Behind the Moon

by Madison Smartt Bell

  She was faintly aware that her legs had wrapped around his back and she was howling both of them howling louder than the dogs outside and there was light now, several small piercing lights that were coupled with an electrical hum; the thin beams picked out detail she would rather not see and now she was down on her knees, choking again, gagging and trying to swallow as the cameras circled, now on her hands and knees

  if you’d listened to that meth head you wouldn’t have ever come in here

  a lull in which she might have passed out, then the heavy hands flipped her over, limp as a filet of meat, hands bending her double so her ankles were pressed down by his shoulders. Kernels of dog biscuit crushed under her back. The light was more general now, daylight filtering in through some sort of fissure, so she could see the man’s face, masklike, his eyes glazed over like the eyes of dogs fucking. This one wasn’t Ultimo at all—she didn’t know how many there were

  she woke up again and lay quietly trying to assess her condition, the several raw punctures, how bad how serious but in a moment the hands had yanked her hair up out of the way to slip a chain choke collar around her neck. Voice-over: once he’s fucked you to death he’s going to feed you to the dogs

  74

  People have this stuff in their minds, Ultimo said. Or probably he didn’t say that, because it didn’t particularly fit the context of where they were now. Marissa raised a hand to touch the side of her neck. She was wearing a scarf but there were no bruises or tears underneath it. Her body was whole, intact. In this universe, the assault hadn’t happened. Except, if it existed in her mind, it also had to exist in his. Didn’t it?

  The three of them were standing by the abandoned Harley, peering over the rim of the vast sinkhole. When Marissa looked down, her vision halted on the pattern of brightly colored specks expanding around the toes of her boots. She felt her breath catch in her throat. If this was some new wormhole opening in her brain she felt certain she didn’t want to go into it. She went down on one knee to look more closely—to drag whatever it was back into some frame of ordinary reality. But the pattern blurred and she couldn’t read it.

  A shadow moved off of her shoulder. Ultimo hunkered down beside her, studying the pattern, then scooping up several bits of it into one hand. In his palm Marissa could now see ladybugs, a dozen or so, multicolored, polished and shiny, like Easter eggs or Christmas baubles. One had a pattern of yellow, black and white that momentarily resembled a tiny death’s head. Another foolish trick of the mind.

  “Well,” Ultimo said, rising from the ground. “Sometimes. . . .”

  Marissa stood up also. Ultimo was still looking at his handful of colored beetles, his expression an odd fusion of childish delight and some sort of ancient sadness. Sometimes what? He sent a puff of air into his palm and the insects dispersed, each carapace opening a pair of minuscule wings. Jamal turned his head to follow their path out over the empty air above the pit, although as usual his bubble sunglasses made it hard to tell where he was really looking.

  Five hours earlier, they’d come to the cliff where the rock-shelters were, but the opening there was impracticable. No way Ultimo could ever squeeze into it. Marissa might just have managed, but the thought made her cringe with claustrophobia, and even Jamal hadn’t seemed too keen. It was he who pointed out that they had brought lights but no climbing equipment and that there was a considerable drop inside.

  There has to be more than one way in, Ultimo said, and Jamal said that somebody else would have found it by now, and Ultimo said not if they weren’t looking. Marissa suggested watching for bats, and Jamal said the bats wouldn’t come out for eight hours at least, and Ultimo said, we’ve got all day, and plenty of water.

  Since then they had been doing their best to circle the contours of the mesa—difficult to determine from ground level. Marissa wished her GPS would deliver a satellite photo, but in this area it barely showed the roads. Ultimo seemed to have a practiced eye, and it was he who suggested turns from his post overlooking the cab. Several times before they saw the buffalo he’d had them stop and scramble up to investigate a crevice between boulders, or just a swale in the ground where earth might have silted over an opening.

  Jamal kept glancing at the motorcycle: he looked like he wanted to kick it over, but he didn’t. Ultimo turned over the hand that had held the ladybugs, closed it, and stood with his fists cocked on his hips.

