Blind Panic (26 page)

Memory Valley, California

As we crossed the main square on our way back to Sweet Memory’s Bed-&-Breakfast, we saw that the Aspen Café now had its doors open and was filled with people. It had a wide glass front with fluted oak pillars, and inside it had a polished oak floor and about twenty circular tables with bentwood chairs. The back wall was lined with mirrors, so that it looked as if it were twice as crowded as it really was. On the ceiling there were two large fans, but there was no power to make them turn, so the atmosphere in the café was hot and stifling.

A red-haired young woman in a red striped apron had set up a camping stove on the marble-topped counter and was brewing up coffee. There was a long line of people waiting to be served. At least a third of them were blind, with other people guiding them—wives and husbands and friends, and even some children guiding their parents.

“How about a cup of coffee?” I asked Amelia. “Looks like they have food, too. Well, Oreos, anyhow. And Kit Kats.”

I bought us two mugs of black coffee and took them over to a table close to the window, where five people were already sitting—three young guys in jeans and sweatshirts and a pretty girl in a very short denim skirt, plus (oddly) a State Park Ranger with a bristly brown mustache, still in his khaki uniform. What was even odder about them was that they were all bruised and scratched as if they been fighting,
even the ranger. The girl had her left arm strapped up with a belt and one of the young guys had the right sleeve of his shirt missing. But oddest of all was the way that they were all holding hands.

There were five of them, but there were still three spare chairs at the table. “Okay if we sit here?” I asked them.

They looked at each other uncomfortably. Then one of the young guys said, “The problem is, we don’t really want to break the circle.”

“What are you doing here, holding a séance?”

“No, nothing like that. But all of us were struck blind, and we found out that if we hold hands together like this, we can see.”

Amelia’s interest was aroused immediately. “You can see, just by holding hands?”

“That’s right. But we don’t know how long it’s going to last.”

“How were you struck blind?”

“We were fishing up at the south fork of the Pit River.

Like the Modoc County National Forest. Then this Indian guy comes up to us all dressed in black, and he has these two weird kind of life-size dolls with him. I don’t know—dolls or robots.”

“These dolls, or robots, or whatever,” said Amelia, “did they both have white faces, and bodies like rectangular boxes, painted black and red? And really bright lights that flashed out of their eyes?”

They all nodded furiously. “That’s right, man! That’s right! Have you seen them, too?”

“Haven’t seen them for ourselves,” I said. “But we’ve sure heard about them. Amelia here—her sister and her family were blinded up at Hell’s Canyon Recreation Area, in Oregon.”

The ranger said, “I can vouch for these kids because those things blinded me, too, whatever they were. I flew us all the way down here to burn up our fuel, three hundred miles and
more, and then we crashed. My partner was killed, God rest her soul.”

Amelia said, “This holding hands thing?”

“We found out about it by accident. We just held hands when we first heard the helicopter, and we could see.”

Amelia glanced around the café, at all the blind people shuffling up to the counter. “Have you told anybody else about it?”

“Not yet. We thought about it, but we didn’t want to upset anybody in case they tried it but they
still
couldn’t see. We thought we’d better wait for the sheriff’s deputies to come see us, thinking maybe they could organize it. We didn’t want to cause a riot.”

Outside the café, the afternoon was growing steadily gloomier. A charcoal gray bank of clouds had blotted out the sun, and the main square seemed to have had all the color drained out of it. Even the leaves on the aspen trees had turned to gray, and they began to shiver.

“Looks like rain,” the ranger remarked.

Amelia said, “Do you mind if
I
join hands with you?”

The five of them looked at one another. They were obviously wary of breaking the chain, in case they lost their sight again.

Amelia said, “I’m a psychic. I’m very sensitive to circles like these. I’d like to find out if there’s any psychic energy passing between you, which I strongly suspect that there is.”

“She’s very good,” I reassured them, giving them the thumbs-up. “She can talk to spirits and dead people, and make wooden heads rise up out of tabletops, and talk to
them,
too.”

“How about it?” said one of the young guys, a dark Italian-looking character with stubble.

