by Alisa Valdes
“I don’t know,” he said with a furrowed brow, as though deeply bothered by this. “But I want to find out. I honestly didn’t think much about it until I met you. When I touched you, and felt the intense energy between us, I know this sounds weird, but I feel like we might be—you know, Kindreds.”
“Can we just kiss and find out?” I said, moving in again.
“No,” he said firmly, pushing me away. “It’s not a chance either of us wants to take. Trust me. If we do, we could both end up somewhere we don’t want to be.”
“So I’ll never be able to kiss you?” I asked, despondent.
“I don’t know,” he said sadly. “I’ll ask around in the Vortex to see if there’s a way for us to find out. But you know, just holding your hand is better than any kiss I ever had before. I mean that.”
I nodded weakly. “Yeah, but if it feels this good to hold hands, just imagine.”
He blinked slowly, as though he was much more mature than I was, and frustrated by me. “I’m sorry. I just—you have to understand that I have to be really careful about these things right now. There’s a lot at stake.”
“Your soul.”
Travis nodded and his eyes scanned the horizon. “It’s getting late,” he said. “Thanks for coming all the way out here. I wanted to show you my ‘haunt,’ and explain it all to you here, where nobody else could hear us, in case you freaked out—which you did.” He smiled affectionately at me. “You should get home. The sun will be going down soon. I have to get back to the Vortex.”
“How do you get there?” I asked, fascinated.
He hesitated as if trying to decide whether to tell me the truth or not. “There are portals all over the world, energy centers for the planet. One of them is here, near Chaco Canyon. I use that one usually, but supposedly I can use any of them.”
“Can I go with you?” I asked, excited by the idea of seeing the Vortex.
“No. You don’t belong there. You should get on home.”
He opened his door and stepped out, all business now. “I’ll find you again soon. I promise. Be careful.”
I watched as he jogged across the road, and then off into the desert. It was devastating to watch him leave. I knew he’d told me to go home, but I also knew that, for better or worse, I seemed to be suddenly turning into a girl who didn’t necessarily do what people told her to anymore.
When he’d gotten a good distance away, I started the Land Rover, and used it for what it was designed for, going off-road and into the desert, to follow him.
Chapter Eleven
I trailed Travis across the empty, frozen desert for what felt like more than an hour. Travis seemed to be starting to sense something, and every so often spun to look back in my direction. I slowly braked the car until he continued on, quick and graceful as a deer—or as a revenant, I suppose.
The terrain got rougher the farther we got from the road, more craggy, with rocky hills popping up, and then growing into ever larger mesas and flat-topped rock formations. I began to realize how stupid I was. It was nearly dark now, and I had no idea how to get back, much less how to change a tire if I blew one out here. It seemed there was no turning around now, so I drove as far as I could, but eventually parked behind a tall crag, kissed Buddy, and peeked out to see where Travis had gone. I saw the vast stone and mud-brick ruins of Chaco Canyon, remnants of a large and thriving Native American city that had occupied this spot more than a thousand years ago.
Travis came to a stop just past the ruins, against the sheer wall of the canyon, and scaled the rock face like Spider-Man, using carved footholds in the wall. It was effortless for him, and in a matter of minutes he’d climbed maybe three stories or so, and disappeared into what appeared to be the opening of a large cave.
I waited a couple of seconds, then hurried to the same spot at the canyon wall. I had taken rock-climbing lessons for years with my mom, at the indoor climbing gym in Albuquerque, and knew more or less what I was doing—though I’d never done it outdoors or without being tethered and belayed by a competent adult. I was relieved that the holds were solid, and deep, and I felt confident that I could make it. Adrenaline pumping, I began to climb up after him. My breath came fast from exertion. Halfway up, a droning sensation in my spine, a sixth sense, hummed, pulsed, and chilled me to the bone. Nonetheless, I continued up, and at last climbed through the small entrance, into a tight and narrow corridor that burrowed down at a steep angle, deep into the canyon. I crouched through the slippery corridor and into an enormous cave that seemed to open into three other caves of equal or greater size. I should not have been able to see here, but the walls seemed to glow with a faint yellowish light, and I saw the shadows of people seemingly walking inside the walls of the cave. I started. These people weren’t walking, they were floating. And they were coming into the cavern through its walls. My instincts told me to run, but something kept me there—my need to find Travis.
