by Ninie Hammon
“Must really be somethin’ to stand right up next to trees was alive same time Jesus was walking around on the other side of the planet. Your folks spend much time there?”
His voice brought her back abruptly from where she’d gone. The scene fell out of the air in front her and she imagined she could hear it shatter into small, shiny pieces on the ground.
“We all went through the bristlecones on the way to and from the chalet, but nobody except Garrett and I spent any time there. If you got caught out there in a storm, you might as well paint a bull’s-eye on your chest.” She glanced at one of the half dozen lightning rods that protected St. Elmo’s Fire. “My dad must have put a dozen lightning rods around that chalet. Garrett and I called them zagga sticks.”
“Twin language?”
She nodded. “Grant said when we were little, we’d babble away at each other and nobody could understand a word we were saying. But by the time we came here, we only used a few words.” She paused. “Special words.”
“It still there, the chalet?”
“I suppose so. But odds are the overhang didn’t survive thirty years of snow and ice.” She told Theo about the balanced rocks, how Garrett had wanted to go there and explore. Something in the telling created an itch in her mind, but scratching it might edge her too close to images she’d been avoiding for three decades.
She shivered, but not from the chill in the breeze, then deftly redirected the conversation.
“We had a whole lot more fun playing in the creek and Notmuchava Waterfall. We saw a bobcat there once.” She didn’t mention they also watched a black bear amble across the meadow one evening, too. She didn’t imagine Theo was up to stories about bears. Or cougars, which they’d never seen anywhere near the cabin, but twice had heard their cry. “And we caught all kinds of critters there. At least Garrett did. I wasn’t into slimy, dirty things. Garrett put a bucket full of tadpoles in the sink once, brought frogs and lizards into the house. Even caught a green snake.”
Theo looked alarmed.
“Oh, they’re harmless, but Dad made him take it back where he found it and let it go. And he must have caught half a dozen tiger salamanders—dark brown lizard-looking things with yellow spots. He didn’t tell our parents about those. Tried to make pets out of them. He’d hide them under his bed—our room and Grant’s was where the stairwell, the office and the mudroom are now. He’d put them in shoeboxes and poke holes in the tops so they could breathe.”
She sighed.
“Apparently salamanders don’t fare too well in captivity, though. At least, Garrett’s didn’t. I can’t remember a single one that even made it through the first night. And when they died they smelled worse than a dead rat under a porch.”
TY SAT STILL on the deck floor directly above his mother, looking at the shoe box with a lid he’d just cut holes into. He could hear the creature he’d captured at the creek scratching around inside.
Well, he’d just have to take the salamander back to the rocks beneath the waterfall and let it go. No sense keeping it if it was going to die.
He’d have been a lot more disappointed if he hadn’t had other, more exciting things to think about than some stupid spotted salamander. A chalet! Up there in the Jesus tree forest! Tomorrow, he and P.D. would go find it. And go explore under that overhang thing, too, if it was still there. Just like his Uncle Garrett.
* * * *
Yesheb has escaped the bonds of living flesh, has died to mortality, risen from the pathetic shell of skin and soars now, prince of an ancient, unseen order that is powerful beyond understanding—a brotherhood with savage hungers and black intent.
He is master; legions bow to him. He is heir apparent to—
And then he is falling, falling, falling into an abyss deeper than time, darker than blindness, home to the essence of agony and isolation whose heart is still and cold.
Yesheb!
The word stabs into his head with such force his ears bleed black blood down his neck.
Time grows short.
The Voice melts the skin off his bones and it drips into a puddle around his feet. The profound dark gobbles up his agonized cries.
Do. Not. Fail.
A sliver of icy terror frozen into a glistening dagger punctures the right side of his chest and slices through him slowly. His heart beats frantically, like the wings of a fettered bird, as the ice inches closer, freezing everything it touches. His heart shrinks away, squeezes backward from the advancing needle as a man might back away from a hissing cobra.
