Ghostlands

FIFTY-EIGHT

People, they had once been people, maybe a dozen of them, men and women, some old, some not, it was hard to tell. Melted together, flowing like wax into an obscenity that was all horrified, screaming mouths and nightmare eyes resembling nothing so much as the ruined, melted stone heads on Rushmore itself.

But worse, indescribably worse.

Vestigial limbs like unformed, aborted fetuses, patches of brittle black-brown, golden-white hair erupting higgledy-piggledy from blotchy, pitted skin with infection runneling down from uncounted, unsealing wounds.

And most nightmarish, most unthinkable of all…it was still alive.

The scientists of the Source Project, Marcus Sanrio and Fred Wishart and Agnes Wu, Sakamoto and Monteiro and the others, transfigured into this monstrosity when everything went wailing out of control and the energy they had endeavored to seize like Zeus with some lightning bolt had instead seized them.

They had ripped a hole clean through to someplace unimaginably else, and that breach remained gapingly open-was, in fact, still flooding out its savage, ungovernable power from the point at which it had first come thrusting, erupting into this virgin world.

Cal Griffin glared and squinted at the dreadful gash in existence just behind the quivering mass that regarded him with rolling, hateful, terrified eyes; the useless, foul body that housed the gestalt mind Stern and Inigo had called the Big Bad Thing.

The light behind it was blinding black, all color and nothingness, a light that was not a light, not-beingness that was nothing of this universe, that was indescribably other, but that had been called forth into existence here, that had been torn out of elsewhere and was fed, replenished from the unthinkable, unknowable font.

The Source.

Cal couldn’t help staring at it, couldn’t bear seeing it. It was so alien, yet had become as all-encompassing, as much of this world, as the air about him, the fundamental pulse that had changed Stern and Inigo and Christina, Goldie, too-and the helpless multitudes like them.

In that quick-flash moment of perceiving it, Cal sensed that he had been right, that the power itself held no consciousness, no agenda; it was like pure, primal electricity, like the nuclear forces themselves.

But the baleful, nauseating creation regarding him from in front of the Source was another thing entirely.

“Kill it!” Cal heard Colleen scream from behind him, and he raised his sword once more, whether to strike out at it, or-

He felt it reach out with its adrenalized, myriad mind, felt it summon every last bit of power from its hostage flares, from the primacy of the Badlands, from all it had been able to leech out of Iowa, focusing, willing it to burn all these trespassers down.

He felt that power surge like hot fire needles along every nerve, felt its cancer invade every cell. He shrieked and fell to his knees, heard his companions screaming, too.

He could feel them in his mind, Sakamoto and Wu and Brinkowicz, Corning, Feldstein, St. Ives, Pollard, Monteiro-every one of them, all the scientists on Shango’s list-could sense them in that tortured, sullied lump of flesh. And at the core, subsuming and commanding them, dominant and undeniable, leading them as he had always led them, Marcus Sanrio.

DIE, Sanrio thought at them, DIE NOW.

Cal felt as though a hand were squeezing him, but also inverting him from within, felt the wave of unbeingness washing over him, inviting him to release, to surrender, to die….

But just then, he felt the grip release just a bit, felt the tide flow back by inches, and he sensed, distantly, a force in opposition. Weaker, but throwing all of itself against the greater mind, holding it back, if only momentarily, from dealing the final stroke.

Cal reached out with his thought to seek it, to identify it-and found a name.

Wishart.

And, surprisingly, remarkably, one other…

Goldie.

Not dead, no, merely held, absorbed, enclosed.

Cal felt his heart rush. Where he sat crumpled there on his knees, he still held the sword.

He released it now.

“Cal…no…” Pleading, moaning, a whisper behind him. Colleen, her life a flickering candlelight held in a breath.

But Cal needed his hands free now, needed no sword. Fighting the agony, fighting to stay conscious a few seconds more, he withdrew from within his shirt the battered leather portfolio Goldie had brought him from the travels Cal had dispatched him on, when Goldie had returned with Enid Blindman and Howard Russo. That had not been Goldie’s only port of call, far from it.

The Sanrio mind bore down, tore at Cal like a freezing river, stealing away his life force piece by piece.

Hold on, Goldie, hang on, Wishart…. Just give me a moment more….

With fingers grown numb, Cal worked to untie the string, to throw open the portfolio, to lay claim to the irreplaceable treasures Goldie had brought from the four corners of the land. His hands trembled; its contents spilled out onto the floor.

“Light!” Cal screamed. “Give me light!” He sensed Tina behind him, battered and assailed. She willed it, and light flooded out, washed over him as he dove down and scooped up the varied flat paper shapes, held them out before him like talismans.

The fleshy abomination was watching him now, gaping eyes brown black green blue, curiosity in them, the same curiosity that had driven them to slice open the world, insatiable curiosity that withheld the death blow.

Cal held out one of the creased, shiny rectangles, colors and shapes parading across it.

“Agnes Wu! Your son, your daughter!” Cal cried. “They’re safe, in Ithaca! They’re waiting for you!”

