The Summoning

by Bentley Little

Sue looked into those eyes that were so like her own. "You mean my D/Lo Ling Gum ? .... Her grandmother smiled, nodded. "Yes."

  She felt none of the power within her, but she held her grandmother's gaze. "It tells me to hunt it down and destroy it.

  "Then we will." The strength that had temporarily invigorated the old woman disappeared, seemed to visibly seep out of her face, and, grimacing, she leaned back on the bed and lay down again.

  "But... what do we do? How do we start?"

  "We wait. We can do nothing right now. I need to know more. For now, we wait."

  "But .. ." Her voice trailed off. People were dying; trees and animals were being killed. A moment ago, her grandmother had admitted that the situation was urgent, had said that they had to act quickly.

  Now she wanted to lie here and do nothing?

  "We are not the architects of events," her grandmother said. "We are merely the construction workers."

  What kind of KungFu crap was that? Sue wondered. "I have to warn people," she said. "Tell them about the cup hugirngsi."

  "You can try." But the tone in her grandmother's voice made it clear that she did not think anyone would listen. She sighed. "I am tired.

  I must rest."

  Sue leave. "What does

  Di Lo stood, preparing to your

  Ling Gum say?"

  The old woman shook her head, put her arm over her eyes, refusing to look at her granddaughter, refusing to answer. "I must rest," she repeated.

  Sue left the the door behind silently, room closing her, feeling far more frightened than she had before she'd come.

  The Indian summer came to an abrupt end. The temperature dropped sometime after midnight, shifting from summer to winter without even pausing at the intermediate stage of fall.

  In the morning, it was cold, and when Robert awoke and walked out to the kitchen, the floorboards beneath his feet felt like frozen steel.

  He dumped some grounds in his old drip pot, turned on the black-and-white television on the counter, and sat down at the table waiting. There had never before been an Indian summer in Rio Verde that had lasted this long, and that made him uncomfortable. The cold, too, seemed to be a bad omen, a portent of things to come, and he found himself wondering if anyone had died during the night.

  He stared for a moment at the dull gray metal of the coffeepot, then forced himself to stand up and walk out to the living room. He dialed the station, asked Ted if everything was all right, was gratified to hear that it was. But he still felt uneasy.

  He stopped by Rich's house on the way to work, dropping in unannounced.

  Corrie was already gone, and Rich was in the bathroom shaving, but Anna opened the door and greeted him enthusiastically. "Uncle Robert!" she cried, throwing her arms around him.

  Grinning, he picked her up and gave her a loud kiss on the forehead.

  She giggled, wiping her forehead with one hand while using the other to check inside his shirt pocket. "Where's my present?" she asked.

  He looked puzzled. "Present? What present?" Anna laughed, hitting his shoulder. "Come onI" "Hmmm. Let me think." He withdrew a stick of Juicy Fruit from his left front pants pocket, snaked his arm around her head, and pretended to pull the gum from behind her ear. "Why, here's a piece of gum!"

  He put her down on the floor, and she ran back through the house toward her bedroom. "Thank you, Uncle Robert!"

  He followed her into the hallway. "Rich! You home?" His brother stuck his head out of the bathroom, small flecks of white shaving cream around his neck. "Yeah. What is it?"

  "You busy today?"

  "Maybe. Why? "

  "I thought I'd go out and-see Pee Wee. You want to come along?"

  Rich off the with a towel. wiped excess shaving cream

  "Are you going to be talking about the FBI or vampires?"

  "Both."

  "Vampires?" Anna yelled from her bedroom.

  "Little pitchers," Rich said to his brother. "Get ready for school!" he called to Anna.

  Rich turned back to his brother, nodded. "I'll go. But I have to take her to school first. And stop by the paper for a few minutes." i "That's okay." Robert grimaced. "I have some faxing to do."

  "Have you talked to Pee Wee at all lately?"

  "A little. Just about Rossiter..... "You haven't asked him what he thinks--"

  "I was going to ask him today."

  Rich nodded. "I'll come by the station, then. Give me an hour."

