by Ninie Hammon
The boom of thunder that follows in its wake is deafening. Like an invisible breaker hitting a beach, a wave of air knocks the children backward a step.
Both of them squeal in terror and then start to cry. Since the day they arrived at the cabin, they have never been outside during a storm. Certainly not way up on the mountainside in the boulder field! They have seen one, though. From the window of the cabin, they watched in awe as lightning danced around the mountaintop, so many bolts of it at once it looked like the mountain had grown white fuzzy hair that was attached to the clouds the way their hair stuck to a balloon that time Grant rubbed one back and forth on the carpet and then held it above their heads.
They can’t go through the trees back to the chalet! It’s too far. But they can’t stand here out in the open, either.
That’s when Gabriella remembers the opening in the base of The Cleft that the rock rolled out of yesterday.
“This way!” she says, turns and dashes around the bottom of the boulders to the far side, gets down on her hands and knees and starts to crawl into the opening.
“What are you doing?”
“This goes all the way through. Come on!”
Gabriella drops down on her belly and squeezes through the tunnel formed by the rocks. It is a tight fit. If she’d been much bigger, she couldn’t have made it, but within seconds she is through, in the empty space formed by the overhanging boulders. Empty except for the lone bristlecone pine tree in the center, where the sun would be shining if there’d been a sun to shine.
She turns and urges Garrett on. He is taller than she is, but only a little bit larger. Even so, he has to grunt and strain to make it through. When he crawls out into the opening with her, he has a large scratch on his cheek.
But he doesn’t mention it. Neither does she. They’d been so terrified; it had been so noisy, windy and dangerous out there. But in here, it is quiet. No, more than quiet. Hushed.
Gray storm light streams in a pallid beam through the opening above them, and it has begun to rain. Hard. The drops fall through the opening and pummel the tree. But the rocks overhang—they hadn’t realized how much, looking at it from above. From down here, it looks like the picture Grant showed them in a National Geographic of a house made out of ice where Eskimos live. It was called an igloo. Smoke went out the hole in the igloo; rain falls in the hole of their boulder igloo. But only what is directly beneath the hole gets wet and that’s the pine tree.
Maybe it is just her eyes adjusting to the darkness here. Because it doesn’t seem nearly as dark as it had looked from above. In fact …
She turns to Garrett and he’s grinning, the first time he’s smiled all day. She can see the gap between his teeth where he has already pulled out the two top ones in the front. Hers are loose, but she’s afraid to pull them.
And it seems like … no, it is. Garrett’s face is glowing.
He says nothing, just points behind her at the tree. She turns to look and realizes Garrett’s face isn’t really glowing. It’s reflecting the glow from the tree. The glow shifts through amber, caramel and yellow and turns her brother’s pale face the color of a brown-toast suntan.
Is this real?
They can hear the rumble of thunder out there in the world. It sounds a little like being in a bowling alley. But the sound doesn’t really come in here. Nothing from the outside does. The air is different, the light is different, the sound is different.
Gabriella lets out a shaky breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding. It’s okay now. They’re safe. The lightning won’t get to them here. In fact, she’s pretty sure that nothing bad can get to them here.
She turns and looks at Garrett. She knows he’s thinking the same things she is. He reaches out and squeezes her hand.
“Drumma du, Gabriella,” he says. Or maybe he doesn’t say the words. Maybe she hears them without him having to say them.
“Drumma du, too, Garrett.”
“Mom!” Ty leapt to his feet. “How did you fi—?” He saw P.D. and didn’t finish the question. “You can’t stay here, you have to run. That man is looking for me and—”
“How did you get down there?” She knew he hadn’t crawled through the opening she and Garrett had used. They’d barely fit and they’d been younger and much smaller than Ty.
“I jumped. Sort of. See over there, on the back side, where that rock juts out over The Cleft like a little shelf?”
The Cleft? How did Ty know …?
Gabriella looked where he pointed. A piece of the back boulder extended out past the other boulders on the top portion of the igloo. It was about the thickness of a shelf in a closet.
