Land of Echoes cb-2

by Daniel Hecht

  "Sounds like me," Uncle Joe put in sadly. "Back whenever."

  "But I never told Julieta about that. I thought they should have a chance. I thought maybe he'd change, even he would know he'd never get that lucky again. Not in this life."

  "You wanted her."

  Early on, Joseph thought, no-not exactly, not yet. At first, it wasn't something he'd let himself think or admit. "They were in love," he said simply. "I liked them both. I wasn't ready, either."

  There was a period of silence during which Uncle Joe shifted and accelerated into a smoother stretch. He used the respite from two-handed driving to light a cigarette, the shaking of his hands more pronounced. "Jesus, we've only gone about two miles. I don't know how those old people do it-driveway that takes fifteen minutes, forty minutes to the county road every time."

  "So it's winter and she's around seven months pregnant, Peter's been gone six months, she's barely hanging on. Afraid of Garrett, mad as hell at him. Still in love with Peter and so mad she'd throw things when she talked about him. And I'm thinking, How could he do this, how could he leave her? She was so beautiful, Uncle! And by then I wanted her, I wanted her to love me like that. But the last thing I could do was… put that in her way. She had enough to deal with as it was." A gout of Uncle Joe's smoke swirled in the cab and Joseph's breath caught on it. He had to cough and clear his throat before going on: "So one night I was at home, I was tired, I'd just come off rotation at the hospital, my first break in a while. This was just before Julieta decided to give up the baby. And I got a phone call."

  "Uh-oh."

  "Yeah, it was Peter Yellowhorse. He was still in California, he said he'd been trying to reach Julieta for days, but she never answered the phone. He wanted to know if she was all right. He said he was coming back, he was going to catch a bus. Wanted to know if she was still at the old house, or if she wasn't, could I give him her new phone number? This was when she had an unlisted number at her apartment, trying to keep Garrett from finding her. And I'm angry at him, too. I tell him, What the hell do you care? You got her pregnant, left her, broke her heart, you shacked up with some Apache girl! And he tells me he's left that girl because he realizes he can't live without Julieta, he'll do anything for her. Everything he should have known six or seven months earlier."

  "So what did you do?" Uncle Joe croaked. His voice was so gravelly and sick that Joseph pulled back from the memory to appraise him with a doctor's eye. He looked alarmingly bad-greenish, clammy, full of tremors.

  "When was the last time you had a drink?" Joseph demanded.

  "This morning. Just before I got your message on the machine."

  Joseph calculated the time and was appalled: almost eight hours. " Why-"

  "Because we needed old Keeday's respect. He probably knows I'm a drunk from way back, but he's been a puritan teetotaler since his son got killed drunk driving."

  "You can't just quit, Uncle Joe! Going cold turkey, you could have seizures! At your age, you'll have a heart attack!" Joseph yanked open the glove compartment, rummaged through it, found nothing. He checked the door pocket, bent to feel under the seat, twisted to scan the backseat and floor, but there was no bottle anywhere. "Don't you keep something in the truck? You must keep a-"

  "No! Today is a day of important duties that I want to respect, I don't want to be drunk for!" He gave a terrible glance as Joseph started to argue, and he brought his fist down on the dashboard so hard the sunglasses and cigarette pack there jumped. "Don't fight with me! Just finish this business! Today we finish all this business! Tell me what you did. When he asked you where she was."

  "I told him he should stay away from her! That he was bad for her. That she was finally starting to get over him, she didn't need him coming back to wreck her life again. That I wouldn't tell him a damned thing and he should stay away!"

  "So then what?"

  "He hung up on me! And I never told Julieta he'd called. And that was the last time either of us ever heard from him." Joseph continued quickly before he became afraid to go on: "I know what I did, but I don't know why I did it. Did I really do it because I wanted to protect her, because Julieta really would be better off without him? Or did I do it because I wanted to keep him away, so maybe I could be with her myself?"

  The truck rode up a sudden incline and at last they could see the slightly smoother track of the dirt road, a quarter mile ahead. Uncle Joe shifted down for the slope and said despondently, "Everybody did something sometime, Joseph."

