Magic Time: Ghostlands (4 page)

Mama Diamond walked in the dragon’s shadow.

“How ’bout you tell me,” Stern asked in a conversational tone, “just why you’re called Mama Diamond?”

“The native kids call me that.” She was startled by the sound of her own voice, insanely chatty. “Called me that. They’d bring in dusty old quartzite now and again. I’d clean and tumble it for ’em. Making diamonds, they called it.”

“But that wasn’t your stock-in-trade—quartz.”

“Surely not. No, I’m a rock hound and a purveyor of semiprecious stones.” Her good eye glanced sidelong at his pebbled hide and vast muscles, the rough protrusions along his frame proclaiming the brute skeleton beneath. “And also bones…”

They turned off Parkhill onto Vaughan, and Stern halted abruptly. They had reached her shop now, and he peered at it, surprised—yes, he could actually be surprised—and impressed.

“The thing I so love about travel,” Stern said, “is there’s a wonderment around every corner….”

No zoning commissioner in his right mind would ever have allowed Mama Diamond to build it, of course. Nor
would the Geographic Society nor the Paleontological Research Institute nor Friends of the Earth nor the Sierra Club. Everyone from Robert Bakker to Jack Horner would have pitched a fit. And the press—at least, in the old, pre-Change days—would have had a field day.

But then, she hadn’t built it. Old Esperanza Piller, grandmother of Mildred Cummings Fielding, from whom Mama Diamond herself had bought the place in ’81, had hired the working men and former slaves who had quarried and assembled this structure ninety years back and more, before anyone had the least notion to raise an objection.

Back when farmers round here were still turning up triceratops skulls in their potato beds.

The Rock and Bone, Mama Diamond’s fossil and lapidary shop, was a house built of dinosaur bones.

It had weathered the Storm—also called the Change, the Upheaval and the Big Friggin’ Mess—without so much as a quiver.

In truth, the house wasn’t wholly made of dinosaur bones; no, they were still held in their rock matrixes, the big blocks mortared into place. But it didn’t take one whit off their grandeur, and Mama Diamond loved the place as much now as when she had first glimpsed it tooling down the blue highway of U.S. 30 in the dwindling light of that long-ago spring day.

Her Fortress, her Sanctuary, her Palace of Delights. Or, as the native kids only half-jokingly called it way back when, her Treasure Chest.

The chill sun glinted on Stern’s gold-coin eyes as he canted his head and appraised the diplodocus bones flanking the doorway, the ribs of the house actual iguanodon and al-losaur ribs. Bones not too different from the dragon’s own, Mama Diamond reflected—at least, the therapods. And she realized, looking at Stern in his terrible saurian beauty, that he was as close as she would ever come to seeing an actual dinosaur walking. But then,
they
hadn’t flown or talked or breathed smoke.

Not that anyone could really say.

As if the dragon had somehow caught the sound of her
thought and completed it, Stern said, “I wonder what energies ruled their world…the old or the new?”

Mama Diamond said nothing—there was no answer—but she pondered, in the distant part of her mind held separate from the fear, if the Change might indeed be cyclical, like the great ice sheets that had once covered this land.

Another gust of wind flared up, stiffening the seams of her face. The handmade wooden sign with the words
STONE AND BONE
suspended off the overhang of roof creaked on its chains.

Mama Diamond opened her door and stepped inside.

“Come in,” she said against her own better judgment, judgment reduced to a wheedling screech at the back of her skull, and she thought of Dracula inviting Renfield to step over the threshold of his castle. Only, the tables were turned in this case, she was inviting the monster into her lair, and she wondered how many before her had done this, and to what terrible consequence. She looked up at the molten-eyed, big-shouldered dragon. “If you can.”

“I still know how to negotiate doorways,” Stern said in his dry furnace voice.

The store was dim, but Stern blocked her when she reached for an oil lamp. Maybe dragons could see a little better in the dark than in the light, Mama Diamond considered. Or maybe they were just wary of fire.

He put out a razored hand to stay her motion, casually; it barely brushed her shoulder. But a sudden snap of blue lightning spit from his fingertip, passing into Mama Diamond’s skin and bones, diffusing through her like smoke. There was a brief instant of her feeling like her insides were lit up, spectacularly energized and alive, then it was gone.

She and Stern looked at each other with an identical expression, and Mama Diamond realized that he was as surprised as she. For the first time since he had arrived, something had happened that he had not intended.

