Daniel Hecht - Land of Echoes

Julieta gave it another full minute before she came around again. "Fine," she snapped. She was trying mightily to stay hard, Cree saw, but it wasn't working. "You're right. That's how I screw up. Joseph has also been kind enough to bestow that little piece of wisdom upon me. You're right. Okay? I'll talk to the grandparents. I'll be conciliatory and sweet and charming as all get-out. And now I want to be left alone. I have a whole school to take care of. I've got work backed up to the rafters."

Cree overcame the urge to touch her, to smooth the lines in that lovely face. She turned toward the door to leave, but then paused. "Can I ask one more thing? Something that will help me think about this?"

"What?"

"How did you determine that Tommy is your child? I want to understand your… recognition of him. When you first knew, how you knew. Was it from his records, or-"

"It's complicated," Julieta said. She paused, and when she spoke again her voice was soft and husky as regret and doubt overcame the iron. "And it'll just have to wait for tomorrow. Because I don't have anything left today. I haven't got what it takes. It's too much. Too complex. Just like every other goddamned thing in the world."

Cree nodded and went into the hallway.

"Cree."

Surprised, Cree turned back. Julieta sat facing her raptly, but kept her eyes on her desk. "I just wanted to say… I think I understand what you're trying to do. And I know I'm not making it easier. I can't believe what a total bitch I've been. I've just… it's just… hard right now. I hope sometime we can get to know each other under… other circumstances."

"I'd like that, too. Very much." Cree shot her a smile and shut the door.

Cree awoke with a shriek, sitting up convulsively and knocking her clock and notebook off the bedside table. The faces in the rocks! They had been writhing and moaning in her dreams, opening wide, devouring mouths and rolling blind eyes. Anger and fear, awful struggle, transformation. For several minutes she sat breathing hard, trying to master her fright. It seemed she could still feel them out there, only a few hundred yards away, invisible but radiating their torment into the night. A wind had picked up outside, making whispers around the infirmary building, a white noise against which her ears strained.

She lay down again, snugged the blankets close, but found she was too wired to sleep. The images wouldn't leave her. They cried their outrage like a curse or a pledge or a warning. Dreaming the same thing two nights in a row: For any psychologist, it would suggest significant subconscious turmoil. For an empathic parapsychologist, it meant much more. Some echo of human experience lingered out there. Some presence.

She'd have to go to the mesa, and soon.

She sat up against the headboard, very aware of the new stiffness of her thighs and the itching ache in her forehead. Listening to the night, she tried to calm her jumpy nerves and thought about Julieta's heartbreaking confessions and her terrifying desperation. A woman so needing comforting yet so unwilling to accept it.

The thought brought her back to the question of Julieta and Joseph. Joseph would comfort her if she'd let him. Did she not see his affection for her, or did she not reciprocate? Had they tried as lovers at some point and decided against it for some reason?

No, she knew intuitively. The longing between them had not been expressed, wasn't the species of desire that former lovers showed. The real answer was simpler: Peter. Though Julieta denied it, she lived with long-gone Peter Yellowhorse always inside her, a phantom of memory. Julieta was "possessed," too, by a young lover from the distant past, transformed with the passage of years from a flesh-and-blood, humanly flawed reality to an unapproachable ideal of passion and potential that no living man could match. Leaving her incapable of finding it with anyone else. Not with the occasional lovers over the years, not even with a handsome, sexy, intelligent, attentive, and patient man like Joseph Tsosie.

Her restlessness grew as her thoughts of Julieta echoed with uneasy resonances in her own life. Her forehead itched, the jacket bunched around her armpits, one leg was falling asleep. She stood up and paced through the ward room in the dim green light, swinging her arms. One forty-three in the morning. She desperately needed sleep, she'd be a wreck tomorrow, but it was impossible while somewhere in Gallup a boy lay with some being inside him, deforming him, damaging him. She needed to get to work. There was no guarantee she'd ever have access to Tommy again, but if she did, she should be better prepared for the encounter. Sleep obviously wasn't going to come tonight, she might as well get on with what she'd planned to do.

Seize the day, she thought. The thought made her chuckle blackly. Or, rather, the night. The ghost hunter's credo.

She put on her jacket, zipped it, and snapped the collar snug around her throat. She found the master key that Julieta had given her earlier, then realized she should probably have a flashlight better than the tiny LED on her key ring. She slipped quietly down the hall and into the nurse's office, where she pulled the rechargeable from the wall and tested it briefly. Not great, but it would do. She left the building by the front door and hurried toward the boys' dorm.

The night was black, an opaque darkness clotted by the haze that had crept in toward sunset, and the sharp light of the security lamps scattered through the campus only served to blind her. The wind blew strongly from the northwest, stirring the dry leaves of the cottonwood trees and drawing a faint, plaintive song from the old bronze bell in its little tower. Not far beyond the mercury-gilt gym building, she knew, the mesa hunkered in the dark. In her mind, its rock faces were alive: She could still feel them there, twisting and swarming, thrusting hopelessly at their mineral barrier.

The lock on the dorm's north door gave her trouble, but she wiggled and jammed the key and at last it turned. She stepped inside and eased the door shut.

A long corridor stretched the length of the building, lit by ankle-high night-lights every fifteen feet. Doorways lined both sides. With the handful of weekenders gone on their field trip, Julieta had let the new residence staffer take a couple of nights off. The building was empty and almost completely dark, just as Cree wanted it.

Julieta had told her that Tommy's room was the second from the north end, on the right. Cree hesitated at the doorway, peering into a darkness lit only by the red eyes of emergency lighting system batteries high on the wall. A long, narrow room the size of a small classroom, six beds and dressers against the west wall, six desks against the inner wall. The scent of pubescent boys-sweat, deodorant, the rubbery perfume of athletic shoes. On the walls, posters, photos, artwork, awards, stolen highway signs, miscellany.

Cree stepped inside, still avoiding using the flashlight, wanting to remain as long as possible in the hyperalert state darkness always induced. Her antennae were buzzing with a nervous electricity that made her jumpy but also seemed to extend the reach of her subtler senses. In the dim red glow, the room had a secret, enclosed feel, like the interior of a photo darkroom. The wind probed at the windows with soft, persistent fingers.

There was no question which bed was Tommy's. No athletic posters here: The wall above was covered with drawings. Reluctantly, she brought out the flashlight and turned it on. When her eyes recovered from the glare, she panned the circle of light from one drawing to the other, increasingly impressed.

There was a portrait of some rap star with a credibly aloof gangsta face, and a savage scene of a group of white policemen shooting an AfricanAmerican man-the Diallo shooting? There were two interior still lifes: a stove with pots and pans and utensils hung on the wall above it, a stark windowsill with a lonely-looking book open on it. Cree's eyes devoured each one in turn.