Damon Knight - Orbit 20

He stared morosely at the gate standing open. Here in the hot still afternoon it was just another ranch gate; no way it could vanish with a twist of the head.

“We all think you were lucky. If you hadn’t been separated from them you’d be gone too.”

Farley turned to look at her. “Tell that to Tom Thorton. And my father.”

“We aren’t a bunch of superstitious Indians,” she said, “afraid of a curse on the land, or land claimed and held by a god. Tom will never admit anything so irrational, but he went over this whole area with half a dozen men at least twice. The rest of it, searching the desert, the bulletins, that’s all for show. Your father, my father, if they knew we were sitting here, well, they’d probably lasso us and haul us out.”

“Aren’t you afraid to be in here?”

“Not during daylight.”

Farley laughed and pulled himself off the rock, wincing as he moved. “And I was going to invite you to come back with me tonight.”

Fran caught his arm as she rose. “You’re not serious! Why? What good can it do if you disappear?”

“I don’t know. That girl asked for help, and I told her to trust me. Now she’s gone. I can’t pretend it never happened.”

Fran shook her head impatiently. “When you were found, they thought you were dying, because they couldn’t wake you up. Dad heard about it and called me. He doesn’t approve, of course. We’ve had scenes. But he called me.” She glanced at him, then looked out over the gorge. She was speaking almost dispassionately. “I was having a dinner party, people were just arriving, and I forgot them. Forgot my husband, my children, my guests, everything. I got in the car and left, didn’t change clothes or pack. I just left. I outran a police car coming over Santiam Pass.” She shuddered briefly. “Then they wouldn’t let me see you. They wouldn’t even let me look at you. It’s a scandal, how I showed up late at night in a long dress, made a spectacle of myself.” She lighted another cigarette. “Edward came down. It was all very loud and nasty. He’s always known, but it was so discreet, he didn’t have to admit it. I believe in your earthquake. It’s shaken my world apart. I don’t want you dead. I don’t want you just gone, like your friends.”

“It wouldn’t work,” Farley said. “You wouldn’t stay here with me. I can’t leave.”

“Won’t,” she said; she dropped her cigarette and rubbed it out with the toe of her boot with exaggerated care. “Won’t, darling.” She shook her head at him. “Forever in love with the unattainable. It’s the poor lost girl now, isn’t it? Now you can live the ideal romantic dream, never have to make any tough choices. Come here and mope, prowl these hills all night and finally one day your horse will come in alone and you’ll have exactly what you’re after. Complete nonexistence.” She strode away from him.

“What will you do?” Farley called after her.

Without turning she waved. “Probably go home and fuck the devil out of my husband and talk him into moving to San Francisco, or Hawaii.” She yanked her horse’s tether loose and swung herself into the saddle smoothly. “And you can follow your goddamn Pied Piper right into the side of the cliff!” She rode away at a hard gallop.

Tom Thorton was waiting for him when he got home. He charged off the porch, stopped when he saw Farley’s face, and said, “Good God! You look like old puddled candlewax.”

Farley concentrated on climbing the steps to the porch. Will stood watching.

“You eat anything today?” he asked quietly.

Farley sat down without answering, and presently Serena appeared with a tray. He drank the cold beer gratefully, then ate. He wanted a shower and clean clothes, but not enough to climb the stairs to the second floor.

“You can search those rocks till Doomsday. Won’t find anything,” Tom said. “I’ve been over that piece of ground three times myself.”

Farley grunted. “That’s the place. I’ll find something.”

Will opened a bottle of beer and poured it, watching the head form. “You came to the hospital and asked me about that piece of land,” he said. “I told you it was poisoned, as I recall. When my father came out here in eighteen-ninety or about then, there were stone markers down there, put there by the Bannock Indians. They were still thick then. No one ever said how the Indians read the stones, but they did. Little piles, like dry walls, here a heap, a mile away another heap, and so on. Anyway, over the years Pa got to be friends with some of the renegades, sheltered them, hid them when the army was on their tail, and they warned him about that three hundred acres. One of them took him all around that piece and told him to keep clear of it. From nineteen hundred two when he actually homesteaded until nineteen twenty-four when he bought the west quarter, including that piece, two Klamath Indians disappeared over there; six or eight white men vanished. Course some of them could have just wandered on, but he didn’t think so. Several dozen head of cattle went in and never came out. Soon as he got that land, he fenced it, been fenced ever since. Even so in nineteen twenty-nine two white men went in looking for oil and they vanished, left their truck, their gear, everything.” He drank and wiped his mouth.

“Tom’s been over it three times. I’ve been over it a hundred times or more.”

“Why didn’t you get help? People with equipment? Scientists?”

Will laughed, a short bark like a coyote’s. “In nineteen fifty when the hunt was on for uranium, we had a couple of geologists here with their geiger counters, stulflike that. They heard me out and we went over. Nothing. They moved on. Who’s going to believe you, son? You tell me. What’s there to believe? How does it fit in with anything else we know?”

“We found something,” Farley said angrily. “I heard that river! I smelled it!”

“And you’re damn lucky to be sitting here talking about it,” his father said quietly. “You’re not the first to go in and see or hear something and come out again. But you’re the first since my father began keeping a record in nineteen hundred two.”

“Victoria came out.”

“But she’s not around to tell anyone.”

Tom Thorton stood up then. “Whatever you say here don’t mean I buy it. I can’t put that kind of stuff in a report. People don’t get swallowed up by the desert. And that girl’s father is coming over here tomorrow. He says he’s going to make you tell him what you’ve done to his daughter. I think you better have something ready to tell him. And you better be here. I’ve had my fill of him; I tell you that.”

Farley hadn’t gone back to the gorge. When he made a motion towards the steps, his father had said very quietly that he would knock him out and tie him to his bed first, and Farley knew he could do it. He had gone upstairs and to bed. Now, waiting for Victoria’s father to arrive, he was glad he had slept. He felt better and stronger, and at the same time much worse. It was as if his emotions, his mind had taken longer to wake up than his body.

He felt deep shame over his treatment of Fran; his father’s grief and loneliness was a weight he wanted to share without knowing how. Most of all he kept remembering Victoria’s trust in him, her faith. The past few days all he had been able to think of was getting back to the gorge, finding something, anything. Not enough, he knew now.

He needed to think, to plan. Whatever was in the valley was pure malevolence; it could kill, had tried to kill him, had tried to drive Victoria over the edge of the gorge. He no longer believed in the earthquake he had experienced. It was as false as Reuben. You couldn’t believe anything you saw, felt, heard, experienced in there; and that made the problem impossible, he thought. If observers could have watched him that night, what would they have seen? He felt certain now that they would have seen him tumbling over the ground, falling repeatedly, running frantically, just as he had seen Victoria running and falling. But, he thought with a rising excitement, then she had risen, had ignored the lights and, like a sleepwalker, had simply left the area. That was the starting point. The clue to her escape that night lay in that action: she had walked away like someone in a trance, or asleep.