by Damon Knight
“Tell me about Mother.”
“We buried her yesterday.”
Farley shut his eyes hard. “Christ! How long have I been here? What happened?”
“Six days. Now, Farl, I’m not answering anything else, so just don’t bother. You got a concussion, ten broken ribs, dozens of stitches here and there, and you are a solid bruise. Nothing seriously damaged. Now just shut up until Lucas gets here and goes over you.”
Then unabashedly he leaned over and kissed Farley on the forehead. “God, I’m glad to see you back, son. Now just relax until Lucas comes.”
“I’ve been out for six days?”
“Awake and sleeping, not really out all that time. Lucas said you might not recall much at first. Don’t stew about it.”
Farley started to speak and his father put his hand over his mouth. “Any more and I’ll go out in the hall.”
Lucas Whaite arrived and felt Farley’s skull, examined his eyes, listened to his heart, checked his blood pressure, and then sat down. “How much you remember now, Farley?”
“Being in here? Nothing. Or coming here.”
“You remember what happened to you?”
“We camped out, by the gorge near the old road …” Suddenly it was all there. “Are they all right? There was an earthquake. Were they hurt bad?”
The doctor and Will exchanged glances. Will said slowly, “Listen, son. There wasn’t any earthquake. You were talking about it before, and we checked. Farl, someone came damn near to beating you to death. Looks like they used four-by-fours on you, then left you for dead. Was it Sam Dumarie and the woman with him? What for, son?”
“Where are they?”
“Wish to God we knew.”
Farley groaned and turned away. “They’re missing? Is that what you mean?”
“No one’s seen them since you all rode out together last week. The horses came back around noon Sunday and some of the hands scattered to look for you. They found you at the campsite, more dead than alive. Should have died too, I guess, out there in the sun bleeding like a stuck pig. Your friends were gone, their day packs and yours gone with them, nothing else. And they haven’t lighted yet. Now you tell us what the hell happened.” Farley told them. Then a nurse came with his dinner and Lucas said he should eat and rest, and no more talk. He left, taking Will with him. The next day Lucas took out forty-nine stitches, from both legs, his back, his side and right arm. “Been run through a goddamn mangle,” he grunted. “Boy, there ain’t no way you’re going to lay where you ain’t on something that’s going to hurt.”
“Where’s Dad? What’s he doing about Victoria and Sam?” Lucas lighted his pipe. “He’s sleeping, I hope. Told him we had hospital business to attend to this A.M.”
“You don’t believe me, do you?”
“Farley, I delivered you, took out your appendix, named your diseases as they appeared, wrote your prescriptions for ear drops, cough syrup, stitched you up from time to time. I know you don’t lie, son. But I also know there hasn’t been any earthquake in this whole territory for years. It’s the concussion, Farley. Funny things happen when the brain gets a shock like that.”
“You believe Sam Dumarie could do all this to me and be able to walk away afterwards?”
Lucas tapped out his pipe and stood up. He lifted Farley’s right hand and held it so Farley could see the knuckles—unmarked, normal. “No,” he said slowly, “you’d have him in worse shape. We all know that. But he’s gone, the woman’s gone, and you’re in here. Listen, son, I’ve held Tom Thorton off long as I can. Maybe there was a landslide, or maybe you fell off a cliff, but there wasn’t any earthquake, and he’ll know that just as sure as I do. Maybe you plain can’t remember yet. I’ll back you up on that. But no earthquake.”
Over the next two days Tom Thorton, the sheriff, questioned him, a state trooper questioned him, the search was resumed in the desert, and no one was satisfied. Farley told Tom Thorton he had been caught in a landslide and Thorton came back with a map for him to pinpoint the exact location.
This was how it had been with Victoria, Farley thought. No one had believed her and she had come to doubt her sanity. Thorton returned again looking glum.
“Look, Farley, I was over every inch of that ground. There ain’t been no slide or anything at all out there. You sure of the place?”
“You calling me a liar, Tom?”
