Daniel Hecht - Land of Echoes

And, as if it had sensed her in the room, the hand roused itself again.

This time the arm raised toward Cree and the hand made a beckoning gesture with two fingers. It trembled and shook and again seemed to beckon her closer. The movement appalled her. Tommy's head lay canted onto his pillow, his mouth wide and slack, eyes closed. And the thing was alert and beckoning.

Without thinking, Cree took two hesitant steps toward it. Run! screamed her instincts. Surrender, she commanded herself. She felt time slow and confusion consume the dark room, and knew she must have hesitated because now Tommy's dark silhouette eclipsed the faint rectangle of window. He had risen from his bed.

As he turned, she glimpsed the ghost's body around the outline of his shape, a faintly luminous limb bending momentarily, a shoulder emerging where it shouldn't be and then vanishing again. The dark form moved toward her. The desire to flee became intolerable, yet she still couldn't move.

And then she realized he wasn't coming straight toward her. Tommy went to the door, east-facing as all Navajo doors were, walked face-first into it, groped it with his hands, opened it. Before Cree could react, the doorway was empty.

Her reactions were delayed by indecision. By the time she got to the door, she could barely see his shape in the blue dark, walking east, up the gentle slope toward the higher ground. Cree debated calling for Ellen or Ray, but there was no sound from the sheep shed, and she assumed they were taking some much-needed sleep.

More important, she didn't want to distract the ghost. The freakish intentional hand had given way to the perseverator, and it was living through its narrative now. She had to experience what the ghost was living through and glimpse the world it thought it was in. Instinctively, she sensed she was getting close to identifying it.

She followed Tommy's puppeted body out into the darkness, keeping her physical distance yet extending all her senses toward it. Around them, a wind moved in the sagebrush as if scores of invisible creatures were scurrying furtively through, each suddenly tossing form igniting a fresh jolt of fear. The darkness seemed to flicker and flutter.

The invisible auras of the ghost's moods waxed and waned like an aurora borealis. Fear? Definitely. Or, more accurately, trepidation. But that didn't impede the drive, the burning purpose that kept it moving. What else? Apology or remorse. That cocky self-confidence, too, almost a machismo, a sexualized braggadocio. But so forced, pumped up, so desperate or artificial. Garrett?

Confusion and doubt, too, and a childlike neediness, seeking consolation or reassurance. And that relentless desire to overcome. Maybe a twelve-year-old boy determined to fight off the effects of the badly formed heart that was killing him, frightened, needing comfort?

Robert? Robert Linn Dodge? she called to it in her mind.

Tommy's body stumbled hard on a knee-high rock and went down. Cree's eyes had adjusted to the starlit dark, enough to see that when he got up, his movements were slack and disjointed. Not as if Tommy were fighting the ghost, but as if his body were simply too worn out from the days and nights of warring to obey.

They were getting pretty far from the hogan now. Cree could barely see the building's dark mass, a hundred yards back; the light from the lantern in the shed was mostly eclipsed by intervening junipers. She began having second thoughts about letting the narrative play itself out. It wouldn't be good to go too far in country neither she nor the ghost knew. There were cliffs here. Ellen and Ray might not hear a call for help.

She picked up her pace to close the gap between them.

Always east. Brother would have been heading east as he desperately tried to get back to the ravine. He'd be proud he'd caught one of the goats, maybe that was the cockiness, a young man proving his daring and worthiness. He'd be afraid of the approaching soldiers. He'd be apologetic for disobeying his father's orders not to go back down the ravine.

They were getting too far away. Tommy's movements were weak, but the ghost seemed tireless. Cree couldn't wait any longer for a confrontation. Scrambling in the dark, she flanked the ghost at a distance and came around to head it off. She stopped ten feet away, directly in front of the dark form.

"Shinnai?" she called out loud. She conjured in her mind the sense of the girl's mental world, her feeling for her brother.

Tommy took several more toppling steps, stopped, and swayed uncertainly. Now all the ghost felt was doubt and fear. "What are you doing here?" he said breathlessly. Abruptly he put up his hands as if warding off a blow and immediately rage exploded him. He swung his fist at Cree and caught the side of her head. She didn't fall, but it knocked her off balance and rattled her and she tried to dodge him, but it was too late, she was moving too slowly. Tommy lunged again and she had to grab his arms. He growled like an animal, but there was little force in his efforts. They fell over and rolled, Cree turning her face away from the clawing hands, her mouth filling with grit.

"Tommy!" she shouted. "Tommy, stop him!"

Its movements faltered. She tried to push it away and partially succeeded, dragged her upper body out from under. Twisting to look as its fists thudded weakly on her back, she saw that Tommy's body appeared to be fighting with an invisible being. The ghost had drifted askew between worlds. In another few seconds it flailed hugely as pain exploded inside it. Its stomach, its chest, everything bursting. The body began convulsing in regular waves. Cree broke free, scrambled a few feet away, fell down as the pain consumed her. She rolled to look at the Tommy thing. It was fighting for its life. It couldn't seem to breathe.

That thought panicked her and she groped in her pocket for her key ring flashlight. When she put the spot of light on Tommy, she could see the asynchronous breathing rolling his chest side to side, the gaping mouth as the lungs exchanged air. Still she couldn't move. The sense of unrelenting purpose burned in the ghost's mind. It wouldn't surrender. Cree felt its will encompass her, its body spirit irradiate her. The ghost felt itself lying on its back as the ground seemed to rise and fall and shake. It was wounded or sick, dying, yet unwilling to relinquish its life or purpose. It was overpowering her. The ghost or Tommy was looking at her desperately and saying something without breath. She felt the word in her own mouth: away. Then one eye fixed on her with enormous effort, and the ghost said it again. This time it sounded more like awake. Was the ghost telling her to go away? Was it pleading to awaken? It wants to come back. Then the power of it waned a little and she pulled back from the edge. Tommy's body was starting to die as it suffocated.

"Ellen! Ray!" she screamed. "Help me, please!" She looked desperately in the direction of the invisible sheep sheds, waving her tiny light back and forth over her head. The ghost or Tommy was still moving its mouth that way. "Are you saying 'away'?" she asked it. "Are you wanting to wake up? Please tell me!" But the rolling chest had gone still and the staring eye turned fishlike and almost without life. It could no longer move.

She bent and began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. She shoved on the motionless chest, exhaled into the slack mouth, reared up, shoved again. She screamed and waved the light and this time heard a clank from the darkness and knew immediately that someone had knocked over the coffeepot down at the shed. "Over here!" she yelled. She blew into Tommy's mouth, pushed on his stubborn chest. Waved the tiny flashlight. Heard voices.

It took a while to get him back to the hogan. They waited until his breathing stabilized and until the snapping arm movement had ceased. Ray and Dan kept watch as Tommy slept. Ellen led Cree back to the shed.