THEO HAD FOUND A ROCKING CHAIR ON THE BACK PORCH THAT suited him and sank down into it now with a grateful sigh. He shivered like P.D. shaking rainwater out of his fur and pulled the Indian blanket he’d gotten off the couch up around his neck. Should have bought a hat to cover up his naked skull! Theo hadn’t been able to get really comfortable since he got here, didn’t have a speck of meat left on his boney backside for padding when he sat down and sure didn’t have enough antifreeze in his veins for the wind that felt like it’d blowed right off a glacier—and maybe it had.
That jeep ride up the mountain three days ago had just about done him in. He shuddered at the thought of it, bouncing and banging around, holding on for dear life with his eyes squeezed so tight shut even the scared tears he was crying couldn’t slip through. Got to the top and that storm hit and he feared he was going to ride a lightning bolt into the presence of his maker. And when that didn’t happen, he was certain he’d close his eyes that first night and not never wake up, that his brain needed way more oxygen than he was sucking in, panting like P.D. chasing a rabbit.
That didn’t happen, neither. He just kept on going like the Energizer Bunny. No, more like one of them Timex watches that takes a licking and keeps on ticking.
Theo heard Ty holler and watched P.D. bound across the meadow. The two of them had adjusted easily to the altitude, far quicker than Theo or Gabriella. Theo paused about every three steps to catch his breath; Gabriella fared better, but after a couple of trips up and down the stairs, she was panting, too.
The dog dived into Piddley Creek and splashed water all over Ty. The creek was only two or three feet deep but the snow-melt-off water had to be frigid. Which didn’t appear to bother Ty any more than it did P.D. That spot in the back corner of the valley had become the boy’s home-away-from-home since the moment he hopped down out of the jeep here. He’d already captured a couple of frogs and brought them back to the house, claimed he could see trout in the water, swimming around with the minnows—though Theo doubted there was fish that big in such a small creek. But then, how would he know? He’d lived his whole life in cities. The only trout he’d ever seen was on a plate, covered in cornmeal and fried up with hushpuppies and … but maybe he was thinking of catfish.
Lord, your ways is strange ways. You said that, mind, I didn’t. ’Fore we got here, I’s beginning to think that boy had plum forgot how to smile. What’d he have to smile about? But now, you couldn’t scrub the grin off his face with steel wool. Maybe you bringing us here ... wasn’t such a bad thing. They’s less tightness around Gabriella’s mouth, too, so I s’pose you did think this through better than it looked to me like you did at first. I might a been wrong. Maybe. Amen
Theo allowed his eyes to travel up the mountainside behind the hanging valley, up, up, up past the boulder field and the bristlecone pine forest all the way to the snow-dusted rocks at the summit and the dry wash that extended down from it on the east side, facing the chalk cliffs of Mount Princeton. He’d been practicing. Was able to look up at the top now without feeling dizzy hardly at all. Now, the front of the cabin, looking down from it to the valley floor—that was another thing altogether. Every time he so much as glanced out one of them front windows, the world started to spin and he had to swallow hard not to upchuck on the hardwood floor. What a sense of humor God had, putting Theodosius X. Carmichael up on the side of a mountain. Theo almost laughed out loud at the absurdity of it.
He wiggled around a little on the chair cushion, which was the only thing between the bones on his backside and the solid oak of the rocker seat.
“Ain’t got enough meat on my butt for even one good cheek.”
And since he’d gotten sick, he’d probably lost fifteen pounds; all his clothes had got baggy and he’d caught Gabriella looking at him sometimes like maybe she could tell. He hadn’t planned on hanging around long enough for her to figure things out. It being cold enough up here he could wear sweaters in June—that’d help for a little while. But eventually … Well, he’d worry about eventually when eventually got here. No sense fretting about it now.
Gabriella came out the back door through the mudroom and sat down in the rocker next to Theo’s and he saw Ty and the dog turn and head down the creek through the woods. She was wearing jeans and an untucked plain chambray shirt, and had her short, curly blonde hair tucked back behind her ears. She looked ten years younger without that long black hair and those pointed bangs, and dressed normal, not in that black gothic stuff. Pretty, even. Except for the scar on her face. The sight of the uncovered scar sickened Theo. Oh, not because it was ugly—which it certainly was—but because of what it meant, because of who was responsible. It had cost Gabriella her looks and Smokey his life.
“You know, the view is a whole lot prettier out front,” she said.
“Yeah, way up here in East Jabib ain’t the end of the world, but I bet you can see it from that front porch.”
She smiled and looked more relaxed than he’d seen her in … maybe than he’d ever seen her. This place was sucking the tension out of Gabriella just like it was Ty. Oh, how Theo wished he didn’t hate it here as much as the two of them loved it.
