Daniel Hecht - Land of Echoes

That thought brought her back a little. She looked at the blotched, scalded-looking face in the mirror and recoiled. She turned on the tap and began to splash cold water against her burning cheeks. She loosened the elastic at the back of her head, straightened her braid, tucked in loose strands of hair. She fumbled in her pockets for her cigarettes, lit up, and stood gratefully taking the fix and blowing smoke up into the exhaust fan. When she was done, she flushed the butt down the toilet.

The face in the mirror looked much better. This wasn't a personal issue, it was an issue of professional responsibility. That was the only way to see it. The well-being of the children was her only real concern, and if she observed misbehavior on the school administration's part, she had a duty to respond. This thing with Tommy was only one example.

The problem was that so far there was nothing overt, nothing provable that she could put before someone with the authority to do anything. And Julieta was so good at charming people into seeing things her way, it probably wouldn't matter anyway.

But. Fortunately, there were a few people who saw Julieta for what she was. There were others who would be very glad to know about the situation with Tommy, who would probably know what to make of it, what to do about it, even if there was nothing that could be done through formal channels.

She waited another couple of minutes to make sure the smoke was fully exhausted, checked the mirror one last time, then turned toward the door.

That's what it's about, she told herself. The children. Professional responsibility.

Cree burst gasping out of a chaotic dream into the darkness of the ward room. Something was screaming in her mind.

It took her a moment to remember where she was. She had chosen a bed against the wall farthest from the inner door, near the window that looked out toward the mesa. A pair of night-lights plugged into wall sockets shed enough light to see the other five beds, green-white rectangles in the gloom. The windows were black, the silence so absolute it hissed in her ears.

In the dream, the night-dark rocks of Lost Goats Mesa had twisted and swarmed and metamorphosed into faces, grotesque brows and cheeks and gaping mouths of beings crying from the depths of the earth. There were crowds of them pushing at the cliffs, and there were air creatures, too, sharp electric things in the sky, flying with cruel stabbing motions. The landscape was alive: things pressing against its inner surfaces, straining against each other, contending with each other.

Dream, she told herself. Just a dream. Get a grip. She sat up and took deep, steady breaths to dispel the feeling.

But it didn't go away. Abruptly, she knew with certainty there was something happening nearby, telegraphing itself directly to her central nervous system.

The part of her mind that didn't recoil in fear registered that the night-lights were throbbing gently, erratically. The flicker phenomenon, she and Edgar called it: the tendency for light sources to become unsteady when paranormal phenomena manifested.

A noise came from the window. A muffled stamp or thump, then a.. what? A breath, a deep exhalation. The horses? She listened and heard nothing.

She got quietly out of bed. In her stockinged feet, wearing the sweat pants and T-shirt she'd used as pajamas, she crept to the door of the room. She looked into the hallway and entry area and listened. The dim corridor, lit by several softly pulsing night-lights, stretched away to the bend that led to the dayroom, the nurse's bedroom, and the ward room where Tommy slept.

Ringing silence, charged with a sense of invisible motion.

She walked stealthily down the hall, through the entry, and into the hall on the other side, thinking to check on Lynn Pierce. The silver-haired nurse with the astonishing fleck in her eye had played hostess to the four of them after they'd come in from the horses, starting a fire in the dayroom hearth, making hot chocolate in the kitchen. They had played cards until Tommy's bedtime. It was like no other card game Cree had ever played: five people trying to chat and act relaxed when all felt a rising dread of anticipation. With the night pressed around the building, she had been acutely aware of how isolated they were, not just physically but socially. For the five of them there was no other recourse, no aid or comfort from the larger world of humankind. They were on an island.

She had pushed Tommy pretty hard, confronting him as candidly as she dared, and by and large was not unhappy with his response. He'd been defiant, embarrassed, shy, reluctant. But every patient of every age resisted probing, quite justifiably. She got a sense of an intelligent, complex person, decent and very much wanting to please, but confused by typical adolescent identity issues and troubled by ambivalent feelings toward his dead parents.

And though he tried hard to hide it, he was also terrified by the inexplicable things happening to him.

If only she'd gotten as good a sense of the supposed entity. The dissonance she sensed was so subdued that she doubted her own perceptions. Was the entity in him at all times but languishing in some kind of latency between crises? Or was it simply not there now-did it come out of the desert night each time, settling into him for a while and then leaving again? Or was there nothing there but a troubled teenage boy?

When it had gotten late, Joseph had driven off to Fort Defiance for his rotation at the hospital, and Julieta had gone to her room in the faculty housing building. Cree and Lynn had promised they'd wake her "if anything happened." Hoping nothing would.

Cree continued down the hall past the nurse's office, turned right, passed the dayroom, and paused at the door to Lynn Pierce's bedroom. It was pitch-dark inside, but her eyes had adapted enough to see the mounded blankets and the long braid trailing over the side of the bed. Tense as a wound spring, she warily approached the door to the smaller ward room. It struck her that the night-lights in this hall were throbbing faster.

Tommy's bed was empty.

Cree backed out of the doorway, followed the hall as it doglegged, and found the rear exit door. It was slightly ajar, rocking softly. When she opened it, the chill wind hit her, straight from the north, and she quickly realized that sweat pants, T-shirt, and socks weren't good enough for the high desert in late September. But a sense of imminence propelled her, and she didn't want to take the time to go back for shoes and sweater. She stepped out into the night and shut the door softly behind her.

The exterior light was on, glazing the yard between infirmary and barn with a hard bright silver. Beyond, the corral fence stood like a construction of bones against the darkness. At the far end of the enclosure, just at the edge of the circle of light, Julieta's three horses were vague forms against deep black night.

No sign of Tommy. No motion or sound at all but the wind.

The blue-white area light blinded her. Beyond its sphere of chemical illumination, the night wrapped a curtain of black felt around the infirmary, the barn, the corral.

Instinctively, she went toward the horses. They were facing away from her, heads up, legs braced, alert but absolutely motionless. She opened the corral gate and went inside, feeling blind and very exposed as she crossed the bare, silver-gilded ground. Sharp stones stabbed up through her socks. Her breath came out in wraiths of steam that fled away instantly; her shadow preceded her, looking like a deformed thing. Beyond the curtain of darkness, she could feel the cliffs of the mesa, in her imagination still moving like flesh. As she got farther away from the buildings, the light on the side of the infirmary shrank to a distant sharp point.