Marc Zicree - Ghostlands

She meant the Source, Goldie realized, and the words Inigo (who looked so much like the vicious little fiends glaring at him now, but who was so different in spirit) said on the way here exploded in his mind like artillery shells in the night.

It would burn you up in the turnstile, It does that.

But even so, everywhere but one was a good sight better than what Herman Goldman, late of Manhattan and the tunnels beneath, could pull off.

But how precisely to get Queen Bitch to share her delightful special skill set? She didn’t exactly seem like the plays-well-with-others type. More like runs-with-scissors…

Or plays well with grunters while they all run with scissors.

Of course, as they say, The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Unless she also happens to be my enemy…

Orlando was looking pretty good along about now.

“So how about you, Hermie?” Her words cut into his thoughts like a scalpel. God, he hated to be called that, it always reminded him of that little weenie from Summer of ’42. “Bet you can do a trick or two….”

“What makes you think that?”

“You wouldn’t be standing here still talking if you couldn’t.”

That was true enough. All right then. He rolled his shoulders to get the kinks out, extended his hands palms up. “Get a load of this, Your Highness….”

Tendrils of light spilled out of his open palms, spelled out letters of fire in midair as he sang like an incantation, “M-I–C…K-E-Y…”

“Oh, put a lid on it,” she spit out venomously. “I hate that little rat.”

Oh great, mouse envy. Then you sure picked the wrong place to land, lady.

“What else can you do?” she asked.

He thought to tell her about some of the rest of his bag of tricks-like that nice little stunt he’d pulled propelling Eddie into the Next Life, or at least a whole new point of view-but thought better of it. This was, after all, their first date.

“That’s really my encore number,” he said. “It’s pretty much downhill from there.”

“You better have something else to tell me, Hermie,” the Bitch Queen cooed.

Cold-sweat city. So he went for broke, told her the whole enchilada, about the Source, their quest, everything. Then he invited her to join their little band of merry men, and a few stout women.

The enemy of my enemy, and all that jazz.

Hey, it was worth a shot.

When he was done, she mulled it over a good long minute.

“Gee,” she said at last, “that sounds like a really bad idea.”

Then she did another great trick.

She made the ghosts fly out of the pipe organ and swarm all over him.

“Little gray guys,” Inigo said. “A lot of them.”

He could smell them, thick and foul and musky everywhere about him. Their traces lay on the paving stones and hitching posts, on the sign heralding GENERAL STORE and the horse-drawn fire wagons dormant in their station, on every ratty, gone-to-mold plush toy in the Emporium and amid the broken glass cases of the candy shop and the rusting stools of the ice-cream parlor.

He wondered if he smelled like that to the others he’d brought along with him, felt sure he didn’t…at least, hoped he didn’t.

“So where are they?” That was Colleen, whose eyesight had completely returned. Goldie’s lightning burst may have been intense, but fortunately its effects had proved shortlived.

Not that twenty-twenty-the human version of it, at least-was much good here in the balmy autumn night. But at least there was a moon casting its silver radiance.

“More importantly, where’s Goldie?” Cal Griffin added. Across his back, he carried the gem-emblazoned rifle he’d retrieved from the El Dorado, the one he could carve a dragon-shaped notch in if he so desired. One-Shot Griffin, with the dragon carcass now moldering in the high grasses to prove it. One thousand miles or more to the east, and two time zones away.

Thank heavens the portal had still proven malleable (if spongy), or Inigo could never have gotten them here.

Welcome to Southern California….

When Inigo had burst in on them at the grain silo, Colleen had been suspicious, and Doc cautious. But Cal had instantly seized the moment. Assigning Krystee Cott and a party of three to keep tabs on Jeff Arcott as he consulted with Rafe Dahlquist over the schematics, Cal demanded Inigo lead them to where he had taken Goldie.

Inigo sniffed the air, pointed to the distance ahead, where Main Street opened onto a once-manicured, now-weedy circle of parkland that branched off to the various lands, like a roundabout. He inclined his head to the left, toward the frontier land.

“They’re down there. All of them…” Inigo breathed deeply through his nose, speculatively, weighing the subtle, variegated constituencies in the air. “And one other…human, I think, and wearing…” He tried to place the scent, recalled it from long ago, in the time before the Change, when he and his mom and dad all lived in Ithaca, and Janet Hirschenson’s mother had come along on a field trip, and he’d asked the name of her perfume. “Shalimar.”

“So it is a woman,” Doc noted.

“Or a guy with gender issues,” Colleen countered.

Cal unslung the rifle, held it at the ready. “Off to work we go….”

Taking point, Cal advanced cautiously, the others falling in behind. The cheery, ruined buildings looked on as they passed, and nothing beyond the four of them moved.

“Why do I so often feel I’m in Aliens 3-D? ” Colleen inquired, warily surveying the awnings, corners and doors.

“Because you have selected a life of activity,” Doc answered.

“So that’s what you call it.”

“You know,” Cal said softly, peering at the silhouetted spires of the castle beyond, “I always wanted to come here.”

“Is it all you envisioned?” asked Doc.

“Less expensive,” Cal said, and tried to make it sound light. But in his heart he knew there were forms of payment more dear than money, and that before the night was out, he might give lie to his words.

Waving them to silence, he angled off, the others following. They passed through the gate of the fort, its perimeter wall of thick timbers still straight and relatively unchanged.

A sound of water drew his attention and he looked to his right, saw the artificial lake with its small island, the water choked with algae and the big paddlewheeler at anchor abandoned and listing to starboard.

“Where now?” Cal asked Inigo in a whisper.

The grunter boy started to answer, but there was no need.

For at that moment, from the square ahead, with its curclicued railings and its Spanish moss, from within the dark mansion fronted by gravestones, a wail rose up that stopped them dead and wrapped them in a cemetery chill.

It was the grunters, in their dozens like a nest of cockroaches, cheering for blood.

And one man, screaming.

Well, this is shaping up to be even worse than the first time I came here, Herman Goldman thought with a curious detachment as the hideous spectres tore at him.

But then, he’d always felt most removed from himself when in the deepest guano, and on this particular occasion it was looking like he had really painted himself into a brick wall.

There were maybe eight or ten of the damn things (hard to keep count when he was being thrashed about so), their grimy, dusty clothes in tatters, flesh rotting off their faces and limbs, death’s-head grins like the “before” pictures of scraggly, nightmare teeth in his periodontist’s office. At the Bitch Queen’s nod, they had vomited forth from the big pipe organ, flown shrieking at him, reaching long skeletal fingers that snatched at his padded electric-blue vest and Tommy Bahama shirt with its palm trees and China Clippers, yanked his tangle of curly black hair back hard, dug cracked sharp nails into his autumn-browned skin. They lurched him spinning up into the air as they gripped and twirled him like a maypole.