When there is no more room in his chest, nowhere for his cowering heart to run, the ice skewers it, impales it, a fish stuck on a pike, flopping frantically. There is an odd crunching sound as the ice stabs deeper and deeper.
His skewered heart still beats in frantic agony but it pumps no blood, merely quakes, shivers and grows weaker and weaker. Until finally, the pounding heart stops. But the pain does not. It grows with every second of silence, festers until finally it—
Yesheb bolts upright in tangled sheets soaked with sweat and shatters the crust of the vision. The shell falls away and leaves him there like a wet, trembling baby bird with bulging blind eyes.
He sucks air into his straining lungs in ragged gasps that so sear his throat he begins to cough. Pulling himself free of the twisted bed covers, he leaps up, groans at the sudden weight on his injured foot, staggers to the window and shoves it open. He leans out into the cool, pre-dawn air and drags in great, heaping gulps of it.
The tears in his eyes from his coughing paint fuzzy circles around the lights of the city far below. It is a live thing. He can feel its dank breath on his face, hear its heartbeat of blaring car horns and wailing sirens. The city that never sleeps. How he loathes New York.
When he can finally breathe evenly again, he pulls back inside, closes the window, leans his back against the wall and then slides down it until he is on the floor with his arms wrapped around his knees.
He tries to think about what he has seen. It was not a nightmare, of course. The insipid conjuring of their own imaginations were the products of pathetic mortal minds. Yesheb’s was a vision. No, a visitation. Though his mind yanks back from it the way your hand instinctively jerks away from a flame, he must force himself to breathe slowly and deeply, to recall every detail of this melding of the world beyond darkness, examine it, listen to it, learn from it. Obey it.
Time is short.
That’s what The Voice said. As if Yesheb needs reminding. The hourglass is a fixture on the edge of his vision, a thing that moves if you try to look at it, but is never gone. The sands in that hourglass slip silently through the hole, pile higher and higher in the bottom half, golden grains in a pointed hill like a volcano. And sink lower and lower in the top glass, sucked down a vortex of swirling sand the way his soul is sucked ever downward by the circumstances of his life. The sand shifts beneath him and then falls away, dumps him into a whirlpool that will soon pull him out of this world, back into the other world where he will receive his reward. Or his punishment.
The full moon in June is only nine days away. Nine days! And he has no more idea now where his bride is than he did the day she gave the surveillance team the slip here in New York. His army of investigators eventually managed to pick up her trail at the restaurant in Little Italy. A background check of every guest in the Warwick Hotel the day the old man disappeared there revealed nothing. A check of the hotel employees netted them Eli Jackson, aka Drumstick, who had once played in a band with Theo Carmichael. With very little persuasion, Mr. Jackson divulged his involvement with the escape plan. The $5,000 he’d earned for his services wouldn’t likely cover the cost of his funeral. Yesheb’s investigators “purchased” toll booth camera footage that placed the Honda Accord with Gabriella at the wheel in New Jersey but after that the trail went cold. Before he drew his final, painful breath, Mr. Jackson had also described in detail the pistol he’d left in the glove box of the Honda.
Did Gabriella honestly
think she could stop him with a gun?
The Voice suddenly roars in Yesheb’s head: Time is short!
His mind is struck so violently by the force of the words that it jackknifes, the front end slams into the back, the past into the present in a sideways slide toward oblivion.
He is six years old, crouched naked in a gilded birdcage that is not tall enough to stand in and not big enough around to sit down. The cage is suspended five feet off the floor in the corner of the huge dining room where the remaining members of his family, his father, mother, and three younger sisters are seated at the table.
They are having dinner. It is formal and tense. His father wears a blue satin disha dasha with pearls inlaid in a design around the neck and sleeves. His long hair is slicked back from his face in a stylish ponytail. The females wear black hijabs and abayas. No child dares speak. His mother certainly has better sense than to open her mouth. His father has not yet had enough wine to pontificate about anything so the silence is broken only by the scraping of forks and spoons on plates.
Yesheb can smell the food; the aromas seek him out like streams of water running toward a drain.
