Back | Next
Contents

Twelve

 

For Connor, Carol, Diacono, and the Van Wyks, the next day was spent closeted individually with Vic, Tory, or Ole. Ole in turn was closeted intermittently with Vic. These second-day sessions were mostly short: One might go in for five or fifteen minutes, then come out for half an hour or longer before going back in. In between, a lot of coffee was drunk and there was a lot of talk and laughter.

There were also numerous catnaps on sofa, floor, porch—anywhere convenient. Sometimes one would waken with a sense that much had gone on during sleep; sometimes a meaningful dream would be remembered. A fifteen-minute nap might feel like two hours, or as if one had closed his eyes for only a minute or two without sleeping.

At seven-thirty that night, after an impromptu cold buffet, they got ready to leave. They would attempt a gate—see what they could learn and what help they might get. If they were lucky enough, it might even be the installation with the surprise generator.

Planning was minimal. Bill and Sharon Van Wyk would go home: Bill had two classes scheduled the next day. Vic told them they might be called on to help from a distance—that they should not be alarmed if they felt an urgent drowsiness, or periods of vagueness and absent-mindedness. Tory would remain at the ranch as an anchor or beacon, an able and stable connection to everyday reality. The rest would go on to Sipapu—the gate through which, according to Hopi legend, the ancestors of the Hopi nation had come into the world.

Vic considered three the most favorable number of people to try the gate. Because Frank was strong and country-wise, he'd be one. Ole's psychic advancement was definitely desirable, and as a semiregular jogger, he ought to be fit enough for the physically strenuous trek.

Jerry's broken arm would be a serious handicap on the rugged canyon climb, so he would guard the pickup with Carol, and they would lend off-site psychic support, along with Tory and Sharon and Bill.

Except for Tory, the support team members weren't at all sure what "off-site psychic support" involved, but Vic assured them that they would if the time came.

The expedition would go in Frank's pickup. It was not until they were ready to leave that they missed the two ghosts. Under other circumstances, Vic or Ole might have taken time to investigate. But Lefty and Leo were not part of their plans, and ghosts, once relieved of any compulsive attachment to a place or body or living person, were prone to recycle, so their absence was passed off as irrelevant.

Frank would drive; he knew the way. Sipapu was remote, and the route unmarked, but it was known and appreciated among connoisseurs of the Arizona back country.

Two hours after leaving the ranch house, they topped the Mogollon Rim on Interstate 17. On the high plateau, brawny pines stood deep in snow. The air was mildly wintry. Frequent cars passed them headed homeward toward Phoenix, skis and sleds secured on tops or backs. In a sense, thought Frank Diacono, he and the others were already in a different universe from the people in the cars they passed. Perhaps some passing child, asleep or sleepy after a day of sledding, was picking up their mission at some subliminal level as they passed; what dreams or strange feelings might such a child be having then?

Diacono stopped in Flagstaff long enough to drop off the Van Wyks, pick up some hiking gear, and fill his gas tank, then headed north on Highway 89. For some miles as he drove, he could see the frozen snowy bulk of the great mountain nearby on his left, and wondered if its formidable spirit was aware of them. If so, what was it thinking?

Psychically he reached, and it seemed to him that it did notice, knew their mission—that it was friendly but not partisan, interested but passive. Had he stayed on the peak that summer night, unprepared as he'd been, perhaps he would have died. But not, he thought, from enmity; rather in the manner of someone stumbling amidst high voltage equipment. He had been susceptible, he decided, and the old man in the mountain had chased him away before it could happen.

With the thought came a rush of goose bumps. He turned and saw Vic smiling at him from his thicket of beard, friendly eyes laughing under bristly brows. Frank grinned back, but neither man spoke just then. Meanwhile, Ole slumped gangling by the door, asleep, his head bobbing now and then with the movement of the truck.

At length Vic broke the silence. "Ole's had the hardest weekend of any of us," he said quietly. "Tory and I needed to get one of you as close to our operating level as possible, as a psychic and a counselor, and Ole had the background. In two days he learned most of what it took us several years to find out. Psychically we brought him as far as we know how."

"How far did you bring the rest of us?" Frank asked.

"A long way; more than you realize yet. You'll have it when you need it; it's all there. On this side you're still pretty much cloaked from yourself, but that'll reduce. You can already operate a lot more freely than you could before, even if it feels like you're doing it blind."

