Ghostlands

TEN

The snow no longer falling, Cal sought out a spot thirty yards behind the Sears Automotive Center, given over now to the wind and a solitary gray owl circling overhead in a last foray as the night wore down. Big stacks of worn-out truck tires provided a windbreak there, and the ground was soft enough to bury Big Mike deep and away from the predations of men or beasts. Doc expertly closed the dead man’s wound, then Mike Kimmel and Flo Speakman washed the body and found enough discarded garments left in the Big and Tall Men’s Shop to lay Olifiers out in fresh, if musty, new clothes.

From Manhattan to Boone’s Gap to Chicago to the Fun Place in Iowa, Cal thought. Another Kodak moment. Another funeral.

As he helped Kimmel and Doc and Colleen enfold the body in a king-size silk sheet recovered from Macy’s (in their travels, it always surprised Cal the incongruity and illogic of which items were scavenged and which remained), Cal surveyed Olifiers’s beefy, innocent face, saw the release, the look of serenity there.

Big Mike had paid his life out, sacrificed it in a moment, for him, for Cal.

And why?

They need you, he had said, or tried to, in his last dying moments.

“I don’t have the answer,” Cal had pleaded with him earlier that night.

And unshaken, Olifiers had simply replied, “Nobody else even seems to know the question.”

No more running for Olifiers, no more fear. Just, at the end of the road, certainty.

The moon dipped low over the powdered earth as the long night waned, and they lowered Big Mike into the ground by the light of Goldie’s spheres, lowered him with the lengths of chain their attackers had brought to drag Big Mike and his kindred back to slavery.

Free now.

All of them stood along the gravesite, Al Watt and Krystee Cott and Rafe Dahlquist and the others, and they looked to Cal to say something.

But what was there to say?

The man with the question…

Unfortunately, Olifiers had never gotten around to discussing with Cal just what that question might be. Certainly there were any number of tantalizing items on the menu, mouthwatering delicacies laced with cyanide….

What dark mentality lay at the heart of the Source? What was stealing away flares? Why was it stealing them away? What integral piece was Fred Wishart in that equation, or the other scientists on the list Agent Shango had given Cal in the woods of Albermarle County-Marcus Sanrio or Agnes Wu or Pollard or Sakamoto or any of the rest?

I don’t know how to beat it, Cal had told Colleen.

But standing in the fierce November wind looking down at the hole gouged in the earth like a bloody wound, Cal knew the question the currency of Olifiers’s death had purchased him.

How do we beat it?

Cal’s eyes moved along the somber, calm faces of Olifiers’s mourners. The fact of any of their deaths was no surprise to them, given the lives they’d been living, only the specific time and place of it.

Rafe Dahlquist, the physicist; Krystee Cott, who had been a soldier; Al Watt, who knew how to find information; so very many of them…

With the skills he would need.

Not to mention Goldie and Doc and Colleen.

Cal had been laboring so hard to find excuses to jettison those traveling with him, to safeguard them, to shield himself from responsibility and guilt and loss.

But if he was going to accomplish anything, if Olifiers’s life and death were going to have any meaning at all, Cal wouldn’t have time for such luxuries.

The one he needed to jettison was himself.

Print the Legend….

He saw that Colleen was watching him intently, almost as though she could read his mind. And why not? She had been the first to throw in her lot with him, before Goldie, before Doc. Before any of the warriors and wayfarers and holy fools that had accompanied them for a time.

He realized he would need many of them back again before this was done.

“Big Mike was the first of you to die,” Cal said, by way of eulogy. “But if you follow me, he won’t be the last.”

Then he told them everything he knew about the Source.

Cal found Goldie in the heart of the mall, squatting at the top of the escalator, peering into the darkness, the nothingness of the vast, brooding space. Since he had dispatched Perez’s magic man, pulverized or transported him to parts unknown, killed or banished him, Goldie had said little, done what was asked of him, kept his distance, deeply shaken and withdrawn, and folded in on himself.

