The Spirit Well be-3

by Stephen R. Lawhead

  “Who knows?” Joe shrugged. “Anyway, they have a state senator on their side. He’s up for reelection soon, so he’s got a bee in his bonnet. Senator Rodriguez-he’s on the squawk box giving interviews about how we’re all a bunch of cold, heartless scientists tearing up the countryside and defiling Indian burial grounds.”

  “This was never an Indian burial ground,” Cass pointed out. “Anyway, we’re not digging up the whole valley, only a few specific locations-the same ones we’ve been working for the past two years. Did you tell them that?”

  Joe regarded her with a pitying expression. “You think logic and reason have anything to do with this? It’s political, and it’s gone septic.”

  “Well, that’s just dandy,” she huffed. “As if we didn’t already have enough trouble with the Sedona Tourist Bureau and the New Agers. This isn’t going to help one little bit.”

  “Tell me about it. I’ve arranged to speak to the editor over at the Sedona Observer tomorrow and put our case on record.”

  “Hold that thought,” she said, and resumed her pursuit of the wayward Friday, who had passed from view behind a boulder at the foot of a washout.

  “We have to stop digging until this is settled,” he called after her. “Get Friday and his crew to help you tie things down and put a tarp over the trench.”

  “Can’t hear you!” she replied.

  Dodging a pumpkin-sized barrel cactus, she hurried on, leaving Greenough behind. Keeping an eye peeled for rattlesnakes-the constant bugaboo of desert digs-she clipped along, dodging the bristles, spines, and saw-toothed edges of the local flora, all of which seemed to have been designed to puncture, slash, tear, or otherwise discourage progress one way or another. Strange, she thought, how quiet it became, and how quickly.

  The thought was no sooner through her head than she heard that rarest of desert sounds: thunder. The distant rumble, clear and present on the hot dry air, brought her up short.

  She glanced up to see that the sky above the towering red-rock hills and canyons of the Verde Valley had grown dark with heavy, black, angry-looking clouds. Oblivious, with her head in the ground, she had failed to notice the fast-changing weather. The wind lifted, and Cassandra smelled rain. A thunderstorm in the desert was not unheard of, but rare enough to be fascinating and fragrant. The smell of washed desert air tinged with ozone was unlike anything else. It would be, she considered, less fascinating to be caught out in a lightning storm. She picked up her pace and called to the swiftly retreating figure ahead, “Friday!”

  The echo of her cry came winging back to her from the surrounding canyon walls. Directly ahead rose a towering rock stack-a multibanded heap of the distinctive ruddy sandstone of the Sedona region. “Gotcha!” she muttered, certain that her quarry had ducked out of sight behind the massive wind-sculpted block of stone. She hurried on. The sky continued to lower; the mumbling, grumbling thunder grew louder and more insistent. The freshening wind sent dust devils spinning away through the sagebrush and mesquite.

  As Cassandra rounded the base of the sandstone stack, she saw that it opened into one of the many feeder gullies of the larger system the locals called Secret Canyon. She thought she glimpsed a figure flitting through the shadows of the gulch some distance ahead. She shouted again, but received no answer; she sped on, moving deeper into the enormous crevice.

  Her Yavapai colleague was in most significant ways the stereotypical red man: work-shy, taciturn to the point of monosyllabic, arrogant, furtive, given to odd moods. Habitually dressed in faded jeans with the cuffs stuffed into the tops of his scuffed cowboy boots, he wore his straight black hair scraped back into a single braid that fell down the back of his sun-bleached blue shirt, and bound the end with a leather strap decorated with a bit of red rag or a quail feather. In both dress and demeanour he presented an image so patently cliched that Cass had come to believe that it was purposefully studied, and one he worked very hard to maintain. No one could have combined so many of these dime-novel qualities by accident.