“I’d rather look up the mountain than down it. Any crime in that?”
“Theo, are you afraid of heights?”
“What you talkin’ ’bout, woman! Theodosius X. Carmichael ain’t ’fraid of nothin’. A piddling little old mountain, why …” Why was he ashamed to admit it? Maybe the good Lord brought him up here to beat some of that stubborn pride out of him, wanted to humble him so he wouldn’t be strutting around heaven like some banty rooster. Theo sighed. “Not afraid, ’xactly. More like … scared spitless. I look down into that valley out there, it’s all I can do not to spew my breakfast all over my shoes.”
“Theo, why didn’t you tell me? What else are you scared of you didn’t tell me?”
“Water.” It just popped out. He bristled instantly at the incredulity on Gabriella’s face. “Now, don’t look like you ain’t never heard nothing so pitiful in all your life. I ain’t scared of water like bathwater or rainwater, puddles, creeks, things like that. Just … deep water.”
“Heights and deep water. You fall off a cliff into a lake?”
“Not a lake. And didn’t nobody fall.”
“Somebody pushed you—who?”
“You the wrong color for us to be talking ’bout a thing like that.” Oops. Probably shouldn’t have said that.
Gabriella was so shocked it took her a moment or two to respond—long enough for Theo to figure out there was no “probably” about it. He absolutely should not have said that. Soon as she caught a breath she went off like a bottle rocket.
“What’s that supposed to mean? Don’t you dare play the race card with me! Why’d you come with us if me being white—?”
“I shouldn’t a said that—okay? I …” He couldn’t say he was sorry, never had been able to say that. So instead he told her, “Don’t get your panties in a wad. My son marrying a white woman … I ain’t gonna lie—I advised him against it.” He held up his hands before she could jump on him. “I’m just telling it like it is. I thought it was a bad idea because I knew it would cause trouble for the both of you—and don’t you tell me it didn’t. Or that it ain’t hard on Ty sometimes, too.”
She didn’t argue with him.
“You a fine woman.” He couldn’t believe he’d said that! Was being sick making him soft, or was that what happened to you when you brain wasn’t getting enough oxygen? “Ty’s a good boy. I ain’t much of a grandfather, but I’m the only one he got and for whatever time I got left—”
“Whatever time you … are you all right? You … don’t look good. Are you sick?”
Stepped in it again.
“I’m seventy-four years old. I traveled a lot of miles in my life, girlie, and most of them roads wasn’t paved.”
The details of his issues were private. Might not ever have to explain nothing, might be like that doctor said, that he’d just drop over dead one day.
He’d finally given in and gone to a doctor after he got where he was afraid to drive. Sometimes he’d go completely blind for two or three seconds. His hearing came and went, too, like some little kid was playing with the volume knob. And every now and then he got so dizzy he’d swear he’d downed a whole bottle of Boone’s Farm in one gulp—when hadn’t a single drop of alcohol passed his lips in ten years. Had the AA chip to prove it!
Them doctors had poked and prodded him, took scans and X-rays and way more blood than he figured he had to spare. Then that doctor said it flat out. A little Asian man who could barely speak English, looked like the moon-faced Chinaman who sold tickets for a nickel to ride the Jack Rabbit at Kennywood Amusement Park when Theo was a boy.
“Mr. Carmichael,” the doctor said. “You have …” and then he said a word so long it used up almost a whole breath.
“You mind chopping what you just said into bite-sized pieces so I can gum it—left my dentures in my other suit.”
Blank look.
Before the doctor could point out that Theo had all his own teeth, he told the little man, “No mayonnaise talk, okay?” Theo didn’t waste his time with folks who used words that had more letters in them than mayonnaise.
Blanker look.
“Small words … like in a fortune cookie?”
Big smile.
“Ah, yes sir. A brain tumor. Cancer. You are fortunate man. It is operable. We remove it, you be good as new. You have surgery very soon, though. You wait, too late.”
“And if I don’t want you to cut my head open?”
“You die slowly, maybe. Or you drop over dead. Hard to say.”
That’d been a conversation stopper. Oh, you didn’t get to be seventyfour years old without wondering what was going to get you—because something was, and somewhere around sixty-five your odds of dodging whatever it was got worse with every breath you took. But when your wait your whole life to find out a thing, kind of takes your breath away when you finally do.
So there was a tumor growing up there in his brain that could kill him. He thought for a moment. He’d call it … Cornelius. Always did hate that name. A thing as important in your life as what could kill you had ought to have a name but no sense wasting a good one on it.
