Water and Stone

by Glover, Dan

  What all those great men of learning failed to understand was that the stone was not a solid object, nor was it liquid. To touch the piedra was to become possessed by it, to be drawn into the other world, the Kaf, the magical and dark place so much vaster than the world of light and rationality.

  It was said that some souls could amass power enough to command the stone, to come and go as they would, while others more weak would gradually succumb to its lure becoming little more than wraiths flitting about the enormity of that dark place.

  Her father believed that the piedra acted as a portal. He postulated that perhaps it had its origins in the Kaf to which it connected the real world but Evalena imagined the stone came from beyond both here and there... that whatever it was made of belonged to neither the Kaf nor the ordinary universe.

  Had it been Hajdani who created the box in which to keep the stone? Though she knew it was his objective to steal the stone from her by building a container impossible for her to open, she allowed it, knowing the piedra would never allow itself to be caged.

  The box was a bit of a miracle in itself. Whatever materials Hajdani used were his secret and one he refused to divulge. She didn’t press him for an answer... as with all her fathers she was simply grateful for his help.

  He was an amazingly clever man in some aspects yet appallingly stupid when it came to other matters. As her luck always ran ill he was the template of all the fathers who would come to her aid as the centuries wore away... as time gradually lost all its meaning.

  He meant to keep the piedra for himself. He didn’t realize its true nature... that the piedra existed in a realm outside of time and space... that no one could possess it. Though she tried to warn him the man refused to listen. He thought since he was the man that he knew better how to handle the danger that the stone represented.

  Hajdani was absorbed with the power of the stone. It served as a warning to her... that to touch the piedra was to court the Kaf. In his arrogance the man tried to talk her into touching it too.

  "I've been studying your stone, Evalena. We'll become immortals... our love will last an eternity. Take my hand. Let us grasp it together."

  "You touch it first. Hajdani."

  "You always were a coward, Evalena."

  She didn't disagree. She hadn’t lived as long as she had by being careless. That was why she needed her fathers... to act as test subjects, to parry the blows that might otherwise land upon her.

  It was Hajdani who taught her the secret of the sand. In an effort to determine more about the stone he had flung a handful of dust at it. The grains passed right through it yet emerging from the other side of the stone they had taken on a sort of glow, as if some part of the magic had been transferred.

  In a series of trials and errors Evalena discovered that the sparkly sand from the stone acted as a sort of magical emissary... that by applying a grain to the food of one of her enemies they would be quickly dispensed with, vanishing without a trace. The sand was better than any poison and more fast-acting.

  Being no longer in possession of the piedra her supply of sand was gradually dwindling away. Without either sand or stone she would be helpless to defend herself against the onslaught of her many and varied enemies. One didn't live so long without encountering many adversaries.

  Chapter 27

  He just couldn't seem to recover his strength.

  Rancher Ford had always prided himself on being something of a superman... he never got sick—not even a cold or the flu—and despite being involved in numerous accidents around the ranch he hadn’t suffered so much as a broken bone in his entire life.

  Now the doctor was telling him his kidneys were failing. The intense pain in his back that he attributed to a pulled muscle was in fact his organs shutting down for some unknown reason—most likely a virus—and unless they could isolate the cause he was liable to die.

  The dialysis bought him some time but it felt as if the machine was sucking the life out of him each time he went to the clinic... a feat in itself since the closest place with a dialysis machine was an hour away and he had to go every other day now.

  As near as he could reckon it all started the day he went to see how Billy was doing at the shack where he was said to be living with Evalena Gutiérrez. Rancher never cottoned to the woman. If she hadn’t been Yani's sister he would've run her off his land years ago.

  He hated how the woman never worked while everyone else around her toiled endlessly. She seemed to believe she was owed something by her sister and even by her nephew. When Billy took a hankering after Evalena, he thought the affair would burn out harmlessly as all of his had done over the years. Instead, the boy fell in love.

  Wanting to talk some sense into his son Rancher Ford had ridden out to Cherry Creek Road for a visit with him. Instead of finding Billy, however, there was an old man living with Evalena and his son was nowhere to be found.

  He knew the tiny shack wasn’t worth much more than the powder it would take to blow it to hell but when Yani lived there it was always an inviting place to go... the gardens flourished, the yard was always well tended, and the house was clean and neat.

  A change had come over everything and not one for the better. He noticed the pallor riding up the path... enormous spider webs had formed on all the trees blotting out the daylight and even the dying vegetation on the ground seemed somehow rank and disgusting. Behind the translucent silken sheaves he could see dark shapes the size of kittens marauding about... carcasses the size of birds and squirrels littered the muddled mazes hanging by strands the size of his fingers.

  His horse pranced and whinnied—spooked—when he tried to urge him into what appeared to be the mouth of hell leading to the cabin. The vast funnel of cobwebs sent a shudder through both him and his mount but by gently clucking the animal forward he was able to gain the cabin.

