Daniel Hecht_Cree Black 02 (2 page)

Except that now it was about to fall down around her.

Sam Yazzie's leaving would have ramifications far beyond the need to shuffle staff and advertise for a replacement. If Sam
felt he had to get out, it wouldn't be long before other Navajo staff and faculty—virtually every employee at the school—
started abandoning ship. And if Tommy Keeday's problem couldn't be solved, it was a much larger issue than the fate of one
very bright, troubled boy. If word of his problem got out into the community, people would stop sending their kids. A vital
opportunity would be lost to those who needed it most.

And Julieta McCarty would be left without a reason for living.

Again the jolt of intolerable fear hit her: the prospect of an empty life. She got up quickly and almost ran to the boys'
dorm, hoping to catch Sam before he left.

She found him in his room, pulling things off his desk and stuffing them into cardboard boxes. With his barrel-chested build,
brush-cut dark hair, and the downturned lips common among older Navajo men, he came across as stern and martial. The look
was misleading; Sam was a sweet person, and it had always pleased Julieta to see that dour mouth smile so surprisingly and
rewardingly.

She stopped at the doorway. He glanced at her, then opened one of the desk drawers and spent several minutes sorting through
it in silence.

At last Sam shook his head, the crescent of his lips tightening. "My grandfather, I mentioned it to him last time, he says
not to talk about it. He says if you talk about it, it will come after you. You shouldn't give it a name. He can tell twenty
stories about what happens to you. Says he knew a guy up in Lukachukai, couple of months ago, saw something strange way out
on Carson Mesa and talked about it to everybody. Next day he got killed in a freak accident. Drove his pickup into the side
of an empty stock trailer. Wasn't drunk. The way they found him, he was kind of. . . up under the hood of his truck. It wasn't
right. Nobody could figure out what happened."

"People get killed in accidents every day. It isn't supernatural."

"The
other boys,
Julieta! Like, I don't know . . . zombies." Just remembering it put a tremor in his shoulders, and again he shook his head,
unwilling to describe the event in any more detail. "You have to see it. Then you'll understand." He gestured with his thumb
toward the students' rooms, looking at her with sympathy in his eyes, then went back to packing his things.

"Did your grandfather say what he thought it was?"

Sam took several books from their shelf and then paused. She knew he was wrestling with his reluctance to tell her anything
at all, the universal fear that bad things could be contagious and that holding evil in your thoughts brought it upon you.

"You know how the old people talk," he whispered. "It's a chindi. Maybe this place was built on bones, maybe Navajo, maybe
Anasazi, and the ancestors don't like the school being here, disrespecting their graves. Or maybe we're doing something else
wrong, maybe somebody died in the dorm building, we shouldn't be using it, and the ghost is coming back. More likely there's
some witches live near here, want to hurt us or hurt the kids. He said it would come from the north, evil comes from the north?
And we had a north wind last night." These explanations seemed to bother him, and he threw down the books in frustration.
"Look, Julieta, forget I'm Dinê. Last night, I wasn't looking at it from some ethnic perspective, okay? Maybe I smoked too
much dope at UA, or maybe some UFO landed near here, there's aliens doing experiments or something to people's minds. I don't
care what. I don't want to deal with it."

Again he looked at her with regret and sympathy, and she realized with a pang how much she'd depended on Sam for the last
five years.

Still she stood in the doorway, unwilling to move yet unable to ask him one last favor.

He couldn't meet her eyes, but his voice was gruffly compassionate when he spoke again: "I know, Julieta. I won't tell anyone
what I saw. This place'd be empty by sunset."

When Julieta put her head into Lynn Pierce's examining room, the nurse looked up with a start, and the pencil she'd been writing
with snapped in her fingers.

"Any word from Joseph?" Julieta asked.

"He'll get here around eleven."

"How's Tommy?" The blinds over the window to the ward room were half slatted; all she could see was a mound of twisted bedclothes.

Lynn's eyes darted to the window, and she bit her lips. She gestured at the patient voice monitor on her desk. Through the
soft hiss pouring from the speaker, Julieta could make out gentle snoring.

"Sleeping now. But it was worse this time. It lasted longer."

"His spine again? The right arm?"

A tiny nod.

"Why didn't you call me, Lynn? I would have—"

"Joseph told me I should let you rest. Unless it was a crisis. Yazzie and I were able to keep him from hurting himself. By
the time I could get free to call you, he'd stabilized."

