Nightmare Country

by Marlys Millhiser

  “Who was here?” Russ looked uneasily at Agnes Hanley.

  “Backra. He and Jerusha … somehow have done this thing between them. We’ve got to make her talk. Adrian, and maybe Fred too, Agnes, could be somewhere—”

  “Called the hospital this morning,” Russ said. “She’s still unconscious. Look, I gotta—”

  “Sit down, Russ, or I’ll tell the sheriff and B & H just how it came to pass that Adrian was left alone that night in Jerusha Fistler’s bedroom,” the teacher said sweetly.

  Russ sat down and reached for another sandwich. He liked her better frail. “Who is Backra, and what—?”

  “Thad Backra, Thaddeus, tall, gray-haired man I’ve never met who lives on an island I’ve never visited.”

  “He the one lives next to that sand cemetery?” Agnes asked.

  “So you do dream of Mayan Cay?”

  “More lately than I ever used to. Them big black birds fly in circles over the tombstones, and the place’s all wrecked. Remember that first party, Russ, when Jerusha and Abner lived in the next place over and she had us think of that island?”

  “I was in Cheyenne. Didn’t get back till the fire.” But he knew the island, had visited it in dreams as well as by way of the machine in the mountain. He was amazed anyone else knew of it.

  “You’ve had a few dreams about Mayan Cay too, haven’t you Russ?” Tamara read his expression. “Odd we should all dream of the same place so often, since none of us have been there. What happened, Agnes, at the first party?”

  “Well, it was kind of like the one you went to. We all ate and then got sloshed, but she didn’t have that creepy plant. Got us all to think about the same thing, like one was a coconut, and she stood by these candles with her eyes shut, like a witch in a movie. I thought coconut so hard, I saw one on the table in front of her. But it kind of faded away. All some kind of game, she told us. Then she shows us a picture of this plant, like the one she’s got now. I don’t remember it, but the next day she claimed our ‘experiment’ had made a cutting of it appear on the table, and she’d rescued it from the fire. Big fuss. Made poor Abner go buy her a vaporizer. Folks kind of stayed away from her after that. Thought she was crazy. Till Miss Kopecky came, she—”

  “Agnes, remember Jerusha asking us at the end of the tunnel to think about Adrian?” Tamara Whelan’s skin was pale, veins feathered blue at her temples. Her hands trembled as she held her coffee cup. But the small lithe body had folded itself into Miriam Kopecky’s armchair, Indian fashion, as supplely as a child’s. She was a pretty woman even under stress.

  Agnes Hanley shook her head. Her troubles showed too in shadows around the eyes and in the nervous clasping and unclasping of her hands. “Hate to admit it, but I don’t remember too much of any of that.”

  “I do,” Russ said. “She put you against the wall and kept repeating ‘Adrian,’ and Agnes kept saying ‘Fred’ instead.”

  “And both Fred and Adrian are missing. And it was the same way she got people to think of the night-blooming cereus,” Tamara said.

  “But it’s not missing. It came, not went. ‘Materialized,’ Jerusha said, but she’s always been nuttier than a fruitcake.”

  “And she was interested in the mine, and Russ’s room with the machine, and … somehow these things are all connected.” Tamara set down her cup wearily. “I just can’t think how.”

  “Maybe she sent Fred and your girl someplace and brought the plant here the same way,” Agnes said. “Don’t make much sense, though.”

  “I’ve seen the night-blooming cereus on Mayan Cay, and Backra on Iron Mountain.”

  The last thing Russ wanted was to get further involved with these mysteries, so he was surprised to hear himself saying, “There’s some connection between this island and Iron Mountain. I don’t think those two are still alive, but we might find out what happened if we knew where this Mayan Cay was. Maybe we could call down there on the phone, sound ’em out.”

  “I know where it is, and I think we should go there, not just call.” The frail schoolteacher sat up straight and spoke with a strong, take-charge tone. “You, Agnes, because you might discover something about what’s happened to Fred. You could sell either your car or Fred’s truck for air fare, and we’ll sell Miriam Kopecky’s antiques for money for the trip too.” Tamara turned to Russ in a way he’d been expecting but dreading. “You should come with us, because you have some time off with pay between jobs and because there are some mysteries which, if not explained, can haunt even you, Russel Burnham, for the rest of your days.”