  Friday, she concluded, wanted to be seen as the quintessential Native American of popular romance. He chased it-to the point of standing outside the Walgreens on Main Street on the weekends dressed in a fringed deerskin vest and beaded moccasins, with two eagle feathers in his hair, posing for pictures with tourists for tips: Sedona’s very own drugstore Indian. All he lacked was a fistful of cigars.

  As to why he did it, she as yet had no clue. Why play a part so obviously derisory and beneath him? Why perpetrate a demeaning cliche that belonged to a backward, less enlightened time? Was it masochism, or some kind of elaborate joke? Cass could not begin to guess.

  “Friday!” she shouted, still moving forward. “Come out! I know you’re in here.” She paused, then added, “You’re not in trouble. I just want to talk to you.”

  The rock walls of undulating stone, layered in alternating bands of colour, rose sheer from the floor of the gulley, which upon closer inspection appeared unnaturally straight: a curious quality Cassandra noticed but put down to a trick of the uncertain light and oddly shaped stone walls. A sudden gust of wind sent loose pebbles falling from the heights above and, with them, the first drops of rain.

  “Friday!”

  The sound of her voice pinged along the sandstone walls, but there was no reply from the deepening shadows ahead. The sky grew dark and angry as a bruise, the low clouds churning. The air tingled with pent energy; it felt alive, as if lightning was about to strike.

  With a hand flattened over her head to protect herself from the scattershot of pebbles, Cassandra raced on, taking the straight path through the canyon to avoid the loose debris from above. The wind shrieked a withering note, sending a sheet of rain down the length of the gulley, drenching everything in its path.

  Cassandra was caught. The wind, funnelled by the canyon, surged over her, dashing cold water into her face. Blinded by the rain, she scooped water from her eyes and dived for whatever cover the overhanging ledges of stone could provide. A blast of icy wind slammed into her with the force of a jet engine, stealing the breath from her lungs and driving her along the canyon floor. She staggered forward, tripped, put out her hands to break her fall, and gritted her teeth.. but the expected jolt did not come.

  To her horror, the ground gave out beneath her, and she continued to tumble.

  Between one step and the next she was airborne, plunging into an unseen void. The landing, when it came, was abrupt, but not the bone-breaking shock she instinctively feared. The ground on which she landed had an odd spongy granularity she could not have anticipated.

  Her first thought was that she had somehow fallen through the roof of a kiva-one of the underground ritual houses favoured by the pueblo-dwelling natives of the past. These were often hidden, and the roofs were known to give way beneath the weight of unwary hikers. But whoever heard of a kiva hidden in a canyon floor?

  Her second thought-an absurd possibility-was that a tornado had plucked her up and dropped her miles away. Did she not feel that she had been flying? How else to explain what she was now seeing? For stretching before her was a vast, arid plain of volcanic gravel without a single cactus or mesquite tree in sight. The towering red rocks of Sedona were gone, and in the far distance a band of black hills lined the horizon.

  And that was all.

  What had happened to Arizona?

  Cass stared at the alien landscape, whirling in panicky pirouette like a dancer who had inexplicably lost her partner. Panic rising, she gulped air in a futile effort at forcing herself to remain calm. Two thoughts chased each other round and round in her spinning thoughts: What happened? Where am I?

  Cass, the back of her hand pressed to her mouth to stifle the scream she felt gathering there, struggled heroically to make sense of this exceedingly strange turn of events, and was on the verge of collapsing on the path and gathering herself into a tight foetal position when a gruff and irritated voice startled her.

  “What are you doing here?”

  Distracte
d momentarily from her panic, she whirled to look behind her. “Friday!” Relief of an oily, queasy sort spread through her. “Thank God it’s you. Didn’t you hear me calling you?”

  “No.” He put his hand to her upper arm. “You must go back.”

  She looked around, the strangeness of the situation increasing by the second. “Where are we? What happened?”

  “This is not for you.” He started walking, pulling Cassandra with him.

  She wrenched away from his grasp. “I’m not going anywhere until you tell me what happened,” she insisted. She glared at him. “Well?”

