Nightmare Country (31 page)

Jerusha Fistler was judged to be in a coma and put on a life-support system. Russ convinced the others to uphold the story that they'd all chased Jerusha, who'd had too much to drink at the party, trying to get her out of the mountain, and had rescued her when the tunnels caved in—which wasn't too far from the truth and would help Russ keep his job. And all the men who'd worked the mine could vouch that she'd been known to enter it regardless of repeated warnings. If Jerusha revived from her coma, she'd tell of Russ's mistake in practically inviting the party into the tunnels. She was the vengeful type. But if she didn't revive, they'd never know the whole story. Russ believed only Jerusha Fistler had any idea of what was going on inside the mountain.

The Cheyenne school system closed the school permanently. It was considered unsafe, with the giant slide of crushed rock that appeared about to eat the mustard-colored cinder-block building. Parents were expected to relocate their children near other schools as soon as possible.

Tamara Whelan sat in her daughter's bedroom and refused to come out.

Agnes finally came to get Russ. He was packing company papers and office equipment and didn't know what he could do to help. The teacher had just closed herself in. But he went along with Agnes. Privately, Russ had decided the big kid had gone sleepwalking on the mountain and fallen into a hole. Probably never be found. That didn't sound like something that would happen to Fred, though.

After trying to talk her out of Adrian's bedroom individually, they stormed in together prepared to pick her up bodily and move her out. But a change that hardened her expression stopped them.

“Backra,” she said with a snap of her fingers, and stood of her own accord. They had to step aside to let her pass.

32

“You'll have to excuse me.” Tamara busied herself in the kitchen. “I haven't eaten in a long time.”

When Agnes and Russ tried to leave, she insisted they stay, and soon had everyone arranged around Miriam Kopecky's coffee table with sandwiches and coffee. At first she ate steadily, staring through the wall over Russ's head. Finally she said, around a tumbler of milk, “He was even here that morning. I don't know why it didn't occur to me till now.”

“Who was here?” Russ looked uneasily at Agnes Hanley.

“Backra. He and Jerusha … somehow have done this thing between them. We've got to make her talk. Adrian, and maybe Fred too, Agnes, could be somewhere—”

“Called the hospital this morning,” Russ said. “She's still unconscious. Look, I gotta—”

“Sit down, Russ, or I'll tell the sheriff and B & H just how it came to pass that Adrian was left alone that night in Jerusha Fistler's bedroom,” the teacher said sweetly.

Russ sat down and reached for another sandwich. He liked her better frail. “Who is Backra, and what—?”

“Thad Backra, Thaddeus, tall, gray-haired man I've never met who lives on an island I've never visited.”

“He the one lives next to that sand cemetery?” Agnes asked.

“So you do dream of Mayan Cay?”

“More lately than I ever used to. Them big black birds fly in circles over the tombstones, and the place's all wrecked. Remember that first party, Russ, when Jerusha and Abner lived in the next place over and she had us think of that island?”

“I was in Cheyenne. Didn't get back till the fire.” But he knew the island, had visited it in dreams as well as by way of the machine in the mountain. He was amazed anyone else knew of it.

“You've had a few dreams about Mayan Cay too, haven't you Russ?” Tamara read his expression. “Odd we should all dream of the same place so often, since none of us have been there. What happened, Agnes, at the first party?”

“Well, it was kind of like the one you went to. We all ate and then got sloshed, but she didn't have that creepy plant. Got us all to think about the same thing, like one was a coconut, and she stood by these candles with her eyes shut, like a witch in a movie. I thought coconut so hard, I saw one on the table in front of her. But it kind of faded away. All some kind of game, she told us. Then she shows us a picture of this plant, like the one she's got now. I don't remember it, but the next day she claimed our ‘experiment' had made a cutting of it appear on the table, and she'd rescued it from the fire. Big fuss. Made poor Abner go buy her a vaporizer. Folks kind of stayed away from her after that. Thought she was crazy. Till Miss Kopecky came, she—”

“Agnes, remember Jerusha asking us at the end of the tunnel to think about Adrian?” Tamara Whelan's skin was pale, veins feathered blue at her temples. Her hands trembled as she held her coffee cup. But the small lithe body had folded itself into Miriam Kopecky's armchair, Indian fashion, as supplely as a child's. She was a pretty woman even under stress.

