Night Relics (13 page)

He suddenly saw a movement in the rocks along the creek.

He stopped the Suburban, shifted, backed up far enough for the headlights to illuminate the rocks again. Then, shifting into
forward, he pulled off onto a grassy little turnout, shifted into park, and let the engine idle.

He had glimpsed it only for a split second—something, someone, moving along the trail. What remained in his mind was the memory
of dark fabric billowing in the wind, just as it had billowed on the top of the pool of water in his memory only moments ago.

He watched, barely breathing, slowly growing more and more conscious of the wind-haunted darkness around him, thinking about
the disappearance of Amanda and David, automatically putting their faces on the bodies in the pool. Beyond the glow of the
headlights the trees were night black, their ponderous limbs swaying against an inky backdrop of vegetation and rocky canyon
wall.

He switched the lights off, leaving his hand on the knob. The Suburban shuddered in the wind, and dry leaves and twigs ticked
against the door panels and windows. Moonlight gleamed on the creek waters. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he could
see farther into the trees, making out a grassy little clearing across the creek and a cave mouth in the steep hillside.

But now nothing moved aside from the wind-shifting vegetation. Whatever it was—probably an animal—had gone. That it had anything
to do with Amanda’s disappearance was impossible. His imagination was running him ragged. He pulled the lights back on, shifted
into reverse, and glanced into the side mirror.

A face stared back at him, reflected in the mirror: a woman’s face, her flesh ivory white in the moonlight, her long black
dress and black hair tossed by the wind.

He slammed his hand down onto the steering wheel, accidentally honking the horn, then slammed the transmission into drive,
jerked the wheel savagely to the right, punched
the accelerator, and drove straight through the brush alongside the turnout and up onto the road before stopping and shifting
again into reverse, the backup lights blinking on.

He swiveled around to look, gripping the steering wheel to keep his hands from shaking. The woman was gone. He slammed the
door locks down one after another, catching sight just then of movement across the creek, someone— the woman in black—disappearing
into the trees.

For one hollow moment he had been certain it was Amanda. He had
known
it. The sight of her ghostly face in the mirror had unnerved him. Now, although he could still picture the woman’s face,
he knew absolutely that she wasn’t Amanda; and just as absolutely he knew who she was: the woman he had pictured lying dead
at the base of the falls.

T
HE TELEPHONE WOKE
B
ETH OUT OF A DEEP SLEEP, AND
she sat up in bed confused, her heart pounding, unable to identify the source of the ringing until the last remnants of her
dream evaporated from her mind. Then she fumbled for the phone, wanting to silence it before it woke Bobby. There was something
fearful about a late-night telephone call. Never good news.

After saying hello she waited. There was only silence at the other end. She could tell that the line was open, but that’s
all. Then a man’s voice said, “I’ve been wanting to talk to you.”

“Peter?” she asked, but when there was no immediate
answer, she hung up. Peter didn’t have a phone. It hadn’t sounded like Peter’s voice.

She sat for a moment, waiting for the phone to ring again. She was certain she had locked both doors. The wind blew outside,
shaking the wooden screens on the windows and rustling through the eucalyptus trees that grew at the edge of the driveway.
Moonlight shone through the wooden blinds, dimly illuminating the room. Probably the call meant nothing, a sick prank.

Wide awake now, she climbed out of bed and crossed the room. When the phone rang again she was almost to the door. She ran
back to the nightstand and snatched up the receiver, not saying anything, but listening again to the airy silence of an open
line. Then the same voice said, “I’m close by.” The sound was muffled, like someone talking through a bundle of cloth. She
could hear a metallic scraping—the sound of a steel telephone cord against the metal wall of a phone booth. “I was wondering …”
but she slammed down the receiver, holding it against the phone as if it would jump off by itself.

She picked it up again and after listening for a dial tone, set the receiver on the nightstand, waiting out the thirty seconds
it took for the recording to come on advising her to hang up. She muffled the receiver while it pulsed, then put it back down.

