The Shasta Gate

by Dick Croy

  When she’d gotten him in that clinch a moment earlier, Pretty Boy had thought himself prepared for anything. But feeling Catherine’s warm breath and then the wetness of her mouth on his ear had taken him by surprise and he’d hesitated. Now it was too late. Roaring in anger and excruciating pain, he took his hand off the throttle.

  “She’ll bite it off if you don’t stop!” yelled Eugene.

  The bike was weaving all over the road. “She’s gonna kill us both!” he screamed.

  “Not before you lose your ear! Now pull over!”

  What choice did he have? The road was just a watery blur. Catherine’s teeth were clenched as tightly as her eyes were closed. She could taste his blood and was desperately fighting back the urge to gag. But they were slowing down.

  At about 30 miles an hour Pretty Boy finally lost control. The bike swerved off the road and dumped both of them on the shoulder, fortunately thick with weeds. Catherine was thrown clear, where she lay gagging and retching.

  Momentarily pinned beneath the bike, Pretty Boy managed to stagger to his feet and put his hands up in a plea for mercy. “Don’t hit me, man.”

  Eugene knocked them savagely away with his left and connected squarely with the right. Pretty Boy’s jawbone splintered. Knocked backwards, he sat down like a baby just learning to walk and stared glassily in front of him. Blood oozed from his mouth. He choked and spit out a shattered molar.

  Eugene stood over him quivering with rage. “Get outa here!” he said in a voice thick with loathing. “You ever try anything like that again...” He turned to Catherine. She lay crumpled on the ground on her side, her face buried in her arm. The dam had finally given way. He knelt beside her, a hand on her heaving shoulder, wondering if she’d been seriously injured—while she cried as she hadn’t let herself cry in years.

  “You were fantastic!” he said.

  Chapter 32

  I’m such a fool!”

  Eugene let her cry for a while, waving away the few motorists who slowed to see what was going on. After confirming that there were no bones broken, they moved from the side of the road to the edge of the pine forest which lined it on both sides for miles. Aside from some nasty-looking abrasions on one arm, Catherine seemed to have come through her ordeal in remarkably good shape, although he knew she’d be sore as hell tomorrow.

  Right now she wasn’t thinking of tomorrow or much of anything else. Emotionally drained, she looked as if she’d just donated two or three pints of blood. Her eyes stared vacantly from a face as white as her breasts had looked last night in the moonlight. But with sighs and sudden upwellings of tears, she was gradually reviving.

  “You ready to go back to town? Your uncle must be back by now.”

  “Normund? He’s not my real uncle.” She smiled wanly at him. “You said I was fantastic...” She put her hand on his knee. “Thanks for saying it—but you were the one. I don’t know what would have happened to me. How did you know what was going on?”

  “I didn’t—at first anyway. When I saw you go past, I went the other way.”

  She smiled sheepishly, again feeling ashamed of herself. “I can certainly understand why.”

  He reached over and grabbed the back of her calf above the ankle. An unaccountable warmth there told her in yet another way what it felt like to be rescued. She never had been before.

  “But something told me you might be in trouble.” He smiled at the memory, seeing no reason to tell her how the thought had manifested itself: something like, the dumb bitch probably has no idea what she’s getting herself into. “I figured you could always tell me to get lost if I was wrong.”

  Again he was simplifying what had been a brief but violent struggle between rationality and intuition on the one hand and blame and forgiveness on the other. The small voice warning him of Catherine’s danger hadn’t even been audible at first above the recriminations he was hurling about in his mind. But when he’d gotten past the initial wave of anger and indignation to see that of course she had no conception of the fire she was playing with—otherwise she wouldn’t be on the bike in the first place—he realized there was no real alternative for him at all.

  Whether she was safe or not, to ignore his conscience or whatever one wanted to call that small but persistent voice, was to invite disaster. Better to make a fool of himself than have to live with the knowledge that he’d failed to act when given clear warning he was needed.

