Daniel Hecht - Land of Echoes

It was hard to think straight, but Cree realized they were talking about him as if he wasn't there. He acted like he was asleep, but she wasn't so sure. Through the pulsing haze in her head, she thought she felt him in there, disoriented but conscious.

Felt them in there.

"Tommy," she said softly. "Hey, Tommy."

Tommy stirred, hitching one shoulder. Julieta's eyes caught Cree's, terrified.

"You awake?" Cree persisted.

Tommy's eyes opened, rolled, stabilized. "Yeah."

"What's going on with you? What do you feel?"

"Nothing. I don't know." His speech was punctuated with wheezes, one lung laboring out of sync.

Cree gave him a moment to elaborate, but he didn't. "Up for Mrs. Pierce poking at you? We want to make sure you're not hurt."

He didn't answer but acquiesced by sitting up awkwardly, pushing himself up off the table with his left arm. He looked around him, blinking in the light, waiting. His breath steadied.

Lynn Pierce took over. "I need to ask you things, and I want you to answer even if they seem stupid to you. Is that okay?"

"Like we did the other times?"

"Yep, same thing." Lynn tried to smile. "You're a great patient, Tommy."

She looked into his eyes and ears, checked his reflexes with a rubber mallet, listened to his chest, and tried to conceal the alarm she obviously felt. "What's your name?" she asked. "I told you this would be stupid."

"Tom Keeday."

A tiny expression of relief on Lynn's face. "Where are you from?"

"East of Sheep Springs."

"What day is this?"

"Friday. September twenty-seventh."

"Who's the president?"

"Begaye. But there's an election coming up, he'll probably lose."

"Tribal president," Lynn explained to Cree. "Very good, Tommy. Can you stand up for me, good and straight?"

Tommy pushed aside the blankets and stepped off the table. His left leg wrongly anticipated the ground and he lurched, but after his right had tried twice to gauge the distance to the tile floor he managed to steady himself.

"Are you as straight as you can be?"

"Yeah."

Arms at his sides, he was bent sideways, the middle of his spine bowed noticeably to the left, his head cocked to the right. Cree shot a glance at Julieta, standing behind Tommy, and found that her eyes had filled and overflowed.

"Tommy, I want you to shut your eyes now. I'm going to touch you, and I want you to tell me where I'm touching you. Just like before."

He nodded and shut his eyes. When she gently prodded his left arm, he said, "Arm."

"You have to say left or right."

"Left."

"Great! Now this. And this." She touched his left pectoral muscle, his forehead, his left thigh, his stomach, and he named them all correctly.

Lynn prodded him on his spine in the middle of his back.

"Arm," he said. "Right arm."

Julieta's face folded in agony.

"This?" Another touch, this time on his neck, just below his buzz-cut hairline.

"Right shoulder."

The nurse bit her lips so hard Cree could have sworn her teeth would come through, but she went on. "Tommy, open your eyes now. What's this?" She had lifted his limp right arm, bending it at the elbow and so she could hold the limb right in front of him.

He opened his eyes and looked at it as if surprised and dismayed by the object's sudden appearance. "I don't know."

Holding the arm out in her right hand, Lynn used her left to stroke the bare skin, elbow to shoulder. "Keep your eyes open. What's this I'm touching?"

"I don't like it!"

"Don't like what?"

"That thing. The thing you're holding." He craned away, afraid of it.

"Where's your right arm?"

"I already told you!"

Lynn put the arm down and ran her fingers over the knobs of his side-bowed spine again. "Here?"

"Yes! I told you!"

"I'm sorry to keep at you. You're doing great. One more thing, and then we'll move on. We're almost done. Okay?"

"Yeah." He was getting sullen now. He mumbled something in what Cree assumed was Navajo.

"Shut your eyes again, please. I want you to tell me when you feel something."

When Tommy had winced his eyes shut, she placed his right hand, palm up, on the tabletop. Lynn dabbed alcohol on his fingertips, opened a sterilized lancet, and held his hand against the table as she isolated his ring finger. With one sharp stab, she drove the lancet into the pad of the immobilized finger.

Tommy didn't say anything. Didn't move, didn't even flinch. A fat bead of blood appeared when Lynn pulled the needle away.

She gripped his middle finger and stabbed deep again. "Feel anything?"

"No."

Lynn Pierce's chin was quivering as she tossed away the lancet and bandaged the fingers. Tommy stood obediently, shoulders squared but spine as bent as a hitchhiker's thumb. Julieta looked at him with heartbreak in her eyes.

Cree's head was throbbing so hard she couldn't make sense of the shrill alarms going off throughout her body and brain. All she could think was doubleness. Too much at once. The three women looked at each other and at the bent, bare-chested boy, and the only thing Cree could feel clearly was horror at the freakish phenomenon she was witnessing. She could almost see the shape of the compound being that stood before her, a doubled thing like some monstrous, unviable conjoined twins with half-merged bodies, arms and legs misplaced and deformed. The outlandish, pretzeling interpenetration, so unbearably wrong.

Again Cree was conscious of their isolation. Two o'clock in the morning, and beyond this tiny island of unsteady light everything was dark for miles in every direction. Three scared women and one lost boy stood in an abandoned school in the desert. There was something invisible among them. And there was no explanation and no succor anywhere.

The room seemed to waver, and Cree had to sit down. She had no idea what to do. There was a powerful paranormal entity three feet from her, and she couldn't begin to approach it. Whenever she tried, she found the pain in her head in the way, obstructing every sense. Everything else was a blur full of shifting impressions. Doubleness, yes, and that stark sense of isolation. Besides that, all she knew was an almost overpowering need to take Tommy to her, hold him against herself, enfold him, protect him. Her heart, her womb ached with the need. But her enclosing arms wouldn't help. The danger, the enemy, was already inside.

"I'd say a mild concussion," Lynn told her. "Lot of blood, but that's typical of a scalp wound. The cut is superficial, you don't even need stitches. You really should go to the hospital for X- rays-we can get one of the maintenance staff to drive you, but I think it can wait until morning if you'd prefer."

The two of them were sitting in the examination room. The nurse had cleaned and bandaged the wound above Cree's eyebrow and then had carefully checked her eyes and reflexes and balance. Julieta had called Joseph Tsosie at the hospital and was told he'd be paged and would return the call. Through the slats of the blinds over the window into the ward room, they could see Tommy sitting on his bed. Eyes mostly closed, his chest moved in a slight lateral ripple, the left and right almost in sync now, and he kept bending his back to the right and tipping his head, almost as if trying to shake water out of his ear. Julieta sat in a chair against the wall, watching him but clearly fighting sleep.

"How long does it last?"

The nurse followed her gaze. "Getting longer. The first time, maybe half an hour. Last time, closer to two hours. He's never made it to the hospital when the full symptoms are presenting."

"Same thing every time?"

"The problem placing his limbs is much worse this time. And the breathing problem-that's new. First time I've observed it, anyway."

"So it's… progressing."