Daniel Hecht - Land of Echoes

"I hope so. Julieta has talked to his grandparents, they sound somewhat flexible. It'll probably be a few days before he's released from the hospital. If indeed he is released."

"And if he isn't?" Ed persisted. He gestured at the row of equipment cases. "I brought the FMEEG gear and the rest of it. I'd like to be able to use it."

"We might be able to swing access to him anyway. I'm hoping Dr. Tsosie asks me in as a consulting psychologist. In any case, there's work to be done while we're waiting."

Joyce sipped her beer and looked around the room, which was done in lovely Southwestern pastels stenciled with Navajo designs. "What're you up to tonight, Cree?"

They would disapprove, Cree knew. "I'll get there," she stalled. "Let me brief you on developments."

They nodded. Ed kicked off his shoes and settled himself on the bed, leaning against the headboard as he swigged beer and flexed his long, narrow feet. Joyce dug a pen and a legal pad out of her bag and sank into the armchair. She took out her hair band and combed the ebony strands free with her fingers.

Cree sat in the desk chair and filled them in, starting with a description of Tommy's symptoms and his explanations of how it felt to him. For context, she elaborated with Joseph's depiction of the boy and the hospital's initial conclusion that his crises were the result of purely psychological, not physical, problems.

"What do you think of that hypothesis?" Ed asked. "What do you sense when you're near him?"

"Oh, they've got a perfectly good psychological theory. Completely right and completely wrong. What do I sense? You know, I've been so off balance-I got clopped on the head before I saw him while… when it was fully on him, before I spent any time one-on-one with him. When we were playing softball yesterday, it was in remission and I honestly couldn't tell. But when he's in crisis, you see it so clearly-two beings in the same body, out of sync with each other, experiencing different worlds. Probably not even really aware of each other except that everything's out of whack." She shook her head, realizing how little this gave them to go on. "There are a couple of empirical signs. There's the flicker phenomenon, for one thing, very pronounced when the manifestation is in full swing. And there's this odd… I don't know what to call it… this charisma. When I found him out by the corral Friday night, the horses were paralyzed. Frozen. The night dorm guy said he felt it, and the other boys were mesmerized. I felt it too, this sort of stunned indecision that you can't shake off. There might be something useful for us in it, I don't know."

"Together with the flicker phenomenon, it could suggest a powerful field of some kind," Ed said doubtfully. "Something we might measure." Joyce nodded and jotted a note to herself.

"There's another thing," Cree continued. "He's an artist, very accomplished, right? Ever since I've been at the school, I've had these dreams of faces, living faces, emerging from the rocks. So last night, after he'd been taken away, I go to look at his drawings? And I find he's drawn two landscapes where rocks are morphing into faces. The school nurse told me the setting is a particular gully in the mesa, not far from the school."

They nodded soberly, and she felt a sudden wave of affection for these two. She didn't have to explain why she attached importance to the fact that she'd dreamed what Tommy had drawn. They'd know it wasn't coincidental, that both dreams and drawings had their source in some echo of human experience in the vicinity of those ancient rocks.

"So today I went back to his room and checked the dates. He drew the faces on September ninth. After that, his drawings began changing-every one of them shows this… I don't know, this double vision. It's hard to explain, but you see it right away when you look at his work."

"So," Ed said after a moment, "what're you thinking? He acquired a formerly place-anchored entity that day? September ninth?"

"It's worth looking into."

"And that's where you're going tonight," Joyce said, eyes narrowing. "Out to the rocks he drew."

Cree nodded and tried to keep looking nonchalant. Ed and Joyce exchanged another quick glance, but to her relief they didn't confront her on it.

"So what're we dealing with?" Ed asked. "A strict perseverator? Or something more intentional?"

"I have no idea. The arm sometimes moves by itself when Tommy's asleep, and it seems so… self-aware. It's almost as if it's trying to figure out where it is, what's going on. Very creepy. And when I was wrestling with Tommy, he did this thing with his eye. Like a wink. As if it was aware of me and trying to communicate. But I really don't know."

They chewed on that. Cree shuddered and wished she could banish the image.

"What about the idea that the entity is Julieta McCarty's ex?" Joyce asked.

Cree looked to Ed. "Did Joyce tell you about all this?"

Ed nodded. "Bad blood between Julieta McCarty and her former husband, now dead. Ex was killed in an accident three years ago, not far from the school."

"Yes. And there's some complicating context there. Julieta told me yesterday that the boy is her son, fathered by a lover long gone to dreams of glory on the West Coast. She kept the pregnancy secret and hardly even saw the baby. He was adopted by a rural family fifteen years ago."

"Oh my," Ed said quietly. "Oh my my." He finished his beer, levered his long frame off the bed, and pulled another from its plastic collar. With an expression of resignation and melancholy, he popped the can, settled himself again, and took a long swallow. "Well, that would lend credibility to the ex-as-entity theory, wouldn't it? Suggests there'd be lots of high emotions and unresolved issues. The boy's genetic relationship to Julieta could possibly explain why the ex's ghost would home in on him, maybe as a surrogate for the mother."

Ed was talking about what they called the "blood is drawn to blood" axiom. Many of their cases over the years had concerned revenants returning to haunt blood kin, a tendency corroborated by statistical surveys of paranormal activity and echoed in supernatural lore throughout the world. Ghosts tended to "home in" on the individuals involved in their deepest compulsions, the powerful emotions felt in life or at the moment of death. Looking for blood relationships, along with emotional connections, was always a wise starting place in the quest to understand witnesses and to identify an unknown entity.

"Very possibly," Cree agreed. "Which is another piece of business we can be working on. I called Donny McCarty today-he's the ex's son-and managed to swing an appointment to meet with him. It's ostensibly to talk about livestock mutilations, don't ask me to explain how we got there, but I want to get a look at the site of his father's death. Maybe hear more about what kind of person Garrett was, see if I can learn anything that will help determine if he's Tommy's entity."

"On the McCartys," Joyce put in, "I've got a pile. Prominent name, lots of press-give it to you tomorrow." She scratched her head with her pen, frowning as if something were bothering her. "This'll sound stupid, but-question: Is Tommy Julieta's son? Do we know that for certain? Because it seems to me it would make a big difference here."

Cree shot her a grin. " God, you're smart. You could get a job as, like, an investigator or something! I'm assuming she knows from his records, maybe his appearance. Or maybe Dr. Tsosie told her-he's the one who arranged the adoption."

"Is she credible?" Ed asked.

"I think so. I trust her, I like her a great deal. But you have to understand, she's very beautiful and charismatic, she sort of dazzles you? She's intense and sexy and smart, she's appealingly wounded… I guess I'm saying she can overwhelm you. It's hard to make an unbiased appraisal."