Ghost Dance (33 page)

Gallagher could not help it; he sang with Danby: ‘I am sending a voice. I am sending a voice.’

For what seemed like hours to Gallagher there was only the chanting, the rough noose chafing skin raw and one foot shuffling left and then the other. Then, with great effort, Gallagher was able to concentrate enough to look at Andie, searching for some sign that she was holding onto reason.

But her expression was vacant. Her jaw hung loose. She was a shell of herself pressed tight to Danby’s chest.

Gallagher’s vision went telescopic again, and Andie was transformed into one of those copper horses galloping out on the plain toward the mesa, getting farther and farther away. She disappeared into a canyon in one side of the mesa and Gallagher raced after her, hearing Danby’s drumbeat chanting fade in the wind.

The air at the mouth of the canyon was cold and strangely still. Gallagher called out for Andie, but heard no response. He crawled deep into the mesa canyon. The rocks became slick with slime. He scrambled through mud and over oily plants and boulders toward the rear of the gulch. The wall there was curved and nearly vertical. It disappeared into fog a hundred feet up. Rivulets of rust-colored water trickled down out of the fog over mosses, ferns and toxic flowers that grew in the scabrous black soil that clung to the cliffwork.

The last hundred feet of the canyon floor were shaped like a bowl descending perhaps fifty feet down into the earth. In the center of the bowl, in its very bottom, grew a ring of brilliant red whips, devoid of leaf or bud, but covered with thorn spikes. They pierced and seared Gallagher’s skin as he passed, and he cried out in terrible pain. But the idea that Andie had come this way kept him going. He parted the last of the whips and teetered on the edge of a pit that yawned into darkness. The rank odor of decay billowed up out of the hole.

Gallagher swayed there on the edge, then pitched into the abyss, tumbling over and over, screaming at the sick, rushing weightlessness that expanded through his stomach and burst out the back of his spine.

G
ALLAGHER AWOKE IN SUNLIGHT-DAPPLED
, sweet-smelling grass that grew in a forest of the palest cottonwood trees brushed by a breeze of insistent, perfect warmth. The air was alive with the flute music of a river shallowed by summer’s heat.

Sarah Many Horses appeared over Gallagher, then strode away through the cottonwoods in a direction opposite to the sound of the river. She wore a threadbare denim blouse, a calico skirt and high leather boots. Her hair was drawn back and held together by a stickpin embroidered with porcupine quills. Gallagher sat up in the sweet grass and called after her, but she did not turn. He got up and ran through the pale trees but could not close the gap that separated them no matter how hard he tried.

After a long time Gallagher slowed and just followed. Out of his peripheral vision he saw the vague forms of men, women and children slipping through the woods parallel to him. And now he made out the sound of a second river ahead. For an instant his attention wandered off Many Horses to others journeying in the glade.

Walking slightly in front and to the side of Gallagher were his mother and father. Agnes was wearing the blue dress he’d buried her in. She trailed Seamus, who wore his old gray tweed coat and cap.

Gallagher wanted to feel anger, to stop and tell them he hated them for who he’d become, but to his surprise he felt only pity and for the first time understood that they, too, had been lost and searching in their own way.

Many Horses stopped to wait for Gallagher. He glanced toward her and back to his parents. But they had disappeared into the flow of the others in the forest, replaced by a little girl, no more than three. She had Emily’s mischievous smile, her blond hair and her pert nose. But her eyes and chin and lips were Gallagher’s own. She walked up and took his hand and urged him on through the woods.

Gallagher and the girl reached a riverbank strewn with sun-bleached stones. A blinding sun was setting over the western shore. Close in, the river appeared shallow and easily wadable, but quickly gave way to a swift, dark and ominous channel.

People were leaving the island forest and venturing into the river. Many hesitated at the edge of the shallows. A few plunged resolutely into the fast water, swam the current with little struggle and disappeared into the blazing radiance of the sunset on the opposite bank. Others thrashed in terror mid-river and were cruelly swept downstream.

Gallagher’s parents separated from the crowd, then waded toward mid-river. He could not watch them after the water reached their waists.

Many Horses stopped where the water made her calico skirt cling to her thighs. She looked at Gallagher in longing. He took two steps in her direction before a hand grabbed him by the wrist and yanked him back toward shore. He turned to release the little girl’s grip and found Andie holding tight to him.

