Poltergeist II - The Other Side

by James Kahn

  It was a house—a square box, a peaked roof—with flowers all around. It had a square central door and two square, slightly elevated windows to the right and left of the door—looking like nothing so much as a mouth and two eyes.

  And there were flames behind the windows.

  “Our house . . .” said Carol Anne. But a shadow seemed to cross her face, so Jess put this picture at the back and went on to the next one.

  But now the shadow crossed Jess’s face as she looked at the disturbing portrait on the third manila sheet. It was the face of a man, and Jess couldn’t say why it was unsettling, but it was. A man in a black hat, a man with yellowed teeth and a smile like fingernails on a blackboard.

  Jess didn’t ask about this one; she just went on to the next. And Carol Anne, who’d drawn it the day before she had gone to the mall with Diane and Robbie, looked the other way so she wouldn’t have to see it.

  It was a crayon drawing of Henry Kane.

  CHAPTER 2

  From Cuesta Verde Taylor took his battered blue pickup down to 1-10, then east all the way to Phoenix. It was midnight by the time he made the turnoff onto 17, going north, so he stopped for gas, coffee, beef jerky, donuts, and a carton of Orange Crush, to go.

  He made another stop just outside Bumble Bee—ten minutes only, long enough to place a fetish object by the grave of his best friend, John Laughing Water—then not again until he was past Flagstaff, on Interstate 40, headed east, did he pull over. A little beyond the Winona ruins, down a narrow two-lane highway that cut through desert now black as the night, was a bar Taylor knew: The Coyote Hogan. It was nearly three A.M. The full moon was just rising.

  Two other pickup trucks sat parked in the gravel drive outside the tavern. Taylor stepped down from his bumpy seat and stretched his legs a minute beneath the chilly sky. Dazzling stars spilled overhead, creating their own special order, like a necklace encircling the universe.

  Taylor inhaled deeply, smelling the starlight and the bedrock of the sacred mountain that marked this boundary of the land of his people. In beauty may I walk, he thought. Then he approached the front door.

  It was locked. The neon signs advertising beer of various brands were turned on, all bright orange and yellow; the lights inside were flickering warmly; the sign in the window said OPEN; but the door was locked. Taylor rattled the handle.

  No one answered. He knocked loudly, ten times.

  “We’re closed,” someone growled from a point beyond where the bartop turned a corner.

  Taylor knocked again, this time until the door opened—only a crack at first; but when the baleful eye saw who was standing there, the door opened all the way. The eye, however, remained half-closed.

  “Oh, it’s you,” said Jemez, standing aside for Taylor to pass. He closed and locked the door again after Taylor was inside, then he walked back around the corner out of sight. Taylor followed.

  There were three men playing cards in the small back room: Jemez, the owner of the place, a short, leathery man with one eye, the other being a dry socket that gaped like an abandoned mine shaft; Charlie Blackbird, who owned a parcel of uranium-rich land not far from there but whose spirit was dirt-poor, and Bad Bob, the owner-trainer of the six fighting cocks that strutted restlessly in wood slat cages at opposite ends of the room.

  The men nodded at Taylor as he entered, without looking directly at him. “Ya-ta-hey,” said Charlie Blackbird.

  “Waiting for a couple buyers from Santa Fe,” said Jemez. “They supposed to come the back way.” He anted and picked his cards up off the table.

  Bad Bob tossed a dollar in the kitty. “Open.” They played the hand out without speaking to Taylor again.

  When it was over, he spoke. “I’m looking for Sings-With-Eagles.”

  “I heard he was in jail over to Gallup,” said Bad Bob. Taylor knew he was lying.

  “You try his trailer?” asked Jemez, dealing the cards.

  “Not yet,” said Taylor. “Thought I’d stop here first, just in case.”

  “He’s in the slammer,” repeated Bad Bob. “In Gallup.” Taylor ignored him.

  “Maybe ask at the Snake Dance on Second Mesa,” said Charlie Blackbird. “Full moon tonight.”

  Taylor nodded.

  “I heard his wife ran away again,” said Jemez.

  “Play cards,” Bad Bob ordered the others impatiently.

