Ghostlands

FORTY

“Save your hate for the Source,” Magritte had told Herman Goldman way back when, in Howard Russo’s dusky apartment on the outskirts of Chicago.

Her subsequent, pointless death had given him formidable reason to build that hate into an edifice more towering than the fortress deranged Primal had erected against the Source; to nurture and preserve it as a focal element that could unleash his power in all its terrible wrath.

Now at long last, he was finally where he could do something about it.

Scant moments before, the place had looked precisely like New York. But it wasn’t New York; hell, he could’ve told that with his eyes closed, could have told it Ray Charles blind, because the music of the Source, that jangly, Village-of-the-Damned, ninth-level-of-Hell swarm of voices, that white-hot electric wire that had been jabbed into his brain and reeling him in ever since before the Change, was shrieking like God Himself was Ethel Merman being tortured.

Radio Goldman was definitely on the air.

He had been saving up his pennies, putting any number of items into his portmanteau of juju, for just for this occasion.

Now he just had to zone in on the insane, beating heart of it, really put the home in homicide.

When Tina and Cal’s mock apartment did its little rumba number and sent him flying Adidas over Stetson, spinning him round and round like a Protein Berry smoothie in a Jamba Juice blender, the lights had gone out for the briefest instant, only to come up again like a curtain rising on this fresh and utterly diverting little vacation spot.

Still South Dakota, he told himself, even if it looked anything but…

Nevertheless, he did not recognize the new digs. Unlike the Manhattan apartment, which he knew must’ve been derived from either Cal’s or Tina’s memory, this scenery was nothing cobbled from his database.

Postcard lovely, though, with its beachfront of faded grand hotels like a chorus line of dowagers, the bulky forties American cars plying their way down the streets, the olive-and-cocoa-skinned men and women bustling along the sidewalks, the lilt of Spanish floating from every window.

Somewhere in the Tropics? Undoubtedly…but not any time around now. This was a scene from fifty years ago, and more.

“Quaint…but I call it home,” a voice behind him said languidly.

Goldie turned, and commanded himself not to drop his jaw.

The face was familiar, and the horns, too, not to mention the tail.

Better the Devil you know…

He looked exactly as he had when first he’d appeared in Goldie’s classroom dog years back, when he’d levitated the classroom and engaged Herman Goldman in a week’s worth of frothy debate and badinage.

With one staggering difference-that particular fallen gentleman had been a projection of Goldie’s mind, he knew that, had even somewhat known it at the time, no more a distinct individual than a ventriloquist’s dummy or an American President.

But this Red Boy, well now, he might look the same, but what was under the hood was another story altogether.

For while the face was familiar, filched from the well-fertilized fields of Herman Goldman’s frontal lobes, the Foul Fiend smiling back at him was a complete and utter stranger.

Not the real Devil, certainly, any more than he’d be the real Santa Claus or Easter Bunny (though they might be arriving on the scene anytime now, no telling). And the fact that he was smoking what Goldie’s finely tuned nostrils identified as a Pall Mall and gazing at him with blind, milky-white eyes (although he seemed perfectly able to see him) only gave further proof, if that were needed.

“Who’s in charge here?” Goldie asked.

“Batista,” the other replied, gazing out at the passing parade. His voice held the faintest trace of accent, cultured and lilting, caught more in the rhythms than the pronunciation.

“Very funny,” Goldie said. “You wanna tell me whose past we’re looking at here?”

Somewhere a band was striking up “Manteca,” a jazzy little Afro-Cuban number Goldman had first heard on a musty Dizzy Gillespie LP his dad had stowed long ago in their attic. The other inclined his head, as if to catch it better.

“Quantum physics teaches us that the space between particles is more real than the particles themselves,” the apparition said dreamily. “That everything material is an illusion, beauty included, especially beauty.”

He drew the smoke deep into his lungs and held it there, gestured out at the buildings with his cigarette. “An elegant facade, nothing more…one that can be blasted apart by a hurricane or an errant thought.”

He brought his cold coffin eyes to look on Goldman once more. “I was a busboy here, in the Hotel Nacional…being spat on, cleaning the vomit of the turistas Americano, when their bored wives-as high strung and finely bred as racehorses-were not giving me their loving attentions…while their husbands practiced free trade in the casinos.”

“Y’know, I just can’t see the Prince of Darkness moonlighting as a busboy,” Goldie observed. “Howzabout we take off the mask?”

“I will if you will, Mr. Goldman.”

Now, that sent a Popsicle straight up the old backbone. Not that it should be that much of a surprise, though, if this clown could peruse folks’ gray matter like strolling the aisles at Wal-Mart….

Only how much has he been shoplifting?

Goldie tried for an offhanded manner. “Mine doesn’t come off, try as I might.”

The other shrugged as if discarding an overcoat draped over his shoulders, and with no seeming transition he was suddenly human, or appeared so; a pale, lean man with sickly white hair and long, nicotine-stained fingers holding the same cigarette, appraising the world with the same blind eyes.

“How’d you get from here to South Dakota?” Goldie asked, figuring he might as well advance a few more feet along the tightrope, try to glean as much as he could.

“An itinerant lecturer passing through on sabbatical recognized this untouchable, this invisible one with the phenomenal gift for numbers, for abstract thought. Was it any more unlikely than Einstein working as a patent clerk? No, although I was somewhat more striking than dear Albert, more compliant…. And so I was spirited away to Cornell and the Ivory Tower.”

Goldie found his mouth was dry. He licked his lips, tried to keep his voice level. “You know my name…” he prompted.

The corner of the other’s mouth lifted in the barest trace of a smile. “In life, I was known as Marcus Sanrio….”

Bingo, a moniker right off the list of Source Project mucky-mucks, director of the whole nine yards, in fact.

It may not have been Hawaii, Goldie realized, but he felt a vibrating certainty within himself (like that endless chord on Sergeant Pepper’s) that odds-on he was talking to the Big Kahuna himself. No floating green head with a man behind the curtain, but the man himself.

“So I’ll ask again,” Goldie repeated, striving to sound casual, to sound anything but what he truly was. “Who’s in charge here?”

Sanrio looked off into the distance and considered; not the answer, Goldie realized, but whether to answer at all. He parted his lips, and let the ghost vapor of the cigarette curl lazily from his mouth, the smoke gray-white like his empty dead eyes.

“It’s a collective, of a sort,” he said languorously, at last. “But as for the governing aesthetic…you could say that it’s mine.”

Bingo again.

So the only question now, Herman Goldman knew, was how best to kill him.