  It snowed the night before Tamara left Iron Mountain, and in the morning she pulled the Toyota over to the side of the road and stepped out to look back. In its coating of clean white, the mountain stood pristine and tall against a sky of snapping blue. It appeared to have dressed up to celebrate her departure, to have shed all those sinister qualities that had shadowed her life for months. Those months seemed like years.

  Did she leave her daughter’s body in a hole on the surface of that mountain? Had her baby died in lonely, painful agony? Terror? Would she roam the mountain now, like Miss Kopecky?

  Augie Mapes hammered on the shack he was building for his generator. The clack of the hammer cut across to her sharply on the cold air, and his red-plaid mackinaw looked like a flare against snow and new wood.

  Augie intended to invoke some form of squatter’s rights to the land on which his trailers and collection of junk vehicles sat and which was part of the parcel B & H had leased from the federal government for three-quarters of a century. He planned to dig a well and install his own generator. Russ didn’t think he’d get away with it, but if Tamara knew Augie and the mess he’d cause hosts of government paper-shufflers, it would be years before he’d be forced to move, even if his squatter’s rights were denied.

  He’d soon be alone with the mountain and its ghosts. Deloris Hope and her children had already moved into low-income housing in Cheyenne. Saul Baggette had found a job with an oil-drilling company in Casper. B & H would transfer Darrell Johnson to Colorado with Russ. Agnes Hanley had given Fred’s German shepherd to Augie, and Augie planned to move Jerusha’s chickens to his “lot” if she didn’t wake up.

  When Tamara and Agnes had driven Fred’s pickup into Cheyenne to sell Miriam Kopecky’s antiques, they’d stopped to see Jerusha in De Paul Hospital. And “see” was about all they could do. Jerusha lay thin and pale but not yet skeletal, kept alive with tubes and wires. Tamara had pulled the plug on the vaporizer in Jerusha’s apartment, left the night-blooming cereus to wither and dry, turn brown, and die. She’d have loved to do the same to Jerusha Fistler.

  Laramie County School District One had offered to transfer Tamara to a school in Cheyenne to assist in a class with “special needs.” But she had to look for Adrian. Which meant she broke the contract, and that would go on her record.

  Tamara turned now and crawled back into the Toyota, where Agnes Hanley sat crying quietly, and drove away from Iron Mountain.

  Interim

  Moment in Time

  Adrian careened through black, through a total absence of light. She could feel the heating up of her skin, the too-rapid shallowness of her breathing, as frenzied chemicals called her body to action. Even though she knew she’d left that body back on Jerusha’s bed.

  This was not like the dreaming had been. And there were “things” in this void with her. Unknown, unseen. She could almost hear them, sensed a whisper of their touch as she hurtled past and felt sickened at the thought of inevitable collision.

  Adrian imagined a scream she had no mouth to utter, imagined it trailing out behind her like a comet in the thick blackness.

  A wind or air current jerked her suddenly in another direction, a wind that sucked and pulled instead of pushing from behind. Perhaps her body was awaking, drawing her back. The wind turned on her, struck her. Adrian tumbled over and over and down, the wind shrieking by her like it would a diving, crashing plane. Light exploded into the darkness
. And then colors. Blues and greens shimmered, reached for her.… No sensation on impact. Just an abrupt end to her dizzying drop.

  The blues congealed to ocean, the greens to palm trees. The familiar ingredients of too many dreams. She hovered above clumps of tortured black rock with jags and holes.

  An old man knelt among a pile of browned palm fronds, staring past her openmouthed. He wore a khaki-colored shirt-jacket with short sleeves and extra tabs, like people wore in ancient Tarzan movies. His beard and hair were white and stringy but neatly trimmed, his eyes the color of frost.

  A movement at the edge of her consciousness, a sound of human agony or forced breath. Adrian whirled to see a giant in a lacy suit.

  “You’re an Atlantean,” the old man said.

