Canyon Echoes

by Miranda Nading

  A blow to the side of her head, rocked it into the tree beside her, ripping Gracie from the world in her head, but she could still hear the echoes of the little girl's cry. Looking up, she found Julie hovering, staring down at her with her hand drawn back for another slap. The homicidal rage that had danced just beneath the surface earlier had been temporarily cooled by concern.

  Julie had done things, horrible things, but for just a moment, Gracie could see the woman who had cared for her for so long. Her voice was still shaking as she held up a hand. “I'm okay. Please don't hit me again.”

  Her words seemed to rock Julie. She took a graceless step back, her hand coming up to cover her mouth before she turned away. For half a heartbeat, Gracie thought about following through with her abandoned plan. Though Julie looked troubled, as if she regretted hurting her, Gracie wasn't fooled into believing she wouldn't gun her down before she made it back to the road.

  She tried a different tactic. “Julie, please tell me what I did to hurt you?”

  Shaking her head as if she could rattle her thoughts into place, Julie spoke. “You. You were not home.”

  Julie seemed to be at war with herself. Tears glistened in the half-light as if she was fighting to figure out how they had gotten there, how things had gone so badly. Gracie had seen the same look on her own face over the years. A look that said she was fighting to remember the events that had led to the dark place she found herself in.

  “Please talk to me,” Gracie whispered.

  It was too much. Julie flew at her, pushing her head back and shoving the barrel of the gun into the soft meat under her chin. “Stop it!” she screamed. She took a deep breath and between clenched teeth, she hissed, “You know this is your fault. Don't play me for a fool or I'll kill you right here.”

  With the barrel digging in, her tongue pinched between her teeth, Gracie couldn't shake her head, couldn't talk. Blood filled her mouth and she choked on it. Julie shoved her down and stepped away, the gun pressed to her own head as she fought to regain control.

  In that moment, Gracie understood two things.

  Julie was even crazier than she was.

  And tonight would be Gracie's last.

  Coughing and spitting, blood spattered the snow around her hands as Gracie tried to push herself back up. Whether that small moment of concern had been real or imagined, she didn't want Julie at her back while she was stuck in the snow, floundering like a panicked animal in quicksand. Using the tree as a crutch, she pulled herself to her feet. The bottom of her mouth felt bruised, torn.

  Julie shoved the gun into Gracie's side, pushing her to give the silent order to move. With no other choice, Gracie resumed the climb. All thoughts of running off into the trees had been wiped away by the throbbing ache left by the muzzle of the gun.

  Exhausted and freezing, each rolling step up the hill became torture. Leaning her tired body forward to keep it from falling backwards, she almost tumbled forward when she crested the hill and found level ground.

  Though she couldn't see through the trees, she knew the scene that lay in the basin below. As Julie shoved her forward, she examined it in her head. Trying to figure out where she was being led, laying out a route from each building in case she had the chance to run. The old hotel had been huge, almost a mile around the perimeter. The corrals, bunkhouses and hay barn, empty until early June, now stood in its place. Other than the Winter Keeper's house and a couple of sheds, there was very little cover.

  To get to the Winter Keeper's house, they would cut left, crossing a rickety old bridge. Farther down his driveway, toward the main parking lot, sat the activity cabin where tourists would flock for trail rides as the ground dried out. She couldn't imagine Julie would risk cutting that close to the cabin. The chance that Steve was awake, working on research or a photography project, was too high.

  On the right, however, the bunkhouses and hay barn had been abandoned for the winter. The wranglers would not start arriving for another two weeks. Gracie thought them a much more likely place for whatever Julie intended to do. Far enough away that screams wouldn't be heard by Steve, yet within jogging distance of Grand Loop Road. An ideal spot for a few hours of privacy.

  As the slope flattened back out and the basin opened up in front of them, Gracie turned toward the stables without thinking.

  “Other way,” Julie, keeping her voice low, waved the gun to the Winter Keeper's residence.