  “I think there was probably more to it than that,” Catherine said. “I’m very grateful, Eugene. And very ashamed. Will you forgive me?”

  “Of course.”

  ... “To answer your question,” she continued, “I’m not so sure I want to go back now. I had...while I was going through all that, I got in touch with a few things I think maybe I’d like to share with you.”

  “Really? Like what?”

  “I’d rather not talk about it now. I’m still a little shell-shocked.”

  “I understand. Well, great! I’m glad you’re stayin’. I was planning to spend the night at Panther Meadows again.”

  “What about your meeting?”

  “Oh hell, that can wait.”

  “Oh no, Eugene—I’ll go with you. I don’t want you to miss it because of me.”

  “Hey listen, it really isn’t that important. I don’t think you realize it, but the whole thing sounded as lame to me as it did to you.”

  “I know, but something changed your mind didn’t it?”

  “Well, maybe—but that was before...” He completed the statement with a gesture that seemed to take in all that had happened since this morning.

  “Maybe before a lot more than you realize. I really want to go with you. With the same qualification you made: if it turns out to be a losing proposition, we can always leave.”

  He laughed. “Okay. You got yourself a deal.”

  ...After they had showered at the KOA campground just north of Mt. Shasta, Catherine insisted on buying her rescuer dinner. They went to her favorite place in town, an Italian family restaurant with a few secluded booths where one could avoid the stares if not the enthusiasm of other diners. The food was good and the boisterous mood infectious. After a bottle of Chianti neither of them was feeling much pain, which in Catherine’s case was no mean feat.

  Actually, the wine was only partly responsible; she was in that euphoric state which is as often the successor to danger as the apprehension preceding it. Now that she’d had a chance to give it some thought, she decided her performance under fire had been pretty darn assured. You could never really know how you’d react in a situation like that until it happened. And having escaped harm, she had been doubly gifted: She’d discovered that she could keep her head when her life was threatened...and she’d made that other discovery about her father—which for some reason it had taken Eugene, of all the men she had known, to trigger.

  After a leisurely meal extended through coffee and after-dinner drinks, at Catherine’s insistence, they drove up in front of a modest single-story frame house with the porch across the front, which Catherine had envisioned, minus the swing. A large maple took up half the front lawn and flowering shrubs scented the balmy evening. Abundant well-tended flowerbeds bordered the house and walk.

  This is the place?” Catherine asked.

  “Four-twenty-four—that’s what the man said, if memory serves. Lotta cars.”

  “But I don’t see any weirdos in robes and ethereal expressions floating around.”

  “I think most of them are in your mind,” he said, getting off the bike.

  “Do you think they’ll allow a nonbeliever into the inner sanctum?”

  “I think they’ll let us in the house.”

  “You’re no fun. You’re supposed to react.”

  With that Eugene raced up onto the porch ahead of her and, raising his arms in warning, intoned: ‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here!’“

  Laughing, Catherine reminded him, “That’s supposed to be over the doorway to hell.”


  “Well, it’s the best I could come up with on the spur of the moment.”

  “I can see she’s gonna love you.”

  He knocked lightly and the door was opened by a young woman whose attractive face was framed in a cascade of dark ringlets. She smiled and put her finger to her lips.

  “Is this Roberta’s?” he asked. She nodded and held the door open for them.

  “Leave your shoes here please and then find a seat anywhere you can,” she whispered.

  Catherine was pleasantly surprised at how conventional everything seemed. Aside from a profusion of pillows and cushions on which most people were seated or sprawled, and a collection of prints which included visionary landscapes and portraits of various saintly-looking individuals, the entrance hall and parlor could have belonged to almost anyone in Mt. Shasta. Furnishings and accessories were far too ornate for her liking but they had been assembled and arranged tastefully enough.

  Things looked clean. A vase of roses and another with an assortment of fresh flowers were illuminated by soft lamplight and candles which adorned the mantelpiece and a couple of end tables. There was a very light fragrance of incense in the air—not strong enough to be objectionable, she decided.