She kissed him and led him back into the streaky twilight of the island forest. She took off her clothes and lay down next to Gallagher and covered them head to toe in a blanket of sweet grass that filtered the last rays of the western sun.

The white heat still seared in Gallagher’s head when he came to and rolled over on the cabin floor. His tongue tasted of smoke and his nose gushed forth mucus. By the ambient light shining through the cracks between the indigo cloth and the rotting windowsills, it was late afternoon. The candles had burned toward stubs. One had already gone out.

Andie lay still and barely breathing next to him on the floor of the cabin. The worry lines had disappeared from her face. She looked ten years younger and so radiantly beautiful Gallagher wanted to cry. Her eyes fluttered open. The white heat in his head gave way to an unalterable calm.

‘You brought me back,’ he whispered.

‘No,’ she said. ‘You brought me back.’

‘The light—it’s around you.’

‘Around you, too,’ she whispered back. ‘It’s everywhere around us.’

A boot scraped over rough wood.

Danby sat slumped against the far wall, his Goliath arms laid across his knees. He clutched the tomahawk in one hand. His stone-colored eyes looped high in their sockets under hooded brows.

‘The old man lied,’ Danby fumed to himself, the way Gallagher’s father had on the subway a week before his suicide. ‘The squaw lied. Father lied. They’re all liars!’

With each word he hacked at the cabin floor with the hatchet blade. ‘Lied!’ he bellowed. ‘Lied! And lied! You can never see beyond!’

Chunks of wood spit into the air. He panted now. He picked up a filthy wall mirror and whipped it across the room. It smashed off a support post. Thick shards of glass caromed around Gallagher and Andie and then stilled.

‘Are you afraid of me?’ he asked. His glare seemed calculated to humiliate and degrade and to give him some perverse pleasure. ‘Are you, brother?’

Gallagher hesitated only long enough to look at Andie and that gentle yellow aura that surrounded them. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m not afraid of you.’

Danby swept out of his sitting position and up on his knees and toes. Veins stood out like writhing snakes across his chest, up his neck and at his temples. The muscles of his abdomen cavitated like plastic sheeting buffeted by gale. He lashed the air with the hatchet.

Neither Andie nor Gallagher moved or showed fear. Danby blinked in confusion. Then his head craned forward and he studied them as if seeing them new for the first time. The fury drained out of him. His eyes widened and his jaw hung agape.

‘You …’ he whispered. ‘You crossed and returned.’

His shoulders slumped and he mumbled self-pityingly: ‘Charun rowed you across, but the gods would not let him see the far shore. Charun will never see the other shore. Charun is the boatman. The cursed boatman of the dead.’

Outside, the forest had gone totally and unnaturally silent. No wind blew. No squirrels barked. No ravens cawed. Then there was a single snap of branch somewhere around the house and one of the little green lights on the radio receiver in the corner flickered.

Danby seemed not to notice. He let the hatchet drop forward from his fingers. The blade struck, cut and wedged into the planking. He drew it out and let it fall forward again, but added a snapping of his fingers. He did it a third time and a fourth and a fifth and a sixth; and as if that action were a pump sucking wrath from deep in his gut Danby’s scarlet rage returned.

He clenched the hatchet in his teeth and raced forward on hands and knees. His attention flared between the two of them. His teeth ground one on the other.

‘Not afraid, brother?’ he bellowed. ‘I’ll show you fear!’

He leaped to his feet, grabbed Andie by the hair and dragged her across the floor toward one of the windows. She slashed her feet out at him, but he sidestepped the blows and backhanded her across the face, dazing her.

‘We’re going to the other shore again, Angel!’ he simpered. ‘Hurry up, please, it’s time!’

Danby flipped her over and twisted her up onto all fours. He grabbed her belt with both hands and tore her slacks down around her thighs, binding her legs tightly at the knees. Andie struggled weakly to get away, but he held her tight by the length of rope connected to the noose around her neck. He pulled down the front of his black trousers. He was erect. Andie choked out low sobs. ‘No, God! Don’t!’ Danby wrenched the tomahawk from his teeth, raised it above her neck, men beamed murderously across the room at Gallagher. ‘Now are you afraid of me, brother?’

T
HE ASSAULT CAME BEFORE
Gallagher could speak or act.

