Secrets of Goth Mountain
Page 16
CHAPTER 8
AMBUSH
In the morning Elizabeth discovered Johnny in the kitchen, cooking eggs and sliced vegetables on the old wood stove. Light streaming in from several windows confirmed that it was morning. Both cats lay quietly on the living-room sofa, doing what cats do better than practically any other creature: they were sleeping.
“Smells great. I’ve never even seen a wood stove, not even on my Aunt’s old farm,” she remarked.
“Goth technology.”
“What are those greens you’re cooking?”
“Sugar snap peas straight from the garden.”
“One of my favorites, but they can’t be snap peas, they’re the size of cucumbers.”
“Bigger.” He tossed her a raw pea-pod, which she skillfully caught one-handed.
“No way!” she exclaimed. The pod was half a meter long. It indeed snapped when she broke it in half, revealing gulf ball sized peas. She skillfully tore off the tough fibers that ran the length of the pod along its edges, then bit into the tender green pod. “OK, it looks and tastes like a sugar-snap pea, but it’s impossibly huge!”
“Thanks to the Goth green thumb,” he replied. “I’ll show you the garden after we eat.” He carried steaming plates piled with over-easy eggs and snap peas to the dining table, where Elizabeth joined him.
“So, what’s going on with Two Bears?” she asked, between bites. “Like for instance how did he get back here before us? Even if he only had a short rest at Dooley’s, who gave him the ride? Dooley doesn’t drive or own a car, and neither does Two Bears.”
“I don’t know, but I think you’re trying to make it out to be more mysterious than it deserves.”
“Maybe. I’ve encountered stranger things here over the last couple of years.”
“The Tribe has its own ways, which may seem strange at times to outsiders.”
“I’ve heard that one before, lots of times. Can I see where you Goths grow the giant snap peas?”
Johnny had also finished with breakfast. “Sure.”
Stepping outside through the back door, their senses were assailed by the overwhelming sights, smells, and feel of the surrounding forest. At first Elizabeth could only stand wide-eyed, taking it all in. She noticed that Johnny was similarly entranced.
A hawk circling high above called down to them. Three-hundred foot tall fir trees swayed in the breeze. A half dozen black-tailed mule-deer grazed at the edge of the forest.
“The forest calls to me, Elizabeth,” Johnny said. “I have been away far too long. This place is where I should be, always. I can feel it.”
“It’s wonderful. Is that a barn?” She pointed at a second log building that was fifty meters behind the first one. It was even taller than the cabin, and featured great double doors.
“Yes. Built in the 1840’s, same as the cabin. It shelters the horses through winter.”
“But the logs that they’re both made of are titanic! How were the cabin and barn built?”
“The Tribe helped.”
“Ten tribes couldn’t move those logs! Some are over eight feet in diameter and fifty feet long.”
“You’re right, it must have been very difficult. I suppose that great-great granddaddy Goth brought some Archimedes know-how with him.”
“My God!” Elizabeth exclaimed. She had been looking at the old barn and the gigantic lilies that lined the stone path as they walked. Suddenly the path had wound through a last stand of flowers and opened into the vegetable garden. Directly in front of her were snap-pea vines that reached to the top of a twenty-foot trellis, zucchini plants with leaves the size of elephant ears, and lettuce plants with heads already the size of water melons. Juvenile eggplant and tomato plants, also king-sized, were already taller than Johnny. It was still only early spring; how big would this stuff eventually get?
“The garden is good this year, just as I remember it as a child," remarked Johnny.
"Good? This is more than good, it's impossible! Did Mort do gene splicing out in the barn to grow giant stuff for county fairs?"
Johnny laughed. "Stuff just grows good up here, that's all."
She shook her head. "There's got to be more to it than that, Johnny, much more."