The cavern was a maze of stalactites and stalagmites, some big enough to hide me. I ducked behind the nearest stalagmite, hoping to avoid being seen by any of the beings here. I heard voices murmuring, and realized I could not understand the languages. So many of them were being spoken, all at once. What were these things? Were they also ghosts, or revenants?
I peeked out, and looked for Travis in the crowd. I spotted him off by himself, sort of kneeling near the back wall as though he were in church, in front of the opening to one of the caves. Next to him, a large pool of water on the floor was fed by an occasional drip from the ceiling of the cave. I tiptoed to the next closest stalagmite, and hid again, peeking out to see what Travis was doing, trying to avoid being seen. I watched in astonishment as the center doorway began to glow, throwing a warm orange light out onto Travis. A low humming filled the cavern, a pitch that resonated within me in a very pleasant way.
Travis stood now and held his arms to his sides. I was so astonished by what I saw that I did not even notice the young man approaching from the dark to my right, until he was right upon me and speaking into my ear, his breath redolent of beer and cigarette smoke.
“Well, hello there,” the male voice said.
I gasped and jumped, startled. I spun to look at him and saw a handsome man perhaps a few years older than Travis, familiar to me from the photos on the other descanso.
“Randy?” I asked, incredulous. He and Travis were the only figures in the cave that looked like regular, solid living people, like me. Everyone else looked like a shadow or a ghost.
He was surprised. “Have we met?” he asked. “I thought you were new here.”
Frightened that Travis would see me, and not knowing what to do, I ducked out of sight and put my finger to my lips to indicate that Randy should be quiet. He seemed to find this very amusing, in the way only drunk people can find things amusing. He followed the line of where my eyes had been looking, and laughed loudly, coldly.
“Are you afraid of my brother?” he asked. “Mr. Goody Two-shoes over there?”
“Please, don’t bring attention to me,” I pleaded in a whisper. “I’m not supposed to be here.”
Randy tipped a flask into his mouth, and took a drag from a cigarette, observing me with half-closed eyes. “Yeah, well, I’m not supposed to bring whiskey in here from out there either, but I do it. Sometimes rules were meant to be broken, right, babe?”
He seemed quite drunk already.
“Hey, Travis!” he shouted across the cavern, to my horror. “Get your ass over here! I think you should see this!”
Suddenly Travis’s chanting and the low drone sound stopped. I peeked out and saw the orange glow in the small cave opening sputter out. Travis spun around, facing the exact stalagmite where I hid.
“Who’s up there?” he called. “Randy?”
“A pretty new girl who’s afraid you’ll see her watching you,” Randy called. Looking at me now he asked, “So, tell me, how’d you bite it?”
“Bite what?” I asked, disgusted by him.
Randy l
aughed. “Die, darlin’. How’d you die?”
“I, what?” I asked, confused. “I didn’t die. I’m not—I’m alive. I’m not one of you.”
Randy’s expression went from flirty to stupefied. “You’re what, now?” he asked, as though he might not have heard me right.
I said nothing, because I could hear Travis coming toward us at a run. I felt my breath catch in my throat. In an instant, Travis was upon us, standing between me and Randy with a simmering fury in his eyes. Travis shoved Randy away and pulled me to the side.
“Shane! What are you doing here?” Travis asked, aghast.
“I wanted to see where you go,” I said meekly. I smiled sweetly and hoped he wouldn’t stay mad at me.
“There are rules,” he hissed. “I told you not to come here. It’s a place for the dead. Not for you. How did you even get here?”
“I just followed you.”