  He felt sorry for the beast... each footstep forward was greeted with a rustling under the spider webs thick and furry on the hardpan. As they progressed up the path Rancher Ford had to continually brush away spiders that climbed the horse's legs and up his flanks seemingly seeking out the rider.

  Never in his life had he witnessed an infestation as bad as that one. He wondered if it was the weather but it was just as dry as always. Over the years Rancher Ford had walked every inch of his property without fear even though rattle snakes and scorpions proliferated but on that day he was afraid.

  When the shack came into view he pulled up on the reins talking softly to calm the bedeviled horse as he tried to decide what to do next. He could sense someone watching him but for some reason though it was full day the light reaching his eyes was so dim he couldn’t make out who it was.

  The air was stifling under the bonneted trees. When he tried to strike a match to light a cigarette it wouldn't burn. His head began to swim the way it sometimes did when he was working inside the barn and had the truck engine running without opening a door for ventilation.

  An old man sat on the front stoop of the cabin. The resemblance was so striking that for an incredible moment Rancher thought it was his own father. Before he could nudge the horse closer to talk to the man Evalena appeared. With a startled look in her eye she hurried the old man inside the shack, closed the door, and turned to confront him.

  It was almost as if he was standing outside himself watching the scene unfold... like he had no control over his movements... that he was paralyzed into waiting for that which was bearing down upon him... like a rabbit caught in the headlights of an approaching automobile and unable to run. He'd gone tharn.

  Evalena's beauty and youth transfixed him. He'd made a life of chasing pretty women but this girl was more stunning than any of them save perhaps her sister Yani. She emerged from the shack before he had an opportunity to dismount and walk up to the door to see who the old man could be.

  As she walked outside she tied the eye patch over her right eye but not before he caught a glimpse of something that jangled the few nerves he had left after
passing through the confusion of webs surrounding the cabin.

  "What are you doing here? You're not welcome. Go home, Rancher Ford, and never return. If I see you around here again things'll not go easy on you, believe me."

  She said it in a haughty voice as if she owned the property upon which they were standing. As she spit the words at him she made a motion of throwing something at him though he felt nothing hit him. He wondered why the girl was so incensed... he'd never been on friendly terms with her but neither had they been at odds.

  It came to his mind that she was hiding something. His arrival had been unexpected and caught Evalena in the midst of that which she would rather that he not see... was it merely that she'd taken off her eye patch or did her anger have more to do with the old man on the porch?

  Had he been thinking right he would have thrown Evalena out of the house right then and there but he was befuddled at what he was seeing and experiencing all around him... as if he'd entered the land of the insane.

  Before she had covered it up the eye he had seen was not a human eyeball. The pupil wasn’t round. Rather it had a vertical slit, like a cat's eye, set in a blood red background... like an eye staring out of the pit of hell.

  Through the slightly opened door Rancher Ford could still see the old man with long white hair, a scraggly beard, and yellow skin along with an enormously swollen stomach sitting in a rocking chair. He remembered as a child watching as his father's brother slowly succumbed to cirrhosis of the liver and how the man's belly had enlarged like a pregnant woman's and how his hair and fingernails turned yellow.

  He wanted to ask Evalena who the man was in the cabin but he couldn't find his voice. A spot right below his shoulder blades had begun to ache even as he sat on the back of his unruly steed which was growing more nervous by the moment. Telling himself that he must have pulled a muscle while doing his best to stay in the saddle Rancher Ford turned and rode as fast as he might back to the hacienda.

  Even after they made it to the ranch his horse continued shuddering with great rippling waves of distress rolling across his flanks so that rather than going into the house right away Rancher curried and brushed and talked to the animal until he began calming down. After checking him over for spider bites he made sure to give him a good supply of oats and water before trudging inside.

  Sitting down in the kitchen he felt every bit as spent as the horse looked. His back ached, his arms and legs were on fire, and though he felt a terrible thirst nothing seemed to satisfy the burning in his throat. In rhythm with each beat of his heart his head pounded so badly that he wondered if he might be suffering a stroke or perhaps some other equally disturbing malady.

  "What happened, Rancher? You look as if someone chased you all the way across Texas. Did you find Billy?"

  He hadn’t seen Yani enter the room. She sounded so much like Evalena that he jumped involuntarily to his feet which only caused him more pain. A stabbing ache grew into such an intense fire in his lower back that he thought he might pass out before he gained the chair again.

  "No... I couldn’t find Billy. If he's with Evalena he must be hiding somewhere. Something is happening out there, Yani... your sister didn’t want me around for some reason... I'm guessing it's to do with that old man whose staying with her."

  "Sit while I make you something to eat, Rancher. I'm sorry you didn’t see Billy. Maybe later the two of us can return to speak with Evalena."

  The next morning, however, he couldn’t get out of bed. Not only was his lower back aflame with pain but the room spun around violently every time he tried to rise. He remembered being a boy and getting clobbered on his right ear by one of his father's left jabs during one of their impromptu boxing sessions and how he suffered through similar spats of vertigo for the next week.

