The air looked clear, here in the mountains north of Santa Rosalia.
The stars stared down sharply at him without the familiar, nervous flickering that they displayed in the heavier atmosphere that blanketed San Diego and points beyond. The man looked up and was suddenly aware of how cold and reptilian the stars seemed, like pinpoints of rage boring through the dense black velvet of the night sky; he was forced to wonder how mere motion pictures—faint images of a reality which was intangible beyond the screens upon which they played—could ever have inspired him to leave behind the comforts of civilization in order to seek out and speak in only half-understood conversations with an ancient people who were obviously none too pleased to have him in their midst.
For an instant, the man seriously considered hopping back into the landrover, trusting his driving instincts to get him back to ground level, and kissing off the “noble” educational motives which had instigated this field trip.
“Hey, White Man, you want to talk more about lobombre or spit at the moon?” demanded an Indian seated on the bare ground next to him.
At least, that was what the visitor thought the other said. These mixed-heritage remnants of an earlier time actually spoke a private language in which English was not represented and Spanish seemed incidental. The visitor had picked up enough similarities to the tongues in which he was conversant to pass most of the time, but the talks were still extremely rough surfing for him. “I wish to partake of more of your knowledge, wise one,” he replied with excessive courtesy. The reason for his presence again caught him up and swept aside his stillborn doubts. “Have you ever seen one of those creatures?” he asked eagerly.
Most of the wandering tribesmen had lost all of their curiosity concerning the man from the north and had strolled away to sleep, but three of the elder males of the group were still sitting with him about the single fire and drinking from his generous supply of estados whiskey. Each member of the trio was drunk, almost as if they felt that they had to live up to Caucasian expectations concerning the effect of liquor on aborigines. Of course, they hardly cared about the image they presented to the rest of the world. In a decade, they would be gone, dead or assimilated into the populations of the ever-expanding cities below them; so why should they irritate their spirits by struggling to present a strong, silent, inhuman front for the benefit of some academic foreigner? Their loose, inebriated laughter died abruptly in the fading echoes of the white man’s question, however.
The man repeated it, “Have any of you ever seen one?”
Throaty coughings answered him at first. Finally one, a man as close as any of them to the position of “chief” of the group, allowed a reply in a low, cautious tone, “Our women still scream at small noises in the night, for it was a beast of the night. Yes, we have seen him.”
“When?” the visitor asked, daring to put away his necessary skepticism, if only for the moment. “What did it look like?”
The chief seemed reluctant to continue, but he responded in payment for the whiskey. “A dozen years ago, in early spring. He was just as we have described to you … but you believe these to be the memories of ignorant fools, of course.”
“No, honestly! I am very interested and respectful of your history and traditions. Who is the ignorant one here? Is it not I?”
The chief appeared to be pacified by that. “Twelve years ago,” he repeated. “For two nights, one in April and one in May. He killed us like a cat through sheep, sixteen men, women, and children, and nothing that was turned against him brought him to the ground. After May, when the right night came in June, all of our men were ready against him with guns and what other weapons we had, and we hoped that our movement during the daytimes had been enough to throw him from the trail. But still he came. This time, though, he was met by Ugalde with the magic—no, you whites won’t accept “magic”—he was met with the proper defense against his evil, and he died.”
The visitor turned excitedly to Ugalde, the medicine man/shaman/priest of the tribe. “And how was it done?”
Ugalde was the oldest and drunkest of them all, but there was a firmness in the shake of his head. “A way that I found after great meditation and communing with the spirits that you don’t believe in; a way that you are not ready to know.”
Faced with this abrupt blind alley, the visitor switched his questioning to another facet of the intriguing story, “What happened to the body after you killed the beast?”
“We buried it,” answered the chief with an expression meant to establish that the tribespeople were not complete savages.
“Where is—”
“After twelve years it certainly belongs to the forest and is born again in the trees and grasses that have sprung above it. The grave is beyond your violation, white man.”
The visitor sighed.
“This is a good time to sleep,” proclaimed the chief as he rose unsteadily to his feet. One of his companions followed, but Ugalde remained where he sat. The visitor didn’t attempt to stop their departure, because he had associated with these people long enough to know that interference would only antagonize them. He still wasn’t sure how he had managed to get this close to them in the first place.
The two old men left.
When he found himself alone with the stuttering fire, the crisp night air, and the leathery-skinned medicine man, the visitor decided to try once more before surrendering the prospects of the night. “Are you willing to speak longer with me, wise one?” he asked.
Ugalde paused. With a fingernail that was an inch longer than any of his others, he drew oddly-shaped designs in the dust surrounding the fire and, as if tiring of this after a few minutes, rewarded the younger man’s silent patience with a nod. Then came the brief command, “You believe most your eye; see this.” The old shaman drew a small cloth sack from a string about his neck and spread its mouth enough to pour an ash-colored palmful of dust into the ring of firelight.
“What is it?” the visitor asked.
“The essence of that which killed our tribe, the dirt that birthed the horror,” Ugalde whispered drily. His eyes shown with the glow of fire. “Once, it was only a vision powder made from cactus hearts, the urine of a child-carrying woman, goats’ brains, and the blood of a hawk killed in the old way.
“But even as I dragged the parts of the dead monster to the secret place where I and I alone placed him in the earth, the foaming drool from the lips of its separated head caught my mind, and I used a leaf to scoop a portion of the spit into this sack. It’s lost all moisture now, and probably its power to contact the gods; but I know with my heart that the terrible strength of the lobombre lies yet within the dryness and would return to seek out human blood if given a host.”
