Ghostwalkers Page 7

  Mircalla wore black lace gloves that had patterns of flitting bats on them. As he watched she drew her hand across the deck and fanned it out in a graceful arc.

  “Pick a card,” she repeated.

  One of the crows in the tree cawed softly. It didn’t sound like a bird. It sounded like the plaintive call of a lost child.

  Grey licked his lips. They were as dry as if he had been lying all day in the hot sun. And yet he remembered drinking. A lot. And very good, cold, crisp beer it had been, too. So how could his lips be dry and cracked? Why would his throat be filled with dust?

  He looked down at his clothes and they were covered with dust and clods of dirt. He no longer wore the jeans, blue shirt, and black leather vest that he’d been wearing since coming west. His clothes were his old cavalry blues. The dirty-shirt blue he’d worn into battle against the Confederates back when he was a young man, barely out of his teens.

  His hands, though, were not the hands of a callow youth. They were not the hands he saw every day now, either. They were thin and wasted. The hands of an old, old man.

  Or the hands of something else.

  Something from which all vitality, all of the juices of life, had been leeched away.

  “Pick a card,” said Mircalla once more. “Any card.”

  “I…”

  “Go on. They won’t bite.”

  She laughed, and it was a grating sound. Like a knife blade dragged across wet glass.

  He recoiled from the sound, but even as he did so his withered hand reached out to take a card. It slid from between the others with a soft hiss.

  “Turn it over,” she said. “Show me.”

  He turned it over.

  It was a tarot.

  It was the death card.

  Exactly the card he expected it to be.

  But Mircalla made a sound of disgust and annoyance. She picked up the card, regarded it for a moment, and then flicked it away into the wind. The card swirled in a circle for a moment and then vanished.

  “Not that card,” she said.

  “Why? It’s mine.”

  “You need to pick a new card,” she said. “That one’s been used already.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  She laughed again. “Of course you don’t. Pick another card. Pick one that matters to your future.”

  “My future? But the death card…”

  “Has already been played. Don’t you know that?” She shook her head. “No, you don’t know it. I can see it in your face. You think you only dream about the dead. You think they’re ghosts of a guilty conscience.”

  “They are—”

  “Of course they’re not,” snapped Mircalla. “The dead follow you everywhere you go. You know it on a level too deep for your stupid mortal mind to realize, but it’s why you always move on. It’s why you’re never content to stay anywhere. It’s why you don’t have friends. Not living ones, anyway.” She paused. “It’s why you don’t love.”

  “I loved someone once…”

  “And she follows you, too, Greyson Torrance. Your Annabelle Sampson shambles along with the rest of them.”

  “No!”

  “Just because you don’t see her doesn’t mean that she isn’t there.” Mircalla cocked her head to one side. “You never even look for her, do you?”

  “She’s buried in Pennsylvania. I dug her grave. I was there when they spoke the words over her to send her soul to heaven.”

  Mircalla threw her head back and laughed.

  “Heaven? Heaven? Is that where you think the dead go? To heaven to play harps and bask in the glory of an eternal God. Oh … mortal man, you are such a fool. Like so many men I have known. Like so many men who still walk this earth. You go about with your guns and your strength and your certainty that the world is what you judge it to be, and all the time the world moves in different gears. You think you understand how the clockwork of the world operates, but you don’t. You’re like monkeys staring at a fine watch and thinking it’s magic made just for you.”

  She turned, lifted the hem of her veil and spat into the dust. For a brief moment he saw her naked flesh. Chin and cheek and lips. And he recoiled from what he saw. They were not the smooth features of a beautiful woman. What he saw was withered and cracked, mottled like the skin of some ancient mummy. Mircalla dropped the veil and turned back to him.

  “You do not understand the world because you are afraid to know its truths,” she said. “Like so many men.”

  “You’re not making sense,” he protested.

  “No? Turn and look.” She gestured to the east and he turned with great reluctance. There, in the direction from which the cold wind blew, there were people. A mass of them, shuffling along, moving slowly. Pale faces and empty eyes.

  He knew them.

  He knew them so well. And she was there. Annabelle. With her torn dress and broken fingernails. Annabelle.

  Oh God, Annabelle.

  “This is a dream,” he said.

  “Yes,” she agreed. “This is a dream. But they are not.”

  “What?”

  “The dead follow you, Grey Torrance. They have followed you since you caused their deaths, and they will follow you until you have nowhere else to run. And then they will claim you as one of their own. That is the truth of it. It is the truth you have been running from.”

  “That’s madness,” he snapped. “You’re a witch and a whore and you drugged me. You slipped something into my beer.”

  He remembered the pain in his neck and touched the spot. His fingers came away slick with fresh blood.

  “You sicced something on me. A snake or a…”

  “My sisters tasted you, mortal man,” admitted Mircalla, “and they wanted to drink deep of you. You may be damned and a fool, but there is so much power in your blood. So much. They wanted to drink you like a fine, rare wine.”

  “Drink me…?”

  Mircalla shrugged. “Men have some uses.”

  “God! What are you?”