  The giant raised his arms. “Primitive in the funnel!”

  He startled Adrian so she almost spiraled off the beach. The next she knew, they were following each other around in circles, apparently unaware of her. Adrian tried to hear what they were saying, but it became work just to keep from drifting off.

  She’d never felt this disembodied in her dreams, this bewildered, had always been able to see herself as whole. But since that peculiar current of air had caught her and tumbled her to this place, she’d had no sensation of body at all, not even the remembered response of the amputee, as though she’d lost all contact with the solid part of her:

  And as her fright grew intolerable, it bounced her about. That frightened her more, and the fear fed upon itself until colors spun, melted, merged, and she whirled. Nothing to grab on to to stop, nothing to grab with.

  She catapulted away from the beach and the human shapes below. Would she disintegrate? Fly off into pieces of thought that couldn’t recombine to form Adrian Whelan?

  What had Jerusha said? “Just relax, let your body sleep and your mind wander, and the fat will melt away without pain, because you won’t need food. And, oh, woman-child, when you wake, you’ll have a body to match your beautiful hair and eyes. And your mother will be so proud.”

  At the thought of Tamara, Adrian’s whirlwind ascent slowed and she began to drop.

  Jerusha had said nothing about her becoming separated from that body, traveling around alone and half-complete. Something had gone wrong with the experiment. That realization sent her spinning up once more with a sort of screaming panic that had a sound of its own. A sound as out of control as her motion.

  Mom? Mommy! Again, a lessening of the bedlam of this nightmare. She fought to form a vision of the thought of her mother, a comforting image, and to hold on to it as she settled back onto the beach.

  Now the giant sat on a rock with the old man at his feet. “We have perhaps repeated this conversation many times before, old Edward, and we are certainly doomed to repeat this moment many times again.” He said this without moving his lips. “Because we have slipped between time.”

  “Help! Please, help me.” Adrian tried to keep quiet thoughts smoothed over the desperate ones to hold herself together. She would have given anything to have her own misshapen flesh back to shield her from the rawness of this experience, and for a tantalizing second she saw it form beneath her—the colors of her blue jeans and blouse, slightly transparent but with unclothed forearms and hands extending from the blouse’s sleeves. But all vanished with her excitement over the sight, and she spiraled.

  Adrian concentrated on her mother, tried to remember what her daddy had looked like the last time she’d seen him, tried to relax—found herself hovering behind the giant’s left shoulder. The old man stared right through her. He kept asking the giant about God and time and nutty stuff. And she could feel the giant’s deep sadness pushing through the fancy lacework of his clothes. Adrian longed again for her own body to shield her from the pain of it, and blue jeans and blouse formed beneath her.

  “Who’s that?” the old man asked the giant, but looked straight at Adrian. “One of your angels?”

  “Help me,” Adrian pleaded, and watched the chimera of herself disappear.

  V

  Chimera

  33

  When Tamara stepped off the Sahsa jet that had flown her to Belize City from New Orleans, she realized just how foolish had been her hopes of finding Adrian alive anywhere, or even finding news of her in a place like this. The near-certainty that her daughter was not hopelessly lost, which had sustained her until now, weakened in the sudden onslaught of blinding sunlight, soaking heat, and humidity.

  “Feels just like Jerusha’s apartment.” Agnes Hanley removed her sweater and added it to the coat over her arm. “Really think I’ll find my Fred … here?”

  Tamara swallowed back a disappointment so intense it stuck halfway down and made her cough. She stumbled on the ramp stairs that led to the concrete runway, and a stewardess—Latin, beautiful, cool-looking—reached up to guide her last few steps.

  Sweat tickled down between her breasts. It had been snowing when their plane left Cheyenne the night before. It had been snowing when they left Denver at four that morning.

  “Belize International Airport, Bienvenidos a Belice” was emblazoned in blue across a building of white concrete block about the size of a small-town high school, with a tiny control tower where there might have been an old-fashioned bell tower. One runway. A huge military-drab helicopter approached over nearby jungle. A white man in tennis shoes and khaki shorts jogged along the runway. Antiaircraft guns sat surrounded by dun-colored sandbags covered with camouflage netting.