  An uncertain mixture of pique tinged with amusement squirmed across the Native American’s sun-wrinkled features. “This is Tsegihi,” he told her. “You do not belong here.”

  Cassandra frowned. If she had heard the word before, she could not place it. “I don’t understand.”

  “You crossed the Coyote Bridge on the Ghost Road.”

  “There was no road, no bridge. I-”

  “In the canyon.” He made to take her arm again, but Cass stepped away. “We must go back before it is too late.”

  “Why?” She glanced around at the elaborately empty landscape. “What could happen?”

  “Bad things.”

  Cassandra allowed the Indian to take her arm. He turned her around and began walking along a path scratched in the pumice chips that covered the plain to a depth of several inches. The path stretched across the empty landscape in an absolutely straight line as far as she could see.

  “Is this the Ghost Road? How did I get-” she began, but her next words were stolen by the wind that gusted out of nowhere, snatching her voice from the air as, between one step and the next, her feet left the ground.

  CHAPTER 2

  In Which the Secret Canyon Gives Up Its Secret

  When Cassandra could see again, she was once more in Secret Canyon, sopping wet, her head throbbing with a headache so virulent she could not see straight. Hands on hips, bent low at the waist, she gulped air and fought down a queasy motion sickness.

  Friday towered over her, frowning.

  “What?” she demanded. “You might have warned me that was going to happen.”

  “You are weak,” Friday replied, looking at the sky. The roiling black clouds were already dissipating as the storm sped off into the distance.

  “And you are both stubborn and arrogant,” she countered, wiping her face with both hands.

  “We will go back to the dig now.” He gave her a cursory glance and started walking. When she failed to follow, he stopped and looked back.

  “I’m not taking a single step until I get some answers, mister.”

  “Okay,” he sniffed. “You can stay here.”

  He started off again.

  Cass watched him striding away and understood from the set of his shoulders that he would not be turning back a second time. She hastened after the lanky figure. “Listen,” she said, falling into step beside him, “I want an explanation. You owe me that much at least.”

  “You followed me.” He did not look at her, but kept walking. “I don’t owe you anything.”

  “That place we were just at-where was that? How did we get there? What happened? Was it something to do with the storm?”

  “You ask a lot of questions.”

  “Nothing like this has ever happened to me.”

  “It won’t happen again.”

  “Hey!” she shouted. “I want to know what’s going on. I mean to get to the bottom of this.”

  “You won’t.”

  “Try me,” she shot back.

  “You don’t know what you’re asking.”

  “Then tell me. Make it simple so I’ll understand.”

  “People will think you’re crazy.”

  “So what?”

  Friday turned his broad, weather-creased face to her. He was smiling. “You don’t care if people think you’re crazy?”

  “Do I look like someone who cares?” she demanded. “Give it up. What happened back there?”

  “I already told you.”

  “You said it was what-Zay-ghee-hee?”

  “Tsegihi,” he confirmed. “That’s right.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “In English?”

  “If possible.”

  Friday nodded to himself. “You would say it is the Spirit World.”

  “That was no Spirit World. That was real.”

  “I said you wouldn’t believe it.” He strode on.

  “Okay, I’m sorry.” Cass hurried after him. “Continue, please. How did we get there?”

  “I already told you.”

  “I know, I know-the Coyote Bridge on the Ghost Road.”

  He made no reply.

  “But that is just a-what do you call it? — a myth, or a metaphor, or something.”

  “If you say so.”

  “No, tell me. I want to know. What is the Ghost Road?”

  “It is the way the Medicine Folk use to cross from this world to the Spirit World.”

  “You mean literally, physically cross over.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “If you say so.”

  They had almost reached the mouth of the canyon. She could see the desert beyond and, judging from the long shadows cast by the saguaro and mesquite bushes, the afternoon was waning towards evening.

  “Among my people, there are those who travel to the Spirit World to perform sacred duties.” He paused, then added, “I am not one of them.”

  “So what are you then? A tourist?”

  A faint smile touched his lips. “Maybe so.”

