by S. T. Joshi
Or someone was. The man sitting across from her certainly didn’t match the description from Julie’s department secretary. He looked about as Native American as Cassie herself did.
So who was the mystery salesman?
“I’m afraid that arrangement didn’t work out, Ms. Barrett.” Disapproval crept into Gray’s voice. “She only lasted a few months here. We can’t afford to pay much, and the non-material rewards of the position weren’t enough, it seems.”
Cassie bit her lip. She hoped she looked embarrassed rather than alarmed.
Or suspicious.
“That’s too bad,” she managed. “I never met her, but I heard all about her rock art documentation. I was looking forward to seeing what she came up with for you.” She hesitated, trying to sound hopeful. “Unless those mural designs in the hall weren’t—”
“Some of them.”
Whatever enthusiasm she’d seen in those eyes was gone now. Before she could ask more questions, Gray passed her a clipboard. It held a standard volunteer information form and a cheap ballpoint pen.
“Given our holiday rush,” he said as she worked through it, “you’re welcome to start whenever you wish. We ask for at least two-hour sessions, preferably at least twice a week.”
Cassie agreed to start the next day, listed her preferred hours, and handed the clipboard back. Gray didn’t rise to see her out.
Strains of his office music—minor, plaintive, disturbing—followed her down the hallway. The lights had dimmed since her arrival. One overhead fluorescent was in its death throes, flickering shadows across the murals. After the first couple of panels, Cassie shifted her gaze straight ahead and walked quickly, telling her imagination to shut the hell up.
By the time she reached her Jeep, she was losing that argument.
Sundown this time of year gave the wind an extra edge. Her numb fingers fumbled her keys into the dirt. Muttering under her breath, she crouched to retrieve them—then sprang up as footsteps thudded toward her from the main building.
“Hey! You almost forgot this!”
Before she could react, the skinny teenage receptionist thrust something at her and ran away, veering toward the cluster of double-wides. Cassie didn’t even think about following. She unlocked her vehicle and slid in fast, locking all four doors before driving away at the maximum sane speed for conditions.
Thin snow had joined the wind by the time she reached the highway, snaking across it as she pulled over and flicked on her overhead light. The receptionist’s gift—a battered blue spiral notebook—lay on the passenger seat.
Cassie flipped open the cover. Lyn Trujillo, Ph.D., in shaky blue ink. Her Dream Journal.
* * *
Several hours later, fortified by a few sips from a stiff rum and Coke, Cassie switched on her desk lamp and took a deep breath. Trujillo’s journal, she reminded herself, was no different from the serious weirdness McAllister had left her. It might be one more minor artifact, recording somebody’s brush with the Outside. It might be nothing at all.
Blue spiral notebooks don’t bite.
And even if they did, they’d be outmatched. Jupe and Juno had followed her upstairs after dinner tonight, just as they’d been doing every evening lately. Before that flier had shown up, Cassie had blamed the approaching winter solstice: cold darkness meant hole up with the pack.
Now she wasn’t so sure. Maybe Frank’s frostbite wasn’t limited to humans.
Flipping past the oddly formal title page, Cassie found that Trujillo had started her journal in late August—not immediately after arriving, but while she still might have been in contact with Julie or other colleagues.
Gray says we are all “here”—who knows if he means PWP or Wyo. or this planet—to explore our spirituality, so here goes. For three nights now, I’ve been having the first spiritual dreams of my life. No clear details, just the sensation of something incredibly old & powerful. Sometimes I see rock art images, but nothing I can draw after I wake up. Not sure why the art’s there, but isn’t that how it is with dreams? I’m going to leave this journal by my bed from now on. Maybe sketching sooner will help.
Two days later, Trujillo sounded frustrated.
Still nothing. Nothing I can use for my designs here, anyhow. I’ve shown Gray all the books I brought with me—hundreds of petroglyphs & sketches—but he keeps asking for something fresh. Authentic but fresh. Says to get in touch with my own “deep understanding” of the culture this art came from, though how I can do that when the Anasazi weren’t even literate is beyond me.