  “Looks like a military base,” Russ said as they waited under a hot sun outside the approach to the customs area and in a line of heavy-jowled North Americans of retirement age. A small dark plane screamed down the runway and rose into the air like a helicopter. Five more followed it at staged intervals. “Fighters. Fixed-wing. Vertical takeoff.”

  The weaponry everywhere around them seemed incongruous with the smiling black faces of the young airport personnel and the lilting, laughing tone of speech that had already haunted Tamara for months.

  “You suppose Jerusha came from here?” Agnes asked.

  “But she’s not black.” Russ looked out of his element in this alien place.

  “Not Kalkasin neither.”

  No passport was required to enter Belize, just proof of citizenship, and they passed through customs and out to a waiting taxi for a hair-raising ride along a narrow jungle-shrouded road and then through foot and bike traffic to an even smaller airport. Here they crowded into a propeller-driven Mayan Airline plane which held a pilot and nine passengers.

  Tamara sat next to the pilot, a Yankee who wore a leather flight jacket and a white scarf. He looked like Robert Wagner without the Pan-Cake makeup and told them that if they really wanted to see Belize they should visit Belize City sometime. Tourists were generally shunted around it and out to the cays. “You’d see the real Central America and some of the most incredible slums this side of Calcutta.”

  When they were over the Metnál, he pointed out dark shapes under the water that he claimed were wrecked ships encrusted with coral. The water was a true sea-green today, and so clear she could see the ocean floor, trace the shapes of coral banks and mounds from the air. Tamara wondered how the Gloucestershire could have sunk from view.

  Her dreaming of the Gloucestershire’s disappearance did form a link between this exotic place and barren Iron Mountain. Possibly a link to Adrian? “Accepting the loss of a child,” she’d overheard a sheriffs deputy tell Russ, “is just near to impossible for some women.” Was that all it was? Had she given Agnes Hanley false hope?

  Behind her Agnes said, “I never been anywhere before. I never saw anything like this except on TV. Never knew it was really this beautiful.…” She droned on in astonishment to her hapless seatmate. Perhaps both she and Tamara would begin to face their mourning here.

  An island appeared off one wingtip, its center a swamp of muddy water and long-rooted bushes. The pilot told her it was uninhabited. After a stretch of empty sea—another island, long and narr
ow, its beaches cutting a dazzling line between the green of the sea and the dark of inland jungle. Tamara imagined the taste-smell of sea salt and a fragrance mixed of flowers and the overripe greenness of vegetation. The memory impression of her dreams. Her heart speeded up even before the pilot announced, “Mayan Cay,” and circled above the lopsided heads of coconut palms, their fronds parted at the crown and flopping over in all directions.

  The plane lined up with the shortest, narrowest runway imaginable. And at the end of the runway, a settlement—one of its larger buildings a direct target ahead of them as they touched down. On either side, palm trees hemmed them in. They stopped just short of the swath of sand that separated the runway from the building—two-story, with children all dressed alike sitting on outside staircases and with lettering above the second-story balcony overhang that could be seen only from the air but which Tamara’s startled eyes had registered, “Escuela de San Tomas.”

  “‘Escuela’ means ‘school,’ right?” She realized she’d grabbed the pilot’s knee. “They built it at the end of a runway?”

  “Sort of like we’d put a housing development there, back in the States, or a shopping center.”

  “Well … you certainly earn your white scarf.”

  “Just remember, whatever you think of the way things are done here,” and he patted her hand, “these people think all backras are crazy.”

  “Backra? You know him?”

  “That’s what they call all Anglos.”

  A jeep from the hotel carried them and their luggage along a narrow street of sand between wooden houses sitting on stilts. Some white. Others in bright pastels—yellow, green, blue, pink. Some with sand yards enclosed by solid-board fences, lovely flowering bushes and plants growing directly out of the sand. Clothes hanging to dry under the houses. Poles carrying power lines aloft, looking naked and out-of-place. Footprints in the sand, and dog droppings. Theirs the only vehicle in sight.

  “Holy gonads,” Russ whispered reverently. He recognized this street too.