Now she could read the space she was in: a sort of half-basement with fieldstone walls as high as her chest, and a split-log superstructure, pole rafters under an A-frame roof. From outside, it must resemble an old-time spring house. There was the fireplace she had glimpsed in the dark, and a lot of animal bones. Into her mind came an image of Ultimo crouched on the floor by the hearth, his face streaked with ash and tallow, splintering bones with his teeth for their marrow, but she shook it off and saw that most of the bones were skulls—all sizes and kinds, and only a few she could recognize for certain. Collectible, even decorative, some might say. A cloth couch and couple of worn leather armchairs were draped with deer hides and buffalo robes. A slightly mangy bearskin covered half the floor.
Ultimo was raking the coals with an iron poker, sending a swirl of ash motes to spiral in the light slanting in from outside. He motioned her toward one of the armchairs and sat down himself in the other. With his huge scarred hands folded below his navel, he fell into such a remarkable stillness that Marissa felt fidgety by comparison, poised on the edge of her seat. Fight or flight? But Ultimo’s deep calm seemed to emanate out of him across the room toward her. It lulled her. She let herself sink into the chair, aware of the coarse hair of a deer hide prickling the skin of her back through her shirt.
“Okay,” Ultimo said eventually. “Now is when you get to ask me what you want.”
The words forked into her brain like roots, dividing the matter of her thought. She ran nonsensical variations: Tell him what I want. Ask for what I want. Or maybe they weren’t nonsensical. In spite of her unlikely sense of ease, she had the feeling that terrible things had occurred here, in the past or future, or even now.
“That stuff ’s not happening here,” Ultimo said.
“What stuff?” Her throat was so dry she was almost croaking.
“The stuff you’re afraid of.” Without warning, Ultimo tossed her a bottle of water. She was surprised how adroitly she caught it, in one hand.
“Thanks,” she said.
“I owe you.”
He was talking about the desert, she realized, and the water Jamal had thought to leave with him. What in the hell had been going on, then and there? But that wasn’t the only thing she wanted to know.
Chaos, Ultimo said. It’s our element.
No, he couldn’t possibly have said that. But his naked eye was on her. An eye shared like a mirror.
“Things aren’t always what they seem,” he said. “Or they are but then again they’re not. Example. . . .” He bent sideways to fossick in a cranny below the arm of his chair, and came up with a blue milk crate full of files. Something seemed incongruous about it; Marissa realized it was the only piece of plastic, or any artificial material, she could see anywhere in the room.
Ultimo was passing her a folder. She set down the water bottle to accept it. There was something unusually good about that water, like she could feel it expanding all the cells in her body. The file was full of photographs all featuring the same handsome, sometimes beautiful dark-haired girl, in her late teens or early twenties, sometimes alone and sometimes in company; there were prom pictures, family Christmas cards, a yearbook portrait, some casuals showing her rigged out for rock climbing or white-water rafting. And documents: missing since . . . last seen in. . . .
Marissa glanced at Ultimo but he had somehow withdrawn and she understood that he expected her to come to her conclusion. She looked through the pictures again, lingering on an eight-by-ten where the girl was wearing some sort of sheer wrap through which the naked energy of her young body glowed; here she had a half-feral gleam in her eye that Marissa abruptly recognized.
“She’s the girl from the truck.”
“Right,” Ultimo said. “You saw me snatch her. And thought God knows what.” He put the folder back in the crate and tucked the crate away. “Fact is, I’m a bounty hunter. Part time. Sometimes. I even have a license for it. Sometimes it’s ugly, but this time I was working for the family. She’s back with them now. No harm done. Or nothing permanent.”
He reached to take down a skull from the stone ledge behind him. Marissa couldn’t identify it; it seemed cat-shaped but much too big for a house cat—maybe a mountain lion.
“The people she was with, the junk she was taking. . . .” Ultimo rolled the skull between his hands. “She’d of looked like this, with a little skin on it, inside of eighteen months.”
“You blew up that meth lab,” Marissa heard herself blurt.
“You don’t know that.” Ultimo turned away from her to set the skull back where he’d found it. “You didn’t see me that time. Just a vehicle that looked like mine.”
The only one like it in a hundred-mile radius. Marissa didn’t say it out loud.
“I know—people died,” Ultimo was saying. “They weren’t very nice people. In fact they dealt in godawful harm. Nobody’ll miss them. Not much, anyway.” He seemed to loom toward her, though he was only leaning a little forward in his chair, elbows braced on his knees. “But human beings still, you’ll say. It’s true—they are. You want to be careful how you call them animals.”
He leaned back, closing his eyes for a moment. “Of course, whoever would have got paid by their enemies to do it. That’s a fact too. You gotta get paid.” His eyes rolled open again. “Sad thing—there’s more people will pay to do harm than good.”
The water bottle—that was plastic too, Marissa thought inanely.
“When bad things happen to bad people,” Ultimo was saying, “sometimes I can help a thing like that on its way.”
