Thunderhead

by Douglas Preston

“Why?”

  Beiyoodzin seemed a little taken aback by his directness. He gave Smithback a curiously penetrating look. “I come here,” he said slowly, “to become a human being again.”

  “What about the rest of the year?” Smithback asked.

  “I’m sorry,” Nora jumped in. “He’s a journalist. He always asks too many questions.” She knew that in most Native American cultures it was rude to show curiosity and ask direct questions.

  Beiyoodzin, however, merely laughed again. “It’s all right. I’m just surprised he doesn’t have a tape recorder or a camera. Most white people carry them. Anyway, I herd sheep most of the time, and I do ceremonies. Healing ceremonies.”

  “You’re a medicine man?” Smithback asked, unchecked.

  “Traditional healer.”

  “What kind of ceremonies?” Smithback asked.

  “I do the Four Mountain ceremony.”

  “Really?” Smithback asked with obvious interest. “What’s it for?”

  “It’s a three-night ceremony. Chanting, sweats, and herbal remedies. It cures sadness, depression, and hopelessness.”

  “And does it work?”

  Beiyoodzin looked at the journalist. “Sure it works.” He seemed to grow evasive in the wake of Smithback’s continued interest. “Of course,” he went on, “there are always those even our ceremonies can’t reach. That’s also why I come out here. Because of the failures.”

  “Some kind of vision quest?” Smithback asked.

  Beiyoodzin waved his hand. “If you call coming out here, praying, and even fasting for a while, a vision quest, then I suppose that’s what it is. I don’t do it for visions, but for spiritual healing. To remind myself that we don’t need much to be happy. That’s all.”

  He shifted, looking around. “But you folks need a place to lay your bedrolls.”

  “Plenty of room out here,” said Nora.

  “Good,” said Beiyoodzin. He leaned back and threw his wizened hands behind his head, resting his back on the rock. They watched as the sun sank below the horizon and darkness came rolling over the landscape. The sky glowed with residual color, a deep strange purple that faded to night. Beiyoodzin rolled a cigarette, lit it, and began puffing furiously, holding it awkwardly between thumb and index finger, as if it were the first time he had smoked.

  “I’m sorry to bring this up again,” Nora said, “but if you know anything about who might have killed our horses, I’d like to hear it. It’s possible our activities might have offended someone.”

  “Your activities.” The man blew a cloud of smoke into the still twilight. “You still haven’t told me about those.”

  Nora thought for a moment. It seemed that information was the price of his assistance. Of course, there was no guarantee he could help them. And yet it was critical they find out who was behind the killings. “What I’m about to say is confidential,” she said slowly. “Can I count on your discretion?”

  “You mean, am I going to tell anyone? Not if you don’t want me to.” He flicked the cigarette butt into the fire and began rolling another. “I have many addictions,” he said, nodding at the cigarette. “That’s another reason I come out here.”

  Nora looked at him. “We’re excavating an Anasazi cliff dwelling.”

  It was as if Beiyoodzin’s movements were suddenly, completely arrested, his hand freezing in the act of twisting the cigarette ends. Then he was in motion again. The pause was brief but striking. He lit the cigarette and sat back again, saying nothing.

  “It’s a very important city,” Nora continued. “It contains priceless, unique artifacts. It would be a huge tragedy if it were looted. We’re afraid that these people might want to drive us away so they can plunder the site.”

  “Plunder the site,” he repeated. “And you will remove these artifacts? Take them to a museum?”

  “No,” said Nora. “For now, we’re going to leave everything as is.”

  Beiyoodzin continued to smoke the cigarette, but his movements had become studied and deliberate, and his eyes were opaque. “We never go into Chilbah Valley,” he said slowly.

  “Why not?”

  Beiyoodzin held the cigarette in front of his face, the smoke trickling between his fingers. He looked at Nora through veiled eyes. “How were the horses killed?” he asked.

  “They were sliced open,” she replied. “Their guts pulled out and arranged in spirals. Sticks tipped with feathers were shoved into their eyes. And pieces of skin had been cut off.”

  The effect of this on Beiyoodzin was even more pronounced. He became agitated, quickly dropping the cigarette into the fire and smoothing a hand across his forehead. “Skin cut off ? Where?”