  "You got it."

  Pee Wee Nelson lived alone at the far end of Caballo Canyon in a house he'd built himself. He'd started the house in the early 1970s, at the peak of the environmental movement, and had worked on it in his spare time and during vacations un till his retirement over a decade later.

  Made end rely from castoff and recycled materials, the house was known locally as Pee Wee's Pagoda, and that was exactly what the structure resembled. Disdainful of the geodesic domes and submerged earth dwellings popular during the period, he had decided instead to build upward, to showcase rather than hide his home.

  The achievement was significant, and the home was still being improved upon long after many other ecologically oriented dwellings had been sold or abandoned. There'd even been an article on Pee Wee and his house in the Arizona Republic the week he had retired as police chief.

  Of all other respects, Pee Wee was ultraconservative. An ardent NRA member and a Goldwater supporter from way back, he was a past president of the Rio Verde Republicans, and a very vocal right-wing activist.

  Like many lifelong outdoors men however, he understood nature and valued it in a way that many limousine liberals did not seem capable of.

  He was the only man Robert knew who had both NRA and Wilderness Society stickers on the bumper of his pickup truck.

  Pee Wee was in his seventies now, but he looked, talked, and acted like a man in his early fifties. He might be a little more stoop-shouldered than he had been in his prime, but at six-foot-five he still towered over everybody else in town and still had the ability to intimidate even the toughest cowboys. He a/so commanded the respect of nearly everyone in Rio Verde, Rich and Robert included.

  In recent years, he'd taken to making mirrors to supplement his retirement income, buying the glass wholesale and cutting it into various designs. The venture had proved lucrative, and he more than doubled his retirement earnings selling his "artwork" to tourists from the

  Rocking DID.

  Both Robert and Rich had one of Pee Wee's mirrors--gifts---hanging in their respective houses.

  It was ten o'clock before they finally left the police station, Robert promising Steve that he would be back before noon, ordering the deputy to stall Rossiter if the FBI agent called.

  Robert drove, pulling onto the highway without looking, swerving in front of a refrigerated semi that was al ready pushing the speed limiL

  The truck braked, swung into the left lane. The semi's horn blared, but only for a second, the driver obviously realizing that he'd been cut off by a cop car.

  "Aah," Robert said, grinning. "The trappings of power."

  Rich checked his seat belt. "Yofi're going to get us killed one of these days."

  "Pansy." "You always pull this macho shit when you go to see Pee Wee.

  You'll probably start spitting when we get there, too. You always do."

  They headed out of town, driving north. Robert honked as they passed Jud, hiding in his speed trap behind the bowling alley.

  "Would you ever have an affair?" Robert asked. "Why would you even ask something like that?" Robert shrugged. "I don't know. It's just that you and Corrie seem .. . well, not exactly all fired up about each other."

  "A relationship's not a straight line. There are hills and

  "This is a valley?" :

  "Maybe a canyon."

  "To me, the best part of a relationship seems to be the beginning. You know, when you touch for the first time, kiss for the first time--"

  "I don't want to hear where this is going." "It i
s, though. It's the best part. It's more exciting when you're first exploring, when her body's new to you--"

  "Do we have to talk about this?"

  "Just because you're stuck in a rut..."

  "The longest relationship you've had been, what, a month?"

  "Three years and you know it."

  They were silent for a while. right, Rich said finally. Robert sighed. "You know, many time I wish we'd had kids, Julie and me." "You think that would're changed anything? You think that would've saved the marriage?"

  "No. But at least I'd have something to show for it, yon know?"

  "I'Ve got a news flash for you. Kids are not trophies. They're people. It might gratify your own vanity if you'd had a child, but think of how tough it would be for that kid, shuffling back and forth between you and Julie--"

  Robert groaned. "Lighten up, for Christ's sake. Stop lecturing. I was just talking. You take everything so damn seriously. That's your main problem."

  "You weren't just talking; you meant it."

  "Give it up."