Gray asked me tonight how my work is coming along. I think he meant my dreams, partly—he asks everybody about their dreams, even the clients. Maybe he’s a Jungian or something. Some of the clients really get him going. The stuff they come up with!
There were no entries for several days after that. Then, in the middle of an otherwise blank page, Trujillo had drawn a bowed tangle of lines with a single protrusion emerging from the right side, toward the top. Two more protrusions at the bottom seemed meant as feet.
The scribble was dated September first.
I hope Gray’s happy, Trujillo had written on the facing page. That damn flute tape—he told me listen to it before bed, so I did & what do I get? Same dreams I’ve been having off & on ever since I got here, but now they’ve got a soundtrack. Did manage to see one of the glyphs a little better, though. Tried drawing it when I woke up, but it’s nothing worth working with.
Cassie took another look at the scribble.
Then she reached for her rum and Coke and started flipping pages.
Kokopelli first appeared in the entry for September eighth. Trujillo was complaining about PWP’s logo. How, she wondered, could she create anything fresh with the biggest cliché in the Southwest in her face everywhere she went? Admittedly, the items this workshop shipped out bore some very interesting variants—
It was bound to happen, she wrote two days later. The ancient spiritual presence in my dreams is now Kokopelli. Or something similar, though I’ve never seen real petroglyphs quite like what I saw tonight. Fortunately.
There was a bonfire or something—a fire in a cave. Glyphs all over the walls, & they were all Kokopelli & they weren’t. There were flutes, & a wind. Then the glyphs started dancing …
Please, Cassie thought, let there not be coyotes.
There weren’t, but only (she suspected) because Trujillo’s alarm had gone off shortly afterward. At the bottom of the page, Trujillo had drawn a whole line of her dancing glyphs: two-legged and six-legged, hunchbacked and not. Almost all had flute-like appendages, and a few looked intertwined.
No need to dig out McAllister’s field journals. Cassie had been through most of them by now, and he’d made his own sketches. Images from tunnels running under certain kivas, from the backs of obscure caves and shadowed, inaccessible cliff faces.
Nyar’la’a.
Well, I’ve finally come up with a few designs Gray likes, Trujillo wrote about a week later. Says I’m finally in touch with that “deep understanding.” He’s already ordering stencils for stuff like coffee mugs—if I can come up with something really striking, he’ll do holiday cards. Or a new cover for those flute CDs the shops in Taos love.
I know I ought to be thrilled—this is what I’m here for, right?—but I’m not. We lost two clients last night. One overdosed & one hung himself. Same night I dreamed most of this art Gray’s so high on—I was working up the prelim sketches when I found out. I wish I’d torn them up, but I needed something for this morning’s meeting.
By the end of September, Trujillo’s handwriting looked ragged. Her sketching, however, had improved.
Started the pencil work today for that hallway mural Gray wants. It’s going to take a couple of evenings, but at least the clients will be helping with the painting. I’ve cut stencils for a lot of that—Gray’s suggestion. Stencils and spray paint, though I hate having paint around. We’ve got one or two huffers—pretty damaged—& they don’t need tem
ptation.
She’d added a couple of images Cassie recognized from her visit to PWP. One, she noted, had impressed Gray so much he was using it for the CD covers.
Not sure it’s worth it, though, she wrote a day or two later. The dreams are getting worse. Sometimes in a cave, sometimes outside, but always the damn flute & the glyphs & now coyotes. They howl like mad when the big one starts assembling itself—no, HIMSELF. Definitely HIMSELF.
Started work on the mural tonight after dinner.
The rest of the page held sketches, most still similar to those in McAllister’s field journals. The last, however, showed HIMSELF in the act of forming. Cassie flipped the page and reached for her rum and Coke again.
The glass was empty.