  “In two places on the breast and lower belly, and on the forehead.”

  The old man said nothing, but Nora could see his hand was shaking, and it frightened her.

  “You shouldn’t be in there,” he said in a low, urgent voice. “You should get out immediately.”

  “Why?” Nora asked.

  “It’s very dangerous.” He hesitated a moment. “There are stories among the Nankoweap about that valley, and that other valley . . . the valley beyond. You might laugh at me, because most white people don’t believe in such things. But what happened to your horses is a kind of witchcraft. It’s a terrible evil. What you’re doing, digging in that city, is going to kill you if you don’t get out, right now. Especially now that . . . they’ve found you.”

  “They?” Smithback asked. “Who’s ‘they’?”

  Beiyoodzin’s voice dropped. “The spotted-clay witches. The skinwalkers. The wolfskin runners.”

  In the darkness, Nora’s blood went cold.

  Beside her, Smithback stirred. “I’m sorry,” he spoke up. “You said witches?”

  There was a faint tone in his voice that the Indian picked up. He gazed at the writer, his face indistinct in the growing darkness. “Do you believe in evil?”

  “Of course.”

  “No normal Nankoweap person would kill a horse: to us, horses are sacred. I don’t know what you call your evil people, but we call ours skinwalkers, wolfskin runners. They have many names, and many forms. They are completely outside our society, but they take what is good in our religion and turn it upside down. Whatever you may think, Nankoweap wolfskin runners exist. And they are drawn to Chilbah. Because the city was a place of sorcery, cruelty, witchcraft, sickness, and death.”

  But Nora barely heard this. Wolfskin runners. Her mind fled back to the shadow-knitted ranch house: the dark matted form that had towered over her, the furred thing that had kept pace with her truck along the rutted dirt road.

  “I don’t doubt what you say,” Smithback replied. “Over the last couple of years, I’ve seen some pretty strange things myself. But where do these skinwalkers come from?”

  Beiyoodzin fell silent, arms propped on his knees, dark hands clasped. He rolled another cigarette, then turned his gaze toward the ground and fell motionless. The silence grew as the minutes passed. Nora could hear the faint cropping sounds of the horse grazing in the draw. Then, eyes still fixed on the ground, cigarette held loosely between two fingers, Beiyoodzin spoke again.

  “To become a witch, you have to kill someone you love. Someone close, brother or sister, mother or father. You kill them, to get the power. Then, when that person is buried, you secretly dig the body up.” He lit the cigarette. “Then you turn the life force of that person to evil.”

  “How?” Smithback whispered.

  “When life is created, Wind, liehei, the life force, enters the body. Where the Wind enters the body, it leaves a little eddy, like a ripple in water. It leaves these marks on the tips of the fingers, toes, the back of the head. The witch cuts these off the corpse. They dry them, grind them up, make a kind of powder. And they drill out the skull behind and make a disk, for throwing spells. If it is a murdered sister, the witch has sex with the dead body. He uses the fluids to make another powder. It’s called Alchi’bin lehh tsal. Incest corpse powder
.”

  “Good God,” Smithback groaned.

  “You go to a remote spot at night. You strip off your clothes. You cover your body with spots of white clay, and wear the jewelry buried with the dead, the silver and turquoise. You place wolfskins or coyoteskins on either side of you. Then you say certain lines of the Night Wind Chant backwards. One of those skins will leap off the ground and stick to you. And then you have the power.”

  “What is this power?” Nora asked.

  Beiyoodzin lit the cigarette. The repeated hoot of an owl echoed mournfully through the endless canyons.

  “Our people believe you get the power to move at night, like the wind, but without sound. You can become invisible. You learn powerful spells, spells to witch people from a distance. And with the corpse powder, you can kill. Oh, can you kill.”

  “Kill?” Smithback asked. “Witch people? How, exactly?”

  “If a skinwalker can get something from their victim’s body—spit, hair, a sweaty piece of clothing—they place it in the mouth of a corpse. With that, they can cast a spell on the person. Or on his horse, his sheep, his house, his belongings. They can break his tools, make his machines refuse to operate. They can make his wife fall sick, kill his dogs or children.”

