The Shadow Priest: Omnibus Edition: Two Complete Novels

by D. C. Alexander

  *****

  The last deep red band of the sunset faded on the western horizon and the sky grew dark. Darker than normal. Arkin's vision was tunneling, his consciousness beginning to flag. He lay down close to the radio so that he wouldn't have to exert any more energy than necessary to use it.

  He began to reflect on how he'd come to be here, dying of thirst on the open sea. The chain of events was too ludicrous to believe. In his banishment to a remote, sparsely populated corner of the Mountain West, had he really crossed the path of an old, invisible adversary? A hidden puppet master who'd driven him from his career, from his dying wife's bedside, from his home? And now, having been shot, having escaped arrest twice, having chased meager scraps of evidence halfway around the world, was he doomed to die of mere dehydration?

  Was the Priest's group even down here? If he somehow survived to complete his journey, would he find nothing more than a remote fish-farming operation, staffed by innocent Chileans mystified that a worn down and weather-beaten gringo would travel thousands of miles to see what they were up to? He could picture their faces, eyeballing him, perplexed. If he'd had the energy, he would have laughed. The whole thing was insane. And he was insane to have come this far. Exhausted, he let his heavy eyelids close.

  *****

  I'll let you in on a little secret, Nathaniel, his childhood pediatrician in Manhattan was telling him as he sat on a paper-covered vinyl bed in an examination room wearing nothing but white briefs. You can drink seawater.

  Really?

  Yes. All that stuff about seawater dehydrating you is just urban legend.

  It is?

  Definitely. In fact, they finally figured out that the rumor was started by a ring of municipal water utility executives from the bigger coastal cities. New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Seattle, and so on. They were all in on it. Bunch of fat cats brainwashing us into thinking we need their product. The doctor shook his head in disgust.

  A conspiracy.

  Exactly. So drink up. I know how thirsty you are. How parched. Try a cup. It's nice and cold. The extra electrolytes are good for you.

  That sounds really good. Really refreshing.

  Go ahead then.

  Okay.

  *****

  It what seemed the blink of an eye, but could have been hours, Arkin came to in darkness. Am I dead? As his eyes adjusted, he saw that he was still in the boat, that it was still night, and that, thankfully, there was no evidence—no nearby cup, no little puddles, no wet clothing—to indicate that he'd tried to drink seawater.

  Certain it was a futile final gesture, he lifted a weak arm to switch the radio on and turn the dial to scan frequencies once more. But there was still nothing to hear. Nothing at all. Listening to the empty hiss of the receiver as he lay there in the dark, he realized he'd never felt so utterly isolated and alone in his entire life.

  Having reached the upper end of the frequency range, he started back down, with barely the energy to turn the dial between his index finger and thumb. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Then, a burst of static, as though someone were keying a microphone. Was he dreaming? Another burst of static. Then voices. Distant, distorted by static. But voices nonetheless. A far away conversation between several boats. Probably fishing boats radioing activity and position reports to each other. But he couldn't make out what they were saying in their quick Spanish. Wait—was it Spanish? The accents sounded South American. Yet Arkin wasn't sure he'd heard any Spanish words. But what other language could it be? Arkin mustered all the strength he could to sit up. He took a deep breath, grabbed the microphone, and in broken Spanish made worse by his cottonmouth, shouted "Emergencia! Emergencia! I have no agua. No agua."

  For a few lonely moments, the channel went utterly silent. Arkin's heart sank. Perhaps he had been hallucinating after all. Finally, one of the boats responded.

  "Que? Repita para mí, por favor."

  If the voices hadn't been speaking Spanish before, they certainly were now.

  "Emergencia. No agua."

  " ¿Quién es esto? ¿Como te llamas?"

  Arkin didn't give his name, but did his best to explain, in English, where he thought he might be: 100 or 200 kilometers southwest of Concepción. A wild guess, at best.

  "¿Donde?" the perplexed sounding voice asked.

