Marc Zicree - Ghostlands

“I’m a federal agent,” Larry Shango said, feeling the absurdity of trying to impress this entity with the weight of his authority. At any rate, the statement may or may not have been a lie, as it spoke to what Shango had once been and since discarded, or tried to discard, like a garment set aside but the ghost tattoo of whose fabric and pattern still adhered to the skin.

Wishart stared unblinking at him, his skin twitching creepily now and then, his face betraying no comprehension, as though federal agent were as meaningless a string of nonsense sounds as Boone’s Gap or West Virginia had been.

“It doesn’t matter,” it said finally. “Go back now…while you can.”

Shango disliked the sound of the creature’s voice-like wind blowing through an empty house, making vowels of gutter troughs and consonants of loose shingles. It made him want to go back, to run far and fast and keep on running. But he had come this far-

“I would be happy to leave,” Shango said. “But there’s something here I want.” Shango knew it to be true, but could not have given voice to what precisely that might be.

“There’s nothing here for you.”

“You’re wrong.”

The Wishart-thing appeared to be growing brighter, the fog rapidly darkening, the night coming on in earnest. Shango saw that the mist about Wishart was spiraling in around him, like he was a drain emptying it of its energy and essence.

“Take me in there,” Shango pressed.

“I can’t….” Wishart stared more intently at him, and there was something blinding and frenzied behind its eyes, like a nuclear core running out of control, that made Shango squint and glance away.

Seemingly in answer, the air around Shango grew thicker and hotter. Shango leveled his hammer, as much shield as threat. The head of the ten-pound sledge left vaporous phosphorescence flowing after it in its wake.

Wishart took a step back, his eroded eyes widening, ravaged skin and clothes emitting their coal-stove light.

I do have some power, Shango realized. He wasn’t entirely helpless.

The wretched haunt tilted its head oddly, as if hearing a distant call, then straightened. “This isn’t a good place to be when the sun’s gone…for a man.”

“Aren’t you a man?” Of course it wasn’t, but Shango wanted to see if there was any remnant of the man within this cobweb-thing, any echo of it.

Hesitation, uncertainty, silence.

“You don’t understand,” Wishart said at last.

“Then explain it to me.”

“We’re bound by what we set loose….” It fixed its gaze on him again, making it clear Shango was included. “All of us.”

“What binds you?” Shango might as well have asked, What did you set loose? It was all the same thing.

“I can’t answer that question.”

Frustration and impatience flared in Shango, and he was surprised at its intensity. He had the sudden memory of his mother long ago with her church ladies in their white gloves and fancy frilled hats at the seances they would infrequently attend, despite their loud and long-professed piety, behind closed-shuttered, paint-peeling doors in the French Quarter. The dearly-departed and resummoned spirits invariably provided irritatingly oblique replies to the most direct questions, as if God would only allow them to quote responses from some Magic Eight Ball in the hereafter.

Why can’t ghosties and ghoulies and things that go bump in the night ever give a fucking straight answer?

And why can’t you, Dr. Fred Wishart, or whatever the hell you are now?

Shango lifted the hammer to a present-arms position, his right hand up the shaft near the weighty steel head. “You need to stand aside.”

Wishart said nothing, his dead eyes on Shango like banked suns, not giving way. The air was hot and simmered with red light.

Shango hefted the hammer, prepared to swing it-

Wishart held out one pale, bloodless hand-

“And what ?” Colleen Brooks demanded. The morning had slid effortlessly into afternoon as the five of them had sat listening to Shango around the gouged old table in the Insomnia Cafe with its ratty furniture and soft rock music, its litter of glasses.

“I don’t remember,” Shango replied.

“You don’t remember? ”

“Well-it might sound ridiculous.”

“Are there any fucking skeptics left on earth?” Colleen retorted. Cal Griffin put a calming hand on her arm.

“Just tell us what happened,” he said.

“I closed my eyes and went to sleep,” Shango said. “It was kind of involuntary.”

“And when you woke up?” That was Doc Lysenko, who maintained a watchful composure although he was on his fifth espresso.

“I was lying in the dirt in an empty rail yard in some hard-luck town near the Mexican border.”

“You don’t know how you got there?” Cal asked.

“No, sir, I do not.”

Mama Diamond watched the dust motes floating in the light shining through the big front windows. It was a hell of a yarn, better maybe than the one about the old stone-and-bone lady and the dragon who paid a call, the dragon that took her treasure and left a secret thing between her and the animals, a secret gift of tongues.

Where was Stern now, whom these new companions of hers had known, and Dr. Fred Wishart, and Cal Griffin’s vanished sister, Tina? All sitting around some table like this one, somewhere else in God’s creation?

It was ridiculous, of course, but no more implausible, really, than the unlikely assemblage of the six of them sitting here. Mama Diamond marveled at the complex tapestry of loss and event that had knit them together.

Where might those threads, those lengths of time and chance that had so entwined them, had brought and bound them together here, draw them next…

And with whom might it further entangle them?

Cal Griffin leaned in toward Shango, his chin resting in his hands, his elbows propped on the table. In his spare efficiency of frame he seemed about one-third the heft of Shango, with none of the other’s broad muscularity. But Mama Diamond noted that they both shared the same unspoken ease of command, the same instinct of decisiveness. Both of them had long been used to relying on their own judgment.

Two Cats Who Walked Alone…but were doing so no longer.

“You ready for a rematch?” Cal Griffin asked Shango.

For the first time that entire day, Shango smiled.

The sign on the building said MARRIED STUDENT HOUS-ING.

I’m neither, Colleen Brooks thought sardonically, and not likely to be anytime soon. But even so, she was grateful for the soft bed and running water.

And Doc there with her.

After their time with Larry Shango in the Insomnia Cafe, the afternoon found them in the quarters Jeff Arcott had assigned them, beyond the physics building and the student store, past the sculpture garden with its Rodins and Henry Moores and Degas ballerinas, to the utilitarian block of apartments where Melissa Wade led them and then-with a delicacy Colleen appreciated-quickly departed.

The two of them dropped their dusty packs just inside the front door and divested themselves of the crossbows, machetes, cutting blades and other miracles of lethality each favored (although Colleen always kept her big Eviscerator Three close by, while Doc retained the straight razor in his boot).

Colleen got the water in the shower running, waiting for it to heat. Doc was in the bedroom now; through the open bathroom door she could see him hiss with pain as he worked to remove his scuffed and sun-faded leather jacket.

She glided over to him, helped him off with it, hung it in the closet, where there were wooden hangers.