by James Kahn
But the crawl space was all Tangina needed: the remnants of the floor provided an adequate roof for her; she carved out a few nesting placed in the earth beneath it, lined her grottos with tarp, rug, and blanket, and moved in.
She became a creature of the night. She was, as noted, afraid to sleep during the time of shadows, in any case; but in addition, she felt it was the best time to explore the haunted site, to chase down the spirits that stalked her slumber. So at night she dug and she wandered.
She dug directly between the Freeling foundation posts, enlarging the crawl space she was inhabiting, burrowing tunnels straight down or sloping away beneath the concrete. She dug initially with a small hand shovel, wherever her instincts led her, creating an ever more intricate series of shafts, caves, and connecting tunnels. As if she were mining for ghosts.
And she shored up her subterranean excavations with scrap wood, pipes, paint cans . . .
That’s how her wandering started.
She needed materials to reinforce her tunnels, so she began raiding the garages and backyards of Cuesta Verde Estates by night. She garnered many useful items this way: children’s swing sets furnished good structural supports, as did short lengths of outdoor water pipes; table-tops made good underground archways; workbenches provided useful tools, including hammers for chipping away at bedrock and pipe wrenches for liberating the plumbing that shored up the earth so well.
Of course, neighbors were less than pleased to wake up any given morning to find a favorite trellis dismantled, its struts missing; or a major water leak in the back shed, where a four-foot length of three-inch pipe had simply disappeared.
They connected the disturbances, of course, with the poltergeist that was said to have been the curse of the Freeling household; and some, quick to take warning, put their houses up for sale. Others, more worldly, believing less supernatural forces to be the likely culprits, merely increased security measures: they build fences, bought dogs, installed burglar alarms, hired private patrols.
None of these steps took adequate account of the determination and cunning of a desperate, sleep-deprived, psychic, achondropiastic dwarf.
The vandalism (so-called) and pilfering increased. Furthermore, people were beginning to see things—shadowy forms scampering across the lawn at night—and reports of elves, trolls, hants, and goblins flooded the local police department. Arrests were made, but nothing ever stood up in court; and, in any case, the “disturbances” continued.
More houses went up for sale.
Tangina, on her part, was becoming more gaunt and more driven. By day, she fitfully half slept in her kingdom of catacombs; by night, she tunneled and gathered. Her tunnels led her under adjoining houses, across streets, into natural caverns, into tombs and graves. And the conversations she had with these withered corpses—both in the moment and in her sparse, fragmented dreams—led her further still into obsession, toward madness.
She would go for days without food, then break into someone’s kitchen and gobble up whatever was in the refrigerator—cold hot dogs, ginger, ale, milk, Velveeta cheese, beer, carrots—and skulk off again into the starlight to steal furnishings for her dreamland-beneath-the-surface. It went on for months like this before she discovered the first petroglyph.
It was etched on the rock face at the entrance to a natural cavern. It was Indian in origin, and she didn’t know what it meant, exactly, except that its psychic impact was so great that it hurled her across the floor and against another wall. She was unconscious for many hours.
When she awoke she knew only that this was the beginning of the portal she’d sought for so long—the entrance to the place that haunted her dreams and distorted her visions. Trembling, she approached the cave drawing and stared at it: it was the likeness of a man with a serpent crawling from his mouth.
She shuddered, retreated up to her original crawl space, and wondered what to do. Fear almost paralyzed her, self-doubt was a willing accomplice. She remained in that earthen cove without food or water for three days.
On the fourth night, hunger and thirst tore her from her warren. She broke in the back door of her downfall: the home of the insomniac local secretary of the American Rifle Association, who had midnight cravings of his own. Hearing rattles in the refrigerator, he tiptoed barefoot into the kitchen, brandishing his favorite twelve-gauge six-shell pump gun. Even so, he wasn’t prepared for the vision that confronted him—that of an emaciated three-foot scavenger with a demented look in her eye and ravioli dribbling from her mouth—and his shot went wide.
Tangina was out the door in a flash, but the gunshot aroused the attention of a passing patrol car, and the officers gave chase. Tangina, debilitated and slightly disoriented from malnutrition and dehydration, ran not to her hideaway but to a skateboard park with only one entrance. She was caught.
She admitted nothing; she said nothing. For two weeks the public housed and fed her in the jail ward of the county hospital. And it must be said that during that period the citizens of Cuesta Verde Estates continued to experience and report strange happenings in their homes—chandeliers crashing to the floor, air conditioner panels flying across the room, lamps going on and off—so one might surmise that Tangina’s tunnelings beneath these various houses had liberated or awakened a host of spirits from whatever slumber they’d enjoyed before her arrival. In any case, she wasn’t responsible for all the mischief the authorities had attributed to her, making her arrest a somewhat less successful police action than had initially been hoped.
In fact, they probably couldn’t even have prosecuted her for the one felony she’d been caught in the act of committing, since the secretary of the American Rifle Association was too ashamed to testify in court that he’d been unable to hit a malnourished midget in his own kitchen with a shotgun.