Stern blinked, dismissing it, then cast his gaze over the shop, taking it all in, not pausing at the oreodont skulls, the smilodons with their saber fangs, the hadrosaur eggs spirited out of China.

His gaze came to the faded photograph taped to the register, the snapshot of the blond child smiling by a riverside, her college chum Katy’s daughter back when Carter was President. Stern studied the girl closely, his eyes lingering.

“She remind you of someone?” Mama Diamond asked.

“Yes.” The dragon’s voice was oddly softened, as close to human as it might ever sound.

“She safe?” Mama Diamond was surprised at her question; she hadn’t thought to ask it. But it had been sparked by the sudden awareness there might be something,
someone,
this thunder lizard actually cared about.

The image came to her of the rough-hewn illustration from
The Hobbit
in her ratty thrift-store copy, the drawing old Tolkien himself had done, of the dragon Smaug wrapped around his treasure trove of gold.

What might Stern hold as his treasure?

For a long time, he said nothing, and Mama Diamond thought he wasn’t going to speak. But then the words came, as muted as the wind held outside the bone-thick walls.

“In safekeeping…” the dragon murmured.

Stern said it as in a dream, and he said it to himself, Mama Diamond felt sure. But still it had been an answer, if one she herself didn’t have the key to decipher.

Then, as if a switch had been thrown, Stern was again scanning the cases and shelves with that nuclear-reactor gaze of his. Mama Diamond knew somehow that on his walk from the station, and his ruminations on her house and the weathered photograph, Stern had been on his own time, taking a break for reflection and diversion. But now he was back on the clock.

“Well, well,” Stern said, his wings folded and his head bent over one of the glass cases.

“They’re not truly precious gems,” Mama Diamond said. “No
real
diamonds here. Just desert rocks, minerals, oxides, carbonates, silicates from all over the world.”

“I know what I’m looking for.”

“Red beryls and morganite; almandine, pyrope, and other garnets…” Mama Diamond rattled it off, on automatic; she knew her spiel from years of practice and ease. But peering
up at the dragon, she contemplated a new mystery. For while it was clear even in this dimness that these radiant stones
were
what Stern had been looking for, they were clearly not what he valued nor cared about. She had seen that covetous look in enough customers’ eyes, the craving, the can’t-live-without-it-whatever-the-price, to know it when she saw it. And when she didn’t.

This is merely a means to an end for him. A currency.

But to buy what?

“Chrysoberyl in three varieties,” Mama was continuing. “That’s a cat’s-eye you’re looking at….”

“Yes. Now bring me some bags.”

“Bags?”

“Sacks, suitcases—whatever you have.”

Mama Diamond felt heartsick. She had spent years accumulating this inventory. Trading it, selling it judiciously, increasing its net worth. She had always depended on the slow equilibrium of acquisition and exchange, never drawing down the true deep inventory faster than it could be replaced and upgraded.

And since the Change the shop had been a great comfort to her, though of course there was no money it in anymore—and what was money worth these days, anyhow? She cherished these stones. And they protected her, or so Mama Diamond had come to believe. Since the Change there had been strange characters on the street at night now and again, many clearly intent on doing harm. They never stopped, of course; there was no reason for anyone, any
thing,
to linger in Burnt Stick. But down the long hot summer and cooling autumn they looted, sometimes they vandalized. They had broken windows and emptied shelves at the 7-Eleven, the grocery, various houses. Mama Diamond had more food stockpiled in her basement than any of those places. But the half-human vandals had never broken in. Mama Diamond thought somehow the stones might be responsible. Bright, shiny, repellent to darker creatures. Except, apparently, this dragon.

“You taking my stock?” she asked Ely Stern.

“You’re really very quick for a woman of your years.”

“Maybe it’s not for sale.” She didn’t mean the words to tremble so. She couldn’t help it.

“Maybe I’m not buying. Maybe I’m bartering”

“What have you got to trade?”

“Your life. If I’m feeling kind.”

This cool and absolutely convincing threat was too much for Mama Diamond. Her courage evaporated. Her knees buckled and she sat down right there on the floor of the Stone and Bone.

“Take what you have to,” she wheezed. “You can get your own damn bags.”

Then she passed out, or so it seemed. A few memories of that fading day (and evening, as it lingered on) remained. She remembered, or had dreamed, that the dragon looked on, huge and imperious, as huddled bunches of small gray men—or rather, hideous parodies of men, with stooped shoulders, pinpoint teeth and milky white eyes—carried out the gleaming stones of her inventory (the days of her life measured in peridot and tourmaline) in plastic grocery store sacks, in old luggage, in yellowed pillowcases, to the creaking Burnt Stick train depot and the impossible black train.