  Joseph knew he meant, Something they can't forgive themselves for.

  "You were probably right, the kid was no good, he'd've been gone again as soon as the baby was born. You know how a guy like that operates."

  "I'm not so sure."

  They had come to the end of the Keedays' driveway. Uncle Joe pulled the truck up to the junction, stopped it, and bent to rest his forehead against the steering wheel as if trying to muster enough energy for the rest of the drive. The sun was dipping into a band of haze over the western horizon, turning the desert shadow-black and orange and making the gnarled buttes and rocks point lengthening shadows at them.

  "Uncle. Let me drive now."

  "No."

  "Uncle, you shouldn't be-"

  "If your little lecture was enough to discourage him, his heart wasn't in it anyway." Uncle Joe winced with discomfort as he straightened again. "Didn't have the guts."

  Joseph felt a wave of nausea come over him, and when he spoke again it was if he were vomiting it out, an expulsive contraction that couldn't be resisted: "You're not seeing what it means! It would have all been different! If I'd given him her number, told him the truth, 'Yeah, she still loves you,' he'd have come back. Even if he'd left her again a couple months later, she'd have kept the baby! You see why I haven't told her?" You see why I can't be with her?

  Uncle Joe took it like a slap, but then turned to Joseph with eyes that were incredibly sad and old, the lids twitching as alcohol withdrawal wrought havoc inside him. He'd neglected his cigarette and ash had scattered all over his clothes and the seat. Joseph felt fear strike him, that Uncle Joe was going to collapse or crash the truck. He'd seen withdrawal seizures before, and his uncle was not a good candidate for surviving one.

  "Yeah," Uncle Joe wheezed at last. "Well, there's something I haven't told you, too. Another stop we have to make today."

  And to Joseph's surprise, the old man turned the truck to the west-not back toward Uncle Joe's home and bottle but toward Highway 666 and Naschitti, into the dull red eye of the sun.

  39

  Cree waited until eleven and the school was quiet before she slipped out of the infirmary. Again the mesa was invisible in the dark beyond the school's lights, but she could feel it there, drawing and repelling her, full of secrets. A strange tremulous calm possessed her, and she wondered if this was what Julieta felt-the abject, willing surrender to whatever had to happen.

  Julieta's admission that Tommy was not the first child she'd believed or imagined to be hers was deeply upsetting. Cree had held her for a long wordless moment. There was nothing to say. It was too complex and poignant. It wasn't until they'd started slowly back toward the school, arms around each other's waists, that she began to think about what it meant for the work she was charged with doing.

  One clear conclusion was that, whoever Tommy was or wasn't, Julieta McCarty, as a witness caught in the disturbing emotional vortex that often accompanied paranormal events, was in far more fragile psychological shape than Cree had thought. Her perspective on who or what inhabited Tommy was therefore no more reliable than her longing for her lost child.

  Just as clearly, her fragility meant that the outcome of this situation would have a profound and enduring effect on Julieta's life. The question, of course, was whether it would prove to be a catastrophic effect or an opportunity for healing.

  So far, Cree had been proceeding under the assumption that the recognition Julieta felt, the reason for the entity taking up residence in the boy, had som
ething to do with their genetic relationship and the psychic connections that would inevitably result. It made sense, too, in light of Tommy's state of mind: his desperate curiosity about his forebears, his yearning need for an anchor in the identity of his parents and ancestors.

  But what did it mean if it turned out he was not her child? What did it imply about the theory that the entity was a revenant of Garrett McCarty? On balance, Cree thought, it weakened the hypothesis; probably, it increased the likelihood that the entity was the ghost of one of Tommy's actual parents.

  The fact was that she didn't have enough information. All she really knew for sure was that she'd experienced an entity or entities out at the mesa, that the mesa had figured in her dreams and Tommy's drawings, and that his problems had begun not long after his visit to the ravine. The convergence of all those elements could not be coincidental. Which meant that the ghost of the mesa remained her only real lead and, until she could spend time with Tommy again, getting to know it her only available course of action.