I told Gray to keep that paint locked up. I’ve rounded up all the cans now & pitched them—the mural’s nearly done & what isn’t yet I’ll do—but too late for … Cassie raised the notebook, squinting, but the name was illegible. We’ll be lucky if the county doesn’t shut this place down. Maybe it should. The clients aren’t making progress, & the dreams they tell Gray keep getting sicker.
One girl I work with (good artist, when she’s sober) says there’s screaming in her trailer almost every night. Nightmares. She wants to leave, but it’s too cold on the street in town.
Cassie scanned down the page. Trujillo’s handwriting was a mess, but the same couldn’t be said for her dream sketches. By mid-October, she’d switched to colored pencils and felt-tip pens.
Sickly green moons. Festering holes of stars.
And rising up against them, twisted and lean and hideous, something that raised its face to those stars … tore at them with straining appendages of that face—
Cassie flipped past, to the end of the notebook, then dropped it on her desk. There were no more words to read anyway. Trujillo’s final entries hadn’t even been dated, though she had obviously been trying to communicate something. More dreams? Waking hallucinations?
So much for artistic inspiration at PWP.
Whatever Lyn Trujillo had hoped to accomplish there, Marcus Gray was right. The arrangement had not worked. Cassie was starting to wonder exactly how badly it hadn’t—and how that receptionist had gotten hold of something so personal as Trujillo’s dream journal.
Three client deaths. At least. And Gray said Trujillo wasn’t there any more, that the non-material rewards hadn’t been enough—
Muttering a few choice words, Cassie dragged McAllister’s carton out of her closet and put the notebook inside. Jupe and Juno seemed to approve. Both Rotts settled close beside her chair, sighing themselves to sleep as she booted up her computer.
And began a very difficult e-mail to Julie Valdez.
* * *
Aside from her own nerves—and that God-awful road out to the facility—Cassie’s first week volunteering went well enough. To her relief, she wasn’t asked to manufacture any Kokopelli products, though she’d been told that some were handmade in-house. Instead, she spent her two hours per shift packing boxes for mailing.
The intermittent racket she’d heard on her first visit turned out to be a conveyor belt that carried boxes past the workers, allowing ample time to check packing slips and select items from stock kept on shelves behind them. In theory. In practice, the belt was down more often than not—and even when it wasn’t, her fellow workers were none too helpful. Most were PWP clients: recovering addicts, possibly recovering alcoholics, and psychiatric cases.
The few volunteers from town, mostly church groups, never showed up more than once or twice.
There were a couple of staff members as well. They wore denim shirts with the garish PWP logo and looked more like prison guards or bouncers. Other than fixing the belt when it broke down, they did almost nothing. Equipped with folding chairs, cigarettes, and a cooler full of Pepsi, they just sat and watched the clients.
A few of these—generally the psych cases—hummed along to the piped-in work music. It was always solo Native American flute, like the stuff she’d heard in Gray’s office, and it wore on her nerves. After her first day, she kept a pair of shooting earplugs in her jacket pocket.
After her second, she wore them almost continuously.
Cassie drove home dead tired on Friday afternoon, fighting the wind and the road and her lack of decent sleep. She had volunteered for five days straight. For the past four nights, the music she’d blocked at the workshop had returned in her dreams, woven through the voices of coyotes.
She needed a hot meal. And a very hot shower.
The scent of the first—followed by two ecstatic Rotts—greeted her as she walked through the door. Cassie knelt and hugged both dogs, then headed for the kitchen. Frank Yellowtail was already there, settled at one end of the table with the day’s mail and a mug of coffee. She poured one for herself and joined him.
Since the dreams had started—or at least, since they’d admitted to them—she and Frank had been eating dinner together often. The idea had been hers, but he’d been more than willing to help out. It was easy enough for her to shove a casserole in the oven or start a pot of soup before leaving for PWP.
Easier than coming home to darkness, anyhow. She suspected Frank felt the same.
Cassie set her coffee down on the Sheridan Press, which had been left folded open across her placemat. She frowned: Frank generally lacked patience with news outside the cattle business. Since when had that changed?
