Land of Echoes

47

There was a glow in the distance: dangerous like a forest fire in the dark, something malevolent that could rush toward you and surround you and consume you. And there was an irritating insect that buzzed a harsh little song as it drilled into Cree's thigh.

Startled, she brushed and slapped at the bug and half sat up before realizing where she was and what was happening. She was lying in one of the sleeping bags under the roof of the sheep shed. The fire was a tumble of embers. The sunlight was gone but for a dull, colorless brightness in the west, washing the dark landscape in a faint light that turned every feature a monochromatic blue-gray. The silence in all directions was the sound of pure loneliness.

Right. Sheep camp. She had taken a nap. Ellen had lain down, too, but now was gone. With Tommy sleeping and Raymond and Dan taking their shift, Cree had opted to try to rest. She'd drifted off wondering how to tell Julieta about Tommy, her thoughts spinning in slow circles, going nowhere.

The glowing dangerous thing was the battle between Tommy and his invader, always there, an emanation of psychic discord looming just out of view, sixty feet away. And the insect on her thigh was Edgar's cell phone in her pants pocket, ringing and vibrating. Ellen had told her that here on the higher ground, reception wasn't too bad.

She opened it quickly and tugged out the antenna, her heart thudding in her chest.

It was Julieta.

"I was going to call you," Cree told her. "Where are you?"

"I'm at Joseph's house. In Window Rock. I called Dr. Mayfield to get your number." Julieta's voice sounded subdued, deliberate. "How are things up there?"

"I'm… I was just taking a rest. Tommy's aunt and uncle and cousin are in with him."

"How is he?"

"Not good, Julieta. I'm sorry." Cree's mind was scurrying, wondering how to break the news.

Julieta went on as if she'd planned out what to say. "I called to tell you something I think you should know. Joseph brought me to my child's grave today. He died about three years ago."

Cree's breath went out of her. She couldn't reply immediately.

"Joseph is being very kind. I'm screwed up about it. But I'm coping. I don't deserve to grieve, Cree. Somebody else knew him and loved him every day. I didn't." Julieta's voice was so gentle it seemed disembodied. It faded and swelled as if the breezes over all those miles of desert between them were blowing the signal astray, or lofting out and away some part of her feeling. There was no bitterness or anger in her tone.

"So my first thought was, I was wrong about Tommy. Knowing him that way," Julieta said. "But…"

She let the word hang there. Cree understood her reluctance to say the rest: But maybe I wasn't. Maybe I recognized him because the ghost in him is my son's ghost.

She couldn't say it because on one hand it could sound like a real neurosis, a delusion that she couldn't let go of no matter what evidence contradicted it.

On the other hand, Cree thought. The theory posed innumerable questions, but it would explain so much. Blood to blood, like to like. If true, it would give them the key to releasing the ghost.

"Julieta, I'm so sorry. I know this is very hard for you. Thank you for letting me know. You're right, it's a very important fact. I understand exactly."

"I knew you would." Very faint.

"Wait, don't hang up! What was his name? How did he die? I don't mean to be so direct, but I… I need every bit of information I can get."

"Robert. Robert Linn Dodge. He died of a congenital heart defect. He was sick for most of his life. Apparently he fought back hard. I don't know where he died, or the exact circumstances. I'll try to find out, if you want me to." Julieta stopped, then went on desperately, "Cree, he would have died anyway. Even if I hadn't… even if-"

"Julieta, you have to come here. The ghost's response to you could be crucial. I need to see you interact. And if you're why it's here, you're the one who has to let it go. Can you come?"

"Of course. When?"

Cree looked around. The rising land to the east was a sweep of deep gray-blue, full of the humped black forms of junipers and boulders. Stars had begun springing out of the night sky. Far too late for anyone to come or go through this wilderness tonight.

"The sooner the better. Tomorrow. Early as possible."

She folded the phone away just as a circle of light edged around the back wall of the shed, bringing Ellen and Ray with it: They'd lit one of the Coleman lanterns. Ellen hung it from a nail and then sat down to stoke the fire. Ray tossed himself down near the fire pit and tipped the coffeepot to see what was left.

"Still sleeping," Ellen said. "Dan's over there, but he's afraid to be inside with him." She looked very worried, and Cree knew why. Tommy hadn't eaten anything for two days. Physical exhaustion would only weaken him, give the ghost the advantage. Even while he slept, it fitted itself more closely to him, a hand working determinedly into a poorly fitting glove.

"I'll go take over now," Cree told them. "I feel a lot better. You folks get some rest, okay? I'll call you if I need you."

"I'm sorry," Ellen said. "My husband and his sister were supposed to come up to help out, but I guess they couldn't get here before it got dark. We're on our own for tonight."