  “You wouldn’t even know if I told you. Mircalla, Miracall, Millarca, Carmilla…”

  “You’re not making sense.”

  She smiled beneath her veil. “Pick a card.”

  Without meaning to, without wanting to, he did.

  “Turn it over,” she commanded.

  Grey glanced toward the east. The ghosts were closer now. Time, he knew, was running out. He had lingered too long, even here in this dream.

  He turned the card over.

  The picture showed a man hanging by one foot, hands bound behind him, dangling upside down from a gallows. Unlike any gallows Grey had seen, this one was made from living wood and fresh leaves sprouted from it. Despite being so perversely executed, the face of the hanging man was serene and composed, and there was a saintly glow around his head.

  Mircalla grunted in surprise. “The martyr’s card,” she mused. “Interesting. I would not have thought it of you.”

  “I’m no damn martyr,” he snapped.

  “You do not know what you are, man of two worlds.” She laughed and traced the edges of the card. “The man who lives between the worlds. Yes … that’s what it says about you. You do not belong to either life or death.”

  There was regret in her voice.

  “That means that I and my sisters cannot have you, Greyson Torrance,” she continued. “You are exempt, pardoned. Not from your crimes but from my web. So sad. Such a loss. And I suppose you must have your companion, too. My sisters will be so disappointed.”

  “What are you talking about?” Grey said, and he could hear the pleading tone in his own voice. “Tell me what this all means.”

  “It means,” she said, “that the universe, for good or ill, is not done with you. I am forbidden to claim you. Your journey is not over. Weary, weary journeys lie before you.”

  “Make sense, damn you.”

  “Make sense? You ask something very dangerous of a gifted one, my doomed young man. But you ask and the card compels me
to answer and so I will.” She bent closer and spoke in such a low voice that he was forced to lean closer in order to hear. “You will walk in the land of the shadow, Grey Torrance. Deep into the heart of darkness. Worlds will turn on the wink of your eye. Worlds will fall in the light of your smile.”

  “I don’t understand any of that.”

  “No,” she said. “You were not meant to. The clock has not struck the hour of understanding.”

  “But—.”

  She swept the cards from the table and Grey immediately bent to catch the Hanged Man card. He did so, but when he looked up, the table, the other chair, and Mircalla were gone. He shot to his feet and turned. The ghosts were gone, too.

  And then, so was he.

  Chapter Seventeen

  When he opened his eyes the harsh sun of noon nearly smashed him back into unconsciousness.

  He flung an arm across his eyes and rolled over, groaning and sick. His head swam and his stomach felt like it was filled with sewer water in which ugly things wriggled and swam. He coughed, gagged, and finally gasped in a ragged lungful of dry air.

  To his left he heard a low, weak groan.

  Grey turned and saw Thomas Looks Away laying sprawled and sunburnt on the hard ground. Forty yards beyond him stood a tall, crooked cottonwood, and in the sparse shade cast by its withered leaves stood Picky and Looks Away’s horse. Just those two. The other horses belonging to the posse were gone. Grey looked around.

  The town was gone, too.

  He frowned.

  The landscape looked familiar. A pair of hillocks, a dead juniper, an untidy row of chaparral cactus. All of that was the same as it was when he and the Sioux rode up to that painted wooden arch on which had been written the word FORTUNE.

  But the town was not there.

  He got to his feet and as he studied the land he realized that he was wrong about that.

  The town was there.

  But it was nothing more than broken timbers laying bleached in the sun. Nothing more substantial than the charred cornerstone of a building was left. It chilled him despite the heat because this was not a new disaster. Those timbers lay like bones of some ancient thing, half covered by the hungry sands. Somehow the town had died and been reclaimed by the desert.

  How long ago, though?

  Surely he could not have slept for years, and only many years of the unrelenting sun could do this.

  “Madness,” he said aloud, and even he wasn’t sure if he was making a statement about the world or his own mind.

  Behind him, Looks Away groaned again. Grey reluctantly turned from the impossible wreckage and hurried over to his new companion. His foot kicked something and he saw that there was a full waterskin on the ground by where he’d awakened. He uncapped it, sniffed it, smelled nothing more than water and heat. He took a pull, and although the water was warm it tasted as pure as new melted snow to his parched throat. The second sip tasted every bit as good.

  Grey knelt beside Looks Away, uncertain as to whether the man was alive or dead. Or, if his luck was holding steady, something else. He placed a hand on the man’s chest, felt the reassuring thump-thump of a living heart, and blew out a sigh of relief. Looks Away groaned softly and his eyelids fluttered weakly. Then, much as the Sioux had done for him after the ghost rock explosion, Grey gently cupped the back of the man’s neck and helped him raise his head to take a sip.

  “Easy now,” he cautioned, “wet your throat with a sip first. There, that’s good. Now take a real pull.”

  Looks Away took the waterskin from him and took two long drinks, then, gasping, thrust it back into Grey’s hands.

  “By god and all the devils in hell,” the Sioux growled as he struggled into a sitting position. “What the bloody hell happened and where the bloody hell are we?”

  “God only knows. Or, maybe it’s the Devil who knows.” Grey stood up. “In either case, take a look for yourself and maybe you can tell me.”

