He tugged open the front door to the Volkswagen camper and froze. Hanging off the rearview mirror was a rosary at the end of which dangled a tiny gold crucifix encrusted with a red jewel. Beside it, attached to a length of black string, was a closeup black-and-white photograph of a woman holding the bridle of a horse. Her cheeks were more severely concave and her oval eyes were harsher than Andie’s, but she had a similar facial construction and that same generous mane of hair, only duskier. She wore a black gaucho-style hat, a starched high-collar white shirt, black riding britches, and black jodhpur boots. She held the bridle of a stallion in one hand and a riding crop in the other.
‘Hello, Persephone,’ Gallagher said. ‘Or should I call you Angel?’
Was it possible she was the same girl who stood next to McColl in the picture of the Guatemalan orphanage? And then Gallagher had the sudden thought that he had it all wrong. Maybe Kerris had met Angel when he lived in South America. Maybe Kerris was Charun and he used the Volkswagen truck not for fishing, but for a sick form of hunting.
By now it was two hours past dawn. The second violent wave of warm rain burst over the mountain peak. Gallagher bowed into it and followed the logging road for almost a mile. From the disturbances in the leaves, someone else had walked the trail recently, and he sneaked along with the gun cradled and ready. Every twig snap, every gust of wind, every clap of thunder seemed to contain more than it should.
The road looped a knoll and dropped off the other side of the ridge, angling back to the east. Three hundred yards later he crested a rise.
Below lay a decrepit squatter’s shack overgrown with thorns. In the murky light Gallagher could see another wrecked hovel and then at least four other ruins in the woods. And then a clearing with charred stumps and a cabin with a sagging roof and porch. He had somehow come in on the opposite end of that squalor people from Lawton called Danbyville. Looking at it, he had a vague sense of déjà vu. And then he felt a tingling sensation where his spine met his head, as if a woman were dancing her fingers there. Andie was in that cabin. Gallagher was sure of it.
Gallagher considered turning around, racing the miles back through the woods to the truck, finding a phone and calling Lieutenant Bowman. But he wanted to be sure before he sounded the alarm. He stood motionless and listened. There was nothing but the stilling breeze and the rain dripping off the trees, so he inched his way down the slope next to the first shack and found a tangled path leading off through the bracken toward the cabin.
The path forked twice. Side trails led off toward the various shacks and outbuildings that had once made up the Danby enclave in exile. On the steep bank behind the shacks Gallagher could see other paths leading up onto the mountain top. His path was only one of three main trails that crossed the overgrown plateau.
At the second intersection he noticed a length of taut green cord attached to a bent sapling perhaps four inches in diameter. He used a stick to clear out the leaves, revealing a snare setup like one he’d seen Aborigines use in Australia to catch rabbits. Only this one was big enough to catch a man.
Gallagher sidled around the booby trap. Off to his right, four ravens flapped up out of the brush surrounding the second ruin. Their wings panted the air in long, lazy strokes. They landed in a wind-stunted pine and cawed loudly, and he hunkered down until they stopped.
The shack closest to the main cabin was the one he’d seen from the clearing the day he and Andie had visited. An entire wall still stood. Gallagher crawled behind it, wiped the rain off his face, then peeked around the right corner.
Lime-green ferns fluttered. The forest’s dripping muffled all sound. The cabin appeared unchanged. Except for the windows and the door. They had all been blocked off with dark fabric. If a helicopter hovered over that malignant clearing at night, the pilot would see no light burning inside. Andie was here. So was Charun.
Gallagher wanted to take one more look from another angle before he ran to get Bowman and the troopers. As he crawled to the opposite end of the shack, thorns tore at his forearms and his face. So he wasn’t looking down at the path as he made the corner. There was a flash of red in his eye and then a shrill beeping noise sounded over the dripping.
His legs and arms went rubbery and his head ducked and there was that flash of red in his eyes again. Strapped low on a pine tree trunk was a camouflaged housing from which cut the thin red laser beam that Gallagher had broken.
He sprang to his feet and went barreling back down the main path even as he heard the thud and scuff of feet sprinting across the wet porch.
