Marc Zicree - Ghostlands

The memories that were the totality of Dr. Fred Wishart.

Oh God… Goldie thought, and he’d have tossed his cookies right then and there, if he’d had cookies to toss or a stomach to toss them from.

“Where am I?” Goldie asked.

“You know that, don’t you?” Fred Wishart said.

Yeah. Yeah, he did….

Beyond Wishart, he could sense murmurings, harmonies and cacophonies of other minds. He extended his consciousness outward, tentatively brushed the other dominant psyches held in thrall there. Sakamoto and Agnes Wu, St. Ives and Pollard, and the other names he knew full well from Larry Shango’s list.

And out beyond them, like an asteroid belt or Oort Cloud of mentalities, lesser minds, banked down, orbiting, tethered fast.

Thousands and thousands of them…

The flares.

He could sense them distantly without even trying, sense their variant stories, their divergent histories, each an individual who’d once been human, once had a family.

Trapped here.

No leaving, and no hiding place…

He could invade them, pick the lock on the strongbox of memory, pilfer their thoughts and keepsakes, just as Wishart had done with him, and he with Wishart.

But beyond them, within them, he sensed another thing, resonant and myriad….

“The flares hold all the minds they have touched,” Wishart said, discerning his thought. “Even those who have gone before.”

Oh sweet Lord, Herman Goldman thought, the impossible, wild hope born suddenly within him. He extended his mind like a great hand stretching out, passing through the multitudinous awareness like a mighty wind striking many trees as it roared through a forest.

And at last, at last, at last…he found her.

Magritte.

Not alive and whole, not all of her, but the essence, the core, preserved, held pristine.

He inhaled her, embraced and enfolded her, took her into himself and made her inseparable, as he had once recognized the one he’d labeled the Devil as himself, as he had once welcomed madness.

The part of him grown bitter and mean since her senseless, pitiless death-that had jettisoned mercy and nearly tortured a poor innocent grunter boy in the missile silo back in Iowa, and had tried so desperately to kill Marcus Sanrio, that Thing who was no longer a man-dissolved like thirst in quenching waters.

For the first time in his life, and despite the fact that he had no body, Herman Goldman knew that he was whole, and healed, and sane.

Then everything outside him fell away, and all was Fred Wishart’s futile, terrified warning.

“He rises!”

And a mind at center, all the other wills revolving about it and lending it certitude and power, brought its scrutiny to bear on Herman Goldman.

YOU KNOW A GOOD DEAL I CAN USE, it thought at him, utterly remorseless and cold.

Marcus Sanrio went into Herman Goldman’s mind and emptied it, turned it inside out and shook it like a pocket on a pair of jeans.

The pain was appalling, and went on and on. Goldie screamed and knew there was nothing he could hold back, no secret he could keep, no sanctuary set aside.

It was crazy badness, and it was only going to get worse.

But Goldie had known craziness before, and he could ride this wave, even as it shattered him and blew him apart.

With the last bit of will he could muster, he envisioned a board beneath his feet, a board he could ride.

The board was Magritte.

Soon you’ll be past the pain…where no one can touch you, Ely Stern had said.

It had been night then, too, but not bone-cold like this, no, sticky-hot and humid, where the summer air plastered your clothes to your skin and all you wanted to do was shear a hydrant clear off its base so the cooling geyser would give you some momentary relief.

Not that he’d been wearing clothes by then…unless you counted the pebbled, iridescent black leather that was a second skin to him; his appalling, magnificent dragon’s hide.

He had flown up to perch atop the night-wreathed tower overlooking the dying city that had been New York. Flown up with the delicate mutating girl whom he had fancied his guest, although other, less generous souls might have dubbed her his captive. She was shaking, wracked with delirium, blue devil fire eddying about her, altering her cell by cell, remaking her into something new and strange and fine.

Incredible that, at that point, she’d been the only one he’d seen touched by the hand of destiny like himself; he’d even fancied the two of them might be the only such in the world. Now he knew there were thousands, millions like them; the post-human beings.

Not that the knowledge made him feel any less alone.

In his fear and impulsiveness and solitude, he had seized her away from her home and the brother who raised her, the one who had once been his employee, and brought her to this barren rooftop to complete her metamorphosis, not merely into this new, inhuman form, but into his companion, his confidante.

What madness.

He had worried she might be frightened, but if she was she’d masked it and-in spite of her fever, of the pain coursing through bone and muscle and flesh-had substituted defiance.

“‘What monstrosities would walk the streets were men’s faces as unfinished as their minds,’” he’d exulted, quoting the philosopher Hoffer, and adding that, to him, they wouldn’t be monstrosities but rather masterpieces, rendered beautiful by their undeniable truth.

Then he’d offered her the world.

“I don’t want your world,” she’d replied, and ran staggering to fling herself off the building.

What fire, what glorious certainty and contempt.

She hadn’t known then- couldn’t have known-that in time, like him, she’d be able to fly. And at that moment, still more human than not, she couldn’t have; she’d have plummeted a thousand feet and died.

She would have, too, if not for the timely arrival of her brother, with his bravado and ridiculous sword, intent on saving her from the monster.

From him.

So he and Cal Griffin had gone on their wild ride flying through the black skyscraper canyons of New York, the aerobatic danse de mort that had culminated in his big-shouldered reptilian self getting skewered like a shish kebob at a sidewalk falafel stand.

A night of surprises all round, as he, not the girl, had fallen eighty stories to the unyielding pavement below, to hear his bones smash like a bag of glass and have nothingness enfold him like leather wings.

Then, like a tentative touch on his shoulder, rousing him to agonized half-consciousness, the sound of echoing light footsteps, a tapping cane.

And the querulous words “How we doin’ there?…” in a voice that crackled like autumn leaves.

“I’ve had…better days,” Stern had croaked through the pain, which elicited a laugh that had no meanness in it, that shared a wealth of understanding and suffering.

“Well, you just take it slow,” Papa Sky had answered, putting a gentle hand on his bloody, broken hide. “We gonna see what we can do about that.”

The old blind man had been a fool. To take him in, to nurse him back to health. What could it possibly bring him, except the likelihood of an abruptly shortened life and painful death?

Not that Stern would have wanted that; it was just the way things tended to sort themselves out. It was a violent world, and to survive one had to take violence on.

But that wasn’t how things had worked out.

Immobilized, lying in Papa Sky’s ludicrously cramped flat, in his absurdly small bed, Stern had found himself with nothing to do with his time but talk.