Marc Zicree - Ghostlands

He plunged with her toward the exit as the demon power surged up out of the portal, gaining ever more purchase here. A bolt of shimmering plasma passed perilously close to Theo’s head, singeing his hair and causing Melissa to twitch against him as if she were gripped in a nightmare.

Stumbling, choking, he carried Melissa out of the laboratory. The corridors of the Physical Sciences Building were likewise blazingly bright, as if someone had cranked up the voltage to the ceiling lights. He felt dreadfully strange, ached in every part of his body. Looking over at Melissa, he could see that she still seemed dazed, her gaze dull and removed. In the pitiless glare, her body seemed more fragile than ever. Her rib cage fluttered with her breathing like an ancient bellows, and her body was as light in his arms as a butterfly or a moth.

He reeled out of the building with her, lost his footing rushing headlong down the stairs and nearly fell, narrowly gaining his balance on the greensward of Philosopher’s Walk.

He heard a shattering of glass and looked back just in time to see the skylight of the physics lab explode upward into the night, followed by a monstrous dark shape.

Ely Stern, having accomplished what he had set in motion so many months ago, the elaborate series of events he had planned and directed and now at last achieved, unfurled himself and took wing.

He vanished into the starlit sky.

You have to know what your center is, so you can stand everything.

— Ann Cedarface

Normally, it’s considered sound advice, when intent on not drawing unwanted scrutiny, to be as quiet as possible.

But then, these were hardly normal times.

So when Cal Griffin advised Enid Blindman that it would probably be advisable for him to start playing anytime now, everyone concurred that was mighty fine idea.

Enid began strumming softly and singing low to himself as the nine of them moved cautiously forward through the mist, its cool dampness like the gentle kiss of a cadaver on their skin, the grunter boy Inigo leading the way.

Upon encountering him in the fog, Colleen had been inclined to skewer the little blue-gray rodent, seeing as how his advice on leading them toward sanctuary hadn’t exactly been five-star up until now. But Cal stayed her hand; they wouldn’t have gotten this far without the boy, and even though Inigo undeniably played a very close hand, he had taken no action so far that Cal sensed as treachery.

“Besides,” Goldie added with his characteristic glibness, “it’s not easy being blue.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” chimed in Howie.

Colleen made no reply, although she ordinarily would have. A sidewise glance at Goldman, shimmering insubstantial as a mirage beside her, revealed a face set in a humorless mask. His mouth might be on automatic with feigned levity, but his mind was elsewhere, and intent on a grimmer purpose.

Not surprising, really, considering their present environs. For they all knew in this frigging haze they might as well be marching down the throat of whatever monstrosity called the Source Project home; might, in fact, be forging blissfully unaware straight on through to the acid-pool of its cavernous belly at this very moment.

But, fatalist that she was on most occasions, Colleen didn’t really think so-not yet, at least.

As she inched through the fog, the midnight-blue chords and harmonies of Enid’s song lulled her, brought calm and reassurance. It hadn’t always been thus. When she and Goldman first encountered him roaming among the tall cedars in that river valley along the Ohio/West Virginia border, Colleen thought Enid a malevolent Pied Piper and had predictably gone on the attack-a typical berserker stunt that succeeded only in landing her upside down in a tree, skewered by a branch (she still had that jagged, lightning-bolt scar down her right side, which Doc-adorable diplomat that he was-said merely added to her charms).

But if she’d learned anything from their travels with Enid from there to Chicago and beyond, it was that his music had power not only to soothe the savage breast but also to block out whatever lurked at the Source from seeing him and his friends, from reaching out its long, invisible tentacles and plucking them away.

At least, that was the story back then, when they’d been one hell of a lot farther away from it. Still, the best they could hope for now was to play the odds and hope they caught some breaks along the way.

“Fourteen minutes and counting,” Larry Shango reported.

“When will we come to the Bridge?” Cal asked Inigo.

“We’ve been walking along it,” Inigo said, and drew to a halt. Before him the misty streaks of neon vapor were swirling concentrically as if spiraling down a drain. Colleen could just now make out the sky beyond, which held a rosy glow of late afternoon or dawn; hard to tell which in the overcast sky. The landscape began to clear, to resolve itself into a body of cool blue water, flanked by rolling green hills. Narrow flat rowboats were tethered together at the shore, a gentle wind nudging them against each other.

Colleen knew this lake well. As the fog dispersed even more, she could see the flower-bedecked rise ahead of her known as Strawberry Fields, and to its left the wedding-cake structure of Tavern on the Green. A glance ahead to her right showed her the vast Romanesque stonework of the American Museum of Natural History, and beside it the Hayden Planetarium.

“Oh my God,” Colleen whispered.

She, Cal, Goldie and Doc all knew this place for a certainty, although only Inigo had truly been here before.

It was Central Park.

“I thought you said we were in South Dakota,” Cal said to Goldie.

Goldman was squinting intently at the vista ahead. “We are…” he replied hesitantly.

Doc stepped to the forefront, peering at the solidity of the structures before them. “Colleen, Calvin, Mr. Shango-your visors, please.”

Colleen lowered the visor on her helmet, and peered through the tan membrane covering her eyes. “I’m still seeing Big Apple,” she said.

“Me too,” Cal concurred. They glanced at Shango, who nodded his agreement.

Doc mulled this over. “Offhand, I would say that the likelihood is what we are seeing is not an illusion but rather solid matter, a replica of some sort.”

“Great, we’re in a diorama,” Colleen muttered. She wondered where all the flares might be hiding, knowing that the Source had abducted thousands, if not millions of them. At least in Chicago, the Ruby City, the glow of them had lit up the skies. It had been a beacon, making the myriad of those that powered Primal distinctly easy to find.

Cal turned to Inigo. “Why is this here?”

Inigo peered up at Cal and said meaningfully, “Because it’s her home.”

Colleen saw Cal’s eyes register surprise, then fill with a comprehension far deeper than the words the boy had uttered.

And despite all his months of preparation, despite his determination to keep a cool head, to be the leader they all needed him to be, Cal took off running full-out across the manicured grassland, darted over the bicycle path and out onto the street and the city beyond.

East to the broad thoroughfare of Columbus, and north to the weathered but well-maintained brownstones of Eighty-first.

To home…and Tina.

“After me!” Cal cried, knowing they would follow.

He could hear Colleen pounding after him, and the others behind her; it was no more than he expected, what he counted on. But Cal didn’t have time to look back nor slow his pace. There were only thirteen minutes or so left, and he knew he could no more return to the portal without discovering if Tina were here than he could tear out his own heart.