“Sure,” Hal said. “Plain as the nose on your face.”
“He couldn’t see it. Mick.”
“It’s there,” Ken put in.
“Yeah,” Penny said. She began to read it again, as if compelled by some force she couldn’t resist. Her world narrowed to the width of her flashlight’s beam. She started right where she had left off, and the words flowed effortlessly, seemingly moving from the wall to her brain without having to even pass through her eyes. She had earlier nearly exhausted the writing she could see from this spot, so she moved around a bend in the cave wall and continued reading.
As she moved farther back in the cave, the writing was older and older. What she was seeing was no longer in English, but that didn’t slow her down for a second. She saw it and understood it, and then the words—drawings, really, scratched on the stone with primitive edged tools, marked with sharp-edged rocks—that formed the bottom layer, over which all the rest was written, swam into focus. Circles and squiggles and lines no human had seen for centuries, and she understood all those as well.
“Penny? Penny…”
Voices from far away called her name but she didn’t respond. She couldn’t respond. She was no longer in the cave, but had been sucked into the world of the people who had first marked on these walls. Another time, long, long ago. She knew it was all in her head, that she was stooped over in the dank cave looking at indecipherable markings, but the markings played a scene in her mind like a silent movie on a screen, and she was helpless to do anything but watch.
Tall, bronze-skinned people, naked but painted and tattooed—here a man’s leg was all black with a row of red dots up the back, here a woman’s face and left breast were aqua, there red and yellow stripes encircled a man’s barrel-shaped torso—moved before her on a desert hillside. The sky overhead was dark and tormented, with angry clouds piled one on top of another like stones marking a trail. Powerful winds swept up the slope of desert, raising whitecaps on a flat body of water that lapped just below their position on the hill.
At the center of the painted people was a strange looking man, taller than the rest by half, which would have made him almost nine feet tall, she thought. His muscular arms and legs were scarred, and his skin, though it didn’t seem to be painted, was as gray as the ash of a day-old fire. He turned, slowly, trying to keep all the others in sight, even though they surrounded him like hunters around prey. This impression was furthered by the weapons in their hands—crude axes, knives, spears with stone points. The man in the center was unarmed, except for the nails of his hands, long and claw-like, and the clubs of his fists, and the gnashing teeth he bared at them, spittle flying in the stiff wind.
One man made his move, lunging with a spear. The gray man sidestepped and caught the weapon, using it to tug the other off-balance. The attacker fell to one knee and the gray man swiped a hand at him, as casually as a grizzly might, and sharp claws ripped through the man’s flesh, trailing blood. The man collapsed, bleeding out onto the packed earth, as his comrades watched. Penny had the impression that this stalemate had gone on for some time.
Then her field of vision changed, and she saw the same scene but from a different angle. Now she could see more people, women and children as well as the men. And more—what at first glance she took to be some kind of forest, she realized, was dozens of the bronze men raised off the earth, skewered on poles that ran red from their grisly decorations. Women and a few men sat beneath these poles, weeping and wailing, though Penny could only see their faces and not hear their cries. But watching, she understood that, while the gray man was ultimately responsible for this scene, he was not the one who had impaled these people and raised them for all to see. The painted people had done this to their own kind. Persuaded or compelled by the gray man, to be sure, but his hands were not soiled by these crimes—the only blood under his horned nails was that spilled in self-defense against the angry mob surrounding him.
The angle changed again, each change a vertiginous swirl that made her stomach lurch, and she saw yet another painted man, older than most of the others, squatting close to the ground. Tattoos covered almost every inch of his nude body, and jewelry encircled his neck, wrists, and ankles. He held a sharp, hard rock, and made markings with it on a flat shard of stone that must have measured eight feet long and four across. Observing him, she realized that he was a shaman or medicine man of some kind, and that the marks he made functioned as the casting of some kind of spell. And he was very nearly finished; his marks, each made with the sure swiftness of a well-practiced hand, closed on the bottom of the slab of rock.