"Is there any point in my going in with him?" All Julieta could think of was to hold him.

"No. Wait until Joseph gets here."

The thought of Joseph's earnest face and skilled, strong hands soothed Julieta a little. It helped that he knew how much this
meant to her. That there was someone who knew it all. Surely he'd have some solution, he'd think of the next step.

"Have you talked to his teachers?" Julieta asked.

"I sent out my usual absence notice. I didn't go into details, just said he wasn't feeling well."

"Who else has seen him? Is anybody talking about it yet?"

Lynn would know this was the school administrator turning to damage control, the need to contain superstitious gossip. The
nurse was one of the few non-Navajo staff at the school, a solidly built woman in her midfifties with silver hair pulled back
into a thick braid that hung down to her waist. She had dazzling blue eyes made more startling by an iridescent bronze fleck
in her left iris that was distracting and sometimes made her expression hard to read. She had come to the rez as a VISTA volunteer
in the 1970s and had married a Navajo man from the Nakaibito area. Childless, her husband now dead, she seemed to have taken
the stream of student patients here as her family. Somehow Julieta hadn't really gotten close to Lynn in her three years here,
but right now she took comfort in the fact that the nurse shared her concern and distress.

"Nobody's called me for details," Lynn said, "so if Sam doesn't talk, it'll probably be all right for a few days. Sam says
the other boys don't remember anything, but I wouldn't count on that—I don't know what kind of gossip they might be spreading.
The teachers will inquire if he doesn't show up in class soon, and his grandparents will need to be informed . . . " Lynn
finished with a gesture:
And soon everyone will know.

Julieta shut the examining room door and leaned against it. "Lynn," she whispered. "What
is
this? Be honest with me. Have you ever encountered anything like this?"

Lynn toyed with the snapped pencil, her fingers drawn again and again to the jagged break. "The brain is a wilderness, the
strangest things can happen. All I can guess is that this is a profound neurological aberration. But I can't square that with
what Sam says—the way it affected the other boys."

They thought about it for a moment, listening to the deceptively serene noise of breathing coming through the monitor.

"What're we going to do?" Julieta whispered at last. "Where do we go from here?"

Lynn shook her head, and she looked at Julieta with her lopsided, startling gaze, her eyes now moist, nested in wrinkles of
worry, and very guarded. "I have no idea."

2

CREE GLANCED up to see that a shape had materialized at the rear of the auditorium. Backlit by the ceiling lights near the
entry, at this distance, it was no more than a dark silhouette: no face or features, just the outline of heavy shoulders and
a large head so low above the body that it seemed the being had no neck. It loomed low behind the last row of seats like someone
crouching or stooping, both menacing and disturbingly familiar.

In the instant it took to place the profile, Cree lost her train of thought. The last echoes of her words rang out over the
speakers, and she wished she could somehow retrieve them and discern what she had said only an instant before.

Mason Ambrose. Here in Albuquerque. It had to be.

Sure enough, as she hesitated, another figure took up a post above the man in the wheelchair: Lupe. The ceiling spot haloed
her gray hair and gave exaggerated dimension to the sockets of her eyes, her gaunt cheekbones, her thorn of a nose. Lupe,
thin as a bone and as hard, not so much Ambrose's eternal personal assistant as his familiar, the sorcerer's mysterious creature
companion.

Covering her surprise, Cree cleared her throat and took a sip of water from the glass on the podium.

"Excuse me!" she apologized. She scanned the nearer rows of the audience, located the earnest face of the woman who had spoken,
smiled, and found her thought again. "It's hard to explain, but I've been asked that question before and I've given quite
a bit of thought to how to answer it. I think I can convey the sensation to you if you'll follow along with me."

Moving to the side of the podium so that everyone could see her clearly, she raised her voice. "Put your index and middle
fingers together and place them just under your right ear, where your jawbone meets the muscle that comes up the side of your
neck. Got it? Now move the fingers forward, just under the jaw, until you feel them slide into the notch there. About halfway
to your chin." Cree tipped her head and tossed her hair back as she demonstrated.
There.
Most of the audience were obligingly putting their hands to their throats, wondering where she was going with this.

"You might have to push fairly hard. But you should be able to feel your carotid artery there—a rubbery cord about as big
around as a pencil? You can feel it stiffen and soften with every heartbeat."

She gave them a moment just to feel it.