“I scooted down off that on my belly, let my legs dangle below, scooted farther and farther until I was just holding on with my hands. Then I let go.”
That was still a long drop. He could have broken … She realized she was about to scold him for doing something dangerous!
Without another word, Gabriella got down on her hands and knees on the shelf with her back to the hollow space between the boulders—nose to nose with P.D. What about Puppy Dog? There was no way to get him down into The Cleft with them and Yesheb would shoot him on sight.
Then Ty called out, “P.D.—Hide!”
The dog turned instantly, raced down the rock steps and disappeared into the trees. She turned and looked a question over her shoulder. “It’s a new game I taught him,” he said. “He won’t come out until I find him or call him. We play it here all the time.”
Play it here all the time?
Gabriella flattened out on her belly on the shelf overhang with her legs dangling into the hole and slowly eased herself backward until she’d slid all the way off the shelf and was hanging from it into the hole. She didn’t have much strength in her hands and arms.
“Out of the way,” she cried, let go and fell down through the years into the shelter of The Cleft, the only place she had ever felt perfectly safe.
She understood now what she’d really known all along. The Cleft was the reason she had come to Colorado.
Gabriella landed without much dignity on her backside in the dirt and Ty leapt into her arms, held on so tight it shot bolts of pain through her injured neck. But she didn’t care, squeezed him just as tight, realized she was rocking him back and forth in her arms, crooning the universal mother song,
“Shhhh. It’s okay. Mama’s here. Mama’s gotcha. Shhhh.”
He wasn’t crying, but he was trembling violently. It seemed to take a long time for him to stop shaking, but she knew it was actually only a minute or two.
“He’s coming, isn’t he?” he finally whispered into her shoulder.
“He won’t find us here.”
“He’s not looking for us. He’s looking for me.”
Children always thought everything was about them.
“I ran away because I didn’t want him to hurt you and Grandpa Slappy.”
Theo! How could she possibly tell Ty that his grandfather was dead? And … no, she couldn’t think about Pedro now. If she did … With a great effort of will, Gabriella banished the images from her mind.
She eased the boy gently back out of her arms and looked into his face.
“You don’t understand, Ty, Honey. He’s stalking me because he’s crazy. He thinks he’s—”
“No, Mom. You don’t understand. He’s come to punish me for …” Then he did start to cry. Softly though, not great gulping sobs. More the worn-out tears of a child who has been crying for hours.
“Do you know Grandpa Slappy saw his best friend drown?”
Where did that come from?
“No. When?”
“But they didn’t mean to do it. It was an accident. And one of them, the fat kid. He’s felt guilty about it for sixty years.”
She had no idea what he was talking about.
“I don’t want to do that.” He looked up into her eyes. “I don’t want to carry it around for sixty years. I think … it’d kill me if I did.”
<
br /> “Carry what around?”
He grew quiet then, turned and looked at the tree. There was no denying it now. It was no trick of the light, no optical illusion. The tree really was glowing. Like a firefly, light from within. And tiny golden sparkles floated in the air all around it. There had to be a reasonable explanation, of course. Maybe it was … pollen, and up here so high the altitude made it … glow. Or … well, something.
Okay, she couldn’t explain it. Or the fact that it was warm in here, had to be twenty degrees warmer than the windswept mountainside on the other side of the rocks.
And she certainly couldn’t understand why the instant she dropped into The Cleft, all fear had left her. Yesheb was still out there, as dangerous as a wounded lion. He was still intent on murdering them both. The storm was dropping lightning bolts on the other side of the mountain like Santa tossing candy to the children along a parade route. She should have been terrified, but she wasn’t. No reason, she just wasn’t.
Ty didn’t seem to be frightened, either. But terribly burdened. She didn’t push him, just waited. He’d tell her in his own time. Finally, he let out a long sigh and scooted away from her, looked at the tree, warmed himself on it the way you warm yourself on a campfire.
