Ghostlands

THIRTY-EIGHT

As any profound philosopher and serious scholar of the natural laws of the universe has discovered at one time or another, there are occasions on which the most appropriate and jejune observation regarding one’s immediate situation is Fuck this!

Which was certainly the epiphany presented to Colleen Brooks in the moments immediately following the little fun-house shenanigans the doppelganger of Cal Griffin’s Upper West Side apartment pulled on her, when the floorboards bucked like Roy Roger’s horse on locoweed and she was hurled forcibly backward and suddenly found herself in surroundings utterly unlike New York or any place on the North American continent.

This wasn’t to say she didn’t recognize her surroundings, however. She knew exactly where she was-or rather, where they wanted her to think she was. The air was musky and thick with humidity, as hard to breathe as if she were trying to inhale syrup. Her skin was instantly sticky with sweat, her clothes beneath the dragon armor plastered to her skin, and yet she felt as cold within as if her insides were tombstone marble.

While it had been daytime only moments before, here it was night (as it was always night in her remembrances) and the garish, ugly street was clogged and raucous with subcompact Toyotas and Nissans belching exhaust; with huge and gaudily decorated trucks over from India blasting their horns as they inched precariously forward; with the brightly colored, three-wheeled taxis known to the locals and farangs alike as tuk-tuks zipping between the swaying, ill-balanced vehicles. The black asphalt of the street was shiny with recently departed rain, and in its reflections the boisterous cacophony of neon signs was rendered double in its seedy enticement, blinking and flashing with images of over-endowed, underdressed woman and smiling, dangerous men; Marlboro Men, to be exact, the American male being the ne plus ultra of invitation, of reckless power and release.

The smell on the air was the same, exactly the same as she remembered it, the fetid stink of sewage, and rotted fruit, and spices in hot cooking oil, of a city of five million left to decay and sink on its foundations slowly back into the marsh and swampland from which it had been dredged and excavated by men long dead, their dreams of glory dead with them.

The street was called Soi Cowboy, and it was the pulsing heart of Bangkok’s red-light district.

Colleen Brooks knew this street well, although the last time she saw it waking was when she was ten, when her Air Force father had been briefly stationed here to perform triage on a squadron of aging, hard-used B-52s left over from the Nam, to render his usual, uncompromising miracles on these gorgeous, terrible death machines. Her mother had flown over from her family’s home in Lacrosse, Texas, to join him, and had brought Colleen along, notwithstanding how she felt about bringing her child into “that kind of environment.” She knew damn well that if Colleen got left behind, there would be hell to pay-long weeks of surly silences, uncooperative sulks, and guilt-inducing looks of raw reproach that could reduce a mother almost to tears.

Colleen, victorious, was just happy to be going somewhere other than Lacrosse, Texas. There wasn’t much to like about Lacrosse in Colleen’s estimation, and flying willy-nilly to Bangkok seemed the height of adventure to a ten-year-old. It was something she would later speak of to schoolmates as if it were merely a weekend trek to the Gulf. (Yeah, we just got back from Thailand. It was okay, I guess. I didn’t see a single horse the whole time.)

Best of all, central to all, they were a family again, at least for a while-reunited with her father.

On this particular night-or the original of it, at least-Daddy had been called upon to locate a young GI who’d escaped into the dark splendors of the city for diversion and return him to his quarters before he was considered AWOL. In the darkness of a foreign hotel room, frigid with over-amped air-conditioning, Colleen had silently eased into T-shirt and jeans and crept out a window to follow and find her father.

After three weary, tear-streaked hours, she located him in a dreary club that was actually fairly innocuous considering the environs, where he was knocking back a few Singha beers with the wayward and depressed young tech sergeant and feeding quarters to Hank Williams on the juke. The boy had just heard from his fiancee back home that she’d determined a mutual friend to be a better marriage candidate (at least more likely to be alive in a year or two) and had cut him loose via a long and rambling Dear John letter.

