The Shasta Gate

by Dick Croy

  Dust was still rising from the barrier, and smaller rocks and pebbles continued to rain from the slope above like sprinkles after a thunderstorm. “Christ—we’re lucky it didn’t come down on top of us!” Catherine exclaimed when she’d caught her breath. Eugene said nothing. He’d caught the faint sound of something besides the clatter of loose rocks that chilled him to the bone.

  Alerted by his tense silence, she listened too and heard the drone of motorcycles on the wind. “It’s them isn’t it?” Before he’d even had a chance to respond, the gang appeared around a switchback immediately beneath them, only a few minutes away. “What can we do?” she asked in alarm.

  Eugene scanned the jumble of loose rocks for a hiding place. “I don’t know if they’ve seen us or not,” he said. “They may not know you’re with me. You could hide up there. If I can get through them, they’ll go after me.”

  “No. I want to stick with you.”

  “Catherine, all they can do is kill me.”

  “I know that.” She was holding onto him tightly, her cheek against his back, a dazed look on her face, not quite believing this was actually happening to her. Not when she’d found someone like this at last....Right, someone to die for. What a laugh! What a fool she was!

  Eugene’s expression, if she could have seen it, was one of fierce determination, both to mask and to hold at bay the fear clutching at his entrails. Fear not so much for himself as for Catherine. It was because of him, after all, that her life was in danger. He couldn’t let it gain control of him, their chances were slim enough at best; affected by fear, his muscles and reflexes would betray them both.

  There wasn’t time to argue with her. The only chance they had was to surprise and attempt to ride through the Gang. If they kept to the inside, hugging the mountain, they might possibly slip through—perhaps even forcing some of the bikers off the cliff. But he knew the chances of executing this were about as slim as driving straight into thin air with the hope that trees hundreds of feet below might cushion their fall.

  The Gang knew they were somewhere ahead of them—Eugene was sure of that. And they’d have witnessed the slide from below. Whether they also realized that the two of them were trapped, he had no way of telling, but they’d be prepared for a move of some kind. He gave the Leader that much credit.

  He took a deep breath to calm himself, visualized and focused on his inner cross, and started the bike. He felt his resolve strengthen, his concentration shrink the world around him to the space occupied by the motorcycle and the tunnel he’d have to make with it ahead of them, through any obstacle they confronted.

  But he’d waited too long. Having seen the slide, the Leader shot well out ahead of the rest of the Gang, knowing the biker had either escaped him once more or was cornered. He came around the last turn ready for anything—and sooner than Eugene had anticipated. Swinging his bike expertly across the highway, the Leader brought it out of its slide and covered them with his Magnum in one continuous motion.

  Finally! Even nature had collaborated in their capture. They had caused him so much grief he’d let the gang do any damn thing they wanted to them. But he was taking no chances. If this guy tried anything...if he moved a fucking finger the wrong way, he’d blow his goddamn head off. The gang would still have the girl to play with.

  He leaped from his bike and back-pedaled to keep the others from piling up in the curve, never for a moment lowering the gun from the center of Eugene’s chest. He and Catherine were completely cut off now on the turn-out, jutting over a sheer treeless slope which fell almost vertically for some five-hundred feet at least. In front of them to their left was the wall of boulders and debris blocking their way. To their right a tangled knot of motorcycles and riders enveloped in the din of idling engines reverberating from the rock face which the narrow road embraced. Disentangling themselves, taunting them, the gang began to close in on their bikes, advancing not in unison but with first one, then another rider darting out ahead of the pack, like wild dogs surrounding their prey.

  Not for the first time, Eugene told himself he wasn’t afraid of dying—though the thought of torture certainly wasn’t appealing. It would be easy to take a slug from the Magnum; he might not even feel it. But what would happen to Catherine? His mind raced futilely for a solution but found nothing beyond killing them both by driving off the side of the mountain. Did he have the right to take her with him like that—even to save her from something a lot worse? If he tried to make a move and was nailed, he’d have no control over the situation at all.

  Eugene turned and looked into her face. A clear answer was the last thing Catherine could have provided at the moment. Her mind was reeling, overwhelmed by emotions at their most extreme—fear, despair, bitterness, hatred: of this man who with a gun in his hand held such power over her; of the world and everything in it for this final inexcusable betrayal; of herself, for being fooled again—and so completely this time.

  Left hand on the clutch, Eugene reached back without turning and gripped Catherine’s thigh. She grasped it in both hands, desperately longing to wake up—in his tent with his arms around her, the bikers just a bad dream, a traumatic rerun of her worst imaginings yesterday.

  In the shimmer and gleam of reflecting metal, the distracting, darting motions of their stalking, the bikers did appear as surrealistic as the figments of a nightmare. She was too terrified even to close her eyes. Then all at once, in this welter of noise and confusion, a face suddenly stood out—Becky’s. Had Catherine seen it somewhere before? Years ago? It could almost...it could almost be her Indian princess.

  A sudden wave of nausea accompanied this inexplicable warp in time or reason...and then a stallion’s scream split the air. All eyes swept upward to the bluff above the fallen rock. To an Indian on an appaloosa, holding the reins of an Arabian stallion.

  “To reach the Shasta Gate...” his commanding voice rang out, “you must pass through your own fear!”

  In bewilderment Catherine mouthed Ram’s name silently to herself. Then her dazed expression vanished. Who cared how he’d gotten here—there was no one in the world she’d rather see right now. “Gene! It’s Ram! It’s Ram!”

  Eugene’s eyes went from Ram to Catherine, leaning forward to his left, then back to the bikers. He realized now that he was in the middle of something he couldn’t begin to understand. Drawing on the experience of his acid-trip days, he let go of what was “real.” At least this way he could still function, still feel clutch and throttle with his gloved hands.