Still not looking at her, he said. “The bad man is after me because I have to be punished for what I did.” He turned slowly, resolutely from the tree to look at her. His voice was steady, but so terribly, terribly sad. “I did it, Mom. Not Daddy. I burned your face with acid.”
CHAPTER 19
YESHEB STANDS IN FRONT OF THE CHALET TURNING SLOWLY around, three hundred and sixty degrees. The cold wind drives the water dripping from tree limbs at him, horizontal rain, like tiny pieces of shrapnel from a grenade. He sways, unsteady on his feet. Loss of blood, lack of oxygen, pain and exhaustion are taking their toll. He understands that he can only drive this injured body so far, that even the fuel of his rage will not propel him forward if there is not enough blood in his body for his heart to pump. He steps inside the chalet to get out of the wind and to bind up half a dozen bleeding wounds.
The one on his forearm is the worst, the only one that is life threatening. The dog tore out a chunk of tissue the size of an egg there and the dish towels and napkins he shoved into the wound are soaked. He stares at it for a moment and makes a decision. He sits down on the bench of a battered picnic table and his dagger makes short work of a bloody dish towel, cutting off a foot-long strip that he wraps around his arm above his elbow. He finds a stick on the floor and uses it to make the strip into a tourniquet. Twists it tight. That will stop the flow of blood, keep him from bleeding out. But unless he gets rapid medical attention, he will likely lose his left arm. He doesn’t care. He only needs one arm, one hand to destroy the woman and the boy—to cut and stab and slice them. He can picture it in his head, imagines every wound, every scream. Ah, the delicious screams! He can picture nothing beyond it, though. On the other side of ripping the two of them apart lies absolute, infinite darkness. He will not need his arm there, either.
Yesheb traces the three entwined G’s carved into the tabletop with his finger as he counts slowly to three hundred again. To rest, to regain his strength and to be certain the tourniquet holds.
When he hits three hundred he looks at the wound. It is no longer bleeding, nor are the puncture wounds below it on his hand. He stands and imagines he feels strength he didn’t have before. Renewed passion for the tasks ahead. For the screams. Then he steps out into the howling wind and his eyes peel away the gathering gloom. He can see like an owl, details in the trees and the rocks and he can smell the faint scent of fear clinging to the ground where she passed, the way a bloodhound can smell one scent among a thousand on a busy sidewalk. He inhales deeply, fills his lungs with it, and follows where it leads him.
PEDRO REACHED THE rocks that formed the back wall of the valley on the right side below the bristlecone pine forest. It would be quite a climb to the top of them and he was losing light, hard to see in the gray shadows. Did she really come here? Did the stalker follow—?
There on the side of a rock at his feet where the rain had not washed it away. Something dark. He wiped it onto his finger and brought it up to his nose. It was blood. Someone passed here who was bleeding. He felt his gut yank into a knot.
Ty? Gabriella? Did the stalker shoot them? No way to tell. The bloody kitchen made only one thing clear. At least one of the combatants in that blood bath was P.D. Paw prints in the blood, scratches on the floor. So it made sense that it was the stalker who was bleeding. But still … He started up the incline and saw other drips of blood in rock crevices or diluted in puddles. Someone was badly injured. Pedro had no doubt that he would come upon whoever it was, or their dead body, soon. If it was the stalker, the man would be as dangerous as a wounded bear. Pedro would not hesitate to shoot him on sight.
“WHAT DID YOU say?”
“It was me. I did it.” Ty grabbed her hand, looked into her eyes with such anguish. “But it was an accident. I swear, I didn’t mean to.”
Gabriella’s head began to spin.
“What are you talking about?”
Ty took a deep, trembling breath.
“I was there. The night when you were fighting. I was on the bottom step of the stairs watching.”
Gabriella couldn’t stifle a gasp. What a horrible thing for a seven-yearold to see!
“I was so scared for you, Mom. Daddy was so much bigger than you are and he was drunk, yelling so loud I put my hands up over my ears so I couldn’t hear but I still could.” Ty paused. “Then he … hit you.”
