Kachina

by Rada, J. R.

Marcy swung her arms around the hospital room. “Look where his decisions have gotten him so far.”

  “I didn’t decide to fall into that cavern, Mom,” David said in his own defense.

  “Maybe not, but you bought that fancy car, instead of a dependable one. If you had bought a good car, it wouldn’t have broken down out there.”

  David could have pointed out the fault in his mother’s logic, but it would only have made her even madder. He could have said if he hadn’t had to visit Brigham Young University’s College of Science to make a presentation he wouldn’t have been on Highway 191 when his car broke down. If he hadn’t taken the job with Hayden Laboratories, he wouldn’t have had to go to BYU. If, if, if, if. The unique combination of a thousand variables had caused him to fall into the cave.

  Or maybe it was simply unavoidable fate.

  Was doing something about Kuskurza also unavoidable fate?

  David turned back to the window. The sun looked higher. It felt good to squint while he looked into the sun. It told him that his eyes were sensitive to bright light once again. He tried to imagine what the world would look like without a sun. Was that how Kuskurza looked? Was that the world he had been in for five weeks?

  He still hadn’t made any decisions as to what to do. He had tossed around his options in his mind last night because he hadn’t been able to go back to sleep after Adam left. He wanted to think about it a little more and maybe do some research into the Hopi legends. It might jog his memory some more like Adam’s story helped him remember the name of the Sun Clan.

  He was glad that he was getting out of the hospital, though. Being cooped up in a room made him feel like a sitting duck for the Bow Clan. Now maybe that he was going home his life would become normal again.

  You’re kidding yourself and you know it.

  There were still two loose ends he had to tie up. One was to find out what had happened to him for the five weeks in the cave. David had to know. He would never be comfortable having a blank spot in his life. He was so desperate, he had even considered going to a hypnotist. Then he remembered that not trying to remember seemed the best way for him to remember. Any other way gave him a splitting headache.

  The second loose end he had to tie up was what do about what Adam had told him about Kuskurza. Was he really so important to the dark kachinas that they wanted him dead? He didn’t like feeling that the Sun Clan was counting on his help when he couldn’t even remember them. He might not do what they wanted him to do if he couldn’t remember in time. That was why he needed to remember. He felt it was important if the dark kachinas were to be stopped.

  David jumped as a nurse pushed the door open to roll in the wheelchair to take him down to his parents’ car. His mother gave him a strange look but said nothing.

  His mother stood on his left side, his father on his right to help him into the wheelchair. If he swayed in the slightest, he felt his parents’ hands on his arms or back supporting him. David settled into the wheelchair with a sigh.

  It was time to face the world again. Both of them.

  CHAPTER 19

  When Kel´hoya saw the Outlanders in front of him, he knew he was having another vision. Even so, there was a moment he wanted to reach forward and strangle the two Outlanders. They sat in front of him and all of them seemed to be enclosed within the invisible walls. The Outlanders’ backs were toward him and they were talking between themselves, but he could not understand their words. If he had truly been seated behind the Outlanders, they wouldn’t have turned their backs to him. They would not have trusted him to do nothing.

  Kel´hoya suddenly felt Pahana stiffen and at the same time sink lower in his seat. Pahana was afraid! But of what?

  Kel´hoya could see through Pahana’s eyes, but he didn’t see what caused the Outlander’s terror. If the Bow Clan didn’t cause Pahana fear, then Kel´hoya wanted to know what did make him afraid. He might be able to use it to the Bow Clan’s advantage.

  He could see nothing. The land sped by the vehicle too quickly. It moved much faster than a pa´tuvwota. If the Bow Clan had such a vehicle in Kuskurza, they could obliterate the Sun Clan. Pahana stared out over the bright land. He saw some vehicles off to the side of the road. They were positioned around what looked like a sipapu. If that were so, then Pahana wouldn’t be afraid, but Kel´hoya would. If the Outlanders had found the same sipapu Pahana had, then Kel´hoya’s mission was a failure. He had failed the dark kachinas and he deserved to die.

  The vehicle passed the open hole and the fear faded from Pahana’s mind. It had been the sipapu that he was afraid of. This was useful. Kel´hoya did not know how he would use it, but he knew he would.

  As Lewis Purcell drove his Cavalier along Highway 191 on the way back to Monticello, Marcy chattered incessantly about how nice Provo was this summer and how David should reconsider coming home for a few weeks. He would enjoy it; she knew he would.

  David sat quietly in the back seat. His eyes were closed and his head was leaning back against the seat. Despite not wanting to close his eyes, it was the only way to clearly review the past three days of his life.

  How could he begin to remember what had happened to him before that, though?

  If he had lost his keys, he would try to retrace his movements until he found where he had left the keys. Could he do the same thing with time? If he replayed the past five weeks in his mind, would he naturally slip past his amnesia and remember everything?

  The first thing David remembered after the missing five weeks was waking up in the hospital. Before that, he had obviously been brought to the hospital, probably by an ambulance.

  And before that?

  He couldn’t remember anything. There were only scattered memories that could just have easily been dreams. It was like continually running into a brick wall that had bricks missing. He could see small pieces of the world beyond the wall, but he couldn’t get over the wall. So he kept running into it. He wasn’t hurting anyone but himself.