“Rabies,” the visitor whispered automatically. But how could a rabid man survive the final stages of the disease long enough to attack the same small group of wanderers over a period of three months? Had it been the same man each time or two of his victims succeeding him?
“A different type of madness,” Ugalde disagreed. Apparently, he was fully aware of that particularly terrible viral infection. Over the next few moments, he drifted away from words once more and allowed his dark eyes to shift from the whitish powder in his hand to the face of the outsider. His gaze was piercing.
Suddenly, the medicine man was taken by an idea that may have reached down to him from the vanished days of greatness … or perhaps it was only an angry reaction to the decades of derision and complete loss that he had faced at the hands of the people who had come late to this land. For whatever reason, Ugalde cupped his right hand about the dusty residue of three months when the horrors of the supernatural had been too real and poured it down the slender neck of a half-empty whiskey bottle.
The visitor watched this strange action without comprehension, and the dry material slid into the light-yellow liquid, turned a dazzling crimson, and mixed thoroughly with the bottle’s contents without so much as a shake from Ugalde. Even in the dim light from the fire and the cold radiance of the stars, it seemed that the flask was suddenly filled with fresh blood.
“Why did you do that?” asked the white man. His hungering curiosity was slowly being overcome by the uneasiness that this sullen Indian was causing in him.
“Looks different,” the medicine man grunted, “not like the juice of visions or the white foam from the monster. Looks powerful.” He reached to the leather sheath attached to the right side of his belt and produced a short, wickedly gleaming knife.
“Ugalde …” the visitor said.
With the swiftness of a man half his age, the Indian leaped from a sitting position onto the other’s chest, as if he were pinning him in some friendly athletic contest. But the crazed expression covering his face and the keenness of the knife blade removed any trace of ordinary competition from the action. Ugalde sat the bottle viciously on the ground next to the visitor’s face and tipped the neck of it toward his mouth. “Drink,” he ordered.
“Ugalde!” the man cried frantically. Visions of wriggling microbes being revitalized by the liquor flooded his mind. Could any life survive for a dozen years in such a dehydrated state? Yes, yes, viruses could live for centuries! “What in the name of God are you doing?”
A sneer replaced the sullen look the older man had worn. “Your god! You believe your eye, white man, and only that, so drink and see what the devils you don’t know can cause a living spirit to become! Drink, or I will cut your throat!”
The visitor was both larger and stronger than the Indian, so that he might have been able to throw Ugalde from his chest and sprint to the rover and escape before any of the others rushed out to help in the mad exercise, but for that icy blade which was resting motionless against his neck.
“You won’t kill me,” he said carefully.
“Do you know my mind? Do you really see into my heart so that you can say I won’t carve away your head and cover your dead remains with the earth of this mountain just as I did to the lobombre? No one would ever discover your bones.”
“You’re crazy! Why would you want to do this?”
The knife bit into the younger man’s throat just as Ugalde splashed some of the red fluid over his mouth. As the hot wetness of the blood rolled down his neck and the cold wetness of the elixir ran over his lips, chin, and cheek, the visitor’s wildly racing mind was unable to distinguish any difference in the sensations.
“Drink it or you die!” repeated the Indian. “Take it into your entrails to show a lesson to those all-wise fools of your own country, to show that the past still overrules the fates of ignorant men!”
The knife sliced even deeper into his flesh, and the visitor was forced to part his lips and allow the red liquid to pour into his mouth. The taste was sharp and stinging, more like a breath of fire than anything wet, and his involuntary reaction was to gag and then spew the tainted whiskey upward. Ugalde’s face was pressed to within inches of his own, and some of the issue flew into the shaman’s eyes, drawing a cry of pain. For a mad instant, the white man hoped that whatever infection the mixture contained would rot the Indian’s features from his face; but the other merely shook his head without taking the knife away from his captive’s throat and blinked his eyes until he could see again.
“No more of that!” Ugalde shouted. “Drink it!”
Though his every instinct fought against it and his stomach coiled like an enraged snake, the visitor again opened his lips and allowed the burning flow into his mouth until his cheeks brimmed with it. Another jab of the knife wordlessly directed him to swallow, and he did.
“Now, now, the lesson is given,” whispered the old man, his own pain adding a moaning quality to his voice. He staggered to his feet, dropped the whiskey bottle onto its side in the dirt so that it began to empty rapidly, and walked blindly in the direction of the simple huts that protected his people from the night. “Go home, white man, and carry the plague to your brothers. And pray that you are able to find a man so wise and brave as Ugalde to end the living hell!”
I’ve got to vomit it up! the visitor thought urgently while he rolled to his knees. His stomach was rebelling wildly against the awful sickness within it, just as his mind was hysterically conjuring images of himself in the final, hideous stages of rabies. But even after he stumbled to his feet and forced the fingers of his right hand down his throat, the eruption wouldn’t come. Swiftly, faster than any medicine he had ever partaken of, the old shaman’s concoction soaked into his bloodstream and took control of his body.
The liquid … got to get a sample to be analyzed, he thought with the last vestiges of rationality.
The whiskey bottle still contained several red ounces, but when he stooped to clutch it, the world decided to spin out of control and throw him to his back. The stars continued to stare down upon him, but they weren’t cold or dispassionate now: they were laughing at him. Even their colors had changed to greens and blues and yellows, and most of all, to burning reds. Like blood. Faces familiar and never before seen coalesced out of the fragments of the sky before his eyes.
“Ugalde!” he managed to cry out. Once.
Every sense became insanely alive, as if to usurp the ultimate control of his body from his brain. “Vision powder … communication with the gods,” the medicine man had called it.
The visitor had found what he sought, and he passed out.
And the next night was March 24.