Then the Asian doctor wanted to schedule his surgery—in three days! But there was something Theo had to do first—just in case Cornelius didn’t fancy getting evicted and decided to blow up the building. He had to see Ty, spend some time with the boy. A few days, maybe a week, that was all. After that, he’d let them take an ax to his head. ’Course, he didn’t have no idea then he was gone get shanghaied! This wasn’t the first time ole Slappy’d played long odds, but these was getting longer every day.
He couldn’t tell Gabriella none of it. If she knew, that woman’d grab him by the ear, haul him off this mountain and drop him on the doorstep of the nearest brain surgeon. Besides, she had enough on her mind already. He looked up at the mountain behind the meadow and purposefully yanked the conversation away from his health.
“Them trees right up there,” Theo pointed to the mountainside that rose up above the valley. “The ones that look all shrunk, twisted up. Them the Jesus trees? You ever seem one up close?”
TY WISHED JOEY was here. Joey Thompson was his best friend, or at least he had been before they left Pittsburgh. Didn’t have a chance to tell him goodbye, though. Ty hoped Joey wasn’t mad at him about that because he couldn’t wait to tell Joey about the green snake when they got home.
Home. How could Ty ever go home again? How—?
He forced himself to focus on the snake, which he certainly couldn’t tell Mom about! She’d totally freak out. He’d brought a worm in the house once and she about went postal! Girls were like that, didn’t like dirty things and for sure didn’t like snakes.
Joey would love the snake, though. It was the color of lime sherbet. Ty had seen it two times by the big rock down from the waterfall. He’d tried to catch it, of course, but it slithered away before he had a chance. And he hadn’t really tried all that hard because he wasn’t completely sure it wasn’t dangerous, poisonous or something. He didn’t think there were any poisonous snakes in North America except rattlesnakes and water moccasins, but he wasn’t sure. He should have listened better when they were studying reptiles in science class. But that was when his father had—
He stopped right there. Had gotten pretty good at that in the past couple of years, of grabbing hold of thoughts before he had a chance to think them, thoughts that would take him there. He visualized that the ugly, scary, guilty thoughts were green slimy things like the stuff he coughed up that time he had bronchitis. And when they’d come sliding into his mind through a door cracked open in the dark place—all infected, ready to make him sick—he’d grab them with one of the hairclips mom used that had teeth like a dog biting down. And he’d open the door into the dark place where all the ugliness in his soul was stored and toss the green things in and slam the door back shut real quick. He’d lock it, too. But it never stayed locked.
He picked up the slimy green thought, but it hollered before he could get it to the door. You did it! Your father’s dead and it’s your—!
Bam! He banged the door shut, then took a deep, trembling breath. It was easier here to get past the shakes he always got when he had to handle one of the slimy things. This place was so different from everywhere he had ever been that it was almost like he was on a different planet, like all that had happened to him, what he’d done, was in another whole galaxy. And maybe … maybe it didn’t even count here!
He didn’t really believe that, but even lying to himself was easier here than it was back home.
The green snake wasn’t the only wildlife Ty had seen in the past three days. There were squirrels in those tall, straight trees—Mom said they were lodgepole pines, or ponderosa pines. He called them rusty trees because they sounded like a door opening on a rusty hinge, like they needed an oil can as bad as that tin man in The Wizard of Oz, which was Mom’s all-time favorite movie ever. Ty thought it was okay if you liked singing but the special effects sucked—you could totally see the wires on those flying monkey things. Some of the squirrels in the rusty trees looked like the ones back home but others were gray with real bushy tails and great big ears that stood up on the tops of their heads.
He’d heard owls hoot in the woods and woodpeckers pecking but hadn’t seen any. There were lots of other birds and Mom knew their names. He never dreamed his mother knew so much cool stuff. She’d pointed out bluebirds and birds as yellow as lemons he couldn’t remember the name of. The big ones with black stripes on their wings were called tanagers, the little fat ones were warblers. And you could see hawks circling in the sky and maybe eagles and falcons, too—they were too far away to tell. Mom said golden eagles could spot a rabbit from two miles away! And that an owl’s round face acted like a satellite dish to capture sound. Yesterday, she put sugar water in this glass thing on the back porch and this morning there were hummingbirds around it—tiny things green as pickles, with wings moving so fast you couldn’t even see them.
P.D. bounded up to him, wet on his underside where he’d been splashing around in the creek. The dog raced around him in circles a time or two until Ty held up his hand, palm out toward the dog and P.D. instantly sat. Ty made a fist and moved it in a downward motion and P.D. obeyed by lying down in front of him. Then Ty got down on one knee to pet the dog, who promptly rolled over onto his back so Ty could scratch his wet belly.
“Good dog, good boy, good Puppy Dog!” Ty said, scratching furiously. He loved to watch P.D.’s left rear leg paw the air in rhythm with his scratching.
