Orbit 20 Page 8

  Farley didn’t stand. Dorsett regarded him for a moment, turned and went back to his car. He drove away in a cloud of dust as thick as the one he had brought with him.

  Victoria had said her mother died when she was a baby. Maybe she did, Farley thought.

  Farley lay on his back, his hands under his head, on top his sleeping bag, and listened to his father and Tom Thorton exchange stories. Tom was talking about his dude-rustling days for Leon Stacy, before he had been elected sheriff twelve years ago.

  “He says to me right off, ‘Mr. Thorton, I don’t know a damn thing about horses, trails, desert country, nothing else I should know. All’s I know is Egypt, history, pyramids, anything you want to know, I can more’n likely tell you. Now if I agree not to treat you like an ignorant slob because you don’t know shit about my specialty, will you agree not to treat me like one because I don’t know yours?”’ Thorton poured himself more coffee from the thermos. “Real fine fellow. Teaches at the University over at Eugene. Came back every year, still does, more’n likely. Nice wife, kids. Questions! Never heard so many questions. And they all listened to the answers. Fine people.”

  Farley counted stars, lost track, and went over the steps again. In the valley there was enough dynamite to blow up ten acres. On the ridge was the detonator. He had already cut the fence up there, made a four-foot opening. They could step through, observe whatever was in the valley, get out, and set off the explosives. On the cliff and at the bottom gate there were powerful searchlights. “It will work,” he told himself again.

  But there was nothing to blast. Halfway through their second night the men had seen nothing, heard nothing. The horse tethered fifteen feet inside the area remained quiet.

  “Three nights,” Will had said. “If there’s nothing for three nights will you give it up? Admit there’s nothing you can do.”

  He had been so certain. Victoria hadn’t waited. Her first night, there it was. When they came again, it was right there. He got up, walked to the gate and watched the horse a few minutes. The starlight was so bright that if it acted up, they would be able to see it. He sat and poured coffee.

  “You should get some sleep,” he told Will.

  “Intend to. Want to check the ridge again first?”

  Farley shrugged. “No point. Not until the horse tells us.”

  Tom Thorton unrolled his sleeping bag. “Call me at three.” He grunted several times, then began to snore softly.

  “Me too,” Will said. “If there’s a sound, anything . . .”

  “Sure, Dad.”

  The night remained quiet and Farley didn’t bother to awaken either of the men. At dawn his father got up first, grumbled, and roused Tom, and when their relief came, two ranch hands who would guard the dynamite during the day, they returned to the house where Farley went to bed.

  The third night was the same.

  “Farl, that was the agreement,” Will said stubbornly. "You agreed.”

  “I didn’t. I didn’t say I would or wouldn’t. I’m taking the camper up there and staying a few more nights. I’ll hang around during the day. You won’t have to send anyone up to relieve me.”

  “It isn’t that, and you know it. If it was this easy don’t you think someone would have done it years ago? That thing comes and goes when it gets ready. It might be quiet up there for months, years. You planning to wait it out?”

  “Yes!” Farley stamped from the room, up the stairs. He began to throw his clothes into a pack.

  His door opened and Serena slid inside and shut it. “Farley, why are you carrying on like this, giving your father more grief? What’s the matter with you?”

  “I’m crazy! Haven’t you learned yet? I’m crazy! Get the hell out of here, Serena.”

  “You’re crazy all right. Driving off Fran, driving your father beyond what he can endure. Why don’t you stop all this foolishness and help your father now that he needs you.”

  "I can’t help him.”

  “You can! Just let yourself instead of rushing off after ghosts all the time.”

  “There’s something out there, Serena! I know because it almost killed me! Do you understand that? It almost killed me!”

  “And it will kill you the next time! You think your father can stand that?” Serena’s voice rose.

  “You don’t understand.”

  “I don’t understand? You’re the one who doesn’t understand anything, Farley Chesterman! Right through the years everyone else’s had enough sense to leave it alone.”

  Farley indicated the door. “Beat it!”

  “You pig! You don’t care, do you?”

  “All right! There’s something out there! A devil. You understand devils, you Catholic bitch! There’s a devil out there and I’m going to get it off this land! That's what I have to do!”

  “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.

  VI

  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.

  Sam knelt by her and held her. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Are you okay? I didn’t want to hurt you. The lights were coming down the hill. I couldn’t let them swarm over me again.”