  He couldn't be sure, but he thought the voice instructed him, in halting and broken English, to key his microphone every few minutes. Did one of them have an automatic direction finder they could tune to his VHF radio frequency? He'd practiced using such devices back in Recon training, but had no idea whether they were common equipment on boats. It seemed unlikely. Maybe he was misunderstanding them, or hallucinating what he wanted to hear. In any case, he fought to keep his eyes open, fought to stay conscious, the darkness ever closing in around him.

  Every few minutes, he keyed the mic. But his body and mind were failing. He had the sensation he was sinking into the deck of the boat as he lay on his back. Then he got the spins. Then, gradually, he lost consciousness.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Back in Valparaiso, hundreds of miles to the north, Morrison opened his eyes after pretending to be asleep as the night nurse peeked through a crack in the door to check on him. Earlier in the day, they'd finally removed the leads to the vital- signs monitor from his body. He'd waited for this day for a long time—both because the vitals monitor would have chimed with an alarm if he'd removed the leads while it was still on, and because he had to come far enough in his recovery from bladder surgery that he could walk. But now he was ready.

  Morrison reached under the side table and pulled the handcuff key Arkin had left for him from the tape that held it to its hiding place. To his continued amazement, no police had ever showed up to handcuff him to the bed—let alone ask him any questions. But he decided to hang onto the key just in case he ran into any trouble down the road, concealing it in the bottom of his sock.

  Quickly, he got dressed, slipped his shoes on, opened his door a crack to see if the coast was clear, and slipped out. He made straight for the fire escape, took it all the way to the ground floor, then went out the door and disappeared into the crisp Valparaiso night.

  As he walked as quickly as he could with a good bit of residual pain in his abdomen, he wondered what had happened to Arkin. He hadn't had a visit in several days. Had some new piece of evidence come to light that obliged him to rush off? Had he been arrested? Had he been killed? Morrison figured Arkin would have left him a message on his cell phone.

  When Morrison finally made it to his hotel, the front desk clerk gave him his suitcase and a small cardboard box into which they'd put loose articles they'd found in his room when they finally went in to clean it out—not having known what became of him. He powered up his phone and checked for messages. There were none. He dialed Arkin's number. He got some sort of recording. He couldn't understand the Spanish, but guessed it was telling him that the person he was dialing was not available. He couldn't even leave a voicemail.

  If Arkin was still alive, he was on his own.

  THIRTY-NINE

  Arkin thought he heard something mechanical. A deep hum. A diesel boat engine? Could it be? But when he opened his eyes, he found himself enveloped in a cold, dark, gray void of howling wind, empty but for the towering figure he stood toe-to-toe with. Once again, it was the Anasazi priest from the pictograph he'd found near the Animas River while fishing with Morrison and Pratt what seemed like years ago. The priest who inhabited his dreams.

  He stood at least eight feet tall, and his face was tipped forward to look down on Arkin. There were no discernable arms or legs—only a broad-shouldered monolith of a torso. Yet his body seemed more shadow than anything corporeal. A figure comprised of dark emptiness. The only parts of him that looked like something physical were his glowing red eyes. But behind them, there was nothing.

  He inhabits this ethereal plane, Arkin thought with a sense of heartened wonder. He waits for me here. Maybe there is more to the universe af
ter all. No. I'm hallucinating.

  Still, with a flicker of hope, he whispered, "Bryant," then slowly reached out to touch the figure—to touch its absence of light. But as his hand seemed about to make contact with the priest's body, the wind rendered the priest to dust. The void went dark and Arkin had the sensation he was falling backward into nothingness.

  *****

  Arkin smelled plumeria.

  "Nathaniel. Nathaniel, wake up."

  Hmmm?

  "Wake up."

  It was Hannah's voice. Hannah?

  Arkin opened his eyes to find himself slumped on a wooden bench, leaning with his back against an unfinished plywood wall. He was in a dark, narrow, unadorned wooden house, a single naked light bulb scarcely illuminating the room from its socket on an exposed rafter overhead. The floor was concrete slab, bare but for one dark area rug of a style that reminded him of the rug in Lily Bryant's house. The close air smelled of fried onions and baking pastry. Two children sat on another bench against the opposite wall. They looked Native American. They were staring at him, silent.

