Ghostlands

FIFTY-THREE

To say that May Catches the Enemy had made a believer of her was to overstate the case.

But as Colleen Brooks stood among the legion of ghost warriors and their shadow horses, she definitely had to admit her skepticism had been put somewhat on hold.

As the daybreak star rose and the Moon of the Popping Trees set, May Catches the Enemy led the lot of them, phantoms and all, back into the big hole in the earth, and sealed it up tight behind them.

“So how’s all this getting us to Source Grand Central?” Howard Russo asked her.

May gestured toward one of the branching passageways. “These tunnels are uncharted extensions of Jewel and Wind Caverns, twelve hundred miles and more,” she explained. “Some of the Lakota believe human beings first came up out of Wind Cave…. We’re goin’ back down.”

Lovelier and lovelier… thought Colleen.

Stern stepped daintily to the passage mouth on ponderous feet, flexing his wings, limbering them. His nostrils stretched wide, drawing in the scent of what lay beyond in the darkness.

“What do you smell?” Cal asked, joining him.

“Death,” Stern replied, then cast him a narrow glance. “How’s your irony quotient?”

“Shoot.”

“Borglum, the guy who built Rushmore, back in the twenties was in the KKK.” Stern’s lip twisted in a mirthless grin, revealing piranha teeth. “At the top was an Imperial Wizard, running an Invisible Empire. Under him were Grand Dragons, and the grunts were called goblins….”

“Hilarious,” Cal said.

Stern nodded, and his hooded eyes regarded the passage again, and the unseen things within.

“Any goblins left down there?” Cal asked.

“Wait and see,” the dragon said.

Christina wafted up to them like a toy boat on a mild stream, regarded the tunnel with cool aplomb. Inigo followed close on, never taking his eyes off her.

“Might be best if you stayed here,” Cal advised her.

“No way. I’m going, Cal.”

“That’s a deal breaker,” Stern snapped in a tone that was…well, stern.

It’s like she has two fathers now, Cal thought, and felt a pang of jealousy, resented how Stern had insinuated himself into her life; knowing, too, that she would not be here if not for that fact.

Stern was glaring at Christina as she hovered high off the ground at his eye level. She gazed right back, not giving an inch.

“You lose, how much chance you think we’ll have that It won’t come for us?” she said evenly.

Stern blinked, knocked back. Cal smiled inwardly; how many times had he encountered that same remorseless drive, the raw determination that had fueled her back when the only fortress she assailed was that of ballet, bent on conquering it and bringing it to heel.

With a sigh, Stern shook his head, yielding. She held within her such delicacy, such fragility, he felt as if he could snap her like a match. But he knew it was not so. He thought of her on the precipice atop the tower in New York; she’d shown that same resolve.

I don’t want your world….

Well, now they were all sharing the same world, the lot of them-one with a monster lying in wait for them.

A monster that, for once, wasn’t him.

They would all die, of course, no matter how many fucking ghost Indians had their back.

Nevertheless, his heart felt ridiculously light in him, and he cursed himself for a fool.

He’d given up job security, and one hell of a pension plan. I mean, talk about eternal life-even if it did ultimately entail getting devoured by a grotesquerie bent on not just ruling the world, but being every last fucking bit of it….

It was laughable, and so that’s precisely what Ely Stern did.

Like a great gout of flame, the laughter erupted from him, went booming down the passageway, preceding them into the entrails of hell.

When his mirth finally subsided, he turned to Cal Griffin, who had once been his underling and now was a great deal more than his better (not that he’d ever dream of saying that).

“Let’s get this show on the road,” Stern said.

The ghostly warriors unslung their weapons, carbines and bows and arrows made of vapor, and climbed aboard their shadow steeds. Indian fashion, the war ponies had no bridles nor saddles, no stirrups. Their tails were tied in a knot.

May Catches the Enemy followed suit, clambering aboard a dappled gray made of mist, which supported her just as though it were entirely substantial.