Ray dumped the coffee grounds on the edge of the fire pit and began preparing a new potful. "So I guess we're what you might call a skeleton crew," he joked darkly.

A small scrabbling noise jolted Cree out of her drowse.

She'd been sitting with her back to the far wall of the hogan, keeping vigil on Tommy and the shifting auras and moods that emanated from his sleeping form. Some hours must have passed, but she didn't dare lift her hand to check her watch. The only light was the faint reflected glow from the lantern over at the shed, coming through the window.

It was just enough to see what made the noise: Tommy's right hand.

Tommy lay on his left side, facing her with eyes shut, mouth agape, his breath coming in ragged snores. But the hand was awake. It flexed and stealthily slid along the floor to the leg of the little table beneath the window. When it encountered the leg, it recoiled, then returned to probe the shape of it. That was the scrabbling noise: fingernails against wood.

Cree tried not to react outwardly. Inside, she felt an overpowering revulsion, the sense of the unnatural. A perversion, even by strange standards of the paranormal. The hand moved as though disembodied. It climbed the leg of the table, felt along its edge. When it encountered the corner of Tommy's notebook, it recoiled again.

Tommy shifted in his sleep, rolling slightly so that the arm fell back to the floor. The hand lay palm up and motionless for a moment, like a stunned insect. Tommy's snores snagged and lost their rhythm. His breath seemed snarled in his throat, as if his tongue were choking him. Cree put her hands to the floor and rose to a crouch, ready to spring to his help if his breathing didn't resume.

And, as if it had sensed her in the room, the hand roused itself again.

This time the arm raised toward Cree and the hand made a beckoning gesture with two fingers. It trembled and shook and again seemed to beckon her closer. The movement appalled her. Tommy's head lay canted onto his pillow, his mouth wide and slack, eyes closed. And the thing was alert and beckoning.

Without thinking, Cree took two hesitant steps toward it. Run! screamed her instincts. Surrender, she commanded herself. She felt time slow and confusion consume the dark room, and knew she must have hesitated because now Tommy's dark silhouette eclipsed the faint rectangle of window. He had risen from his bed.

As he turned, she glimpsed the ghost's body around the outline of his shape, a faintly luminous limb bending momentarily, a shoulder emerging where it shouldn't be and then vanishing again. The dark form moved toward her. The desire to flee became intolerable, yet she still couldn't move.

And then she realized he wasn't coming straight toward her. Tommy went to the door, east-facing as all Navajo doors were, walked face-first into it, groped it with his hands, opened it. Before Cree could react, the doorway was empty.

Her reactions were delayed by indecision. By the time she got to the door, she could barely see his shape in the blue dark, walking east, up the gentle slope toward the higher ground. Cree debated calling for Ellen or Ray, but there was no sound from the sheep shed, and she assumed they were taking some much-needed sleep.

More important, she didn't want to distract the ghost. The freakish intentional hand had given way to the perseverator, and it was living through its narrative now. She had to experience what the ghost was living through and glimpse the world it thought it was in. Instinctively, she sensed she was getting close to identifying it.

She followed Tommy's puppeted body out into the darkness, keeping her physical distance yet extending all her senses toward it. Around them, a wind moved in the sagebrush as if scores of invisible creatures were scurrying furtively through, each suddenly tossing form igniting a fresh jolt of fear. The darkness seemed to flicker and flutter.

The invisible auras of the ghost's moods waxed and waned like an aurora borealis. Fear? Definitely. Or, more accurately, trepidation. But that didn't impede the drive, the burning purpose that kept it moving. What else? Apology or remorse. That cocky self-confidence, too, almost a machismo, a sexualized braggadocio. But so forced, pumped up, so desperate or artificial. Garrett?

Confusion and doubt, too, and a childlike neediness, seeking consolation or reassurance. And that relentless desire to overcome. Maybe a twelve-year-old boy determined to fight off the effects of the badly formed heart that was killing him, frightened, needing comfort?

Robert? Robert Linn Dodge? she called to it in her mind.

Tommy's body stumbled hard on a knee-high rock and went down. Cree's eyes had adjusted to the starlit dark, enough to see that when he got up, his movements were slack and disjointed. Not as if Tommy were fighting the ghost, but as if his body were simply too worn out from the days and nights of warring to obey.

They were getting pretty far from the hogan now. Cree could barely see the building's dark mass, a hundred yards back; the light from the lantern in the shed was mostly eclipsed by intervening junipers. She began having second thoughts about letting the narrative play itself out. It wouldn't be good to go too far in country neither she nor the ghost knew. There were cliffs here. Ellen and Ray might not hear a call for help.

She picked up her pace to close the gap between them.