One of other young guys, a chubby fellow with curly hair and flaming red cheeks, said, “
No,
man! What if we lose our sight again for good?”

“I think we ought to give it a try,” said the girl. She looked
up at Amelia, and I could see that there was an immediate rapport between them. Some people you just like the look of when you first meet them, and for some reason you trust them, too. I could see that this girl had immediately taken to Amelia. Maybe it was her hoopy earrings and all of her jangly bracelets. “What if she can give us our sight back permanently, so we don’t have to hold hands all the time? No offense, Charlie, but you have
really
sweaty palms.”

They all hesitated for a moment, and then the ranger released his grip on the Italian-looking guy’s hand, and we pulled out two of the three spare chairs and sat down. Amelia held hands with the ranger and I held Amelia’s hand and the Italian-looking guy’s hand.

“We don’t actually have to be in a complete unbroken circle,” explained the young guy who had lost his sleeve. He was skinny, with thick-rimmed eyeglasses, and he was so pale that he looked as if he had spent his entire life locked in a linen closet. The left lens of his eyeglasses was cracked, so that I could hardly see his eye through it. “We got our sight back when we just held hands in a line, but it seems a whole lot better when we sit in a circle. Brighter, you know. Sharper. And I guess we feel safer, too. We feel like we’re kind of sharing the experience, you know?”

Amelia looked at them all, one after another. “You’re Charlie,” she said to the red-faced young guy with the curly hair. “Your parents called you Clarence, didn’t they, but you prefer your friends to call you Charlie.”

“
Clarence?
” exclaimed the Italian-looking guy. “You never told us your real name was Clarence!”

“After Clarence Darrow,” Charlie protested. “My dad always wanted me to be a lawyer.”

“
Your
name is Remo,” said Amelia. “You were named for San Remo, the city, where your grandparents originally came from, because there isn’t actually a saint called Remo. And you—you’re Mickey. That was your father’s second name, after
his
father. Cayley—your parents just liked the sound of Cayley. And Jim, you were christened Robert James
Edison but you never liked anybody calling you Bob-Jim. You thought it sounded too much like
The Waltons.
”

The five of them stared at Amelia, deeply impressed. I had seen her do her name-guessing trick before at parties, but it still amazed me.

“Now,” said Amelia, “I’m going to close my eyes and I’m going to discover what kind of psychic power is running through you. I can sense it already—it’s like a generator humming, but it’s very,
very
strong.”

She said nothing for almost a minute, and we all looked at one another and tried to be serious about what we were doing. I usually found it hard not to laugh during séances, but this time it wasn’t difficult to keep a straight face. We all knew what would happen if Amelia couldn’t discover why these young people and this park ranger had lost their sight, and how they could get it back. They couldn’t sit at this table holding hands for the rest of their lives.

The inside of the Aspen Café was growing increasingly dark, and when I turned around and looked out of the window I saw a flicker of lightning behind the trees. The wind was getting up, too. Dry leaves were scurrying across the sidewalk and the sheriff’s deputies in the main square were holding on to their hats to stop them from blowing away. A large red truck appeared at the far end of the square and came slowly trundling toward us. It was gigantic, one of the biggest trucks I had ever seen. It parked next to the ornamental fountain and a black woman dressed in black climbed down from the driver’s seat. One of the sheriff’s deputies waddled over to speak to her.

“I think I’ve got it,” said Amelia, with her eyes still closed.

“You think you’ve got what?”

“I can feel it now. I can feel it so clearly. I can
hear
it, too—it’s like singing. Like a church choir, almost.”

“What is it?”

“It’s the
key,
Harry. It’s the answer.”

“The answer? I don’t even know what the question is.”

She opened her eyes, and looked around at all of us, and she was smiling. “It’s the
spirit
. It’s the
faith.
It’s why the pioneers kept going when they were exhausted and they were starving and the winters were freezing them to death. It’s an unshakeable belief in a better world.”

Ranger Edison shook his head. “I’m sure I don’t understand one word of what you’re saying to us, ma’am.”

“Let me try and explain it to you. The Native Americans have their magic, and it’s Native American magic that blinded you. Those things that look like boxes on legs, they’re sun devils—Eye Killers, the Pueblo Indians call them—with all of the brightness of the sun in their eyes.

