Marc Zicree - Ghostlands

He stifled the answer he already knew, and chased the words away.

It was beautiful here, the long sunlight raking the high yellow grass, the occasional sound of insects, a V of geese subdividing the meridian. He rose and continued walking, the brittle reeds crackling under his feet. This must all be marshland, Goldie thought, when the river runs high.

The sun, which had seemed fixed and motionless in the sky, was suddenly lower; soon he would be in the dark. Dangerous things were abroad in the land; one shouldn’t be out alone. But along this particular stretch of river, he knew he was the most dangerous creature of all.

He caught a sound of footsteps behind him, and knew who it was before he turned. In their hajj across the continental United States, they had all of them become accomplished trackers.

Cal Griffin approached him in the gathering dark, and Goldie saw in his face a mirror of his own, weighted with the future. Cal held out a sheet of paper.

“There’s some places I’d like you to go,” he said.

Waiting had always been the worst part for her, even when she was little and it was the endless anticipation of scanning the horizon for Santa Claus or summer to appear on the glide path coming in on approach.

Which wasn’t a patch on waiting for some Union of Concerned Scientists, Hearty Man TV-dinner sweet old pencil-pusher-namely, Dr. Rafe Dahlquist-to give you the green light to step over the threshold into hell.

As the days slid one into the other and winter came on in earnest, Colleen Brooks had to admit that it was her own damnable impatience and not everyone and everything getting on her last nerve that made her want to haul off and kick a puppy.

So contrary action was in order….

“What’s the deal here?” Cal inquired as Colleen led him slogging blindfolded along the slushy sidewalk of the main drag toward the Art Deco structure that was still in reasonably good shape, despite being subjected to more than sixty corrosive Iowa winters in its long and distinguished tenure here in town. Doc obligingly brought up the rear, as did Goldman, who had been mostly absent in recent days-and infuriatingly mum on the subject, to boot.

Colleen had made it a point to seek out the surprisingly young Bohemian who still kept the place running and charm the socks off the guy (not that hard a trick, really, when she set her mind to it; hell, she could walk and talk with the best of the bipeds). So he’d led her downstairs to his Fortress of Solitude, the big basement that doubled as a storage vault, and let her peruse what turned out to be his fairly impressive holdings.

Now, some days later, Colleen drew Cal out of the winter chill into the steam-heat warmth of the lobby, then to the larger hall beyond. Contrary to the exterior facade, its interior style was not Deco but rather a neo-baroque eruption of gilt chandeliers, cherub sconces and rococo stairways-a Depression-era proletariat vision of grandeur.

She sat Cal down front and center, and whipped off the blindfold.

The acoustics of the theater were pretty damn good, so the ovation that erupted was close to deafening.

They stood arrayed along the rows of seats and up the twin aisles, grinning broadly at him, Krystee Cott and Mike Kimmel and the rest, the orphaned wayfarers Cal had led through the valley of the shadow and other perilous realms to the respite and relative safe harbor of Atherton (all in attendance save Rafe Dahlquist, naturally, who was under lock and key with the full chorus line of guards, not to mention the unholy troika of Arcott, Siegel and Wade, building the Son of the Megillah).

“Surprise,” Colleen said.

“It’s not my birthday,” Cal said.

“Shut up,” she said. She waved her arm up at the little high window in back, and the house lights dimmed.

For the first time in a long time, they watched a movie.

Kenny Escobar, the manager-cum-projectionist, had a number of fairly recent releases (recent prior to the Change, of course) available for screening. But Colleen had gotten to know Cal pretty well by now.

So she chose Laurel and Hardy in Sons of the Desert.

Cal laughed until the tears rolled down his cheeks.

(Goldman, meanwhile, sat watching totally stone-faced. “Don’t think I’m not enjoying this,” he explained to her in a whisper. “It’s just that when I was a kid my Uncle Vaclav had a complete collection of Stan and Ollie flicks that he’d screen in his weird old mansion and make me sit watching without cracking a smile, ’cause he was of the conviction they weren’t comedians but rather great tragedians -a theory which I suppose has its merits.” “Christ, Goldman,” Colleen responded, “does everyone in your family have a screw loose?”)

Then she showed Cal North by Northwest.

It was only as she sat watching there in the dark, alongside those with whom she had inextricably bound herself, the three so-very-different men who had entrusted her with their lives, that she realized how much like these films their journey had become. They were all of them as helpless as dandelion fluff in a hurricane, totally at the mercy of whatever weird shit the Fates threw at them.

Give in to the moment, it invited, surrender to the currents of storm and flow with them, be uplifted.

Which, paradoxically, didn’t mean that she shouldn’t fight like hell at the same time-just not be so preoccupied with the struggle that she failed to recognize what resources might avail her.

In the darkness around them, Colleen could discern the other baby birds Cal had taken under his wing, and the townies and college kids who had filtered in to watch the show, who were now sharing the experience along with them.

We aren’t alone in this, Colleen thought. We never were.

Ely Stern may have brought them here, all the legions of the damned might be awaiting them at the end of the road, and she might not be able to do a damn thing about it, none of them might.

But that wasn’t for her to say.

Remarkably, with that awareness she felt suddenly unburdened, so light it was akin to weightlessness, and it occurred to her that this flush of exhilaration might well be labeled hope.

She sat anonymous and totally present, her eyes filled with the timeless, fleeting images on the screen-Eva Marie Saint dangling from Mount Rushmore, Cary Grant extending his hand out to her, grasping her wrist and pulling her effortlessly up into what was now transformed into the interior of a sleeping compartment, as they kissed and the train that bore them vanished howling into the blackness of a railway tunnel and the unknown future beyond.

Amid the torrent of applause, the music of communal experience, the houselights rose again. Colleen perceived the bulky, rumpled figure awaiting them in the aisle, Goldman standing behind him, having spirited him here.

“We’re T minus thirty-three minutes,” Rafe Dahlquist said.

The light was like nothing in this world, and Jeff Arcott couldn’t take his eyes off it.

The resonance chamber was banked down like logs gone to ash in a fireplace, barely glowing now. But it was hypnotic in its lazy, ceaseless motion, the flashing bits of evanescence winking in and out of existence in the vacuum of the huge cylinder, leaving vaporous rainbow trails like fingers dangled casually in a stream. As he watched it entranced, it seemed almost to be talking to him.

And scant minutes from now, Jeff Arcott knew, it literally would be.

No longer murmuring in myriad whispers like the legions of the departed, it would soon be invested with power on a scale that would heighten and focus those voices to crystal clarity…and quite a good deal more.