Land of Echoes

39

Cree waited until eleven and the school was quiet before she slipped out of the infirmary. Again the mesa was invisible in the dark beyond the school's lights, but she could feel it there, drawing and repelling her, full of secrets. A strange tremulous calm possessed her, and she wondered if this was what Julieta felt-the abject, willing surrender to whatever had to happen.

Julieta's admission that Tommy was not the first child she'd believed or imagined to be hers was deeply upsetting. Cree had held her for a long wordless moment. There was nothing to say. It was too complex and poignant. It wasn't until they'd started slowly back toward the school, arms around each other's waists, that she began to think about what it meant for the work she was charged with doing.

One clear conclusion was that, whoever Tommy was or wasn't, Julieta McCarty, as a witness caught in the disturbing emotional vortex that often accompanied paranormal events, was in far more fragile psychological shape than Cree had thought. Her perspective on who or what inhabited Tommy was therefore no more reliable than her longing for her lost child.

Just as clearly, her fragility meant that the outcome of this situation would have a profound and enduring effect on Julieta's life. The question, of course, was whether it would prove to be a catastrophic effect or an opportunity for healing.

So far, Cree had been proceeding under the assumption that the recognition Julieta felt, the reason for the entity taking up residence in the boy, had something to do with their genetic relationship and the psychic connections that would inevitably result. It made sense, too, in light of Tommy's state of mind: his desperate curiosity about his forebears, his yearning need for an anchor in the identity of his parents and ancestors.

But what did it mean if it turned out he was not her child? What did it imply about the theory that the entity was a revenant of Garrett McCarty? On balance, Cree thought, it weakened the hypothesis; probably, it increased the likelihood that the entity was the ghost of one of Tommy's actual parents.

The fact was that she didn't have enough information. All she really knew for sure was that she'd experienced an entity or entities out at the mesa, that the mesa had figured in her dreams and Tommy's drawings, and that his problems had begun not long after his visit to the ravine. The convergence of all those elements could not be coincidental. Which meant that the ghost of the mesa remained her only real lead and, until she could spend time with Tommy again, getting to know it her only available course of action.

They had parted at the administration building, Cree going back to the infirmary, Julieta to her duties. Edgar had gone back to Window Rock to compare notes with Joyce and spend the night. Cree had done yoga for an hour and generally tried to stay low-key, charging up for what promised to be a long night.

The most difficult part of the evening had come when Lynn Pierce returned from her day off. They spoke briefly, Cree very aware of the nurse's sliding eyes. Cree had cut short their conversation with the excuse she needed to catch up on her notes and reading; she hadn't yet figured out how to deal with Lynn and her treachery. Yet another problem.

At ten o'clock Julieta had phoned from the admin building to say that Joseph had called. "He said he met with the Keedays. They agreed to allow you and me to see Tommy."

"That's great news!" Cree said. "I'll go first thing in the morning. How can I find the place?"

"He drew a map and faxed it, I have it here. To the grandparents' place, anyway, I guess they'll tell you how to find Tommy when you get there."

"Me, but not you?" Cree was puzzled by her tone as well-the flat, frightened affect that came over the wire.

"I have administrative duties tomorrow. Stuff I can't get out of, a pair of prospective major donors coming to get a tour of the school. It takes the better part of the day, and hundreds of thousands of dollars ride on it. I have to… I have to do the charm thing."

"What else, Julieta? What's the matter?"

"The way the grandparents described Tommy, he's losing ground fast." Julieta's voice quavered. "And the way Joseph sounded. He was so distant. Like something had happened to him. I asked him what was wrong and he wouldn't tell me. I was so worried I called him back right after we hung up, but he didn't answer the phone. It was only about a minute later, where would-?"

"Julieta. He probably went to bed. You should get some sleep, too. We'll set it all straight tomorrow. You do your work, I'll do mine, okay? That's what I'm here for." Trying to sound reassuring, when in fact, as always, Julieta's frazzled anxiety and aching heart had leapt into her.

The night was cold and crisp, the sky slightly hazy so that only a few stars pricked through the velvet black. Cree had opted against wearing her down jacket because the nylon shell made too much noise. Instead, she'd put on a pair of sweaters, borrowed a denim overcoat from the horse barn, and wore tights under her black jeans. She had brought only a flashlight, a bottle of water, Joyce's can of pepper spray, and a blanket, all tucked into her shoulder pack.

