Magic Time: Ghostlands Read online

  The moon and stars took charge of the sky as Arcott turned away, toward the greater darkness beyond this low ridge. To the old railway tracks alongside Willow Neck Creek, where there should have been nothing at all; but where, just now, he anticipated—or could he actually hear?—the ancient tracks rattling to an unaccustomed presence.

  His own private special delivery was out there, hurtling through the night, off in the darkness, still unseen.

  He had stepped into the shadow of the trees along Philosopher’s Walk to avoid being seen on the way here. “Keeping himself to himself,” as his father might have said.

  Because he was ashamed?

  No. Because there were some things that could not yet be divulged, even to Siegel, even to Wade, his confidants, his lieutenants, his good hands right and left.

  Sometimes research had to proceed in secret, or at least with due regard for security. They could know everything else about the operation, but people couldn’t always interpret certain facts correctly.

  At least for now, at least until the Radio was on the air…

  He followed a footpath to the old concrete railway piers. The trees here were bare of leaves. The railroad stretched toward the dark west like a dry river. Moonlight glinted fitfully on the rust-eaten rails.

  He caught himself whistling a tune, something from his father’s jazz collection, a half-forgotten Chet Baker song. Bad idea. The sound would draw attention to himself. Better to remain anonymous, even in the empty night.

  The cracked concrete piers stood canted at the trackside. These had been loading bays for the gypsum plant that had been abandoned and torn down forty years ago. The slabs, ten feet by fifteen and half as tall as a man, must have been too massive to cart away. Arcott selected the nearest one, hauled himself up onto its abrasive surface, brushed away a layer of fallen leaves, and sat cross-legged. He shivered. His denim pants and cowhide jacket were feeble armor against this graveyard chill.

  He saw the train far out on the flatlands. It seemed to grow more substantial, more material, as it approached. Such was the nature of things.

  Arcott stood up. He hated these encounters. They were unavoidable, obligations of iron necessity, like the church services his father had dragged him to every week, fundamentally unpleasant.

  The train was black as night. Blacker. He watched it come, mesmerized. Soon it would glide silently to a stop, and Arcott would scramble toward it, a little afraid as always, but also trembling with anticipation, imagining the weight of treasure that would soon be his, the cold beauty and clean utility of the stones, raw and cut, all the angles of symmetry, indices of refraction, directions of cleavage, the semiprecious stones gathered from a thousand places….

  The gift from the west, from the Ghostlands.

  In due time, the train passed through a wavering mist like a night mirage and drew to a stop on the outskirts of a slumbering town. Steam hissed from the locomotive’s ribs like a foul breath, like a killing fog.

  (Inigo recalled the fog in London that had killed all those people on a bleak day in the previous century, in the 1950s; his father had related it to him like a fairy tale, stressing the imperative moral of the story—that the world can turn hostile in a moment, that it can kill you.)

  From his perch atop the passenger car where he lay silent and still, Inigo watched the man in the long black coat emerge from the front of the train. The other man was waiting for him beside the tracks, younger, with wavy dark hair and bright blue eyes, and the overalertness of the scholar, the intellectual.

  Without his heightened senses, Inigo wouldn’t have been able to see him clearly, to make out his smooth olive skin, the faded bomber jacket that gave little protection against the brittle night.

  Or to smell the fear and eagerness radiating off him like sweat on a hot summer day.

  The man in black strode toward him, and as he crossed the headlight beam of the locomotive like a hellish eye, Inigo saw the man’s silhouette change like a gargantuan black umbrella unfurling. Then he was through the searchlight and his outline was a man again.

  Bomber Jacket had seen it, too, and grown pale, taken a shaky step back.

  “Jesus, I hope they grade you on a curve,” the man in black said contemptuously, and he laughed.

  It made Inigo’s skin crawl even more than the insect feel on the skin of the train.

  The man in black canted his head back toward the train, murmured something Inigo couldn’t hear over the hiss of steam.

  The big doors on the black passenger cars slid back, and the twisted forms so like Inigo in shape and unlike him in soul began unloading the shipment, the precious cargo Bomber Jacket craved so much that it held him there despite his fear.

  The man in black leaned idly against a pillar, lit up a cigarette and stood inhaling the frosty blue smoke, stirring it about on his tongue, then lazily exhaling it. Inigo caught a dusky whiff of the exotic tobacco and was impressed, for he knew despite all appearances that the dread visitor’s smoke was not tobacco, and its source not the illusory “cigarette” but rather the visitor himself.

  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.

  TEN

  GRIFFIN BEFORE DAWN

  The 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.
<
br />   “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.

  ELEVEN

  DIAMOND DOGS

  Familiar 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 ex
tinct, 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.