It arced through time and space and indigo fabric, striking a glancing blow off the occipital bone at the back of Danby’s head. At impact he jerked like a marionette that has busted a string, and something dark and electric pulsed through the room. The monster collapsed inward, then toppled to the floor, barely breathing.

The tomahawk clattered toward Gallagher. He lunged after it even as a black pant leg thrust itself through the cloth covering the window. Gallagher was over on his back. His fingers reached toward the hatchet handle. A stiff hiking boot kicked the weapon into the shadows.

‘Thank God you came!’ Andie sobbed.

She was squirming on her back next to Danby, struggling with her bound hands to pull her slacks up around her hips.

Gallagher stared back over his shoulder at the black shirt and cleric’s collar of Monsignor Timothy McColl. The priest carried a length of oak limb about the size of a baseball bat. It was mottled with green lichen. His skin was flushed. His jaw chewed the air. His eyes darted from Gallagher to Andie to Danby and then to the journal and pouches in the pile next to the candles.

‘Cut us free, Monsignor,’ Gallagher gasped.

McColl ignored him and went to the journal. He picked up the pieces of it with trembling hands. ‘At last,’ he murmured unbelievingly. ‘At long last!’

‘Please,’ Andie pleaded. ‘You’ve got to help us, Father.’

McColl’s head turned toward her as a desert lizard’s might—slow, knowing and reptilian. Suddenly, his eyes clenched shut. He ground his teeth and clasped his stomach.

‘Father?’ Gallagher repeated softly to himself; and in that word alone, he knew that the priest was not their savior but another manifestation of their doom. In all of Charun’s notes, Gallagher had taken the reference to ‘father’ as Danby’s father, Franco. But now he remembered that Danby had known McColl long before he had been elevated to a monsignor. The priest was Danby’s ‘father.’

McColl’s eyes opened and he breathed heavily. He looked around wildly, like a man who has jumped a gold claim and is already plotting his defense of stolen treasure. Gallagher struggled to get to his feet, to go after the tomahawk Andie had rolled over and was trying to get hold of the machete trapped in the sheath under Danby’s comatose body.

McColl moved quick as a cat now. He booted Gallagher hard in the ribs. Gallagher grunted and writhed. The priest kicked him a second time and Gallagher curled up and rolled away from the blows into the shadows just beyond the dwindling candlelight.

McColl crossed to Andie. He used the butt of the oak limb to push her back away from Danby toward the cabin wall. ‘Don’t move, Andie,’ he ordered icily. ‘I don’t want you to suffer any more than is necessary.’

He grabbed Danby by the ankles and dragged the inert beast into the corner. When at last Gallagher’s breath returned, his fingers closed on a cold and sharply jagged object under him. The piece of shattered wooden frame held a dagger of sharp mirror glass. He turned it in his hands and got the keen edge against the duct tape and parachute cord that bound his wrists. McColl looked his way and Gallagher froze.

‘You knew who was killing in Lawton the whole time,’ Andie said. ‘You told Danby about Sarah Many Horses’ journal, didn’t you?’

‘I didn’t have to.’ McColl chuckled. He took his attention off Gallagher and looked at the pages with obvious enchantment. ‘Terrance told me about the journal when he was thirteen years old, and I just figured it was the odd fantasy of a very disturbed little man. Imagine that juvenile nonsense: that the scribbling of a heathen contained the key to looking into heaven.’

McColl held his palm up and swept it over the pages, the stones, the hair and the pipestone. ‘But here it is!’

‘What made you change your mind and believe it existed?’ Andie demanded.

His attention turned fully toward her now. Gallagher sawed at the duct tape and parachute cord and felt the glass bite.

McColl was enjoying himself. ‘You want the whole tale, I see,’ he said. ‘I suppose it’s the least I can do before … well

‘Before you kill us?’ she said.

‘I am a man of the cloth,’ McColl protested. ‘Because the fire that will engulf this shabby place will destroy all the evidence, the police will be left to come up with their own story. I think it will be that my beloved boy Terrance killed you for some twisted reason the police might never fully understand. But it will fit part of his pattern. Death followed by fire or water. They’ll come up with a theory—something about a terrible upbringing and an equally rotten manhood. I will receive some scrutiny, of course, but eventually it will pass. It always does. I’ve always been very careful.’