Last Safe Place, The (12 page)

As Yesheb watched construction of the scale model of rocks one day after class, his mind was inexorably drawn to thoughts of destruction and desecration and it occurred to him that it would be entertaining to defile the stones like the graffiti-slathered walls in London’s tube stations and bus shelters.

His fellow students were intent on their work and paid no attention to his feigned interest as he sauntered around behind the largest carved stone. He sat down in the grass beside it and ran his hand over the smooth, almost greasy surface of the soapstone. As soon as he was certain no one was watching, he withdrew a felt-tip marker from his pocket and scrawled YESHEB AL TOBBANOFT on the base of the rock, down low where the tall grass would cover over his handiwork from the casual observer. Then he stood and stared up at the stone, wondering how long it would take his classmates to discover that he’d made their precious work of art as ordinary and mundane as a bridge abutment where some brainless lover had scrawled ShaMika Loves LaRon 4-Ever.

As he smiled at his desecration, The Voice displayed its power, came to Yesheb in a mighty vision and revealed to the still tender boy his identity, his royal place among the powers of the universe.

Yesheb’s ears began to ring with a thousand tiny bells and The Voice spoke rumbling, powerful words inside his head in a language the boy had never heard before and Yesheb has never heard since. The world all around him grew too bright and he had to squint to keep his eyes from watering. Then a searing light focused on the rock in front of him and left everything else in pale shadow. The light grew brighter and brighter until Yesheb could barely stand to look at it. Then, out of the light, burning gold letters began to appear one at a time on the stone, as if a giant invisible pen were inscribing each one. Yesheb stood transfixed as words began to appear slowly, one letter at a time, until the stone stood like a mighty doorpost with a name inscribed in burning gold letters upon it.

THE BEAST OF BABYLON.

Yesheb had no idea who or what The Beast of Babylon might be, but stared at the flaming letters in awe and wonder. Then the most amazing thing of all happened. The small, black marker-inscribed letters of Yesheb’s name lifted off the bottom of the rock one at a time, floated up into the air and grew larger and larger until they were the size of the flaming letters written by the invisible pen. Then each letter from his name was inserted into the words on the stone. When his black letter covered a flaming letter, it blocked out the light—like placing a lid over a candle—there was a sizzling sound and smoke rose up all around it.

The Y of YESHEB became the Y in
BABYLON
. The E in YESHEB became the E of
BEAST
. And so it went, one letter after another until all the letters of Yesheb’s name had been used and all the flaming letters had been capped in black. There on the stone, with smoke rising up around each letter, were the words THE BEAST OF BABYLON—spelled with the letters of Yesheb’s name. The Beast of Babylon and Yesheb Al Tobbanoft were one and the same. Yesheb had learned his true identity.

Of course, it was years before he understood the future laid out for The Beast of Babylon. He learned that in the pages of Zara’s book—her diary disguised as fiction, her prophesies set down in the form of fantasy.

Only Yesheb understands that it is neither fiction nor fantasy. After a millennium of searching, the identity of the Bride has been revealed. And the path they must travel to their destiny has been laid out. Follow that path and the throne of a mighty kingdom in The Endless Black Beyond will be
his, ushering in a Dark Age of demonic rule on the heels of their apocalyptic victory over the forces of light.

But he must follow the path. He cannot stray from it. Everything has to happen as it has been prophesied. His world, his kingdom and his life depend upon it.

Yesheb gets to his feet and hobbles back to the window. He stares into the deepening gray shadows of evening, concentrates, wills his mind to reach out and connect with the mind of his beloved Zara. For an instant it seems he almost does, he imagines he smells something—a hint of pine or cedar—but it is gone in a heartbeat. Wherever Zara is at this moment, her mind is closed to him.

CHAPTER
6

T
HE AROMA OF PINE AND CEDAR FILLED EVERY BREATH AND
Gabriella sucked in great lungfuls of it as she followed the winding road into the mountains. The air was a feast of crispness; it smelled so clean it must have been scrubbed with lye soap and hung out on the line to dry.

U.S. 285 had led her along the valley floor in front of Mount Princeton for eight miles to Nathrop, where HWY 162 peeled off to the right and began to wind up through Chalk Creek Canyon between Mount Princeton and Mount Antero. As the road curved along beside the creek, massive chalk cliffs reared up on the south side of Princeton, towering 1,500 feet into the cloudless sky.