“Hell no! But a man can make a mistake, misremember. I been reading about concussions. Down in San Francisco they been using a medical hypnotist, helping people remember things better. I been thinking—”
“No,” Farley said. “Why would I be lying, Tom?”
“I been thinking,” Tom Thorton said. “We all know this Dumarie’s been digging around them mountains for years. What’s he looking for? He makes fancy jewelry, right? So what does he need? Gold! Silver! What if he found it on your land and took you out to show you, and you gave him an argument about it, being’s it’s on your land and all. Gold comes between brothers, fathers and sons. So he waits till your back is turned and knocks you over the head with a rock, then he takes you over by the gorge and rolls you down the cliff, him and that girl with him. He doesn’t want you found anywhere near the gold.”
“Jesus Christ! Just go out there and find them, will you, Tom? They’re both dead by now, but they’re out there, somewhere near the gorge, or down in it, or in the fenced-off valley.”
The next day Lucas reluctantly agreed to let Farley go home. It had been ten days since they had made camp by the ranch road at the Ghost River gorge. On the way home Will drove by the small cemetery. It was wind-scoured; clumps of junipers, small groves in the barren land, were the only signs of the care given the burial ground where Farley’s grandparents lay near Farley’s uncle and a cousin; where his mother now was.
Standing at her grave by his father, Farley said, “I’m sorry I wasn’t with you.”
“I know. That last night she dreamed of you. She told me. You sang and danced for her, recited some poetry. She said she held her umbrella over you so you wouldn’t get sunburned. The dream made her happy. She died without pain, smiling over her dream.”
Both men became silent; the wind whispered over the tortured land.
Farley sat on a rock, aching, hurting, unwilling to move again soon, and watched Fran ride up. She made it look so easy, he thought, remembering how Victoria had sat in the saddle climbing Goat’s Head Butte.
Fran waved, but didn’t urge her horse to quicken its gait; it was too hot to run a horse on the desert. She stopped near his jeep in the shade of a twisted juniper tree, tied her horse, then joined him inside the fenced area. No one ever brought animals inside if they could help it.
“They all said you look like hell,” she said cheerfully, surveying him. “They’re right.”
“You just happened to be passing by?”
"I came when . . . I’ve been home awhile, thought I might as well hang around to see you. Want to talk about it?”
He didn’t know if she meant his mother’s death, or the landslide he had dreamed up for the sheriff. “No.”
Fran nudged him over and sat by him. The sun was low; long shadows flowed down the gorge like cool silent lava.
“It was here, wasn’t it?” Fran asked. She lighted a cigarette and pocketed the match. “Serena said you came out here right after breakfast. Been here all day?”
He stared morosely at the gate standing open. Here in the hot still afternoon it was just another ranch gate; no way it could vanish with a twist of the head.
“We all think you were lucky. If you hadn’t been separated from them you’d be gone too.”
Farley turned to look at her. “Tell that to Tom Thorton. And my father.”
“We aren’t a bunch of superstitious Indians,” she said, “afraid of a curse on the land, or land claimed and held by a god. Tom will never admit anything so irrational, but he went over this whole area with half a dozen men at least twice. The rest of it, searching the dese
rt, the bulletins, that’s all for show. Your father, my father, if they knew we were sitting here, well, they’d probably lasso us and haul us out.”
“Aren’t you afraid to be in here?”
“Not during daylight.”
Farley laughed and pulled himself off the rock, wincing as he moved. “And I was going to invite you to come back with me tonight.”
Fran caught his arm as she rose. “You’re not serious! Why? What good can it do if you disappear?”
“I don’t know. That girl asked for help, and I told her to trust me. Now she’s gone. I can’t pretend it never happened.”
Fran shook her head impatiently. “When you were found, they thought you were dying, because they couldn’t wake you up. Dad heard about it and called me. He doesn’t approve, of course. We’ve had scenes. But he called me.” She glanced at him, then looked out over the gorge. She was speaking almost dispassionately. “I was having a dinner party, people were just arriving, and I forgot them. Forgot my husband, my children, my guests, everything. I got in the car and left, didn’t change clothes or pack. I just left. I outran a police car coming over Santiam Pass.” She shuddered briefly. “Then they wouldn’t let me see you. They wouldn’t even let me look at you. It’s a scandal, how I showed up late at night in a long dress, made a spectacle of myself.” She lighted another cigarette. “Edward came down. It was all very loud and nasty. He’s always known, but it was so discreet, he didn’t have to admit it. I believe in your earthquake. It’s shaken my world apart. I don’t want you dead. I don’t want you just gone, like your friends.”