  He lapsed into silence. The owl hooted again, closer now.

  “Witch people from a distance,” Smithback repeated. “Move at night, without sound.” He grunted, shook his head.

  Beiyoodzin glanced at the writer briefly, his eyes luminous in the gathering darkness, then looked away again.

  “Let me tell you a story,” Beiyoodzin said, after a moment’s hesitation. “Something that happened to me many years ago, when I was a boy. It’s a story I haven’t told for a long, long time.”

  A hot red ember flashed out of the dark, and Beiyoodzin’s face was briefly lit crimson as he drew on the cigarette.

  “It was summer,” he went on. “I was helping my grandfather bring some sheep up to Escalante. It was a two-day trip, so we brought the horse and wagon. We stopped for the night at a place called Shadow Rock. Built a brush corral for the sheep, turned the horse out to graze, went to sleep. Around midnight, I woke up suddenly. It was pitch black: no moon, no stars. There was no noise. Something was wrong. I called out to my grandfather. Nothing. So I sat up, tossed twigs into the coals. As they flared up I caught a glimpse of him.”

  Beiyoodzin took a long, careful drag on the cigarette. “He was lying on his back, eyes gone. His fingertips were missing. His mouth had been sewed shut. Something had been done to the back of his head.” The red firebrand of the cigarette tip wavered in the dark. “I stood up and threw the rest of the brush onto the fire. In the light I could see our horse maybe twenty feet away. He was lying on the ground, guts mounded beside him. The sheep in the pen were all dead. All this—all this—without even the sound of a mouse.”

  The pinpoint of red vanished as Beiyoodzin ground out the cigarette. “As the fire died back, I saw something else,” he continued. “A pair of eyes, red in the flames. Eyes in the darkness, but nothing else. They never blinked, they never moved. But somehow, I felt them coming closer. Then I heard a low, puffing sound. Dust hit my face, and my eyes stung. I fell back, too scared even to cry out.

  “I don’t remember how I made my way home. They put me to bed with a high fever. At last, they put me in a wagon and took me to the hospital in Cedar City. The doctors there said it was typhoid, but my family knew better. One by one, they left my bedside. Except for my grandmother, I didn’t see any of my relatives for a couple of days. But by the time they returned to the hospital, the worst of the sickness had passed. To the surprise of the doctors.”

  There was a brief silence. “I later learned where my relatives had been. They’d returned to Shadow Rock, where we’d camped. They took the village’s best tracker with them. A set of huge wolfprints led away from the site. They followed the tracks to a remote camp east of Nankoweap. Inside was . . . well, I guess you would have to call him a man. It was noon, and he was sleeping. My relatives took no chances. They shot him while he slept.” He paused. “It took a great many bullets.”

  “How did they know?” Smithback asked.

  “Beside the man was a witchcraft medicine kit. There were certain roots, plants, and insects: taboo items, forbidden items, used only by skinwalkers. They found corpse powder. And up in the chimney, they found certain . . . pieces of meat, drying.”

  “But I don’t understand how . . . ?” Smithback’s question trailed off into the darkness.

  “Who was it?” Nora asked.

  Beiyoodzin did not answer directly. But after a moment, he turned. Even in the dark, Nora could feel the intensity of his gaze.

  “You said your horses were cut in five places, on the forehead and two places on each side of breast and belly,” he said. “Do you know what those five places have in common?”

  “No,” Smithback said.

  “Yes,” Nora whispered, her mouth dry with sudden fear. “Those are the five places where the fur of a horse forms a whorl.”

  The light had completely vanished from the sky, and a huge dome of stars was cast over their heads. Somewhere in the distance, out on the plain, a coyote began yipping and wailing, and was answered by another.

  “I shouldn’t have told you any of this,” Beiyoodzin said. “No good can come to me. But maybe now you know why you must leave this place at once.”

  Nora took a deep breath. “Mr. Beiyoodzin, thank you for your help. I’d be lying if I told you I wasn’t frightened by what you’ve said. It scares me to death. But I’m running the excavation of a ruin that my father gave up his life to find. I owe it to him to see it through.”