Another photograph.

“Bernard Sakamoto! Your wife is in a shelter in Baltimore! She’s there with your granddaughter!”

Another.

“Stanley Monteiro! Candace, she’s in the hospital in Hannibal! Her back was broken in a fall, but she’s healing! She needs you there!”

And so on, through Brinkowicz and Corning, Feldstein, St. Ives, Pollard and the rest. All the names Cal had researched in Who’s Who in Applied and Molecular Physics, discovering their hometowns, their families.

All the ones who had been kept apart from them due to the security lockout at the Source Project, prior to the Change. All those who might have a claim on them, on their hearts and minds, their allegiances beyond Sanrio.

Who, alone of them, had no one he loved, or who loved him.

They had not chosen to become this monstrosity, to absorb a world out of fear and madness; that accident had been visited upon them, that drive imposed on them.

Perhaps only Sanrio, their merciless, killing leader, had ever wanted that, had hungered for it since his days of degradation in Havana, his powerlessness….

Cal had learned at last, after all the long days and hard miles, the tortured road from Manhattan to Boone’s Gap, Chicago to here, to differentiate between the action and the actor, to jettison notions of evil and perceive only the fear….

Pray to see what’s real, Mr. Griffin…and you will.

Cal felt the gestalt mind tremble and hesitate, felt the wills of the others pull back, tenuously rebel.

“You’re human!” Cal pleaded. “Be human again!”

But then, like a relentless tide flooding back, Cal sensed Sanrio gaining mastery once more, reeling them in again.

They’re not strong enough, Cal thought despairingly, they need a leader….

Take me! he thought at It, with the same fierce will that had driven him across this devastated, phenomenal land; that had gathered together Goldie and Doc and Colleen to follow him, and Enid Blindman and Lady Blade and the escaped slaves off the farm at Unionville; that had defeated Primal, and Fred Wishart, and Stern, in their time; the will that might also be called love.

Take me!

He opened himself to It.

He felt his body fall away and dissolve like dying, felt himself swept up and plunged into a heaving, boiling mass that was pure thought and memory and being, that held no time and all time at once, that was pure now with no past or future in it, a moment held frozen and eternal.

And that moment was terrifying….

Blurred streaks like blood smeared on a mirror. Men, women, booted, hooded, gloved in white, running, shouting. Machines spinning, pinwheeling sparks, a thrumming rising to a whine and then a wail. This is not right, this is not how it’s supposed to be. A rectangular door lined with lights. A gateway. And something emerging, slashing into existence, all colors and none, a whirlpool blaze of pure, savage power. The men, the men and the women all tumbling over each other, pitching headlong to get away, but the whirlpool surges up, seizes them and spins them back into itself. Faces shrieking as they melt together, a chaos of eyes and mouths, not dead, alive, not many but one, frozen in that horrified moment, screaming, screaming-

As Cal suspected, the gestalt mind was frozen, locked into that molten instant of horror and fear. No wonder it had taken the actions it had to safeguard itself, to wipe every contrary will like chalk off a blackboard. The lesser minds had given themselves over to Sanrio, to guide them, to keep them safe. Crazy and paranoid, and no wonder. Madness maddened, and turning the world mad, too.

But now there was a new sheriff in town….

Cal found himself floating in the blackness. But he could sense the other minds there, could hear them like voices in the night.

Come to me, Cal thought. Come to me and I’ll be your sanctuary.

He felt Goldie first, sensed him surge up and lock on. Then Fred Wishart, who had tried, he knew, to keep them safe when they had first invaded this realm, and who had turned Shango away when he had trespassed, too, before Sanrio could discover him.

And Agnes Wu, who had protected Inigo when his own mother could not, when he had been forsaken and transformed.

Cal felt Marcus Sanrio then, felt him attack with a consciousness like a knife, felt his own mind scream as Sanrio tried to cut him to pieces, to gather the others to shred him like wolves tearing apart a deer.

But Cal was on the inside now, and Sanrio couldn’t hold them.

Hesitant at first, but with growing determination and velocity, Bernard Sakamoto and Stan Monteiro, Agnes Wu and the others reached out to Cal, holding on, giving over their will to him. He felt their dread and their longing, felt them gain stability as he soothed and reassured them. He felt himself grow with power, felt it fill him like hot air in a balloon, felt himself expand and extend his dominion.

Sanrio fought it, then fell back and fled.

Cal reached out with his mind, pursuing….

And sensed, beyond him, the flares in all their multitudes, heard them like a plaintive, echoing chorus.

Then, as Sanrio diminished further still, Cal caught on the distant edge of perception, barely detectible, like a whisper in another room, a whisper wrapped in cotton…

Something else.

Minds…

Not from this side, Cal could feel it…. Other, unimaginably other…

And behind them, a boy, somewhere in this world, a boy with a mind like no other, a boy who had been a boy for a long, long time…

Then, like a door slamming determinedly shut, the awareness was gone.

Cal was in the blackness, surrounded by the countless minds held captive here, pleading that he help, pleading that he act….