P.D. hadn’t been with him either time he’d seen the snake; he had been running around in the meadow chasing butterflies. It was a good thing, too, because P.D. would have caught the snake for sure, would have killed it. But what if the snake was poisonous?
Pedro would know. He knew all about these mountains. Ty liked Pedro, liked that his eyes were kind, that he talked soft and didn’t say mean things and laughed easy. And when he smiled—the way it looked like he’d lifted a broom up off his teeth made Ty want to laugh out loud.
Something moved in the damp undergrowth about ten feet away and P.D. was on his feet and after it faster than Ty could follow. Maybe it was the green snake. Then Ty saw a flash of it, dark and splotchy looking. P.D. snapped at it and missed then pawed at the spot where it had slipped away into the rocks covered with lichen. Whatever it was popped out the top of the rocks, P.D. lunged, caught it in his mouth and Ty cried, “Drop it!”
The dog instantly dropped whatever it was at Ty’s feet. It wasn’t hurt, and before it could get away again, Ty scooped it off the ground. He pushed his glasses up on his nose and looked at it in wonder. It wasn’t a snake—it had legs—so Ty knew it wasn’t poisonous. The only poisonous lizards in the United States were Gila monsters, and those lived in the desert. He did remember that from science class.
But this thing might not be a lizard. It was fatter than a lizard, with a round nose. He couldn’t see any teeth in its mouth. Its skin was skin—not scales like a lizard and it had yellow spots on it.
“Joey’s never gonna believe this,” Ty told the dog, who cocked his head to one side as if he understood every word. “I’m going to keep it, as a pet.”
P.D. barked once in agreement.
Ty turned toward the house. His grandfather was sitting in the rocker on the back porch and his mother had just stepped out the back door to join him. Ty headed down the creek instead of across the meadow, so he could go past the house and in the front door without being seen. P.D. padded along right beside him.
GABRIELLA THOUGHT SHE heard something on the deck above their heads, almost sounded like the door opened. But then Theo asked her about the Jesus trees and her mind went in an entirely different direction.
“You ever seen one up close?”
Gabriella looked up at the mountain stretching above them, the sight so achingly familiar she could almost believe she was a kid again, seeing it fresh and new every morning.
“There’s a chalet up there in the bristlecone forest—at 12,500 feet,” she said. “I don’t think my parents even knew it was there when they rented this cabin. I can see why it wouldn’t have been listed on the lease. It was more a glorified cave than a building, snuggled among the boulders with a wood frame and rock walls sealed with grout, one big room that had wooden platforms for sleeping bags, some cabinets and shelves and a big stone fireplace, bigger than the one here, covered the whole back wall. There was a picnic table, too, where Grant carved three interconnected G’s—Grant, Garrett and Gabriella.”
Gabriella’s mind created the scene in the air in front of her as real as the golden aster, the blue larkspurs and red Indian paintbrushes that splashed color on the meadow.
“That summer, we all went up to the chalet almost every day, the whole family, took supplies and spent the night sometimes. And if you think this place without electricity was rustic!”
She pointed to the bare rock near the mountain’s peak. “Up there, above the tree line past the bristlecones, that’s where my parents and older brother looked for aquamarine. They also found gem-quality smoky quartz, blue beryl, calcite and chalcedony, too, beautiful rocks, but their best specimens were aquamarine.”
“That where you got that crystal rock you wasn’t ’bout to leave behind in Pittsburgh?”
“I don’t remember where I got that one. But I wouldn’t leave it behind because it was the only one left. All the rocks we had around the house when I was a kid—they’re all gone except that one.”
Theo squinted up at the forest above the back wall of the hanging valley. “And your whole family stayed up there?”
“We were just kids, didn’t mind the hard beds and the cold. We’d get up every morning and Mom would fix a big breakfast over an open fire in the fireplace—eggs and bacon or sausage we hauled up there in backpacks. Made coffee in an old metal coffee pot where you put the grounds in the water. Then they’d take Grant and climb up above the tree line looking for rocks and leave us behind in the chalet. We had this arruga horn we could use to call if we needed them; they weren’t more than half a mile or so away.” She laughed. “Child Protective Services would snatch your kids and never give them back if you did something like that today—left twin seven-yearolds alone for three or four hours at a time on the top of a mountain! But it seemed perfectly normal to us.”
Actually, that wasn’t entirely true. She had been frightened, though it hadn’t bothered Garrett in the slightest. He liked being on his own.
“They’d always be back by noon. The storms came in the late afternoon and we’d be long gone before that.”
“What’d you and Garrett do in that chalet all by yourselves for hours?”
