Ghostlands

TWENTY-ONE

When he’d been here long ago with his so-called biological parents (thank God that matching pair of advertisements for Flattened Affect were biological, Goldie used to think; it meant they had to sleep every now and then, leaving him blissfully alone for a few hours), the park had been called the happiest place on earth.

And now, well, it still was…if you happened to be a grunter.

Those manic little orcs were having the time of their lives, laughing their distended creepy heads off.

And the best thing, the very best thing, in the dusty old words of that toothless guy at Woodstock, was that now, thanks to the Change, it was “a free concert, man!”

No admission price, no waiting in line-hell, no lines at all.

Nobody here but us chickens…

And Herman Goldman, who, for some reason that seemed considerably less like a good idea around about now, had thought to come here.

Upon emerging topside and seeing the hyperkinetic little monsters all piled on the flying elephant ride (which, minus electricity, was even more going nowhere than when it had just moved in circles), Goldie backed himself up all the way to Main Street. Which was exactly like the Main Street Sinclair Lewis had described in his book of the same name, if the buildings were three-quarter scale and all the inhabitants were four feet tall with hypodermic teeth and ravenous, maggot-colored eyes.

At least you’ve still got your sense of humor, Goldie told himself.

Yeah, and look where that’s gotten you your entire Rube Goldberg life.

So now what? Beat a hasty retreat, and live to tell the tale?

He knew the answer to that one.

Nobody here but us chickens…and Herman Goldman. And one other human, or near-human, somewhere in this rambling, dead faux kingdom. Not the best Inigo had ever seen, but the best he’d heard of.

The Man with the Knack.

To take the grunters where they could not go, where tunnels and caverns and mineshafts failed, where burrowing would not suffice. To bridge the gap, make straight the path, take two points and draw a straight line.

Goldie needed that knack, if he could get it. For Cal, and Tina, and the rest of them.

But mostly for Magritte, for what had been done to her, for the dead hot core that burned in him now that only blood would quench.

He had a job to do here.

And neither rain, nor sleet, nor dark of night…

Nor even-what had Inigo called them? — little gray guys would stay him from his appointed rounds.

Crouched in the alcove of what had been a silent-movie theater, he could hear (even with his pitifully weak human ears) the wretches scurrying about outside, could catch their fierce quick breaths, their helium-esque cries of twisted delight. They were everywhere.

What kind of ticket do you need for the Meet the Wizard ride?

But then, they’d gotten rid of ticket books years ago.

The shortest distance between two points is a straight line….

Herman Goldman walked boldly out of the silent-movie theater (which really was silent now, and dead as vaudeville) and strode up to a bunch of the stooped creatures, who were feinting at each other with knifelike shards torn from the shattered plate-glass window of the Emporium across the way.

Upon seeing him, they stopped their game and turned with gleaming, malicious eyes. At which point, he spoke the words he’d waited his entire life to say.

“Take me to your leader.”

At first, they’d all bared their pointy piranha teeth and, squealing like rabid Pekinese, leapt for him.

It took mucho fancy footwork and summoning up the granddaddy of all glowing blue fireballs to drive them back and get them to actually listen to Mr. Midnight Snack a moment or two.

“Cut it out, cut it out!” Goldie cried, swatting them away, his fingers trailing long threads of luminescence. “Jiminy crickets, you guys got about as much impulse control as a junket of Republicans!”

They settled down to resentful grumbling. Then they took him where he wanted to go.

Which, as it turned out, next to the pirate ride and the shrinking-inside-a-molecule ride (which was long gone even before the Source put paid to the whole notion of tourism), was his favorite of all.

The New Orleans mansion had been designed to look derelict and forsaken, so more than most things it looked essentially the same from the outside.

As for inside, from the moment he’d beheld it as a boy three decades back, the long, rectangular room with its ruined, eighteenth-century opulence had been his ideal of a banquet hall. The addition of dozens of candles flickering in the chandelier and along the walls did nothing to diminish the effect.

The dead ones still sat in their places around the table but, being automatons of ghosts rather than the real thing, they did not move any longer. At the head of the table, a massive gilt throne was positioned, and in it sat the Man with the Knack…which was the real surprise.

“Well now…” she said. “Look what the cat dragged in.”

The dozens of grunters lining the walls all chuckled in that ugly, low way that sounded like blood pulsing from a wound.