  From the point where they stood, the sinkhole offered a gentle slope down to the overhang of the cavern. A peculiar silence rose up from it, like smoke. Wings of a hawk flying overhead looked to Marissa like fins of a fish swimming, and everything had an oddly dampened quality as the three of them walked down. The caved-in earth on the sinkhole’s floor was soft under their feet, scattered with fallen rock and knots of uprooted scrub.

  Halfway to the overhang, Ultimo dropped to a crouch. There was an automatic pistol by his left foot but he didn’t seem to notice it, staring instead at an enormous clawed paw-print. Marissa felt a shiver run over her, but she wouldn’t exactly have called it fear. The fine hair on her forearms prickled up, the way it did when she was moved by music.

  “Grizzly?” That was Jamal’s voice.

  “I never saw one that big,” Ultimo said. “I never saw anything that big.” He probed the pad of the print with his middle finger, which went down all the way to the knuckle. Then he flattened his huge hand into the print; his fingers didn’t begin to reach the claw-marks.

  Marissa backed up and looked around the rim of the sinkhole and saw nothing. On the ground there were buffalo hoof marks along with the bear tracks and (she thought) a set of boot prints not their own. The buffalo had run around a good deal and beyond that she could make no sense of it. She was no tracker. The bear tracks climbed to the spot where the buffalo had emerged, she could tell that much.

  “He went thataway,” Jamal said. Nobody laughed.

  Jamal kicked at the pistol with his toe. Ultimo waved him back. With a bandanna he drew from his back pocket he picked up the pistol by the barrel, wound up and threw it, whirling end over end like a boomerang, out of the sinkhole altogether.

  “What about the bike,” Jamal said.

  “What about it,” Ultimo said, and then, over his shoulder as he walked down toward the cave, “Just don’t touch it, that’s all.”

  Just don’t touch the bike, Marissa repeated to herself, like learning syllables of a foreign language by rote. By now all three of them had passed into the shade of the overhang.

  “There’s your bats,” Ultimo said, looking up into the curve of the high dome.

  “Some of them anyway,” Jamal said. From croppings of the stone roof a couple of hundred bats were hanging in the shrouds of their folded wings, like shriveled fruit.

  “Sound sleepers,” Ultimo said, and turned to the rear wall. There were three openings, all about the same size. Ultimo looked at Jamal, who shrugged.

  “I don’t know if I was back this far,” Jamal said.

  “It would be pretty far,” Ultimo said. He handed Jamal a two-foot-long mag lite. Jamal picked the middle entry.

  Marissa couldn’t measure how far they had gone, but it was only ten minutes or so before they came out of the passage into a much larger space, cathedral-size it seemed to her, though she felt it more than she could see it. The beams of their strong flashlights got lost in there, as if they were aiming them into the night sky.

  “Okay,” Jamal said. “I was here. I think. I’m pretty sure.”

  The bright circle of his flashlight’s beam kept dragging along walls and ceiling, looking for something that wasn’t there.

  “This light’s all wrong,” Ultimo said. “Come back.”

  Marissa and Jamal stood under the overhang, blinking in the daylight while Ultimo fashioned a torch from a knot of greasewood that had fallen in with the other debris. This time Ultimo tied the end of a roll of twine to a stone before they went back into the passage, and handed the roll to Marissa, who went last, letting the l
ine unspool behind her.

  “Back off,” Ultimo said, when they’d reached the cavernous space again. “Look up.” He raised the torch above his head.

  Now Marissa understood what he had meant about the light. The torchlight stroked, caressed the walls, instead of probing and splintering the way the flashlights had. Still, there was nothing on the rock but water stains. The images welled from inside her head.