  They were into the desert, the town behind them, and the shoulder at the side of the highway was littered with the discarded husks of blown-out truck tires, their black and twisted forms looking like the charred corpses of known animals. The gravel sparkled with the shards of broken beer bottles.

  Robert turned down an unmarked dirt road that hit the highway just after the third cat de guard. The caI bumped down a low dip, then settled into a rut.

  "You know what's depressing?" he said. "I think I'm the only person from my graduating class who's still here, Everyone else has moved out of town, moved onward and upwaro. "Yeah, and they're working

  "Windowless offices I breathing smoggy air, driving in horrendous traffic, and living in crowded apartment complexes. You're lucky." knock off the back-to-nature crop."

  "You are. I mean, you're well respected, important, in a position of authority. You live in a beautiful area--"

  "It's a desert."

  "It's a beautiful desert. Look at that sky. Look at those buttes.

  This is the kind of scenery that photographer., make calendars out of. Raw beauty."

  I "You're so full of shit."

  Rich grinned. "You'd better be nice to me. You want me to start trying to talk some sense into Pee Wee again;

  You want us to get into abortion? Busing? Affirmative Ac. fion? The ERA?"

  I "Don't bait him. He's an old man."

  "Answer me, then. Where else would you get to pi off truckers just for the hell of it? And ticket people yo don't like?"

  Robert nodded. "This is true. i "See? You're not so bad off."

  The road curved around a low cactus-covered hill, the headed straight for a narrow opening between two lightl' striated cliffs, the western entrance of Caballo Canyon Nothing was said between them, no words were spoken but the mood in the car grew palpably more somber as the car fell under the blue shadow of the buttes.

  Robert glanced over at his brother. "You still don't think it's a vampire, do you?"

  "Not this again."

  "Tell me how a human being could suck every last drop of blood and piss and spit and everything else from four people, six horses, and God knows how many other animals through holes in their necks." He shook his head. "You know how you always said you hated horror movies because the people in them were so stupid? They'd hear screams at night and say their house was just settling, or they'd find a friend's body torn apart by a monster and then split up to see if they could find the creature? You always said you hated those movies because the people in them didn't act the way real people would act. Well, you're acting just like one of those people in a monster movie."

  He'd expected an argument, had half hoped for an argument, wanting desperately to be wrong and to be proved wrong. But Rich nodded wearily. "You're right "I am?"

  "I suppose your vampire theory's as good as any other. Probably better than most." The car bumped over a particularly big pothole, bottoming out, and he put a hand on the shaking dashboard to steady himself.

  "Tell me this. Do you think Pee Wee's going to buy the vampire idea?"

  "I have no idea. But I thought, at the very least, that he might be able to tell us something we don't know. Maybe this has happened before, and it was all covered up. Maybe the town was built on burial grounds or something."

  Rich shook his head. "What don't we know about this town? We've lived here all our lives. I'm the editor of the paper; you're the police chief. You think there's some deep dark secret that's been hidden from us all these years?"

  "I don't know. I'm just throwing out ideas." "Well, throw that one out for sure. It's stupid." "We'll see."

  The bloom of summer was still visible on the low upward sloping floor of the canyon, the pink cactus flowers land tiny yellow blossoms of brittle bush not yet having gotten word that winter had arrived. The road hugged the southern butte as the canyon opened out, widening into a plain that flattened into desert a few miles eastward. From here they could already see the pointed triangular contours of Pee Wee's home and, next to it, his old metal windmill, silhouetted against the morning sun, tail pointed east, vanes, turning slowly in the nearly nonexistent desert wind.

  Robert honked three times and gave a short whoop of the siren to let the old chief know they were coming, although he had no doubt seen the growing dust cloud kicked up by the car. The sound echoed off the rock walls, loud even with the windows up.

  "What if he's not home?" Rich said.

  "I called. Besides, he's always home."

  There was a corral close by the house, a square patch of dry tramped dirt fenced in by four irregular posts and a single strip of barbed wire, and within the corral, a bony horse stood on the hard ground, staring southward.