Travis looked out at the darkening sky, concerned. He took a deep breath to compose himself, and told me, “Listen. I know you don’t mean any harm. But we have to get back now. We check in each sundown. I’m not supposed to still be on this side like this, but I can’t leave you out here with Victor out there.”
“Victor’s not my enemy,” I said. “I can just find my way back.”
“Yes, he is your enemy. He’s trying to harm you.”
“I don’t understand.”
Travis stared me down, hard, as though I were very stupid and had missed some crucial detail. “The day you crashed,” he said. “What happened before I got there, exactly?”
I told him quickly about the coyote in the road.
“That was Victor,” he explained.
“Victor’s a coyote?” I asked.
“No. Victor’s an incubus.”
“A what?”
“A demon from the first level of the Underworld. A shape-shifter,” he explained hurriedly. “He knew me in life, and he comes to your world with only a couple of goals in mind: to kill people for fun, and to try to ruin my and Randy’s chances of getting to the Afterworld. Sometimes he’s a coyote. He can be almost anything he wants, whenever he wants.”
I froze in fear.
Travis thought for a moment, and said, “Wait here for me. Stay quiet, and don’t move. I’ll go check into the Vortex, and then I’ll return, but not like this. When I come back, I’ll be nothing but energy and maybe faint wisps of light that will look like smoke or shadows to you.”
“A ghost?” I whispered.
He nodded, and I felt guilty for causing all of this.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. We’ll get you back to your car. Wait here. It’ll be maybe fifteen minutes, okay?”
“Okay.” I hesitated, watching behind him as the stream of people-things continued to enter the cavern. “What are all of those?”
“Spirits,” he said.
“Do they know I’m here?” I asked.
“Some probably do, most probably don’t. They leave their dimensions for their own purposes, and return to their own times. The ones you can see pretty well, solid like me and Randy, are from our time. The see-through ones are from another time. Dusk is when we all have to return to change form.”
I shivered, and watched. “Does that mean that maybe some of the people I’ve thought were regular people in my everyday life might have been something else?”
He smiled. “We’re still people,” he said. “We’re just in a different energy form.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes. Probably. I don’t really know, Shane. My haunting area is pretty remote. I don’t do a lot of socializing in any of the dimensions. I gotta go. I’ll be back in a while. You’ll be okay.”
“I’m afraid.”
“Don’t be. But to be safe, you should stay behind this thing,” he said, indicating the stalagmite.
“How will I know when you’re back here, if I can’t see you?” I asked in a panic.
“You’ll have to feel me, and focus on that. I’ll try to make it clear where I am. I’ll lead you back to your car and I’ll protect you from Victor. If he senses you mean something to me, he’ll go out of his way to hurt you.”
“Oh my God,” I said, terrified now.
“Just wait here, touch nothing. Got it? Can you do that?”
I hung my head and nodded. When I looked up, I saw his body had begun to fade, as though it were in a darker space than mine. I gasped.
“It’s happening,” he said, observing his hand as it seemed to turn, for a moment, into a swarm of miniscule fireflies. “The sun’s just about down. Wait for me here. I don’t have much time.”
I stared at him as his body seemed to dissolve, melting away like honey in a cup of hot tea, into the air around us. It finally sank in, in that moment, that he wasn’t like me.
The portal began to glow in the distance again, and again came the low hum. I watched with tremendous sadness as Travis’s body evaporated into a trail of vapor, and was sucked into the portal like water down a drain.
Once he’d gone, the portal returned to its darkened state until the next revenant took her place before it, began to chant and transmutate, and was gone. There was a line of them, all going into the Vortex. I watched in utter amazement. Randy was at the end of the line, drinking and smoking, and unlike the others, he stopped before the third portal, and reached a hand out to touch it. A thread of what looked like dark, wispy electricity came out and shocked him, quite badly from what I could see, and he backed away. He began to dissolve. And then, as the others were quickly sucked away to the Vortex, Randy, too, was pulled in. Before long, every spirit was gone with the last flicker of the sun.
