Ghostlands

THIRTY-SEVEN

Normally, it’s considered sound advice, when intent on not drawing unwanted scrutiny, to be as quiet as possible.

But then, these were hardly normal times.

So when Cal Griffin advised Enid Blindman that it would probably be advisable for him to start playing anytime now, everyone concurred that was mighty fine idea.

Enid began strumming softly and singing low to himself as the nine of them moved cautiously forward through the mist, its cool dampness like the gentle kiss of a cadaver on their skin, the grunter boy Inigo leading the way.

Upon encountering him in the fog, Colleen had been inclined to skewer the little blue-gray rodent, seeing as how his advice on leading them toward sanctuary hadn’t exactly been five-star up until now. But Cal stayed her hand; they wouldn’t have gotten this far without the boy, and even though Inigo undeniably played a very close hand, he had taken no action so far that Cal sensed as treachery.

“Besides,” Goldie added with his characteristic glibness, “it’s not easy being blue.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” chimed in Howie.

Colleen made no reply, although she ordinarily would have. A sidewise glance at Goldman, shimmering insubstantial as a mirage beside her, revealed a face set in a humorless mask. His mouth might be on automatic with feigned levity, but his mind was elsewhere, and intent on a grimmer purpose.

Not surprising, really, considering their present environs. For they all knew in this frigging haze they might as well be marching down the throat of whatever monstrosity called the Source Project home; might, in fact, be forging blissfully unaware straight on through to the acid-pool of its cavernous belly at this very moment.

But, fatalist that she was on most occasions, Colleen didn’t really think so-not yet, at least.

As she inched through the fog, the midnight-blue chords and harmonies of Enid’s song lulled her, brought calm and reassurance. It hadn’t always been thus. When she and Goldman first encountered him roaming among the tall cedars in that river valley along the Ohio/West Virginia border, Colleen thought Enid a malevolent Pied Piper and had predictably gone on the attack-a typical berserker stunt that succeeded only in landing her upside down in a tree, skewered by a branch (she still had that jagged, lightning-bolt scar down her right side, which Doc-adorable diplomat that he was-said merely added to her charms).

But if she’d learned anything from their travels with Enid from there to Chicago and beyond, it was that his music had power not only to soothe the savage breast but also to block out whatever lurked at the Source from seeing him and his friends, from reaching out its long, invisible tentacles and plucking them away.

At least, that was the story back then, when they’d been one hell of a lot farther away from it. Still, the best they could hope for now was to play the odds and hope they caught some breaks along the way.

“Fourteen minutes and counting,” Larry Shango reported.

“When will we come to the Bridge?” Cal asked Inigo.

“We’ve been walking along it,” Inigo said, and drew to a halt. Before him the misty streaks of neon vapor were swirling concentrically as if spiraling down a drain. Colleen could just now make out the sky beyond, which held a rosy glow of late afternoon or dawn; hard to tell which in the overcast sky. The landscape began to clear, to resolve itself into a body of cool blue water, flanked by rolling green hills. Narrow flat rowboats were tethered together at the shore, a gentle wind nudging them against each other.

Colleen knew this lake well. As the fog dispersed even more, she could see the flower-bedecked rise ahead of her known as Strawberry Fields, and to its left the wedding-cake structure of Tavern on the Green. A glance ahead to her right showed her the vast Romanesque stonework of the American Museum of Natural History, and beside it the Hayden Planetarium.

“Oh my God,” Colleen whispered.

She, Cal, Goldie and Doc all knew this place for a certainty, although only Inigo had truly been here before.

It was Central Park.

“I thought you said we were in South Dakota,” Cal said to Goldie.

Goldman was squinting intently at the vista ahead. “We are…” he replied hesitantly.

Doc stepped to the forefront, peering at the solidity of the structures before them. “Colleen, Calvin, Mr. Shango-your visors, please.”

Colleen lowered the visor on her helmet, and peered through the tan membrane covering her eyes. “I’m still seeing Big Apple,” she said.

“Me too,” Cal concurred. They glanced at Shango, who nodded his agreement.

Doc mulled this over. “Offhand, I would say that the likelihood is what we are seeing is not an illusion but rather solid matter, a replica of some sort.”

“Great, we’re in a diorama,” Colleen muttered. She wondered where all the flares might be hiding, knowing that the Source had abducted thousands, if not millions of them. At least in Chicago, the Ruby City, the glow of them had lit up the skies. It had been a beacon, making the myriad of those that powered Primal distinctly easy to find.

Cal turned to Inigo. “Why is this here?”

Inigo peered up at Cal and said meaningfully, “Because it’s her home.”

Colleen saw Cal’s eyes register surprise, then fill with a comprehension far deeper than the words the boy had uttered.

And despite all his months of preparation, despite his determination to keep a cool head, to be the leader they all needed him to be, Cal took off running full-out across the manicured grassland, darted over the bicycle path and out onto the street and the city beyond.

East to the broad thoroughfare of Columbus, and north to the weathered but well-maintained brownstones of Eighty-first.

To home…and Tina.

“After me!” Cal cried, knowing they would follow.

He could hear Colleen pounding after him, and the others behind her; it was no more than he expected, what he counted on. But Cal didn’t have time to look back nor slow his pace. There were only thirteen minutes or so left, and he knew he could no more return to the portal without discovering if Tina were here than he could tear out his own heart.

He dove past the variegated street denizens of Manhattan, who remarked on him not at all, past the gleaming parked cars and trucks. It registered on him that this was a simulacrum of New York City before the Change, but one muted, damped down, with none of the clamor nor haste, as contemplative and unchanging as an aquarium.