Beyond him—and he kept an eye on this scene, as well, as if he knew what was at stake—the warriors continued to try to bring down the gray man. But more of them had fallen; their bodies littered the ground around him now, and the sand was red and wet. Finally, as Penny watched him, the shaman finished his spell, and the gray man suddenly stopped, his arms dropping to his sides, head lowering to his chest, as if he’d been a puppet and his strings had been cut. She could see his eyes, red and glaring with defiance, but his muscles were no longer under his control. Now the men were able to reach him and they did so, cutting and scoring his flesh—which, she noticed, did not bleed—then throwing aside their weapons and closing their hands around him, picking him up and bringing him to the shaman’s side.
For the first time, Penny noticed the pit next to where he worked. It almost matched the dimensions of the stone on which he marked, and was rimmed with low stone walls, like a well. The warriors threw the gray man into the pit, then spat at his still form, pissed on him, kicked rocks and dirt down onto him. The shaman watched this for a while and then spoke up, and the warriors came to him, helped him lift the heavy slab of stone and place it on top of the rock walls. The gray man was sealed inside.
And the water, until now just a lake in the distance, spilled onto the shelf of land on which they stood, and kept rising, covering the people’s feet, their ankles. They shouted and laughed and moved up the side of the hill, seeking higher ground, even as the water covered the inscribed slab of rock and the poles bearing their impaled brothers.
And the water kept rising and rising, drowning the world.
***
Ken and Hal looked at each other. Penny had left the building, Ken thought. Her eyes were open, the flashlight in her hand still shone on the cave walls, and her feet moved her along as if she were really reading the hieroglyphics there. But he had waved a hand right in front of her eyes, snapped his fingers next to her ears, called her name, and she had not responded.
“Can’t just leave her here,” Hal pointed out.
“Whatever she’s doing, it must be important,” Ken suggested. He knew how absurd that sounded—she might as well have slipped into a coma, how could that be important? But he knew it was true. Any man whose had accepted magic into his life had to be willing to let intuition triumph over reason from time to time. “We can wait a few minutes.” Not that he wanted to spend any more time than necessary here—he’d had enough of tunnels and caves to last a lifetime.
Sure enough, after a couple of minutes, she returned from wherever she’d been. She blinked and blew out a ragged breath, and her rigid body relaxed. Ken moved to catch her in case she fell, but she put a hand out and steadied herself against the wall. “Wow,” she said. “What was that?” Her tone was strange, as if she were in a cathedral, filled with awe at the glory of God.
“I don’t know,” Ken said. “But we should probably get—damn.”
His radio crackled—not broken after all, unless it had fixed itself. “Ken?” He recognized Clara Bishop’s voice, from down in El Centro.
“Yeah, Clara. What is it?”
“I’ve had a call from Lamont Hardy at the Shop-R Mart up there,” Clara said. “He says Mindy Sesno hasn’t shown up for work. He went by her place, and her car’s there but the doors are locked. He’s worried about her. He asked for you, said he thought you were friends with her.”
“No, Billy. You stay where you are. I’m on my way.” He turned to the others. “I have to go. Now. You two can stay here if you want or come with, but I’m going to be moving fast. You come, you have to keep up.”
“No trouble,” Hal said. “I feel, quite literally, stronger than I have in years. Maybe decades. You can’t outrun me.”
“You’re not leaving me here,” Penny said. “This place creeps me out.”
“You were kind of creeping us out,” Ken pointed out, already making his way back toward the cave’s entrance. “What was going on with you back there?”
“I’ll tell you on the way,” she said. “Let’s go.”
***
Penny explained what she’d seen in the cave as the Bronco bounced toward Salton Estates. Ken acted like he barely heard her. Whoever this Mindy Sesno was, she must have been important to him. But he nodded and grunted in the right places, and when she was done, he was silent for a moment, mulling it all over.
“I can’t claim to know what you saw,” he said after a time. “But it sounds right, somehow.”
“What do you mean?” Hal asked him. Hal had the shotgun seat while Penny rode in the back, leaning forward, her arms over the seats between the two men.