An impossible train in more than one fashion. It had arrived from the north, facing south, toward the Hanna mines. But now it was turned the other direction, though there were no sidings here, no rail turntable closer than a hundred miles away. It was as if the train had simply inverted itself, switched back for front.

Or maybe that was just part of the dream.

When she came fully awake, the moon was out, a thin sliver hanging over the Medicine Bow Range, and she was lying on her back on the platform, and the train was gone. That was good, the absence of the train, as if an abscessed tooth had been pulled.

The bad news—well, one small part of it—was that she ached in every bone and muscle. The night had turned bitterly cold. She should have been in bed with a fire crackling in the woodstove. Here she was instead, stretched out on
these old unyielding boards, the night wind riding up her coattail.

She moved against the pain as if against an invisible weight, a whole ocean of pain bearing down on her in one inexorable wave. She flexed finger joints, elbows, then bent at the waist and sat up, an act that made the town spin on the pivot of her head.

She gained her feet at last.

The walk home was excruciating—worse, because she knew what she would find at the end of it. Her shop, stripped; her inventory, stolen; all that glittering magic lost and departed.

The bones—literally—would still be there. But so much gone, ripped away, amputated.

Her bed would be waiting, at least. Her bed, and the woodstove.

What she did not expect was the large man in a ragged trench coat squatting on her steps, an oil lamp lit beside him.

Mama Diamond thought:
What fresh hell—?

But there was not much menace in this stranger, not as Mama Diamond sensed it. Power, yes. Great strength, yes, and great restraint.

The man stood up. He was a black man, and he spoke with the faintest trace of a soft accent. He had probably tried in his growing years to lose it, to cloak himself in the anonymity of Anyplace, America. But Mama’s ears were sharp, and she caught the lilt she had heard in voices long ago, in her travels South, in the sultry, primordial places of the Louisiana bayou.

“I’m a federal agent,” he said. “My name is Larry Shango, and I believe you’ve been robbed.”

THE GIRL IN HER APARTMENT

T
hat night, she had the dream again. The one with the third blind man, the one who could see. It perplexed her, she didn’t know how that could be so, but he told her not to worry, she’d know when they met. And in that telling, at least, she came to a partial knowing, that somehow his name was Blindman, and that it was not his eyes that were blind.

In the dream, they sat in a park, the two of them, the wind scattering the dry leaves like frightened children, and she could look across the street to the strange house, the one that was shrouded in night, lights shining within, yet a bright daylit sky above.

With that odd split consciousness of dreamer and dream, she realized she had seen this image before somewhere—in a book?—that it was a painting, and there was a name associated with it that at first she could not summon to mind. Yet she also knew that name had once been the Blindman’s heart.

Magritte…

As if sensing her thought, the third blind man smiled, large even teeth dazzling against his young dark face, the old dark eyes. “The heart broken was Goldman’s,” he said.

She knew she should remember who the gold man was, too, but her mind felt muted as it so often did nowadays, as
if pale fingers had brushed against her lips and stifled the answer.

A rumble sounded in the azure sky, rolling in from the west, and she smelled a sharp tang in the air, like fresh sheets off a clothesline, and she knew a storm was coming.

“Time to get you home,” the third blind man said.

There was a crackling and snapping in the sky like insane angry blue lightning. It swirled down at her faster than thought, seized her like the jaws of a big dog that was all the world. It tore at her and shook her and worried her as if she were a small dead thing, and it screamed and she screamed, too.

The Girl woke up in bed. The bed that looked just like her bed, under the blue and pink blankets that looked just like her blankets.

It was the same, and that was the really terrible part.

She threw back the covers and sat up and stretched, feeling the coil and ache of young muscles.

It was cold in the apartment, and she drew on the familiar terrycloth robe that lay at the foot of the bed.

She rose and padded across her room in the darkness, lithe as flowing water—navigating with easy familiarity the clutter of dance magazines, souvenir programs, textbooks and, of course, the Nijinsky diary—and emerged out into the hall.

The door to the other bedroom lay half open. She commanded herself not to look again, not to give in to the tiny hope that was so akin to hopelessness. But as ever she lacked the will.

In the predawn gloom, the hissing lights from Patel’s Grocery and the Amoco billboard shed just enough illumination to cast the room in noir starkness. The Marvin the Martian clock stood sentinel by the bedside, the covers tossed aside as if another had just awoken from unquiet dreams, too, and momentarily stepped away.

