David Morrell - The Shimmer

A woman approached them. She had big blond hair and wore an ornate costume that made her look like a country singer.

“Janice, thanks for coming in to help,” Harriett said.

“No problem.” The woman laughed and spread her sequined green skirt. “I figured I’d wear something the out-of-state customers will re- member. They’ll go home and say we all dress like we’re in one of those old Westerns where everybody sang when they weren’t shooting bad guys.”

“Do you think you and Viv can handle the store for a while?”

“Of course. We know what to do.”

“Just don’t sell the light fixtures.”

Laughing at what she thought was a joke, Janice went to greet a customer.

Harriett led Page and Tori through the door in back, entered her sparsely furnished living room, locked the door, closed her eyes, and inhaled deeply. When she finally opened her eyes, she said, “You’re here to talk about what happened last night?”

“If you’re too busy, we can come back later,” Tori said.

“No. Come with me-I want to show you something.”

Harriett’s pickup truck headed along the now familiar route.

“You’re taking us back to the viewing area?” Page asked. He sat against the passenger door, with Tori next to him.

“Past it,” Harriett answered.

Ahead, more cars were parked along both shoulders of the road. Flatbed trucks had concrete barriers on them. A crane was lifting the barriers and placing them in a line along the entrance to the viewing area, forming a high wall. Two men in suits supervised the work. Their hard hats contrasted with the cowboy hats of Medrano and an- other Highway Patrol officer.

“Looks like they’re shutting the place off,” Harriett said. “If they’re smart, they’ll take down the shelter altogether, along with the historical marker, and load the portable toilets onto those trucks. I never approved of what the county did here. The lights shouldn’t be a tourist stop. I don’t care about the business outsiders bring to town. Keep the lights a secret. Let people discover them if they’re meant to.”

“If they’re meant to?” Tori asked.

“Do you think these people deserve to see the lights? Most can’t. The others aren’t capable of appreciating what they’re lucky enough to see.” There was a tone in her voice that Page hadn’t heard before.

People filled the road, complaining about the tall barricade. Harriett was forced to stop the truck.

“Quit blocking traffic!” Page heard Medrano yell.

Reluctantly the crowd parted.

Harriett drove on, passing the parked cars. Beyond barbed-wire fences, scrub grass stretched in both directions. Five miles later, she steered toward a gate on the left. Page got out, opened the gate, waited for the truck to drive through, then resecured the gate.

They drove along a dirt road. The heat of the day had dried the puddles from the previous night’s storm. Dust rose in small clouds to mark their passing. The rugged grassland extended toward the distant mountains, the vast area so flat and treeless that only the grazing cattle provided variation in the landscape.

Wait, Page thought, peering into the distance. Something’s out there.

He saw a speck at the end of the road. Leaning forward, he tried to identify what it was. As the truck drove nearer, the speck became larger.

“It’s a building,” Tori said, curious.

“Why do I feel like I’ve been here before?” Page frowned, recalling his sense of déjà vu when he’d flown over the cattle and the windmill on his approach to Rostov. He’d also felt it when he’d first driven along the town’s main street.

The building became more identifiable-and more puzzling. It was an impressive three-story ranch house. A covered porch stretched along its wide front. Several chimneys projected from its roofline. A square tower rose on the right corner, ending in a cupola that made the house look like a castle. But as majestic as the place appeared, it had a brooding, gothic quality.

“I’ve seen this house before,” Tori told Page. Abruptly she made the connection. “Birthright.”

“Of course!” Page said. “That’s why everything looked familiar when I flew here. This is the house Captain Medrano was talking about, the one Mullen took the tour to see.”

Page remembered when a restored version of Birthright had been shown in theaters to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary. He and Tori had heard so much about the classic film-which had seldom appeared on television-that they’d made a point of seeing it.

“We love that movie,” Tori said.

“Yeah, it really makes an impression,” Harriett replied, the house becoming more distinct as she drove toward it. “People here in Texas sure admired it. They couldn’t stand the novel, which they thought looked down on them, but they felt that the movie showed their strength and determination, not to mention the vastness of the countryside. No fake-looking computer effects in those days. When you saw a hundred thousand head of cattle, every one of them was real. The miles and miles of ranchland. The endless sky. I don’t think a movie has ever looked so big. As big as the state. And the actors matched the bigness of the movie. James Deacon, Veronica Pageant, Buck Rivers. Legends.”

Page stared toward the looming house. Its dark, weathered wood reinforced the feeling of gloom that the structure exuded. Soon the truck was close enough for him to see that some of the boards had fallen, that there were gaps in the wall, that the porch was in danger of collapsing.

“Doesn’t anybody maintain it?” Tori asked in surprise.

“The movie people left it here, and the family that owns the ranch took care of it for a while, but then they got distracted,” Harriett answered. “And anyway, who would they have maintained it for? It’s not as if they wanted tourists tromping over their land and leaving the gates open so their cattle would wander down the road and maybe get hit by a car. By the time the parents died, the children had pretty much forgotten about it. When they finally remembered, it was too late. Now the place is in such bad shape that it can’t be repaired with- out basically being rebuilt.”

She stopped the truck at decaying steps that led up to collapsed boards on the porch. The ornate front door looked as if it was about to topple from its rusted hinges.

Page got out of the truck, his sneakers crunching on pebbly dirt. He helped Tori down and watched Harriett come around to join them. She put on her cowboy hat. The sun was intense enough that Page wished he’d thought to bring a baseball cap. Tori continued to wear hers, concealing most of her red hair.

“In the movie, a lawn was here,” Page said.

“And a curved driveway bordered by flower beds,” Tori added. “A cattle stampede tears it all up. Veronica Pageant and Buck Rivers put it all back together. Then they do it again when there’s a tornado. Then there’s a terrible drought, but somehow they keep building their empire.”

“Texas determination,” Harriett said.

“And James Deacon’s the white trash they humiliate, until he strikes oil and uses his money and power to get even with them. At one point, he drives his battered old truck across the lawn. He’s covered with oil from his first well. He jumps out and punches Rivers.” Page looked around. “But I don’t see any oil wells.”

“Forty miles from here,” Harriett said. “That’s where you’ll find them. One reason the movie was made here is that this isn’t oil country and there weren’t any wells to interfere with the illusion that this is what Texas looked like a hundred years ago, before the oil boom.” She paused. “I said there weren’t computer effects, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t any movie magic. Walk around the house, and you’ll see what I mean.”