And Cal realized that, at last, his long-ago dream had arrived.

But it was different in its details, there was clamor and chaos, but not the sounds of battle, of metal on metal, of metal tearing flesh. And no sword for him to claim…

These had only been the symbols of things, the metaphors, of confrontation, of power….

Cal could sense Sanrio coming back, drawing on the power of the void itself, on the power of the Source.

He was returning to reclaim what was his.

Cal felt the power of the others within himself. Like Sanrio, he could draw upon the raw power of the Source, too.

The flare minds called to him.

He stood at the black heart of the tumult as they cried their anguish, their despair, demanded, pleaded-

That he act.

But act how?

He reached out with his new, expanded awareness, felt the tenebrous borders of the rent, the tear in the universe….

And he knew with utter conviction that he could seal it, plug the hole, cut off the torrent of the Source.

But it would take drawing upon all the force at his command. It would take bringing the mountain down in on itself, cascading tons of rock crashing down on their heads, crushing them.

In the lighthouse beacon of his mind, Cal could make out the frail, delicate form with hair fine as white spiderweb and eyes a scorching blue….

Christina.

And the others beyond her, among the multitude of souls…

Colleen. Doc. Goldie. May Catches the Enemy. Inigo. Papa Sky. Mama Diamond. Enid Blindman. Howard Russo. Larry Shango.

Cal knew he could do this, stop the energy that had flooded the world, and destroy Marcus Sanrio, too….

But it would kill them all.

And would it change the world back, back the way it had been?

Who could say?

With the will that had brought him here, the will that could also be called love, Cal made his choice.

He brought his vast attention to Sanrio and blasted him back, sent him hurtling, tumbling away, before Sanrio could regroup, draining him as he went, bleaching his bleached, cadaverous soul, inhaling the fiercesome wildfires as they burst out of Sanrio like nuclear mandalas of psychotic glory made flesh and lightning strike, and then blowing them back at the albinic stick figure, vomiting forth the torrent of withering black-star corruption to scour raw this child’s scrawl of phosper dots and malignity, until only the barest remnant of the being remained, a tenuous loose affiliation of particles that had once been a man, had once been known and known itself as Dr. Marcus Sanrio.

Cal tried then to draw the entity back in, to hold him still and mute and captive.

But with the last bit of power that was his, Marcus Sanrio fought to evade these filaments, to slip from Cal’s grasp. There was a moment of fierce struggle and then, in a searing implosion of mind and will, Sanrio winked out, spiralized and compacted to nothingness, vanished from distance and time, and was gone from all awareness.

Extinguished, destroyed? Cal thought so, but then…

He couldn’t be sure.

But this much he knew-either way, Sanrio had been dead a long time, soul dead….

Let go of the dead, and attend to the living.

He turned his attention to the others that orbited about him…and repeated what he had said before.

You’re human. Be human again.

He summoned up all the power that was within him, within the scientists and the lost ones and the flare children, the power he could draw from the flood coursing out of the rent in the universe, felt it suffuse him and erupt and flow outward in a great, warming deluge….

You’re human. Be human again.

And it was so.

The first thing Cal realized as he sat up groggily on the scorched tile floor was that he had a body again.

The second was that he had no more power than an ordinary man.

May Catches the Enemy was there, helping him shakily to his feet.

“Not bad, Griffin,” she said, smiling broadly. “Not bad at all…”

Cal looked about him, and saw that the room was a shattered wreck of what had once been a laboratory, the walls chiseled out of bare rock. It was what it had always been, at least since the Change, at least in reality.

“Christina…?” Cal croaked out worriedly, and his sister floated up to him. Still a flare, not human, but thankfully, not harmed. In her glow, Cal could make out Inigo and Howard Russo huddled concernedly about him, still grunters, as well. Colleen stood close on, Enid and Shango silent and watchful alongside, Papa Sky and Mama Diamond there, too.

“Man, you sure know how to throw a party,” said a voice behind him.

Cal turned and-even though he knew the man was generally leery of human contact-hugged Goldie until he nearly turned blue.

The shadow warriors and their horses were gone, May explained, fled back to the Spirit Realm. But then she led Cal to where Doc Lysenko stood ministering to Fred Wishart and Agnes Wu and the other Source Project scientists, human again, who sat blinking and moving like sleepers gone far from the world, awakening at last from unquiet dreams.

Of Marcus Sanrio, there was no sign.

“What about the flares?” Cal asked.

May led him through the Hall of Records to the staircase beneath the watchful, ruined heads of Mount Rushmore.

In the autopsy room at Atherton, beside the ravaged body of one that was not Ely Stern, Doc had told Cal that the dragons, and the grunters and the flares, were not inhuman, but rather alternate humans….

Pray to see what’s real, Mr. Griffin….

Humans, all of them, in all their forms, in the world as it truly was.

From his vantage point high atop the Black Hills, which had been called He Sapa since time out of mind, peering over the Badlands as they lay timeless under a rising sun and a cloud-wracked sky, Cal had to admit that the glow of the multitude, flying home to all four corners of the land, was spectacular indeed.