Ghost Dance (35 page)

Danby’s head glowed with death lust. But the blow to his skull had weakened the giant. He slurred and overbit his words. And every time he stepped to his left, there was a hesitation, a pause, as if he had to tell his body what to do next.

McColl must have seen the weakness, because just as Gallagher freed Andie, he stepped right and came at Danby with a vicious overhand strike. But the priest misjudged the depth of Danby’s malady. The memory of thousands of hours of training bypassed the befuddled parts of the assassin’s mind.

The madman lunged forward. His left forearm snapped out and cracked at the priest’s wrist, loosening his grip. McColl’s machete was flung through the air. Danby’s blade trembled at the priest’s throat.

‘My boy, my beloved boy,’ McColl gasped. He stood on tiptoes. ‘Don’t. I’m … Father!’

Danby hesitated for a long beat, then hissed the words slowly: ‘No, you’re not!’

The cut was horizontal and deep. The priest’s head lolled back at a sickening cant and there was a great gout of blood in the air and Monsignor McColl swayed and fell.

Danby tottered, transfixed by the quivering body below him. ‘You’re not!’

Andie plucked up McColl’s machete. She smiled at Gallagher in encouragement. ‘Now,’ she said. ‘Before he recovers.’

She circled to Danby’s left around the last burning candles while Gallagher went right, clutching the tomahawk. Danby became aware of them then, coming up from some deep abyss that he had explored and mapped too many times before.

His jaw jutted forward to expose the rank of his yellowed lower teeth. He was hunched so far forward that all Gallagher could see were the whites of his eyes. His bloody knife was poised in the air.

‘Ever fought with a hatchet, brother?’ Danby asked dreamily.

Gallagher said nothing, watching him, aware of Andie creeping closer. Danby went for his boot and came up with a short-bladed knife. He had two weapons now, both of them working the twilight.

‘It should be darkest night,’ he said. ‘And the light should be from lanterns and the bugs should be at ya, biting. That’s how ya have a hatchet fight. That’s how ya the like this, brother. That’s how everything dies like this.’

Danby’s voice had taken on the accent of the Vermont backwoods boy he once was. The muscles in his neck vibrated like piano wire. Gallagher brought up the tomahawk and pointed the blade directly at him. Danby grinned and sidled toward him while his eyes tracked Andie’s progress. He made a sharp feint at Gallagher with the knife. Gallagher tried not to react, but he jerked. Danby laughed wickedly.

He made a second stab and then a third and Gallagher swung wildly. Danby neatly dodged outside the attack, danced in and slashed his left arm. Gallagher leaped back even as Andie screamed at the sight of his blood flowing.

The pain was as if a welder’s torch had stroked through his skin. Gallagher stumbled and fell to his knees, staring dumbly at the bleeding arm, the last two burning candles, the pile of leather pouches and six loose pages of the journal on the cabin floor.

Danby grunted with pleasure and stepped in, readying himself to finish.

‘Charun,’ Andie called, husky and soothing, with just the trace of a Spanish accent. ‘Come to me. Come to your Angel.’

Danby’s next step was off-balance. He weaved on his feet, confused. ‘Angel?’

‘Your sweet Persephone, Charun,’ Andie said, thrusting her hips and holding her open arms toward him. ‘Come on. We’ll try again to cross the river.’

Danby took two steps toward her and ran his tongue halfway across his upper lip before halting. And a look of recognition crossed his face. ‘You’re not Angel,’ he seethed. ‘You’re one of the little Lawton cunts who used to tease me on the playground when I was a kid! You used to make fun of my mother!’

Andie froze in terror and he lumbered across the room at her, huge and looming; and Gallagher pictured Joshua Danby cornering Sarah Many Horses in the cave before he killed her.

Gallagher grabbed the loose pages of the journal. ‘Danby, don’t, or I’ll burn it all!’

The madman’s great skulled head snapped in his direction.

Andie rushed Danby. She cut him hard and deep in the bulk of his upper back. Danby bellowed in agony, spun and stabbed. There was the low, hollow sound of a fist plumping a pillow, and Andie coughed and looked over his shoulder at Gallagher with a surprised look of despair scrawled across her face.

Danby arched up as if in ecstasy and released his hand. Andie staggered backward into the wall and slithered down it. The hunting knife handle stuck out of her two inches below the right clavicle. She looked at the knife hilt, then up at Gallagher with a drunken expression.