Then he was on the familiar street, bounding up the short flight of stairs to the heavy oak door he knew so well, the one whose original had been there in the time of Fiorello La-Guardia and Al Smith and before. He threw it open, bounded up the stairs.

But at the same time, he was no fool; he knew where he was, or rather where he wasn’t. He drew forth his sword-he felt sure that at least would still work; let those behind him wield their rifles-and vaulted up the stairs two and three at a time.

He hit the landing, turned hard right and found himself facing the apartment door that was identical to his own, a perfect replica. He could hear the others thundering up the stairs behind him, felt the reassurance of their presence, their constancy. He tried the knob, felt it turn. The door was unlocked. He plunged inside.

The curtains in the living room were drawn tight, casting the room in dimness, and for a moment Cal couldn’t see detail in the gloom. He looked about wildly, spied illumination coming from the hall. He bolted for it, his feet making cushioned, echoing thumps in the worn carpet as he ran. He saw his own room, dark and untenanted but incredibly exact in what detail he could discern, then he spun toward Tina’s room. Its door was slightly ajar, and light was pouring forth from within.

God, let her be there, he pleaded to the unseen, uncaring deity that had taken their mother’s life and gifted them with an abhorrent, fugitive father, had cast him and his sister onto the foreign shores of Manhattan and then split them apart. I don’t care what she is, what inhuman, damaged thing. Just let her be alive, let me care for her and get her home….

He opened the door and stepped inside.

The girl sat in her chair by the bed, in the rocker (or cunning replica of it) that had been bought on the day of Cal’s birth, that his father had torn the runners off of in a fit of rage before Tina was born. A reading lamp sat on a shelf above her head, glowing like a halo, shining its radiance down on her glistening hair.

She held a book open in her lap, was glancing down reading it. Cal knew it from its scuffed leather binding; it was Great Expectations. He had read it aloud to her, in their life together, the life that had been theirs so long ago.

“Tina…” Cal said, and his voice cracked, had no volume to it.

She looked up, and two thoughts struck him at once, with the force of blows. Her hair was not silken and white, her eyes not an alien blue; both were dark, and she appeared utterly human.

And in those human, dark eyes as she regarded him calmly, quizzically, there was not the slightest hint of recognition.

She doesn’t know me.

He was staggered. He had not expected any of this, and he felt a flood of fresh grief, of raw anguish that cut him as if with the sword he carried in his hand.

“Tina, it’s Cal,” he prompted.

“I go by Christina now,” she responded abstractedly, but underneath there was no hint of familiarity.

Of course, Cal realized, a more adult name. He could see she looked older than when he’d last seen her; she was thirteen now. And they had been separated by what each had experienced since their parting, yet another gulf between them.

The others were behind him now.

“We have eight minutes,” Shango murmured.

Enough time, barely, to get back, if they left now.

“Take her,” Cal said.

But before they could move to do so, Goldie suddenly moaned, grasping his head with both hands, and fell to his knees.

Cal peered at him in alarm. With an effort of supreme will, Goldie forced his face up toward him. His eyes were slits, pain filling them wetly with tears. “The way back,” he gasped, whispering. “It’s closed….”

The floor abruptly shuddered with a pulse, a tremor that shook along its length like a bear awakening from slumber and stretching to rise. Outside, the air rumbled with a deep, sonorous roar.

“It knows you’re here,” Inigo said, and there was dread in his voice.

The far wall of Tina’s room melted and reached for them.

“Shango!” Cal cried. “The explosives!”

Shango dug in his bag and pulled out one of the homemade metal canisters he and Krystee Cott had constructed back in Atherton. He pulled the pin and hurled it at the shifting, amorphous shapes stretching out toward them.

Now we’ll see how good a cook you are, Cal thought, as he shielded Tina and drew her back away with the others.

There was a breathless moment of expectation, then a satisfying explosion of fire and smoke, blasting what had been the wall clean apart.

“Yeah!” Colleen shouted in triumph…then fell silent along with the rest of them as the smoke cleared and what was revealed filled them with horror.

Littering the scorched area of the blast, lying piled atop each other by the gaping hole in the wall, were what looked like frail, delicate children, bloody and mutilated, torn to pieces, their glow damping down to nothingness.

Flares, dead flares.

And though Inigo had not told them-had not until that moment even known-Cal and the rest of them grasped exactly what this hideous spectacle meant.

“It’s flares,” Cal whispered, thunderstruck. “All of it…”

With the exception of Tina, who somehow had been made human again, everything they had seen in this cruel parody of New York City, every building, every street, every tree and cloud and lamp fixture, was composed of flares. That was the substance that made up the matter of this place, that powered it and gave it solidity. The thousands, the millions of innocents abducted by the Source and turned to this brutal purpose.

Cal realized they couldn’t-mustn’t strike out at it.

They would be killing the very hostages they had come to save.

And in their moment of terrible uncertainty, of hesitancy, the room rose up against them, like ocean waves crashing up out of the floorboards, and separated them, one from another. Mama Diamond and Goldie, Shango and Colleen, Doc and Howie and Enid all cried out in surprise and alarm, frantic exclamations that were quickly stifled and fell to silence.

The room resumed its formal shape, with no sign of the mangled flares; they’d been absorbed into the greater, secret whole. Cal found himself alone with Inigo and Tina.

The others were gone.

“We have to get out of here!” Inigo tugged insistently at Cal’s sleeve, at the scaled dark dragon hide encasing him. “Now!”

Stumbling blindly, bereft, Cal dragged his sister out of the building and, led by the wild, abandoned boy, made his escape into the void.