No high-tech tonight. This wasn't about scientific proof anymore; it was about results in starkly human terms, Tommy's survival. Anyway, she wouldn't have dared to ask Edgar for the equipment. He and Joyce would be furious if they knew she was going out alone.

She walked silently along the foot of the mesa, feeling the mounting tension of anticipation. It swelled inside her and made the dark pregnant with latent movement and force. The beauty of the night, its sharp-edged silence, thrilled her. Its fearful glory and clarity exploded joyously in her heart, and she panted with sheer exhilaration. Oh yes, she could die out here or lose her mind and go adrift forever in a lonely cosmos of stars and ghosts. But it was worth the risk. Close to death, you felt your life acutely.

It helped to have seen the area in the daylight. This time, she recognized the ravine before she got to it, an angled slash of deep blue-black against the paler blue of the rock face ahead. Moments later, at its mouth, she found she could now interpret the dim outlines of its sloping floor, the shadowed boulders, the old rock fall, and the forking corridor beyond.

She took a deep breath and one last look around at the bare plain, banished a sudden onslaught of fears that included scorpions and Skin-walkers, and headed up.

Again, she found herself drawn to the area near the rock dam. This time she climbed up and over the tumble of slabs and boulders and stopped just above it, where she had a better view of the cliff faces and shadows of the upper end of the ravine. Again the breeze snaked past her and took her steaming breath with it. Grateful for the stealth her soft clothes allowed, she found a shallow shelf a few feet up from the ground and folded herself into its shadow. It felt strategic and somehow safer than squatting on the ravine floor.

She unfolded her blanket, tucked it around her legs, and put the flashlight where her hand could find it quickly. And then she sat and tried to forget everything. She felt fears and thoughts and discomforts come and go and tried to be transparent to them.

Time passed.

The cold crept relentlessly around her thighs and into her collar. The blue ravine grew darker. More time passed. She felt the gradual onset of the paradoxical state she sought: so alert, yet so near sleep.

Movement startled her. Cree's eyes flicked as she realized that there was someone else in the ravine. Her heart thudded jarringly with the shock of it.

Forty feet farther up, a man crouched in the deep shadow next to a boulder. She could see the silhouette of his head and one shoulder and arm, one sharply bent knee. Motionless. The sight knocked the breath out of her, as if someone had punched her chest. She wanted to run, she wanted to cram deeper into her little shelter, but before she could do either she saw the second man, and she froze in fear. He was thirty or forty feet farther up than the first, just now squatting down in the shadow of a boulder. He tucked his head closer to the rock and all but disappeared.

Above the second, yet another shapeless shadow moved from side to side, coming down. Then it vanished, too.

Cree still hadn't taken a breath when the nearest man crept out of his shelter, slipped closer, and faded into a vertical seam in the cliff. She stared at where he'd been and could just see one long leg, the side of his body, the swell of a shoulder.

He was lit wrong. She could see him too well. Against the dark ravine, his body seemed to glow with a strange luminosity. A tiny, distant rational voice told her he glowed because it was daylight where he was. When he was.

A noise from below roused her from her paralysis and reminded her of her mission. At first she took it for a human voice of alarm, but then she recognized the bleat of a goat. Then the big rustling rumble, hooves and voices, the jangle of harness. She had to get down there, now; she had to find Brother. Warn him back. He shouldn't have gone to retrieve the goats. She shouldn't have gone after him, but she couldn't stop herself, and now it was too late.

Above, someone slipped on rolling gravel. She looked to see two more shapes coming quickly down the ravine and she knew she had to run now or she would lose her resolve and something terrible would happen to Brother.

She leapt down from her shelter and scrambled to the rock dam in confusion, smashing her front into the boulders, then climbing and stumbling and falling among the rocks, bruising her hands. The rocks were all wrong. She rammed both knees into a jagged slab and fell heavily, twisting her body just in time to take the impact on her shoulder. It stunned her, but in an instant she was up again, scrabbling on all fours over the fall and tumbling to the smoother floor of the ravine.