Colleen remembered the look of grave sympathy on her dad’s face as he watched the younger man spill his pain onto the drink-stained bar.

“Chief,” he told her later, when they were safely back in their hotel room, “all I could think was, ‘There but for the grace of God…’ I wasn’t sure I wanted you and your mom to come to Bangkok. But sitting there listening to that poor kid, I was damn glad you were here.”

“Language,” her mother had said, giving her dad a look that was at once loving and reproachful.

Knowing full well it was not that time, that she was not ten, that she was still in South Dakota no matter how it looked, Colleen still felt that same long-ago fear that scythed her breath into short gasps and made the blood pound in her ears and pulse behind her eyes. She hurried breathlessly along the tawdry street, the seedy tourists and dissolute expats and servicemen on leave not shooting her so much as a glance.

She wondered what awaited her beyond the black-enameled door of that dive at the end of the street-some ghastly recreation of her father consoling the wayward airman like a waxwork tableau in Madame Tussaud’s, that would move and speak despite their utter lack of souls…or something unfathomably worse?

And dammit, in spite of everything she knew, in spite of the fact that she was utterly sure that whatever was behind this fucking charade had no object in mind other than to distract and delude and almost certainly ultimately kill her, she still found herself longing to see her father again-even if it was just some copy of him, some image raided from the vault of her memory. To see his cockeyed smile that made the corners of his eyes crinkle up, see the sandpaper stubble no razor seemed entirely able to subdue. To look into those brown, forgiving eyes, to feel his callused hand with its grease-stained nails ruffling her wild mop of hair and hear his voice.

“How goes it, Chief?”

Just once, once more. To call him back from the grave…

How goes it, Chief? Not fucking well.

Language, Colleen. Language.

But before she could reach that door, unlock its secrets, she found herself snared by another storefront on the vile, raucous street, lured by the lilting music wafting from under its door and around the edges, by the smell of incense curling out on the sultry air.

She felt drawn against her will, beguiled the same as she had been fifteen years back and more. She hadn’t thought of this in a long time, this perplexing dark vision, as alluring and ruined as a poisoned wedding cake.

There was a big window set in the door, and she remembered that her first time round she’d had to stand on tiptoes to see through; this time, she could look right in.

The room was the same, wide but not deep, with glaring, unadorned bulbs casting the room in a harsh, unforgiving light. Staggered wooden tiers stretched the width of the room, like baseball bleachers or a section of Roman amphitheater peering down at gladiatorial blood sports.

There was a birdcage hanging on a hook from the ceiling beside the wooden tiers. Within it perched a shiny black bird with a bright orange bill, chattering along in Thai, and Colleen found herself thinking the same absurd thought she had at ten-

Boy, that’s one smart bird, speaking a foreign language.

Perched sitting on the tiers were rows of fragile young women and pale, delicate boys, some in shorts and tight T-shirts or bathing suits, some in frilly nightwear. Each held a piece of white cardboard before them with a number written on it.

As a child, seeing these pale, underfed women and boys, with their blank, apathetic faces, she had been confounded by what they might be doing there, although even then the frank air of carnality and commerce made something churn in the pit of her stomach.

But now, she knew them for what they were, understood that beyond the inner side door would be a long hall with tiny, unadorned rooms like monks’ cells, a narrow, worn bed in each.

Pick a number, just like a deli, she thought with distaste.

It was the same, exactly the same as she remembered it. But then she saw the one thing different, the dissonance that made the sweat on her skin go clammy, made her heart skip a beat.

There was an old woman, an old Asian woman, sitting dead center on the middle tier among all the others, the bored ones waiting to be picked, if only for the variety, the change in the tedium.

She hadn’t been here before, not the first time around, Colleen was sure of it-and the woman was looking dead at her.

Although she was about the age of Mama Diamond, of her race and coloring, with eyes that held a similar alertness, this woman had none of the other’s kindness nor regard. She was all hard edges and coldness. She rose from her place on the tier, took several small, precise steps to floor level and approached.

