Ghostlands

EIGHTEEN

Underground, in the dark, untenanted and unrecalled, the cavernous space held the smell of the earth, of only the soil now, no air handlers processing it, sanitizing it to nullity. To one of the intruders, the dead controls and silent alarms, the corridors snaking off to infinity, presented themselves as clearly lit as if by a camera flash. To the other, the darkness beyond the periphery of the musty blue light was total.

But it still felt like home.

After all, Herman Goldman reflected, there wasn’t a whole hell of a lot of difference between the tunnels under New York and a missile silo beneath the Iowa sod, other than that one tended to the horizontal, the other to the vertical-once the subway trains and nuclear missiles were rendered a historical footnote.

Inigo stood staring quizzically at him in the pale light of the roiling sphere, and Goldie knew the inhuman little Caliban would just as soon sprint off into the blackness as give him the time of day-but that fear and curiosity held him rooted there.

“Why’d you do that?” Inigo asked, with a quaver of uncertainty, like his voice was about to crack. “Up there. I thought she was your friend.” He meant Colleen, whom Goldie had left rolling on the ground as if trying to dig a hole to China, temporarily blinded and helpless when (to mangle unapologetically “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”) he had loosed the terrible swift sword of his lightning against her.

“Hey, I’m from New York, we don’t have friends.”

Which got exactly the look from the pint-size gnome it deserved. Goldie grew serious. “Colleen Brooks is altogether too formidable for me to give her half a chance to work up a good head of steam. She’d wipe the floor with me, not to mention the windows and baseboards.”

He knew that didn’t answer the question, not at all, not really. It was merely the what, not the why of the act. But how could he answer that, even to himself, measure out the dimensions of ambush and betrayal, when he had no clear notion, no answer other than that he had acted wholly upon impulse?

And that it was only the beginning….

“So how ’bout you riddle me a thing or two, eh, little buddy?” Goldie went on. “Like why you were making such a beeline for this retro artifact of what was once laughingly referred to as the Balance of Terror? Not for its piquant charm, certainly. And don’t say you were intent on homesteading.”

Inigo hesitated, debating his answer. Then he said quietly, “You want to let me go.”

“Aw no, I don’t think that’s the sine qua non of the ideal answer, pardon my French. Two more to go.”

Inigo looked at his feet.

“And while you’re ruminating on a verb or two, let me just add an inquiry as to precisely how you knew to lead us to the delightful hamlet of Imaginary Corpse Town. Or for that matter, how you grokked what went down in Wind City, and the enigmatic little tchotchke Colleen laid with such refreshing venom on Primal. Why, you’re just a walking yellow pages of mysteries and miracles, you are, Boy Wonder.”

The babbling, effervescent torrent of words warned Goldie that he was inching way over into the red zone, majorly in danger of full-tilt out-of-control-dom.

And didn’t this infuriating, distorted, stunted, sad little boy only know he was throwing fuel on the fire by pulling this wordless Jesus-before-Herod crap?

“Okay,” Goldie sighed. “I’m gonna turn over all the cards.”

He reached out his hands, and crazy energy bubbled out of them, building in intensity.

Soon, he knew, Inigo would begin to scream.

I don’t want to do this, the tiny soft voice inside Goldie said.

But then came the answering self, the grim, dark presence that was increasingly finding purchase in the desolate stone landscape within him.

You ain’t got a choice, Jack. Not and get to the church on time.

On other occasions, he had heard the murmuring voices in his head, the iron railroad spikes driven deep into his mind, had known them for the dissonant thrum of the Storm, the Source like the ultimate Benzedrine-mainlining Stravinsky chorus, the distant chaos land of power and enslavement and release. He had scuttled frantically away then, pushed his consciousness far from them to survive, to salvage some distinct notion of himself, of who he was and (here he had to force himself not to laugh) what he stood for.

Get thee behind me, Satan…and don’t push.

For Herman Goldman, this was anything but academic.

For long ago, in a galaxy far, far away known as Manhattan, New York, he had met the gentleman with the inimitable headgear and sunburn to die for.

And wasn’t that a topic for casual after-dinner conversation….

He had been a grad student in his penultimate year, teaching-and please stifle your guffaws, ladies and germs-a course at NYU in Beginning Psych (having by then jettisoned his equally laughable pursuit of law) for the third dismal semester in a row, spewing it out by rote, no improvisation allowed, please, he had the patter down cold. Transference, anima and animus, borderline personality disorder, chronic narcissism, you name it, A to Z in the DSM-IV.

Droning on to the bored undergrads with their butts planted in those uncomfortable wooden amphitheatre seats because they’d rather have a marginal shot at a future than just eat the damn twelve-gauge now. Herman (he was called Herman then, not yet Goldie) smiled again at the cute Anorexia Lite girl in the third row like Feiffer’s Dance to Spring, when he suddenly noticed-

The Devil, sitting right there in the front row, grinning at him like…well, like the Devil.

