Land of Echoes

26

The night wasn't as cold as Cree had expected. Currents of warmer air slid through the chill layers, meandering off the desert toward the mesa. She and Ed walked slowly, talking only rarely and in whispers. When they'd first started out, the lights of the school had blinded them, making the night seem impenetrable, but now the campus had disappeared around an arm of the mesa and their eyes had had time to adapt. The night world was blue and transparent, crisply visible in the light of sparking stars and the residual glow of a setting half moon. To their right loomed the cliffs of the mesa, a chiaroscuro of blue and black, rock surfaces riven with the shadows of cracks, folds, gullies. An occasional pinon tree clung to the lower slope, a hunchbacked blob of darkness. Cree didn't know how far they'd come, but they had not yet seen anything like the higher palisades Tommy had portrayed in his drawings. Already, the vanished school seemed distant as a memory.

Night: Shadows became holes through the surface world into a place of immeasurable depth. In the darkness, the five ordinary senses strained and the subtler ones awakened, the spectrum of extrasensory awarenesses used by the parapsychologist and the mystic. Cree shivered with a familiar tremble of fear and exhilaration. It was joyous, reverent, and keenly mortal: the sense of the imminence of the other dimensions of the world, the true scope of the universe; the awareness that the vacuum of space above didn't end where sky met earth but interpenetrated the ground and the things upon it, that even the solidest-seeming matter was after all full of emptiness and energy, and that mind could merge with it and move within it in myriad ways.

The rocks and sky brooded as if waiting: ancient, starkly inhuman, neither cruel nor kind. The ghost of the land looks just like its body, it occurred to her. Its essence and its outward stuff were one and the same. Still, it was not simple; within the big encompassing ghost of mineral and atmospheric wilderness swarmed smaller ghosts, distinct as the different layers of air, alive with separate moods as clear as scent or memory. If you believed that the universe was something like a dreaming mind, you had to accept that it was a mosaic made of lesser dreams and thoughts, yearnings, latencies, echoes of events past, immanences of things to come. It thrilled her and frightened her. It was majestic and merciless.

Thinking about it, Cree remembered the question Ed had asked maybe five minutes ago. The prospect of a long nighttime walk in this wild, empty land clearly made him nervous, and he'd brought a handle from one of the infirmary's brooms to serve as walking stick and weapon. She knew exactly what he meant when he asked, "Why do you think it's a human revenant inside Tommy? Why not something else?" He'd gestured at the dark landscape, so full of secrets, meaning, Why not something from this?

Out here, close to the brooding rocks, it was easy to doubt her earlier conviction. In the absence of wind, there was no sound but the crunch of their footsteps and the sweeping noises of the fabric of their jackets or jeans. They were very alone. She struggled to banish images from the possession literature, and the thought of animal mutilations nagged at her; being out here, with the interstellar wilderness above and the hard, unforgiving desert all around, you could easily believe in raptors of every sort.

But at last she said quietly, "You know how sometimes, when you're taking the bus across town and you're unconsciously staring at the side of some guy's head? Maybe you're not even thinking about him, and then suddenly he turns toward you and your eyes meet?"

"Yes."

"I mean, you're both startled by the contact. You've never seen him before, but for an instant you sort of recognize each other, there's this shock of communion. You see his eyes so clearly… that spark of awareness. It's very intimate-and then of course you both look away. You retreat from it, right?"

"Yeah."

"That first night, when we were back in the infirmary and trying to hold him down? I felt it startle and recoil as it sensed me. I recoiled, too. It was just like meeting the gaze of a stranger on the bus. Mutual recognition. I just… felt sure it was human."

But telling him about it now, Cree felt her conviction ebb. She saw again the exploring fingers of the hand and that awful, labored wink, and then remembered Tommy's description of the parasites in the sheep, the living, pulsating bumps.

Yeah, it reacted to me, she thought. The maggots would probably squirm if you prodded them, too.

She shivered and did her best to concentrate on the cliffs.

"So what are we looking for?" Ed asked. "I mean, if there was an entity anchored here, and it's now in Tommy, what's left here for us?"

"Don't know. All I know is those dreams. Maybe the rocks in the dream are part of the thing's memory? Or maybe it's a divided entity, like the one in New Orleans, with a more intentional element in Tommy and a perimortem element that's still out here. Or maybe there's more than one."