But it wasn’t so, the Girl knew. There was no one else here. But there
should
be, a part of her memory insisted. She should not be alone. He had promised her she wouldn’t be alone.

She continued on to the bathroom, where she showered and dried and did her morning things.

She looked at herself in the mirror, just like her mirror, the silvering coming away in the upper left and lower right corners. Her hair was dark and her eyes were dark—not blue at all, though strangely somehow she felt they
should
be blue—and her skin was smooth and pink, and her bare feet were planted solidly on the cracked blue tile.

What could possibly be wrong about that?

Her Danskin leotard and tights hung from the hook on the back of the door and she drew them on, feeling their snug familiarity with the subtle curve and flare of her body. She picked up the Grishko slippers from where they lay curled beside the cabinet and slid them onto artfully callused feet.

She glided out into the still, silent living room and switched on the television, turned the volume low.
It shouldn’t be working,
she told herself in some dim back part of her mind—as she told herself every time she turned it on—but it glowed to life as always. Sometimes it showed TV series or movies she knew well, remembered from when she was little, or from more recent times. On other occasions, it displayed a puzzling multicolored snow or revealed disturbing abstract patterns.

But mostly it broadcast snatches of scenes the Girl couldn’t place—disjointed moments in vibrant color or scratchy black-and-white, some in English but many in languages that sounded like they might be Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, French. These she classified as being derived from Sakamoto or Sanrio, Monteiro or St. Ives, without clearly understanding what those names meant, or from where she summoned them.

The early daylight sun shone through the slats of the window blinds, painting the walls and the Girl with shadows like prison bars. She folded back the faded area rug, ran through her regimen of stretches. Then she assumed first position before the large practice mirror, went through her variations and barre work, felt the call and response of finely tuned muscle and sinew.

Once these motions had been primal to her, almost the totality of her past, present and future.

But now they were just something to do to fill the time, on the track of remembered action, like a train that returned you to where you started.

And beneath everything, like a low vibration just below the threshold of sound, the sense of
wrongness,
humming in the marrow of her bones, in the helixes within her cells.

Completing her routine in due course, the Girl ventured into the kitchen, nuked the coffee in its WNET pledge mug in the microwave. The level of instant coffee in the Sanka jar was always the same as she spooned it out, and the strawberry Pop-Tart always the last as she withdrew it from the box in the freezer and popped it in the toaster.

Is it live or is it Memorex?
The Girl couldn’t quite place who had told her of the commercial with the old lady jazz singer breaking a glass with her voice—only that it had been someone with a twin, someone who had had something horribly wrong with him. But the Girl herself had never seen the commercial, and—despite the melancholy variety of programming on the set now—it never appeared.

She remembered, too, the story someone—she had trouble remembering who—had read her when she was little (but not too little to comprehend it) by that bearded guy who had written for
Star Trek,
in which strange creatures appeared at night and rebuilt an exact duplicate of the entire world for the next day, so you would think it was all the same.

But invariably, of course, they screwed it all up.

The Girl walked back out to the living room. She set the Pop-Tart and coffee on a side table and plopped cross-legged onto the burgundy recliner with the tear hidden in back. She reached behind her and selected a volume from the big maple bookcase that displayed the round jelly-glass stain, exactly like the one that had journeyed with them when she and the companion now walled off from her recollection had come from Hurley, Minnesota, when she was small.

The book was a tattered leather copy of
Little Women.
The Girl knew it well; her mother had read this book to her, and that unremembered
other
had, too, and she’d read it many times herself. She flipped through it. All the pages were there, and all the words.

Not so with many of the other works on the shelf, she knew. They might hold only half the words, or a third of the pages might be blank, or the cover a blur.

She drew out another book, a dark blue one with a gold dragon on the spine, and the title
A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder.
She had not inspected this one before. With mild curiosity, she blew the dust off and opened it, saw scrawled in a childish hand on the inside front cover, “This Book Belongs to Agnes Hilliard Wu.”

The frontispiece showed a group of mustached and bearded men in animated conversation around a table, with the caption “The Doctor was evidently discoursing upon a favorite topic.” She fanned the pages. The words seemed intact, set whole. Agnes Wu must have cherished this book; must still, wherever she might be. There were other books on the shelves inscribed to Agnes, books in a lilting text that the Girl recognized (although she could not have said precisely how) as Thai; she wondered if Agnes Wu, whoever she was, might once have lived in that fantasy place.

The Regulator clock on the wall chimed the half hour—seven-thirty. The Girl returned the book to its place on the shelf, uncurled and stood.