Always east. Brother would have been heading east as he desperately tried to get back to the ravine. He'd be proud he'd caught one of the goats, maybe that was the cockiness, a young man proving his daring and worthiness. He'd be afraid of the approaching soldiers. He'd be apologetic for disobeying his father's orders not to go back down the ravine.

They were getting too far away. Tommy's movements were weak, but the ghost seemed tireless. Cree couldn't wait any longer for a confrontation. Scrambling in the dark, she flanked the ghost at a distance and came around to head it off. She stopped ten feet away, directly in front of the dark form.

"Shinnai?" she called out loud. She conjured in her mind the sense of the girl's mental world, her feeling for her brother.

Tommy took several more toppling steps, stopped, and swayed uncertainly. Now all the ghost felt was doubt and fear. "What are you doing here?" he said breathlessly. Abruptly he put up his hands as if warding off a blow and immediately rage exploded him. He swung his fist at Cree and caught the side of her head. She didn't fall, but it knocked her off balance and rattled her and she tried to dodge him, but it was too late, she was moving too slowly. Tommy lunged again and she had to grab his arms. He growled like an animal, but there was little force in his efforts. They fell over and rolled, Cree turning her face away from the clawing hands, her mouth filling with grit.

"Tommy!" she shouted. "Tommy, stop him!"

Its movements faltered. She tried to push it away and partially succeeded, dragged her upper body out from under. Twisting to look as its fists thudded weakly on her back, she saw that Tommy's body appeared to be fighting with an invisible being. The ghost had drifted askew between worlds. In another few seconds it flailed hugely as pain exploded inside it. Its stomach, its chest, everything bursting. The body began convulsing in regular waves. Cree broke free, scrambled a few feet away, fell down as the pain consumed her. She rolled to look at the Tommy thing. It was fighting for its life. It couldn't seem to breathe.

That thought panicked her and she groped in her pocket for her key ring flashlight. When she put the spot of light on Tommy, she could see the asynchronous breathing rolling his chest side to side, the gaping mouth as the lungs exchanged air. Still she couldn't move. The sense of unrelenting purpose burned in the ghost's mind. It wouldn't surrender. Cree felt its will encompass her, its body spirit irradiate her. The ghost felt itself lying on its back as the ground seemed to rise and fall and shake. It was wounded or sick, dying, yet unwilling to relinquish its life or purpose. It was overpowering her. The ghost or Tommy was looking at her desperately and saying something without breath. She felt the word in her own mouth: away. Then one eye fixed on her with enormous effort, and the ghost said it again. This time it sounded more like awake. Was the ghost telling her to go away? Was it pleading to awaken? It wants to come back. Then the power of it waned a little and she pulled back from the edge. Tommy's body was starting to die as it suffocated.

"Ellen! Ray!" she screamed. "Help me, please!" She looked desperately in the direction of the invisible sheep sheds, waving her tiny light back and forth over her head. The ghost or Tommy was still moving its mouth that way. "Are you saying 'away'?" she asked it. "Are you wanting to wake up? Please tell me!" But the rolling chest had gone still and the staring eye turned fishlike and almost without life. It could no longer move.

She bent and began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. She shoved on the motionless chest, exhaled into the slack mouth, reared up, shoved again. She screamed and waved the light and this time heard a clank from the darkness and knew immediately that someone had knocked over the coffeepot down at the shed. "Over here!" she yelled. She blew into Tommy's mouth, pushed on his stubborn chest. Waved the tiny flashlight. Heard voices.

It took a while to get him back to the hogan. They waited until his breathing stabilized and until the snapping arm movement had ceased. Ray and Dan kept watch as Tommy slept. Ellen led Cree back to the shed.

Neither said anything as Ellen heated some water on the fire and used it to wash the scratches on her face. They weren't severe. When Cree checked her watch, she found it was almost two a.m.

Ellen finished up her face and sat back on her haunches. "Better?"

"Much better. Thank you, Ellen." Cree reached out a hand to touch her brown cheek, cherishing her. She kept her right hand in the pocket of her jacket. She had placed it there carefully with her left to keep it from hanging loose from her shoulder. It wasn't responding. It wasn't there. It wasn't actually her arm at all. Her real arm, she was sure, was unaccountably wrapped around behind her, tucked hard along her spine as if she'd slipped her hand deep into the waistband of her jeans and couldn't bring it out. The feeling was so gnarled and knotted it made her nauseous. Some part of the entity's body ghost had entered her. Or she had empathized with it so much she'd inherited its condition. Whatever the mechanics were. It didn't matter, and she didn't want Ellen to worry. They needed to hold out here until morning and hope that Julieta would come and the ghost would reveal itself to her and they could somehow let it go. No, she decided. Looking at Tommy after they'd laid him among his blankets, she'd seen how the weeks of warring had sapped him. There'd been unceasing doubt and anxiety, and the exertion of the fighting and convulsing. He had nearly suffocated several times. Worst of all, his body had relived someone's act of death innumerable times. There was little left of him, not even physically; even animated by the ghost's preposterous power, his fighting had been feeble. They couldn't wait for Julieta. As soon as daylight allowed, they'd have to get him back to the hospital, where at least his body could be kept alive. Whatever they might do to him there, this wasn't working. This couldn't go on.