Colleen saw that nearby, Mama Diamond was speaking softly to one of the spectral mares, in a tongue only she and they could understand. Then she mounted it, with an effortlessness that was uncanny in a woman of her years, not to mention one that had endured such rough handling of late.

Colleen approached a pony that still remained riderless and recalled the words her father had said to her, of how he chose a dog.

I look in its eyes, and if I see a soul there, I take him home.

Cautiously, she drew near the creature’s head, looked it square in the eye…and found reassurance there.

She climbed aboard.

It sat her well. She pressed her knees gently into its sides and wove her fingers into its insubstantial mane.

Seeing Doc hesitate, Colleen called out, “C’mon, Viktor, it’s just like riding a bicycle.” She was careful not to add, One called back from the dead.

Enid mounted a sorrel mare, hauling Papa Sky onto its rump behind him. Enid had his harmonica secured on its holder around his neck, Papa his sax on its strap.

The others climbed aboard their horses, Inigo and Howard Russo; even Walter Eagle Elk and his grandson Ethan, too.

Cal was the last to mount, and before he did Colleen saw him stash the battered leather portfolio inside his Ghost Shirt; the portfolio Goldman had brought him upon returning from his mission to fetch Enid Blindman, that she knew held an enigmatic collection of photographs and notes.

“What do you say to make it go?” Cal asked May.

“Hoka hey,” she said.

“Hoka hey!” he cried, and the legion of them thundered off down the passageway, the horses’ hooves flying into the darkness.

It’s kinda instant replay, but not exactly, Inigo thought as he flew along the endless rock tunnel, down and down, back toward the place he’d lived in but never called home.

The last time he’d tried a stunt like this, he’d been clinging to the top of the hellbound train, plunging through the darkness to burst up out of the earth and deliver its gleaming treasure to Jeff Arcott and the waiting town of Atherton. Right now, he was holding on for dear life to the wispy mane of a nag that’d probably been bleaching bones on the prairie before Teddy Roosevelt was out of short pants.

This was better, if only marginally; the wind whipped at him, howling like a lost soul-or an army of them, more precisely. But the real army was the one riding alongside him-the ghost warriors and the human ones; Howard Russo, who was a creature like himself; the dragon Stern; and Christina, ever fair and flowing. If necessary, Inigo knew she was a beacon he would follow to his own burning death, or beyond.

He was not alone in this. Her brother Cal had done the same thing. It’s what had led him to trust Inigo in the first place, despite the misgivings of his closest advisers; what had led him here, where’d he finally rescued his sister, only to return to the dread place of her imprisonment, in a wild attempt try to finish things up right.

Inigo realized that he liked Cal, he liked him a lot. And from the little he’d seen of the two of them together, so did his mom. Yet there was something else there, too, something troubled, that seemed to have a history in it. He didn’t think the two of them had met before, didn’t think they could have. Still, he made a mental note to ask his mom about it later…if there was a later, that was.

He realized his heart was pounding like a drum machine on meltdown, that he was scared right down to the soles of his leathery big feet. He forced himself to take a deep breath, tried to slow his pulse to a level below tachycardia.

Just then, the spirit horse banked around a sharp bend in the passage. Inigo yelped and clutched tightly to the beast’s compact, muscled body so as not to be thrown clear. There was a roar from up ahead, and a burst of hot air surged past him, tingling his face like sunburn.

It was Stern, flying fast at the forefront, exhaling great explosions of flame every minute or so to clear the road. It lit up the cave spectacularly, making Inigo wince with the glare, providing flashbulb brilliance to accompany the more muted light provided by Christina’s aura and the cool glow of the spectral warriors and their steeds.

Inigo wondered how long Stern could keep this up; did his flame come from some internal gas tank, or was it replenished from some other font?

We’ll see soon enough….

Apart from Stern’s warming blasts, the tunnel was cold but not freezing, and the air was fresh. Behind him, Inigo could hear Enid Blindman and Papa Sky atop their mount, playing full out over the wind. The music hardly echoed at all, which surprised Inigo.

