May Catches the Enemy, who was sometimes called Lady Blade and who had once been May Devine, drew her knives and, circling, began to dance.
One by one, the others followed suit-including, at the last, a grumbling Colleen Brooks.
Griffin’s sister Christina was moving now, too, flowing in the air with deft motions that left streaks of entwined color and light in her wake. May Catches the Enemy found herself staring openmouthed at the fairy girl, knowing that her soul was that of a dancer.
Watching May and doing what she did, moving to the beat, Cal came up alongside Enid Blindman and Papa Sky. “Play with all you’ve got,” he called to them. “Play to wake the dead.”
They set to it with a will. Their music swirled and spiraled around the drumbeat and voices, gained assurance and majesty, filled up the sky and the land.
And from the Black Hills, from the rotted, cancerous Thing at its core, an answer came.
Angry black clouds spread out like a carpet unrolling, suffocating the sky, and from within them flared blinding flashes like worlds exploding.
The lightning rained down.
Howling, Stern took to the sky, breathing flame up at the heavens, deflecting the raging death strokes. Christina, too, extended her radiance, twisting the sizzling current away from the dancers to scorch prairie grass and barren trees scant yards away.
The lightning bolts increased their fury, pounding down like blazing fists, ravaging the land. Tortured, unthinking animals, summoned by the Mind that could not be denied, streamed out from the hills, shrieking maniacally, launching themselves with fang and claw, to be immolated on this killing ground.
“Keep dancing!” May called out to the others, and Cal took up the cry.
Slowly, barely perceptibly, the lightning began to die off, the clouds took on colors of red and blue and gold within the blackness, moving like the breath of a living thing.
The thunder came.
It boomed out like the universe clearing its throat and issued, not from the sick core of the Hills, but from somewhere deeper, and older still.
“The Thunder People!” May Catches the Enemy shouted over the roar. “The Thunder People summon their children!”
It reverberated through them and went on and on, rattled their bones and teeth, shook the ground beneath their feet, tumbled rocks and raised great plumes of dust into the muted and shrouded air.
“Son of a bitch!” Colleen Brooks exclaimed.
The land about them was rippling, turning over, like a rumpled sheet being reversed on a mattress. The ancient soil cracked, vented, bent away….
And where it folded, something rose up from below.
Shadow forms, many hundreds of them spreading over the land, wraiths of smoke and ember and will.
As one, they turned toward the dancers and advanced on them.
Larry Shango slowed in his gyrations, edged up to Cal. Their eyes were locked on the coming forms.
“Is this a good thing,” Larry Shango asked in a low voice, “or a bad one?”
Cal Griffin considered the figures, drifting toward them like fog. He could see now that some were shaped like men, and some like horses.
“A good thing,” he said at last.
The others had stopped dancing now, the music fading off and the thunder banking down to a low rumble.
The shadow ones stopped before them.
“Hua kola…” the warrior in front said, and his voice was shadowy, too. He was no more than smoke and vapor, but Cal could see he stood well-muscled and tall, and the shadings of color within the smoke revealed curly brown hair and pale gray eyes. He wore a single eagle feather and behind his ear, a stone. Painted on his chest were a lightning bolt and two shapes that, in time, Cal would learn were hailstones.
Ely Stern had come to ground beside Cal, and Christina floated down silently, in awe. The others, too, gathered around him to face this newcomer and his brothers, who had been called forth by the thunder and not the Storm.
May Catches the Enemy stepped up to them and smiled. “I’d like you to meet my ancestor,” she said, and introduced them to the one some had called Curly, and others Our Strange Man.
The one most had known as Crazy Horse.
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….