The same thing they did in the cabin—amused themselves. Twin sevenyear-olds on the side of a mountain and their parents didn’t bring a single toy or activity from home for the children to play with. Which had come back to bite them severely the first time it rained for three days in a row and they were stuck inside St. Elmo’s Fire all together. Her mother had been about to lose her mind when she stumbled upon the Bible in the back of a bookcase. It was huge, the big Family Bible variety, probably twelve inches wide by eighteen inches long and three inches thick. But it was clearly not somebody’s treasured heirloom. The white leather cover was stained and torn and no longer attached to the pages, which were tattered and dirty themselves. The top right corner of the thick slab of pages had been chewed on by some animal with exceedingly sharp teeth.
“Here,” her mother had told her. “Use this for paper and draw me a picture.” While Garrett played with a make-believe train he’d constructed out of broken pieces of fireplace stones, Gabriella wrote and drew pictures on the pages of the Bible—which was conveniently designed with wide white margins and small-print text set in a block in the middle of the page like a picture framed by a large mat. Over the course of the summer, the book became a picture diary, an image journal that told the tale of Gabriella’s mountain adventure recorded with three broken crayons—red, blue and green—and a ballpoint pen.
In Exodus, she drew pictures of the cabin. In the book called Numbers—she could read that word without Grant’s help—she drew stick figures of the family. She and Garrett wore identical overalls, her mother had red, curly hair and an apron, her father wore a tie and Grant … he was identified by his huge smile. In First and Second Samuel, she drew the creek and Notmuchava Waterfall. Through the Psalms and Proverbs were pictures of the Chalk Cliffs. When they went to the chalet, she’d tear out pages to take with her, then folded the pictures neatly and slid them back into the Bible when she returned. She also had folded napkins with pictures she’d drawn in restaurants—even a blank check her mother had ripped out of her checkbook in frustration once to give her something to doodle on.
Gabriella remembered the first thing she put in the book, too, on the blank page opposite Genesis 1. Below a huge drawing of Mount Antero she’d printed: “I love you, Mount Anero! Your friend, Gabriella Griffith.”
Her last picture, in the back of the book, the last page, was an angry scrawl of black lines, made with a ball point pen applied with such force it tore the thin paper. Back and forth, she had scratched until the page and the back cover beneath it were torn. In small, block letters on the tattered bottom, she’d written, “I hate you!”
That Bible was the book Jim Benninger had found. Gabriella shrugged off the image of the torn page and focused on Theo’s question.
“What did we do while our parents and Grant were up on the mountaintop? Well, we were supposed to figure out some way to entertain ourselves—and stay inside the chalet.”
She paused.
“But, of course, we never did.”
Images formed in the air in front of her. Images she hadn’t looked at in thirty years.
Gabriella and Garrett wave at their parents and Grant and watch them until they are out of sight. Then they wait five more minutes. That’s the rule, five minutes. In case somebody forgets something and has to come back—though nobody ever has. But they’re careful anyway. They time the minutes on the big clock on the wall, stare at the second hand as it goes around and around and around.
And when it comes up to the twelve for the fifth time, they are free!
Out the door they scoot to play in the boulder field and the bristlecone pine forest. Each tree is unique, bent over, warped and deformed, twisted by the constant wind in summer and blizzards in the wintertime, growing in the rocky soil that has no grass cover—only gray-green lichen and tiny white and purple wildflowers. But since the trees are short and dense like shrubs, with wide spaces between them, the forest is a huge fairyland maze the children have learned over time to negotiate, branching out farther and farther from the chalet as they explore. Sometimes they stop in a clearing to gaze out over the Arkansas River Valley spread out seven thousand feet below them.
They play hide and seek and treasure hunt, leave trails of broken sticks for each other to follow, or pretend Garrett is Indiana Jones and they’re looking for the Arc of the Covenant in the forest. But no matter what the game, they almost always wind up at the same place. It seems like a long way from the chalet, on the mountainside where the boulders are huge, big as cars, and the bristlecone pine forest is thinned out. Garrett is the one who spotted it. He’s always the most adventurous of the two, always wants to go farther and farther away from the chalet when Gabriella is ready to go back so they won’t get caught.
In fact, she’d been telling Garrett they should go back but he went forward instead, out where even their parents wouldn’t go—beneath the overhang! A big rock juts out from a crest high above. It looks like the thing the doctor sticks in your mouth and tells you to say “ahh.” It’s so big and tall you can see it from the chalet and their father had pointed it out one day. Said it looked to him like that rock was barely hanging on, like it was ready to let go in a landslide that would take out everything below. To which her mother had said that he was being silly. That the rock had been there for thousands of years and just because he thought it was barely hanging on didn’t mean it was going to come loose if he walked under it and topple down on top of him. It was always like that. Their father was always cautious and their mother poked fun at him for it. She liked to explore, take chances, live more … her father called it “on the edge.”