Herman blinked his eyes, hard, then blinked them again.

But the sonofabitch was still there.

Not such a bad-looking guy, actually. But then Satan began to needle him, really get his goat, heckle the hell out of him. It took all of Herman’s concentration to keep lecturing, to act like he was ignoring the bastard.

Didn’t the freak with the wings have any better place to be?

At which point, the Dark Angel pulled his trump card, levitated the whole damn class right up to the ceiling and held them there.

So Herman kept lecturing up at them where they floated. In due time, they settled back down en masse into their seats, still as shit-ass bored-looking as ever, and the bell rang.

One of them, a pimply sophomore named Lenny Hoff-mayer, sidled up to him at the lectern. “’Scuse me, Mr. Goldman, um, why were you talking up at the ceiling for a while there?”

“Well, because that’s where you were,” Herman shot back, offended.

Lenny didn’t stick around. The rest of the students had filed out, too. Only the Devil remained.

In fact, he stuck around for days. Going everywhere Herman went, engaging him in long philosophical debates. Herman was surprised to find out the guy was actually more optimistic than he was himself.

And because Herman Goldman had his line of patter, his syllabus, so stone-cold down, he found he could continue his lecture schedule without breaking a sweat, punch his clock same as regular, in essence pull the wool over everyone’s eyes.

After that first class, no one tumbled to the fact that Herman Goldman had an extra passenger aboard.

Then, after a few days, he clicked back to normal like the reset button had been pushed, and realized he’d been hallucinating. Which surprisingly, rather than filling him with dread, gave him an odd sense of security.

He’d always feared that if he ever went crazy, he’d stay that way.

But some inner equilibrium had kicked in, brought him back to the air-bubble-smack-dab-in-the-center-of-the-liquid level of sanity.

And here was the key thing, the relevant part-he realized that Satan had not been anything other than…himself.

Just as in this breathless moment, in the flat heart of the country a thousand feet down, in the vast, dead home that had ever-so-recently housed a chummy nuclear family of MIRVs, the implacable voice telling him to torture this helpless Changed boy was none other than-

Himself.

And he had no idea, no idea at all, if this time he could reel it back in.

On the road to Atherton, the new recruit to the fold, the little gray brother named Brian Forbes, had told Inigo everything Herman Goldman had done to the fake policeman in the snowstorm night outside the Gateway Mall.

Standing now in the missile silo, his stunted back to the gunmetal wall, with absolutely nowhere to run and Goldie staring at him with an intense, anguished expression while his open hands erupted hot radiance like a pair of Fourth of July sparklers on steroids, young Master Inigo Devine had a nasty feeling he was about to be on the receiving end of a sensation a whole hell of a lot like it.

He screwed his eyes tight, tried to brace himself for what was coming, something far worse than riding a hell-bound train, or climbing down a freakin’ missile silo….

But then there was a cry that came, not from Inigo, but from nearby, and went echoing off into the void. Inigo opened his eyes in time to see Goldie collapse onto his knees, see the light from his hands flicker out.

“I’m sorry, oh God, I’m sorry….” Goldman reached out to him in supplication and shame-although, Inigo realized, Goldie had stopped himself, had not done anything (short of scaring the shit out of him).

Which was when the Big Zap happened.

It was like Inigo’s mind was a battery suddenly discharging, shooting a flood of raw images into Goldie’s mind, one huge, mentally migraining mindburst, a zillion-mile-an-hour blur made up of bits and pieces that might (or might not) be Tina, Papa Sky, New York or something like it, and…and…

“The Source.” Goldie was gasping, dry-mouthed. “You came from the Source.”

Inigo didn’t need to say anything. Goldie knew. At least, that much of it.

And Judas Priest, this was dangerous, because now that it was out of his mind and into Goldie’s, it was way possible-

You Know Who might be able to hear it.

“Quiet,” Inigo hissed, sitting up now, every nerve like burnt insulation and sizzling wire. “The Big Bad Thing-”

But he shouldn’t even say that, shouldn’t name It. Goldman shot him a wide-eyed, questioning look, but didn’t press it.

“You’re going back there,” Goldie said instead. “You know where it is.” He grabbed Inigo by the shoulders, crouching there at his level as the globe started to gutter and long fingers of darkness enfolded them. “Take me with you.”

Inigo shook his head slowly. “It would burn you up in the turnstile, It does that.”

Goldie nodded solemnly, fortunately accepting (maybe thanks to the connection they’d just had) that he was telling the truth. No way in, no argument, and no talking about it, either.

It would burn you up.

Suddenly, from far down one of the corridors, came a sound like a marathon of barefoot runners, moving fast, growing in volume and then diminishing again, passing them by.

Inigo gave it all a furtive look.

