F Paul Wilson - Novel 03 (15 page)

           
 
"Which way does it
seem
we should go now?" he said and knew right away from her
expression that it hadn't come out the way he'd meant it.

           
 
"Look, Dan," she said, eyes
flashing. "I know you think I've gone off the deep end on this, but it's
important to me. And if—"

           
 
"What's important to me is
you,
Carrie. That's all. Just you. And
I'm worried about you getting hurt. You've pumped your expectations so high . .
."

           
 
Her eyes softened as she challenged the sun
with that smile. "You don't have to worry about me, Dan, because she
is
up here. And we're going to find
her."

           
 
"Carrie—"

           
 
"And now that I think about it, it
seems
we should take the south
fork." She swung back into her seat and closed her door. "Come on,
Driver Dan. Let's go! Time's a-wastin'!" Dan sighed. Nothing to do but
humor her. And it wasn't so bad, really. At least they were together.

           
 
It was getting near
four o'clock
. Dan was thinking about calling it a day
and heading back to the highway while there was still plenty of light left.
Wouldn't be easy finding his way back down in the light. No way in the dark. He
was just about to suggest it when Carrie suddenly lurched forward in her seat.

           
 
"Oh, my God!" she cried, her eyes
darting between the windshield and the sheet of paper in her lap. "Jesus,
Mary and Joseph, could that be
it?”

           
 
Dan skidded to a halt and craned his neck over
the steering wheel for a look. As before, the trailing dust cloud caught up to
them and he could see nothing while they were engulfed. But as it cleared . . .

           
 
"I'll
be damned," Dan muttered.

           
 
No, he thought. It's got to be a mistake. The
sun is directly ahead, it's glaring off the dirt on the windshield. A trick of
the light. Got to be.

           
 
Hoping, praying that his eyes were suffering
from too much glare, Dan opened the door and stepped out for a better look. He
shielded his eyes against the sun which was sitting on the flat ledge atop a
huge outcropping of stone ahead of them, and blinked into the light. He still
couldn't tell if it—

           
 
And then the sun dipped below the ledge,
silhouetting the outcropping in brilliant light. Suddenly Dan could see that
the ledge ran rightward to merge with the wall of the mountain of which the
outcropping was a part, and leftward to a rocky lip which overhung a sheer
precipice that bellied gently outward about halfway down its fall.

           
 
Damned if it didn't look just like. . . a
tav.

           
 
"Do you see it, Dan?"

           
 
He glanced right and there was Carrie, out of
the cab, holding the yellow sheet of paper at arms length before her and
jumping up and down like a preschooler who'd just spotted Barney.

           
He hesitated, unsure of what to say.
As much as he wanted to avoid reinforcing her fantasies, he could not deny the
resemblance of the cliff face to the Hebrew letter he'd drawn for her.

           
 
"Well, I see something that might
remotely—"

           
 
"Remotely, shlemotely! That cliff looks
exactly like what you drew here, which is exactly the way it was described in
the scroll!"

           
 
"The
for
g
ed
scroll, Carrie. Don't forget that the
source of all these factoids is a confirmed hoax."

           
 
"How could I possibly forget when you
keep reminding me every ten minutes?"

           
 
He hated to sound like a broken record, but he
felt he had to keep the facts before her. The scroll and everything in it was
bogus. And truthfully, right now he needed a little reminder himself. Because
finding the
tav
rock had shaken him
up more than he wished to admit.

           
 
"Sorry, Carrie. I just—"

           
 
"I know," she said. "But you've
got to
believe,
Dan. There's truth in
that scroll." She pointed at the
tav
rock looming before them. "Look. We're not imagining that. It's
there."

           
 
Dan wanted to say, Yes, but if you want to
perpetrate a hoax, you salt the lies with neutral truths, and the most easily
verifiable neutral truths are simple geological formations. But he held his
tongue. This was Carrie's show.

           
 
"What are we waiting for?" she said.

           
 
Dan shrugged and got back in behind the wheel.
The incline ahead was extra steep so he pressed the
LOW
RANGE
button on the dashboard.

           
 
"Can you believe it?" Carrie said,
bubbling with excitement as they started the final climb. "We're traveling
the same route as St. James and the members of the
Jerusalem
Church
when they carried Mary's body here."

           
 
"No, Carrie," he said softly.
"I can't believe it. I want to believe it. I'd give almost anything to
have it be true. But I can't believe it."

           
 
"You will, Danny, me boy-o," she
said, smiling that smile. "Before the day is out, you will."

           
 
The closer they got to the rock, the less and
less it resembled a
tav . . .
and the
more formidable it looked. Fifty feet high at the very least, with sheer walls
that would have challenged an experienced rock climber even if they were
straight; but the outward bulge and the sharp overhang at the crest made ascent
all but impossible.