She had been focusing on the garden, but now looked beyond it. A well-worn path led east into the woods, disappearing among impossibly immense trees, including impossibly immense Douglas firs that towered skyward well over three hundred feet. Fifty meters in from the clearing a three-meter high steel-framed gate blocked the path. An over-sized padlock locked it shut. An imposing barbed wire fence of equal height disappeared into the woods on either side of the gate. The Tribe’s holy place, the Goth mystery that Fenster wanted to know about, was apparently somewhere behind that second fence.
“I don’t suppose you can tell me what’s back there?”
“I wouldn’t, if I knew, but I don’t know anyway, at least not all of it. I saw much of it long ago, but I was too young to be shown everything.”
“But now they’ll show you everything?”
“Yes, I will need to be shown everything now. But the longer I am here, the more I remember about what my father taught and showed me already. First and foremost I have serious responsibilities; I am now the Goth.”
“That’s exactly what they used to call Mort. The Goth. Exactly what does it mean?”
Johnny smiled. “For several generations the Tribe and my family have had an arrangement for their mutual benefit.”
“Chief George told me something of that, in order to get my help. The Goths look after a holy place of the Tribe: what they call the Holy Forest. It’s through that inner gate somewhere, obviously. But it seemed to me that he told me only part of what he knew, and that even to tell me that much was very difficult for him.”
“Yes. You are probably the first non-Tribe person to know so much. They must trust you very much.”
“More desperation than trust, I suspect, since I’m not a member of the Tribe. But you are a formal member of the Tribe, White Wolf?”
“Of course.”
“This is all very strange.”
“I’ve been out of this for fourteen years. It’s a bit strange for me too.”
Strange and wonderful, she thought: this strange and wonderful place, ancient and wild, and this unusual enigma of a man that she had immediately liked and felt so strongly drawn to. “What’s next?” she asked, as they walked slowly back towards the cabin.
“Elizabeth, I’m thinking that you might be safer on the Reservation than here or back in town. Fenster and Dark are both very dangerous, and they seem focused on me and this place. You’ve already been caught in the cross fire.”
Elizabeth looked us into Johnny’s deep gray eyes, and she suddenly realized she was more concerned about being without Johnny than she was about encountering Barns, Skunk, Fenster, or even Dark. “I feel safer being here with you.”
“I’m going to be very busy for the next few days.”
“Secret Tribe stuff, right? I won’t ask you any more questions; just let me stay.”
“I don’t want you to get hurt.”
“I don’t want to leave.”
“On the Reservation you’ll be closer to your school.”
“I have a signed lease that gives me the right to be here, Johnny Goth! Even with cause you’ll have to give me a thirty-day notice to break it.”
“There’s plenty of cause, but we don’t have thirty days.”
“I just don’t want to leave you, Johnny Goth.”
Johnny smiled, but didn’t at first reply. He was having a second conversation with a very old friend.
“She likes you very much Johnny, and you like her,” said the voice in Johnny’s head.
“Yes, very much so,” pathed Johnny in reply. “What do you think of her, Two Bears?”
“I too like her very much; the whole tribe does. I’ll come to see you when I’ve finished here. We have very much to discuss. Good luck with Elizabeth.”
Two gunshots in quick succession echoed through the valley.
Johnny’s eyes went wide with horror as they lifted away from Elizabeth and turned towards the forest to the south. “No!” he cried out, in terrible anguish. Then without another word he ran swiftly across the clearing and into the forest beyond.
“What is it?” Elizabeth shouted, but Johnny was already gone, lost in forest shadows.
Elizabeth followed, calling out Johnny’s name as she went. Entering the forest he saw no footprints or other signs of his passage; she could only continue in what seemed to be the direction he had taken. Around her, she heard bird whistles and hoots, moving at ground level in parallel with her, converging towards some point ahead. It had to be some of the Tribe members that had been guarding the cabin that she heard, also moving towards the source of the rifle shots. The sounds gradually moved ahead of her and faded away, but she took that as affirmation that she was still moving in the right direction.