  Julie had always been on good terms with Steve. He kept to himself, rarely leaving his office in the basement unless he had to. She couldn't think of one good reason why Steve would be involved in this madness. Of course, she never saw this coming to begin with. Julie had only rarely lost her temper. When she did, she vented, got it out of her system, and moved on. At least, that's what Gracie had always believed.

  Regardless of her reasons, Gracie couldn't allow Julie to hurt Steve. If this was because of her, if she'd done something to set Julie off, enough people—good people—had paid the price for her mistake. It had to end tonight, with her.

  She need not have feared for Steve, before they got to the bridge, as they passed around a rocky mountain juniper, Julie pulled her to a stop. A doorway that seemed to lead to nowhere, stood in the dark. A doorway she'd never seen before. Gracie stared at it for several moments, wondering if the door was really there, or if her damaged wiring had taken on a new short circuit.

  Keys, tinkling in the night like silver bells at Christmas, landed on the ground at her feet. “Take off the snowshoes and unlock the door. Use the master monkey.”

  The master monkey was a special master key. There was no manually keyed door on location that it couldn't open. Few in the company had access to it, and Julie wasn't one of them. The door was weatherworn, the brown paint the National Park Service was so fond of, was peeling and chipping, but the padlock shone brightly in the waning moonlight.

  With the lock off, Gracie kicked at the little snow that had gathered in front until she could pull it open. Hinges, rusted and warped from the extreme weather, caught and then squealed, as it broke loose. Light burst around her, breaking through the gloom and exposing a ten-foot square, barren dirt floor. A second, sturdier door, stood sentry on the other side.

  The inner door was wooden, solid. Not glass that captured the moonlight and spread it in a million directions. There was no back yard waiting on the other side, no little girl, yet Gracie's heart stuttered in her chest as if it tripped over the dread that was building. She opened her mouth, taking deep breaths to calm herself.

  The cold outside, she was used to. The ice currently crawling through her veins was arctic. She shivered, and stepped inside.

  36

  Afraid Julie would cut back towards the road and head for the canyon, Hudson drove with his lights off. In the open, the soft moon cast an otherworldly blue glow on the snow cover. The small range of hills between Canyon and the corrals blocked out the moon and left the world around him in a moon-shadow as black as a starless night sky.

  Wanting to watch for movement on the hillside, but afraid to take his eyes off the road, he was forced to stick with his original plan and get to the barn and bunkhouse as fast as he could. Maintaining a safe speed around pitch-dark corners became impossible. Wrapping his truck around a tree would do nothing to help Gracie. On the other hand, each second that slipped by, she was less and less likely to survive the night.

  The drive to the corrals sat at the edge of the woods, just around the bend of a curve. It caught him by surprise. His truck fishtailed and threatened to spin him around. Gravel from seasonal road-fill pounded the underside of his truck.

  Saying a small prayer that it hadn't been heard, that he had arrived ahead of the lunatic and her hostage, he pulled to a stop at the ticket kiosk. Searching the small valley for any sign of Julie and Gracie, he grabbed his flashlight off the dash and reached for his sidearm.

  “Shit!” he hissed under his breath. It wasn't there.

  Either the Julie had taken it af
ter she knocked him out, or it had fallen out of his holster. Either way, he was in deep shit. Turning on the radio and calling for help crossed his mind, but only for a second. There was no time to wait for backup. No time to second-guess things now. Leaning in, he popped open the dash and grabbed his knife.

  Halfway to the bunkhouse, movement at a small cluster of trees in front of the northern hillside caught his eye. Dropping to one knee behind the buck-rail fence, he waited for nearly a minute for those furtive movements to resume on the other side of the trees.

  If it had been Julie and Gracie, they weren't heading for the bunkhouse. Torn between sticking to the original plan—a place he knew would offer her the privacy she wanted—and checking out what he thought he had seen, froze Hudson in place. Gracie would pay with her life if he made a mistake now. Deciding to go with his gut, he turned back and ran for the Winter Keeper's cabin.