  “A tourist,” she harrumphed. “I don’t believe you.”

  “That is your choice.”

  “Okay, sorry. So you’re a tourist in the Spirit World.”

  “We call one who travels the Ghost Roads a World Walker.”

  “Right, so how do you do it? This world walking-will you teach me?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “It is not for you.”

  Despite her repeated attempts to cajole, threaten, and otherwise bully him, Friday refused to tell her more. In the end she was forced to abandon the attempt and return to the dig to oversee the securing of the site.

  On the ride back to town, Cassandra was preoccupied and distracted-behaviour that did not go unnoticed by her coworkers in the van.

  “You’re a quiet one today,” declared Anita, one of the undergrads the dig relied on for donkeywork.

  “Am I?” wondered Cass. “Sorry.”

  “Anything the matter?”

  “I guess I’m just a little tired.”

  “Tell me about it. Mac had us wrestling bags of rubble all afternoon.”

  “Hmm.” Cassandra gazed out the van window at the passing scenery, all red and gold and purple in the early evening light. “It really is a beautiful landscape,” she said absently.

  Anita gazed at her for a moment. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “Yeah, fine. Why shouldn’t I be?”

  “I thought Greenough might have got to you with this news about shutting down the dig.”

  “I suppose so…” She returned to her contemplation of the skyline with its monumental sandstone rock stacks.

  A little while later the van convoy pulled into the motel parking lot.

  “Hey, Cass-you going over to Red Rocks with us?” called Anita as the crew disembarked and headed off across the parking lot. Red Rocks served cheap tacos and fizzy beer and was the official digger watering hole.

  “Yeah, later, I guess,” replied Cassandra, walking away. “You guys go on without me.”

  She picked up her key from the front desk and meandered to her room. The King’s Arms motel was a tired old fleapit, but it was inexpensive by Sedona standards. Moreover, it was about the only place in town halfway eager to cater to the diggers. The lobby smelled of damp dog ineffectively masked by Pine-Sol; the result was a
crid. This sucks, she thought, not for the first time. To be a poor academic in a resort for wealthy tourists was, contrary to any expectations, no picnic. You couldn’t turn around without being reminded that you didn’t belong and, moreover, were just taking up space that could be better used by paying customers.

  Once in her room, she threw herself down on the sagging bed and stared up at the ceiling, her thoughts whirling in unison with the creaky ceiling fan. She took her time showering and changing, and by the time she arrived at Red Rocks the party was in full swing. The worker bees were celebrating the fact that they had just received at least two, and maybe three, whole days off from the dig. Out of deference to the Native American sensitivities and a wish to avoid confrontation with Senator Rodriguez and thereby deny him a soapbox, Joe Greenough had announced that they would suspend operations over the weekend. After a beer and a handful of nachos, Cassandra called it a night, made her excuses, and sneaked away. She walked back to the motel by herself, outwardly calm, inwardly a raging turmoil of half-formed thoughts and wild speculations.

  She closed the door to her room, picked up the phone, dialled, and pressed the receiver to her ear while the dial tone rang again and again. When no one answered, she hung up and turned on the TV. She sat in bed watching mindless sitcoms for an hour or so, then picked up the phone again.

  This time it was answered on the fourth ring. “Hello, this is Tony-speak to me.”

  “Dad?”

  “Cassie? Is that you? What’s wrong?”

  “It’s me. Does anything have to be wrong for a girl to call her father?”

  “No, no-not at all, honey,” he replied quickly. “It’s just thatdo you know what time it is?”

  “Uh-um.” Cass paused. “Is it late? Sorry, I forget about the time difference.”

  “No problem, sweetie. I’m glad you called. What’s up?”

  “Nothing. I’m sorry. Go back to sleep. Everything’s fine. I’ll call back another time.”

  “Cassandra,” her father said in a tone of voice he used when he was serious. “What is it? I’m here to help.”

  She drew a deep breath. “Dad, ever have one of those days when the whole world turned upside down?”