Something else.
Minds…
Not from this side, Cal could feel it…. Other, unimaginably other…
And behind them, a boy, somewhere in this world, a boy with a mind like no other, a boy who had been a boy for a long, long time…
Then, like a door slamming determinedly shut, the awareness was gone.
Cal was in the blackness, surrounded by the countless minds held captive here, pleading that he help, pleading that he act….
And Cal realized that, at last, his long-ago dream had arrived.
But it was different in its details, there was clamor and chaos, but not the sounds of battle, of metal on metal, of metal tearing flesh. And no sword for him to claim…
These had only been the symbols of things, the metaphors, of confrontation, of power….
Cal could sense Sanrio coming back, drawing on the power of the void itself, on the power of the Source.
He was returning to reclaim what was his.
Cal felt the power of the others within himself. Like Sanrio, he could draw upon the raw power of the Source, too.
The flare minds called to him.
He stood at the black heart of the tumult as they cried their anguish, their despair, demanded, pleaded-
That he act.
But act how?
He reached out with his new, expanded awareness, felt the tenebrous borders of the rent, the tear in the universe….
And he knew with utter conviction that he could seal it, plug the hole, cut off the torrent of the Source.
But it would take drawing upon all the force at his command. It would take bringing the mountain down in on itself, cascading tons of rock crashing down on their heads, crushing them.
In the lighthouse beacon of his mind, Cal could make out the frail, delicate form with hair fine as white spiderweb and eyes a scorching blue….
Christina.
And the others beyond her, among the multitude of souls…
Colleen. Doc. Goldie. May Catches the Enemy. Inigo. Papa Sky. Mama Diamond. Enid Blindman. Howard Russo. Larry Shango.
Cal knew he could do this, stop the energy that had flooded the world, and destroy Marcus Sanrio, too….
But it would kill them all.
And would it change the world back, back the way it had been?
Who could say?
With the will that had brought him here, the will that could also be called love, Cal made his choice.
He brought his vast attention to Sanrio and blasted him back, sent him hurtling, tumbling away, before Sanrio could regroup, draining him as he went, bleaching his bleached, cadaverous soul, inhaling the fiercesome wildfires as they burst out of Sanrio like nuclear mandalas of psychotic glory made flesh and lightning strike, and then blowing them back at the albinic stick figure, vomiting forth the torrent of withering black-star corruption to scour raw this child’s scrawl of phosper dots and malignity, until only the barest remnant of the being remained, a tenuous loose affiliation of particles that had once been a man, had once been known and known itself as Dr. Marcus Sanrio.
Cal tried then to draw the entity back in, to hold him still and mute and captive.
But with the last bit of power that was his, Marcus Sanrio fought to evade these filaments, to slip from Cal’s grasp. There was a moment of fierce struggle and then, in a searing implosion of mind and will, Sanrio winked out, spiralized and compacted to nothingness, vanished from distance and time, and was gone from all awareness.
Extinguished, destroyed? Cal thought so, but then…
He couldn’t be sure.
But this much he knew-either way, Sanrio had been dead a long time, soul dead….
Let go of the dead, and attend to the living.
He turned his attention to the others that orbited about him…and repeated what he had said before.
You’re human. Be human again.
He summoned up all the power that was within him, within the scientists and the lost ones and the flare children, the power he could draw from the flood coursing out of the rent in the universe, felt it suffuse him and erupt and flow outward in a great, warming deluge….
You’re human. Be human again.
And it was so.
The first thing Cal realized as he sat up groggily on the scorched tile floor was that he had a body again.
The second was that he had no more power than an ordinary man.
May Catches the Enemy was there, helping him shakily to his feet.
“Not bad, Griffin,” she said, smiling broadly. “Not bad at all…”
Cal looked about him, and saw that the room was a shattered wreck of what had once been a laboratory, the walls chiseled out of bare rock. It was what it had always been, at least since the Change, at least in reality.
“Christina…?” Cal croaked out worriedly, and his sister floated up to him. Still a flare, not human, but thankfully, not harmed. In her glow, Cal could make out Inigo and Howard Russo huddled concernedly about him, still grunters, as well. Colleen stood close on, Enid and Shango silent and watchful alongside, Papa Sky and Mama Diamond there, too.
“Man, you sure know how to throw a party,” said a voice behind him.
Cal turned and-even though he knew the man was generally leery of human contact-hugged Goldie until he nearly turned blue.
The shadow warriors and their horses were gone, May explained, fled back to the Spirit Realm. But then she led Cal to where Doc Lysenko stood ministering to Fred Wishart and Agnes Wu and the other Source Project scientists, human again, who sat blinking and moving like sleepers gone far from the world, awakening at last from unquiet dreams.
Of Marcus Sanrio, there was no sign.
“What about the flares?” Cal asked.
May led him through the Hall of Records to the staircase beneath the watchful, ruined heads of Mount Rushmore.
In the autopsy room at Atherton, beside the ravaged body of one that was not Ely Stern, Doc had told Cal that the dragons, and the grunters and the flares, were not inhuman, but rather alternate humans….
Pray to see what’s real, Mr. Griffin….
Humans, all of them, in all their forms, in the world as it truly was.
From his vantage point high atop the Black Hills, which had been called He Sapa since time out of mind, peering over the Badlands as they lay timeless under a rising sun and a cloud-wracked sky, Cal had to admit that the glow of the multitude, flying home to all four corners of the land, was spectacular indeed.
FIFTY-NINE
In these recent days of miracles and wonders, Garrett Lambert had seen some freaky things, truth to tell and no fish story, my man.
But it went without saying that the cobwebby dude sitting on the bench by the dead old train depot was right up there with the contenders.
“What’chu doin’ there, old-timer?” Garrett ambled up to him in the noonday sun only mad dogs and Englishmen would dare sashay out in. In his era, Garrett had been a pretty mad dog hisself, and once upon a time had been enough of a blueblood to pass for a Brit on a five-buck dare, if need be.
“Waiting for a train,” the old dude exhaled, his voice as silken and insubstantial as cobweb, too. His skin was pale, faded parchment locked away in a tomb, and his hair and clothes were leeched of all color, too, diseased somehow.
Garrett squinted hard at him; what with the glasses he’d misplaced in Laredo, and the four Dos Equis he’d quaffed as his morning Breakfast of Champions, he was having a hard time getting a lock on this particular member-in-good-standing of AARP. He seemed to go in and out of being, somehow; appeared MIA in the crevices and shadowy places of his face and form.