They sat for a few minutes, warming themselves on the snapping juniper-twig fire Ellen had rekindled. Cree felt crushing disappointment at her inability to enter the ghost's world. To heal Tommy. She had promised Julieta and Tommy, and she had failed them.

Still, as Pop always said, It ain't over till it's over, and it's never over. Until morning came, she had to keep trying.

"Ellen," she said hoarsely. "The ghost, or maybe it's Tommy, says things sometimes. Have you heard it?"

"Yeah. Before you came, a couple of times."

"Did you hear it say 'away' or 'awake'?"

"Yeah. Only I thought it was a Navajo word, `awee,'" Ellen ended the sound with a glottal stop that could almost have served as a k.

"That's it exactly! What does it mean?"

" 'Baby.'"

"Does that mean anything to you under the circumstances?"

Ellen shook her head. She poked at the fire with a stick as Cree tried to imagine what the word might imply, or who had spoken it. Could it have been Tommy, somehow knowing his possessor was Julieta's child, her baby? Or the chindi itself, understanding its plight and struggling to express the tidal pull toward its mother? It didn't make sense. But if either was true, seeing the ghost with Julieta could well reveal everything. If she got here in time.

But she couldn't let her thoughts be prejudiced by Julieta's longing. There were other possibilities to consider. One of Tommy's parents could have called out for their child at the moment of death. But the death was not at all what Cree would have expected if the entity was one of the parents. The person inhabiting Tommy had been hurt in the stomach and chest, not the head. He- she was sure it was male-hadn't died quickly at all, but had fought off the injury and pain for quite some time. The ghosts at the ravine were probably her strongest candidates; the father had just seen his children killed. He might very well have been calling out to one of his "babies" in his last moment.

She turned to Ellen, who was staring sleepily into the fire. "Are you up for talking anymore?"

"Sure."

"Can I ask what clan your people are?"

"I'm Black Sheep on my mother's side. Towering House on my father's side."

"Are there any Waters Run Together in your ancestry?"

"You're trying to figure which ancestor's in him? Sorry, I don't know. You go back a couple generations, you've got dozens of clans mixed in. Nowadays, people don't know their clans so much."

The impossibility of untangling Tommy's ancestry depressed Cree, but she gave it one more try: "So, Tommy… would he be Black Sheep as well?"

"Usually, he'd be 'born to' his mother's clan. We'd say he's 'born for' his father's clan."

"So what was his mother's clan?"

"Bernice? I don't know. She wasn't Dine-she was Jicarilla Apache. She had a lousy family, we never had anything to do with them. She and Tommy's dad met when they both worked at the lumberyard in Farmington."

An alarm went off in Cree's head, a connection being made. Abruptly her heart was pounding and she couldn't seem to catch her breath.

Ellen was looking at her strangely. "You know already, don't you?"

"Know what?"

"About Bernice and my brother. When you first came, asking about whether Tommy looks like his dad, whether he was adopted, all that."

"Tell me about Bernice," Cree said shakily.

"Oh, like I said, she was a wild one. She was already pregnant when she got together with my brother-that's what you figured out, right? My parents never accepted her, called her al'jil'nii-that means, oh… like 'loose woman.' But I always figured she was a good match for my brother, he was no saint, either, believe me. And Bernice, she turned out to be the steady one. I was always proud to call her my sister."

"Had she always lived around here?"

"She was born on the Jicarilla rez, that's about maybe seventy-five miles from here. But she'd lived in Farmington and then ran away to California. San Diego. Met some handsome Navajo guy who got her knocked up and then left her high and dry to go back to his true love. She never heard from him again. She came back when she knew she was pregnant. Her family was no good to her, they threw her out. But it worked out okay. When she met my brother, she wasn't showing yet. They fell in love, he didn't seem to mind about her having some other guy's baby, he said he figured he was old enough he should have had some kids by now anyway. And she settled down. They were pretty happy for some years. I always figured, you know, love will find a way." Ellen's face had grown warm with remembrance, but suddenly her lips pursed and turned down. "Unless you do something stupid," she finished sadly. "Like my brother getting drunk that time and getting them both killed."

Love will find a way, Cree was thinking. In Peter Yellowhorse's case, love was still trying to find its way. But he'd done something stupid, and then gotten himself killed.

She wondered how Julieta would handle it when she found out just which ancestor of Tommy's had entered him.