  This seemed to astonish Beiyoodzin. “Your father died out here?” he asked.

  “Yes, but we never found his body.” Something about the way he spoke put her on guard. “Do you know something about it?”

  “I know nothing.” Then the man was abruptly on his feet. His agitation seemed to have increased. “But I’m sorry to hear about it. Please think over what I’ve said.”

  “We’re not likely to forget it,” said Nora.

  “Good. Now I think I’ll turn in. I’ve got to get up early. So I’ll say goodbye to you right now. You can turn your horses out to graze in the draw. There’s plenty of grass down by the stream. Tomorrow, help yourself to breakfast if you like. I won’t be around.”

  “That won’t be necessary—” Nora began. But the old man was already shaking their hands. He turned away and began to busy himself with the bedroll.

  “I think we’ve been given the brushoff,” murmured Smithback. They went back to their horses, unsaddled them, and made a small camp of their own on the far side of the pile of rocks.

  * * *

  “What a character,” Smithback muttered a little later as he unrolled his bag. The horses had been watered and were now nickering and muttering contentedly, hobbled nearby. “First he spooks us with all that talk about skinwalkers. Then he suddenly announces it’s bedtime.”

  “Yes,” Nora replied. “Just when the talk got around to my father.” She shook out her own bedroll.

  “He never said what tribe he was from.”

  “I think Nankoweap. That’s how the village got its name.”

  “Some of that witchcraft stuff was pretty vile. Do you believe it?”

  “I believe in the power of evil,” Nora said after a moment. “But the thought of wolfskin runners, witching people with corpse powder, is tough to swallow. There are millions of dollars worth of artifacts at Quivira. It seems more likely that we’re dealing with a couple of people playing at witchcraft to frighten us away.”

  “Maybe so, but it seems like a pretty elaborate plan. Dressing up in wolfskins, cutting up horses . . .”

  They both fell silent, and the cool night air moved over them. Nora rubbed her arms in the sudden chill. She could offer no explanation for what had happened to her at the ranch house, the matted form running alongside her truck.
Or the same dark figure, racing away from her kitchen door. Or the disappearance of Thurber.

  “Which way is downwind?” Smithback asked suddenly.

  Nora looked at him.

  “I want to know where to put my boots,” he explained. In the dark, Nora thought she could see a crooked smile on the journalist’s face.

  “Put them at the foot of your bedroll and point them east,” she said. “Maybe they’ll keep the rattlers away.”

  She pulled off her own boots with a sigh, lay down, and pulled the bag up around her dusty clothes. A half-moon had begun to rise, veiled by tatters of cloud. A few yards away, she could hear Smithback grunting as he flounced around, making preparations for sleep. In the calm darkness, the thought of skinwalkers and witches fell away under the weight of her weariness.

  “It’s strange,” Smithback said. “But something is definitely rotten in the State of Denmark.”

  “What, your shoes?”

  “Very funny. Our host, I mean. He’s hiding something. But I don’t think it has to do with the horses.”

  From far overhead came the sound of a jet. Idly, Nora located its faint, blinking light, crawling across the velvety blackness. As if reading her mind, Smithback spoke: “There’s some guy,” he said, “sitting up in that plane, guzzling a martini, eating smoked almonds, and doing the New York Times crossword puzzle.”

  Nora laughed quietly. “Speaking of the Times, how long have you written for them?”

  “About two years now, since my last book was published. I took a leave of absence to come on this trip.”

  Nora sat up on one elbow. “Why did you come?”

  “What?” The question seemed to take the writer by surprise.

  “It’s a simple enough question. This is a dangerous, dirty, uncomfortable trip. Why did you leave comfortable old Manhattan?”

  “And maybe miss out on the greatest discovery since King Tut’s tomb?” Smithback turned in his sleeping bag. “Well, I guess it’s more than that. After all, I knew there was no guarantee we’d find anything. If you get right down to it, newspaper work can be boring. Even if it’s the New York Times and everyone genuflects when you enter the room. But you know what? This is what it’s all about, really; discovering lost cities, listening to tales of murder, lying under the stars with a lovely—” He cleared his voice. “Well, you know what I mean.”