“‘Your old men will see visions…’” Cal intoned softly, climbing the stilled metal steps until he stood just below him, his face level with Goldie as he crouched.

“‘Your young men will dream dreams,’” Goldie completed the quotation. Revelation, what Goldie had said to him on that day of days, just before the world had come spinning to a halt and they had been thrown together, launched on this mad, uncertain trajectory.

“It’s a bitch to be lead dog,” Cal said.

Goldie nodded. “Canary in a coal mine’s no Swiss picnic, either.”

“Got any line on what you did with Eddie back there?”

“Nope. Just did it.”

“Are you getting better at this, Goldie…or is it getting the better of you?”

“This multiple choice?”

“I’ve got this twitchy feeling we’re getting close real soon, ready or not.”

“Yeah, I’ve got that feeling, too.”

“We’ll need every trick we can muster, every reinforcement along the way.”

“Portals aren’t a snap to open, Cal; it’s not like making a call. Correction, like making a call-”

“Used to be, I know.” Cal sighed. So much of their associations were what used to be, as if they themselves were lingering ghosts who didn’t know when to depart. “Look, I’m not asking for miracles…okay, I guess I am. Get as good as you can, as fast as you can. Ask for what you need. Don’t be a solo act.”

Goldie was staring off into the darkness again, enclosed in solitude. Cal grabbed his shoulder, forced his attention. “We’re family here, Goldie,” he said, and meant it.

“I’ve done family,” Goldie replied darkly, in his unshared, black memories. He turned to Cal at last, and smiled wanly. “What you’ve worked up here trumps it, believe me.”

Then he added, “I’ll do my best, Cal, really and truly. But take some advice from the unsettled set-have a fallback plan…. And if you need at any propitious moment to ditch me as thoroughly as Jerry Lewis dumped Dino, then you do it, and do not look back. You got that?”

Cal nodded, hoping he wouldn’t need to, not knowing if he could.

They sat a long time in the dark, sharing the silence.

While Colleen and Doc took morning watch, Cal returned to the gutted Waldenbooks with the torch Perez had discarded. What remained of the stock was patchy, but sufficient to Cal’s purpose.

Extinguishing the flame, he settled himself beside a crack in the wall where a shaft of dawnlight filtered through, and began to read.

He started with Martin Luther King, Jr.’s A Call to Conscience.

Soon enough, he would move on to Sun-Tzu’s The Art of War.

Cal didn’t realize he’d fallen asleep until an awareness of a nearby presence startled him awake, adrenaline surging in him. He threw himself back and grabbed for the sword at his hip. But the misshapen figure didn’t move.

It stood watching him silently in the shadowed part of the room, away from the shaft of daylight, the dust motes dancing in the air.

From its shape, Cal could tell the creature was a grunter, and for an instant he thought it was Brian Forbes, the one he had liberated from Perez, and who had asked to join him. (Curious how a small minority of the grunters, like Howard Russo and Forbes, lacked the viciousness of their brethren, sharing only the same air of forlornness and pain.)

But then Cal saw that this grunter was smaller. And even though he was smaller, even in the dimness, Cal could glean from his body language and the expression on his face and a thousand subtle other things that he was far more formidable than either Russo or Forbes.

“My name is Inigo,” the grunter boy said.

Having seen The Princess Bride on countless occasions-it was a ritual with Cal and Tina to watch it together on her rare sick days, in the close times before her life had been consumed by ballet and his by law-Cal half expected him to complete the statement with, “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”

But thanks to the deeper education his mother had given him before her death, Cal also knew of another Inigo, Inigo Jones, a renowned British architect of the Renaissance, who had studded the realm with glorious palaces, churches and halls.

So which Inigo’s spirit would this inhuman boy embody-the builder…or the destroyer?

“There’s somewhere you need to go,” he told Cal.