  Keeping his eye on the small cluster of trees where he thought he had seen movement, he ran between the buck-rail and the house. A rattletrap bridge crossed the drainage ditch behind the house. When he hit it running, it launched into a chorus of groaning joints and creaking planks. Too late to be quiet, he brought his knife up and flipped it against his forearm, the serrated edge facing out, ready, and slid to a stop when he could see the other side of the rocky mountain juniper.

  No one waited in the shadows. Furious with himself for losing so much time, he turned to get back to the bunkhouse and saw the tracks in the snow. He walked the last few yards, but the tracks vanished into the thicket.

  Not possible, he thought. On his mad dash across the meadow, he had kept his eyes on this spot. No one could have passed on the far side of the juniper without him seeing them. Following the tracks, Hudson found the door set in the mounded earth like storm cellars he had seen down south as a kid. The snow in front had been kicked away to allow the door to sweep wide. The spark of moonlight on silver led him to the padlock, half buried in the snow where it had been dropped.

  Never before had he been this far back on the property, had no idea that this little hobbit hole had even existed. Most likely a remnant of the old hotel, he braced himself for the protest of the old hinges as he grabbed the handle. With the other hand, he held his weapon pointed at the door, ready for whatever waited on the other side.

  The door did not disappoint. The cacophony of squealing hinges startled ravens, causing them to voice their raucous and edgy displeasure. The interior of the little building was nothing like the storm shelter he had imagined. Though above ground and mounded over with living dirt, it was nothing more than a barren mudroom. One more door waited across the earthen floor.

  His frustration growing, he moved to the next entry point and took up the same prepared position he had used a moment before, one hand on the handle, his knife loose, ready to flip it and throw it if he had to. This time, however, the hinges moved easily, silent in the small enclave.

  A small, uncovered bulb with a chain pull hung from the ceiling, blinding after the darkness of the initial entry. In the millisecond before his irises reacted to the sudden brilliance, he understood two things. This room was even smaller, and it was empty.

  When his eyes adjusted, he scanned the closet sized room for another door or access point and almost tumbled down the shaft that led below ground. Tripping over his feet to back away from the hole, his heart thudded in chest. There were very few things he feared in this life. He'd always managed to avoid confined spaces such as the attic in the old buildings and the Pagoda, and he never, ever, went below ground.

  “What the hell is this place?” His knife-hand shaking, pointed at nothing it could protect him from, made him feel foolish. Though he kept a tight grip on the hilt, he forced his hand down. Claustrophobia wrapped around him like a steel blanket, squeezing. He hadn't even gone in and every nerve in his body screamed at him to get out.

  A scream echoed up from the shaft, twisted and distorted by its journey to the surface. Sure that it was Gracie, his heart overrode his brain, sending him plunging down the steel rungs of the ladder and into an ancient, moldering tunnel.

  Bare bulbs hung from the ceiling every fifteen feet, casting circles of light between small cavities of darkness. Fighting to keep from hyperventilating, he forced himself forward, unable to see the end of the corridor. His footfalls, the hard soles of his work boots, thundered on the cement floor, echoing off the walls.

  Rooms like small cavities, littered both sides of the corridor, slowing him down as he quickly searched each one before he could move on. Terminated pipes and empty drains were all that was left of the old works in most of them, yet as he moved farther down the corridor, he found equipment, boilers and transfer ducts, that hadn't been salvaged or stolen over the years.

  Pushing forward, desperate to find her, he found himself stuck at a cross section of tunnel which shot off to both sides. In the tomblike stillness of the subterranean tunnels, he was horrified to find that he had no idea which way to go. Searching the floor for signs of their passage was useless. Though dust had settled in several inches thick on the floor, footprints appeared in all directions, heading out and back again.

  The lights overhead, already dim, flickered and grew faint as if something pulled at the power they needed to operate. The faint light they produced looked dangerously close to failing altogether.

  He waited. The flashlight held in one hand, ready to turn it on if he was thrown into darkness. Saying a small prayer that the lights would hold out a little while longer, he eased his way down another corridor.

