need some rest. You come a long, hard way.”

Colleen looked questioningly at Cal.

Yawning, he rose. “Show us to our suites.”

The others were led to various alcoves where warming fires blazed, given sleeping bags and blankets from Wal-Mart and Prairie Edge and wherever else folks had been able to scrounge supplies before they’d been locked in here, trapped in their tiny enclave of safety from the encroaching, malign power at the Source.

May Catches the Enemy found Cal and Christina a cozy
place in a shadowy corner away from everyone, where Cal was surprised to find fluffed pillows and a goose-down comforter and thick buffalo robe waiting. The woman withdrew, and Cal settled into the robe, wrapping its lush dark fur around him as he lay on the dry, hard earth. Christina floated onto the comforter and grew still, closing her eyes, her aura fading to faintest eminence as she eased into rest.

Her eyes fluttered open and focused on a distant spot, to the darkness where Doc and Colleen lay unseen. “Things are different,” she said drowsily.

“Uh-huh,” Cal said.

“She’s with him now, huh?”

“They’re good together,” he said. “It’s a good thing.”

“You’re different, too….” Her eyes came to rest on him. “Good different. You’re strong, Cal.”

“I can’t move boulders with my brain.”

She gave him the faintest smile, then her face clouded. “Goldie…” she said, and didn’t finish it.

He nodded, feeling the loss, knowing there was nothing to make it right.

“Maybe we’re alive in who remembers us, at least a little,” his sister said. “Maybe we’re alive in what we set free….”

“Maybe,” he agreed.

They were silent then, alone with the crackling fires, the weight of air.

At last, Christina spoke again. “Back in the mountain, when I was…you know.” He sensed she couldn’t bring herself to say
human.
“It’s all fuzzing away now, like a dream when you wake up, I can’t keep hold of it. But the one you mentioned to Papa…he was there.”

Cal felt chilled, within the warm embrace of the robe. Neither needed to say his name; they both knew. Cal was wide-awake now, his senses keen. In the distance, down the rock passages, he could hear the whistling of the wind, and a sound like something calling.

Christina huddled deeper into the comforter, her pale fine hair fanned atop it. As sleep enfolded her, she murmured, “Inigo calls him Leather Man.”

As night drew on, Cal found sleep eluding him. Restless, he moved off from his sister as she slumbered, not wanting to wake her. Wrapping the buffalo robe about him, he walked to the mouth of a passage, peered down it. Air swirled up out of it like a titan exhaling, and he heard a rhythmic, deep pulse. But it was dark as a coal miner’s esophagus. He felt like seeking out Inigo, with his night-sharp grunter eyes, and asking him to search out its secrets.

He was weary of mysteries….

Suddenly, he was gripped hard from behind, felt cold steel at his throat, the edge of a long blade.

“I been a long time waiting for this,” the voice behind him said softly in his ear. It held music in it, and steel.

He knew the voice.

He’d placed his sword by the pillows and comforter; still, he had his short knife in its scabbard under his ribs. He could reach it easily, might be able to do something with it. Or he could call out to his sister. Rousing fiery awake, she could shatter this one’s bones where she stood, blast her to dust on the air.

He did nothing.

“You’ve got something to say.” He worked to keep his voice level, and as quiet as hers. “Or we wouldn’t still be talking.”

She released him then, and came around to face him.

“My married name was Devine,” May Catches the Enemy said.

As the night waned and morning came on, Cal came to know that long months ago, nine hundred miles away in Chicago, he had killed this woman’s husband, and Inigo’s father.

They drank coffee, just the two of them, beside a low fire, out of earshot of the others. The flames leapt and sparked, made light play in her raven hair, her emerald eyes.

“He never wanted it, what happened to him,” May said, not looking at Cal. “He left to keep us safe. Maybe that’s
what he was doing with them flares, too…. Then it all went to hell.”

“Have you told your son?”

“Not yet…I’ll tell him when the time’s right. We got a lot of catching up to do. When I got back, I couldn’t get to him. With everything I could pull off, the farthest I could get was here.”

