Ghostlands

FORTY-NINE

Now, this is really interesting, Herman Goldman thought.

In the terrible moment when he’d tried to leech the life force out of the blazing projection of Marcus Sanrio and found it to be a horribly misguided style choice (much akin to all those Blind Dates of Dr. Moreau he’d gone on in his college days, when his aberrant behaviors could be fobbed off as merely the excesses of youth), Goldie had assumed that he’d pretty much bought the farm.

And what the hell was he gonna do with a farm?…

But no, seriously, he thought he’d cashed his chips, sounded the trumpet, kicked every bucket from here to Poughkeepsie.

In short, that he was dead meat. In fact, in that one, endless, eternal second, he’d fast-forwarded through every damn Kubler-Ross stage of dying-denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance-and all seven dwarves and thirty-one flavors, to boot.

But most of all, he saw his entire life. Not flashing before him like some preposterous VCR playback on crystal methamphetamine, but rather the shape of it-a multidimensional object rendering every action, intention, memory into a complete and seamless whole.

And being his life, its form was naturally…unusual. Gaudy and eccentric; sort of like the entire universe laid out as a bird of paradise, all bright colors and odd angles.

It was all there, in hyperrealistic Technicolor. Every time he’d fallen on his face, ranted when he should have whispered, sang when he should have stayed mute-and that last, impetuous jete with Sanrio, when he’d failed big-time.

But he could also discern that there was honor there, and forthrightness and valor; the attempt, at least, to render on the canvas of his existence something worth doing.

All in all, it was a life he could live with.

Which, surprisingly, was exactly what he found he was doing.

The abstract construction of his life winked out, and Herman Goldman, Esquire, didn’t.

He was still alive, still conscious, still experiencing things.

It was just that things happened to be, well…kinda funky.

For one thing, he didn’t exactly seem to have a body. No hands, feet, mouth, nose-in fact, none of the parts you’d need to have a complete Herman Goldman collection.

Just a rather nebulous consciousness, an ongoing, stable (as stable as he ever got, that was) awareness of self. He felt like a helium balloon floating through the clouds, untethered, unconnected to anything.

Yet for some reason, he felt okay. He also felt damn certain this was not some wacky expression of the Afterlife. After all, he’d read pretty damn thoroughly on the subject, and this wasn’t it.

So just where the hell was he?…

“Welcome to my world,” said a voice in his mind.

Then it introduced itself as Fred Wishart.

Herman Goldman had met Fred Wishart before, in the desolate and devastated house in Boone’s Gap, West Virginia, when Wishart had almost nixed the whole town in an attempt to keep his twin brother, Bob, alive and incidentally keep himself out of the clutches of the ravenous Gestalt Entity at the Source that was equally bent on reeling him back in.

But back then, Wishart had possessed a physical manifestation, a sort of uberbody made up of starlight, glowing nuclear embers that flared and extinguished themselves and were continually replenished out of the life energy of everything around him.

It was a description that jibed with the way Shango described Wishart when he’d encountered him on his first delightful little jaunt into the Badlands.

But it was nothing like what presented itself as Wishart now.

For one thing, this manifestation had no body whatsoever, no more than Herman Goldman himself had. Instead, it was merely a cloudy presence, a distinctness apart from the generalized hazy nothingness about them, just as Goldie himself seemed merely an apartness rather than a physical presence.

Which he supposed made them, in the inimitable words of Stan Laurel, two peas in a pot….

“Um, how’s it hangin’?” Goldie asked.

“You’re in great danger,” the Wishart cloud replied.

Oh, marvelous.

“Yeah, well, that’s not exactly a surprise,” Goldie replied. It had essentially been his general state, waking and sleeping, for a good long time now, and he certainly didn’t need Mr. Cumulus here to point it out to him.

“I tried to protect the Russian one, the doctor,” the Wishart consciousness continued absently, as if to himself, “I drew a place from his mind, a place of serenity, to shield him…but he wouldn’t stay put.”

“Yeah, well, that’s Doc, always antsy.” Goldie realized that neither of them was exactly talking-a good thing, considering their notable lack of tongue, teeth and larynx (not to mention anything that could even remotely hang…). “Say listen, you think you could point me toward an exit?”

And while you’re at it, maybe a body?

“There’s no leaving,” Wishart responded dolefully. “And no hiding place, once He awakes…”

“He? He who?” Goldman asked, although he felt reasonably sure he already knew. Despite his total lack of a body, he shuddered nonetheless.

Sanrio…

“Yes…” Wishart replied, and Goldie realized the other could read his thoughts. Or, he amended, his private thoughts, the ones he intended for himself.

It filled him with dread, a sense of violation. Wishart, or what was left of him, seemed to mean no harm. But Wishart wasn’t the only teddy bear on this here picnic, and the casualness with which he invaded Goldman’s mental garden of verse gave a hint of darker things.

Fuck it, I’m outta here, Goldie thought and, spurred by his fear, felt his consciousness plunge forward-

Which happened to be right through Fred Wishart.

Goldie felt a sudden rush of memories and sensations, a headlong tumult of images and sounds and smells and feelings. Little League and Stanford and the movie house in Beckley, and that fishing trip with Bobby when they were both teens, the two of them with Wilma Hanson along, all three of them laughing their asses off, even though she was older, of his mother, Arleta, and his doctor father, who died young…

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.