  She was grateful for the warm, low-key lighting that muted their entrance as well as the room and the interested stares of its occupants. There were 25 or 30 people arranged in a circle on the floor and in several comfortable-looking overstuffed chairs. A sweeping glance told her they ranged in age from teenagers to at least one elderly couple, and in lifestyles from students to outdoors types to the successful professionals one would expect to see at Esalen or in an encounter group in any large city.

  These last were the people who made her most uptight: the men with their beards, jewelry and custom shirts open to expose bronzed hairy chests, the women who looked as if they were dressed either to trade with the natives or having just traded, exchanging small fortunes for a handful of jangling, glittery, craftsy accessories. But it wasn’t the way they dressed that got to her; that was usually just the tip-off. It was the too-earnest air they had, a sort of refined desperation: they worked so hard on the image there was barely enough energy left to contain the naked ego. Was she afraid of these people because, like herself, they were all smart enough to know they were lost souls—without the trust to accept this condition as one from which to grow?

  No matter, the nouveau new-age were in the minority here anyway, she told herself as she and Eugene settled themselves where room had been made for them on the floor. Most in the group were closer to her in age, if not in outlook—in jeans and fresh, alive faces which looked genuinely glad to be here. And after her experience this afternoon, she felt she could actually identify with this aliveness for once, rather than automatically discounting it. What they said was true: a brush with death did make one more fully appreciative of being alive. But she was still very much on her guard.

  That was obviously Roberta—a lady in her late 50’s or early 60’s, wearing a sort of muu-muu. Although on anyone else it might have looked tacky, on her it was becoming, Catherine grudgingly admitted. The woman had a great deal of presence yet seemed to be extraordinarily relaxed. Her hold on this small gathering was effortless.

  “We’re talking about the ‘Lemurians,’ who some people believe live inside our mountain,” she told them, smiling in welcome.

  “Jesus,” Catherine mumbled under her breath. Eugene just nodded and smiled. The woman had his full attention.

  Roberta continued, addressing the whole group now: “Stories of these people are as numerous as they are bizarre. Their physical descriptions run the gamut from ‘Little Men,’ a race of tiny dwarves, to the Big Foot or Sasquatch creatures. Tens of thousands of years ago, when the continent of Lemuria supposedly existed where the Pacific Ocean is now, the Lemurians are said to have had a fleshy protrusion right here in the middle of the forehead—in the area of the ‘third eye’. This was supposed to be a highly-developed sense organ, used for mental telepathy. If the Lemurians still possess this sixth sense it would certainly help explain why they’re so seldom seen.”

  Catherine approved heartily of the mild laughter at this remark but noticed that others seemed annoyed by the amusement. She couldn’t tell from Roberta’s manner whether she was being sarcastic or not.

  “Many of the people who have lived here for some time—including some in this room, I might add—have experienced odd occurrences in connection with Mt. Shasta. But certainly one of the most authoritative witnesses would have to be Professor Edgar Larkin, who wrote several articles on Lemuria and Atlantis—at least one of which was published in the San Francisco Examiner.

  He was reportedly testing a long-distance telescope by training it on the mountain, when he noticed a gold-tinted dome which he said later looked like part of an Oriental building of some kind. It shouldn’t have been there. He studied the area for some time and claimed to have discovered a second dome and part of a third. Now, Professor Larkin was hardly your everyday kook. He was director of the Mt. Lowe Observatory in Southern California.”

  This produced a murmur of interest, but Catherine merely rolled her eyes at Eugene.

  “What did the dome turn out to be?” asked a tall thin man sitting next to the woman who had let them in.

  “Neither Professor Larkin nor anyone else that we know of was ever able to locate them again,” Roberta answered.

  “Well, wouldn’t you say that makes the sighting somewhat suspect?” he asked. “I mean, couldn’t it have just been some sort of optical illusion?”