“But when the pioneers came West, they brought their own magic with them. I’m not talking about spells, incantations, potions, or charms. For sure, they had deep religious faith, but more than anything else, they came with a vision. They had a firm belief that they could make this country blossom, like the Garden of Eden.”

“Hmm,” said Ranger Edison. “My family came from the west side of Baltimore originally. I sure wouldn’t call the west side of Baltimore the Garden of Eden. Not by a long stretch.”

“That isn’t the point,” said Amelia. “Some of the pioneers were greedy. Some of them were murderous. Some of them deliberately wiped out Native American tribes by giving them blankets infected with cholera. But they still had that vision, whether it was right or wrong, and it’s the power of that vision that’s giving you your sight back. It’s the spirit of the pioneers. It’s still here. It’s all around us. It’s in the air; it’s in the wind, just like Native American spirits. It’s
everywhere.
”

There was a bellow of thunder right over our heads. Lightning crackled on the far side of the main square and set fire to a poplar, so that it blazed like a candle.

“It’s coming,” said Amelia. “I can feel it. The beginning of the end. What did Dr. Snow say about Memory Valley? It was the last battle of the Indian wars. The last night of Native
American independence, after thousands of years. Now they’re fighting back.”

“But what can we do about it?” I asked her. “We might have the jolly old spirit of the jolly old pioneers, but that hasn’t stopped Misquamacus from blinding half the population, has it? And it looks like he’s going to blind the rest of us, given half a chance.”

“Erm…we’ve
seen
something,” Mickey put in. “I don’t really know if it’s real, or what it means. Maybe it was a mirage. But it was
soldiers.
Like cavalry, you know? Soldiers from the olden days.”

Haltingly—prompted now and again by Remo and Charlie—Mickey told us what had happened when Infernal John had first blinded them, and tied them all together, and forced them to climb up the promontory and throw themselves off. He told us how they had been rescued, and how their rescuers had vanished by the following morning—although they had briefly reappeared when they had held hands and their sight had returned.

Amelia listened very solemnly, still holding hands in the spiritual circle. “This could be good news,” she said at last.

“What,
more
spirits?” I asked her. “There are so many goddamned dead people around, there’s hardly any room left for us living folks.”

“You heard what Singing Rock told us in Portland,” Amelia reminded me. “Misquamacus has borrowed the spirits of hundreds of long-dead medicine men, so that he can appear all over the country and blind as many people as possible. But to do that, he will have had to open up the portal that connects the spirit world to the real world.”

“The
portal?
” asked Ranger Edison.

“It’s hard to describe it, but it’s like a sliding door, and if you slide it open, then one time temporarily overlaps another, just like a sliding door overlaps the the other door. You get two times existing side by side, parallel with each other.”

“Now you really
have
lost me.”

“It doesn’t matter if you understand it or not. The most important thing is that if Mickey and Remo have really seen nineteenth-century cavalry soldiers, then
they’ve
come through, too. And who knows who else. Misquamacus has opened up a connection between two different times, and he’s brought through it the spirits of all the medicine men he needs to help him. But he wouldn’t have been able to prevent any other spirits from following them. Or maybe—if they’re soldiers—they were actively
pursuing
them.”

“So how is this such good news?” I asked her.

“They’re
soldiers,
Harry. They’re experienced Indian fighters. And they saved these guys, didn’t they, when they were forced to jump off the top of that rock? Is there anybody else you’d rather have on our side?”

I sat back. “I guess not. Let’s hope we can find them when we need them. And let’s hope we can find out how to deal with these walking toolboxes. And Misquamacus, and his less-than-merry medicine men.”

“That’s why we’re holding a séance at Dr. Snow’s this evening.”

There was another burst of thunder that set the coffee mugs rattling. It had started to rain now—that hard, relentless rain that fills up the gutters in just a few minutes, and bounces on the sidewalk like eggcups. I saw four figures running toward the café, their coats and sweaters pulled up over their heads, and then the door burst open and they came inside, shaking their arms because they were so wet.