  They had parted at the administration building, Cree going back to the infirmary, Julieta to her duties. Edgar had gone back to Window Rock to compare notes with Joyce and spend the night. Cree had done yoga for an hour and generally tried to stay low-key, charging up for what promised to be a long night.

  The most difficult part of the evening had come when Lynn Pierce returned from her day off. They spoke briefly, Cree very aware of the nurse's sliding eyes. Cree had cut short their conversation with the excuse she needed to catch up on her notes and reading; she hadn't yet figured out how to deal with Lynn and her treachery. Yet another problem.

  At ten o'clock Julieta had phoned from the admin building to say that Joseph had called. "He said he met with the Keedays. They agreed to allow you and me to see Tommy."

  "That's great news!" Cree said. "I'll go first thing in the morning. How can I find the place?"

  "He drew a map and faxed it, I have it here. To the grandparents' place, anyway, I guess they'll tell you how to find Tommy when you get there."

  "Me, but not you?" Cree was puzzled by her tone as well-the flat, frightened affect that came over the wire.

  "I have administrative duties tomorrow. Stuff I can't get out of, a pair of prospective major donors coming to get a tour of the school. It takes the better part of the day, and hundreds of thousands of dollars ride on it. I have to… I have to do the charm thing."

  "What else, Julieta? What's the matter?"

  "The way the grandparents described Tommy, he's losing ground fast." Julieta's voice quavered. "And the way Joseph sounded. He was so distant. Like something had happened to him. I asked him what was wrong and he wouldn't tell me. I was so worried I called him back right after we hung up, but he didn't answer the phone. It was only about a minute later, where would-?"

  "Julieta. He probably went to bed. You should get some sleep, too. We'll set it all straight tomorrow. You do your work, I'll do mine, okay? That's what I'm here for." Trying to sound reassuring, when in fact, as always, Julieta's frazzled anxiety and aching heart had leapt into her.

  The night was cold and crisp, the sky slightly hazy so that only a few stars pricked through the velvet black. Cree had opted against wearing her down jacket because the nylon shell made too much noise. Instead, she'd put on a pair of sweaters, borrowed a denim overcoat from the horse barn, and wore tights under her black jeans. She had brought only a flashlight, a bottle of water, Joyce's can of pepper spray, and a blanket, all tucked into her shoulder pack.

  No high-tech tonight. This wasn't about scientific proof anymore; it was about results in starkly human terms, Tommy's survival. Anyway, she wouldn't have dared to ask Edgar for the equipment. He and Joyce would be furious if they knew she was going out alone.

  She walked silently along the foot of the mesa, feeling the mounting tension of anticipation. It swelled inside her and made the dark pregnant with latent movement and force. The beauty of the night, its sharp-edged silence, thrilled her. Its fearful glory and clarity exploded joyously in her heart, and she panted with sheer exhilaration. Oh yes, she could die out here or lose her mind and go adrift forever in a lonely cosmos of stars and ghosts. But it was worth the risk. Close to death, you felt your life acutely.

  It helped to have seen the area in the daylight. This time, she recognized the ravine before she got to it, an angled slash of deep blue-black against the paler blue of the rock face ahead. Moments later, at its mouth, she found she could now interpret the dim outlines of its sloping floor, the shadowed boulders, the old rock fall, and the forking corridor beyond.

  She took a deep breath and one last look around at the bare plain, banished a sudden onslaught of fears that included scorpions and Skin-walkers, and headed up.

  Again, she found herself drawn to the area near the rock dam. This time she climbed up and over the tumble of slabs and boulders and stopped just above it, where she had a better view of the cliff faces and shadows of the upper end of the ravine. Again the breeze snaked past her and took her steaming breath with it. Grateful for the stealth her soft clothes allowed, she found a shallow shelf a few feet up from the ground and folded herself into its shadow. It felt strategic and somehow safer than squatting on the ravine floor.