  Taylor turned to leave.

  “Make sure the door is locked,” said Jemez.

  Taylor was halfway across the bar when he heard Bad Bob call out: “Hey! Chief! You wanna buy a couple good fighting birds?”

  Taylor left. When he got to his pickup truck, he found Bad Bob’s wife slouching on the front fender, a drink in her hand. “Well, ya-ta-hey, Taylor,” she said softly, every syllable an insinuation.

  “Your husband’s inside, Gloria,” he said, then got in the truck and started the engine. She stood back, spilling her drink. He pulled out. His headlights swept past her, showing her standing alone under the low moon, arms across her chest, head leaning to one side, staring back at him. Then she was out of his glare, swallowed again by darkness, and he drove off.

  Back to the main road, east on 40 once more until he reached Diablo Canyon; then up the canyon and into the Painted Desert. He was in the Navajo Nation now.

  Just past the Little Colorado he sensed the sunrise nearing, so he stopped his truck and walked out into the desert. This was a magic time to be here, and Taylor needed all the magic he could gather now. It was the moment when Changing Woman—who was the child of Darkness and Dawn—most clearly revealed herself. It was a time of extraordinary beauty.

  He crossed over a rise so the truck would be out of sight and sat facing east. As he fingered his medicine bag the sky turned from black to thick gray, suffused this with violet, then lightened it by adding peach, then amber, then robin’s-egg blue . . . then the magenta sliver that was the sun, striking him abruptly, his shadow instantly racing across the sand and then stopping, like a fifty-mile-long knife poised at his back.

  Taylor chanted:

  “In beauty may I walk,

  All day may I walk,

  Beauty before me, with it I wander.

  Beauty behind me, with it I wander,

  Beauty below me, with it I wander,

  Beauty above me, with it I wander,

  On the beautiful trail I am.

  With it I wander.”

  This was the Night Way, the Way that cured anguish. There would be much anguish where he was bound, and though he was learned in these Ways, he always had more to learn. And it was from the earth that one learned. From the harmony of the land.

  Here, the land of his people, the Dineh: there was profound meaning in every butte and mesa.

  A remoteness, too, was here—in the soul of the land and of the people. And of this person.

  Taylor watched an eagle circle high above and suddenly dive, as if pulled by an invisible wire. It hit the ground with a screek, then took to the air again with a rabbit squirming in its talons. Eighty feet up the rabbit writhed free and sailed to the ground in a slow, graceful arc not ten yards from where Taylor sat. The eagle, uncertain of Taylor’s intentions, flew off into the sun.

  Taylor stood, walked over to where the rabbit lay, crouched beside it. It was bloody but alive: paralyzed by terror or, more likely, a broken neck, its eyes stared wildly up at him. He placed his hand on its chest. Its heartbeat was nearly a trill.

  He asked the animal’s forgiveness, in deference to the intricate interrelationship of all things; then, quickly twisting its head, he killed it. At the moment of death he brought the rabbit’s mouth to his own and inhaled deeply, drinking the Sacred Wind of Life.

  And just as he did this he heard the eagle sing. This he took as an omen, and he returned to his truck to continue his search for the old magus.

  Just within the border of the Hopi Nation Taylor found the desert mule path that took him past the arroyo where Sings-With-Eagles kept his trailer. It
was up on cinder-blocks—an old, rusting, twelve-foot Airstream, its windows broken, its door long gone. A mangy dog stood barking near the hitch. Taylor called out, but he could feel no one was home.

  Next he went to Sings-With-Eagles’s Kiva—the sacred underground chamber used by the Hopi for storing fetishes, ringing chants, working magic. He located the Sipapu—the opening—to the old man’s personal underworld by following a finger of rock that pointed to a pile of dead cottonwood that kept the Sipapu in shadow most of the day. The fire pit in the Kiva was still warm, the totems carefully spaced around its perimeter, but Sings-With-Eagles was not there.

  It was noon when Taylor got to Second Mesa, and the Snake Dance was in progress. Hundreds of dancers, masked, feathered—some possessed—chanted and reeled in the ancient ceremony, twisting amid the thousands of snakes they’d gathered from the desert, snakes they hypnotized with yucca wands, snakes they enchanted, snakes they dangled from their mouths.