The scene was blurred in Gabriella’s memory. The doctor said that was normal with people who’d had concussions. She’d been unconscious for two days, which as it turned out was a good thing, since she was spared at least some of the agony of her burns, the part where doctors cleaned the acid out of the wound and removed the destroyed tissue.
“And I couldn’t let him do that, hurt you like that. I jumped up and ran at him. Slammed into him … like to tackle him, I guess. I don’t know. I just threw myself at him.”
He paused. Drew a breath.
“I didn’t know what he was holding in his hand.” Ty began to cry then, sob. His words were strangled, but Gabriella heard them. Understood them. And understood a world of other things that happened later, things that made no sense at the time. “When I hit him from behind, it knocked him off balance, and the jar in his hand … he dropped it on the floor. You were lying there and what was in the jar, the acid, it splashed in your face.”
Gabriella started to cry, too. “Oh, Ty. You poor baby.”
“Daddy was so drunk, he didn’t even know. He stumbled and fell down on one knee, got some of the acid on his hand and he started yelling, hollering. It scared me to death. I thought he was mad at me, that he was going to kill me. I turned around and ran as hard as I could back to my room and hid under the bed.”
Smokey had actually managed to dial 911—for the burns on his hand, not for Gabriella. When the EMTs arrived, they found her on the floor. After Smokey sobered up, he couldn’t remember a thing, had been in a total blackout, pleaded guilty to assault and went to prison. He was killed there, knifed by another inmate in a fight over a package of cigarettes on Christmas Eve.
Ty stopped crying, but tears still streamed down his cheeks. “I didn’t tell because I wanted Daddy to go to prison—for being so mean and for hitting you. And because I was afraid I’d get in trouble. And I was afraid … that you’d hate me.”
She grabbed him and crushed him to her chest. “I don’t hate you. I could never hate you. I love you!”
“I burned your face, Mommy.” He hadn’t called her Mommy in years. “I got Daddy killed!”
“No you didn’t!” She held him out away from her so she could look directly down into his tear-slathered face. “Now you listen to me, Tyrone Griffith Carmichael. What happened was an accident. You were only seven years old.”
Pedro’s words ra
ng in her mind then.
“… you’d forgive him and you’d want him to forgive himself.”
“But … the bad man. He’s—”
“Don’t you worry about the bad man. He can’t hurt us here. We’re safe.”
“Actually, that’s not entirely true, Gabriella.”
The voice came from above them. A voice as cold as a polar ocean. It seemed to take a long time for Gabriella to lift her head and look, but, she already knew what she would see, who she would see. Knew he’d have a gun in his hand, pointed at her. Even knew he’d be smiling that ugly, crooked smile.
YESHEB STANDS TRIUMPHANT. The storm in this world has passed over the peak, the sky is clearing, the rising moon lights the shadowed mountainside brighter than the setting sun. The storm in the other realm is over, too. He feels no pain. He is complete, whole again. The force of his own will has healed his injuries! No longer is his life blood pouring out of him from a dozen gory wounds inflicted by vicious teeth and savage claws. His whole body is flawless, without blemish. Even his severed ear has grown back.
But far more important than the healing of his body is the healing of his mind. The scales have dropped away, the gauzy curtain raised. He sees with absolute clarity now, understands that this—all of this—has been a gauntlet he had to run to cleanse his body, mind and soul. It has been a test—that he is about to pass!
When The Voice spoke in his head as he ran—staggered—through the ugly forest of stubby, mangled trees, he had dropped to his knees in terror, surprise and wonder.
It is almost over.
The hole inside him was filled again with the presence of The Voice. And with its power. He felt it surge through him like an electric current as the other voices spoke to him. They were all there—the sultry woman’s voice urged him to get up, to go on. Voices in Italian and Arabic directed him down the path. The child’s voice from his boyhood revealed where his prey was hiding.
And they all speak in harmony now as he stands triumphant. They chant in concert, “Kill them! Kill them!”