“Those are called Moon Cliffs,” Gabriella told Ty, shouting so he could hear her above the wind in the open jeep. “You can read a newspaper outside from the reflected glow off them when the moon’s full.”

A full moon. Twelve days away.

The road followed the creek higher and higher up the canyon. Mount Antero reared up above the road on the left and filled the whole sky, bald and snowcapped above the tree line.

After a 45-minute gradual climb, they rounded a curve and came upon the little town of St. Elmo. Named a National Historic Site, the resurrected ghost town rested at an elevation of 10,000 feet. It had been a mining camp in the late 1800s and its buildings were authentic period structures, wood frame, with raised wooden sidewalks that stretched for four blocks along both sides of Chalk Creek Canyon Road, which formed the town’s main, and only paved, street.

Gabriella could see houses down a handful of side streets—small adobe structures mostly, with dirt yards. She was surprised that anybody actually lived here full-time. By September, the upper reaches of Princeton and Antero were snow-clogged and many valleys like this one were impassable.
Skiers didn’t come here, though. The resorts and striking Colorado slopes were on the other side of the Mount Massive Wilderness Area—an hour and a half north in Vail or three hours away in Aspen.

There were cars, pickup trucks and SUVs parked in front of businesses, along with several jeeps she suspected were rentals and other battered, mud-splattered jeeps she was certain weren’t. Some of the vehicles obviously carried tourists, easy to spot with their cameras and binoculars dangling around their necks, or holding cell phones out at arm’s length to frame and capture digital images. But the locals were easy to spot, too. Hispanic, many of them, some Native American, they chatted, two or three together here and there, dressed in not-a-fashion-statement frayed jeans, well-used Stetsons and scuffed and muddy cowboy boots.

Gabriella pulled her jeep to a stop in front of a building flanked on one side by the dry goods store and on the other by the apothecary. A hand-painted sign on the front proclaimed St. Elmo’s Mercantile, Established 1885. The proprietor, a man named Pedro Rodriguez, was the man Gabriella had driven more than a thousand miles across seventeen states to see. He held the key—literally—to her future. If what James Benninger had said in every Christmas card in the past five years was true, the owner would welcome Gabriella and her family, supply them what they needed and give them directions, maybe even a hand-drawn map to direct them to St. Elmo’s Fire, snuggled in a hanging valley on Mount Antero 11,673 feet above sea level.

Gabriella opened the jeep door and got out, then turned to help Theo clamber out of the backseat. But he stepped down unaided and shook off the hand she’d placed on his elbow.

“You’ll know I need help standing up when you see me falling down. And you’ll know I’s ready for the Reaper when I stay down there cause I like the view.”

“A little grumpy, aren’t we? You’re just afraid I might find out you’ve got a heart of gold.”

“So does a hard-boiled egg.”

Ty and P.D. had already bounded up the steps to the wide wooden sidewalk in front of the Mercantile. Gabriella couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen the boy’s eyes lit with so much joy. He must feel like he’d left the real world to take up residence in a cowboy movie. She and Theo joined
him and pushed open the door and set the bell above it jingling. P.D. didn’t have his guide dog sign hung around his neck but Gabriella suspected this was a place where animals were as welcome as people.

The interior of the store was dim and shadowy, the array of merchandise on the shelves an eclectic hodgepodge of items. What appeared to be a well-stocked small supermarket filled the whole left side. Theo headed that way, likely searching for licorice. In the center was a Southwest souvenir shop like those they’d passed every fifty miles since they crossed the Oklahoma border into Colorado. Ty had pleaded with her to stop at Injun Joe’s Wampum or Crazy Harry’s Rattlesnake Ranch or the one with a twentyfoot-tall purple Tyrannosaurus Rex out front that advertised Indian rugs, turquoise jewelry, pizza and Chinese carry-out.

The Mercantile’s souvenirs included the classics: T-shirts that proclaimed I HEART Colorado or My Parents Went to Colorado and All I Got Was This Stupid Shirt. Rubber tomahawks, Indian bows with stoppers instead of arrowheads on the arrows, cap guns, slingshots, Indian drums topped with stretched rubber instead of animal hides and Indian headdresses made from dyed chicken feathers. For the more discerning shopper, the back wall featured turquoise and silver jewelry, genuine handmade Indian pottery and rugs and Pendleton blankets.