“The Cahuilla Indians used to live in the Salton Sink, back in the old days. When white settlers first came through here, but even before that, for who knows how long? Thousands of years, maybe. They were a pretty basic, primitive people. But we know they painted and tattooed themselves, like you described, Penny. We know they went mostly naked. And we know something else.” The Salton Sea filled the middle distance, out the windshield, and he pointed toward it. “The Salton is basically an accidental sea, an error in judgment made back in 1905 when the Colorado River was allowed to run free for two years and filled this vast, low space. But it’s not the first time there’s been water here. See that line on the hills?”
He pointed now at a distinct line, a little more than halfway up the hills on both sides of the Sea. The rock was noticeably darker below the line, lighter above it. “This land was all underwater once, part of the Gulf of California. As the Colorado River wore through the Earth, carving out the Grand Canyon and the like, it carried its silt down here and made the Delta that’s out there now, effectively damming it up. But even so, some years there was a lake here, Lake Cahuilla, it’s called now, even before the Salton Sea. It was bigger and deeper, and it came and went with very little notice. When the Colorado and Gila Rivers overflowed their banks powerfully enough, the lake came back, and it happened with what the Cahuilla Indians must have considered depressing regularity. Their oral tradition, at least, is full of it. They liked it when there was a little water around. They could farm, grow some crops, have plenty to drink. When there was a lot of water, though, they had to move to higher ground, sometimes in a hurry.”
Now the dirt road met the pavement of Highway 111, and Ken squealed out onto the roadway. A couple of cars and a big rig were in the lane ahead of him, but he hit lights and siren and bore down on them. “So the part you describe, Penny, about the water coming in and forcing them off their land, is accurate. This ‘gray man,’ I’ve never heard stories about him. The Cahuilla weren’t especially warlike, that I remember hearing about, so that whole thing with the stakes is a little strange.”
Penny shut her eyes, trying to remember not what she saw but what she felt about what she saw. “I had the impression that he was one of them, but not,” she said. “Not their God, but sort of—the way we tend to think of God as a guy, you know, a man who sits on a chair, that you could talk to if only you were in Heaven. It was like the gray guy was some kind supernatural entity, but not one who was strange or unknown to them. More like he was around a lot, and he was a nuisance. Not a nuisance, that’s understating it.”
She decided to tell them what she had really felt, watching him. Even though it scared her to think about. “It was like he was evil. Or maybe Evil, with a capital ‘E.’ The personification of it. Like they held him responsible for the bad things they’d done to each other, and wanted to punish him for that.”
“And they punished him by putting him in a hole in the ground?” Hal asked.
“Right. Not just under the ground, though. Under this magical slab, in a place where they knew the water would cover him. He was supposed to be kept under the sea. I don’t think these people would have had a safer place they could have put him. He’d have been at the bottom of the ocean, as far as they were concerned, for what? A generation? More?”
“I don’t know precisely how long the deluge lasted when it came,” Ken said. “Long enough to make it into their stories. And not the happy ones. If they managed to capture Evil and put it under the sea, that’d probably help explain why they weren’t happy ones.”
The town of Salton Estates rushed past the Bronco’s windows. Between the buildings, Penny caught glimpses of the Salton Sea, strobing in the last light of the sinking sun. Ken drove like a maniac, whipping into the oncoming traffic lane of the two-lane highway when someone wouldn’t get out of his way fast enough. Capture Evil? Penny thought. Somehow, evil had gotten out. She doubted whether there had ever been a time, in the history of mankind, when evil had been entirely encapsulated in a single individual, even such a big, freaky looking one as the gray man. Maybe before people had come along to spoil things there had been no evil, but there certainly was now. If the Cahuilla had managed to seal away evil beneath their stone slab and their rising sea, then more power to them. But they hadn’t locked it away completely or forever.
