Daniel Hecht - Land of Echoes

"What does it do that supports the perseverating narrative idea?" Ed prompted.

Cree tried to recall every moment. "Well, the first night I was there, it went walking. And it seems to attack or… fight. There's a period of convulsions every time, too. Some stereotypical movements, too, the arm pushing out and snapping back."

"Is there a predictable sequence to its actions?" Joyce asked.

Cree thought about it, trying to picture it. "Maybe. I don't know. The problem is, you can't tell whether it's the entity or Tommy who's at the wheel at any given moment. You see what I mean? And we don't know how much of what we're seeing is just a… a bad fit, a neurological short-circuiting caused by two beings trying to occupy one body. And whatever the ghost is trying to do, it can't very well because Tommy fights it. We fight it. We sit on Tommy so he doesn't hurt himself."

"Hmm." Ed turned away, folded his arms across his chest, dropped his head. Turned back. "What would happen if nobody fought it? If you just let it go so you could observe the whole cycle of its actions?"

"I've considered that. So far, I've been too afraid Tommy could hurt himself-walk off a cliff or something. Afraid if we don't interrupt it, it'll take him over completely. But you're right, I'd get a better idea of what's going on if I let it play out. It'd have to be a last resort, though."

Ed nodded. "Okay. So what have we seen that suggests intentional elements?"

"The arm's independent movements. You can't escape the sense that it's acting with self-awareness. Like the entity knows it's 'alive,' it's trying to figure out what's going on. The hand explores, makes gestures, and reacts-when it touched Tommy's hair, it pulled away quickly, as if surprised."

"As if it had expected to feel a different type of hair?" Joyce asked. Cree shrugged, maybe.

"Two ghosts?" Ed hazarded. "Both parents? One somehow limited to control of the arm?"

"Seems unlikely. But who knows? It's just so hard to say." Cree's frustration and urgency came back, intolerable. "Again, I don't know who's Tommy and who's his visitor, or when the arm is part of the perseveration and when it's self-aware. I don't know how to figure it out."

Neither of them had any advice to offer.

Cree double-knotted her boots and stood up. "But I'll do my best. Narrative. I'll look for the ghost's narrative. I'll look for cycles and sequence. Thanks for keeping me rational. I don't know why this is so emotional for me."

They both looked as if they wanted to say something, but neither did. They just held her eyes gravely.

"Listen, you guys. If I don't… if anything happens so that I'm

… you know, if it gets into me and I can't get it out. You guys find me. You'll bring me back, I know you will. But if you can't, call Dee. If she can't, call Mason Ambrose in Geneva. He's the world's worst shit, but he knows a lot about this stuff."

Ed nodded. "One more thing. Take my cell phone. I know you hate to use them, but for this once, I think it's a good idea. Short messages won't screw up your brain irretrievably." He held out the little rectangle.

"Please."

Cree took it and put it in her pocket. She stepped toward the door, but paused. Suddenly she felt as if she were about to cry. "Hugs," she mumbled. "Gotta have some hugs here."

They surrounded her, and she drew strength from the nearness of them, their familiar smells and the warmth of their bodies and the glowing, golden aura of their friendship. And then she broke free and left the hotel to begin the drive to the Keedays'.

It wasn't until twenty minutes later, as she turned north onto 666, that she realized she'd forgotten to tell Ed and Joyce about Nick Stephanovic's nighttime visit to the ravine. She turned it over and over in her thoughts. Another convergence on that place, another piece that she couldn't get to fit the puzzle. Finally, aware her circling thoughts were wearing grooves in her brain, she gave up on it. Now it was just time to keep her appointment with the inevitable.

Three hours later, Cree finally admitted that she was lost. Following her AAA Indian Country map and the hand-drawn map Joseph had faxed, she had taken 666 north from Ya-Ta-Hey toward Naschitti. For the first hour, the highway stretched straight into the distance, dividing the world into two completely different halves: on the left, the foothills and massive shoulders of the Chuska Mountains, blue and remote; on the right, the Chuska Valley, a bone-dry plain so vast it gave her vertigo. The dirt here was yellow-brown, parched, bare, and so smooth she could see for what had to be thirty or forty miles. With such long views, she thought at first, finding the Keedays' place would be easy.

But after turning onto the county road and driving sixteen miles on rough gravel, she found the land changing. The vast open spaces gave way to a mysterious country of low, decaying rock formations. The flat-topped, sharp-shouldered little buttes and mesas looked like ancient, abandoned castles. At times she felt as if she were driving the empty streets of some lost city being devoured by the desert. And that was before she'd turned off into the labyrinth of lesser tracks and trails that led into the heart of the necropolis.

For the next hour, she'd tried to find the Keedays' driveway. For the last hour, she'd just been trying to find her way back to the county road and start over.

It wasn't Joseph's fault. The map he'd drawn was clear, the landscape features neatly labeled in the most precise handwriting she'd ever seen a physician use. But it was a maze in here-wheel tracks branching and forking again, weaving between buttes and rock formations. Innumerable flat-topped rotting-away buttes all looking the same. No long views to orient by. The fire of urgency that had rocketed her out of the hotel had burned itself out in the frustrating search for the right road, the right rocks, the right direction. Hopelessness began to steal over her.

It was only one o'clock, the sun still searing down, but Cree decided that this was the spookiest country she'd ever been in. It was so dry, so parched, so devoid of plant or animal life that it seemed impossible anyone could live out here. In three hours, even on the so-called county road, she had not encountered a single vehicle or human being. The little buttes were not the lovely, red-hued, sensuous forms of Window Rock, but low, gnarled, close-set islands of mustard yellow shot with streaks of gray and capped by ugly black tops. They stuck up from the desert floor like the stumps of rotting teeth. As she grew tired, the shapes began to frighten her, taking on the look of monsters, gargoyles, corpses, aliens.

You're exhausted, she cautioned herself. Getting morbid.

She stopped the truck and looked at her maps with no sense of where she was. Her back and shoulders aching from the hours of tense, tricky driving, she stared at the forking canyons ahead without any idea of which to choose. She took a long swallow from her water bottle and noticed that it was nearly empty.

After ten more minutes of frustration, she gave up on the wheel tracks and decided to look for a way to higher ground, a vantage from which she could get her bearings. It took a while, but at last she found a promising-looking slope and was able to wrestle the truck over gnarled rock and loose gravel to a small promontory thirty feet above the desert floor.

The longer views gave her only a moment of relief. She could see the open plain from here, but she was separated from it by miles of the broken maze, the dead city. The ridge of the Chuskas loomed against the western horizon, but again it was blocked by miles of geological wreckage. There was no human-made thing as far as the eye could see.

She shut off the truck, too tired to go on. And into the gap charges Cree Black to save the day: Joyce was right to remind her of her hubris. Quite the rescue operation this was turning out to be.