It’s different at night, the King had said, shuddering at some unspoken memory.
It’s different at night.
We’ll see, thought Shango.
Shango watched the transformation from the shelter of the pillared rock.
As the sun set, the wall of noncorporeality seemed to take life and potency from the gathering dark. Shango had brought with him a pair of costly binoculars, for which he had paid nothing at a deserted camera-and-optical shop in a town called Reliance. By the last of the day’s light he was able to see long streaks of multicolored light glowing and slowly twisting within the mist-structure like contrails illuminated by a sun that had dipped below the horizon.
On other nights at other stopping places, Shango thought he had discerned this phenomenon. This vantage point was the closest he’d gotten to the barricade; despite the hall-of-mirrors trickery played on him, it confirmed his suspicions.
The rainbow of comet tails divided and multiplied, gaining in number until they covered the fogscape like an incandescent quilt some titan might wrap himself in.
Shango could not divine the purpose of this display, but he assumed it was a means of drawing or accumulating energy. The Source, he thought…source of what? Of power. Of preeminence.
What affected the world, Shango suspected, had not simply originated here. It was sustained here, controlled here, manipulated, given its unique nature, its personality.
Shango stood a moment watching the sun slide lower, wondering what his next step should be.
Stealth would gain him nothing. Shango shouldered his hammer and his canteen and walked to the roadway of Bureau of Indian Affairs Route 2 heading west, where in the dimming light the gravel still showed erratically through a skein of drifted dirt.
He set himself firmly on the path, striding deliberately toward the frosty wall of light, like a supplicant or a pilgrim, and this time he was not turned back.
He pierced the skin of the fog, felt it moving damp and electric on his skin, like a convocation of lightning bugs, and curiously smelled hot chocolate and gunpowder and evergreen. He wondered if those smells were truly there, or if something within the fog were somehow conjuring them from the well of his memory.
The last natural light of day fell away, and if there were stars overhead they were lost to the feverish glow of the fog.
Shango moved cautiously forward as the light trails coiled and danced about him, painting their colors on his shiny dark skin and battered clothes and the hammer he bore.
Some yards ahead of him, the haze seemed to be coalescing, gathering itself together into a form. At least, that was the impression it gave; it could be that Shango’s wearied mind was playing tricks on him, that someone was walking toward him through the fog and becoming visible, rather than actually assembling itself from the constituent atoms, drawing into solidity from the particles of mist.
But he didn’t think so.
And as he drew closer to the apparition, he was sure.
What stood in his path was a man-at least, partially. But the texture of its hair and skin, the cable-knit sweater, plaid flannel shirt and faded jeans it wore, were all wrong, constantly shifting and rearranging themselves with subtle, unceasing movement, like an ocean seen from a height or a colony of termites. Rather than being illuminated from the light trails, Shango could see that the creature glowed from within, casting its own muted nimbus onto the vapors about it.
And something even more disconcerting-at times, the phantom looked whole and complete, then in an instant the sweater, shirt and jeans would appear altered, stained and, in some places, torn. The man’s face was ghastly pale, bone peeking here and there through parchment flesh. Part of that face looked as if it had been sandblasted away. Its eyes were cloudy and distant.
A suggestion perhaps-and Shango shuddered at the thought-that this being had been horribly injured at some time in the past.
It was like one of those pictures of Jesus where he opened his eyes from a certain angle, closed them from another; both realities true at the same time, and both an illusion.
“You’re not allowed here,” the ghost-thing said. It gazed coolly into Shango’s tired eyes.
Shango collected himself, cradled his hammer in his hand.
“What place is this?” he asked.
“You know what place,” the being of mists and vapors replied flatly.
True enough, Shango thought. But how did you know that?
“Who are you?” he said, and wondered why he hadn’t asked What are you? But then, Shango knew that answer, some of it, at least, if not in his mind then in the instinctual, resonating part of his gut that clenched tight before this appalling guardian.
“My name…” it said, as if the question were a difficult and troubling one, “is Fred.”
Great, a monster named Fred. “Fred what?” Shango asked.
Again, the question seemed to perplex the creature, to propel it into rumination as though diving into murky waters. At last, it answered, in a hollow tone redolent of longing and loss, “Wishart…”
“Wishart,” Shango exhaled. It was one of the names he had seen on the list of Source Project scientists, the list he had salvaged from agent Jeri Bilmer’s purse in the crumpled wreckage of United 1046 out of Houston, its debris trail scattered and forgotten in the woodlands of Albermarle County.
The list that had cost Jeri Bilmer her life.
And a name, too, Cal Griffin had told Shango there in the woods of Albermarle, that Cal’s sister Tina had murmured in fevered dreams back in Manhattan; when, heat-melting like a waxen thing, she was transforming into a being of radiance and inhumanity.
“You know me?” this nightmare that had been Dr. Fred Wishart asked.
“I know of you. You’re from West Virginia, from a town called Boone’s Gap.” A town that Griffin and his friends had been journeying to when Shango had encountered them in the woods, although they had mistakenly thought the town was named Wishart-until Shango had taken it upon himself to break his oath to President McKay and tell them it was a man.
He wondered now if that intelligence-and the little else he had known of the Source Project at the time, the little he’d been able to share with them-had been sufficient to save their lives.
And if somehow-despite the unlikelihood, the clear impossibility of it-Fred Wishart could have been there as well as here.
The spectre paused distractedly, as if trying to process this information. But Shango could glean no clue whether this horror could fathom what Boone’s Gap might be, or West Virginia.
“I’m a federal agent,” Larry Shango said, feeling the absurdity of trying to impress this entity with the weight of his authority. At any rate, the statement may or may not have been a lie, as it spoke to what Shango had once been and since discarded, or tried to discard, like a garment set aside but the ghost tattoo of whose fabric and pattern still adhered to the skin.
Wishart stared unblinking at him, his skin twitching creepily now and then, his face betraying no comprehension, as though federal agent were as meaningless a string of nonsense sounds as Boone’s Gap or West Virginia had been.
“It doesn’t matter,” it said finally. “Go back now…while you can.”
Shango disliked the sound of the creature’s voice-like wind blowing through an empty house, making vowels of gutter troughs and consonants of loose shingles. It made him want to go back, to run far and fast and keep on running. But he had come this far-