Magic Time: Ghostlands Read Online Free PDF Page B

part, Mama Diamond thought as she slow-walked with the dragon down the main street of Burnt Stick, was how calming his presence was. Not reassuring —oh no, definitely not—but calming the way an oil slick calms a wind-whipped sea; calming the way a dose of Thorazine calms a lunatic. The energy, the madness, is intact, but it can’t be expressed. Something about Ely Stern slowed the heartbeat and thickened the tongue. One was not permitted to panic in his grand and overweening presence.
    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. Norwould 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 herthought 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,