  He held out a hand and pulled Looks Away up. Together they walked over to where the FORTUNE sign should have been. Pieces of it lay on the ground, the letters faded to ghosts. Grey watched as the other man turned to look at the landscape and then looked once again at the ancient ruins.

  “I don’t…,” the Sioux began, but let the rest trail off into the dust.

  “Yeah,” said Grey.

  They stood there for a long time, neither man saying another word. What, after all, could they say to this? Nothing in Grey’s experience provided him with a vocabulary sufficient to put what he felt into words. Sure, there were words for some of this deep in his soul, but none of those words would fit into his mouth. He couldn’t have said them at gunpoint. From the strained, frightened expression on Looks Away’s face, he was facing the same challenge. So they left it unsaid.

  As one they began backing away from the town. Then they turned and ran for their horses.

  However as they approached, Grey saw something that twisted an already misshapen day into an even more perverse shape. There, tucked into a fold of his saddle, was a single heavy pasteboard card.

  On the back was a painting of the death mask of some ancient queen, her mouth bloody.

  Grey did not want to touch it, and his hand shook as he reached for it.

  “What’s that?” asked Looks Away sharply. “Is that a tarot?”

  Grey said nothing. He took the card and turned it over, though he knew full well what would be on it.

  A hanged man.

  Looks Away saw it and cursed softly.

  Without another word the two men got onto their horses and fled toward the west.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Grey Torrance and Thomas Looks Away did not speak at all for the rest of that day. Grey knew that they should. It was probably important to compare experiences, to try and make sense of everything.

  But he did not want to.

  He was afraid of the sense that it would make.

  The world had become a strange place. It was like stepping into a dreamscape. Or like entering one of the fantasy worlds in the dime novels he used to read back in the early days of the war. Back when fantastical adventures were a way to turn away from the endless bloodshed, the weeks of drudgery and boredom between battles, the aches of walking hundreds of miles, the diseases that came with bad food and worse water. Back then the stories of frontiersmen braving the wilds and ragtag bands of soldiers defending small Texas forts and castaways finding treasure on deserted islands were all ways to step out of the moment. They allowed for hope of something better, even if that hope was nothing more than purple prose in some writer’s fanciful scribblings.

  That time had past.

  The war never ended. The nation became so fractured. The dream of a grand America had been torn apart by greedy and hateful men.

  And there was something else.

  Something that lurked behind the scenes of everyday life. Something people knew about but never talked about.

  The world itself had changed.

  Not merely the politics or borders. Not loyalties and plans of empire.

  No.

  The actual world was different now.

  Something had shifted.

  It was a darker world. And that thought was true even as they rode beneath this blistering sun. The heart of the world was darker. Its soul was darker.

  It wasn’t the same world he grew up in.

  Grey knew that much of this had started when the big quake tore itself along the fault lines in the West and dragged most of California into the thrashing sea. That alone might have been enough to fracture the world. At least the American part of it.

  But it was only the start, and Grey knew it. Everyone knew it.

  It was simply that people didn’t talk about it. The change, the darkness, was like some kind of secret.

  Grey thought about that and realized that he had it wrong.

  It wasn’t a secret. Not really. Nothing as simple as that. It was more like a night terror. Like a monster hiding ben
eath the bed. It was something that was not real, but could be real if people were unwise enough to say it out loud. To name it.

  To accept that it was real.

  That’s why Grey didn’t want to talk about what had just happened. Not with Looks Away, and maybe not even with himself. Every time his questioning mind tried to look too closely, tried to put labels on the things that had happened, Grey forcibly wrenched his thoughts away. He force-fed new thoughts into his head. He considered the landscape. The clouds. He counted and named the number of cities and towns he’d been to. He mentally recited old lessons from his school days, or snatches of poetry. He mumbled the lyrics to old ballads and alehouse bawdy songs. He named all of the women he had ever known and catalogued their virtues.

  He did all of that to keep from thinking about the town of Fortune and the women there. If they were women at all. He tried not to think about the hanged man tarot. He tried to erase the memory of Mircalla from his memory.

  He tried and tried.

  The more he tried, the more he failed.

  The more he failed, the more terrified he became.

  He caught Looks Away staring at him as they rode, and for three slow paces of their horses, their eyes met.

  Then the Sioux shook his head.

  And Grey responded in kind.

  The terror in his heart grew and grew.

  PART TWO

  The Maze

  Science is always discovering odd scraps of magical wisdom and making a tremendous fuss about its cleverness.

  —ALEISTER CROWLEY

  Chapter Nineteen

  They did not speak again until they crossed into California.

  Looks Away grunted and pointed to a wooden sign hammered onto a post someone had driven into the dusty ground. It read:

  SINNERS REPENT

  ALL OTHERS TURN BACK

  THERE IS NO REDEMPTION HERE

  Clustered around the base of the post and piled into a crude pyramid that reached halfway up its length were skulls.

  Human skulls.

  Some still had scraps of leathery skin or strands of sun-bleached hair stuck to them, but otherwise the bones were white and dry.