The article’s terse headline didn’t help much. Woman, 31, Found Frozen to Death.
Judging from the accompanying photo, it was the kind of story most papers ran this time of year to help the Salvation Army kettles. The sad fact was that transients got wasted and collapsed in alleys all year round.
Lyn Trujillo, a former client of Piper With a Purpose—
“No.” Cassie’s hands tightened on the paper. She picked it up to examine the photo, then shook her head. She’d never met Trujillo. That blanket-wrapped form slumped against a Dumpster could have been anyone.
I’m afraid that arrangement didn’t work out, Ms. Barrett—
“This had to be a mistake.” Cassie pushed the article in Frank’s direction. “Trujillo was their creative director, not a client! There’s no way she could have ended up like …. that. Julie said she didn’t even drink—”
She stopped short at the look on his face. Damn.
Lacking children of his own, Frank was a devoted uncle. From past experience, Cassie knew all too well how he felt about her getting Julie involved in anything strange.
“I know,” he said. “I called her this morning. We had a good long talk.”
Which meant, it turned out, that he knew all about her recent e-mails to his niece. Why she’d really started volunteering at PWP, and what she she’d learned from Trujillo’s dream journal. Not surprising that Julie had wanted her uncle’s opinion on that. Frank’s grandfather had been a powerful dreamer, and Cassie suspected he’d inherited some talent.
Not a good thing, lately.
“If you want to see that journal yourself,” she offered, “I’ll get it. I should have let you check it out in the first place.” To her surprise, Frank shook his head.
“You’d better leave it alone, too. From what Julie told me, nothing in it could make any difference now. Trujillo got too close.”
Cassie nodded, wincing at another touch of frostbite.
Frank looked at her sharply. “Maybe you should quit volunteering there.”
“Don’t you think I haven’t already considered it?”
The words burst out with a surprising mix of anger and fear. Staring down at the article to avoid his reaction, Cassie felt a cold certainty: she did have to go back to PWP. Whatever had happened to Lyn Trujillo—and several clients—there wasn’t like last year at Zia House. It wasn’t something lurking in some remote cave.
Whatever Trujillo had seen in her dreams had a toehold right here.
After a moment, Frank picked up the paper and threw it on the floor.
Cassie swallowed the dessert in her throat. Frank was making good sense, but he didn’t know the whole story. He only knew what Julie had told him.
Not what Marcus Gray had announced this afternoon.
“You’re probably right,” she finally said, “but I’ve got to keep going for a while longer. The Little America in Cheyenne just placed a huge order, so there’ll be an all-night packing party on the twenty-first.”
Frank Yellowtail frowned. Twenty Mile had its own bad solstice history.
“We’re going to have a special visitor that night, too,” Cassie added. “The director won’t say who, just that he’s very important to ‘the mission of our program.’ Like a founder or something.”
Frank wasn’t frowning any more.
The creases in his face looked more like crevasses.
* * *
In the end, they’d compromised. She would cut back on her hours and carry her cell phone whenever she was at PWP. She would also keep her nose out of Trujillo’s dream journal. In return, Frank would back her decision to keep volunteering until the twenty-first.
When she asked what “backing” meant, he handed her the keys to his pickup.
“We need to swap vehicles, at least on the days you’re going out there.”
Cassie blinked. Frank had recently traded off his ancient green monster for a two-year-old Ford half-ton in gleaming black. She’d never borrow it for a grocery run, let alone that miserable drive out the workshop.
“Why?”
“To bring the dogs with me,” he said, avoiding her eyes. “If you call.”
For a moment, the statement didn’t make sense. Then she nodded.
“Coyotes.”
Though they were smart about them, Jupe and Juno hated coyotes—and most of the “song dogs” around Twenty Mile stayed clear of the big Rotts. Cassie wasn’t sure what one coyote under her window and a whole pack in her dreams (not to mention Trujillo’s) meant in the waking world.