Ghostlands

TWENTY-SEVEN

Larry Shango stood atop Sheep Mountain Table in the Badlands of South Dakota and looked west, into nothingness.

It had been a long, hard trek under a merciless summer sun that hung nailed in an endless azure sky. The cracked asphalt of Highway 44 heading west had given way to rutted, cantankerous dirt road. A sudden thunderstorm the day before had reduced the path to a slurry of mud, and although it was drying out quickly in this heat, it was still a bloody mess. He’d been forced to set aside his mountain bike and struggle the rest of the way in on foot.

Frogs heralded his way as he passed remnants of ponds, reeds waving along their perimeter in the small respite of breeze; prairie dogs yipped their echoing calls of alarm to one another like bouncing pings of radar. Amid the tall summer grasses, eroded hillocks of earth fell away, revealing gleaming bits of quartz and the fossil jawbones of departed beasts.

Shango knew he really needn’t make this climb to see what lay ahead; still, some bullheaded part of him-the part he prized most, the part that had allowed him to stay on this side of the veil this long into his remarkable life-insisted he climb to highest ground to verify what his sight informed him, and his instincts confirmed….

That a mile or two ahead to the west lay a shifting wall of nonreality that rose up off the land like the flat of God’s hand, stretching straight up into the burning sky as far as he could see.

It hurt his eyes to look at it, somehow made him feel defiled and unclean. He knew within its borders lay Ellsworth Air Force Base, which he had visited along with the President and his retinue three years back for the dedication of a new bomber. If the B-1Bs and stealth fighters were still there, they were inert as paperweights now.

On that trip, Shango had struck up an acquaintance with Milt and Jamie Lee, documentarians whose specialty was American Indian music and culture, Milt himself being part Oglala Sioux (“Sioux” being a misnomer from the French; “Lakota” among the preferred names). They’d taken him all over the Badlands and Black Hills on a personalized tour, and he’d marveled at a terrain so different from the homes he’d known in New Orleans and D.C.

The Black Hills were so named because of the ponderosa pines that covered them, they’d told him, and in a flurry of fresh snow Milt had pulled the van over and peeled off some fresh bark; Shango had inhaled deeply of its perfume, and found it smelled like butterscotch.

The other predominant sentinels along the way were aspen trees, but Milt told him that too was a misnomer. In reality, a grove of these “trees” was actually one mass entity, its appearance as a group of individuals mere illusion.

Standing on this high tableland now amid the tall grasses, the song of the meadowlark filling the cloudless air, Shango wondered what had become of the pines and the aspen, and Milt and Jamie, too.

In the last few weeks, Shango had reconnoitered around this periphery, keeping his distance, seeing how far it reached. As near as he could tell, the protective barrier ringing the Source Project extended fifty-three miles out in all directions, allowing nothing-even a glimpse-to get through. In its voraciousness, it had swallowed up a good chunk of the Badlands and all of the Black Hills, Rapid City and Mystic and Nemo and Custer, all the way up to Deadwood and down to the Pine Ridge Reservation. Johnson Siding and Thunderhead Falls lay grasped within its nameless boundaries, Beautiful Wonderland Cave and Jewel Cave; Wind Cave, too, where some of the Lakota believed their people had originated. Not to mention (as a billboard on the outskirts trumpeted) the Flintstones’ Bedrock City.

Sacred or profane, ancient or absurdly modern, all were held in thrall to whatever reigned there, brought under its scrutiny and protection.

And whatever went in did not come out.

At least, that’s what the few dogged survivors in this abandoned shadowland had told him, the ones who had not fled to all parts east, west, north and south-the dominant concept being away from this realm of mist and fog and silence.

Most of the ones Shango had encountered as he’d drawn near had been purely mad, hallucinating and delusional. Shango had had no way of knowing whether they’d been driven to this in recent times, or had been always thus and it helped protect them now. Still, for all their crazed pronouncements, there was a kernel of information that stayed consistent from person to person, leading Shango to believe there might be truth there.

So Shango had kept a respectful distance from the swirling fog that was really nothing like fog at all.

But now he was determined to walk right up to it. Because, after all, what else was there for him to do?

Shango had been left with the Source Project as his only objective, a task he had undertaken because no other tasks remained to him.

For Cal, Colleen, Doc and Goldie, the journey cross-country had been strewn with obstacles and detours-perhaps because the Source had sensed their progress and attempted to obstruct them. If that were so, then Shango had managed to fly under the radar. He had simply walked and bicycled his way doggedly west, trading his strength for food, building stone fences or raising barns or bringing in crops, or simply scavenging his meals as he progressed through the more sparsely populated prairie lands.