  David had been rescued from the cave. Had he been conscious when the search-and-rescue team found him? Had he said anything? Had anyone in the search-and-rescue team seen anything?

  Talking to the person who found him would be his first step in remembering. And - he shuddered at the thought - he would have to go back to the cave. It might stir up some memories about what had happened to him. He wouldn’t go alone, this time, and he would take a very strong flashlight with him to keep the darkness at bay.

  David opened his eyes. His mother was staring at him.

  “You know you should have told us you couldn’t remember the awful time you had, Davey,” his mother said from the front seat.

  He hadn’t meant to tell her at all. She had read about his amnesia in the newspaper yesterday.

  Through the gap between the front seats, David watched the highway approach and disappear beneath the car. In another twenty miles or so, his father would turn the car onto the Center Street exit and drive into Monticello.

  David looked forward to walking into the small two-bedroom apartment he rented on the west side of town. Only then, when he could touch his furniture and sleep in his own bed, would he know that at least part of his nightmare was over. He was finally going home after having been away almost a month.

  “What good would it have done if I had told you, Mom?” David asked.

  “It would have eased my mind.”

  Lewis stifled a laugh. Marcy heard him and hit him on the arm. The car swerved slightly to the left as Lewis jerked away from his wife’s punch.

  “Well, it would have,” she said.

  “What you don’t know won’t hurt you, Marcy,” Lewis replied.

  What you don’t know won’t hurt you. The old saying repeated itself in David’s head like an echo. What you don’t know. What you can’t see you don’t know. Does that mean the dark can’t hurt me? But why would the dark want to hurt me?

  His head suddenly throbbed painfully, and he rubbed his temples.

  “Dad’
s right,” he said. “The fact that you didn’t know I had amnesia at first eased your mind. I didn’t see any reason to tell you because Dr. Haskell told me it was probably only a temporary condition. If he had been wrong for some reason, I would have told you.”

  “You still should have told me,” Marcy grumbled but not as forcefully. She knew she was wrong. David had won an argument with his mother and he savored the rare moment.

  The mountain foothills were closer now. They were close enough so that David could see the brown grass that covered the slopes. Occasionally, the grass would part and make way for a clump of brown brush. But there was not much more than that on the mountains.

  “Dad, remember when you mentioned the Boy Scout caving trip in the hospital?” David asked.

  “I’m sorry I brought that up, son. Your mother was right; it was not an appropriate topic at the time.”

  “Well, I think it is now. How long was I lost in the cave?” David asked.

  Lewis cast a sidelong glance at his wife, but she was looking at David. Lewis thought for a moment. “About two hours. We noticed you were missing within a few minutes after you got separated from the troop, but you must have gotten disoriented and wandered deeper into the cave.”

  It seemed to David that he never sat still long enough in any cave for someone to find him easily.

  “Was there anything odd about me when you found me?” David asked.

  Lewis shook his head. “You were crying, but as soon as I got to you, you started wiping your tears away so that none of the other boys would see that you had been crying. You made me promise not to tell anyone I found you crying.”

  “There’s no shame in crying, Davey,” his mother said. “You were scared. Anyone would have been.”

  “Did I say anything weird?” David asked his father.

  “Well, you were muttering something over and over. It didn’t make any sense, though,” Lewis recalled.

  David leaned forward in the seat so that he was looking over his father’s shoulder. “What was I saying?”

  “Something like ‘For low the path to the fourth world’ or ‘Follow the path to the fort word.’ Neither one makes much sense.”

  David sat back. Fourth World. Follow the path to the Fourth World. Now that his father had reminded him, David was sure that was what he had been saying. Especially considering what he had learned the last few days. His father was wrong about one thing, though. It did make sense if you knew Hopi creation stories.

  And it made even more sense if you had seen a dying member of the Sun Clan when you were twelve years old. In a flash of insight, David remembered why he had wandered off in the cave. He had heard a sound like thunder and he was curious as to what had caused the sound. So he had gone to investigate. Instead of some odd phenomena, he found a pale-skinned man. The man’s skin was so white, it seemed to glow in the light from David’s flashlight. The man was wearing a yellow tunic with black trim, and in the center of it was a gaping hole in the man’s chest.

  Come closer. The voice startled David because it had been spoken inside his head, and it wasn’t his own voice.

  David moved closer and stared at the man. The man’s fingers were waving David toward him.

  “What happened to you? I should go get my father,” David said.

  The man reached out laid his hand over David’s. The man patted his hand in the same way his mother did when she talked to him sometimes.

  No. It is too late. I have failed, but I came close. You are from the Fourth World, aren’t you? Ma´saw was right. The Bow Clansmen are fools. The dark kachinas are wrong. If only I could return to Kuskurza and tell them how to follow the path to the Fourth World.

  The man coughed and his body shook violently. His eyes rolled back in his head and he grabbed at his chest with his free hand. The hand that was covering David’s tightened in a vise-like grip, then the man lay still. When David saw a dead man’s hand was holding his, he shook his hand free and ran away from the man. He had never seen a dead man before, especially one who had been so horribly wounded. That must have been why his twelve-year-old mind blocked the memory. He hadn’t wanted to remember the horror.