"You're putting your finger right on your physical life. That throb—it's always been with you. Your heart's keeping you alive
without your conscious thought—it's living inside you almost as if it's a separate creature alive in your chest. It does
its job day in, day out. Most people don't like feeling it. We don't like to be reminded that there's an automatic part of
ourselves, going about its business without our conscious supervision. It's a little creepy, isn't it? Vital, insistent, sort
of foreign somehow? Yet of course it's deeply intimate, that pulse—deeply familiar, right?"

The audience was silent; most of them had their heads tilted, hands at throats. Some serious expressions, a few uncomfortable
grins. Two hundred people feeling the secret pulsing inside.

"So, to answer your question, that's how it feels. That's how . . .
intimate
it feels. That's how
real
it feels, how disconcerting it feels, to experience a ghost. Both physically and psychologically, that's the closest analogy
I can come up with. That's the way experiencing a ghost reminds you of what you really are."

And if you don't like that, Mason, if that's too "spiritual" for you,
she thought defiantly,
screw you.

At the rear, the silhouettes of Lupe and Mason Ambrose hovered, motionless as a trompe l'oeil painted on the back wall.

The woman who had asked the question was clearly among those who were uncomfortable with touching that pulsing serpent. She
nodded seriously, two fingers still held against her neck.

There was another moment of quiet, and then Dr. Zentcy, the conference's coordinator, moved from the wings and took over the
microphone. He was a pleasant-faced man who struck Cree as rather too young and too informally dressed to be an academic of
any kind, let alone head of the psychology department of a major university.

"And I think that should be our last question for Dr. Black today. Thank you, Lucretia, for a provocative talk, and for taking
so many questions. You've given us a great deal to think about. And thank you all for coming. Dr. Black's lecture is the final
event today, but I hope we'll see you all here tomorrow for the final presentations in this year's Horizons in Psychology
seminar."

The wash of applause was genuine, but as the room lights came up Cree didn't feel the gratifying release of tension that typically
came after she'd delivered a lecture. Mason Ambrose didn't just casually show up at conferences, and his presence disturbed
her. She hadn't seen him in four years, hadn't even spoken to him in perhaps two. If he was here, he had a reason. She realized
that her body had something of a Pavlovian aversion to him, derived from the two years she'd spent working and studying with
him. It wasn't just his grotesque physical appearance, or that he seemed to relish the more gruesome aspects of paranormal
research: Mason Ambrose liked to push you into a learning curve so steep it could give you a nosebleed.

Dr. Zentcy had turned to Cree with a puzzled, pleased frown. He tipped his head slightly toward the back of the hall and asked
under his breath, "Is that . . . that isn't by any chance—"

"Why, yes," Cree said, pretending she hadn't noticed earlier. "Mason Ambrose. I believe it is."
Internationally renowned neuropsychiatrist and expert on abnormal psychology, internationally controversial scholar of parapsychology. My mentor.

"I didn't know . . ." Zentcy tried, "I mean, I had no idea he was actually . . ."

"Still alive? Good point." Cree leaned toward him with a bogus paranoid face and whispered, "What makes you so sure he
is?
"

For an instant, Zentcy's eyes widened, and Cree regretted teasing him—it was an indication of her own uneasiness. Zentcy
was a good guy who deserved kudos for putting Cree and her radical ideas on the agenda here. The academic world was simply
not ready for the idea that ghosts were real, and that the experience of death—and living people's relationships with the
dead—must be central to any theory of psychology. His open mindedness had no doubt earned him some scorn from his colleagues
here at the University of New Mexico, yet he'd treated her with only respect and consideration.

"I'm kidding," she reassured him. "But I know what you mean. With Dr. Ambrose you're never quite certain. I'll introduce you,
if you like." Zentcy nodded with equivocal enthusiasm.

A dozen audience members had assembled at the front of the room, waiting to speak with her: students with theoretical questions,
professors with bones to pick, even a few local residents with personal tales of ghosts and hauntings. By the time the last
of them left, the figures at the back of the room had vanished.

Cree left the building feeling a mix of disappointment and relief at Mason's disappearance. Why would he have taken the time
to attend her talk if he didn't want to meet with her? Just playing Mr. Mysterious, she decided; she'd hear from him again
before she left Albuquerque. She drove back to her hotel to find a faxed note that confirmed her hunch:
Take the Sandia Peak tramway at 5:00. See you at the top. Ambrose.