“It wouldn’t work,” Farley said. “You wouldn’t stay here with me. I can’t leave.”
“Won’t,” she said; she dropped her cigarette and rubbed it out with the toe of her boot with exaggerated care. “Won’t, darling.” She shook her head at him. “Forever in love with the unattainable. It’s the poor lost girl now, isn’t it? Now you can live the ideal romantic dream, never have to make any tough choices. Come here and mope, prowl these hills all night and Anally one day your horse will come in alone and you’ll have exactly what you’re after. Complete nonexistence.” She strode away from him.
“What will you do?” Farley called after her.
Without turning she waved. “Probably go home and fuck the devil out of my husband and talk him into moving to San Francisco, or Hawaii.” She yanked her horse’s tether loose and swung herself into the saddle smoothly. “And you can follow your goddamn Pied Piper right into the side of the cliff!” She rode away at a hard gallop.
Tom Thorton was waiting for him when he got home. He charged off the porch, stopped when he saw Farley’s face, and said, “Good God! You look like old puddled candlewax.”
Farley concentrated on climbing the steps to the porch. Will stood watching.
“You eat anything today?” he asked quietly.
Farley sat down without answering, and presently Serena appeared with a tray. He drank the cold beer gratefully, then ate. He wanted a shower and clean clothes, but not enough to climb the stairs to the second floor.
“You can search those rocks till Doomsday. Won’t find anything,” Tom said. “I’ve been over that piece of ground three times myself.”
Farley grunted. “That’s the place. I’ll find something.”
Will opened a bottle of beer and poured it, watching the head form. “You came to the hospital and asked me about that piece of land,” he said. “I told you it was poisoned, as I recall. When my father came out here in eighteen-ninety or about then, there were stone markers down there, put there by the Bannock Indians. They were still thick then. No one ever said how the Indians read the stones, but they did. Little piles, like dry walls, here a heap, a mile away another heap, and so on. Anyway, over the years Pa got to be friends with some of the renegades, sheltered them, hid them when the army was on their tail, and they warned him about that three hundred acres. One of them took him all around that piece and told him to keep dear of it. From nineteen hundred two when he actually homesteaded until nineteen twenty-four when he bought the west quarter, including that piece, two Klamath Indians disappeared over there; six or eight white men vanished. Course some of them could have just wandered on, but he didn’t think so. Several dozen head of cattle went in and never came out. Soon as he got that land, he fenced it, been fenced ever since. Even so in nineteen twenty-nine two white men went in looking for oil and they vanished, left their truck, their gear, everything.” He drank and wiped his mouth.
“Tom’s been over it three times. I’ve been over it a hundred times or more.”
“Why didn’t you get help? People with equipment? Scientists?”
Will laughed, a short bark like a coyote’s. “In nineteen fifty when the hunt was on for uranium, we had a couple of geologists here with their geiger counters, stuff like that. They heard me out and we went over. Nothing. They moved on. Who’s going to believe you, son? You tell me. What’s there to believe? How does it fit in with anything else we know?”
“We found something,” Farley said angrily. “I heard that river! I smelled it!”
“And you’re damn lucky to be sitting here talking about it,” his father said quietly. “You’re not the first to go in and see or hear something and come out again. But you’re the first since my father began keeping a record in nineteen hundred two.”
“Victoria came out.”
“But she’s not around to tell anyone.”
Tom Thorton stood up then. “Whatever you say here don’t mean I buy it. I can’t put that kind of stuff in a report. People don’t get swallowed up by the desert. And that girl’s father is coming over here tomorrow. He says he’s going to make you tell him what you’ve done to his daughter. I think you better have something ready to tell him. And you better be here. I’ve had my fill of him; I tell you that.”