  75

  I wondered when you’d come, he said. He folded the dog biscuit tin under one elbow and beckoned her through the gate. Marissa stepped into the enclosure, watching the dogs, who watched her with an equal care, without rising to approach. The trailer door was shut, and she stopped at the step leading up to it. Ultimo, she noticed, wrapped the chain around the gate posts as it had been before, but didn’t bother to snap the padlock. As he walked toward her he switched the dog biscuit tin from one hand to the other. She had the weird notion he meant to offer her his arm, but that didn’t happen. He reached past her to open the door of the trailer, pushed it inward, and waved her inside.

  Instead of the room she had expected she was standing in a sort of hallway, or maybe just a gap between two rooms. The air smelled, not unpleasantly, of an animal musk, and it was too dim for her to make any sense of the space, though it didn’t agree with her impression of the trailer from outside. Through the doorway to her left was the colored flicker of light from a screen, and sounds: hard breathing and a fleshy slap. Ultimo turned from closing the door behind them and pressed something on a remote that had appeared in his right hand. The sound stopped and the light flicker with it. Surprised by the dark, Marissa touched her palm to the nearest wall to orient herself. It felt like a totally flimsy partition; if she put any weight on it, it might well collapse.

  “Careful,” Ultimo said. “There’s some steps down.” His hand opened across the small of her back—huge as a bear’s paw, but after the first uninterpretable thrill of the touch she understood it meant no harm. His other hand was under her elbow, in fact, using it like a rudder to guide her down a set of stairs into an even darker space, which smelled less of musk than cedar smoke.

  “Just a second,” his voice said. There was a tiny swirl of dizziness as his touch departed. She couldn’t tell where he was in the dark—not near her. So long as she didn’t move, though, she could still orient herself. It was a straight shot up the stairs behind her to the door of the trailer, and she remembered that he hadn’t locked the chain around the gate.

  Then a well of light opened and she saw him standing in the center of it, pushing a set of double doors open into the day outside. She was in some sort of half-basement with a field-stone wall the height of her heart. There was a fireplace full of ash and a lot of animal bones.

  “Come on up.”

  Ultimo’s jeans and boots were disappearing into the light at the far end of the room. Marissa followed, shading her eyes with one hand as she emerged onto a low wooden deck. She heard herself laugh in delighted surprise; it was like they’d come out on some other planet. A wide empty plain, white as salt, rolled out to a horizon toothed with the peaks of slate-blue mountains.

  Ultimo motioned her toward two webbed deck chairs to the right of the double doors he had opened. On the other side was a battered blue cooler; he squatted beside it to lift off the lid.

  “Beer? Pop?”

  “Water?”

  He straightened and walked over to her with a bottle dripping in his hand. He must have loosened the cap for her because it spun free when she opened it, bounced once on the deck floor and disappeared into a crack between two boards.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Ultimo said. He settled into the chair beside hers and twisted the top from a bottle of orange soda. Marissa took a long draft from her bottle. She was thirsty—her mouth dry. Maybe she’d been more apprehensive than she’d realized in the dark passage between there and here. She took a pair of sunglasses from her shirt pocket and put them on. Ultimo was wearing mirrored aviator shades. He set his pop bottle down on the boards and lowered the back of his chair, then stretched out with his face turned up to the blank sky.

  Marissa felt an absence of expectation in him that she found reassuring. She might ask him anything, or nothing. It would be the same to him. Then she had a little stab of anxiety—if she had come ill-prepared the visit might after all be wasted. She took another long pull from the water bottle, noticing a faint acrid taste, like aspirin. The water was clear. Maybe the taste was in her mouth already. After all, there were three questions on her mind. Why had he firebombed the meth lab? But she couldn’t very well imagine asking that one, and anyway the answer would be . . . not obvious, but in some way banal. People had died, though. She had seen them run out of the building streaming flame and afterward the news confirmed that they were dead. There hadn’t been any news about the naked painted girl she’d seen him snatch out of the truck. Who was she? Where was she? Marissa was afraid of the answer to that one. She finished off her bottle of water. And what had Ultimo been doing that day out there in the desert? Performing some ritual—that much was clear—but what was its purpose? He had swung his boots up on the foot of the chair and now lay on his back in much the same posture as when he had collapsed that other day, though now he was clothed and his eyes masked by the mirror glasses. . . .