His mouth would water if he weren’t so thirsty his tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth like a piece of dried meat to the paper it is wrapped in. He has had nothing to eat in three days and only a cup of water each day and that was this morning.
No one may speak to him or acknowledge his presence. Make eye contact with him and you will join him.
This is Yesheb’s punishment for wetting his bed.
His three days in the cage will end at midnight unless he dares to foul himself before a servant hands him a can through the bars later tonight. If he cannot wait, he will remain in the cage for another three days.
When his sisters are punished, they are beaten. He often hears their cries and yearns to watch his father whip them. Someday, he will have his own whip and his own women.
Someday he will be too big and too strong to force into a birdcage!
The Voice speaks again the words it spoke in the vision: Do Not Fail.
The words are eerily familiar, of course. The last words his father ever said to him. Almost.
Yesheb has been summoned to his father’s bathroom. While his father relaxes in a just-installed whirlpool tub, the twelve-year-old boy must answer his questions. History. Science. Mathematics. His tutors have taught him well because they fear the wrath of his father as much as he does. They will be beaten if Yesheb makes a mistake. Yesheb will be punished, too, of course. His father will shove a sewing needle under his fingernail if he answers incorrectly. Yesheb can see a packet of them on the top of the marble steps leading to the tub. He will shove the needle deeper if Yesheb fails to answer the next question instantly and will insert a second needle under another fingernail if the boy is wrong a third time. When his father first imposed this particular torture, Yesheb was so distracted by the pain, he couldn’t think, and ended the question session with needles under every fingernail on both hands. But he quickly taught himself to wall off the pain, close the door on it and will it out of existence.
“Answer me correctly,” his father tells him, his eyes pools of menace and threat, the greasy dark brown color of shallow water in which something has drowned. “Do not fail.”
His father reaches over and pushes the button on the side of the tub and the bath water instantly begins to froth and foam as if full of piranhas in a feeding frenzy. He smiles, groans in pleasure and stretches his feet out to the end of the tub.
“Tell me who ruled Persia in 2580 BC,” he says and leans his head back.
“The Unnamed King of Awan,” Yesheb replies confidently. His father had been unable to trip him up about Babylonian kings a week ago—which angered him. Yesheb suspected he would change tactics this week and in anticipation of the change, he has memorized the names and dates of every known ruler of the Persian Empire since 2700 BC, beginning with In-Su-Kush-Sir-anna, as well as the rulers of Mesopotamia, of course, and of—
All at once his father’s head vanishes under water; his arms and legs begin to splash frantically.
The boy takes a tentative step forward, tries to figure out what—
His father’s face barely breaks the frothing surface long enough for him to gasp, “Turn it off!” before he is sucked back under.
Yesheb understands now. Anwar’s long hair has caught in the water in-take of the new tub!
By arching his back and pulling with all his strength, Anwar is able to lift his nose and mouth above the water again.
“The tub switch—off!” he yells.
Yesheb doesn’t move. His father’s voice seems to come from a great distance, as if he is shouting up from the bottom of a well. That’s because the other voice that speaks to Yesheb is so loud, clear and powerful it drowns out all other sound.
“Yesheb. Do nothing,” The Voice instructs.
The boy doesn’t move, merely looks at his father, watches him strain with all his strength to keep his nose out of the water.
“Yesheb,” his father gasps, and in opening his mouth he swallows water and almost strangles. “Off,” he commands. “Turn the tub off.”
“Your time has come,” The Voice says. “Watch. Enjoy!”
“Now!” His father is gurgling, coughing. The commanding, demanding tone is gone. “Yesheb, my son …” It is the first time in Yesheb’s life his father has ever called him that. “… turn it—”
The boy starts to laugh. He throws his head back and roars. The more he laughs, the more the laughter takes control until he could not stop even if he wanted to. Which he doesn’t. He wants to laugh. He wants his laughter to be the last sound his father ever hears.
Even after his father chokes, strangles, finally stops thrashing spastically and floats still in the water, Yesheb continues to laugh. He howls until his sides hurt so bad tears run down his face.
