Ghostlands

TWENTY-THREE

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Colleen Brooks hissed when she returned limping and bloodied along with Cal Griffin and his companions to the Iowa grain silo where Krystee Cott and the other refugees waited breathlessly for their return.

Al Watt noticed Herman Goldman carrying a battered black stovepipe hat. “What’s up with that?”

“Two ears and a tail,” Goldie replied, and would say no more. He tossed it onto his bedroll and moved off from the others, back out into the night, to where he could be alone with his thoughts.

Rafe Dahlquist approached Griffin, who was just pulling some jerky from his pack, handing a bit off to the grunter boy Inigo. Jeff Arcott accompanied Dahlquist. Under his arm, Arcott carried the rolled schematics he’d brought from Atherton, the plans for his dearest, most secret project.

“It’s incredibly ambitious,” Dahlquist confided. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“What exactly is it?” Cal asked.

“A communications device,” Arcott jumped in. “Let us say on rather a grand scale. I have to be rather cagey at this point, sorry about that.” He cast an eye at Dahlquist. “And I would need to require your discretion, too, Doctor.”

Cal glanced over at Dahlquist. “It’s your call.”

“I’d like to pursue this, yes. I think I can help them get it up and running.”

Cal considered, spied Inigo staring at him. The boy had led them here, had said Cal would find what he sought in Atherton….

And who was to say that this project might not be the door to the very thing he sought?

“You want him, you let them all come,” Cal insisted of Arcott, the sweep of his arm taking in the men and women dozing, mending clothes, speaking quietly about the room. “They could use a hot shower, a warm meal, clean bed.”

“Sure. Anything else?”

“I keep this,” Cal said, unslinging the rifle. He thought to add, And you give me more ammo. A lot more.

But why fan the flames of Arcott’s suspicions, tip his hand? Besides, he didn’t need Arcott’s approval.

He would get what he required, and go where he had to.

Through Atherton to the bloody heart of the Source Project, whether helped or hindered by anyone in this hellish, miraculous world.

Arcott nodded his agreement. Satisfied, Cal looked back toward Inigo.

But the boy was gone.

Herman Goldman stood in the night on the periphery of the derelict farm, the fierce wind off the prairie grasses making his teeth chatter, blowing clean through his many layers of clothes, chilling him to the bone. The freezing awareness of his own armature made him regard himself as a living skeleton, barely wrapped in gristle and flesh, as much a ghost as the phantoms that had attacked him in the haunted mansion out California way; more so.

Every part of him ached. Lord, he was tired. He longed to curl up in his bedroll and sleep for about twenty hours or so, the sleep of the dead, of the just or unjust, it didn’t matter, so long as it was without dreams-please, for pity’s sake, no dreams.

But he was here for a reason. He had to find something out, or all his adventures down this long night that seemed without end were for nothing.

Colleen had largely dropped her uppers when he’d kissed that Bitch Queen; hell, they all had, regardless of their human or inhuman status. But all of them had totally missed the point of his actions; the last thing he had in mind was romance (although now that he was safely several thousand kilometers out of her homicidal clutches, he had to admit-at least, in retrospect-that she was fairly hot).

Back in the Preserve, and later in Chicago, he had learned that on occasion he could summon up a talent, an ability to drain off, absorb the abilities of others. Not always, it was hit-or-miss, as was virtually everything on this loony tunes planet since the advent of the Megillah.

But when it worked…brother, hold on to your hat.

So when Herman Goldman lip-locked that Empress of toothy grays and not-so-amusing windup toys, he had utterly no delusions that he was Tom Cruise or Antonio Banderas.

He wasn’t trying to get into her pants, he was trying to get into her powers.

And in that moment of intense, electric contact, he’d definitely felt as if something were being transferred. (He had also felt, absurdly, ashamedly, that he was betraying Magritte in this act, but he pushed this aside, submerged it; beyond anything, this was in service to her, to her memory.)

Now it was time to see how well he’d done….

The harpy wind was banging a metal sign on the side of the road back and forth into its crossbeam, causing it to warble eerily like a demented musical saw. Goldie extended a hand out toward it and thought, Stop that.

It did absolutely nothing.

Under the pale starlight and dipping moon, he then tried similarly to animate a tractor, then a harvester, then-more modestly-the ragged remains of a scarecrow (whose purpose, he supposed, had originally been more rustically ornamental than practical).

Gutter ball.

It was a humbling experience.

All right, then, power deux. Portals, and the opening thereof…

He already possessed the ability to resummon one recently cracked by another, more skillful practitioner, or to create a transport between two sacred points, like the Adena burial mounds and Olentangy Indian Caverns.

But peering off to the black horizon where the moon was just now setting, Goldie realized he was damn short of practitioner or sacred site at this given moment.

Nothing but grass and dirt and air.

“Oh, what the hell.” He made a broad round motion with his hand at the empty, cold air. “Open,” he said.

And damned if it didn’t.

The door in the air glowed purple along its periphery of mute flame, and a vista beyond showed daylight.

Herman Goldman stepped through, to see what he could see.

It turned out to be Albany, New York.

He stepped back into Iowa, then made holes to San Simeon, and Dubuque, and Alberta, Canada.

But, as the Bitch Queen had said of the warp and woof of her own special abilities, he found he couldn’t summon portals to a location across the sea, or anywhere near the place to the west the dark siren call of the Source summoned him.

They would still have to find another way there.

And there might well be any number of other limitations, hiccups in his range and reliability.

Even so, he felt sure this borrowed-all right, stolen-gift would come in mighty handy.

The sound of horses whinnying behind him turned him around.

Cal stood with Colleen and Doc and the others from camp, all packed up and ready for bear. He saw his friends had let those who had sustained the roughest handling back at the mall ride the horses. Only one of their team members was missing, the grunter Inigo, and it felt right somehow that he was not among them; perhaps at last he had returned to the track Goldie had shunted him from earlier this evening.

“We’re pulling up stakes,” Cal said. “Heading back to Atherton. You game?”

He was indeed.

The town would be the same, wrapped in the chaos he alone could sense.

But better the Devil you know than the one you don’t. And Herman Goldman had known the Devil, that carrion eater, that deliverer of chaos, when the scarlet gent had paid a call on him in grad school. And then again, if more subtly, when the Change had come, and when it had taken Magritte from him.

He would let the chaos that engulfed the town engulf him now. He wanted it, as he wanted other chaoses, other destructions that beckoned to him down the far road of the future.

With his new power humming in his veins like myriad voices along a telephone wire, Herman Goldman felt utterly sure he would get exactly what he wanted.

Just before the sun rose, as their party neared the slope that led down into Atherton, Doc Lysenko spied the bulk of the dead dragon that lay silhouetted amid the singed grasses.

He grew thoughtful and said to Cal, “I would very much like that brought into town, to where I might perform an autopsy.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Cal responded, and moved off to speak with Jeff Arcott.

In the end, it took Arcott sending out a flatbed with a full work crew to hoist the carcass and transport it to town, to the hospital morgue where Doc awaited it with gleaming knives.

And while Doc’s tender ministrations ultimately proved more butchery than autopsy, no one could deny that the dragon turned out considerably more useful in death than he had ever been in life.