At the second fork, Gallagher’s right heel struck the trigger on the snare. The sapling sprang upright. The loop of green rope caught the very back edge of his boot heel and flung him out and forward on the feeder trail toward the second shack. He landed with a thud that knocked half the wind out of him.
Just beyond the second ruin, a tan trail climbed the bank toward safety. If he could make it there, Gallagher might get a shot at his pursuer as he came down the trails in the brush. Gallagher got up into a crouch, put the butt of the gun to his shoulder and duckwalked forward as fast as he could toward the second shack.
A green blowfly buzzed by his head. The wind puffed a sickening stench back at him. A tornado of the green flies spun up out of a pit that had been dug in the trail next to the ruin. There were hardwood limbs and pine bows caved into the pit. Wrapped around one of the saplings was a hand. Strips of flesh had been torn away, revealing bones, and for a second Gallagher thought with horror that the gold ring on a finger was one he remembered Andie wearing.
He looked down into the pit as he went by it and had to do everything in his power not to scream. Six sharpened sticks stuck through what was left of the body. The domes hung in shreds. The ravens had been at the body so as to make it indistinguishable as man or woman.
There was crackling in the thorns at the other side of the pit. Gallagher leveled the gun, shot, then sprinted ahead. There was a crackling sound in the brush on the other side of the trail and he spun and shot at that, too, only to see a rock bounce out into the trail.
The pursuer was playing with Gallagher, throwing stones as a diversion. Gallagher had to make the top of the bank, where he could see down and get a clear shot. He clawed his way toward the top, slipping and sliding in the slick clay soil. It was so steep at the top that he had to reach up for a hand-hold he might use to haul himself to safety. His fingers curled around a knotty exposed pine root. He heard a crash in the thorns behind him and grinned. Gallagher thought he had his pursuer where he wanted him now.
But sudden, screwlike pain drilled through his hand. A black boot pinned Gallagher’s fingers to the root. Polished obsidian eyes glared at him from inside the camouflaged hood. Charun sniggered at some private joke. Gallagher swung the gun up at his chest and jerked at the trigger even as the hooded man lashed out at the barrel with his boot.
The gun went off, then jumped from Gallagher’s hand and went end over end down the embankment. But the blast upset Charun’s balance for a second and Gallagher got hold of his heel and upended him. As Charun fell, he whipped his boot sideways, bashing Gallagher in the chin, and all went to black
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
SUNDAY, MAY 24
A WEIGHTED METAL OBJECT dragged across a rough wooden floor. Gallagher’s tongue lolled, swollen and useless, against teeth that moved freely in his gums. He was propped up in a corner, hands and feet bound. The air was tainted with the fetid odor of marijuana mixed with much more powerful ingredients.
Gallagher opened his eyes, saw Andie in the shadows opposite him, thought it was a dream and smiled. She returned his smile. Her face was smudged and bits of straw hung in her tangled hair, but Gallagher thought she was still lovely. A lovely dream. Then, without moving another muscle, she rolled her eyes left and the dream turned black.
Charun had flipped the Formica-topped kitchen table against the door. Busted chairs, trash and boxes had been stacked atop the woodstove, leaving an open, o
rderly area in the middle of the cabin perhaps thirty feet in diameter. There was a radio-scanning device with eight little green lights glowing in the corner. Arranged on the floor in a semicircle, a dozen candles burned.
The hooded giant sat with his legs crossed under him, rocking before the candles as if in a trance. An executioner contemplating harsh work Charun had the pieces of the journal laid out in front of him in separate piles. The lock of hair from Andie’s pouch rested between the index finger and thumb of his left hand. He rolled the stones from Olga Dawson’s pouch among the fingers of his right. He had drilled and fitted a length of river ash as a new stem for Ten Trees’ pipestone. It lay across his ankles. A thin contrail of smoke sinewed up from the bowl like a cobra rising to the flute.
Gallagher came alert and glanced about the room, looking for the shotgun, but it was nowhere in sight. There was no weapon at all in sight except the tomahawk and the machete, each in a beaded sheath at the madman’s either hip.
Andie looked at Gallagher, smiled again at him lovingly, then mouthed, ‘Trust me.’