  "Did you see the priest?" Arkin asked.

  The children looked at each other, then back at him, expressionless.

  "The priest. Was he here?"

  Arkin's head spun. He wondered if he wasn't seeing a vision of the afterlife. Perhaps he'd died of dehydration on the boat, and had now come to the place to which the Anasazi had vanished so many centuries earlier.

  The children continued to stare. Arkin closed his tired eyes once again.

  *****

  When he next came into light, he was staring at a lone cliff dwelling tucked up under the lip of a shallow canyon ridge above a river that might have been the Animas. It was after sundown, the light rapidly waning. A purple-edged veil of darkness was approaching from the east at unnatural speed. He was only a few feet from the short doorway of the ancient sandstone structure. But strain as he might, he couldn't make out anything in the pitch-dark interior. As he stared, a figure approached the door from within and emerged, meeting his eyes. It was Hannah. Her skin was glowing. She had all her beautiful dark hair again. She was wearing her favorite white linen dress and silver Harvey bracelets on her wrists.

  "Hannah?" he asked in a desperately sad voice. My wife is dead. I'm dreaming a cruel dream. This isn't real. Is this real? "What were you doing in there?"

  But she didn't speak. She just nodded and smiled. It was the same heartwarming smile that, all on its own, used to pull Arkin out of his fits of despair and set him back on his feet again, reassured that there were good things, good people in the world.

  She stepped forward, took his hands in hers, then stared into his eyes for a moment. Holding her warm hands, Arkin changed his mind. This was real. He opened his mouth to speak, but she put a finger to his lips to keep him quiet, then leaned forward and kissed him. Before he could react, she turned and, keeping hold of one of his hands, led him back toward the dark doorway of the cliff dwelling. But he grew afraid and stood firm. She turned and looked at him and smiled again. Her lips didn't move, but in his head he heard her say, "Come with me."

  "What's in there?"

  She smiled that glowing, all-powerful smile again, and he relented. He stepped forward and followed her into the darkness.

  *****

  With a thud, he woke to find himself lying on his side on the dirt floor of what looked like a plywood storage shed, his eyes wet with tears. Dirt-caked farming tools lined one wall. Parts of three honeybee hives sat in a corner. He lay alongside a cot he guessed he'd fallen off of. His jacket hung over the back of a small wooden chair. Next to where his head had landed was a large jug of water and a plate with what looked like two empanadas on it.

  He had a splitting headache and felt like shit from head to toe. Much worse than the worst hangover of his life. He wiped his arm over his face to dry the tears and grunted as he sat up on his elbows, blinking to clear his eyes. There was a pale light in the sky outside a small window above the tools. It was either a little while before dawn or after sunset. He had no idea what time it was, or, for that matter, where he was. The last thing he remembered was hearing people speaking in an unrecognizable language on the boat's radio as he began slipping into shock.

  What the hell?

  He sat up, leaning against the cot, trying to get his bearings. The empanadas smelled good. But his stomach didn't feel quite ready for food yet, so he settled for a long drink of water from the jug. Then he tried to stand up and immediately got the spins before sitting back down. Clearly, his body wasn't quite ready to move.

  He tried to think, doing breathing exercises to calm and focus his mind. Bits of other memory began to surface, so fragmented and fleeting they could well have been nothing more than parts of a dream recalled. A powered fishing vessel—a purse seiner—towing him to a small harbor. People who looked Native American circled around and staring down at him as he lay on his back on the dock. The same people giving him water, a blanket, a cot.

  Best he could figure, a fishing boat had received his distress call, located him with a direction finder or radar, and rescued him. He was sure he owed the crew his life.

  "Deus ex machina," he muttered as he gazed out the tiny window, smiling weakly, remembering his late friend John Pratt. He'd explained the meaning of the Latin phrase while teasing Pratt about a ludicrous, gimmicky plot twist in a book he was reading. A happy memory. He got back into the cot and went back to sleep.