A minute later, Ken brought the Bronco to a shuddering halt in front of a small house. The stucco had been pink once but was faded and cracked. Colorful curtains covered the windows and the little patch of gravel in front, where a couple of golden barrel cacti and an ocotillo grew, was well manicured. A window air conditioner dripped onto the gravel near the house, and a couple of dandelions grew up where the water fell. Not far away, a couple of mushrooms had sprouted, white with red, like the ones they’d seen in the cave. Ken jumped from his seat as soon as the engine died and ran to the door. He pounded on it, calling Mindy’s name. When no one answered, he reared back and kicked the door, next to the knob. Wood splintered and the door gave way, and Ken disappeared inside.
***
Hal turned in his seat and looked at Penny. She had changed in the few short hours he’d known her, he realized. When she had first walked into the Sheriff’s office she’d been distraught, an emotional train wreck. Surely she’d been through a lot since then—discovering that others shared the same kind of magic that had touched her life; finding that the body of her friend was gone, maybe eaten by impossibly fast-growing mushrooms; somehow seeing or being transported through the mists of history to the distant past. And yet, she looked better than ever—clear-eyed, alert, almost happy. She was a pretty young woman, even reminded him a little of Virginia when they’d first met. It was the intelligence about her eyes, he thought, and the way she held her mouth when she was about to say something and then decided against it. So many people, they never decided against it. Just said whatever flitted into their minds.
She ticked her eyes toward the little house. “He going to be okay?” she asked.
“He’s plenty worried about that young lady,” Hal answered. “I think she means a lot to him.”
“Because he didn’t talk about her all the way down here.”
“I’ve never heard him talk about her,” Hal said. “That’s how I know how much he thinks of her.”
“Have you known him long?”
“Ken? As long as I’ve lived on the Slab, I guess. But really known him, just the last day or so. Since the…”
“Since the magic kicked in,” she finished.
“Right. Since then.”
“It’s
funny, isn’t it? Feeling like you’ve known someone your whole life when you barely know their name.”
“Funny?” he repeated. “I guess. But nice, too. We could all use more people to be close to, right? I mean, really close.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” she said. “I suppose we could.”
Hal looked back toward the house, its door gaping open on a dark interior. “And Kenneth, I think he had his heart set on a closeness he may never get now.”
***
He knew she was dead as soon as he got inside the front door. The a/c was blasting and had been for some time, cooling the house far below the temperature at which he knew Mindy, a lifelong desert dweller, was comfortable. The air conditioner had helped to dilute the smell of her, but it still hung in the air.
He found her in her bedroom, nude, laying on her back on top of sheets which she had soiled in death. A ligature around her throat—the sash of a pink silk robe he saw wadded in a corner—and hemorrhaging there instantly revealed how she had died. He fought back tears at the sight of her body, so vulnerable in its nakedness, so slight. Trying to maintain an air of professionalism, he looked at the condition of her body—the body, he corrected himself, keep it straightforward, it’s a crime scene investigation now.
Cyanosis had blued her lips and the tips of her fingers. Her eyes were open, covered with a filmy glaze. The body had paled as blood settled to her back, lividity showing when he raised one shoulder and looked at the blotchy redness on her back. The corpse was cold and the muscles were stiff, so rigor mortis had set in.
Touching Mindy, though, he couldn’t hold back his personal feelings for her any longer. He sank to his knees beside the bed and awkwardly cradled the rigid form in his arms, getting just a whiff of her perfume from her hair, the scent that had always appealed so to him when he leaned close to her in the store or spoke to her on the street.
As he held her and breathed her in, a dozen images of Mindy flooded his brain, but then they fell away and he was here, in this room, but frantic, anger and fear and pain fighting for primacy in him and he knew he was looking out through Mindy’s eyes. “If you want the old man so much why don’t you just go to him?” a voice raged at her, and then a hand slapped her, backhanded her, and she took a deep gasping breath until the hand resumed tugging on the silken sash, cutting into her throat and then she couldn’t breathe, and “You’d be perfect together, you’re both used up old ladies!” and then tighter, he pulled the silk still tighter, and she tried to twist, to writhe out of his grasp but her strength was already going, arms and legs and hips not responding to the desperate commands her mind sent, black dots filling her vision, swarming before her, blocking everything.
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