Grant was like their father, looked like him, too. Both parents adored him, doted on him, talked to him like he was a grown-up. When they talked about Grant, they had special looks on their faces they never got about the twins, and Gabriella sometimes thought that maybe her parents didn’t mean to have any more children and suddenly there they were—two of them. She wasn’t at all clear where babies came from, so she supposed it was possible for them to show up even when their parents didn’t want them.
Garrett was as much like their mother as Grant was like their father. Gabriella didn’t know which one of them she was like; it wasn’t as obvious as with her brothers. Garrett was always pushing the limits, wanted to go farther, do more. Since Gabriella didn’t, maybe that meant she was like Grant and her father.
She’d actually been wondering about that when Garrett was so determined to go out under the overhang that day. He didn’t care that it was a dangerous place, with those rocks above ready to tip over and fall down right on top of him. He didn’t care that they weren’t supposed to go there—ever. In fact, that’s probably why Garrett wanted to go in the first place.
“Must really be somethin’ to stand right up next to trees was alive same time Jesus was walking around on the other side of the planet. Your folks spend much time there?”
His voice brought her back abruptly from where she’d gone. The scene fell out of the air in front her and she imagined she could hear it shatter into small, shiny pieces on the ground.
“We all went through the bristlecones on the way to and from the chalet, but nobody except Garrett and I spent any time there. If you got caught out there in a storm, you might as well paint a bull’s-eye on your chest.” She glanced at one of the half dozen lightning rods that protected St. Elmo’s Fire. “My dad must have put a dozen lightning rods around that chalet. Garrett and I called them zagga sticks.”
“Twin language?”
She nodded. “Grant said when we were little, we’d babble away at each other and nobody could understand a word we were saying. But by the time we came here, we only used a few words.” She paused. “Special words.”
“It still there, the chalet?”
“I suppose so. But odds are the overhang didn’t survive thirty years of snow and ice.” She told Theo about the balanced rocks, how Garrett had wanted to go there and explore. Something in the telling created an itch in her mind, but scratching it might edge her too close to images she’d been avoiding for three decades.
She shivered, but not from the chill in the breeze, then deftly redirected the conversation.
“We had a whole lot more fun playing in the creek and Notmuchava Waterfall. We saw a bobcat there once.” She didn’t mention they also watched a black bear amble across the meadow one evening, too. She didn’t imagine Theo was up to stories about bears. Or cougars, which they’d never seen anywhere near the cabin, but twice had heard their cry. “And we caught all kinds of critters there. At least Garrett did. I wasn’t into slimy, dirty things. Garrett put a bucket full of tadpoles in the sink once, brought frogs and lizards into the house. Even caught a green snake.”
Theo looked alarmed.
“Oh, they’re harmless, but Dad made him take it back where he found it and let it go. And he must have caught half a dozen tiger salamanders—dark brown lizard-looking things with yellow spots. He didn’t tell our parents about those. Tried to make pets out of them. He’d hide them under his bed—our room and Grant’s was where the stairwell, the office and the mudroom are now. He’d put them in shoeboxes and poke holes in the tops so they could breathe.”
She sighed.
“Apparently salamanders don’t fare too well in captivity, though. At least, Garrett’s didn’t. I can’t remember a single one that even made it through the first night. And when they died they smelled worse than a dead rat under a porch.”
TY SAT STILL on the deck floor directly above his mother, looking at the shoe box with a lid he’d just cut holes into. He could hear the creature he’d captured at the creek scratching around inside.
Well, he’d just have to take the salamander back to the rocks beneath the waterfall and let it go. No sense keeping it if it was going to die.
He’d have been a lot more disappointed if he hadn’t had other, more exciting things to think about than some stupid spotted salamander. A chalet! Up there in the Jesus tree forest! Tomorrow, he and P.D. would go find it. And go explore under that overhang thing, too, if it was still there. Just like his Uncle Garrett.
* * * *
Yesheb has escaped the bonds of living flesh, has died to mortality, risen from the pathetic shell of skin and soars now, prince of an ancient, unseen order that is powerful beyond understanding—a brotherhood with savage hungers and black intent.
He is master; legions bow to him. He is heir apparent to—
And then he is falling, falling, falling into an abyss deeper than time, darker than blindness, home to the essence of agony and isolation whose heart is still and cold.
Yesheb!
The word stabs into his head with such force his ears bleed black blood down his neck.
Time grows short.
The Voice melts the skin off his bones and it drips into a puddle around his feet. The profound dark gobbles up his agonized cries.
Do. Not. Fail.