Agnes Hanley shook her head. Her troubles showed too in shadows around the eyes and in the nervous clasping and unclasping of her hands. “Hate to admit it, but I don't remember too much of any of that.”

“I do,” Russ said. “She put you against the wall and kept repeating ‘Adrian,' and Agnes kept saying ‘Fred' instead.”

“And both Fred and Adrian are missing. And it was the same way she got people to think of the night-blooming cereus,” Tamara said.

“But it's not missing. It came, not went. ‘Materialized,' Jerusha said, but she's always been nuttier than a fruitcake.”

“And she was interested in the mine, and Russ's room with the machine, and … somehow these things are all connected.” Tamara set down her cup wearily. “I just can't think how.”

“Maybe she sent Fred and your girl someplace and brought the plant here the same way,” Agnes said. “Don't make much sense, though.”

“I've seen the night-blooming cereus on Mayan Cay, and Backra on Iron Mountain.”

The last thing Russ wanted was to get further involved with these mysteries, so he was surprised to hear himself saying, “There's some connection between this island and Iron Mountain. I don't think those two are still alive, but we might find out what happened if we knew where this Mayan Cay was. Maybe we could call down there on the phone, sound 'em out.”

“I know where it is, and I think we should go there, not just call.” The frail schoolteacher sat up straight and spoke with a strong, take-charge tone. “You, Agnes, because you might discover something about what's happened to Fred. You could sell either your car or Fred's truck for air fare, and we'll sell Miriam Kopecky's antiques for money for the trip too.” Tamara turned to Russ in a way he'd been expecting but dreading. “You should come with us, because you have some time off with pay between jobs and because there are some mysteries which, if not explained, can haunt even you, Russel Burnham, for the rest of your days.”

It snowed the night before Tamara left Iron Mountain, and in the morning she pulled the Toyota over to the side of the road and stepped out to look back. In its coating of clean white, the mountain stood pristine and tall against a sky of snapping blue. It appeared to have dressed up to celebrate her departure, to have shed all those sinister qualities that had shadowed her life for months. Those months seemed like years.

Did she leave her daughter's body in a hole on the surface of that mountain? Had her baby died in lonely, painful agony? Terror? Would she roam the mountain now, like Miss Kopecky?

Augie Mapes hammered on the shack he was building for his generator. The clack of the hammer cut across to her sharply on the cold air, and his red-plaid mackinaw looked like a flare against snow and new wood.

Augie intended to invoke some form of squatter's rights to the land on which his trailers and collection of junk vehicles sat and which was part of the parcel B & H had leased from the federal government for three-quarters of a century. He planned to dig a well and install his own generator. Russ didn't think he'd get away with it, but if Tamara knew Augie and the mess he'd cause hosts of government paper-shufflers, it would be years before he'd be forced to move, even if his squatter's rights were denied.

He'd soon be alone with the mountain and its ghosts. Deloris Hope and her children had already moved into low-income housing in Cheyenne. Saul Baggette had found a job with an oil-drilling company in Casper. B & H would transfer Darrell Johnson to Colorado with Russ. Agnes Hanley had given Fred's German shepherd to Augie, and Augie planned to move Jerusha's chickens to his “lot” if she didn't wake up.

When Tamara and Agnes had driven Fred's pickup into Cheyenne to sell Miriam Kopecky's antiques, they'd stopped to see Jerusha in De Paul Hospital. And “see” was about all they could do. Jerusha lay thin and pale but not yet skeletal, kept alive with tubes and wires. Tamara had pulled the plug on the vaporizer in Jerusha's apartment, left the night-blooming cereus to wither and dry, turn brown, and die. She'd have loved to do the same to Jerusha Fistler.