The big noise was there, out on the desert. The evil people were coming. She had to run now. Below, a shape moved out on the sunset-lit desert and she knew it was Brother. And he had caught one of the goats, he was running with it on a rope. She ran out of the ravine mouth to call to him, Shinaai, don't go for the goats, come back! but that was foolish because he had already caught one, he already knew the danger and was running back. Back in the ravine, the men were crying out in alarm and anger.

She had almost reached Brother when part of him broke away, part of his head was gone in an instant and suddenly he was splayed out on the sand and the goat was running away trailing its tether. And then the goat stumbled and rolled, shuddering and kicking its feet in the air as if savaged by an invisible predator. Far away across the ground, she saw the other goat running toward the south and then, panicked, change its mind and turn back. She knelt by Shinaai and knew that the monster that ate people and took them away had taken him. It was too evil to bear. She stood and ran at it, raging and cursing it, but something bit her leg like a dog or wolf. It tugged just once but so hard she fell to her knees. When she looked down her thigh was open, burst like a shattered gourd. And she shouted up at the horsemen a curse on their lives and clans forever and then her belly and chest burst, too. She fell on the sand and lay as the stamping hooves danced briefly around her and then moved on out of view, toward the ravine. She wanted to turn her head to see what was happening there, but she couldn't move. She lay looking along the ground, out toward the empty desert, a sideways red-lit plane where even the grains of sand were huge and frighteningly vivid. Unable to move her body, she felt her mind and heart fling outward, love and warning and apology snapped like an arrow from a bow, back toward the ravine where the family was. She heard the guns there and then she heard and saw nothing.

She awoke to find herself a hundred yards from the mouth of the ravine, lying facedown on coarse sand. It took her a long moment to regain herself, give herself a name: Lucretia Black. It wasn't sunset, it was deepest night. She sat up quickly and winced as all the pains came at once, the bruised shins and elbows and wrenched shoulder. She straightened and felt every vertebra kink and complain. She got to her feet and swayed for a moment, deeply chilled. After a moment, she thought to push the glow button on her watch, and found that it was after two in the morning.

Two people had died on this spot. She was too battered and numb to examine the experience in detail, but she sensed they were young, a girl of around thirteen and her brother, a little older. The girl had called him Shinaai. He had gone to retrieve the runaway goats against the family's instructions, and she had followed to bring him back, also against orders. They'd been shot by someone the girl thought of as the New People and the Enemy People: men on horses, many of them, enough to make that awful, air-quivering thunder of hooves and motion and manic energy.

She did a quick inventory and admitted that she was beat to crap, that she'd done all she could for now. She absolutely had nothing left, emotionally or physically.

But the wrong of it! The lingering sense of the girl's last bitter instant fired her, and she sat back down, suppressed her sobs, and stubbornly ordered herself to stillness. She willed it to come again: demanded that the ghost cycle through its manifestation, commanded herself to find and tolerate the echoes of that life and death. Insisted that the rocks give up their secrets. Whatever, however the hell it worked.

But of course you couldn't force it. You couldn't find it if it wasn't there or if you weren't ready. After fifteen more minutes, she accepted the obvious and got creakily to her feet.

She limped up the ravine to retrieve the backpack and blanket. Climbing over the rock dam again, she thought about the spatiotemporal divergence she'd experienced on her way down, during her urgent rush to warn her brother. The rocks impeding Cree's passage didn't exist in the world of the girl whose final moments she'd experienced; clearly the avalanche that had brought this tumble down hadn't been there when the girl had lived. Her stumbling efforts to clamber over the rocks when half her world didn't contain them brought home just what Tommy must be experiencing when the entity was active in him. It explained the confusion of his labored attempts to climb through the corral fence, or to come down off the examining table: spatiotemporal double vision.

She made it to the niche and stuffed her things into the backpack, then sat for a moment in the dead silence of the night. Not seeking or expecting anything to happen, just scraping together enough energy to walk back to the school.

But something was happening.

Ice crystals tingled in her veins: There was a noise. It had started subliminally and grew imperceptibly until it demanded notice and then it was undeniable. At first, a distant mosquito, and now a big, resounding noise, echoing up from the mouth of the ravine.