  If the lights failed, if he had to use his flashlight, he'd be a walking target, visible to Julie long before he could locate her. Without his gun, knowing that she was armed, he needed every second of surprise he could get.

  The lights flared like small suns going nova. He shielded his eyes, seconds before several exploded overhead, showering him with small bits of paper-thin glass. Light and shadow danced around him as the small explosions rocked the remaining bulbs. The claustrophobic labyrinth had become a fun house freak show run by a demented carnie.

  A scream, filled with horror and pain, ripped through the labyrinth. It bounced off the cement walls, echoed up from each of the tunnels and seemed to run from one end to the other. He was on the move before the first wave of sound faded, refusing to allow the subsequent reverberations to disorient him.

  37

  Gracie lost track of the twists and turns they had taken through the underground corridors. More focused on waiting for Julie to get too close, or get distracted, as they made their way deeper into the ancient underbelly of the old hotel, she realized that if she did find a way to break loose, she would never find a way to get back out. Not without giving Julie a chance to catch her.

  Nor was there anything to hide behind, or in, to wait for Julie to get tired and leave. A boiler the size of a semi-truck filled one room, but she dismissed the idea as soon as she saw it. It was entirely too easy to imagine it becoming a trap—or a coffin.

  “Turn right,” Julie ordered.

  It was one of many rooms which had been used to maintain the beautiful lodge when it was a thriving hotel. Now, it had become a chamber of horrors. A single bed sat in the center of the room. Handcuffs dangled from all four corners. Yet it was the device in the corner that made her legs go weak and her heart race.

  Gracie glanced behind her, hoping Julie had kept her distance enough for Gracie to step against the wall and try for the gun as Julie turned the corner. The barrel of the gun met her gaze, close enough to look as wide and dark as the Eisenhower Tunnel.

  Faced with a choice between taking a bullet between the eyes, or laying down on that bed, Gracie said, “Please shoot me.”

  “This should be like coming home for you, Gracie.” There was an edge of excitement, almost glee, in Julie's voice, that was as unnerving as the gun held to Gracie's head. “Besides, if I shoot you it'll be in the leg. Just the meat. I'll dress the wound and you'll end up on the bed anyway. In more p
ain than necessary. Now move.”

  Once Gracie reached the edge, Julie shoved her forward so she fell on the bed. The old springs protested and in the long empty catacombs, they echoed, mocking her. The handcuff's rattled against the frame, taunting her.

  “No, no, no, NO!” It started as a whimper, but for the first time since Julie took her from the truck, Gracie raised her voice, screaming the last word and frantically shaking her head. Once those cuffs were on, there would be no chance to get away. What they had done to her in the hospital had been bad enough. This would be nothing short of torture. “You'll have to shoot me because I am not going to play this game with you.”

  “Game?” Julie yelled and hit her in the face with the butt of the gun. The attack had been so sudden Gracie barely got a hand up to try to deflect the blow. Though her pinky took the brunt of it, the butt glanced off her cheekbone, sending Gracie to the mattress.

  Mommy?

  “No!” Gracie cried. She needed to think, she needed to find a way to fight back. She couldn't do either if she couldn't keep a grip on the real world. Where was her Other, her inner bitch? The one always ready to come to the surface at the worst possible time. Except for the night she'd saved Gracie from her step-father.

  The jaundiced light of the room swam and faded, replaced by the silvery light of some distant moon. The small hand, so fragile, so vulnerable, reached down and caressed the tangled, filthy hair before reaching to move aside clods of dirt.

  With every ounce of strength Gracie had in her, she screamed. Not in the nightmare world of the little girl, but in the warrens below the corrals. The vision of the little girl fled to the back corners of her mind when Julie grabbed a fistful of her hair and jerked her head back, the barrel of the gun shoved deep into the flesh of her back.

  “Do you have any idea how many times I can shoot you without killing you?” Julie hissed. “When you pass out from the pain, I'll rip your clothes off and use them to bandage the wounds. I can keep you alive a long time that way, naked, writhing in pain. Is that what you want?”