She walked out into the living room and checked the dead bolt, which was locked, just as she remembered. There was no sound
from Bobby’s room; he was still asleep. She went into the kitchen and looked out at her neighbor’s house. It was dark, but
she could see that their Jaguar was parked in the driveway, blocking the closed garage door. No doubt they were home. She
found their number in the phone book and wrote it out on a piece of paper that she brought back into the bedroom with her,
laying it next to the phone.

Completely awake now, she roamed through the house again, looking in on Bobby, who was sleeping among a
heap of stuffed animals. After pulling his comforter over him, she went back into the living room and moved the blinds aside,
looking out at the moonlit street. The wind had diminished a little, and the night was quieter than it had been.

Why had he said he was “close,” unless he
was
? And why disguise his voice, unless he knew her?

Nothing more than to frighten her, probably. Well, it had worked. She dropped the blinds and went back to bed, where she lay
with the light on, aware of the uncradled receiver on the nightstand, picking out and identifying stray sounds beyond the
window. After a moment she opened a book and tried to read.

P
ETER THREW THE DOOR OPEN AND JUMPED OUT ONTO THE
road. “Wait!” he shouted, but the woman was already gone and the wind tore the word away so that he could barely hear it
himself. He
had
to speak with her. He had seen her face in his mind a half dozen times that day. A single question …

Tree limbs lashed overhead, and the night was full of the sound of tearing and breaking. Shrouds of leaves rose from the forest
floor, whipping into the air, whirling away down the canyon. He turned his head away from the onslaught, grabbing his leather
jacket off the seat before slamming the door and loping down the hillside trail that led to the creek.

The woman had disappeared into the leafy darkness of the alders, moving upstream toward the foot of Falls
Canyon. Looking for a crossing, he followed the creek until the trail was blocked by thickly growing willows. The water ran
fast and shallow there, and he stumbled his way across, the half-exposed rocks shifting and tilting under his weight as he
stepped from one to another.

The trees grew thick on the other side of the creek, old oaks with such a heavy canopy of limbs that their shadows were unbroken
by moonlight. Darkness swallowed the steepening trail and there was nothing but night and wind. He peered into the gloom ahead,
looking for movement issuing from beneath the trees at the verge of the steepening hillside. Here the trail forked, one path
angling steeply upward toward the ridge, the other winding through grass and brush into the mouth of Falls Canyon, which lay
hidden in the distance beyond a heavy tumble of rocks. There was nobody visible in either direction.

The wind fell off abruptly, the night quiet and still. He listened for the sound of footsteps, sliding rock, broken branches.
Nothing. She had disappeared. She’d been hurrying, but so had he, and it struck him uneasily that she was close to him at
that very moment, perhaps watching him.

When he had looked into the car’s mirror he had seen Amanda, and although he knew it was crazy and impossible, it was Amanda’s
face, Amanda’s presence, that he felt now, along with a wild, indeterminate fear for her safety. The smell of sage and oak
leaves rose up around him as he stood listening, and in the momentary silence he heard from somewhere above him the plaintive
sound of a child crying.

Fear slammed up into his throat, not for himself, but for the woman and her child, a wild despair, the certain knowledge that
unless he found them, the dark dream of their death would become solid and real. Suddenly he knew that she had taken the path
to the ridge, that she had somehow moved far ahead of him, too far. He ran, clambering up the trail, slipping and sliding
on broken rock, scrabbling with
his hands. The wind rose again, and the stiff brush on the hillside shuddered in the silver moonlight, animated like images
in a jerky old film. There was the sound of crying again—faint, distant, muffled almost immediately by the rising wind and
followed closely by an answering cry, a woman’s voice, calling from somewhere above.

He threw his weight forward, grabbing the stiff shrubs along the trail, hauling himself up the scree-covered slope. Rocks
scattered from beneath his feet and rattled away down the hill. He slipped, slid backward, rolled into the brush and caught
himself, then immediately scrambled upward again, tasting dirt in his mouth, windblown debris stinging his face.