  Though he assured Yani he would be okay given time she insisted on calling the family doctor to look in on him. The doctor came into the bedroom, examined him briefly, and the next thing Rancher knew the paramedics were loading him in the back of an ambulance for an emergency trip to the hospital.

  It was one of the hardest trips of his life. The men insisted on strapping him down to a board, locking a neck brace upon him, and sticking his arm with a needle that seemed as thick as a drinking straw. Lying like that in the back of the ambulance he became so nauseous that he vomited and nearly choked to death upon it before they were able to clear his airway.

  Three days later the diagnosis came... Rancher expected it was no more than riding hard and being put up wet but from the look on the doctor's face he realized right off—before the man had any opportunity to speak—that he was in trouble.

  He wanted to tell someone about the happenings at the cabin but who would believe him? If the doctor was correct his kidneys had been giving out for years... it was only recently that the symptoms began to manifest in earnest.

  "I've been after you for years to take care of that high blood pressure of yours, Rancher. A man can't live like you've been doing... sooner or later something is bound to happen and now it has."

  He hated being dependent on anyone, most of all Yani. He wanted to be with the woman for decades... for better or for worse he had purposely avoided her to lessen the pangs of regret blossoming each time he saw her. If he had been any sort of man at all he would've divorced Lorraine years ago and married Yani.

  Now that their chance had finally arrived he was only a drag on her... pulling the girl down into a pit of hell from which she might not ever emerge... it wasn’t right. Still, he was going to hire a private nurse but Yani talked him out of it.

  "I'm here for you, Rancher... I'm not going anywhere. You took care of me for years and now it's my turn to do the same for you."

  He had taken care of her all right... he'd never paid her a dime so far as child support went, he had nothing to do with their son for the first six years of his life, and he allowed the woman he loved to live in a hovel.

  He deserved all the bad luck coming his way. Doubtlessly both their lives would have been better were he more of a man... someone who actually cared about those around him instead of seeking after land like it was worth more than the ones he loved.

  A real man would have made sure a woman like Yani was looked after... he would have provided her and their son a proper home to live in and he'd have been around more to help them over the rough patches of life.

  Billy was gone and now Church had disappeared.

  It was another piece of bad luck for Rancher Ford who heretofore felt he'd been blessed somehow. Maybe when things turned bad, they turned hard too... he didn’t know. He'd never lived through such a stretch. It seemed as if everything he loved and cherished was being snatched away from him and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

  "Do you ever just feel like dying and getting it over with, Yani?"

  "Hush now, Rancher... no one's going to die. You'll see... before you know it you'll be back on your feet."

  "Have you heard anything from Church, Yani?"

  "No... but that's not unexpected. I sent him on an errand of great importance. I'm sure he has been delayed. He'll be home soon though... I feel it."

  She was lying to him and he knew it. He also knew better than to call her on it... she was only doing her best to keep him from getting his blood up again over something he couldn’t do anything about anyway.

  Chapter 28

  She knew better than to challenge her sister outright.

  At the same time, though, Yani realized that unless she acted proactively, Rancher would die. There was no one she could talk to... if she went around telling people that her sister was a witch who had cursed Rancher Ford, people would come to her aid, all right. They would help put her into a lunatic asylum.

  They had the same blood running through their veins so it was possible they held the same powers too. Evalena was much more practiced at the nuances of devilry, however. Yani knew if she made but one misstep the girl would pounce upon her showing no mercy.

  "Su
btlety is the key to magic, Yani."

  The words of the man she called father tingled in her ears as if he was standing right beside her. He always seemed distant to her as if he was fearful of establishing too close a relationship but now there he was, giving her the same good advice she remembered from her childhood. She had always been envious of how father and Evalena seemed to bond so completely while she was shuffled off to the side. Now, all that had changed.

  Lately she'd been wondering if the distance he kept had all been but a ruse. She'd long ago accepted that the man she called father was not her actual father. That part didn’t bother her as much as wondering why he'd taken on the responsibility of raising a girl who was not his blood.

  Rancher Ford had all but ignored Church for years even knowing that the boy was his son. Sometimes it was all she could do not to hate the man. But she knew he was married when she got involved with him. What did she expect?

  That Church and Billy were brothers was apparent from the start. And sometimes when she looked at Evalena she thought she was gazing into a mirror.

  At the same time she sensed that even though they weren't sisters she shared a bloodline with Evalena that went far back into time. Yani had never understood why the girl wouldn't let her live in peace... why she kept appearing in her life especially at times when she couldn't turn her away.

  Decades ago she'd run off to the heart of Mexico thinking that she could hide there, that no matter how they looked the people who wanted her would never think of searching in those haunted hills hidden inside of high mountain passes and trees that touched the sky. Later she came north to Texas once again believing that the trail had long gone cold yet Evalena had found her as easily as if she'd drawn up a map and left it lying about to be found.

  When the girl showed up at the chabola during the height of the storm Yani thought Evalena was the victim of bad timing... that the ferocious weather had caught her unawares. Now she wondered instead if the girl had summoned the storms simply to make it impossible for Yani to turn her away.