Marc Zicree - Ghostlands

Not the real Devil, certainly, any more than he’d be the real Santa Claus or Easter Bunny (though they might be arriving on the scene anytime now, no telling). And the fact that he was smoking what Goldie’s finely tuned nostrils identified as a Pall Mall and gazing at him with blind, milky-white eyes (although he seemed perfectly able to see him) only gave further proof, if that were needed.

“Who’s in charge here?” Goldie asked.

“Batista,” the other replied, gazing out at the passing parade. His voice held the faintest trace of accent, cultured and lilting, caught more in the rhythms than the pronunciation.

“Very funny,” Goldie said. “You wanna tell me whose past we’re looking at here?”

Somewhere a band was striking up “Manteca,” a jazzy little Afro-Cuban number Goldman had first heard on a musty Dizzy Gillespie LP his dad had stowed long ago in their attic. The other inclined his head, as if to catch it better.

“Quantum physics teaches us that the space between particles is more real than the particles themselves,” the apparition said dreamily. “That everything material is an illusion, beauty included, especially beauty.”

He drew the smoke deep into his lungs and held it there, gestured out at the buildings with his cigarette. “An elegant facade, nothing more…one that can be blasted apart by a hurricane or an errant thought.”

He brought his cold coffin eyes to look on Goldman once more. “I was a busboy here, in the Hotel Nacional…being spat on, cleaning the vomit of the turistas Americano, when their bored wives-as high strung and finely bred as racehorses-were not giving me their loving attentions…while their husbands practiced free trade in the casinos.”

“Y’know, I just can’t see the Prince of Darkness moonlighting as a busboy,” Goldie observed. “Howzabout we take off the mask?”

“I will if you will, Mr. Goldman.”

Now, that sent a Popsicle straight up the old backbone. Not that it should be that much of a surprise, though, if this clown could peruse folks’ gray matter like strolling the aisles at Wal-Mart….

Only how much has he been shoplifting?

Goldie tried for an offhanded manner. “Mine doesn’t come off, try as I might.”

The other shrugged as if discarding an overcoat draped over his shoulders, and with no seeming transition he was suddenly human, or appeared so; a pale, lean man with sickly white hair and long, nicotine-stained fingers holding the same cigarette, appraising the world with the same blind eyes.

“How’d you get from here to South Dakota?” Goldie asked, figuring he might as well advance a few more feet along the tightrope, try to glean as much as he could.

“An itinerant lecturer passing through on sabbatical recognized this untouchable, this invisible one with the phenomenal gift for numbers, for abstract thought. Was it any more unlikely than Einstein working as a patent clerk? No, although I was somewhat more striking than dear Albert, more compliant…. And so I was spirited away to Cornell and the Ivory Tower.”

Goldie found his mouth was dry. He licked his lips, tried to keep his voice level. “You know my name…” he prompted.

The corner of the other’s mouth lifted in the barest trace of a smile. “In life, I was known as Marcus Sanrio….”

Bingo, a moniker right off the list of Source Project mucky-mucks, director of the whole nine yards, in fact.

It may not have been Hawaii, Goldie realized, but he felt a vibrating certainty within himself (like that endless chord on Sergeant Pepper’s ) that odds-on he was talking to the Big Kahuna himself. No floating green head with a man behind the curtain, but the man himself.

“So I’ll ask again,” Goldie repeated, striving to sound casual, to sound anything but what he truly was. “Who’s in charge here?”

Sanrio looked off into the distance and considered; not the answer, Goldie realized, but whether to answer at all. He parted his lips, and let the ghost vapor of the cigarette curl lazily from his mouth, the smoke gray-white like his empty dead eyes.

“It’s a collective, of a sort,” he said languorously, at last. “But as for the governing aesthetic…you could say that it’s mine.”

Bingo again.

So the only question now, Herman Goldman knew, was how best to kill him.

It’s like tearing through different flats on a theater stage, Cal Griffin thought, ripping away layer after layer of illusion.

Along with Inigo and Tina (who still stared blankly at him, seeming not to recognize him at all), Cal had managed to utilize his armor to burst through the barriers and reunite them with Colleen and Doc, then reach Mama Diamond, Howard Russo and Enid Blindman. As he suspected, they weren’t far apart at all, just separated by walls of different settings, like themed rooms at some fantasy hotel.

So now here they were, Cal and Colleen in the lead, bursting through tiers of unreality in search of Larry Shango and Goldie.

“Cripes, what’s the deal here?” moaned Howie. “I mean, why not just kill us and get it over with? I do not need to be seeing that 1976 production of The Fantasticks again.”

“Old Devil likes his games, Howie,” said Enid. “But don’t you be dissin’ it. We still breathin’ here.”

“It seems to be rooting around in our minds,” offered Mama Diamond. “Searching out the threat to it there.”

True enough, thought Cal. But given what Doc and Colleen had told him of their forays in mock Russia and Thailand (Mama Diamond pointedly choosing not to share what picture postcard had been summoned from her memory; Cal’s quick glimpse of it revealing only that it looked like some kind of prisoner camp), the answer seemed more complex, the motivation and purpose of what set the scene and manipulated the players more diverse. Perhaps the Consciousness at the Source was not simply homogenous malaise in a bottle; maybe there were majority and minority opinions at work here, discrepancies and deviations….

“You got an opinion on this?” Cal asked Inigo.

Inigo looked furtive, hunched his shoulders. “I don’t ask questions.”

“Yup,” Howie agreed, “that’s always served me pretty well, kid-leastways, till now ….” He shot Inigo a grin.

Cal caught the look of gratitude on the boy’s face, of recognition; the two grunters were outcasts both, even among their own kind.

Abruptly, they punched through to Goldie. He was standing beneath the swaying palms on a bustling, old-fashioned resort street, talking to a lanky old man blanched as an albino.

Cal heard Inigo suck in his breath. “Aw, man …” He sounded profoundly dismayed.

“It’s the second blind man,” Tina murmured, gazing at the old man. She turned her face to Enid and whispered enigmatically, “You’re the third.” Cal wondered who the first might be, and had an inkling he just might know.

“Who is that?” Cal asked Inigo.

“Sanrio,” Inigo said.

Cal shot Doc and Colleen a glance; they all knew that name from the list.

“Is he real?” Doc asked.

“That’s kinda complicated,” Inigo replied. “But yeah, mostly. Listen, we gotta get outta here before he spots us.”

But it was already too late. Cal saw that Sanrio had raised his head and spied them. Sanrio canted his head upward, as if in silent supplication, both a prayer and a summons.

A tumult rose up from ahead of them, insane shrieks of rage and belligerence, growing in volume.

Cal motioned for Colleen to flank him. “Get behind us,” he told the others; his and Colleen’s armor would help shield them from whatever the flare matter formed itself into.