Well, that was a bit facile, Marissa thought, for justifying yourself as a hired assassin. Maybe it would be simpler just to go with it, though.
“But that’s not what you’re here for,” Ultimo said, and raised an eyebrow at her. One of his scars went through the eyebrow, thick as a white worm.
“No,” Marissa said. “It’s not.” Still, she didn’t know how to frame the question she had wanted to ask.
“Savages,” Ultimo said. “Savagery—is it the old ones dancing around a big kill or those drugged-out kids circling their cars around the town square all night long?”
She felt that forking sensation again in her brain. “I don’t know,” she said. Sometime previously she must have asked herself this question without knowing it. “Both. Neither? There’s something the same in the pattern.”
“Right,” he said. “If you strike into a pattern there’s something in you that wants to stick with it.”
But all this talk was still obscure; he wasn’t really telling her anything. In a burst of frustration—almost anger—she said, “Look, you had some reason for doing that thing out in the desert—digging a hole in the ground with your feet till you passed out from dehydration! Trapping yourself out there like that. You could have died.”
“I could have,” Ultimo said. He didn’t go on. That cat-and-mouse thing. She was beginning to hate it, almost. Should she get up and leave (if he would let her), or keep trying to wind some thread of meaning out of all this elliptical talk?
“That headache you’ve got,” Ultimo said. “It’s the animal in you trying to come out. Trying to sprout its horns. Of course it’s scary! That other stuff—”
“That’s not happening here?” But she had the idea that stuff was happening somewhere, on parallel tracks, and it was just good luck that she happened to be on this track—the reasonably benign one. Or maybe somehow she’d had the power and good sense to choose it.
“Right,” Ultimo said. “That’s all about—you’re afraid of losing your body. That your body would be taken from you. Or else you’re afraid of losing your mind. And the risk is real—it can happen.”
She saw a flash of the whites of his eyes as he rolled his head back against the cushion of his chair. Then he straightened up and looked at her again.
“I been scared plenty,” he said. “If I look like the baddest thing on the block right now, it wasn’t always that way. I lived in New York for a
spell, back in the day. Back when it was a dangerous place.”
“Oh,” Marissa said, realizing she’d meant to say Why? Her own experience of New York, came from movies, a couple of books and the TV news. She could hardly imagine herself there, much less Ultimo.
“I was a lot younger then,” Ultimo said. “On my lonesome. I didn’t belong to any of the local tribes. I had a crib in a slum on the Brooklyn waterfront and . . . there was no law around there back then. On the trains the same. Bad things happened all the time. Black Muslims rode the same train as me. It always felt safer when they turned up, even though I knew they had no use for me or anybody but themselves. But there was order in their lives. Just by being there they kept order on the trains. . . . And later on, when I went to prison, it was the same.”
Ultimo leaned forward, his eyes returning to meet hers. “So I learned something—fear depends on your belief. And fear responds to your desire. Sometimes to get where you want to go you have to pass through it. And risk that you might not return.”
“What are you talking about,” Marissa said.
“I’m trying to answer your question.” Ultimo covered his mouth with his hand for a moment, then took it away. “It’s hard to talk about it, I guess. You know that animal person trying to tear its way out of your head? Well, what I think is that the old ones created the animals out of chaos. That’s why I want to see the bear they painted on the rock. It’s more real than the real one. It was there first.”
“But what about Julie?” Marissa heard the hint of a choke in her voice, and realized her eyes had prickled with tears.
“I’m not out there to get your girl back. It’s not like the other one. You didn’t hire me. And I don’t have what it would take for that.”
“What was her name?” What is her name?
“Dunno—Melanie, I think.” Ultimo glanced in the direction of the hidden milk crate. “It’s in the file if you need to know.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Hey, there was nothing to that but bad drugs and bad company. Easy enough to claim her back.” Ultimo paused. “The good thing is, in the end she was willing. Your girl now, she’s making a choice to stay where she is.”
“But why?”
“If something in this world frightened her, then maybe she feels safer on the other side. And more than likely there’s something she has to work out there too.” Ultimo shrugged. “But that’s just guessing. Here’s what I know.”
He caught Marissa’s eye and held it. “You’re a pilgrim. She’s a pilgrim. But you’re more experienced than she is. You have a practice. I don’t know what it is but I can tell that you have it. And she’s the one who needs a guide. You’ve been with her there already, before now, haven’t you? You’re the one who can get there again—”
He’s hypnotizing me . . . it was only a fleeting thought. A host of butterflies was rising in her throat, and she couldn’t get unstuck from his gaze, which seemed to press on the fault lines of that headache. The pain was much worse, almost unbearable, and she felt a flash of real terror too. Ultimo was shaping something with spiral movements of his hands, as if the shadows of that cave-like space had taken on the density of clay and could be molded. He was still murmuring I can only help you a little but I’ll do what I can. . . . Her jaw had dropped and with her mouth open it seemed that the pain in her head was diminished just slightly. How long had she been in that room? The shaft of daylight admitted through the double doors had perhaps been creeping toward her, toward of both of them, but now it was moving improbably fast, unless time had warped somehow, and the pressure in her head was truly unbearable. In the light shaft, motes of dust, or ash, kept swirling.