She tucked herself back into the little hollow, trying to analyze the sound as it swelled and Dopplered between the walls. For a horrible moment she thought she'd slipped back, she'd lost her grip on her self and her present and was being drawn unwillingly back to that murderous past.

But as the noise grew she recognized it. Not horses. A motor.

A bright light panned the south wall of the mouth of the ravine, bouncing, veering, then skidding upward along the south cliff wall toward her. Two close-set, brilliant beams flashed up the cleft, straight into her eyes, and she jerked her head back. For another few seconds the lights stayed motionless, cutting the rock walls nearby into harsh light and shadow. And then they went out. The engine died.

Someone was there. At the mouth of the ravine. On some kind of all-terrain vehicle.

She tipped her head and peered into the darkness below. The blue transparency of the night was gone. Purple blotches and a pair of searing lavender orbs swam in her vision and she couldn't see anything until someone turned on a flashlight, panning it left and right. Somebody was coming up on foot.

Cree slipped the pack straps over her shoulders, waited until the light vanished momentarily, and then jumped down. She landed on all fours and stayed in a deep crouch, where the rockfall below sheltered her from the flashlight's direct beam. She heard the scrape of boots and a rattle of stones as someone moved closer. The beam came up the ravine again, lighting the cliff just over her head.

Staying on all fours, she scrambled as high as the shadows allowed, then froze. The shadows swayed and shifted as the flashlight moved, and then it grew dark where she was. She risked a glance back. Whoever it was had reached the lower side of the rock dam and was pointing the flashlight down. Moving it around, left and right, as if looking for footing.

She took the opportunity to lizard-crawl twenty feet higher. Another ten feet ahead was a fallen sandstone slab big enough to keep her out of view. She leapt for it, stumbled, knocked some loose stones together with a clatter that seemed deafening. She rolled into the embrace of shadow and lay awkwardly half on top of the backpack, cupping her hands over her mouth to muffle her breathing.

Whoever it was had climbed onto the rocks and was shining the flashlight up the ravine, panning it systematically. Looking for the source of the noise! Cree lay unmoving, shaken by her pounding heart, afraid to lift her head to check whether her feet were out of view, afraid to pull her knees up lest the movement attract attention.

After an endlessly suspended moment, the light dipped again. She pulled in her legs, cramming herself behind the canted slab. From the scuffle of boots, it didn't sound as if the person was coming any closer, and at last she dared to tip her head out to look.

Someone was moving around on the rockfall, shining the flashlight down at the jumbled boulders and stones. Cree was only sixty feet away, but all she could see was the brilliant circle of light and the rugged surfaces of the rocks it illuminated. Back and forth. Somebody was looking for something. A very systematic inspection.

She watched for several minutes, trying to decide what she would do if whoever it was came higher. There would be no opportunity to run farther up without being seen, no protection from the light. She could wait behind her slab, leap up, clop whoever with a rock. Or maybe she should use the pepper spray. If she could just get the jump on whoever it was-

The movement of the light changed. The person was coming this way again. Whoever it was came down off the rock dam on the uphill side. Cree groped in the pack for the pepper spray. She brought the can out and positioned her finger on the spray button, mentally rehearsing what she'd have to do.

But the flashlight didn't approach. The person appeared to be inspecting the base of the rockfall, taking time, looking into cracks and gaps. With the glow of the rocks behind it now, she could see the whole black silhouette of the visitor for the first time, and she let slip a gasp of surprise as she recognized the shape. After another few minutes, the light went out and there was silence. Cree saw the flare of a match, quickly extinguished and replaced by the glow of a cigarette. In another moment, the smell of tobacco wafted up. For a time she couldn't see or hear anything, but then she heard the scrape of boots again, up and over the rock dam, fading.

The engine of the ATV cranked and revved, the headlights washed the ravine and panned and disappeared. The retreating wedge of light swept to the right, and the red taillights zipped out of view to the north. The engine noise swelled and faded and was gone.

North, she thought. The direction from which evil comes.

She waited for a long time in the darkness, still afraid to move. At long last, she stood and began a limping half walk, half run back to the school and sanity. Her nerves shrieked with tension. She went stealthily, watchfully, ready to dart for cover if there was any indication Donny McCarty's thug, Nick Stephanovic, was coming back.