Frank nodded; it felt right to him. The things he'd looked at and done under Vic's guidance, in session, had changed him a lot. In two days all of them, even Ole, had changed conspicuously before each other's eyes.

He wondered what was going on in the camper shell between Jerry and Carol. His body stirred at the thought, but he didn't feel actually horny. Two days ago he probably would have. Now—she wasn't his girl.

They came out of the forest onto a vast rolling grassland marked by scattered, rounded cinder cones of the Flagstaff volcanic field. The snow was less deep here, the south slopes burned bare by the sun. He had to look back over his shoulder to see the high peaks now. Nothing strange or dangerous had happened on the road—nothing like the incidents that Jerry had described. It occurred to him that whoever their adversary was might deliberately let them continue unhindered: "Come into my parlor," said the spider to the fly, he thought. He glanced at Vic Merlin again; the man's eyes were straight ahead now, but it seemed to Frank that only Vic's body was there, on hold and idling, and Vic himself was elsewhere.

An hour later they checked into a motel at the high-desert village of Tuba City, and Vic set his alarm clock for five-thirty. Frank phoned Coach Barkum's office, knowing he'd get an answering machine he could lie to unquestioned, and left a message that his truck had broken down in Albuquerque—that he might not be back before Wednesday.

Then he paused by the phone booth for a last look at the night. Around him, the patchy snow had been worn thin by desert winds. The moon had risen, and some sixty miles southwest he could see Humphrey Peak lighted by it, impersonal now, as if its guardian slept. Tomorrow... He had no idea what tomorrow might bring.

* * *

Dawn was grading into day when they left Highway 89 just north of the tiny Navajo village called "The Gap." The road they took was not on their map, probably not on any map, not even with the symbol for unimproved dirt roads. It had not been put there by the white man's engineers but by the wheels of Navajo sheepherders' wagons and later by Navajo pickup trucks.

No one had wanted to ride in back this morning because visibility was poor from the camper shell. So all five were crowded in front, like a Navajo family on an outing, Vic and Carol sitting on laps because they were the lightest.

Frequently the road forked or branched; always it wandered. There were no road signs, and although the country was desert grassland, it rolled enough that they could not usually see the road for any distance ahead. Occasionally they came to a Navajo cabin with horse shed, corral, and sheep pens; otherwise, the country seemed empty. Jerry and Carol were impressed that Frank could find his way.

After an hour they topped a low, broad-backed ridge and stopped. Frank pointed. "Up ahead is the canyon of the Little Colorado River. Sipapu is in the bottom of it, a few miles above where the Little Colorado runs into the Grand Canyon. We get there by climbing down a side canyon called Salt Canyon; that draw off to our right is the head of it."

He shifted back into gear and continued for a little way along the ridge top, then pulled off to the side and set the parking brake.

"And this," he said, "is where we get out and walk."

Vic put on a pack that held a lunch each, plus a few dried trail rations and three towels. Each man carried a belt canteen. Jerry and Carol walked with them down into the draw, to the point where it reached the headwall of Salt Canyon. There and over several other stretches, Frank assured them, the way was not a hiking trail but a thinly marked scramble and climb.

The three began working their way down. After a few minutes, Jerry and Carol lost sight of them and hiked back up the slope to the truck. Neither felt good about staying behind.

At the pickup, Carol stood slowly scanning the desert plateau, empty as far as she could see. Jerry practiced drawing his revolver left-handed, dry-firing it, until he felt comfortable that way. At length they both got into the cab, saying little. He turned the radio on. The only station he could pick up decently featured country and Indian music and an announcer who spoke what they decided must be Navajo—tonal, with sequences of vowels, its consonants mostly soft. After a little he turned it off.

They wondered where the three hikers were now, how far down the three-thousand-foot descent, and how difficult it was. Neither had even a concept of what the gate would be like.

* * *

Eventually the three looked down from a bulging prominence at their first good view of the Little Colorado River. Ole and Vic were glad to sit on a rock and rest. The river, only a few hundred feet below them now, was a milky turquoise blue. Ole guessed that it averaged about forty feet wide there—a lot of water in that country.

"How deep is it?" he asked.

"You can wade it in most places," Frank said, "but generally, we'll float or swim. In lots of places the saltcedar jungle is so thick with fallen trees and regrowth that you actually can't walk along the shore, and in places the cliffs come right down to the water."

"V'at makes it that milky blue color? It don't even look like real vater. It looks like some painting v'ere the artist didn't get the color right."

"It's full of dissolved carbonates. Tastes like mineral water, but it's okay to drink."