He nodded, but understood he had never been so frightened in his life.
‘Terrance?’ Andie said suddenly. She spoke softly, compassionately.
The body stopped rocking and seemed to swell in girth. The hood jerked swiftly toward her. He watched her for a moment. He tore the hatchet from its scabbard.
‘Terrance Danby is dead, dead as the Lawton vermin that spawned him,’ he snarled. ‘Only Charun lives now!’
Gallagher pressed back into the corner, preparing for the onslaught. But in that next instant, the monster’s physical attitude melded toward self-pity.
‘They hated Terrance,’ he said. ‘They made fun of him! Persephone, do you think after all these years Lawton respects him?’
‘You’re all they talk about,’ Andie assured him. ‘Persephone knows how you’ve suffered, Charun. You were the one who took me to the other shore. You can take me again. Untie me. I can help you.’
The hood drooped toward his left shoulder as if swooning from the smoky elixir coursing through his bloodstream. ‘Help me?’
‘Yes.’ Andie spoke in the understanding tones of a therapist. ‘You know our myth, Charun: every summer I come back from Hades, from the land of the dead. I can help take you there, let you see what I see.’
‘I’ve smelled it,’ he said, talking to himself. ‘I’ve heard the silence of it.’
‘But you’ve never seen the other side,’ Andie observed. ‘Untie me. We’ll dance the Ghost Dance.’
The fiend stared at her for the longest time. Andie never blinked.
He put the hair, the bowl and the stones carefully on the floor before him. He stood, then came toward her gripping the tomahawk loosely. Andie held her bound wrists out toward him.
But halfway across the room he halted as if remembering something. He looked intently over his shoulder at Gallagher, who tried his best to hold Charon’s gaze, to be like Andie facing death and not let him see fear. But when Gallagher looked into those eyes he saw the unexpected, and instinctively kicked back toward the wall.
Charun came and stood before Gallagher. ‘What’s your name, brother?’
‘Patrick Gallagher,’ he croaked.
He drew the machete from the beaded sheath that looked almost exactly like the one on the wall in Monsignor McColl’s office. ‘You know what has to happen, don’t you, Patrick?’ he stated, as if they were old and bitter siblings.
He shuffled closer and slashed with the machete, stopping the blade a fraction of an inch from Gallagher’s pulsing temple.
‘Are ya scared, brother Patrick?’ he demanded in a mock Irish accent that shockingly reminded Gallagher of his father’s coarse brogue. ‘When ya see me, do ya smell the river?’
He tugged off the hood. Danby had aged hard since the sergeant-major picture; his face was harshly drawn down of flesh, his eyes had sunk back in their sockets and his hair and beard were sparse, flecked with gray and cut tight to the skin. His gums had pulled away from his teeth, which were yellowed. He leaned close and Gallagher caught the smoky, backwater stench of his breath. The derangement of it all became a pressurized thing, crushing Gallagher’s will, making him want to curl up like a child alone in the night.
‘Do you smell the river, brother?’ Danby demanded.
Gallagher heard himself whimper, ‘Yes.’
He caressed Gallagher’s temple with the blade of the tomahawk. ‘Do you want to cross it now?’
‘Charun!’ Andie yelled. ‘Don’t. You’ll need him.’
‘Why?’ he said, dropping the Irish accent. His gaze never left Gallagher, but it had shifted somehow, become more focused.
‘The more dancers, the more powerful the ceremony,’ she coaxed. ‘When the Sioux performed the Ghost Dance, they had thousands—’
‘Would you kill your love to believe?’ Danby asked Gallagher before she could finish.
Gallagher looked into Danby’s tombstone face and his jaw would not move. Gallagher knew that his life depended on how he answered. For a split second he tried to figure out what Danby wanted him to say. Against the dim back wall of his mind Gallagher saw Emily and the vague form that was their aborted child.
‘Yes,’ he said truthfully. ‘I would kill my love to believe.’
Danby let loose a humming noise from down in his chest. The machete hovered in the air and then found the beaded sheath. He shoved the hatchet handle between the duct tape and the parachute rope that bound Gallagher’s wrists, then dragged his two hundred and twenty pounds across the floor like a small sack of potatoes.