He had come to the Source with no weapons but a pile-driving hammer and his own wits. He had no real idea what he expected to find nor what he could hope to do about it. He was road-crazy at that point, exhausted beyond reason, running on instinct.

Shango paused and drank from his canteen, swirling the warm water in his mouth. He supposed this was reconnaissance, what he was doing here. But like everywhere else on the perimeter, there was nothing to see.

So he turned back down the muddy, argumentative road and made his way off the tableland, then swung southwest toward Buffalo Gap (or the unseen region that had been Buffalo Gap), deciding to see just how close he could get.

But that was the problem, as it turned out.

At the foot of Sheep Mountain stood a shaded cove of caked earth and stone as tall as two men, projecting from the dry earth like the gnomon of an enormous sundial. Shango ran his hand appreciatively over the cool rock, then abandoned it for the shadeless barrens beyond.

He had walked, by his estimate, a half mile toward the swirling fog and the Source Project beyond when he found himself standing by another similar outcropping of stone. He rested there a moment, savoring the shade. He drank once more from his canteen. The fog seemed no closer. But distance and perspective were tricky, Shango knew, in places like this.

Then he looked down at his feet. A scrawny lizard scuttled away from his high boots. But that wasn’t what astounded him. What astounded him were the pressed tracks in the dusty soil.

Bootprints. Bootprints like his own.

They were his own.

A wave of vertigo washed over him. Somehow he had come full circle, back to the same stony overlook where he had stood scrutinizing the barrier of the Source.

But he had walked consistently toward it….

“Damn,” Shango said aloud. Heat prostration, he thought. Dehydration. He must have turned himself exactly ass-backward.

He rested a good twenty minutes and drank water freely. Then he set out toward the wall of mists again. In places, the soil was loose enough that he was able to follow his own footprints. He was doggedly careful to keep the barrier ahead of him, avoiding gullies that would take him out of line-of-sight, not letting his eyes leave the shifting wall of evanescence that seemed alive and malevolent, for more than a few seconds. And then he came up a slight rocky rise to a pillar of rock-

Full circle.

This was useless, Shango was finally forced to admit. There was a kind of coiled space surrounding the Source Project, a sort of fence. A fence he couldn’t climb, because it was impalpable, immaterial.

What goes in doesn’t come out, the denizens of the Badlands, the crazies, had told him.

What they hadn’t added was how it got in.

He rested his spine against dust-spattered rock and contemplated his next move. Clearly, the Source Project was unapproachable. At least by daylight.

Just east of here and one day back, at the juncture of the White River and Medicine Root Creek, Shango had encountered a balmy white man of indeterminate age, resplendent in eagle and wild turkey feathers and rusted beverage cans, who called himself the King of Empty Spaces and Nickel Redemptions. Although the man studiously avoided looking at the shifting wall stretching up into the sun-wrinkled sky, he clearly knew much about the barrier of vapors and the power it projected.

It’s different at night, the King had said, shuddering at some unspoken memory.

It’s different at night.

We’ll see, thought Shango.

Shango watched the transformation from the shelter of the pillared rock.

As the sun set, the wall of noncorporeality seemed to take life and potency from the gathering dark. Shango had brought with him a pair of costly binoculars, for which he had paid nothing at a deserted camera-and-optical shop in a town called Reliance. By the last of the day’s light he was able to see long streaks of multicolored light glowing and slowly twisting within the mist-structure like contrails illuminated by a sun that had dipped below the horizon.

On other nights at other stopping places, Shango thought he had discerned this phenomenon. This vantage point was the closest he’d gotten to the barricade; despite the hall-of-mirrors trickery played on him, it confirmed his suspicions.

The rainbow of comet tails divided and multiplied, gaining in number until they covered the fogscape like an incandescent quilt some titan might wrap himself in.

Shango could not divine the purpose of this display, but he assumed it was a means of drawing or accumulating energy. The Source, he thought…source of what? Of power. Of preeminence.

What affected the world, Shango suspected, had not simply originated here. It was sustained here, controlled here, manipulated, given its unique nature, its personality.

Shango stood a moment watching the sun slide lower, wondering what his next step should be.

Stealth would gain him nothing. Shango shouldered his hammer and his canteen and walked to the roadway of Bureau of Indian Affairs Route 2 heading west, where in the dimming light the gravel still showed erratically through a skein of drifted dirt.

He set himself firmly on the path, striding deliberately toward the frosty wall of light, like a supplicant or a pilgrim, and this time he was not turned back.