‘Our love?’ she asked.

A harsh and incomprehensible stillness descended over the cabin. The glowing around her ebbed and Gallagher saw the image of the total destruction of himself: a sunken-eyed man alone in the frigid waters of a winter river, desperately casting his line across sterile shallows toward the undercut bank of a foreign shore.

He thrust the free pieces of the journal into the candle flame. Dry and brittle, more than a century old, they burst afire.

Danby was grinning at Andie, enjoying her desperate struggle for life. ‘Are you afraid now?’ he asked her wickedly.

Out of the corner of his eye, Danby caught sight of the burning journal pages and he bellowed in rage and raced toward Gallagher, the machete cutting the air. Gallagher slumped on his knees, showing defeat. His bloody left hand lay over his right, which covered the tomahawk between his thighs. The journal pages flamed out, turned to blackest ash, tumbled and fragmented in the still, rank air.

‘Now Charun will row you across the river, brother!’ Danby ranted.

Gallagher gazed up into his face and knew death, but was not afraid. ‘Do it, you sick fuck!’

Danby raised the machete with both hands as a farmer might a scythe before ripe wheat. As he reached the apex of his backswing high over his left shoulder, Gallagher spun on his knees, striking up and out with the tomahawk.

The stone blade shattered the low bones of Danby’s rib cage and buried itself to the back block in his lungs. An inexplicable, electric force bolted down the hatchet handle, crashed through Gallagher’s joints and exploded inside him. Gallagher’s vision strobed in shades of ebony and pewter. He heard an owl hoot. He smelled the rot of a river’s backwater.

Danby tried to scream, but all that issued forth was a series of long, moist rattles. The machete slipped from his hand. He buckled to his knees, and then forward on all fours, his body cringing, his head pitching from side to side.

Then he saw the red leather pouches Monsignor McColl had piled before the candle stubs and he reached for them in vain. The tips of his fingers brushed the ash of the burned journal pages and they crumbled to dust.

Danby collapsed onto his side, his soiled fingers splayed in fear and desire, his stone eyes staring through the expiring flame of the last candle before his lips moved one final time in knowing.

‘Persephone!’ he whispered.

‘I
FEEL LIKE I’M
drowning,’ Andie choked.

There was surprisingly little blood around the knife handle, which seemed to be acting as a plug to the wound. But with each breath there was an audible bubbling and Gallagher knew her lung was pierced, filling and in danger of collapse.

‘Am I going to die?’ she asked.

‘We never die,’ he replied, kneeling next to her. ‘Part of us goes on. You believe that, don’t you? Our love will go on?’

‘I want to think so,’ Andie said, smiling dreamily at the thought. She put her hand on his forearm and squeezed ever so softly. Then she closed her eyes and her head rolled to one side.

A blind panic tore through Gallagher. ‘No! No, not now!’ he yelled into the darkness. ‘Don’t let her go now! I’ll give up forever if you don’t take her now!’

Gallagher pulled off his belt and then his shirt and ripped it into strips with his teeth. One cloth strip stanched the deep gash across his bicep. With the second strip he tied tight the knife handle to Andie’s flesh so it would not shift and do any more damage. Then he looped his belt around his neck as a sling to support his bad arm and lifted her.

The air outside the cabin was thick, humid and bug-saturated. The full moon was rising over Danbyville, sending tentacles of shadow through the hardwood forest. He ran east across the clearing, past the blackened stumps and the fire ring where Terrance Danby had first tasted and wondered about the mystery of death.

Gallagher found the path Andie and he had used during their first visit to the clearing, but halted before going forward. Danby had set out booby traps in the forest. That was Chief Mike Kerris back there in the spear pit. Gallagher was sure of it. Kerris must have stumbled onto Danby’s green van when he was up trying to find his cousin’s broken headlamp, recognized it from the description of the fleeing vehicle at Nyren’s and come to investigate. And die.

Andie heaved as she fought for air in Gallagher’s arms. Monsignor McColl had somehow figured a way in here safely. He would take the risk, too.

Gallagher veered off the path and plunged straight into the forest, navigating by the moon shadows through the thicket, down gullies, sliding in the mud. The wound in his arm bled again. He had not slept three hours in the past thirty-six. His head went foggy when he staggered into a clearing near the rivulet that was the Bluekill River’s origin and laid Andie down so he might rest.