A sliver of icy terror frozen into a glistening dagger punctures the right side of his chest and slices through him slowly. His heart beats frantically, like the wings of a fettered bird, as the ice inches closer, freezing everything it touches. His heart shrinks away, squeezes backward from the advancing needle as a man might back away from a hissing cobra.
When there is no more room in his chest, nowhere for his cowering heart to run, the ice skewers it, impales it, a fish stuck on a pike, flopping frantically. There is an odd crunching sound as the ice stabs deeper and deeper.
His skewered heart still beats in frantic agony but it pumps no blood, merely quakes, shivers and grows weaker and weaker. Until finally, the pounding heart stops. But the pain does not. It grows with every second of silence, festers until finally it—
Yesheb bolts upright in tangled sheets soaked with sweat and shatters the crust of the vision. The shell falls away and leaves him there like a wet, trembling baby bird with bulging blind eyes.
He sucks air into his straining lungs in ragged gasps that so sear his throat he begins to cough. Pulling himself free of the twisted bed covers, he leaps up, groans at the sudden weight on his injured foot, staggers to the window and shoves it open. He leans out into the cool, pre-dawn air and drags in great, heaping gulps of it.
The tears in his eyes from his coughing paint fuzzy circles around the lights of the city far below. It is a live thing. He can feel its dank breath on his face, hear its heartbeat of blaring car horns and wailing sirens. The city that never sleeps. How he loathes New York.
When he can finally breathe evenly again, he pulls back inside, closes the window, leans his back against the wall and then slides down it until he is on the floor with his arms wrapped around his knees.
He tries to think about what he has seen. It was not a nightmare, of course. The insipid conjuring of their own imaginations were the products of pathetic mortal minds. Yesheb’s was a vision. No, a visitation. Though his mind yanks back from it the way your hand instinctively jerks away from a flame, he must force himself to breathe slowly and deeply, to recall every detail of this melding of the world beyond darkness, examine it, listen to it, learn from it. Obey it.
Time is short.
That’s what The Voice said. As if Yesheb needs reminding. The hourglass is a fixture on the edge of his vision, a thing that moves if you try to look at it, but is never gone. The sands in that hourglass slip silently through the hole, pile higher and higher in the bottom half, golden grains in a pointed hill like a volcano. And sink lower and lower in the top glass, sucked down a vortex of swirling sand the way his soul is sucked ever downward by the circumstances of his life. The sand shifts beneath him and then falls away, dumps him into a whirlpool that will soon pull him out of this world, back into the other world where he will receive his reward. Or his punishment.
The full moon in June is only nine days away. Nine days! And he has no more idea now where his bride is than he did the day she gave the surveillance team the slip here in New York. His army of investigators eventually managed to pick up her trail at the restaurant in Little Italy. A background check of every guest in the Warwick Hotel the day the old man disappeared there revealed nothing. A check of the hotel employees netted them Eli Jackson, aka Drumstick, who had once played in a band with Theo Carmichael. With very little persuasion, Mr. Jackson divulged his involvement with the escape plan. The $5,000 he’d earned for his services wouldn’t likely cover the cost of his funeral. Yesheb’s investigators “purchased” toll booth camera footage that placed the Honda Accord with Gabriella at the wheel in New Jersey but after that the trail went cold. Before he drew his final, painful breath, Mr. Jackson had also described in detail the pistol he’d left in the glove box of the Honda.
Did Gabriella honestly think she could stop him with a gun?
The Voice suddenly roars in Yesheb’s head: Time is short!
His mind is struck so violently by the force of the words that it jackknifes, the front end slams into the back, the past into the present in a sideways slide toward oblivion.
He is six years old, crouched naked in a gilded birdcage that is not tall enough to stand in and not big enough around to sit down. The cage is suspended five feet off the floor in the corner of the huge dining room where the remaining members of his family, his father, mother, and three younger sisters are seated at the table.
They are having dinner. It is formal and tense. His father wears a blue satin disha dasha with pearls inlaid in a design around the neck and sleeves. His long hair is slicked back from his face in a stylish ponytail. The females wear black hijabs and abayas. No child dares speak. His mother certainly has better sense than to open her mouth. His father has not yet had enough wine to pontificate about anything so the silence is broken only by the scraping of forks and spoons on plates.
Yesheb can smell the food; the aromas seek him out like streams of water running toward a drain.
His mouth would water if he weren’t so thirsty his tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth like a piece of dried meat to the paper it is wrapped in. He has had nothing to eat in three days and only a cup of water each day and that was this morning.
No one may speak to him or acknowledge his presence. Make eye contact with him and you will join him.
This is Yesheb’s punishment for wetting his bed.
His three days in the cage will end at midnight unless he dares to foul himself before a servant hands him a can through the bars later tonight. If he cannot wait, he will remain in the cage for another three days.