Beyond her apartment, the city waited, and her regular classes, and the School of American Ballet.

The train on its track, circling.

The Girl emerged from her fourth-floor walk-up out onto the street, dressed in her school grays, the book bag with its toe-shoe insignia slung over her shoulder. The morning was bright and mild, with none of the weight of humidity nor razor chill she associated with so many of her days in Manhattan. Unseen, the robins and skylarks trilled their songs, and strangers bustled about on the brownstone street as if they were actually going somewhere.

Eighty-first looked exactly right; the streets she most often walked on were always as she remembered them. Some of the other streets were complete, too—maybe St. Ives or Monteiro or the others knew them. But sometimes she’d turn a corner and be back on the street she was on before, or it would just be fog.

Outside her place, the Girl passed the cherry tree within its circle of vertical iron bars, a prisoner of Eighty-first Street. It blossomed even in captivity.

As she strode toward Columbus and St. Augustine Middle School, a gentle wind detached some of the blossoms from the tree and they pursued her, floated about her like a scene from
Madame Butterfly.
She caught one in her hand and ran it along her lips, her cheek; it felt like her own soft skin.

Joggers loped past her and kids strolled bantering in easy, laughing conversation. The Girl knew by now not to try to speak to them. People looked real, too, but they wouldn’t engage her in conversation; they were like extras in a movie.

Every now and then, though, someone would talk to her, and then she knew they were really real, or at least connected to someone who was.

The Girl slowed as she came to Mr. Lungo’s home. It was the familiar curlicued Victorian wedding cake of a house she remembered. But really, with its warped and weathered shingles, its peeling paint, listing fenceposts and wild devil grass, it was more like Miss Havisham’s ruin of a cake in
Great Expectations,
the symbol of abandonment, and broken promises, and time stood still. Even when she was little it had disquieted her, seemed an anomaly brutishly inserted onto this ordered street of brownstones with their weathered stoops and muted foliage.

It wasn’t like this every day. Sometimes the lot showed nothing more than blackened timbers and twisted wreckage, smoke curling up and choking the air, the way the house had been after disaster had befallen it on that riotous, murdering night.

Other times it wasn’t there at all—just the houses adjoining on either side, butted up against one another.

Lungo himself never made an appearance. But occasionally, his front-porch glider would rock with the slightest motion from the wind, in the shade of his scraggly jacaranda, and his twisted walking stick, like an arthritic, broken finger, would be resting against the rail.

The realest people here are the ghosts,
the Girl thought, and turned onto Columbus.

She caught the sweet liquid sound from far off, way around the corner, like the smell of menthol, and honey on your tongue, and the azure sky at sunset when the stars were just peering through.

Then the husky, lulling murmur of the saxophone paused in mid-phrase.

“Well, if it ain’t Anna Pavlova….”

The blind black man turned his milk-sheened, useless eyes toward her and smiled with that smile that was like sinking into a warm bath. How he could know she was there before she spoke was always a mystery to her, and it felt right.

He was not young like the third blind man in her dream, nor pale like the other, malign one. His skin was a deep burnished brown, like old, oiled furniture, and when the light hit it just so, it showed a subtlety of gray, like a fine coating of ash.

“How they treatin’ you today, sweet girl?” Papa Sky asked.

“Okay,” she replied, and both the question and the answer soothed her, although she couldn’t have said who she thought “they” were.

“Well, you just hang in there. You got friends in high places. What you wanna hear today?”

She shrugged, which was a request in itself. Dealer’s choice…and when the dealer was this good, it was all flow.

Papa Sky put the shaved Leblanc reed of the 1922 Selmer alto sax (this instrument that was almost, but not quite, as old as he was) to his wetted lips, and it was an incantation and supplication in one.

The glorious sounds poured out, smooth perfection, throaty and soaring and exultant.

The Girl recognized the tune. The last time he’d played it, the old blind black man (the half
cubano
as he called himself) had told her it was called “Night and Day.”

She closed her eyes and let the melody fill her, began to move to it. And this was no longer just going through the motions, nor feigning interest in the arabesque and pas de deux that had once been her universe.

Night and day, you are the one….

She gave herself over to the river of harmony, let its cool voice fill every pore, engulf eye socket and fingertip, ankle and neck, liberated into expression and movement.

The way it had been before, when Luz Herrera had taken the photo (so exactly like the one atop her night table now) of her as Giselle at the March recital in mid-jété, enraptured, effortless.

Freed from the pull of earth, and its cares.