But then Mama Diamond explained that was due to the boxwork, the odd crystal formations in the ceiling, so-called because they looked like square post office boxes all in rows.

They didn’t look like that to Inigo, though; they seemed like thousands of bats, just waiting to wake up and swarm down at them. He shuddered and fought to banish the thought.

“And see that there?” Mama Diamond shouted to him as they thundered on. “That white bumpy stuff’s called cave popcorn, calcium carbonate deposited through limestone pores. And that curtainy stuff hanging down off those high ledges is called drapery, though it always reminded me of Wells’s Martians, fat jellyfish with all those tentacles. Nail-head spar, and dogtooth…It’s just crystal, though, laced with different minerals like iron and manganese.”

Inigo suspected she was telling him all this because she sensed his apprehension, saw him as just a kid, and was trying to distract him from what lay ahead. It was quaint, courtly even, and it touched him-rather than pissing him off with its condescension, which it normally might have done.

Hell, they all had to look out for each other any way they could, even with the small stuff.

“I reckon we must be five hundred feet down, if we’re an inch,” Mama Diamond continued. “And will you look at what’s up ahead….”

Inigo cast his gaze forward, feeling a hint of trepidation for an instant. But then he saw it, stretching out wide before them….

A lake, huge and black and serene, showing not even a ripple, save where an occasional droplet of water fell from the vault above. Stern winged above it into the darkness beyond, a perfect dragon reflection skimming below him in the water’s mirror sheen. The wraith horses sped after, their hooves barely kissing the surface, throwing up light, bracing sprays.

Then they were past it. Inigo looked about him at the walls and ceiling, seeing deep into them with his night-blessed eyes, really studying them for the first time as they flashed by. They were incredibly beautiful, rose and blue and gold sparkling in the quartz, an astonishing array of shapes, spires and projections all honeycombed, with rivulets of water dripping down from fissures in the rock.

And because he was looking right there, and had the vision to discern it, he saw them first.

Oozing out of the boxwork, squeezing through, clambering down on the craggy rock face, flowing slick as oil.

Grunters, baring their snaggly, fanged teeth, glaring down with hungry, crazed faces, coming on fast. The massed, thick smell of them hit him like a blow, that stink of rotted meat and other unclean things; he wondered if it came from what they ate or just from them.

Inigo let out a shout, waving wildly upward. The others saw now, too, and unsheathed their blades, nocked arrows into bows. Stern swung about in a great arc, beating his black wings and climbing, inhaling deep to unleash the inferno.

The grunters let out wild, triumphant shrieks and released their holds, dropping down to land among them. Seeing this, Stern clipped off his exhalation; he couldn’t let loose the torrent without claiming them all.

Cal was shouting orders, and Inigo heard the cries of Shango and Colleen Brooks, too. And something else, weird and creepy, that raised the hackles on his neck, a piercing ululation like nothing a human throat could make. There were words in it, but not English, and Inigo couldn’t make them out.

Then he saw and understood-it was Crazy Horse, and the other warriors, taking up their war chant, plunging into the mass of writhing, attacking fiends, driving them back with rearing hooves and arrows and spear.

Abruptly, a body struck Inigo from above, one his own size, wild and hard, hurling him off his horse. He hit the stone floor, the breath knocked out of him, the screaming mad thing atop him ripping and biting. Inigo punched at it, kicked hard, bit into its neck. But more of them leapt on him, holding him down, tearing out flesh and meat.

Then Cal Griffin was there, driving two away with thrusts of his sword. The third turned on him, knocking the sword aside with a wild blow.

Cal didn’t dive for the sword, didn’t hesitate. Instead, he bulled into the beast, driving it back, lifting it clear off its feet-and plunging it down onto a crystal stalagmite, impaling it in a fury of cracked bones and screams and gushing hot blood.

The killing began.