Still, she was obviously crazy, and the county was ready to commit her to long-term hospitalization when—because she was still technically in jail—they granted her the single phone call to which she was entitled.
She called Dr. Martha Lesh.
Lesh sprung her that afternoon—bail wasn’t all that steep on a breaking and entering to steal nonfat milk and tuna fish salad; nor did it hurt that this person into whose custody Tangina was being released was a psychiatrist—this type of guardianship got the court (in the court’s opinion, of course) off the hook.
Lesh, in any event, was the university professor and psychic researcher who’d become involved with the Freelings during that whole horrible episode—become involved with them by monitoring all the phenomena that were occurring in the house with infrared cameras, voltmeters, and the like. Lesh taped while Tangina astral-projected.
Now, half a year later, Lesh was back to her classes, and Tangina was one of the bag ladies of the fifth dimension.
“How can I help you?” Lesh asked as they walked out of the jail ward.
“Come on back to Cuesta Verde with me,” said Tangina.
And so they went. Tangina showed Lesh through the underground city of graves and caves and Indian drawings, and it wasn’t long before Lesh got pretty excited about the idea of a university-funded exploration of the site—possibly cofunded by the departments of anthropology, history . . . Lesh’s wheels were already turning.
She got the appropriate release forms from the Freelings; she got the required city permits; she got the lot designated by the state as a potential historic landmark of early California settlement; she got co-funding for digs to begin; she got a fence put up around the whole lot so little kids wouldn’t fall in a hole and sue and so poachers wouldn’t steal any artifacts the research team might unearth.
This all took another half year, during which the rest of the houses in the area went up for sale or were simply abandoned by their owners. No one wanted to buy there; no one wanted to live there. Too many strange things had happened—and were still happening. Too many ghosts in too many closets.
Tangina was named assistant director on the project, over the objections of som
e of the senior faculty—she was quite an oddity for a community of academics. For any community at all, in fact.
For one thing, she went right back to living down in her catacombs as soon as she was physically up to par. Lesh was dubious about this at first, but Tangina insisted, and Lesh wasn’t all that hard to convince—after all, her major interest was in observing and documenting Tangina’s psychic experiences in situ, and Tangina assured her that extrasensory phenomena were standing in line waiting to show themselves here.
And so they did.
But not to Lesh.
In fact, as far as Lesh was concerned, Tangina simply disappeared for a couple months. What she wasn’t aware of was that Tangina had only migrated to another plane of existence.
She tunneled beyond the first cave drawing and—barely two feet further on—plunged eight feet straight down a sandhole into a large cavern. She had no light, but she knew it was large by its echo. A small landslide closed over the hole she’d fallen through. There were several tunnels leading from the cave, all black as blindness. She took one by feel and knew it was the right one instantly: a cold, ethereal wind rushed around the walls, filling her like a whirlpool. She lay down quickly, to avoid injury. And in the next moment her spirit was sucked into the maelstrom.
Black light sparkled in every direction, every photon hitting her with a tiny explosion, turning her this way and that. She made no effort to control her flow in these currents for some time. Eventually her spirit was pulled down a chute of brighter blackness to a place of colored waters, mostly blues and violets. These waters buffeted her to a geyser of shimmering orange, which shoot her to another plane, a dimension she was not unfamiliar with. The place of mists.
Wandering souls there. The Lost Ones who could not find the Light, though it flooded their eyes.
The Beast had dwelled here before, but she didn’t see him now—not in his previous incarnation, at least. What she did see was much worse, in a way, because it was so much more human. What she saw was Henry Kane.
He saw her, too—saw her at once as food for his diseased soul—and moved quickly to devour her.
She flew away heedless of where. She knew only that she was no match for this abomination in her uncertain condition, and she had to get away. So she closed her eyes and flung her spirit into the ether, spinning out to the deepest hidden pocket of nowhere; and there she huddled, silent and chilly and beyond Kane’s reach.
It was a place of whites and grays and blacks. The land was covered with a coalish spongy nettle that she crouched under—it was good for hiding, though it pierced and scratched her. Other souls cowered here as well, some totally out of sight, some calling out to attract the attention of the flying creatures that soared above.
These, too, were black, with human torsos and heads, but some had only eyes, without noses or mouths, and some had only mouths, without noses or eyes. They flew on torn, batlike wings and had sticky spider legs, and they swooped low over the sponge nettles, picking up random souls in their talons and veering up into the clouds.
The clouds were black, like splashes of ink. Periodically one would be punctured and deflate, spilling a viscous, tarlike substance all over the sky.
Needle-toothed hyenas prowled upright on two legs, through the brush, howling regularly in triumph or anguish. Sometimes they bit someone and laughed.
Large, dangerous birds stalked here, too, pecking, pecking.
A face appeared in the sky from time to time: two-dimensional, hollow, commanding. It would be torn apart by gray winds or set upon burrs that spun off the nettles.
Pits of black lava emerged and disappeared. Lakes of tar bubbled up creatures who congealed and flew away.
The air was full of pain.
Here Tangina resided for many weeks, afraid to move.
Here Taylor found her in his wanderings.