Colleen felt the hairs on her neck rise, felt the jolt of adrenaline hit her heart, her pulse quicken. She felt the strong urge to run, but instead drew her machete. When it came to fight or flight, she generally found herself of the fight variety.

Let’s see how dumb a decision that is this time.

The Asian woman drew near within the room, reached the door and, rather than opening it, was suddenly just on the other side, out in the sticky night air.

“You shouldn’t be here, little girl,” the woman said with a lightness that made it all the more ominous.

“Who are you?” Colleen replied, and fought to keep her voice even. “I don’t know you.”

Up close, she could see that the texture of the old woman’s lined parchment skin was odd, composed of a subtle, transient energy that flickered like galaxies of stars blinking on and off, endlessly extinguished and reborn.

“Funny…” the old woman said absently, glancing about at the street rather than at Colleen. “I-we-I”-she seemed to be having trouble with pronouns-“was actually here, you know, at about this period. I fled the Cultural Revolution…dreadful times, the savagery, the destruction…. My own father was beheaded by the white-boned demon.”

There was a sense of all this being said distantly-mere ghosts of memory, shreds of feeling and expression-an old tape playing, not the least connected to how this women (or whatever she truly was) existed now.

Then the old woman focused on Colleen and, for the briefest moment, Colleen thought she could discern sympathy in those eyes, the fleeting scrutiny of someone both kindly and human.

“Fear is what drives this world, my dear,” the apparition whispered, “fear and the remorseless need for security….”

Her eyes slid away and all emotion drained, replaced by that dreamy, distant quality.

“I came to this sewer,” the woman-thing said. “I did what I had to, I survived.” She said this last with the faintest echo of defensiveness, guiltily, as if Colleen might well have grounds to accuse her.

“Who are you?” Colleen repeated.

“Agnes Wu,” the old woman responded. But once more, she seemed to be speaking by rote, as though the answer held no meaning, the syllables in an unknown language, mere nonsense sounds.

Colleen recognized the name. It was on the list of Source scientists Cal carried with him, copied off the one Larry Shango had shown them, that Shango had found hidden alongside the corpse of Jeri Bilmer.

So now I’ve met two of the bigwigs who fucked up the world, Colleen thought, Wu here and Fred Wishart back in Boone’s Gap-and neither of them human anymore. Wishart must be around here somewhere, too, and how many of those other clowns?

Beyond that, and far more important to her, Doc and Cal and dammit even fucking irritating Herman Goldman, too, not to mention Enid and Howie, Shango and Mama Diamond, somewhere nearby, she knew it. But how to find them in this maze of conjured memory, this shell game of misdirection and illusion?

“You’re in a bit of a predicament, my dear,” Agnes Wu said with the cool aplomb of a Bengal tiger stalking a gazelle. “Can’t go forward, and can’t go back.”

“So where’s that leave me?” Colleen asked, her hand tightening on the machete.

“Where does that leave anyone?” Agnes Wu asked philosophically.

The clamorous Thai music from within shifted to a throbbing disco beat, and the words blared out through the glass. “Stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive…”

Agnes Wu’s placid features twisted into a mask of rage that for a moment was another face, an old man’s face Colleen did not recognize, pale and thin, with sightless eyes blank as eggshell.

“I hate that song!” the Agnes Wu thing spat, and reached out to Colleen with a hand that was a hand no longer but instead a churning mass of multihued energy, a vortex of will and nothingness that Colleen could feel pulling her toward it, inhaling her like a drowning man breaching the surface of the sea.

And in the midst of this, in some distant-observer part of her mind, Colleen got a visceral flash, an instant-message comprehension, that while the memories presented might be Agnes Wu-at least drawn from her consciousness-the homicidal rage erupting from behind the facade seemed dissonantly someone else. That pallid blind man perhaps, in all or part; if not a puppet master, a dominant awareness…

With a cry, Colleen grasped her machete in both hands and brought it down hard across Agnes Wu, hacking her from shoulder to hip in a move that would have sundered her in two had she been composed of meat and bone and blood, or any material that could be so affected.