  “I know,” Victoria said. “I had nightmares about them.”

  “I didn’t see them the first time,” Sam went on. “I saw a path, wide, easy, glowing. I knew it led to … to … I don’t know what I thought it led to. It terrified me and I wanted to get on it, follow it home, all the time thinking it would kill me if I did. Then I saw the Indian, and I knew he knew the way. I know that Indian. He does know the way.”

  “We can’t be separated,” Victoria said. “Farley was separated from us. He must be in there somewhere, lost, maybe he fell over the gorge. Maybe they drove him over the gorge. . .

  “Sh.” Sam’s hand tightened on her arm. “Maybe he just came out somewhere else, like we did.”

  Victoria looked around. Everywhere it was the same, dead trees, no signs of life, and the bitter wind that tore through her jacket. “The fire’s gone, the wall I made is gone. My pack. We can’t put anything at all down and expect it to stay. We can’t leave each other even a second, or one of us might vanish.”

  Sam nodded. “It’s too damn cold,” he said slowly. “Every time we’ve gone in and out, it’s been different. Different climates, different scenery. Times.” He stopped and when he spoke again, his voice was strained. “We’re yo-yoing back and forth in time! That’s it, isn’t it! Come on, once more.”

  Victoria’s ears were hurting from the cold and her toes were starting to go numb. “We should count our steps or something,” she said. “The wall won’t be there, no point in making another one. But we have to know how to get out again.”

  Sam nodded, and hand in hand they started forward. There was no sense of transition, nothing to indicate change, but one moment they were in the frozen air, and then the air was balmy and sweet smelling, not from a rain forest this time, but from thick lush grasses that crowded down the hillsides, and from tangled vines, creepers, dense bushes that made nearly impenetrable thickets to their right. The river was there, not a furious roar of a cascade, but rushing waters singing over rocks.

  “Here they come,” Sam muttered. “Out!”

  The lights were coming in an elongated cloud, head-high, straight down the hill toward them. They took several steps, and the lights were no longer there. They had crossed the boundary.

  They made a fire and huddled close together. “We need shelter,” Sam said finally. “The moon’s going down. While there’s still enough light we have to arrange something.” By the time the moon vanished over the mountains in the west, Sam had made a lean-to with the mylar space blanket from his pack, attaching it from bushes to the ground, and Victoria had gathered armloads of grass that made their mattress. They wrapped Victoria’s jacket around their legs, and Sam’s around their torsos, and after a long time they fell asleep in each other’s arms.

  “We can’t stay here!” Victoria cried late the next afternoon. They had bathed in the clear river, had portioned out their scant rations, had hunted for berries to supplement their food, and now the sun was setting and she was hungry and tired.

  Sam was standing just beyond their marker stones, facing the hill. Together they had explored the hill, the valley, the entire area repeatedly. They had crossed and recrossed the barrier without effect
; nothing had changed.

  “It’s not evil, not malevolent,” Sam said softly. “This must be what happened to the others who disappeared. They weren’t killed at all, just put out somewhere else, away from harm.” They would starve, Victoria thought dully. Grazing animals would find this a paradise, but not humans.

  “Once more,” Sam said abruptly and started up the hill again. Victoria didn’t follow this time. There wasn’t anything up there, nothing in the valley. It didn’t show itself by daylight, she thought, and suddenly realized that the only times anything had happened, there had been brilliant moonlight. She started to call Sam to tell him, but he was nearly to the top out of hearing.

  When Sam came back it was twilight. “Think of the power!” he said exultantly. “It’s showing us what we can have. How many of those who vanished realized what was being offered? They probably came out and ran as far and as fast as they could and died out there on the desert, or in the cold, or of starvation. But the power’s there, down in that valley, waiting for anyone who has nerve enough to accept it. It’s ours, Victoria! Yours! Mine!”

  He wasn’t hungry, he said, wasn’t tired, just impatient. “There’s a secret we haven’t learned yet, about how to call it, how to make it manifest itself. We’ll learn how to summon it.”

  He began to stuff things back into his pack. “Come on. I’m going to wait for it this time down in the valley. Hurry up before it gets too dark.”

  “It won’t be there,” Victoria said. “It’s never there until after the moon is up. Both times the moon was up.”

  “Coincidence. Come on. The point is we don’t know why it decides to come and when it will decide again. I intend to be there when it does, with you or alone.”