  His face was turned straight up to the sky, but she still had the feeling that his eyes were watching her, studying and waiting for something.

  “But you cut your own tires,” she heard herself. The line seemed to come from the middle of some discussion they hadn’t even started yet. Ultimo didn’t seem surprised of it.

  “True,” he said, without turning his head. “It’s a form of commitment.”

  She had that forking feeling again in her brain, as if roots were prying apart the matter of her thought, but it didn’t hurt this time.

  “Same as you,” Ultimo said dreamily.

  “What?”

  “You came here. Do you have a way back?”

  She was too numb, as if anesthetized, to feel alarm at this proposition. Instead, an odd and rather pleasant lassitude was seeping all through her body; it no longer seemed important to keep on talking and in fact she probably couldn’t have said any more because her tongue was too thick in her mouth. Dosed. The faint bitter taste. Rohypnol didn’t have any taste but he might have put something else in the water. Even that stab of panic felt muffled, far away. She felt that she should get up and start running—anywhere, but her dense relaxation could not be overcome. There was no confinement here. No fence. She had come in through a fence but she wasn’t inside one now—no obstacle between the deck and the horizon. The double doors they’d emerged from were made of plates of steel and must be immensely heavy, though Ultimo had pushed them up and open as easily as cardboard. She remembered now he hadn’t locked the gate and maybe that was so other people could come in, strangers who intended her no good.

  He had not moved toward her, only rolled his head in her direction, so that she saw two images of herself distorted in the mirrored teardrops. Those roots pulled her brain into several pieces and even

  her fear was disintegrating

  But there was no difference between the inside and the outside of her head, Marissa wanted to say. Not here there wasn’t. Here, again, in the cave. She wanted to say what she had seen, when the torchlight played over the water-stained stone, but the others were going on, into another passage. She followed, paying out the string behind her. When the string ran out, she called to Ultimo, who produced a second roll. They switched on a flashlight for long enough to knot the ends together before they went on. The torchlight seemed enclosed in itself. It was something to follow, but illuminated nothing.

  “Stop a minute,” Jamal said. He looked up, using both hands like blinkers to block the torchlight from his eyes. Marissa did the same. Above, she could see diffused gray daylight, indirect, as if it was coming around a corner or over a lip.

  “Here’s where she fell,�
� Jamal said. “I’m sure of it.”

  Ultimo tilted the torch toward the wall.

  “The bear was there,” Jamal said. “Right there.”

  Ultimo looked at him through the firelight.

  “There’s nothing here,” Jamal said.

  “Just us,” Ultimo said. It was odd how he didn’t seem disappointed.

  “Oh,” Marissa said, in a sharp, shocked tone, almost a cry. “She’s dreaming the whole thing.”

  76

  “Careful,” Ultimo said. “Step down here.” He had set one large hand across the small of her back, while other grasped the point of her elbow, using it like a tiller to guide her down a set of stairs into an even darker space, which smelled less of musk than cedar smoke.

  “Wait a second.” Ultimo let go of her, once they’d reached a level floor. He moved away from her, into the dark ahead, and Marissa stood stock still, trying without success to make some sense of where she was. To her right was the reddish glow of embers from what must be some sort of hearth, and other than that she had no clue. Gooseflesh prickled hairs upright on her forearms and the back of her neck, but she couldn’t interpret the sensation as either anticipation or fear. She’d been a fool to come here, maybe; this was a dangerous man. A shaft of light stabbed down into the dark, and after her eyes adjusted she saw that Ultimo had pushed up a pair of cantilevered doors at the far end of the space, opening a rectangle of cloudless blue sky in which there hung a fraying disc of daylight moon.