Suddenly, I was alone. The cave walls stopped glowing. The drone ceased. The darkness and the cold enveloped me completely, and I began to tremble head to toe, thinking of Victor and how he’d tried to kill me once already. I remembered the demonic thing outside the guest bedroom the night of the accident. Had that, too, been Victor? Was he following me?
I took my cell phone from the pocket of my jacket, and checked to see if I got reception out here, in case of an emergency. There were no bars at all. Nothing but the red SOS notice that indicated no service. This was why it was all that much more mysterious and frightening that at that exact instant, the phone rang, with the song I’d programmed in for my mother. My mom was calling me? But how? It should have been impossible, given the lack of reception here.
I answered the call, whispering because Travis had told me not to make any noise.
“Hello?” I said. “Mom? Is that you? Can you hear me?”
I heard wet-sounding heavy breathing, low like a man’s, and in the background the blare of loud Western music, and the staccato of people arguing. It sounded like a bar or something. I couldn’t imagine my mother, the classical music fan who never went on dates, being in an environment like that.
“Hello?” I asked again, my pulse beating faster. “Mom?”
“Well, hello there,” growled an unclean-sounding, very low, very rough man’s voice. A sudden chill of fear swept through me. I felt the lewd, greasy presence of the voice through the phone, and dirty fingers of anxiety crawled up and down my skin.
“I’m sorry,” I choked out lamely. “You must have the wrong number.”
“No,” said the voice seductively. “You’re Shane Clark. I want to talk to you.” I heard his Western accent now, thick and heavy. “How are you liking the cave of the damned?” The question terrified me. I began to look around frantically, horrified.
“Who is this?” I asked, my voice breaking with nerves.
He answered me with a vulgar laugh.
“Randy?” I asked.
“No, not Randy.”
“Who is this?” I asked.
“Listen,” he oozed. “I have a message for yer boyfriend. You tell him I’m gonna git you. You tell him I don’t fail.”
I couldn’t answer. I was petrified, sickened, horrified. This made him laugh again.
“You give him that message for me. Okay, baby?”
He made a disgusting sound, as though he were a dog licking its chops, and his breathing got faster and louder, punctuated with grunting. When I failed to answer him, he groaned in a filthy, nauseating way.
“You tell him something else for me. Tell him that if he wants to find your little fleabag, he knows where to look.”
The man let out a blood-freezing howl that seemed to come from the pits of hell itself. A coyote howl. Then he began to laugh, hideously, obscenely. My mind raced to Buddy. That was the only little fleabag I could think of, and I’d left him all alone in the Land Rover.
In a sick panic, I pressed the buttons on the phone, trying to end the call. Nothing worked. I scrambled to remove the back cover, and pried the battery out. The phone went dead. I curled up against a wall in the darkness. Outside a coyote greeted the night with a long and dissonant wail.
Chapter Twelve
Minutes later, as I sat on the floor of the cave, rocking and hugging my knees, scarcely daring to breathe, silently praying and begging for Travis to return, I saw a faint glimmer of lights in my peripheral vision. Frightened, I snapped my head toward the lights, and where they had been I now saw a faint smoky shape floating in the air, sort of pale blue, about the size of a man.
“Travis?” I called softly, my heart hammering in my chest. What if it wasn’t him? What if it was whoever had just called me? The smoke undulated a bit, and sort of snaked along in the air toward me. Instinctively, I scooted away from it, until my back was pressed hard against the uneven surface of the cavern wall. I trembled. The haze seemed to pause, and it began to fade away. It was almost worse not to see it, because I knew it was still there, just invisible now.
“Travis?” I whispered. “Please don’t leave me here alone. Please give me some sign that it’s you.”
A brighter light caught my attention now, near the ceiling of the cave. I looked up and saw an orb, made of faint blue light, hovering above me. It hummed, in harmonic intervals of sound. I powerfully sensed his presence, in a way that is almost impossible to describe. I just knew, much as I had known he was with me in the dream. I felt his energy, and his smile, and his calm confidence as it surrounded me protectively. I knew that everything was going to be okay.