The silhouette that was Ed nodded, accepting her impressionistic way of feeling her way through. She felt a surge of affection for him as they walked on in silence. He didn't experience the world the way she did; in fact, his whole training rebelled against her outlook. And yet he believed-he so trusted her, personally, that he accepted what she saw or felt as real and valid. No one else had ever crossed such a gulf to come to her, she realized. Not even Mike, not Joyce, not Deirdre or Paul Fitzpatrick. The thought astonished her. She silently cherished Edgar as they walked.

The drive from the motel had been largely silent, too. Ed seemed wary. For her part, Cree felt as though she had a lot to say to him. She wanted to be with him more… more straight on and not so lateral. It seemed as if they had a lot to catch up on, some important personal developments to discuss, but she didn't know what those might be. Nothing had changed: She had talked to Paul Fitzpatrick earlier tonight, was feeling romantically toward him and planning to go to New Orleans as soon as she could get free; Ed was getting used to that, keeping some distance from her as he figured out his own feelings. They were business partners, collaborators, and good friends. Nothing had changed.

Puzzling over it, she kept coming back to thoughts of Julieta. She sensed a pattern, a sort of mandala of emotion, around Julieta. It had to do with Peter Yellowhorse and Joseph Tsosie and unexpressed or unrequited feelings, with Julieta's emotional arc through so many years of self-denial and self-restraint. But every time Cree tried to inspect it, her thoughts shied like skittish horses.

Ed's whispered voice brought her out of her thoughts. "Could this be it?"

He was looking up at the deep blue walls of the mesa, higher and steeper here, perhaps eighty feet of sandstone. They had arrived at a place where a ravine divided the rock, angling deep into the body of the hill, its nearly vertical slopes sculpted by the elements and topped at the rim by boulders. From what she could see in the dark, it all looked crumbling and fragile. Farther into the mesa, the sloping cleft narrowed and disappeared in shadow.

"Maybe," she whispered.

It was hard to tell in the dark, and yet as she studied the scene its familiarity grew. At first she couldn't tell if she recognized the place from her dreams or from Tommy's drawings, but in a moment she knew it was neither. There was something like a song echoing in the ravine, inaudible but charged with deep emotion. She realized now it had been growing in her awareness as she'd approached, preoccupied with her thoughts. It drew her into the embrace of the cliffs, and made her suddenly breathless.

"Yes," she said.

Edgar knew to give her space. He sat on a boulder a stone's throw from the mouth of the ravine and hunched motionless in his jacket with his broom handle across his lap. As Cree moved silently into the shadows, his shape blurred until he became indistinguishable.

A hundred feet up, she leaned against a fallen slab and tried to release the tension in her shoulders. She labored to keep her breathing from going shallow and panicky. She struggled to master her fear, which filled every shadow with furtive movement, goosing her heartbeat and making her hands and feet tingle. She released her thoughts, gently willing them to stillness so that their clamor wouldn't obscure the secret confessions of the rocks.

Even if the next stage was a perpetual surprise and mystery, she knew this part well-this first part, the act of stepping to the entrance to the hidden parts of the world. It started with a mounting pressure as of something impending. The sense that an event of importance was about to take place, the feeling of movement just out of view. She had known the feeling before she became a parapsychologist, living in that third-floor Philly apartment and sensing from subliminal sounds or vibrations that the resident of the apartment below had come home. Was maybe even standing directly below, only five vertical feet away: so close, yet so separate and unknowing.

Yeah, she thought, except that here your body tells you it's dangerous.

She startled as a pebble tickled down the rock slope from almost directly above. Her heart answered with jarring thuds. She held her breath and waited for more signs that something was moving up there, but no more fell.

Fear was the big impediment. Your body said, Don't come here. Its impulse grew remorselessly: Get ready to run. You should run. Run now!

Runrunrun-

When it peaked, when the instinctive mutters of warning became screams and seemed unendurable, that was the very moment the empathic parapsychologist had to sustain: the intolerable moment of breakthrough. Slow the breath, she chanted to herself. Let go thoughts. Feel the texture of the dark. Hear the hiss in the ears. Don't break the silence. Don't shatter the mood, the moment. The contact.

Most important: Remember, it's made of the same stuff you are. The secret life stuff inside, the quickening light-that's all you are, too.

