Marc Zicree - Ghostlands

No, something inside proclaimed to him. You get your fucking ass out of there right now, Doc Lysenko.

It was a voice that spoke in his heart, an American voice, a woman’s voice.

Boi Baba…

“I cannot remain here,” he murmured to the exquisite, serene woman beside him. He began stumbling away, along the lip of the ocean, his sandals pressing into the damp sand as the foam retreated back from him into the waves.

Yelena moved quickly to overtake him, stood blocking his way. Her eyes were no less loving, but more firm as she held him in her gaze.

“You had a dream, Viktor,” she said, not unkindly, “and in your dream we died, Nurya and I, and you were a refugee washed up onto a distant shore, and the world died, too….”

“No,” he breathed, and could not have said whether he was denying that it was a dream or that it was so.

“Is that the world you want, Viktor? A world of corpses? Or this, to be with the living?”

But it hadn’t been just a world of the dead. There had been someone, someone who had brought him back to life, when he himself had been the walking dead.

Why could he not remember her name?

Yelena drew close to him, and he let her kiss him on the lips. He felt her living breath, felt the perfume of her, the promise with no hint of the grave.

“It is no accident that we are here,” she said, and the emphasis she put on the word “accident” made him shiver and called up a distant echo of tires shrieking as they lost their grip on a rain-sheened road, the roar of a stream that was too swift, too deep, and too hungry, of two bodies he once had forced himself to identify.

Her caress banished the phantoms. “We’re safe here,” she said. “No harm can come to us.”

“And why is that?” he said, a tremor of cold running through him despite the warmth on his skin.

“Maybe there is one who provides you sanctuary, whose name we cannot speak…but who wishes you well.”

Wish…?

Wishart.

The name blossomed in his mind but meant nothing to him, although he felt it should.

But named or not, that was how power worked, how it always worked. Without that protection, that favor, all you loved could be washed away as casually, as disdainfully as skid marks off a road.

Sanctuary…

He could stay here, wrap the sea about him like a winding sheet, entomb himself in safety within this eternal moment, embrace and become like these two he loved.

But then, that was hardly a new sensation, a fresh novelty. No, if anything, it was the state that long years had made familiar to him, a decision he had chosen before the earth on two graves had grown smooth and cold.

Before a young man and woman had sought him out to help a little girl, before they and a wild-eyed mystic had called him back from his torpor, back to an existence of uncertainty and hope and pain.

Wouldn’t you rather be with the living?

Yelena stroked his cheek and smiled again. “I’ll make you breakfast. We’ll rouse Nurya. Wouldn’t you like that?”

He made to speak, to voice a question, but suddenly there was a tearing sound, and he turned from her to look outward.

There was a woman there, clothed in scaly black leather garments, a black helmet crowning her. She held a machete, and a multiplicity of other weapons draped across her back and hung from belts and bandoliers. Behind her, a ragged tear in the sky was sealing up. He supposed she had done that with the machete.

She was standing on the ocean.

And in that moment, Viktor felt a door close in him, and it was a good closing, not a forgetting but definitely an ending. He let out his breath, a release, and felt himself relax into ease and comfort and belonging, like floating on the warm, forgiving sea.

“Time for me to go,” he said to Yelena, and it surprised him only a little how easy it was to make his decision.

He found that he himself could not walk on water, so he splashed out to the ludicrously armored woman in the warm surf. He grabbed her hand, and she hauled him up to her level.

Before she led him out of there, he felt a giddy urge to turn back to Yelena (who still stood there watching him, and had not yet changed into a Gorgon or the goddess Kali or any other improbable thing that was indisputably not Yelena) and shout back, This is my American girlfriend!

But he only had so much tolerance for the absurd.

“Save your hate for the Source,” Magritte had told Herman Goldman way back when, in Howard Russo’s dusky apartment on the outskirts of Chicago.

Her subsequent, pointless death had given him formidable reason to build that hate into an edifice more towering than the fortress deranged Primal had erected against the Source; to nurture and preserve it as a focal element that could unleash his power in all its terrible wrath.

Now at long last, he was finally where he could do something about it.

Scant moments before, the place had looked precisely like New York. But it wasn’t New York; hell, he could’ve told that with his eyes closed, could have told it Ray Charles blind, because the music of the Source, that jangly, Village-of-the-Damned, ninth-level-of-Hell swarm of voices, that white-hot electric wire that had been jabbed into his brain and reeling him in ever since before the Change, was shrieking like God Himself was Ethel Merman being tortured.

Radio Goldman was definitely on the air.

He had been saving up his pennies, putting any number of items into his portmanteau of juju, for just for this occasion.

Now he just had to zone in on the insane, beating heart of it, really put the home in homicide.

When Tina and Cal’s mock apartment did its little rumba number and sent him flying Adidas over Stetson, spinning him round and round like a Protein Berry smoothie in a Jamba Juice blender, the lights had gone out for the briefest instant, only to come up again like a curtain rising on this fresh and utterly diverting little vacation spot.

Still South Dakota, he told himself, even if it looked anything but…

Nevertheless, he did not recognize the new digs. Unlike the Manhattan apartment, which he knew must’ve been derived from either Cal’s or Tina’s memory, this scenery was nothing cobbled from his database.

Postcard lovely, though, with its beachfront of faded grand hotels like a chorus line of dowagers, the bulky forties American cars plying their way down the streets, the olive-and-cocoa-skinned men and women bustling along the sidewalks, the lilt of Spanish floating from every window.

Somewhere in the Tropics? Undoubtedly…but not any time around now. This was a scene from fifty years ago, and more.

“Quaint…but I call it home,” a voice behind him said languidly.

Goldie turned, and commanded himself not to drop his jaw.

The face was familiar, and the horns, too, not to mention the tail.

Better the Devil you know…

He looked exactly as he had when first he’d appeared in Goldie’s classroom dog years back, when he’d levitated the classroom and engaged Herman Goldman in a week’s worth of frothy debate and badinage.

With one staggering difference- that particular fallen gentleman had been a projection of Goldie’s mind, he knew that, had even somewhat known it at the time, no more a distinct individual than a ventriloquist’s dummy or an American President.

But this Red Boy, well now, he might look the same, but what was under the hood was another story altogether.

For while the face was familiar, filched from the well-fertilized fields of Herman Goldman’s frontal lobes, the Foul Fiend smiling back at him was a complete and utter stranger.