“This is not a place for such a one as you,” his spirit told her. He stood brazenly above the low brush, undaunted by the flying things, the pecking things, the biting things.
“What do you know of such a one as me?” she asked suspiciously. Might he not have been an agent of the Beast?
“I have tracked you from the tomb of my ancestors,” he said. “When you unearthed those sleeping spirits, their call awoke me, and I came to judge your intentions—but your spirit was already screaming from the Evil One, so I have trailed your sign from the Canyon of Shadows to this place of fear.”
A flying thing without eyes dived at him, but he batted it aside backhanded, and with a wail it melted into a smoky rain that blistered the souls beneath it.
“Have I . . . given offense by entering the tombs marked by Indian sign?” she asked. She still couldn’t glean what was in store for her; she was still thick with dread.
“No.” Taylor smiled. “Rather you allowed their spirits to escape from a place they loathed. Their spirits are free now. I am here to help you.”
“I could use a little assistance at that.” She nodded. A hyena screeched at Taylor and ran off. She held his hand, and it was warm, and she was less afraid. “There was great evil in those caves,” she said. “I could feel it, even blind as I’ve become.”
“To reach the darkest evil, you must dig deeper still—to the true core. It is there you will find the Evil One in his lair and perhaps learn the story that my ancestors told on the walls and set themselves to guard with their spirits.”
“What is that story?”
“The story of the white man Kane . . . but it is a story each must learn alone. It is not for me to tell. Only let me guide you back now, that you may continue to unearth his unholy tomb.”
So he led her out of this hell, back to the place of mists, to the portal that returned to the Fifth World—the earthly plane.
“Good-bye for now,” he said. “I must find Sings-With-Eagles.” And he was gone.
She was about to return to her body when Kane roared up from inside a darkish vapor. It terrified her just to view him. She dived through the portal, but not before he’d sent two of his followers down on her—shrieking, dancing ghouls wearing eyeless masks. They struck out at her, clawing her eyes, blinding her totally to further visions of these nether dimensions.
The first bulldozer on the first day of digging opened up the cave in which Tangina’s almost lifeless body was slumped against a far wall. Hypothermic, hypo metabolic, she looked like a corpse. But Lesh was called right over, and she found a pulse.
They rushed Tangina to the hospital, where she remained in coma for two more days. Then suddenly she sat up in bed, holding her hands to her eyes and screaming, “I’m blind! I’m blind!”
She remained in the hospital another week, during which her health and her earthly vision returned to normal, though her spirits did not.
She could no longer see in the astral. Not even in her nightmares.
This was a blow to Lesh, too, since she’d been counting on recording Tangina’s visions. It was such a blow that she tried to rectify the situation in a rather unorthodox, even unprofessional, manner. She took Tangina to the excavation one night, hypnotized her, and then put herself in a trance using autosuggestion.
The idea was go get Tangina into a dissociative state that approximated her psychic states and then break through whatever boundary was frightening her by reaching a similar level of consciousness and attaining some kind of empathetic resonance.
Whatever Lesh had in mind exactly, it didn’t work—in a big way.
Tangina became terrified in her blindness at the entrance to the next plane; Lesh tried to ease her spirit there, showing her there was a way in and a way out; Tangina, in her panic, thrashed wildly, knocking Lesh through the portal to the other side; and Lesh never returned. Couldn’t find her way out.
When Tangina came back into her body at the cave site, Lesh was dead.
The diagnosis was coronary infarction, but Tangina knew the real cause of death: caught on the wrong side without an escort; a victim not even of her own fear but of Ta
ngina’s.
It caused something of a scandal. The project shut down, pending a lengthy investigation. The last holdout homeowners of Cuesta Verde left town. And Tangina went underground—figuratively, this time. She moved to Hollywood.
It was a transient’s apartment building just off the Boulevard, known to the locals as the Sundown Hotel—because that was the time of day it seemed to come alive. And there Tangina wandered the halls, searching for her lost soul.
She felt as if she’d betrayed Dr. Lesh, a woman of great heart. So she kept herself from making friends, lest she betray them as well, simply by the force of her own weakness. There was one woman, however, with whom she began to spend time—an old Mexican woman who lived alone, two doors down. Together they’d sit for hours, sipping absinthe and casting tarot.
It was this woman who told Tangina she must prepare for a final battle if she ever hoped to control her own destiny again.
It was this woman who told her she had to confront her worst fears if she was ever to know herself again.
It was this woman who told her she would soon meet a tall, dark man in some out-of-the-way place.
And it was the following weekend, rummaging around the temporarily abandoned Camp Cuesta Verde Excavation Site 1, that Tangina ran into Taylor. For the first time, in the flesh.
They nodded knowing, without greeting. He pointed her in the direction digging should proceed, if it were ever renewed. She told him what had happened to the house that had been here, and to the family that had lived in it. He gave her an old photograph—a group picture of settlers on their way west, led by a man in a black hat. She stared at this man and became quite breathless. She knew his face. It was the face of the creature that had almost devoured her on her last visit to the astral. Taylor said his name was Kane.
Tangina held the picture, trembling, and promised Taylor they would dig to the core.