The moonlight shining on her through the forest canopy triggered in Gallagher the memory of Many Horses as she had appeared in his first dream—a fragmented, electric figure disappearing into a blizzard.

Gallagher picked Andie back up and began to run, aware of the forest before him, but inwardly focusing continuously on the perceptions of a terrified woman sprinting through a snowy forest under a full moon such as this a long, long time ago:

The powder snow blew on a cold gale, stinging exposed skin. Men yelled to each other in the woods behind Many Horses. Her lungs burned as she crossed a cliff and saw below her a lantern and, in the light, Joshua and Caleb Danby. Joshua was drinking from a brown cork-stoppered bottle and encouraging the others with the freshness of the track Many Horses gripped the leather bundle that contained the mysteries of her people. She ran uphill.

Andie’s breath was shallow, rapid and ragged when Gallagher broke free of the trees and out onto the dirt road that led back to Lawton. He sobbed as he stumbled up toward the gap on Gorm Ridge, which had became snow-drifted in his addled state.

He hallucinated a cave at the top of the rise and a light glowing at its mouth. With every step the cave glowed brighter.

Painted Horses and Ten Trees stood waiting at the cave mouth. Then they turned sideways to reveal a fire.

Gallagher settled Andie before the fire, which sparked and rolled into a blinding light. He tried to shield his eyes from it, but stopped when he became aware of shadowed forms dancing in and around the flames. He joined them, Ghost Dancing as Sarah Many Horses must have done a century ago when the voices of her pursuers closed around her.

E
ARLY THAT MORNING, HER
coffin was towed through the streets of Lawton in an open-backed wagon harnessed to a single black horse. The June wind had held southeast for nearly a week, funneling heavy, hot air north over the central Green Mountain. Mosquitoes whined. But the birds were oddly quiet.

The bells in the steeple atop St Edward’s Catholic Church tolled a slow, metallic dirge that echoed somberly across the rooftops of Lawton Mountain, now wholly clad in summer’s green foliage.

Quietly, the people of Lawton filed out of their shops, homes and schools to pay their respects. As Gallagher heard the clopping of the caisson horse approach, he rested his forehead against the bark of an oak tree at the corner of Whelton Lane, unable to watch. His feet seemed as numb as his left arm, which despite several operations had not yet fully regained feeling. But with hard work, the surgeons had said, he would eventually recover. But of that Gallagher remained wholly uncertain. He knew that in many ways he would never again be the person he was before Lawton. The strike of the horse’s hooves against the tar echoed in the thick air. A hand placed itself gently on his shoulder.

‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

‘I have,’ he answered.

‘Is the ghost beautiful or terrible to look at?’

‘She’s the most beautiful thing in the world to me.’

Andie leaned in against the oak tree and kissed him. ‘The plane’s ready for Sarah at West Lebanon,’ she said. ‘We should go.’

The flight to North Dakota took four hours. Gallagher spent most of the time looking out the window at the vast terrain Sarah Many Horses had covered after the massacre at Wounded Knee. And he thought about the depth and range of her heart and understood he had been opened up by her story to an invisible world of hope.

Andie slept for most of the flight. It had been more than a year since they had fought with death on Lawton Mountain, and the scars of her ordeal had not yet faded either. Her hair had silvered more at the temples. And she still insisted on wearing high-necked collars to hide the more dramatic wounds, including the scar from the tracheotomy the emergency rescue squad performed on her shortly after Deputy Phil Gavrilis’ headlights caught Gallagher dancing in an incoherent frenzy around Andie’s fallen body.

Gavrilis had gone up on the mountain looking for Chief Kerris and Gallagher after forcing the story from Bernie Chittenden. Within hours, television helicopters had circled over Danbyville, their searchlights probing the gloom for a glimpse at the shards of madness.

The plane touched down in Bismarck around noon. The drive south to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation took two hours. There was a crowd of hundreds waiting. Six young Sioux men unloaded the coffin that held the bones of Many Horses. They carried it on their shoulders up onto the bluff above her beloved Grand River.

The Grand ran white and sparkling in two channels. In the middle was a narrow island where succulent sweet grass grew amid a stand of the palest cottonwoods. A warm wind gently blew through the trees and jostled the leaves as they laid her coffin down.