  Taylor skirted the main event, walked down two backstreets, and entered a pueblo with covered windows, dark but for a single candle burning in the corner. On a rug beside the candle sat an old, blind woman—a Snake Priestess once, now too old for anything but memories and waiting.

  “Hummingbird Grandmother,” said Taylor, sitting cross-legged before her.

  She tilted her unseeing head. “Taylor, Taylor, last of the renegade Koyemshi,” she joked—a reference to the Zuni mudhead Kachinas; they were the sacred clowns, deformed, insane, yet potent. Thus did she think of Taylor.

  “I seek Sings-With-Eagles, Grandmother,” he said. “I would do battle, and he must show me the Way ”

  She nodded. “Even this morning he told me to look for you.” Her opaque eyes were concentric rings of blue, tan, black—like a sand painting. “But he had to leave,” she continued. “I think his wife ran away again.”

  Taylor nodded. “He will be back?”

  She shrugged. “He is eagle. He will come when hunger hurts him.”

  “You know where he went?”

  “To beyond Black Mesa. To his totem rock,” she said, head nutating. “He had that look about him.” She smiled.

  Taylor smiled. “You have needs before I go?”

  “Hunger hurts the hummingbird no less than the eagle, though she has not claws.”

  He went out, drove all the way back to the rabbit felled by the eagle in the desert, retrieved it, and returned to Hummingbird Grandmother. Closing the circle, maintaining the harmony, sensing the pattern, flowing into the weave.

  He spent the rest of the afternoon cooking the rabbit, then he shared the meal with the old woman. It was evening when he headed his truck up toward Black Mesa, and night came quickly, for there were no stars—only a rumbling of clouds so low they fogged his windshield.

  He reached the base of the rock around nine. Not a rock, really; an obelisk. Like a Roman column, fifty feet around, three hundred feet tall, it rose straight up to the sky without so much as a foothold to gain access up its sheer sides.

  Well, hardly a foothold.

  Taylor stood back from it and looked to the top. Lightning struck out from the roiling clouds just beyond it, struck like a serpent’s tongue, illuminating a fall of rocks along one side of the base—a fall of rocks that might provide a grade to start climbing.

  It was another omen.

  Taylor started climbing.

  In the distance to the south, thunder shook the air.

  Thunder rattled the kitchen window as Jess put Carol Anne’s crayon drawings aside.

  “You’re real good at drawing,” she said as if she were sharing a secret with the girl. “Would you like to be an artist when you grow up?”

  “Maybe.” Carol Anne shrugged. “Don’t wanna grow up much.” She had seen, once, what grownups could become.

  “How come?” said Jess.

  “Probably not much fun.”

  “Oh, sure it is!” Jess protested. “I’ve loved being every age I’ve been. They all have their blessings.” Even old age, which most of the young reject or abhor—even this is a special time. “When I was your age,” she went on, “I learned I could do things other folks couldn’t.”

  “Like what kinda things?” Carol Anne wanted to know, half-suspicious, half-intrigued.

  “Well, I just knew things. I didn’t know how I knew. But I did.”

  Curiouser and curiouser. “Well, like what?”

  “Well, when I was your age my aunt lost her bracelet and I knew where it was—two miles from our house, in a place I’d never been.” She paused and stared at Carol Anne, searching deeply for truths in the child she loved so well. “You ever know things and couldn’t explain why?”

  Carol Anne broke into a slow, embarrassed smile.

  “Yes?” pushed Gramma Jess.

  “Yes,” said Carol Anne.

  “Well, my darling, that’s a special gift you and I have. It’s nothing to be scared of, and it’s nothing to be ashamed of. It’s made my life full of wonder.”

  Steve heard this on his way upstairs and almost stopped to say something, but he only frowned and kept walking.

  Carol Anne was concentrating hard on what her grandmother had said. “Will it help me be a ballerina?” she coaxed.

  Jess laughed and hugged the girl. “Sure will. Anything you can dream, you can be.”

  Carol Anne wasn’t sure she liked that, though. She knew her dreams only too well.