  Even now he felt there was more to remember, but he had run into the wall again. He couldn’t finish the memory.

  “Davey, why did you want to hear about all that again?” Marcy asked looking over the top of her seat.

  David shrugged. What would his mom say if he told her that he had watched a man die in the cave, a man who hadn’t even been from this world? She would probably think he had brain damage from the fall into the cavern. He could see his mother forcing his father to turn the car around to drive back to Blanding Community Hospital so that she could make the hospital give him a CAT scan.

  He said, “You know how they say, ‘History repeats itself.’ I think it’s interesting that I’ve been lost in a cave twice. What are the odds of that happening? If I’m smart, I’ll stay away from caves from now on.” Even as he said it, he knew he would have to go back in the cave at least once more if he wanted to find out the truth.

  “Well, I would hope so.”

  His mother turned and faced forward again.

  A cold lump formed in the small of David’s back. David looked at his parents. They had fallen into talking about the drought that western farmers were having to deal with this year. They weren’t cold at all. No chills. No white-vapor breath spewing from their mouths as they talked.

  David looked out the car window and saw only the hills. But he knew it was something outside that was causing the chill. Then he saw a car and a Jeep parked along the side of the road next to a large RV. He didn’t see the drivers anywhere around. They were probably in the RV keeping out of the sun.

  There was something familiar about the area. He had seen it before, but without the truck and the RV. If it was deserted, it would look like...

  Where he fell into the cave!

  “This is it,” David whispered.

  Marcy looked over her shoulder and saw her son’s pale face and wide eyes.

  “Davey, are you all right?” she asked.

  David nodded slowly. “This is where I fell into the cave, isn’t it?” he asked slowly.

  “Yes. The state wants to map out the interior since they own the land. They’ll probably turn it into a state park and sell tickets to people who want to tour it.”

  David shuddered and lay back against the seat. He couldn’t imagine anybody paying to go down into the darkness of the cave. It was probably the same impulse that drove people to parachute out of airplanes or stay in a nuclear submarine for three-month stretches.

  The cold lump eventually melted and released its grip on David’s spine once he had passed the small camp, but he watched the area out the back window until he couldn’t see it any longer.

  He sighed as he turned forward. Settling into the seat, he saw he wasn’t looking at the back of his parents’ head. He was staring at the back of a pale-skinned Bow Clansman. He knew the man was a Bow Clansman because he wore a black tunic with red trim. All Bow Clansmen wore the same colored tunic. It was a symbol of the power of the dark kachinas just as the yellow-and-red tunic of the Sun Clan symbolized the power of the sun. The man was staring out of a cave shielding his face against the bright morning light.

  How could David be seeing this? He was sitting in his father’s Cavalier driving towards Monticello not in a cave.

  Adam had spoken of visions. Was this some sort of psychic vision? David almost laughed until he realized it wasn’t very funny. Was he actually seeing through someone else’s eyes?

  Whose?

  He could only see one of the Bow Clansmen, but there had been two Bow Clansmen last night. Was he seeing through the eyes of one of the Bow Clansmen? The thought chilled his spine again.

  What would Adam think about this vision?

  David didn’t really think it was a vision. If he could read people’s minds, wouldn’t he know how to handle Terrie better?


  Then David remembered how when he was younger and his mother had misplaced a gold bracelet with intricate carvings. He had been the one who knew where the bracelet was. He had seen the bracelet in his mind even if he couldn’t actually see the jewelry with his eyes. There had been other times like that, too. He had known the exact grades his friends got on their tests before the teachers had handed them back. Once he had known lightning was going to strike a tree by Utah Lake. There were dozens of little things he hadn’t associated with psychic experiences until now.

  But they had all been a long time ago. Nothing like that had happened since he was twelve. Since he was lost in the cave as a Boy Scout. David also remembered how he had seen the pale-skinned man sleeping in the cave before the Bow Clan had attacked him. At the time, he had thought it was part of his dream, now he knew differently. David had started having psychic visions again after he was rescued from a cave the second time.

  David didn’t like coincidences. Loose threads were tying themselves together around him, but they were in a knot he couldn’t unravel. He didn’t seem to be in control of his life.

  Why hadn’t he had any psychic visions in the time between the two instances he was lost in the caves?

  Why had he had them at all?

  CHAPTER 20

  David’s legs tingled as if they had been asleep, but rather than fade, it became an ache. He climbed the stairs to his apartment lifting each leg as if he were trying to balance an egg on the top of his foot, then set his foot down on the next step and gradually shifted his weight onto it. The pain wasn’t so great when his legs gradually took on his weight. He also had to make sure his legs would support his weight. If his mother saw him fall, David would never be able to get his parents to leave.

  And he certainly couldn’t have them around when the Bow Clan came back for him.

  His pulse quickened as he slipped his key into the lock and turned the doorknob. His giddy feeling was his excitement to be out of the hospital. He swung open the door and wanted to run across the floor. He probably would have wound up laying on his back listening to his mother scolding if he had tried it.