And a huge section of rocks.

Gabriella was instantly drawn there. She gazed at the kinds of minerals she’d grown up with, housed in cases and on shelves in a special room in her childhood home. Glittering pyrite—fool’s gold; deep purple fluorite octahedrons; flaky, milk-colored mica that looked like shaved glass; dense blue apatite; shiny black squares of galena and slices as big as a saucers of quarter-inch-thick granite, striped with black and reddish brown veins, polished to a finish as smooth as a granite countertop.

And of course, blue, white and purple aquamarine—some polished into semi-precious stones and others in the natural, crystalline state her parents had found on the mountain.

“Mom, come look at this,” Ty called. He was standing with P.D. at the counter of a small post office on the far wall of the Mercantile next to a bank of post office boxes and a small array of mailing paraphernalia—first class envelopes, small boxes and brown wrapping paper. A mini laundromat—three washers and three dryers—occupied the wall on one side of the post
office and on the other side stood swinging doors like those in an Old West saloon. Gabriella could see what appeared to be a family room beyond the doors, likely the living quarters of the proprietor.

Ty was talking to a rugged Hispanic man with a thick black mustache who stood behind the post office cash register. A dark-haired girl was down on her knees petting P.D.

“Check that out, Mom.” Ty pointed behind the counter to a life-sized poster beside a collage of snapshots under the banner Wall of Honor. The snapshots were of grinning fishermen displaying trout of every variety—rainbow, brown, cutthroat—and every size.

Gabriella smiled at the poster. It showed Napoleon Dynamite—one of Ty’s all-time favorite movie characters—with his hair a curly red fuzz-ball and his arm draped around the shoulder of a smaller, dark-haired boy on whose upper lip sprouted something that approached a mustache. Both wore t-shirts that proclaimed “Pedro for President.”

So did the man behind the counter.

“His name is Pedro, too,” Ty said, and nodded to the man, who extended his hand.

“Pedro Rodriguez. I’m happy to meet you, ma’am.”

Pedro was tall, broad-shouldered and barrel-chested, a sturdy man whose unibrow shaded direct brown eyes. The bright smile that lit his face like a halogen bulb revealed perfect teeth beneath the black broom of mustache. His features were craggy, not traditionally handsome but rugged and strong. Gabriella was embarrassed to discover that if she’d had to describe him in one word, that word would have been “sexy.”

He looked her dead in the eye when he shook her hand, took in her face as a whole rather than a collection of pieces with one side slathered in makeup that camouflaged but didn’t completely hide her deformity.

“This is my daughter, Anza—Esperanza,” he said. “In Spanish, that is Hope.”

“I’m Gabriella … Underhill.” She didn’t think he picked up on the pause. Even after using it for two weeks, the fake name didn’t flow easily off her tongue and she was always afraid Theo and Ty would forget it altogether.

The girl stood and Gabriella got a good look at her as they shook hands. Her hand was small and soft, but her handshake was firm—no dead fish on a stick.

“Your boy tells me you’re going to be spending the summer at St. Elmo’s Fire,” Pedro said.

“Mister Rodriguez says—”

“Pedro ees fine, son.” The man’s Spanish accent was the musical kind where every word is linked to the next in a melodious daisy chain.

“
Pedro
says that St. Elmo’s Fire is the only cabin on the whole mountain, Mom! On the only road on the whole mountain. And there’s a creek there with a waterfall and trout and at night the moon shines on the chalk cliffs, which aren’t really made out of chalk and—”

“Breathe in there somewhere, Ty,” Gabriella said, “before you pass out.”

At that moment, she was acutely aware of Ty’s
little boyness
. As evidenced by his exuberance, of course, but more apparent by what failed to light a fire under him than what did. Ty paid no attention at all to the young woman smiling beside her father. And any male human being who didn’t stare at the girl slack-jawed was clearly pre-pubescent. Or a blind eunuch.

Though voluptuous in a peasant blouse, Esperanza Rodriguez was modest and demure, with a head of glossy black curls, a china-doll face, and warm, brown skin as clear as morning light. She had the kind of plump, moist mouth men grow stupid about, pouty lips that were red without lipstick and brown, doe eyes with obscenely long eyelashes. Beside a girl so strikingly beautiful, Gabriella felt like a troll under a bridge.