  Steve entered the bedroom and flopped down beside Diane on the bed.

  “Your mother’s at it again,” he said.

  “Hm? At what?” She was going through papers.

  “Diane, we’ve got to keep her from freaking out Carol Anne.”

  “She’s fine. Really,” Diane said, though she verbalized more than felt her words. “I have bad news, though. They’ve denied our claim again, Steve.”

  “What?!”

  Diane shook her head. “We never should have told them the house vanished into thin air . . .”

  He was outraged, but finally this was just one more failure on the pile of failures his life had become—and therefore hardly unexpected. “See? You tell the truth and what do you get for it? Nada.”

  Diane tried staying with her thought, rather than getting caught up in one of his increasingly self-pitying harangues. “They said if it disappeared, then technically it’s only missing.”

  “What do they think—it’s gonna return?! It’s been four years, Diane. It’s not coming back. I have a gut feeling about this. Tell them I’m positive . . .”

  “They say they sent an investigator out to the property and there was nothing there, not a board, not a nail . . .”

  “That’s what we told them . . .”

  “But if the house had been destroyed by something we were covered for, like fire, explosion, natural disaster, whatever, there should be some remains, or evidence of the natural disaster . . .”

  “Yeah? What about supernatural distasters?”

  “And they seem to imply, though they never accuse, that since the property values obviously bottomed out in that area, as ‘evidenced by the surfeit of abandoned buildings in the immediate environs’ ”—and here she was reading from the insurance company’s letter while Steve silently sulked—“they seem to imply that they suspect we had the house moved, to collect the insurance.”

  “Moved! Moved to the Twilight Zone, is where it was moved! Tell them . . . Never mind. I’ll tell them myself. I’m filing our fourth claim.”

  “Good for you, honey.” Diane liked to encourage his take-charge moods. On the other hand, she still had to broach the subject she’d been leading up to ever since Steve had come in. “In the meantime,” she said, “we’re almost broke.”

  Steve visibly shriveled. “Hey, do we have to go through this again? We’re not exactly starving, you know.”

  “No, we’re not,” Diane admitted. “But I don’t like living off my mother, and I’d like a home of my own.”

  That pulled Steve’s plug. “That
’s the difference between you and me, Diane,” he said, starting on a slow roll of sarcasm. “I enjoy downward mobility. I want to sell vacuum cleaners door to door the rest of my life. Being homeless and broke makes me feel upbeat. Patriotic. Proud!” This last word lifted him off the bed, and with gathering momentum he began to pace. “Like the way it used to be! Out in the streets with the people! Get the paints and brushes, Diane—we’ll make the car day-glo and hit the road together! That fabulous family whose house disappeared! Come one, come all! See the famous Freaky Freelings!”

  “Honey, you were never a hippie.” Diane tried to calm him with quiet patience.

  “Huh?” he said, losing the pace of his rhetoric.

  “You were never out in the streets with ‘the people.’ You always wanted to make money. The only reason you painted your van all those colors and grew your hair long was to impress Cookie Gurnich.”

  “Gurnick. Cookie Gurnick.” His eyes lit up at the memory.

  “Miss Free Love.” Now she was losing her patience.

  “True.” He nodded, reflecting fondly. “But you know something—”

  “I hated you then, Steven.” It made her realize that for all the problems he was having, she loved him now.

  “But I always made up with you.” He grinned. “Remember how?”

  “Don’t try it now,” she warned. She was still pissed off about Cookie Gurnich.

  “Do you remember how?” he goaded.

  “No, I don’t.” She did.

  “Come on. You do,” he prodded. He tried pulling her off the bed. She resisted.

  “Oh, yeah,” she allowed, “you’d sing that stupid song. Don’t toy it, Steven. I still haven’t forgiven you for Cookie Gurnich.”

  “Gurnick,” he laughed, pulling her up into his arms, slow-dancing as he sang “If I Fell in Love with You” by the Beatles.

  Before long she laughed back, even let him dip her. “Is it true Cookie crumbled in your hand?” she asked gaily.

  At which point Carol Anne did a rather dramatic little pas de deux into the doorway. “Mom! Dad! I’m a ballerina!”