When his sisters are punished, they are beaten. He often hears their cries and yearns to watch his father whip them. Someday, he will have his own whip and his own women.
Someday he will be too big and too strong to force into a birdcage!
The Voice speaks again the words it spoke in the vision: Do Not Fail.
The words are eerily familiar, of course. The last words his father ever said to him. Almost.
Yesheb has been summoned to his father’s bathroom. While his father relaxes in a just-installed whirlpool tub, the twelve-year-old boy must answer his questions. History. Science. Mathematics. His tutors have taught him well because they fear the wrath of his father as much as he does. They will be beaten if Yesheb makes a mistake. Yesheb will be punished, too, of course. His father will shove a sewing needle under his fingernail if he answers incorrectly. Yesheb can see a packet of them on the top of the marble steps leading to the tub. He will shove the needle deeper if Yesheb fails to answer the next question instantly and will insert a second needle under another fingernail if the boy is wrong a third time. When his father first imposed this particular torture, Yesheb was so distracted by the pain, he couldn’t think, and ended the question session with needles under every fingernail on both hands. But he quickly taught himself to wall off the pain, close the door on it and will it out of existence.
“Answer me correctly,” his father tells him, his eyes pools of menace and threat, the greasy dark brown color of shallow water in which something has drowned. “Do not fail.”
His father reaches over and pushes the button on the side of the tub and the bath water instantly begins to froth and foam as if full of piranhas in a feeding frenzy. He smiles, groans in pleasure and stretches his feet out to the end of the tub.
“Tell me who ruled Persia in 2580 BC,” he says and leans his head back.
“The Unnamed King of Awan,” Yesheb replies confidently. His father had been unable to trip him up about Babylonian kings a week ago—which angered him. Yesheb suspected he would change tactics this week and in anticipation of the change, he has memorized the names and dates of every known ruler of the Persian Empire since 2700 BC, beginning with In-Su-Kush-Sir-anna, as well as the rulers of Mesopotamia, of course, and of—
All at once his father’s head vanishes under water; his arms and legs begin to splash frantically.
The boy takes a tentative step forward, tries to figure out what—
His father’s face barely breaks the frothing surface long enough for him to gasp, “Turn it off!” before he is sucked back under.
Yesheb understands now. Anwar’s long hair has caught in the water in-take of the new tub!
By arching his back and pulling with all his strength, Anwar is able to lift his nose and mouth above the water again.
“The tub switch—off!” he yells.
Yesheb doesn’t move. His father’s voice seems to come from a great distance, as if he is shouting up from the bottom of a well. That’s because the other voice that speaks to Yesheb is so loud, clear and powerful it drowns out all other sound.
“Yesheb. Do nothing,” The Voice instructs.
The boy doesn’t move, merely looks at his father, watches him strain with all his strength to keep his nose out of the water.
“Yesheb,” his father gasps, and in opening his mouth he swallows water and almost strangles. “Off,” he commands. “Turn the tub off.”
“Your time has come,” The Voice says. “Watch. Enjoy!”
“Now!” His father is gurgling, coughing. The commanding, demanding tone is gone. “Yesheb, my son …” It is the first time in Yesheb’s life his father has ever called him that. “… turn it—”
The boy starts to laugh. He throws his head back and roars. The more he laughs, the more the laughter takes control until he could not stop even if he wanted to. Which he doesn’t. He wants to laugh. He wants his laughter to be the last sound his father ever hears.
Even after his father chokes, strangles, finally stops thrashing spastically and floats still in the water, Yesheb continues to laugh. He howls until his sides hurt so bad tears run down his face.
When he is finally able to control himself, he steps to the tub and picks up the packet of sewing needles. He lifts his father’s limp, still-warm hand out of the bubbling water and carefully shoves a needle under each fingernail. Though it punches holes in the skin of his own thumb so deep they bleed, he pushes each needle all the way in until it is invisible. When he has used ten of the dozen needles in the packet, he pockets the remaining two—mementos of the occasion. He leans over and spits into the water, then turns and walks out of the room.
The Voice seemed benevolent when he was a boy. It was his only friend. Over the years that changed. That all changed.
Yesheb hugs his knees tighter; the words ring in his ears.
Do not fail.
What can he do that he isn’t already doing? Should he hire another hundred private investigators? Another thousand?
The ones he has now are tripping over each other. What possible good could it do to pay more …?
His head snaps up. That’s it. That’s what he should do. Pay more! Not hire more people. Pay the ones he already has more money! Offer a reward.
He leaps up, ignores the pain in his foot at the sudden movement and hobbles to his cell phone on the night table. He hits a speed dial number. The man at the other end picks up on the first ring.
“Tell your men I will pay five million dollars cash to the one who finds my Zara!”