Damon Knight - Orbit 20

“If there’s a devil, it’s not out on the desert! You’re carrying it around with you all the time!”

“Shut up and get the hell out of here! What gives you the right to—”

There was a knock on the door. This time it was Will, who stuck his head into the room and said mildly, “I thought you two gave up screaming at each other ten, fifteen years ago.”

Serena gave Farley one last furious look and ran from the room, down the stairs. Will regarded his son for a moment, then closed the door gently.

“Bitch,” Farley muttered, and sat down on the side of his bed, suddenly shaking. Bitch, bitch, bitch.

Although the sheriff had collected Victoria’s belongings to have them delivered to her father, no one had known what to do about Sam’s camper, and it was still parked in the side yard. Farley loaded it, checked the water and food, added coffee to the stores, and left, driving slowly, unwilling to add to the coating of dust on everything in the valley.

At the gorge he told the two hands they could go back to the ranch. He chose a spot near the gate where the camper would have shade during the hottest part of the afternoons; then he climbed the cliff to check the detonator, and to scowl at the cul-de-sac below where something came and went as it chose.

His ribs ached abominably, and his head throbbed; fury clouded his eyes, blurring his vision. Somewhere down there, within the three hundred acres, he knew, the bodies of Victoria and Sam lay hidden. The packs they had carried, his pack and camera, it was all in there, somewhere. Unless, he thought, they had fallen over the gorge and the rushing river had carried them miles downstream. The desert shimmered with heat waves, and in the distance a cloud of dust marked the passing of a jeep or truck—it was impossible to see what had raised the cloud. No other life stirred in the motionless, hot afternoon; no sound broke the silence, and even the colors had taken on a sameness that was disturbing, as if a patina of heat had discolored everything, obscured the true colors, and left instead the color of the desert—a dull, flat dun color that was actually no color at all.

But he had smelled the river, he told himself, and then as if he needed more positive affirmation he said aloud, “I smelled the goddamn river, and I saw the earth move. I felt the rocks of the earthquake!”

And for the first time he wondered if that was so, if he really had smelled the river, really had been in an earthquake. And he wondered if maybe he was crazy. In the intense heat of the desert in August, he had a chill that shook him and raised goosebumps on his arms and made his scalp feel as if a million tiny things were racing about on it.

Victoria watched the swarm of lights with rising panic, until Sam tugged her arm; then they both started to run blindly down the hillside. The lights swirled about them and Victoria stumbled, was yanked forward, stumbled again, and they both stopped, and now Sam was trying to brush the darting specks away.

The lights hovered around Victoria, blinding her momentarily, then left her and settled around Sam, who fell to his knees, then all the way to the ground, and rolled several times before he became quiet. Victoria could no longer see his body under the pulsating lights; instead, it was as if the shape was all light that gave no illumination, no warmth, but swelled and subsided rhythmically.

Victoria knelt beside him; they mustn’t be separated, she thought. She reached for him, hesitating when her hand came close to the mass of lights; she took a deep breath, reached through and touched and held his arm. The lights darted up her hand, paused, flowed back down and rejoined the others. Presently Sam stirred. There was a tightening in his muscles, a tensing before he started to sit up. The lights dimmed, moved away from him a little distance, and he got up shakily, Victoria still clutching his arm.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“Yes. I think so.” His voice was hollow, distant.

He began to walk aimlessly, as if unaware of her; she held his arm tightly and kept up. Tree frogs were singing, and there was a chirping call of a night bird, and, farther away, the roar of the river. A pale moth floated before her face; a twig snapped. A large animal scuttled up a tree, as if in slow motion. A sloth! she realized. It turned its head to look at her, then humped its way upward until it was out of sight in the thick foliage.

Still the lights hovered about Sam, not pressing in on him as they had done at first, but not leaving him either, and she remembered watching herself—the other woman—surrounded by lights, walking as if in a trance out of the fenced-in area. She began to direct their steps, keeping parallel to the wild river, and suddenly the lights stopped, as they had done before. She and Sam had crossed the dividing line. She jerked Sam to a halt and stared in disbelief. The soft moonlit rain forest continued as far as she could see. She turned, but the lights were gone. Hesitantly she took a step, and they surged toward her from the tree-covered hill. She darted back across the invisible line, and they vanished.

“Sam, sit down a few minutes. Rest. It’s all right now,” she said. Sam obeyed. Victoria began to arrange stones and sticks to indicate the beginning of the three hundred acres. She made a short wall, only inches high, a marker, not a barrier. Sam was still blank-eyed.

For a long time neither of them moved. Not until she began to shiver did Victoria realize how cold the night air had become. Reluctantly she stood up to look for sticks to build a fire. Hypothermia, Farley had said, could strike any time, summer of winter. She had watched him put several thick fire-starting candles in each pack. Deliberately she thought about the candles, not about Farley, who must be dead or lost.

After a smoldering start, the fire began to blaze. Victoria was still nursing it when Sam suddenly jumped up and shouted, “Come back! Wait for us!”

Victoria hurried to him and grasped his arm. “Who, Sam? Who did you see?” She peered into the forest.

“The Indian. Where is he? Which way did he go?”

“There isn’t any Indian.” But perhaps there was. He might have seen her fire, might have been attracted by the smoke.

“There was an Indian, Victoria! With one arm. He was taking me somewhere. You must have seen him!”

Abruptly Sam stopped and rubbed his eyes hard. “I saw something,” he muttered more to himself than to her. “A path, a path of glowing light, and the Indian motioned me to follow him away from it. The path was the wrong way, that’s it. It was the wrong way, and he was going to take me the right way. With one arm! You must have seen him too!”

She shook her head. “He’s like Reuben. Your Indian, my Reuben.”

For a moment she thought he was going to hit her. Then he slumped and his hands relaxed. “What happened?” he asked dully.

“I don’t know. The lights came down the hill; you fell down, just like I did that other time. When you got up you were walking like someone in a trance, and I brought us out here.” She stopped while Sam turned to stare at the forest all around them. “I thought it would be like the other time, that I would go back out, be where our camp was, but . . .” When she stopped there was only the sound of the river, a constant muted roar in the background. “I made a line to show where the gate was,” she said, indicating it.

Sam hesitated only a moment, then took her hand and started over the stones. More afraid of being separated than of whatever lay on the other side, she yielded and they moved into the strange area once more.

This time everything was different. The trees were skeletal, bone-white under the brilliant moon. No grass had grown here for many years; the ground was barren and hard, littered with rocks that made walking difficult. The wind was piercing and frigid; it was the only sound they could hear—a high wail that rose and fell and never stopped entirely. Suddenly Sam yanked her arm hard and she felt herself being pulled backward, back over the wall that no longer existed. She fell heavily.