Danby dumped Gallagher on the front of the candles, then dragged Andie over and placed her at a forty-five-degree angle to him. Danby knelt between them with the piles of the journal, the lock of hair, the stones and the empty leather pouches before him. His free hand rummaged in a green knapsack and came out with a small Mason jar. He twisted it open and thumbed a wad of what looked like dried spinach and mushrooms into Ten Trees’ pipe bowl. He leaned forward so the flame of the candle flickered at the bowl’s edge, then sucked on it. The pipe glowed, flamed and smoked.
He held the pipestem out to Andie. She shook her head. ‘I want to dance, Charun.’
Danby gave her a curious look ‘You always said the smoke would get us to the other side faster, Angel.’
Andie’s attention darted to Gallagher, who nodded. She took the stem between her lips. He placed his mouth over the bowl and blew. She gasped and choked at the cloud that belched forth.
‘Again,’ Danby ordered and she took a second and third inhalation. All tension fled her shoulders. He sliced the tape and rope around her ankles, then came toward Gallagher with the bowl. Gallagher anticipated that Andie would strike out at Danby then, his back turned and her feet free. But Andie’s mouth hung agape and she stared, stupefied, off into space.
‘This is my religion, brother,’ he said, extending the pipe toward Gallagher. ‘This and the dance will take us across the river.’
Gallagher bit down on the stem, trying to limit the quantity of smoke that would enter, hoping he might be able to attack Danby should he free his ankles as well. But Danby blew on the pipe bowl again and caustic smoke flooded Gallagher’s lungs.
On the first inhalation, a ringing started in Gallagher’s head. On the second, the ringing was accompanied by an amplification and fine-tuning of all the background noise about the cabin: the whine of blackflies, the distant cawing of ravens, the snapping of shagbark in the wind. On the third breath, it all turned to the deafening roar of white water beating against submerged boulders.
Gallagher’s body felt paralyzed and he panicked that he would not be able to breathe. Then he noticed his chest rising and falling. A sparkling emerald liquid spilled from his mouth with every breath. The sweat on Danby’s body turned a metallic, iridescent fire. When he moved, tracers of flame spit out behind him.
Danby bent down and cut the binds from Gallagher’s ankles. Gallagher screamed
inside, fight! But every joint in his body had jellied. Danby placed the pipe on the ground in the lid of the Mason jar, picked up Many Horses’ stones and her lock of hair, then gazed raptly at the pages of the journal, his lips silently wrapping themselves around words and phrases the world had last heard more than a hundred years ago.
The candle flames became huge, exploding balls of fire that licked the sky and threatened to melt Gallagher. And then the fireball ebbed and Gallagher was aware of a man’s voice singing deep and hoarsely. Danby was on his feet, singing, with the pages of the journal held tightly between his thumbs and index fingers as if he were grasping a prayer book at a church service.
Danby’s abdomen rippled as he chanted out undulating worship to a life force that in Gallagher’s altered state was instantly embraced as truth. It triggered in Gallagher’s mind the sepia-toned image of a brand of copper horses racing tongue-weary across a blistering and dusty plain toward a mesa engulfed in storm. Lightning broke apart the sky above the mesa, but the horses kept galloping toward it until they were specks in a vast and barren wilderness.
Danby put a rope noose around Gallagher’s neck and hauled him to his feet. Danby shoved the pipe bowl in Gallagher’s face and leered at him. Gallagher took a fourth inhalation of smoke, and the air around him turned bubbly with froth. Andie appeared in the ferment with a rope around her neck, too. She seemed to be surrounded by a yellow glow, an aurora, that bulged and extended toward Gallagher with her every breath.
Danby’s veined hands wrapped themselves in the nooses around their throats. He gathered them tight to him. His singing became louder, deeper and more urgent. He shuffled left, lowering and raising his upper body and so theirs. The singing went on and on, the words all fusing into one another, until, reaching a chorus, he chanted at the end of each segment ‘Grandfather! I am sending a voice. To the heavens of the universe, I am sending a voice.’
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