Farley hadn’t gone back to the gorge. When he made a motion towards the steps, his father had said very quietly that he would knock him out and tie him to his bed first, and Farley knew he could do it. He had gone upstairs and to bed. Now, waiting for Victoria’s father to arrive, he was glad he had slept. He felt better and stronger, and at the same time much worse. It was as if his emotions, his mind had taken longer to wake up than his body.
He felt deep shame over his treatment of Fran; his father’s grief and loneliness was a weight he wanted to share without knowing how. Most of all he kept remembering Victoria’s trust in him, her faith. The past few days all he had been able to think of was getting back to the gorge, finding something, anything. Not enough, he knew now.
He needed to think, to plan. Whatever was in the valley was pure malevolence; it could kill, had tried to kill him, had tried to drive Victoria over the edge of the gorge. He no longer believed in the earthquake he had experienced. It was as false as Reuben. You couldn’t believe anything you saw, felt, heard, experienced in there; and that made the problem impossible, he thought. If observers could have watched him that night, what would they have seen? He felt certain now that they would have seen him tumbling over the ground, falling repeatedly, running frantically, just as he had seen Victoria running and falling. But, he thought with a rising excitement, then she had risen, had ignored the lights and, like a sleepwalker, had simply left the area. That was the starting point. The clue to her escape that night lay in that action: she had walked away like someone in a trance, or asleep.
His thoughts were interrupted by the appearance of an automobile, or the cloud of dust from a car, at the top of the hill overlooking the ranch buildings. The car came down too fast, screamed around the curve at the bottom of the hill; the dust cloud increased.
“You want me out here?” Will asked from inside the screen door.
“No point in it. I’ll talk to him.” Farley watched the car careen around the last curve, screech to a stop. The driver was a thin, balding man wearing a pale blue sports coat, white shirt, tie, navy trousers. He made Farley feel hot. He went down the steps to greet Victoria�
��s father.
“Mr. Dorsett? I’m Farley Chesterman.”
The man ignored his hand and walked quickly to the shade cast by the house. “This is where she came to spend a week? In this hellhole?”
“You might as well come up and sit down,” Farley said. He went up the steps and sat in one of the canvas chairs. “You want a drink? Beer, Coke, anything? That’s a long hot drive.”
“I don’t want anything from you,” Dorsett said shrilly. “I just wanted to see for myself. A pack of lies, that’s all I’ve had from your sheriff. Nothing but a pack of lies. You don’t look like someone almost dead to me. And this sure as hell doesn’t look like any resort hotel where my girl would spend even five minutes, let alone a week. I want to know what happened up here, Chesterman, why my girl came here, what you’ve done to her.”
Farley told him the official story of the campout, the landslide. “I was found and taken to the hospital. They haven’t been found yet.”
“I’ll take that beer,” Dorsett said, wiping his forehead with his handkerchief.
Farley went in for it and when he came back Dorsett was sitting on the porch.
“Why did your sheriff send people poking around in my affairs? What’s any of this got to do with me?” The belligerence was gone from his voice.
“I don’t know. I guess he’s trying to account for the fact that Victoria and Sam weren’t found.”
“Ha! Because she’s just like her mother—follow anyone who whistles.”
“It’s hard to believe they’d leave anyone hurt, not try to help.”
“Didn’t her mother leave me in a jam? She ran off with one of my buyers, vanished without a word, nothing. Left me with a two-year-old baby girl. What was I supposed to do with a girl?”
“Did you ever find her?”
“I didn’t look! She found me a couple years later when lover-boy ran out of cash and things got tough.” He drank his beer and stood up. “As for Victoria, she’ll show up again. If you have any pull with that sheriff of yours, just tell him to keep his goddamn nose out of my business. I haven’t seen her and don’t expect to. I wasn’t sure if it was just him, or if you were making insinuations too. Now I know. If it’s a shakedown, he’s bucking the wrong man. I didn’t get where I am today being intimidated by two-bit politicians. You tell him, Chesterman.”