Daniel Hecht - Land of Echoes

"I can't wait to meet her," Ed said, deadpan but for an intrigued lift of his eyebrows.

"Hey, me neither," Joyce quipped, looking alarmed. "And I'm about as hetero as it gets."

They chuckled. But the wan, reflective mood was stealing over them, the late-night lonesomes compounded by pondering the complexity of the human condition. They each retreated into private reflections for a moment.

Joyce broke the silence: "It sounds as if you have a lot to do while we're waiting for a crack at Tommy. But what about Ed and me? We can't sit here and watch sitcoms all day."

"There's plenty. Ed, we need you to check out the school's electrical system, rule out system weakness for the flicker phenomenon. Joyce, there's a ton of research to do-a lot of running around western New Mexico and eastern Arizona. We need to learn more about Tommy's adoptive parents' car accident-where, when, exactly what happened. Regardless of his biological parentage, their emotional connection marks them as prime candidates here. Also, when I meet with Donny McCarty, it'd be good if one of you came with me-give me more credibility, maybe help me find an excuse to walk around the mine area."

"But what about Tommy?" Ed asked. "He's our main focus. He's the one who's stuck with the critter. How can we get access to him?"

Cree nodded, chewed her lip. "That's the biggest problem. I think Joseph Tsosie will be the deciding factor. If Tommy stays at the hospital, Joseph's the one who can swing our access to him or cut us out. And if the boy ends up back with his grandparents, Joseph could be a crucial intermediary for us with them. I'm hoping Julieta can persuade him to help us. Beyond that, I don't think there's anything we can do."

Ed nodded, looking far away. Joyce jotted something in her private shorthand.

"So," Cree said, standing up and taking a last sip of water. "I'd love to linger, but I've got to head back. See you both tomorrow."

Again they exchanged a quick glance, nodded, shrugged. Ed sighed as he unfolded from the bed, then jangled the coins in his pocket and fished out a quarter. "Heads," he called, flipping it with his thumb. Joyce waited expectantly as he caught it and slapped it onto the back of his other hand. "Heads it is," he announced.

"What's with the coin?" Cree asked.

"Deciding who goes with you tonight," Joyce told her in a steely voice.

"Don't bother arguing, Cree. Don't even try. You don't know the country. You don't know what's out there. You've been injured recently. It's the middle of the night. There could be coyotes, scorpions, rattlesnakes. You need backup nearby." She stood, stretched, and went to the door. "Me, I'm gonna go back to my room and do some light bedtime reading about mutilated animals, murdered cowboys, massacres of and by Indians, violated graves, and stuff like that. Good luck and good night."

Cree stood openmouthed as the door swung shut behind her.

Ed had been putting on his shoes again. When he was done, he straightened and offered his elbow like a young swain at a formal ball.

"Shall we?" he asked with weary dignity.

The night wasn't as cold as Cree had expected. Currents of warmer air slid through the chill layers, meandering off the desert toward the mesa. She and Ed walked slowly, talking only rarely and in whispers. When they'd first started out, the lights of the school had blinded them, making the night seem impenetrable, but now the campus had disappeared around an arm of the mesa and their eyes had had time to adapt. The night world was blue and transparent, crisply visible in the light of sparking stars and the residual glow of a setting half moon. To their right loomed the cliffs of the mesa, a chiaroscuro of blue and black, rock surfaces riven with the shadows of cracks, folds, gullies. An occasional pinon tree clung to the lower slope, a hunchbacked blob of darkness. Cree didn't know how far they'd come, but they had not yet seen anything like the higher palisades Tommy had portrayed in his drawings. Already, the vanished school seemed distant as a memory.

Night: Shadows became holes through the surface world into a place of immeasurable depth. In the darkness, the five ordinary senses strained and the subtler ones awakened, the spectrum of extrasensory awarenesses used by the parapsychologist and the mystic. Cree shivered with a familiar tremble of fear and exhilaration. It was joyous, reverent, and keenly mortal: the sense of the imminence of the other dimensions of the world, the true scope of the universe; the awareness that the vacuum of space above didn't end where sky met earth but interpenetrated the ground and the things upon it, that even the solidest-seeming matter was after all full of emptiness and energy, and that mind could merge with it and move within it in myriad ways.

The rocks and sky brooded as if waiting: ancient, starkly inhuman, neither cruel nor kind. The ghost of the land looks just like its body, it occurred to her. Its essence and its outward stuff were one and the same. Still, it was not simple; within the big encompassing ghost of mineral and atmospheric wilderness swarmed smaller ghosts, distinct as the different layers of air, alive with separate moods as clear as scent or memory. If you believed that the universe was something like a dreaming mind, you had to accept that it was a mosaic made of lesser dreams and thoughts, yearnings, latencies, echoes of events past, immanences of things to come. It thrilled her and frightened her. It was majestic and merciless.

Thinking about it, Cree remembered the question Ed had asked maybe five minutes ago. The prospect of a long nighttime walk in this wild, empty land clearly made him nervous, and he'd brought a handle from one of the infirmary's brooms to serve as walking stick and weapon. She knew exactly what he meant when he asked, "Why do you think it's a human revenant inside Tommy? Why not something else?" He'd gestured at the dark landscape, so full of secrets, meaning, Why not something from this?

Out here, close to the brooding rocks, it was easy to doubt her earlier conviction. In the absence of wind, there was no sound but the crunch of their footsteps and the sweeping noises of the fabric of their jackets or jeans. They were very alone. She struggled to banish images from the possession literature, and the thought of animal mutilations nagged at her; being out here, with the interstellar wilderness above and the hard, unforgiving desert all around, you could easily believe in raptors of every sort.

But at last she said quietly, "You know how sometimes, when you're taking the bus across town and you're unconsciously staring at the side of some guy's head? Maybe you're not even thinking about him, and then suddenly he turns toward you and your eyes meet?"

"Yes."

"I mean, you're both startled by the contact. You've never seen him before, but for an instant you sort of recognize each other, there's this shock of communion. You see his eyes so clearly… that spark of awareness. It's very intimate-and then of course you both look away. You retreat from it, right?"

"Yeah."

"That first night, when we were back in the infirmary and trying to hold him down? I felt it startle and recoil as it sensed me. I recoiled, too. It was just like meeting the gaze of a stranger on the bus. Mutual recognition. I just… felt sure it was human."

But telling him about it now, Cree felt her conviction ebb. She saw again the exploring fingers of the hand and that awful, labored wink, and then remembered Tommy's description of the parasites in the sheep, the living, pulsating bumps.

Yeah, it reacted to me, she thought. The maggots would probably squirm if you prodded them, too.

She shivered and did her best to concentrate on the cliffs.

"So what are we looking for?" Ed asked. "I mean, if there was an entity anchored here, and it's now in Tommy, what's left here for us?"