Marc Zicree - Ghostlands

They were in the great hall now, Cal was sure of that, but there was no way to see that, because the Big Bad Thing was reaching into their minds, summoning forth all their bleakest memories and best-beloveds, the cornucopia and totality of their lives, to shape into solid form from the unborn clay, the writhing power at its command-to hurl these bloodless facsimiles at them to rip out their hearts, to kill them stone-cold dead.

The Ghost Dance Shirts Cal and his companions wore were growing less persuasive-perhaps there was a limit, a fading terminus to their power-and so they needed the added impetus of steel and grit and brawn.

“Torment me not, you fraudulent things!” Doc was yelling, his English growing absurdly formal with the stress, as he flashed his machetes and cut to ribbons the pustulent, glowing radioactive forms in ragged uniforms and other trappings, the dead of Chernobyl whom Cal knew Doc had tried to save long ago, and failed. There were others, too, Cal saw, a willowy woman and small girl, who flung themselves at Doc.

Doc could not bear to cut at them, but shoved them hard away; and Stern roasted them to whispers.

Colleen, too, was up to her elbows in a rogues’ gallery of men and women summoned from all the hours of her life, who launched themselves hissing at her. Women in business attire and tatty thrift-shop dresses, men in overalls and T-shirts and work clothes-and most notable of all, a handsome, weathered simulacrum of a man in an Air Force uniform that Cal saw she had the hardest time of all slicing and taking down, but did so with grim determination, her eyes brimming with tears.

It was the same for all of them, for Shango and Mama Diamond and Papa Sky, for Howard Russo and Enid, May Catches the Enemy and Inigo, Christina, too. A relentless, unceasing force cobbled up into the specifics of elderly Asians, young Nisei men in Army uniforms, camp guards, old black church ladies in their Sunday best, roadies and hophead musicians with dreamy grins and lethal hands, tribal elders and sun-wizened earth mothers, hot young gas station mechanics…

And children, children like a maddened, stampeding herd, predator-crazed into blind, rushing panic, tousle-haired and rumpled, freckled and dewy-eyed, friends and schoolmates and neighborhood kids dust-deviled into solidity, driving at them to knock them down and trample them to death.

As all about them, buildings rose and shifted and fell, the counterfeit sky wheeled and stormed and cleared and stormed again, mountains thundered up and avalanched to dust, desert plain gave way to skyscraper canyon and black, turbulent shore, shearing off and re-forming from the evanescent landscapes in their minds.

But not once, never once, showing the true form of what lay only yards beyond…

“Where is It?!” Cal screamed again at Stern, as he drove his sword clear through the shape that was wholly his dead mother made flesh again, forcing himself to feel nothing, or as close to it as he could come.

Stern tried to speak, but there were dozens of forms like humans flinging themselves atop him, bringing him down with their sheer weight, swarming. Some Cal recognized as replicas of Stern’s former clients and underlings, while others-beautiful, contemptuous women; elderly, corpulent men-he didn’t know.

Stern flipped his hulking body and rolled on the ground, trying to extinguish them like flame. But then even more were on him.

Still, he managed, with a wild gesture, to fling an arm out toward a space some feet behind Cal.

Cal cracked the hilt of his blade into the face of the fourteen-year-old girl who’d been his first love, sending her flailing back away from him, and turned to face what lurked behind him.

The air quivered about him; Cal had the strong sensation that whatever lay hidden there sensed his intention. The illusory stores and tenements and shacks about him gave way as the real stone walls on either side of him trembled, fractured and extended out in hard gray fingers, crushing together to form an insensate wall blocking him from whatever was sheltered and watching from within.

Then the stone shuddered and reached out for him.

Cal grasped his sword hard in both hands and braced himself. The blade had hewn steel, had cut the hell-bound train in two.

But what about stone?

Well, hell, he’d pulled it from Goldie’s towering trash heap in the tunnels under Manhattan, hadn’t he? Just like some postmodern Excalibur…

But Jesus Christ, that didn’t make it Excalibur!

It didn’t matter, none of that mattered, only that he see what was on the other side of that wall, see what was true.

Pray to see what’s real, May Catches the Enemy had told him, and you will.

In the instant before the rock could seize him and crush the life out of him, Cal turned to Our Strange Man and his followers, the sacred dead ones in the midst of the fray.

“Brothers!” he cried out. “Help me!”

They and their war ponies curled in on themselves, turned to vapor and surged over Cal like a cleansing stream, flowed past him along his arms into the holy blade, which gleamed and throbbed and sang with the power of the sky and the water and the land.

Cal brought the sword down hard as the cold stone reached him, and there was a cry like every wild, crazed beast in the unseen places of the world, and the stone wall shattered to pieces and fell away.

Cal saw what lay behind it, and gasped.

People, they had once been people, maybe a dozen of them, men and women, some old, some not, it was hard to tell. Melted together, flowing like wax into an obscenity that was all horrified, screaming mouths and nightmare eyes resembling nothing so much as the ruined, melted stone heads on Rushmore itself.

But worse, indescribably worse.

Vestigial limbs like unformed, aborted fetuses, patches of brittle black-brown, golden-white hair erupting higgledy-piggledy from blotchy, pitted skin with infection runneling down from uncounted, unsealing wounds.

And most nightmarish, most unthinkable of all…it was still alive.

The scientists of the Source Project, Marcus Sanrio and Fred Wishart and Agnes Wu, Sakamoto and Monteiro and the others, transfigured into this monstrosity when everything went wailing out of control and the energy they had endeavored to seize like Zeus with some lightning bolt had instead seized them.

They had ripped a hole clean through to someplace unimaginably else, and that breach remained gapingly open-was, in fact, still flooding out its savage, ungovernable power from the point at which it had first come thrusting, erupting into this virgin world.

Cal Griffin glared and squinted at the dreadful gash in existence just behind the quivering mass that regarded him with rolling, hateful, terrified eyes; the useless, foul body that housed the gestalt mind Stern and Inigo had called the Big Bad Thing.

The light behind it was blinding black, all color and nothingness, a light that was not a light, not-beingness that was nothing of this universe, that was indescribably other, but that had been called forth into existence here, that had been torn out of elsewhere and was fed, replenished from the unthinkable, unknowable font.

The Source.

Cal couldn’t help staring at it, couldn’t bear seeing it. It was so alien, yet had become as all-encompassing, as much of this world, as the air about him, the fundamental pulse that had changed Stern and Inigo and Christina, Goldie, too-and the helpless multitudes like them.

In that quick-flash moment of perceiving it, Cal sensed that he had been right, that the power itself held no consciousness, no agenda; it was like pure, primal electricity, like the nuclear forces themselves.