When he is finally able to control himself, he steps to the tub and picks up the packet of sewing needles. He lifts his father’s limp, still-warm hand out of the bubbling water and carefully shoves a needle under each fingernail. Though it punches holes in the skin of his own thumb so deep they bleed, he pushes each needle all the way in until it is invisible. When he has used ten of the dozen needles in the packet, he pockets the remaining two—mementos of the occasion. He leans over and spits into the water, then turns and walks out of the room.
The Voice seemed benevolent when he was a boy. It was his only friend. Over the years that changed. That all changed.
Yesheb hugs his knees tighter; the words ring in his ears.
Do not fail.
What can he do that he isn’t already doing? Should he hire another hundred private investigators? Another thousand?
The ones he has now are tripping over each other. What possible good could it do to pay more …?
His head snaps up. That’s it. That’s what he should do. Pay more! Not hire more people. Pay the ones he already has more money! Offer a reward.
He leaps up, ignores the pain in his foot at the sudden movement and hobbles to his cell phone on the night table. He hits a speed dial number. The man at the other end picks up on the first ring.
“Tell your men I will pay five million dollars cash to the one who finds my Zara!”
CHAPTER 9
GABRIELLA SAT PROPPED UP WITH PILLOWS ON HER BED STARING at the empty screen of her new laptop. The curser mocked her—blink, blink, blinking on the blank Word document. What in the world had made her think she could still do it? Poetry came from a place in your soul that was pure, and nowhere inside her was pure anymore. The core of who she was lay slathered with filth and reeked of sulfur. She reached up and touched the scar on her cheek—her outside matched her inside.
Words appeared on the page and she wasn’t even conscious of typing them.
Insides and outsides, ugliness all.
No mirror reflects, no nostril detects
wretchedness reeking, forgiveness seeking
a glimmer of hope however small.
It was awful, of course. Totally lame. So were the other words that lined up behind the first ones, leaping unbidden from her fingers. Tortured structure, painfully awkward, forced and clumsy and … burn-it-when-I-die bad.
Gabriella kept typing anyway, on and on. Words filled the white expanse of screen, lined up like cadets for inspection, neat and tidy. She didn’t stop until she heard music. Then she sat still and listened.
She’d always thought it was beautiful, eerie, haunting and way too complex for her to understand. Oh, she grasped the incredible skill it took to produce it, was awed by the musicians’ ability to improvise something that complicated, make it up as they went along.
But unfortunately, when she added all her responses to jazz together, the total still came up just short of liking it.
Smokey loved jazz! Loved to hear his father play, told her that before his father had bailed out on him when he was a kid he would sit for hours as the old man made his tenor saxophone sing, wail, cry, laugh—created sounds on the instrument Gabriella suspected it was never designed to produce.
Slap Yo Mama Carmichael was never more at home, in his element, than when he was playing. And today, that home was St. Elmo’s Fire.
The Tony Lama boots she’d purchased from Pedro on her first solo trip down the mountain three days ago were not broken in yet so they felt stiff and uncomfortable, but she leapt down the stairs in them nonetheless. She’d driven into Buena Vista that day and returned with some of the belongings they’d left in the trunk of their getaway car. It would take several trips to ferry everything up to the cabin, but she’d prioritized—first things first: Ty’s Nintendo and video games, her laptop and Theo’s vintage Selmer saxophone. And now Theo was playing it!
She found Ty sitting with his legs crossed Indian style in front of Theo on the back porch with P.D. lying beside him, his chin resting on Theo’s fleece-lined leather moccasins. The old man wore a flannel shirt, a heavy sweater and a denim jacket. Ty was dressed in a western shirt and jeans. Even in the I Heart Oklahoma sweatshirt she’d bought in Tishomingo, Gabriella was cool. Little boys had different thermostats altogether, she thought, and remembered how Garrett and Grant spent the summer in short sleeves—their arms turned a lovely caramel brown in tacky trucker’s tans by the surprisingly hot, high-altitude sunshine.