  She unfolded her blanket, tucked it around her legs, and put the flashlight where her hand could find it quickly. And then she sat and tried to forget everything. She felt fears and thoughts and discomforts come and go and tried to be transparent to them.

  Time passed.

  The cold crept relentlessly around her thighs and into her collar. The blue ravine grew darker. More time passed. She felt the gradual onset of the paradoxical state she sought: so alert, yet so near sleep.

  Movement startled her. Cree's eyes flicked as she realized that there was someone else in the ravine. Her heart thudded jarringly with the shock of it.

  Forty feet farther up, a man crouched in the deep shadow next to a boulder. She could see the silhouette of his head and one shoulder and arm, one sharply bent knee. Motionless. The sight knocked the breath out of her, as if someone had punched her chest. She wanted to run, she wanted to cram deeper into her little shelter, but before she could do either she saw the second man, and she froze in fear. He was thirty or forty feet farther up than the first, just now squatting down in the shadow of a boulder. He tucked his head closer to the rock and all but disappeared.

  Above the second, yet another shapeless shadow moved from side to side, coming down. Then it vanished, too.

  Cree still hadn't taken a breath when the nearest man crept out of his shelter, slipped closer, and faded into a vertical seam in the cliff. She stared at where he'd been and could just see one long leg, the side of his body, the swell of a shoulder.

  He was lit wrong. She could see him too well. Against the dark ravine, his body seemed to glow with a strange luminosity. A tiny, distant rational voice told her he glowed because it was daylight where he was. When he was.

  A noise from below roused her from her paralysis and reminded her of her mission. At first she took it for a human voice of alarm, but then she recognized the bleat of a goat. Then the big rustling rumble, hooves and voices, the jangle of harness. She had to get down there, now; she had to find Brother. Warn him back. He shouldn't have gone to retrieve the goats. She shouldn't have gone after him, but she couldn't stop herself, and now it was too late.

  Above, someone slipped on rolling gravel. She looked to see two more shapes coming quickly down the ravine and she knew she had to run now or she would lose her resolve and something terrible would happen to Brother.

  She leapt down from her shelter and scrambled to the rock dam in confusion, smashing her front into the boulders, then climbing and stumbling and falling among the rocks, bruising her hands. The rocks were all wrong. She rammed both knees into a jagged slab and fell heavily, twisting her body just in time to take the impact on her shoulder. It stunned her, but in an instant she was up again, scrabbling on all fours over the fall and tu
mbling to the smoother floor of the ravine.

  The big noise was there, out on the desert. The evil people were coming. She had to run now. Below, a shape moved out on the sunset-lit desert and she knew it was Brother. And he had caught one of the goats, he was running with it on a rope. She ran out of the ravine mouth to call to him, Shinaai, don't go for the goats, come back! but that was foolish because he had already caught one, he already knew the danger and was running back. Back in the ravine, the men were crying out in alarm and anger.

  She had almost reached Brother when part of him broke away, part of his head was gone in an instant and suddenly he was splayed out on the sand and the goat was running away trailing its tether. And then the goat stumbled and rolled, shuddering and kicking its feet in the air as if savaged by an invisible predator. Far away across the ground, she saw the other goat running toward the south and then, panicked, change its mind and turn back. She knelt by Shinaai and knew that the monster that ate people and took them away had taken him. It was too evil to bear. She stood and ran at it, raging and cursing it, but something bit her leg like a dog or wolf. It tugged just once but so hard she fell to her knees. When she looked down her thigh was open, burst like a shattered gourd. And she shouted up at the horsemen a curse on their lives and clans forever and then her belly and chest burst, too. She fell on the sand and lay as the stamping hooves danced briefly around her and then moved on out of view, toward the ravine. She wanted to turn her head to see what was happening there, but she couldn't move. She lay looking along the ground, out toward the empty desert, a sideways red-lit plane where even the grains of sand were huge and frighteningly vivid. Unable to move her body, she felt her mind and heart fling outward, love and warning and apology snapped like an arrow from a bow, back toward the ravine where the family was. She heard the guns there and then she heard and saw nothing.