The path leveled again and he found himself on a broad, rock- and scrub-covered terrace, the trail running parallel to the
canyon now, wind coursing unhindered out of the east. The trail switchbacked through the brush, so that the canyon was sometimes
visible away to his left, sometimes hidden from view. Somewhere ahead lay the dense line of alders that shaded the stream
at the top of Falls Canyon. He stopped momentarily, cocking his head to listen, and although it must have been impossible
above the rush of wind, he thought he heard the sound of footsteps somewhere ahead. There was a smell in the air, traces of
jasmine, like a woman’s perfume.

He began to run blindly, the trail nearly level now, and in a moment he broke from the dense chaparral onto an empty, moonlit
meadow some hundred yards across. Wind swept the meadow grasses flat, animating the limbs of a pair of oaks that stood on
the far edge and cast a broad circle of dense black moon shadow. Shapes moved within the shadow. Peter’s throat constricted,
his breath jerking out in short gasps.

The woman in the black dress stepped from beneath the trees into the moonlight. She held the hand of a small boy. Peter was
in plain view, but neither the woman nor the boy looked back. They disappeared beyond the underbrush
again, still moving east along the trail.

Whoever they were, they weren’t Amanda and David.

He set out warily across the meadow, following them, the trail narrowing again as dense brush closed it in on either side.
He could see nothing ahead except darkness. There was no crying, no voices, just the sound of the wind and the noise of his
shoes scuffing on the dirt and rock of the trail.

Suddenly a sharp, anguished scream rang out ahead of him, cut off with a chilling abruptness, like a snap.

The wind died. The night waited—one vast, dark silence for the space of five seconds. Then, with a wild shriek, the wind sprang
up again without warning, slamming against him so furiously that he lurched forward, nearly falling, running toward the scream,
knowing without any doubt what it meant. Ahead of him lay the dense stand of trees along the top of the falls. There was a
dark hollow between the moving branches, like the mouth of a cave. He bent into the darkness, picking his way across the rocky
streambed. The precipice itself was hidden by undergrowth, but the sound of cascading water rose from below, and he looked
carefully out over the rocks into empty air. Creek water cascaded ankle-deep off the edge in a windblown spray, falling toward
the rocky canyon floor nearly invisible in the shadows below.

Holding on to overhanging brush, he leaned out to see into the shadowy depths, trying to make out shapes, movement. He could
just discern the gray-black outlines of rocks that edged the canyon floor, a glimmer of moonlight on the pool…

… and then, interrupting the spread of moonlit ripples, the twisted shapes of the two bodies that had fallen together a minute
ago.

He screamed hoarsely. He was too late. As if carried on the wind, the thought rushed into his head—again he was too late,
and for one anguished, desperate moment he was
possessed with the wild urge to throw himself off after them.

Startled, he steadied himself, forced himself away from the brink of the cliff, and scrambled along the ledge, his footfalls
knocking loose layers of weathered shale that tumbled off into the darkness. In order to descend, he was forced to angle away
from the sharp decline of the canyon wall and to break his own steep trail through the sage and greasewood. The sound of falling
water diminished behind him, masked by the wind.

Soon the hillside fell away so steeply that he hung on to the gnarled branches of hillside shrubs, lowering himself step by
step, searching out footholds against roots and trunks secured in the decomposing rock. He chanced a look downward, surprised
to see the trail twenty yards below, zigzagging up from the canyon floor. It was little more than a rain-scoured line, losing
itself almost at once among the oaks that lined the lower canyon wall. As close as it was, it seemed to him that he would
never reach it, and he was filled with the maddening, slow-motion futility of a dream.

He sat down and began to descend on his feet and the seat of his pants, braking with his heels, trying to keep his center
of gravity far enough back to avoid tumbling forward. Within seconds he knew it was a mistake; already he was sliding downward
in an uncontrolled rush.

He snatched at limbs and roots to catch himself, tearing the flesh on his palms. His hand closed on something and he held
on, but his momentum cartwheeled him sideways, his face smashing against dried sticks and leaves. He let go, sliding again,
and slammed to a stop against the broad trunk of a tree some few feet from the edge of the canyon.