Ghostlands

FIFTY-FOUR

Jeff Arcott felt limitless power surging within him, and it was unspeakable.

His eyelashes and his cracked, dry lips flashed and snapped with blue-green fire. His hair writhed like severed high-tension lines, and his eyes were glorious suns held nailed within burning sockets. His flesh pulsed with midnight blue and lavender and Sucrets-green pure neon flame. He was hideously, vibrantly alive, abrim, overfull with momentous energy as he reeled across the common in the hell-light that coated everything like a sick sheen of radioactive vomit.

Like a moth held prisoner in a killing jar, Arcott felt his consciousness immobilized within his body, unable to command the slightest movement.

Sanrio was moving him, he knew. Sanrio had done all of this; it was what he had planned all along. Arcott had been no equal partner, merely a flunky, a dupe, in service to a distant, uncaring god.

He prayed only to die.

But his god was not one given to answering prayers.

Through blast-furnace eyes, Arcott made out, silhouetted against the glowing, infected surfaces of pavement and adjoining structures, a tenuous figure rushing toward him from off in the distance, floating rather than running, her unshod feet barely grazing the pathway.

Melissa…

Plunging headlong toward him, driven by need and love, the twin currencies that motivated her still, despite the inevitable change Arcott could see had finally overtaken her.

She would reach him in a moment, would embrace him and, he knew, be consumed like an autumn leaf in a bonfire.

Melissa, no… He tried to shriek, but could utter no sound.

He was Sanrio’s bitch now. But he’d always been, hadn’t he?

In the asylum of his mind, Jeff Arcott began to laugh hysterically.

He saw Melissa slow before she reached him, saw her get a good look at him at last and begin to scream.

What must he look like?

Run, Melissa.

But Sanrio was making him stagger toward her, arms outstretched like some fucking Frankenstein’s monster. He felt Sanrio’s hunger to absorb her power, her light, just as he was eating up everything else in sight, absorbing it and growing strong.

Melissa was down on her knees, shrieking, shaking her head as he drew near. Funny, he thought, she should be able to fly….

Maybe she didn’t know that yet. She wouldn’t ever now.

He reached out to her….

Suddenly, something hard struck him in the midsection, drove him hurling back.

There was another agonizing blow to his ribs that threw blazing sparks off his radiant self. He lost his balance and fell.

Looking up, he saw a hunched form standing over him, wielding a length of metal pipe like a baseball bat. Even though the other was mightily changed, Arcott recognized Theo Siegel.

Theo’s mouth opened to bare impossibly sharp teeth, and he cried in a voice that was equal parts sob and roar, “Forgive me!”

As he swung the pipe toward Jeff’s head, Arcott thought, Good for you, Theo.

OPEN YOUR MOUTH AND SCREAM, the Sanrio-mind commanded him, BURN THE LITTLE WRETCH AWAY.

No, Arcott protested silently, and fought against the command with every scrap of will he could muster; not enough, he knew, to hold long, only for a moment….

A latticework of all-consuming nonfire shot out of Arcott’s frame despite his efforts to oppose it, and the disintegrating flood would assuredly have swept Theo into the ranks of the post-living had he not been suddenly yanked sideways by-

Melissa. Saving him, at the last moment.

A marionette, damned, Jeff Arcott wheeled to face Theo again, to devastate him.

But impossibly quickly, Theo regained his balance and sprang full at Jeff, bringing the pipe down on Arcott’s skull. There was a hideous wet crack. Theo shouted with the impact, an anguished cry.

Arcott staggered back, knowing that the demon energy overflowing him would repair the damage, would not allow him surcease.

But then another thought intruded from the Sanrio-mind, a desperate, frightened thought not directed at him.

I/WE ARE ATTACKED, INVADED….

NEED POWER.

And all of the dread energy, all the hellacious, diseased light flowed out of Arcott and the streets and the buildings, out of the trees and the grasses, back through the Spirit Portal to South Dakota to fortress the Big Bad Thing, to defend the Sanrio-mind.

All of this happened in the briefest instant, too swift to register.

Arcott sank back, his body crackling and crisped as a blackened leaf, relieved, knowing he would have died anyway, but this hastened it.

He could move his body again, a little, and tried to speak. He motioned Theo closer.

But if Theo Siegel heard him, Jeff Arcott never knew.