They started down the last stretch, the route marked only by an occasional small rock "cairn," usually just two or three stones stacked up. Often, keeping the trail was more a matter of picking the only way that presented itself as it wound downward through narrow clefts or among great stones. At last they came to near-white sand and a thicket of green saltcedar, where the turquoise river rushed smoothly by between tall boulders, rock shelves, and sandy beach.

They stood by its edge for a moment, then took off their boots and clothing and stashed them behind some saltcedars. The elevation was less than three thousand feet there, and the late morning temperature about sixty degrees—cool but not wintry. And the exertions of the trail, even downhill, had generated body heat to spare. Vic's thin, wiry legs contrasted markedly with Frank's massive, hairy ones; Ole's looked stronger than Frank had expected for his age and rawboned frame.

The water was chilly, but not as cold as Ole had expected. Frank explained that along here the river was the product of many springs which fed into the canyon at a year-round temperature of sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit.

They committed themselves to its current and let it sweep them across a deepish hole until they came to a broad sandy shallow. For more than a mile they traveled thus, alternately floating and wading, occasionally chuting through rock-walled narrows or picking their way over low natural dams of travertine—carbonates deposited from the river water. The men had felt good to begin with, floating the river; the farther they went, the better they felt. It seemed to Vic that this boded well, foreshadowing something good to come.

Frank, in the lead, finally stopped hip-deep in a broad pool, turning to grin at the others as they appeared around the corner of a huge rock. He pointed. A mound of travertine about twenty feet high stood beside the river, and together they waded to it. If there was a guardian here, Frank thought, it was without malice or threat.

Vic led them now, pausing momentarily at the foot of the mound, then they walked side by side to the top. At the top was a round hole about six feet across, widening below the lip. About six feet below the opening, a great spring of water filled the hole, rolling powerfully as if at a hard boil, although the water was not hot. It was rather like standing on a giant open-topped kettle, looking in. Swimming in it would be impossible, climbing out doubly so, and God knows, Diacono thought, where the bottom was.

"What do we do now?" he asked.

"We go through the gate," said Vic. "I'll go first."

"The gate," Frank echoed. "I hate to ask this, but where is the gate?"

"You're standing at the edge of it."

"That?" Frank pointed downward.

Vic nodded.

"Looks like suicide."

"It would be for most people, either way, whether they landed in the water or in the other side of reality. And it takes a pretty unusual self-awareness to come out sane; it can do some pretty wild things to your whole perceptual system. Two days ago I'm not sure even Ole could have pulled it off. It's like it was booby-trapped.

"That's one advantage of it looking so deadly: no one's likely to step into it on purpose unless he really feels sure of himself."

Frank's steady eyes met the equally steady eyes of Vic Merlin. "Vic," said Frank, "I don't like to disappoint you, but I don't feel that sure of myself."

"That's okay," Vic said, "you don't need to go. In fact, you shouldn't unless you feel ready, and you'll be helping just by being here on this side. When we come back out, we may not be in too good a shape, psychically or physically; we may be glad you're here to help us back to the truck."

Frank gestured with his head. "And you've been through it before?"

"Tory and I and Norm. Kelly stayed on this side in case we needed someone here."

"Did you? Need someone here?"

"No, as it turned out, we didn't. That was summertime, and we had sleeping bags with us. We just camped until we felt up to hiking back out."

"And two is enough on the other side?"

"It should be. I've learned a whole lot since the first time."

"And you just jumped in with no one to lead you?"

"We could shift reality and see the other side. We just walked down the stairs."

"Hmm. How about you, Ole?" Frank asked. "Do you see stairs?"

"Ya, but I can see through them. They look kind of airy, vith vater under them." He turned to Vic. "I'm ready v'en you are."

Vic nodded, and without saying anything more, winked at Frank, then stepped in. It wasn't clear to Frank whether he fell in the water or not; it was as if he disappeared, or maybe as if the moment of falling had been deleted. But surely there had been no splash. A second later Ole followed, again with no splash.

Frank stared thin-lipped into the powerful surging roll of water. To him there appeared no faintest sign of stairs, nor of either older man. "What the hell," he muttered, and jumped.

* * *

It was not long before noon. Carol had crawled into the camper shell to take a nap. Jerry too had gotten suddenly drowsy and had lain down on the seat of the cab. Shortly afterward his body jerked once, then relaxed again. In back and at the same moment, Carol's did the same.

 

Back | Next
Framed