Cal thought back to the deserted mall in Iowa, to his first encounter with her son, when he’d heard the boy’s name and recalled the line from
The Princess Bride.

My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die….

Incredible, Cal reflected, the turns of fate, the dance of loss and grief and inexorable parting, of sins committed, and allies made….

“That thing with the knife,” May said, “I just needed to get it off my chest.” Her eyes found him, held him pinioned there. “You did what you had to,” she added, an absolution.

Nevertheless, Cal blamed himself, even knowing he could have chosen no other course, that Clayton Devine, in his guise as both Primal and Primal’s toady, would surely have killed them all had they not gained the upper hand.

Guilt and necessity, that was the rule of the day. So what separated the pure from the defiled, the evil from the good? Compassion? Could that possibly be enough?

Or did the old definitions, the dividing lines, no longer hold sway? Had they changed like everything else in this twisted world?

“You have a busy head,” May Catches the Enemy said, intruding on his thoughts. She touched his hand, and he was surprised to find that her touch discomforted him more than the blade at his throat had.

Catching this reaction, she smiled. It was the first time he’d seen her smile, and it transformed her, rendered her girlish and appealing. He saw she had a dimple in one cheek, the fire lending her skin a warm glow.

“It’s a good thing you’re here,” she said, growing serious again. “Mostly, those who made it here are old folks, some
kids. We only got one or two holy men, and that won’t be enough….”

“For what?” Cal asked.

May Catches the Enemy gave him another smile, but with mystery in it, and the promise of coming things.

“Better get some sleep while you can,” she said, rising.

“I haven’t slept much since the Change,” he replied.

She gazed down at him. “The world hasn’t changed,” she said, “just revealed more clearly what it always was, so everyone can see it plain.”

She fell silent, meditative. Then she murmured, soft as a feather touch, “Folks got so busy, everything so noisy and fast, they forgot who they were. Things had to get quiet again, so they could find the being in human being, get connected to the universe again, to the world, to their power….”

It was amazing, Cal thought, that here, surrounded by the forces of darkness, cut off from anything that might bring reinforcements or aid, she could so effortlessly, so simply summon up hope. Her certainty, her self, was like a golden spike driven straight through her to the center of the earth.

Cal felt something inside him come alive and warm. And for the second time since he had entered the Ghostlands, he felt he was home.

With a start, he realized he was staring at her. She lowered her eyes. “I didn’t mean to make a speech,” she said.

“It’s okay,” he answered, then added, “I like your world.”

She brought her eyes up to him once more, and he floated in her gaze. “The big circle of everything,” she concluded. “The four quarters, four winds, four directions, four races…all balanced in unity.”

Unity?
At this last, Cal found his mind rebelling.
What about the Evil inside that mountain?

As though answering his thought, May said, “No such thing as the Devil, only a sickness at the heart of things, an imbalance.”

She bent to him, kissed him lightly on the head. “Pray to see what’s real, Mr. Griffin…and you will.”

Cal wasn’t aware of having fallen asleep, but he was awakened by the rumble of the earth opening up and daylight pouring in.

A man stood facing him from the gaping mouth of the land, a man all in black, his gleaming black hair pulled into a ponytail and held in place with a white gold clasp.

“You may have wondered why I’ve asked you here,” the man said with a voice like acid-scraped rock.

Cal’s eyes darted to where he’d lain his sword in its scabbard. Christina was no longer there. He dove for it, rolled and came up fast.

The man was sauntering up to him, his face and body melting in the morning sun like candle wax, shifting and reforming into black iridescence, into truth, into reptilian splendor.

He laughed as Cal drew his sword.

“You don’t want to kill the man who saved your sister,” the dragon said.

Cal lowered his sword.

“I didn’t think so.”

A figure appeared from behind the dragon, walking on spindly old legs, her tan, lined face like the land itself, with its patience and wear.

“We’ve got a good deal of catching up to do,” Mama Diamond said, putting a hand on Cal’s arm.

Together with Stern, she took him to where the others waited.