  FORTY

  The next time he woke it was night. This time when he sat up, he was hungry. By the pale moonlight shining in through the window, he devoured the two empanadas sitting on the plate next to his bed. They were filled with fried onion and cheese. He swore they were the best things he'd ever eaten. He licked every crumb off the plate, then drank all the water remaining in the jug.

  While he felt a tremendous urge to find his rescuers and thank them heartily for saving his life, he knew he had to move. It was entirely possible that his rescuers, thinking they were helping, had informed the authorities of his whereabouts and that the authorities were on their way. He attempted to stand up once again. This time his stomach tightened but he didn't get the spins. He was stable. His sense of balance had returned.

  Looking around, he could see that none of his belongings were with him. There was no additional food. No clothes other than his jacket and what he was wearing, stiff from dried saltwater. It made no difference. He had to run for it.

  He slipped his shoes on, grabbed his jacket, crept to the door, and slowly opened it a crack to take a look. It was a clear, starry night. The shed was at the back of a small yard behind a simple house of plywood walls and a torch-down roof. The house had no foundation, but rested on concrete pilings that had been sunk into compacted earth. Along one side of the yard, what looked like several different kinds of squash and tomatoes grew in a narrow garden plot. Just outside the door of the shed stood an ancient apple tree, its trunk half-covered in moss.

  There was no activity in the yard, and there didn't appear to be anyone awake in the home. Perhaps more importantly, there were no signs of guard dogs. He opened the door, slipped out into the cool night, then went around the back of the shed and jumped a short split-rail fence that separated the yard from a rough dirt alleyway that ran behind a half-dozen similar houses. Arkin stood still to get his bearings and listen to the sounds of the night. Each end of the alley was lit with the soft orange glow of sodium vapor streetlights. He could hear one dog barking in the distance, not close enough to be a cause for concern. He also thought he heard the roar of crashing surf some distance to his right. He turned left, heading inland, figuring it was his best bet for finding a reliable means of transportation south. He was done with boats.

  FORTY-ONE

  By dawn, he'd managed to hoof it several miles inland, following a severely potholed road, jumping into the woods anytime a vehicle approached. He'd also stolen a couple pounds of ripe cherries from someone's yard on the outskirts of the fi
shing village he'd woken up in, eating one of them as he walked, carrying the rest in a makeshift carrier he'd fashioned out of his jacket. As the sky began to lighten, he found a large, dry culvert that ran under the road. He gathered up armloads of leaves and brush and dumped them into one end the culvert until he'd built up a sizable pile. Then he burrowed under it for warmth, leaving only his face exposed, and went to sleep.

  *****

  Arkin woke late in the day and decided to resume his walk despite the fact that it was light out. The area was very sparsely populated, and there had been so few vehicles using the road that he figured the risk of being spotted was minimal. He could always jump into the trees if he heard a vehicle approaching.

  *****

  Less than a mile along the road, Arkin came to a bridge over a small, crystal-clear stream. He climbed down to its bed, stripped down, and washed his filthy, salt-stiff clothes for the first time in many days, then spread them on large boulders to dry. But barely an hour later, impatient to make progress, he put them back on, still half-wet, and resumed his hike. He reckoned he was heading roughly east-southeast. Having studied maps of Chile, he figured it couldn't be more than 30 or 40 more miles to Chile's main north-south road—Ruta 5—part of the great Pan-American Highway. From there, he figured he'd try to stow away on a southbound truck.

  *****

  Just as the sun began to set, he came across a small grass airfield running parallel to the road in a valley running between two long, green mountains. There were three airplanes parked in the open next to a large, rusting Quonset hut hangar—an ancient Cessna 188 crop duster painted in a striped red and white sunburst pattern, a Cessna 152 with its engine removed, and what, at least at this distance, looked like an old Aeronca single-engine tail-dragger, painted from stem to stern in a bright canary yellow. Arkin figured that despite its looks, the plane probably wasn't an Aeronca because, as far as he knew, the very last general aviation Aeronca airplane had rolled out of its Middletown, Ohio, factory in the early 1950s.