Then she was absorbed into the light and at the same moment her skull cracked open and the antlers came out. The relief was so astonishing she could let her body relax completely; she was buoyed up in a warm sparkling fluid—an ascending helix whose glittering motes were now revealed as eyes of the animal persons, looking at her—thousands of eyes regarding her but benignly as if she was one of their own. Their horns fit comfortably on her brow.
It seemed to be a triple helix, and Ultimo, eyes sealed shut, was absorbed into a second funnel whose shining sparks closed about him like a cocoon. In the third spiral was Julie herself, eyes open and trained on Marissa, reaching out her hand. Marissa responded with the same gesture. She could feel the warmth of Julie’s hand. Julie was ascending as Marissa was sinking. In passing their fingers grazed with the faintest feathery tingle of a touch.
Then there was nothing left but the bright well of light, with the powder blue sky at the top of the shaft, and the moon so frail and tattered—how could there be anything behind it?
77
The bison came into the dry gulch and stood for a long moment staring at the first bus in the caravan, which pulled to a quick stop, heeling over slightly from the unevenly distributed weight of its passengers. The animal’s head lowered; it blew dust from the ground. It was big, and the horns looked bluish in the midday light. A buffalo was not a wholly uncommon sight hereabouts, but a cameraman got out of the KELO van and moved in, shooting steadily till the buffalo lifted its head with a snort, turned and went trotting away down the gulch.
From the edge where the buffalo had appeared the sinkhole offered a gentle slope down to the overhang of the cavern. Despite the considerable crowd unpacking itself from two buses and a good number of private trucks and cars, a peculiar silence rose up from it, like smoke. The caved-in earth on the sinkhole’s floor appeared to be scattered with small yellow flowers, which struck Marissa as impossible, until, as more and more people poured in from the gulch, they uprooted themselves and took to the air; a saffron flight of butterflies. A general gasp went up from the crowd.
Where the butterflies had been thickest, Ultimo squatted on his heels, studying something on the ground. He wore brown clothes that matched the dirt, and nobody seemed to notice him except Marissa and Jamal, who slipped away from from the bus they’d come in and walked across the loosened earth to join him. Arms wrapped around his knees, Ultimo was looking into 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, other than a swell of people still pouring over the lowest lip. They were fast obliterating any tracks, and anyway she was no tracker.
The crowd was trying to coordinate itself. A famous anthropologist had come out with his coterie from Sioux Falls, and a team of archaeologists from the university in Iowa City. Each group was vying to be first in the cave; meanwhile Janice Rivington was already striding down toward the cavernous overhang. She was bigger than she looked on TV and wore a shiny silk suit that made sense for the studio, with a pair of blond Timberlands, which were doubtless not meant to appear in the shot.
Ultimo, Marissa, and Jamal had passed quietly 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. The KELO cameraman was craning back to shoot them.
“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.
Janice Rivington was arguing something with the famous anthropologist and the archaeological team, in front of the mi
ddle opening. Her blond hair tossed with the vigorous movement of her head. Then she turned from the others and called into the crowd: “Jamal? Jamal Bin Dajani? Jamal?”
Jamal didn’t answer. The thicket of onlookers concealed him where he stood. Ultimo put his big hand on his shoulder for a moment, then took it away. The cameraman beckoned to Jamal’s older brother, but Omar shook his head, pretending not to understand, while Ramin simply stared through him. Janice and her lighting men exchanged a couple of whispers and then the whole camera crew abruptly plunged into the middle opening. The famous anthropologist and the archaeology team were left gaping at each other for a moment, then began scrambling in after the TV group.
“All three of them come out in the same place,” Jamal said. “I mean, I think they do.”
With a grin, Ultimo handed Jamal a two-foot-long mag lite. “Wait a minute,” he said, and walked back to collect a few branches from a knot of greasewood that appeared to have fallen out of the sky. He nodded to Jamal, who led their way into the passage nearest them. Marissa looked back once over her shoulder. Now that the crowd was all under the overhang, struggling to squeeze in after the experts and the TV crew, the butterflies were settling again: a yellow-orange carpet on the broken ground.
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.
“Shut the lights,” Ultimo hissed. When they had done so, the darkness seemed at first absolute, a black well of deep time.
Ahead and to their left a glow was building, then the first of the television lights emerged. Janice Rivington stepped into the open space, automatically striking a pose as her head moved snakelike, searching for the camera. The experts trickled out, and then the crowd began to pour, jostling and murmuring. Marissa thought of the bats they’d seen smoking out of the slit entrance on the cliff by the rock shelters a few days before, and she thought it was curious how all these people seemed only to be aware of themselves.
Behind the Moon Page 20