  “I’m sure it could. But that possibility isn’t enough to discourage some of the people around here from believing the Lemurians are still among us. One of the stories I find most fascinating concerns a great bell, said to be made of a transparent material that makes it invisible unless you’re within a foot or so of it. It’s supposed to be located near a secret entrance to the mountain, and the wind blowing against its rim produces a strange high-pitched vibration—which repels anyone close enough to hear it.

  “According to legend, one of the cities beneath the mountain is named Yaktayvia, whose people are said to be the greatest bell-makers in the world. It was supposedly through the vibrations from bells and great chimes that the mountain was hollowed out into the corridors and galleries and rooms where the Yaktayvians live. And other bells, ringing continuously, are said to provide illumination for the city.”

  “This is too much!” snorted Catherine in disgust as another murmur prompted Roberta to pause for a moment.

  “Don’t be such a tight-ass,” Eugene said with a grin. She turned away indignantly.

  “Roberta,” asked a middle-aged woman on the other side of the room, “I can’t tell whether you really believe all of this or not. Would you mind telling us?”

  “Whether or not I believe it?”

  “Yes—please.” For the first time since their arrival Catherine leaned forward with real interest.

  “...Let me put it this way,” she began. “We know less than we claim to know about the universe we inhabit. Even as science improves its capacity to measure and record—in fact because of its outward and inward reach, sweeping former boundaries away to reveal new orders of infinity within the atom and beyond the galaxies—what we know is becoming a smaller and smaller percentage of what we do not know. Socrates was never more prophetic than now: ‘If I am wise it is because I know that I do not know.’“

  Eugene glanced over at Catherine and was pleased to see that the corners of her mouth were no longer quite so turned down, in her self-perceived role as the Skeptic in the room.

  “In addition,” continued Roberta, “the psychological dimension of the universe, in some way we are still just beginning to grasp, may interpenetrate the physical dimension, rather than merely coinciding with it. Apparently, there is no valid way of measuring what’s ‘out there’ without taking into account how the measurer and manner of measuring affect the measurement. The whole concept of
an objective reality existing independently of the minds which attempt to perceive and comprehend it seems to be giving way in some scientific and philosophical quarters to a hypothesis which I’ll generalize this way: the thinking in mind is an operation or process of reality: reality in flux. In other words, the individual human mind doesn’t just perceive objective facts and truths of the universe which contains it; it actually participates in the creation of reality for the human being who experiences the universe through it. And having co-created it, it can, and does, re-create it all the time. Perhaps there is no fixed objective reality for humanity then...only the potentiality to create all the phenomena which we constantly and unknowingly take part in creating.”

  Feeling the combination of rapt attention and agitation in the room, Roberta paused, and it seemed almost every one of her listeners took a deep breath or made some comment to a companion. “Are you still with me, people?” she asked with an almost mischievous smile. A smile which Eugene shared, Catherine noticed. Feeling her eyes on him, he whispered, “She sure loves messing with your mind, doesn’t she?” Although she’d been thinking much the same thing, Catherine merely grunted. But the consensus in the room was an affirmative murmur which prompted Roberta to take a deep breath herself and continue.

  “...Well, if what I’ve just been speculating has any basis whatsoever in reality, then the concept of relativity as it has so far been articulated by philosophers and scientists may be only the tip of the iceberg—or perhaps more to the point, only the tip of a whole pyramid or cone of “natural law” (with a base somewhere off in infinity) which exists right smack in the middle of all the hypotheses and equations so painstakingly constructed over the centuries as a bulwark of rational understanding against ignorance and chaos. And if ‘Mt. Relativity,’ I’ll call it in honor of our beloved mountain, is really there, then our concept of reality would seem to be skewed out of any semblance to reality as it actually is. Because we have failed to realize that for each of us, reality is relative to the operation of our own individual creative mind (or our use of what may actually be a shared resource) through which we experience all the phenomena of the universe.