He pierced the skin of the fog, felt it moving damp and electric on his skin, like a convocation of lightning bugs, and curiously smelled hot chocolate and gunpowder and evergreen. He wondered if those smells were truly there, or if something within the fog were somehow conjuring them from the well of his memory.

The last natural light of day fell away, and if there were stars overhead they were lost to the feverish glow of the fog.

Shango moved cautiously forward as the light trails coiled and danced about him, painting their colors on his shiny dark skin and battered clothes and the hammer he bore.

Some yards ahead of him, the haze seemed to be coalescing, gathering itself together into a form. At least, that was the impression it gave; it could be that Shango’s wearied mind was playing tricks on him, that someone was walking toward him through the fog and becoming visible, rather than actually assembling itself from the constituent atoms, drawing into solidity from the particles of mist.

But he didn’t think so.

And as he drew closer to the apparition, he was sure.

What stood in his path was a man-at least, partially. But the texture of its hair and skin, the cable-knit sweater, plaid flannel shirt and faded jeans it wore, were all wrong, constantly shifting and rearranging themselves with subtle, unceasing movement, like an ocean seen from a height or a colony of termites. Rather than being illuminated from the light trails, Shango could see that the creature glowed from within, casting its own muted nimbus onto the vapors about it.

And something even more disconcerting-at times, the phantom looked whole and complete, then in an instant the sweater, shirt and jeans would appear altered, stained and, in some places, torn. The man’s face was ghastly pale, bone peeking here and there through parchment flesh. Part of that face looked as if it had been sandblasted away. Its eyes were cloudy and distant.

A suggestion perhaps-and Shango shuddered at the thought-that this being had been horribly injured at some time in the past.

It was like one of those pictures of Jesus where he opened his eyes from a certain angle, closed them from another; both realities true at the same time, and both an illusion.

“You’re not allowed here,” the ghost-thing said. It gazed coolly into Shango’s tired eyes.

Shango collected himself, cradled his hammer in his hand.

“What place is this?” he asked.

“You know what place,” the being of mists and vapors replied flatly.

True enough, Shango thought. But how did you know that?

“Who are you?” he said, and wondered why he hadn’t asked What are you? But then, Shango knew that answer, some of it, at least, if not in his mind then in the instinctual, resonating part of his gut that clenched tight before this appalling guardian.

“My name…” it said, as if the question were a difficult and troubling one, “is Fred.”

Great, a monster named Fred. “Fred what?” Shango asked.

Again, the question seemed to perplex the creature, to propel it into rumination as though diving into murky waters. At last, it answered, in a hollow tone redolent of longing and loss, “Wishart…”

“Wishart,” Shango exhaled. It was one of the names he had seen on the list of Source Project scientists, the list he had salvaged from agent Jeri Bilmer’s purse in the crumpled wreckage of United 1046 out of Houston, its debris trail scattered and forgotten in the woodlands of Albermarle County.

The list that had cost Jeri Bilmer her life.

And a name, too, Cal Griffin had told Shango there in the woods of Albermarle, that Cal’s sister Tina had murmured in fevered dreams back in Manhattan; when, heat-melting like a waxen thing, she was transforming into a being of radiance and inhumanity.

“You know me?” this nightmare that had been Dr. Fred Wishart asked.

“I know of you. You’re from West Virginia, from a town called Boone’s Gap.” A town that Griffin and his friends had been journeying to when Shango had encountered them in the woods, although they had mistakenly thought the town was named Wishart-until Shango had taken it upon himself to break his oath to President McKay and tell them it was a man.

He wondered now if that intelligence-and the little else he had known of the Source Project at the time, the little he’d been able to share with them-had been sufficient to save their lives.

And if somehow-despite the unlikelihood, the clear impossibility of it-Fred Wishart could have been there as well as here.

The spectre paused distractedly, as if trying to process this information. But Shango could glean no clue whether this horror could fathom what Boone’s Gap might be, or West Virginia.

“I’m a federal agent,” Larry Shango said, feeling the absurdity of trying to impress this entity with the weight of his authority. At any rate, the statement may or may not have been a lie, as it spoke to what Shango had once been and since discarded, or tried to discard, like a garment set aside but the ghost tattoo of whose fabric and pattern still adhered to the skin.

Wishart stared unblinking at him, his skin twitching creepily now and then, his face betraying no comprehension, as though federal agent were as meaningless a string of nonsense sounds as Boone’s Gap or West Virginia had been.

“It doesn’t matter,” it said finally. “Go back now…while you can.”

Shango disliked the sound of the creature’s voice-like wind blowing through an empty house, making vowels of gutter troughs and consonants of loose shingles. It made him want to go back, to run far and fast and keep on running. But he had come this far-

“I would be happy to leave,” Shango said. “But there’s something here I want.” Shango knew it to be true, but could not have given voice to what precisely that might be.