  Robert parked the car next to the west side of the corral, and the two of them got out simultaneously. Pee Wee was already walking toward them from the house, grinning hugely. "Glad to see you boys. It's been a while."

  "glad to see you, too," Robert said, extending his hand.

  Pee Wee shook the proffered palm. "Not a bad grip," he commented. "The job hasn't let you go too far to seed." He nodded to Rich. "Good thing your brother called first instead of just dropping by like he usually does. I was all set to go rabbit hunting this morning."

  Robert spat in the dirt. "Out by Dry Beaver Creek?" "Yeah." Pee Wee chuckled, shook his head. "Dry Bea ver Creek. Whoever thought of that name? It had to be a joke."

  "Maybe they were thinking of your sister."

  "Or mama." your

  Rich smiled politely, not joining in. He never had gone in for this sort of macho camaraderie, and he didn't know how to do it. Even witnessing it made him slightly uncomfortable.

  "It's chilly out here this morning." Pee Wee nodded toward the house.

  "Let's go inside, have some coffee, talk."

  Robert grinned. "I hear you."

  The two of them started walking, Rich following only a few steps behind.

  Pee Wee spat. "So the feds're tryin' to horn in on your territory, huh?"

  "Not only trying," Robert said. "Succeeding."

  "Can't say that ever happened to me. Nothin' big enough ever occurred here in my day to interest the feds." "But if it had?"

  "I woulda fought 'em tooth and nail."

  "My approach exactly."

  "I hate to bring reality into this," Rich said, catching up and drawing even. "But the important thing is that the murderer get caught, not who catches him. The way you're talking, I can just see you and Rossiter hoarding information, not sharing things with each other, trying to be the first to crack the case."

  "Yeah, right," Robert said.

  "He has a point," the ex-chief nodded gravely. "Your first duty is to your office, not your ego."

  "I know that. But the two aren't mutually exclusive."

  They walked into the house. The small narrow entryway opened onto a huge living room with a vaulted ceiling nearly two stories high. One whole wall of the
room was an eastward-facing window that offered a truly spectacular view of the open desert past the canyon.

  Pee Wee excused himself, went into the kitchen to get the coffee, and Rich and Robert walked silently around the big room, examining the new mirrors hanging on the wall opposite the window. The reflection of the desert in the angular hexagons and parallelograms gave the already oversize room an aura of true vastness, making the house seem as though it were suspended in air high above the sand.

  A collection of hunting trophies adorned the stone fire place to the left of the mirrors, and when the old man returned, carrying mugs of black Yuban, Robert pointed up at the mounted head of a javelina. "Is that new?"

  Pee Wee shook his head. "I ain't got nothing new for weeks now. The game source has pretty well dried up around here. I know there's been a drought for the past few years, but this is getting ridiculous. I haven't seen shit but lizards, vultures, and an occasional rabbit for the past month. Even the damn coyotes are playing possum."

  Robert and Rich looked at each other.

  I Robert sipped his coffee, preparing to speak, but before he could say anything Pee Wee cut him off. "All right, what is it? What's up? You two've been pussyfootin' around something ever since you got here.

  Spill it."

  "What would you say if I told you that there was a vampire in Rio Verde?"

  "I'd say you were a fool-assed chump and two sandwiches shy of a picnic."

  Robert sipped his coffee. Rich nodded. "A week ago I would've said that," Pee Wee said. "But that was before I saw the body of that wild filly out by the wash. Now I say tell me more." bert glanced up. "You believe it?" don't not believe it. That filly was nothing but a mummified corpse, and two days before she'd been eating my scrub."

  "We've found other animals too. And the mechanic and the groom and those two kids were all killed the same way. Drained of blood, emptied."

  "Exsanguinated," Pee Wee said.

  "Yes."

  "Seems to me this is where the feds or the staters'd be some help. What do they say about this?"

  Robert shrugged. "I haven't discussed it with them. The

  FBI agent is in charge of the investigation, but if he has some sort of overall strategy in mind, he's not sharing it.