She was twenty-five, if that, long and lean in a feline way. Her legs, which went up to here, were stretched out and perched casually on the table. With her hair like flowing black mercury and sparkling green eyes, she looked a whole hell of a lot like the Evil Queen he’d first seen in that feature-length cartoon, the one that had virtually single-handedly propelled him into puberty. I mean, after all, she was the real babe in that movie, not that priss of a title character who hung out with the seven vertically challenged nonunion mine workers.

But just right now, Herman Goldman was thinking there wasn’t a damn thing sexy about the sociopathic personality, not when you were camping out on the other side of the mirror with it.

“My name’s Herman Goldman,” he ventured. “What’s your name?”

“Queen Bitch.”

“Right…” Why did the Source have to make everyone a comedian, and power mad to boot? “Nice little place you got here,” he added.

She smiled at that, and stretched languorously. “For a while, I thought I’d pick Universal. But hell, this has its own castle. Sometimes I do that, sometimes I do this. Depends on my mood.”

“Well, it’s nice to have a choice.”

She nodded, then said, “I found the crate, you know. The one everyone said was down here.” Her face clouded. “Unfortunately, he’d thawed.”

“Bummer.”

“Mm.” She regarded him contemplatively. “I like you better than most of the folks they bring round. But then, you’re alive.”

“Yeah, well, that kinda adds to the charm factor.”

“Just don’t blow it,” she cautioned, her mood darkening like a storm front. Another appreciative chuckle bubbled up from the peanut gallery. This was like being on American Idol with Madame DeFarge in the front row.

Okay, okay, Goldie told himself, don’t get rattled (or anyway, more rattled), get to the point. “I, um, hear you’re pretty adept at opening up doorways.”

“Wanna go to Orlando?” She glanced at the heavy oaken door at the end of the hall. It glowed bright around the edges, then flew open, revealing a night-drenched lakefront, the water’s silver iridescence against the sand.

“Or how about Tierra del Fuego?” she taunted saucily, and glanced over her shoulder at the near door. It too burned radiance around its lip, grunters shrinking back from the light. The door banged open, showing another, similar beach, but one thousands of miles removed.

The Bitch Queen blinked her endless black lashes just once. The twin doors slammed shut, the light extinguished.

“Sweet,” Goldie observed. “There anywhere you can’t go?”

“Can’t go across the ocean, maybe ’cause of the water, I dunno, that’s just the way it is. But North, South and Central? Most every place but one…and, from what I hear, I wouldn’t want to go there.”

She meant the Source, Goldie realized, and the words Inigo (who looked so much like the vicious little fiends glaring at him now, but who was so different in spirit) said on the way here exploded in his mind like artillery shells in the night.

It would burn you up in the turnstile, It does that.

But even so, everywhere but one was a good sight better than what Herman Goldman, late of Manhattan and the tunnels beneath, could pull off.

But how precisely to get Queen Bitch to share her delightful special skill set? She didn’t exactly seem like the plays-well-with-others type. More like runs-with-scissors…

Or plays well with grunters while they all run with scissors.

Of course, as they say, The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Unless she also happens to be my enemy…

Orlando was looking pretty good along about now.

“So how about you, Hermie?” Her words cut into his thoughts like a scalpel. God, he hated to be called that, it always reminded him of that little weenie from Summer of ’42. “Bet you can do a trick or two….”

“What makes you think that?”

“You wouldn’t be standing here still talking if you couldn’t.”

That was true enough. All right then. He rolled his shoulders to get the kinks out, extended his hands palms up. “Get a load of this, Your Highness….”

Tendrils of light spilled out of his open palms, spelled out letters of fire in midair as he sang like an incantation, “M-I–C…K-E-Y…”

“Oh, put a lid on it,” she spit out venomously. “I hate that little rat.”

Oh great, mouse envy. Then you sure picked the wrong place to land, lady.

“What else can you do?” she asked.

He thought to tell her about some of the rest of his bag of tricks-like that nice little stunt he’d pulled propelling Eddie into the Next Life, or at least a whole new point of view-but thought better of it. This was, after all, their first date.

“That’s really my encore number,” he said. “It’s pretty much downhill from there.”

“You better have something else to tell me, Hermie,” the Bitch Queen cooed.

Cold-sweat city. So he went for broke, told her the whole enchilada, about the Source, their quest, everything. Then he invited her to join their little band of merry men, and a few stout women.

The enemy of my enemy, and all that jazz.

Hey, it was worth a shot.

When he was done, she mulled it over a good long minute.

“Gee,” she said at last, “that sounds like a really bad idea.”

Then she did another great trick.

She made the ghosts fly out of the pipe organ and swarm all over him.