But it was like trying to cut lightning, like severing smoke. It had no effect at all, except possibly pissing off the thing that was Agnes Wu-or was composed partially of her-even more than she was previously.

The abomination gave a hideous, deafening roar that shook the ground and sky and all its stars. Its force hurled Colleen windmilling back, struggling to maintain her balance-which is what saved her ass, in the long run. For as she flailed wildly to stay on her feet as she was driven backward, her arm glanced against a wall, which shrieked and flinched away.

Now, that’s interesting, Colleen reflected.

Agnes Wu was striding toward her and she didn’t really look human anymore, unless humans were made of the molten hearts of suns, made of reactor cores in full meltdown. Colleen could feel her skin sunburning as she faced her, her eyes crisping like she was peering into the fires of hell. She turned quickly away and plunged her arm again into the wall. Her bare hand hit blunt stone, was turned aside, but where her arm glanced the wall, the brick surface rippled and screamed and irised away.

It’s the armor, Colleen realized, the armor of dragon skin that Doc, Lord bless him, had made for her and Cal and Shango. Just like the scale that had burnt Clayton Devine, that crazed, homicidal half-flare, back in Chicago when Colleen had pressed it into his flesh, the armor was doing the exact same thing here.

Because-as that bloody, horrific explosion had so clearly demonstrated just minutes before-the walls and doors and everything else here were made of flares.

With the possible-no, make that probable-exception of Dr. Agnes Wu, who was bearing down on her right about now with all the loving tenderness of a rabid Mack truck.

Not wanting to test the proposition at this juncture, not in the least, not one little bit, thank you very much, Colleen finally chose the flight side of the equation and threw herself bodily at the wall. As the armor encasing her legs and torso connected with the hard brick, the wall let out a wail of pain and opened up. She passed clean through like a knife through butter, like a B-52 through a cloudy sky, and was gone. It sealed up behind her, a fast-healing wound.

Colleen found herself on the other side, not Bangkok or New York but rather an undifferentiated area, murky and dim. The floor under her feet was substantial, however, and as she moved forward she noted that the matter in the air-not fog, precisely, denser and more still-avoided touching her, shrank away as she pressed through. Keeping an eye on the path behind her, just in case Agnes Wu or whatever it was took a notion to come after her (which thankfully, she did not), Colleen slowly advanced.

She discovered that by waving her arms in a broad arc, she could clear a bit of space around her, actually get a look at where she was. She saw now that she was in a vast corridor hewn from solid stone, blasted out of the rock itself. Not like a cavern, nor a mine, either, it was puzzling. She noted there were porcelain panels set in the walls, with writing on them. But in the dim illumination from the fog, she couldn’t make out the words.

She reached out and touched the rock wall, found to her relief it stayed solid and silent. It was real, or as real as anything could presume to be nowadays, which was about as far as you could throw it.

But no, she corrected herself, what she felt for Viktor was more real than that. He had made her wear this freaking armor against all her protestations, her contrariness. He had saved her.

She longed to see his gray, forgiving eyes, his knowing, sad smile, feel the tentative sureness of that touch that unmanned her, that made her small again and opened her heart like a surgeon’s scalpel that would only heal and not harm.

And unlike the fraudulent tissue structure overlaying some twisted armature that would have been the likeness of her father had she reached the end of Soi Cowboy, she knew that when she found Viktor (and she would find him, and the others, too, get them the hell out of here, if it could be humanly done), he would be alive and present and no mocking ghost.

Her arms waving like some crazed Leopold Stokowski on speed, Colleen Brooks made her way down the vast corridor of stone, the murky thick air around her-that had once been fragile young women and pale, delicate boys-clearing a path before her.