Sometimes it started with changes in the phosphene patterns, the shimmering retinal star field that was always there behind closed eyelids. In the deep blue dark of the ravine, she didn't need to shut her eyes to observe the phosphene haze. Were there shapes in the swirl? Maybe. Her pulse kicked up.

Without thinking about it, she made her way farther into the cleft, another hundred feet to a place where a dam of fallen slabs and boulders blocked it from side to side. At its deepest, the barrier was only shoulder high, easy to climb over. But she lowered herself to the ground, her back against a rock, facing sideways. An old smell here: wind-weathered stone. She could see the cliffs opposite, some of the ravine above, the gentle downward slope and the curtain of dark beyond which, only a hundred yards away, invisible, Edgar would be sitting, patient and alert.

Physically, he wasn't far. In other ways, he was very distant. In a different world.

She waited for a long time, enduring the sense of imminence. She felt very alone. She sensed the darkness changing subtly as the big globe rolled its belly to face a different expanse of sky, and the blue air got colder. After a while, she found she could see her breath: faint curls of mist that moved slowly away, sucked into the ravine by some imperceptible updraft. She tried not to feel isolated and exposed, but the feeling grew and grew. Reflexively she hugged her knees, made herself smaller.

She felt like she was hiding. She was hunkered here, curled into deepest shadow, trying to compress herself into invisibility, silent as she could be. She was waiting, paralyzed with fright and indecision.

She was hiding because fear was moving, somewhere in the dark, and growing closer.

She'd made a mistake in coming here, she realized. It was too dangerous. Abruptly she felt the others nearby, now waiting, now coming down the ravine, coming out of the shadows for her. She couldn't let them come nearer. But she couldn't move.

Another pebble made an insect noise as it scuttered down the cliff. Cree wanted to bolt up, climb, run, but she couldn't, they'd see her. There was another noise now, a dull tumult that she felt more than heard, a low thrum in her belly. It was shot through with sharp, silver noises. And now there were voices from above and below, calling, warding, threatening.

There was something bad happening out where Ed was, she realized distantly. Somebody or something had come in the dark, and he was out there. They had screwed up badly, thinking it could be this simple. She could hear it clearly now, a rushing and rumbling and something metallic. And in the cleft, urgent wailing voices.

She stood, and as she looked up the ravine she saw the shadows moving. Humped, furtive shapes leaping and alighting, side to side, closer and closer. Her heart wanted to burst at the sight. Panicked, she brayed at them like a crazed, wounded animal, warding them back. But they didn't stop. Suddenly she was rushing back toward Edgar, hurtling between the crazy angles of the cliffs, stumbling over rocks, catching herself, tearing her fingers on the stone, blinded by fear.

"Ed!" she called. The rumble was all around him, the evil had swarmed off the desert to the opening of the ravine. Big movements, manifold movements, a huge thing that she knew was the evil that ate people, took them away to nowhere. She couldn't see him, he was already taken by it, he was consumed in its blue mouth. "Edgar!" she shrieked. "Ed, they're coming! Run! Run!"

She tore toward the boulder where he'd been and suddenly it was moving and a shadow reared out of it and it was a man.

"Cree!" the shape shouted. The horizons swallowed its cry.

"Run, Ed!"

"Cree! Are you all right? What is it?" He was coming toward her, holding his staff, a watchful shepherd attending to an alarm.

There was pain in the air. Pain and piercing loss and every regret. She swore a curse upon it with rage torn from her bowels, her bones. It was monstrous and evil beyond reckoning, and the voices and rumble and jingle, the exploding fear and heartsickness and outrage all merged into one thing, a whole world that gathered into the sound of a cymbal clashed and ringing and then damped and fading and silent.

And there was no one there but Ed, alone beneath the sky on the vast empty desert.

She fell between worlds. She tumbled against him and his arms were around her and his body rocked hers as she tried to catch her breath. Her pounding heartbeat shook her. He wasn't very real and then he was.

"It's okay, Cree! You're okay! What happened? What's up there?"

It wasn't up there, she wanted to tell him, it was out here, she had rushed to warn him. Save him. But that didn't make sense. What she had wanted so urgently was evaporating from her mind. She grasped at the knowledge of it but it slipped away, mist between her fingers.

All that she could conjure of it was the thing she'd had to tell him, so urgent, but when it came to her lips it had shrunk to a single word that surprised her and was utterly without meaning: "Goats!" she panted. "The goats!"