“There’s nothing here for you.”

“You’re wrong.”

The Wishart-thing appeared to be growing brighter, the fog rapidly darkening, the night coming on in earnest. Shango saw that the mist about Wishart was spiraling in around him, like he was a drain emptying it of its energy and essence.

“Take me in there,” Shango pressed.

“I can’t….” Wishart stared more intently at him, and there was something blinding and frenzied behind its eyes, like a nuclear core running out of control, that made Shango squint and glance away.

Seemingly in answer, the air around Shango grew thicker and hotter. Shango leveled his hammer, as much shield as threat. The head of the ten-pound sledge left vaporous phosphorescence flowing after it in its wake.

Wishart took a step back, his eroded eyes widening, ravaged skin and clothes emitting their coal-stove light.

I do have some power, Shango realized. He wasn’t entirely helpless.

The wretched haunt tilted its head oddly, as if hearing a distant call, then straightened. “This isn’t a good place to be when the sun’s gone…for a man.”

“Aren’t you a man?” Of course it wasn’t, but Shango wanted to see if there was any remnant of the man within this cobweb-thing, any echo of it.

Hesitation, uncertainty, silence.

“You don’t understand,” Wishart said at last.

“Then explain it to me.”

“We’re bound by what we set loose….” It fixed its gaze on him again, making it clear Shango was included. “All of us.”

“What binds you?” Shango might as well have asked, What did you set loose? It was all the same thing.

“I can’t answer that question.”

Frustration and impatience flared in Shango, and he was surprised at its intensity. He had the sudden memory of his mother long ago with her church ladies in their white gloves and fancy frilled hats at the seances they would infrequently attend, despite their loud and long-professed piety, behind closed-shuttered, paint-peeling doors in the French Quarter. The dearly-departed and resummoned spirits invariably provided irritatingly oblique replies to the most direct questions, as if God would only allow them to quote responses from some Magic Eight Ball in the hereafter.

Why can’t ghosties and ghoulies and things that go bump in the night ever give a fucking straight answer?

And why can’t you, Dr. Fred Wishart, or whatever the hell you are now?

Shango lifted the hammer to a present-arms position, his right hand up the shaft near the weighty steel head. “You need to stand aside.”

Wishart said nothing, his dead eyes on Shango like banked suns, not giving way. The air was hot and simmered with red light.

Shango hefted the hammer, prepared to swing it-

Wishart held out one pale, bloodless hand-

“And what?” Colleen Brooks demanded. The morning had slid effortlessly into afternoon as the five of them had sat listening to Shango around the gouged old table in the Insomnia Cafe with its ratty furniture and soft rock music, its litter of glasses.

“I don’t remember,” Shango replied.

“You don’t remember?”

“Well-it might sound ridiculous.”

“Are there any fucking skeptics left on earth?” Colleen retorted. Cal Griffin put a calming hand on her arm.

“Just tell us what happened,” he said.

“I closed my eyes and went to sleep,” Shango said. “It was kind of involuntary.”

“And when you woke up?” That was Doc Lysenko, who maintained a watchful composure although he was on his fifth espresso.

“I was lying in the dirt in an empty rail yard in some hard-luck town near the Mexican border.”

“You don’t know how you got there?” Cal asked.

“No, sir, I do not.”

Mama Diamond watched the dust motes floating in the light shining through the big front windows. It was a hell of a yarn, better maybe than the one about the old stone-and-bone lady and the dragon who paid a call, the dragon that took her treasure and left a secret thing between her and the animals, a secret gift of tongues.

Where was Stern now, whom these new companions of hers had known, and Dr. Fred Wishart, and Cal Griffin’s vanished sister, Tina? All sitting around some table like this one, somewhere else in God’s creation?

It was ridiculous, of course, but no more implausible, really, than the unlikely assemblage of the six of them sitting here. Mama Diamond marveled at the complex tapestry of loss and event that had knit them together.

Where might those threads, those lengths of time and chance that had so entwined them, had brought and bound them together here, draw them next…

And with whom might it further entangle them?

Cal Griffin leaned in toward Shango, his chin resting in his hands, his elbows propped on the table. In his spare efficiency of frame he seemed about one-third the heft of Shango, with none of the other’s broad muscularity. But Mama Diamond noted that they both shared the same unspoken ease of command, the same instinct of decisiveness. Both of them had long been used to relying on their own judgment.

Two Cats Who Walked Alone…but were doing so no longer.

“You ready for a rematch?” Cal Griffin asked Shango.

For the first time that entire day, Shango smiled.