  Of the Gang, only the Leader seemed surprised by the Indian’s sudden appearance. Just another hallucination to the rest. Their momentum was too great to be stopped now in any case. They continued to press forward. “Go on—get them!” he screamed.

  Catherine looked wildly to Ram for help. He gestured toward his chest from the rearing appaloosa and in a voice like a war cry exclaimed: “Anger is fear, Catherine!”

  Something snapped inside of her. She broke into a sweat, her chest heaved, and she tried to scream, whether in fear or anger, she couldn’t have said. But panting like a woman in labor, she couldn’t utter a sound.

  “Let go of it, Catherine! Hold on to nothing!”

  It was obvious to Eugene that the Indian’s sudden appearance was all that prevented the bikers from rushing them. Yet not a shot had been fired, nor a gun raised against him.

  “Eugene!” How the hell did he know his name? “A man unafraid is a dead man!” Didn’t he know the danger they were in? Ram laughed uproariously, then bellowed another war cry.

  This was all it took to set Catherine off. They didn’t need fucking platitudes when their lives were at stake! Fear and frustration finally released her rage. Shaking her head slowly at first, then with increasing frenzy, she released a searing scream of such power that it reverberated not just in her ears but in her very being. Was it only her imagination, or were there faint vibrations even in the mountain itself? Shasta dancing to her tune.

  She felt the beginn
ing of another muscular contraction in her gut, this one even stronger than the first. Energy was building in her like floodwater piling up behind a dam. She could feel it rising, the dam was going to break.

  Fire exploded from her belly into her lungs and throat. The terrible sound of all this compressed energy savaging her vocal cords was the moaning howl of the mountain in Ram’s dream, on a human scale. The bikers seemed to waver as if seen through heat waves. Catherine thought she recognized other faces from her past in the distorted images. She caught glimpses of her father everywhere, but when she looked directly at them, focused on the elusive images, the apparitions disappeared.

  “Hey, Gringo!...Hey ‘Seeker’!” No, it couldn’t be!

  He must have blacked out for a moment because, though his rational consciousness denied this, Ram and the horses no longer occupied the bluff. Somehow they had managed to descend its nearly perpendicular face and negotiate the mass of fallen rocks to occupy the middle ground between Catherine and himself and the bikers.

  “The warrior’s way lies within!” Ram cried out. “The ‘last frontier’ is fear!” He threw back his head with another extraordinary laugh and a gesture that said more clearly than words could have: “Get on with it!”

  The laughter was so infectious, and he was so emotionally overwrought, Eugene was on the verge of laughing himself. Then Ram extended the reins of the stallion to Catherine.

  Her questioning look was met by Ram’s unambiguous wordless reply, and she leaned forward to meet Eugene’s eyes, searching his face for understanding, and finding it. With the same sense of time suspended that she had experienced the day before, Catherine felt herself cross the short distance between the bike and her horse. Using the Indian’s stirrup and strong arm, she swung herself onto the stallion’s glistening bare back. Only now, face to face with her, did Ram falter: a look of loss flashed across his face. But in a moment it was gone, replaced by an unmistakable expression of triumph.

  Now that the Indian had intervened, liberating him from the sole responsibility for Catherine’s safety, Eugene felt as light and deadly as a hawk facing a flock of crows. And like the Indian his urge to laugh and, simultaneously, to do battle, merged. Suddenly there was the same warrior’s camaraderie between them that Catherine had shared with her guardian for years.

  Thrusting his fist toward the sky, Eugene brought his head back in a full-throated roar of affirmation. Gave himself up completely to it. The triumphant scream came rolling up of its own momentum, mighty and glorious, pulling all manner of emotional effluvia with it. The release of old compacted angers, hurts and fears continued long after it seemed he had any breath left. What an extraordinary sensation of light and cleanliness surged into the vacuum that remained! If he let go of his bike’s handle grips would he levitate? He felt transformed. And when he looked with wonder and excitement at Catherine astride the stallion, her face was full of admiration: admiration and something greater. A vista of shared destiny, timeless and inalienably human, opened out from the two of them to extend on all sides as far as their eyes and hearts and minds could see.

  Together—closer now than when she’d sat behind him with her arms around his waist—they faced their adversaries, their demons, and lifted their faces to the sky. Lifetimes of pent-up fear and rage and frustration were stripped from their souls and released. No ordinary human sound, their shared scream was the exultant cry of nature itself, ascending: giving birth to consciousness.

  Catherine and Eugene made their move, plunging in unison into the midst of the Gang. A crack appeared in the face of the cliff. A brilliant white light flooded their faces. The biker gang, wavering before them like a mirage, began to dissolve, to disintegrate...until only the Leader’s astonished face—an empty, sightless and disembodied mask staring blankly at the sky—lay on the ground at their feet.

  With nothing now to stop them, horse and motorcycle were hurtling straight into the solid rock wall of the mountain. But the luminous aperture was widening. In the timeless moment their headlong rush took them across the highway to the base of the cliff, it opened wide enough to admit them both. Side by side, they burst through the portal in a blaze of light...and were gone.

  With a reverberant sound, which those on the mountain and in the towns beneath it took to be distant thunder, the door closed seamlessly in the rock behind them.

  The appaloosa, riderless and frightened by the thunderclap, neighed and bolted for the ranch. Far above him, ascending Mt. Shasta in a widening spiral, was a golden eagle. Higher and higher it rose, until with the distant triumphant cry of its kind it too had disappeared, beyond the cloud wreath crowning the mountain.

  END