           
 
As they rounded the outcropping, Dan realized
they'd entered the mouth of a canyon. The deep passage narrowed and curved off
to the left about a quarter of a mile north. He stopped the Explorer in the
middle of the dry wadi running along the eastern wall. Cooler here. The canyon
floor had been resting in the shadow of its western wall for a while. To his
left he spotted a cluster of stunted trees.

           
 
"Aren't those fig trees?" Carrie
said.

           
 
"Not sure," Dan said. "Could
be. Whatever they are, they don't look too healthy."

           
 
"They look old. Old fig trees . . .
didn't the scroll writer said he was subsisting on locusts, honey, and wild
figs?"

           
 
"Yeah, but those trees don't look wild.
Looks like somebody planted them there."

           
 
"Exactly!" Carrie said, grinning.

           
 
Dan had to admit—to himself only—that she had
a point. It looked as if someone had moved a bunch of wild fig trees to this
spot and started a makeshift grove . . . out here ... in the middle of nowhere.

           
 
But that only meant the forger of the scroll
had to have been here in order to describe it; it didn't mean St. James had
been here, or that the Virgin Mary was hidden away atop the
tav
rock.

           
But a big question still remained:
Who had planted those fig trees?

           
 
He turned to Carrie but her seat was empty.
She was walking across the wadi toward the
tav
rock. Dan turned off the motor and ran around to catch up to her.

           
 
"Where do you think you're going?"

           
 
"Looking for a way up," she said,
studying the cliff face as she walked. "The scroll says there's a
path."

           
 
Dan scanned the steep wall looming before
them.

           
 
"Good luck."

           
 
"Well, this isn't nearly as smooth as the
far side. There could be a way up. There has to be. We simply have to find
it."

           
 
Dan saw countless jagged cracks and
mini-ledges protruding randomly from the surface, but nothing that even vaguely
resembled a path. This looked hopeless, but the scroll had been accurate on so
many other points already, there just might be a path to the top.

           
 
He veered off to the left.

           
 
"Giving up so soon?" Carrie said.

           
 
"If there
is
a path," he said, "you won't spot it from straight on.
It'll only be visible from a sharp angle. You didn't spot one as we rounded the
front of the cliff, so let's see what things look like from the back end."

           
 
She nodded, smiling. "Smart. I knew I
loved you for some reason."

           
 
Dan figured he'd done enough nay-saying. The
only way to get this over with was to find a path to the top—if there was
one—and convince Carrie once and for all that there was no cave up there and
that the Virgin Mary was not lying on a bier inside waiting to be discovered.
Then maybe they could get their lives back to normal—that is, as normal as life
could be for a priest and a nun who were lovers.

           
 
He reached the northern end of the outcropping
and wound his way through the brush clustered around its base. When he was
within arm's reach of the base itself, he looked south along the cliff wall.

           
 
"I'll be damned . . ."

           
 
Carrie hurried to his side. "What? Did
you find it? Is it there?"

           
 
He guided her in front of him and pointed
ahead. Starting a dozen feet behind them and running up the face of the cliff
at a thirty-degree angle was a narrow, broken, jagged ledge. It averaged only
two feet or so in width.

           
 
Carrie whirled and hugged him. "That's
it! You found it! See? All you need is a little faith!" She grabbed his
hand and began dragging him from the brush. "Let's go!"

           
 
He followed her at a walk as she ran back to
where the ledge slanted into the floor of the canyon floor. By the time he
reached it she was already on her way, scrabbling upward along the narrow ledge
like a lithe, graceful cat.

           
 
"Slow down, Carrie."

           
 
"Speed up, slowpoke!" She laughed.

           
 
She's going to kill herself, he thought as he
began his own upward course along the ledge. He glanced down at the jagged
rubble on the hard floor of the wadi below and quickly pulled his gaze away.
Maybe we're both going to get killed.

           
 
He wasn't good with heights—not phobic about
them, but not the least bit fond of them. He concentrated on staying on the
ledge. Shale, sand, and gravel littered the narrow, uneven surface before him,
tilting toward the cliff wall for half a dozen feet or so, then a crack or a
narrow gap, or a step up or down, then it continued upward, now sloping away
from the wall. These away sections were the worse. Dan's sneakers tended to
slip on the sand and he had visions of himself sliding off into—

           
 
"Dan!"

           
 
A high-pitched squeal of terror from up ahead.
He looked up and saw Carrie down on one knee, her right leg dangling over the
edge, her fingers clawing at the cliff wall for purchase. She'd climbed back
into the sunlight and it looked as if her sharp-edged shadow was trying to push
her off.

           
 
Oh my God! "Carrie! Hang on!"