“That something you can talk about?” Goldie asked him.

And fuck it, they were so worn out, and both oddly thrown together in this brutal journey neither had invited nor relished, that Inigo told him.

“Little gray brothers, I guess you call ’em-us-grunters…” He shrugged, and said simply, “They’re digging across the country.”

Goldie looked like Charlie Brown after Lucy yanked away the football, agape.

“Old mines,” Inigo continued. “Subway tunnels, storage facilities, caverns, anything underground basically. They’re connecting them all up, so they don’t have to go out in the air much, where there’s sun and stuff.”

Goldie, who’d had diarrhea of the mouth only moments before, was speechless. Then he rallied. “That’s nuts. I mean, Buddha on a Popsicle stick, do you know how many homunculi a stunt like that would take?”

“A friend of mine”-Inigo studiously avoided naming Papa Sky-“says maybe one in seventy-five turned into gray guys, maybe one in fifty. That makes somethin’ like two, three million of us, just here in the States alone.”

“Yeah, but not every one of you-”

“More and more of ’em diggin’ in every day, least that’s what I hear. I mean, I’ll tell ya, that UV’s a bitch.”

“It’s not possible. The whole country?”

“Well…” Inigo hesitated. “When they hit something they can’t go though, they find a way…around. There’s guys like you.”

Goldie’s eyes flashed, and there was that crazy scary determination again. “Guys like me. You mean, who can do some of the stuff I can do?”

Inigo nodded. On the road to Atherton, he had heard of Goldie’s knack with portals. And while portals could be finicky and selective-the more so depending on who wielded the power-they certainly cut down on travel time.

“Some are volunteers, some are drafted,” Inigo said of those with the gift. Captured he meant, held as slaves, like Olifiers and his group, but with different masters, to a different purpose.

Goldie was squeezing Inigo’s shoulder again, hard now. “Who’s the best you know?”

Inigo couldn’t tell him the best he knew, not personally. But he could tell him the best he’d heard of.

And fearing that Goldie-or the part of Goldie that was nothing like the rest of him-might change his mind and turn the juice on, Inigo showed him how to get there.

Moving quickly through dark passages, Goldie could sense the telltale membranes, the fading shut doorways where the connective tissues of the world were particularly permeable. For a time after they were opened, even those without the special gift, without the power to make things part, might still be able to pass through the doors.

Inigo led him to exactly the right spot, where the wall glowed in just exactly the right way. The boy was too terrified to pass through, but Goldie still had that strange connectedness to him, the vibe that let him know the boy had led him true, was pulling no shell game of bait and switch.

He let the boy go, and Inigo took off running full-out, back the way he came, all too glad to be let off the hook.

Goldman, however, pressed on.

He passed through the shimmering portal to parts unknown, felt the queasy, familiar sensation of being transported to someplace far from the point of origin, hundreds, perhaps thousands of miles away.

The best you know…

The Man with the Power. And Goldie would need that power, would need every trick he could glean, every skill and talent he might derive.

Emerging through onto the other side, he found himself in a dark corridor, the only sound the mausoleum-knock of his footsteps. He willed another globe rolling brilliant onto his hand and crept forward.

Then froze in his tracks.

Ahead of him, as far as the eye could see, metal spikes projected diagonally up out of the wall.

With heads stuck on them.

Big heads, far larger than any human would have-any normal human, at least.

His stomach lurching, throat in his mouth, Goldie forced his feet to move, forced himself to approach the nearest of the hideous trophies. He reached out and felt it, found to his relief and amazement that it was not flesh but rubber instead.

The heads, the heads were all masks, huge and grotesque, of mice and dogs and tigers and bears, of dwarfs and a rootless boy who led other Lost Boys.

Incredibly, he knew them, or at least recognized them from childhood years sitting planted in front of the TV screen. With a sense of disorientation and homecoming, he began to suspect just where he might be.

Continuing on, he discovered a stairway that led up to a closed metal door. He opened it, and it swung outward, surprisingly silent. A balmy night wind met him as he stepped onto level ground, with no hint of Midwestern chill.

Everything was dark, of course, and some of it was far different than he remembered it from long ago, when he had come here with his parents.

There was no Skyway, no Rocket to the Moon.

And, most significantly, no people.

At least, none of the human variety…

The puny, gnarled creatures scurried this way and that in their huddled groups, muttering nastily to themselves, one group chasing down a rat, pouncing on it with teeth and claws, consuming it alive.

Sounds like needle jabs drew Goldie’s attention, and he realized that it was demented, high laughter. He spied a bunch of the loathsome little curs swinging on the unmoving arms of the familiar framework he recalled from his youth. They clambered up into the fiberglass cars so artfully formed into the shape of grinning, flying elephants.

They were everywhere, had overrun the place, claimed it as their own.

A real E-ticket ride…

The grunters in the Magic Kingdom.