Daniel Hecht - Land of Echoes

The third possibility was that she could again persuade his grandparents to keep him here. She'd met them twice, and they seemed to trust her judgment. Here at the school, he'd have decent, if not optimum, medical care; he'd have social contacts and educational options and all those lovely "normalizing" things. Plus there was the possibility, one she found increasingly credible, that Cree Black could do something for him. The problem there would be Joseph. And the liability issues, of course.

What was the right thing? What did he really need? You couldn't decide that without deciding whether he was suffering from a neurological dysfunction, a psychological problem-or, as Dr. Ambrose and Cree Black insisted and his impossible symptoms seemed to prove, the literal invasion of his central nervous system by some foreign entity.

"It comes down to what we believe, doesn't it?" she asked Spence. Then she corrected herself: "What I believe." This time he whickered in agreement, and she stroked his shoulder, whispering gratefully, "You're my man, Spence. My debonair gent."

Sometimes you had to make decisions entirely on your own. It was hard, it was scary, it was lonely, but it was what you did if you had any guts. You did what you believed was right and necessary. No, she resolved, letting go of Tommy was out of the question. She'd fight to keep him at the school. She'd play whatever hand she had, legal or financial or personal, to retain a say in what happened to him.

"Screw safe!" she shouted. "Huh, Spence? Screw easy!"

He picked up his trot as if he agreed. She felt a little better. An angry inner fire warmed her against the chill. When had she ever done anything easy?

The full disk of the sun had nudged above the horizon by the time she came within sight of McCarty Energy's current operations. She reined Spence to a stop and then sat there, looking north to a ruined ridge and the gigantic rearing boom of a dragline just visible a couple of miles away. Again she wondered why she'd come this way. She hated the sight of it. She'd been there often enough to fight with Garrett and Donny to visualize what lay beyond the screen of hills.

There was a wasteland of dug-up soil and rock heaped in man-made mountains, meandering dirt roads and ramps for the big machines, and gaping trenches blasted and scraped into the ground. There was the crusher and the huge mounds of coal waiting to be loaded onto trains. There were the walking draglines, whole movable buildings that supported the colossal girdered booms and buckets, one of which was the same dragline Garrett had led her through when he was in his phase of impressing her with the many large, expensive things he owned. With the boom from which sixty-six-year-old Garrett had fallen and died while showing off for his latest tramp girlfriend.

There were yellow dump trucks and front loaders the size of houses. There was the office and repair complex and a parking lot full of pickup trucks. And sometimes there was Donny's Lincoln Navigator or Porsche in the lot, and Donny, along with a gaggle of rapacious bean counters, going over the operation's records and being an officious pain in the ass and thinking up clever ways to make more money. And as a sideline, kind of a hobby, thinking up ways to make Julieta's life miserable.

Just like his father.

"One mistake," she told Spence. "That's all it takes. One. Then your whole life is spent living it down or trying to compensate."

Spence swiveled one ear as if to hear her better but didn't answer. And of course it wasn't that simple. Which was the one mistake? Being suckered into that first teen modeling job? Sticking to the competitions despite growing misgivings? Going out for lunch that first time with a man old enough to be her father?

Or maybe the mistake was one of the avalanche of decisions that had come later and that had haunted her, every day, ever since.

It was hard to think of the creature inside Tommy as anything but a demon, a supernatural monster existing only to cause anguish- some horrible being from Navajo mythology, or a violent spirit of the ancient rocks, a distillation of sheer malevolence from old, angry gods. But maybe Cree Black was right about everything. Maybe she was right to look at Julieta, to put her on the couch along with Tommy. Maybe she was right in her theory that the psychological situations of people in proximity to the haunting created the conditions needed to support a ghost's manifestation. That what had invaded Tommy was a part of a once-human consciousness, taking someone else's flesh in an attempt to fulfill its deepest compulsions.

If that was true, there was only one person Julieta could imagine having the malice to do what it was doing. One person who'd have the fiendish insight and the motivation to destroy a child, this child, in an effort to strike at Julieta herself.

That's why she'd come here today, she realized. To remind herself.

She stood up on the stirrups and beamed hatred at the rearing boom where Garrett McCarty had gotten himself killed, as if she might see his vicious ghost and by sheer force of will send it screaming back to hell.

Another pickup truck ride. Every bump in the gravel banged up through the suspension of Dr. Tsosie's Ford and up Cree's spine to be delivered like a hammer blow on the inside of her forehead. She had gone to bed determined not to take the time for a visit to the hospital, but this morning as she'd bent to look for her shoes a sick red-purple haze of pain suddenly filled the room, and she'd changed her mind. She had agreed readily when Dr. Tsosie insisted she accompany him to the hospital in Fort Defiance.

Joseph's first act upon arising had been to inspect Tommy, and when he'd assured himself that the boy was stable he'd looked Cree over with the same thoroughness. Then he'd taken her to the school cafeteria, where along with a handful of weekend staff they'd grabbed a breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast. Julieta didn't join them; Joseph said she was probably out riding-it was what she did when she needed to think.

Now the two of them drove in silence as an ebullient sun bounded up from the mesa, promising a brilliant day as open and guileless as the night had been cloaked and full of dire things. Joseph seemed content to ride next to this stranger without making small talk, and Cree didn't mind. There was a lot to think about.

The problem was that any impressions she might have received had been muddled by the pain, which had obstructed any empathic resonance with Tommy and whatever had invaded him.

Inspecting her memory of the movements of his hand and that awful wink, she'd decided that the being now resident in Tommy was not some unknown category of entity-some relief there, maybe-but had once been human. She couldn't say why she thought that, except that she'd felt seen by it, felt its rude self-awareness glimmering there, enough to feel its similarity to her own. The eerie movements of the hand and arm suggested intentionality, some level of awareness of itself and its circumstances. But she'd garnered nothing of its character, identity, origin-or, crucially, its motivations.

No, the few insights she'd come away with had little to do with the boy.

One observation had to do with the way Joseph had dealt with Julieta when he'd arrived last night. The moment he was confident Tommy was resting safely and that Cree's injury wasn't serious, he'd gone to Julieta. He took her by the shoulders and with one hand swept the loose hair away from her face so he could study her. She looked like hell, exhausted, eyes puffy from crying, but as she gazed into his face her unguarded expression revealed how relieved and grateful she was to have him there. Joseph had first lightly touched her scraped cheek, and then his hand had turned and he'd delicately brushed the back of his fingers along her jawline before he turned away. It lasted only an instant, but even through her pain Cree could see that though the first touch had been a physician's, the second had been much more.