Laramie County School District One had offered to transfer Tamara to a school in Cheyenne to assist in a class with “special needs.” But she had to look for Adrian. Which meant she broke the contract, and that would go on her record.

Tamara turned now and crawled back into the Toyota, where Agnes Hanley sat crying quietly, and drove away from Iron Mountain.

Interim

Moment in Time

Adrian careened through black, through a total absence of light. She could feel the heating up of her skin, the too-rapid shallowness of her breathing, as frenzied chemicals called her body to action. Even though she knew she'd left that body back on Jerusha's bed.

This was not like the dreaming had been. And there were “things” in this void with her. Unknown, unseen. She could almost hear them, sensed a whisper of their touch as she hurtled past and felt sickened at the thought of inevitable collision.

Adrian imagined a scream she had no mouth to utter, imagined it trailing out behind her like a comet in the thick blackness.

A wind or air current jerked her suddenly in another direction, a wind that sucked and pulled instead of pushing from behind. Perhaps her body was awaking, drawing her back. The wind turned on her, struck her. Adrian tumbled over and over and down, the wind shrieking by her like it would a diving, crashing plane. Light exploded into the darkness. And then colors. Blues and greens shimmered, reached for her.… No sensation on impact. Just an abrupt end to her dizzying drop.

The blues congealed to ocean, the greens to palm trees. The familiar ingredients of too many dreams. She hovered above clumps of tortured black rock with jags and holes.

An old man knelt among a pile of browned palm fronds, staring past her openmouthed. He wore a khaki-colored shirt-jacket with short sleeves and extra tabs, like people wore in ancient Tarzan movies. His beard and hair were white and stringy but neatly trimmed, his eyes the color of frost.

A movement at the edge of her consciousness, a sound of human agony or forced breath. Adrian whirled to see a giant in a lacy suit.

“You're an Atlantean,” the old man said.

The giant raised his arms. “Primitive in the funnel!”

He startled Adrian so she almost spiraled off the beach. The next she knew, they were following each other around in circles, apparently unaware of her. Adrian tried to hear what they were saying, but it became work just to keep from drifting off.

She'd never felt this disembodied in her dreams, this bewildered, had always been able to see herself as whole. But since that peculiar current of air had caught her and tumbled her to this place, she'd had no sensation of body at all, not even the remembered response of the amputee, as though she'd lost all contact with the solid part of her:

And as her fright grew intolerable, it bounced her about. That frightened her more, and the fear fed upon itself until colors spun, melted, merged, and she whirled. Nothing to grab on to to stop, nothing to grab with.

She catapulted away from the beach and the human shapes below. Would she disintegrate? Fly off into pieces of thought that couldn't recombine to form Adrian Whelan?

What had Jerusha said? “Just relax, let your body sleep and your mind wander, and the fat will melt away without pain, because you won't need food. And, oh, woman-child, when you wake, you'll have a body to match your beautiful hair and eyes. And your mother will be so proud.”

At the thought of Tamara, Adrian's whirlwind ascent slowed and she began to drop.

Jerusha had said nothing about her becoming separated from that body, traveling around alone and half-complete. Something had gone wrong with the experiment. That realization sent her spinning up once more with a sort of screaming panic that had a sound of its own. A sound as out of control as her motion.

Mom? Mommy!
Again, a lessening of the bedlam of this nightmare. She fought to form a vision of the thought of her mother, a comforting image, and to hold on to it as she settled back onto the beach.

Now the giant sat on a rock with the old man at his feet. “We have perhaps repeated this conversation many times before, old Edward, and we are certainly doomed to repeat this moment many times again.” He said this without moving his lips. “Because we have slipped between time.”

“Help! Please, help me.” Adrian tried to keep quiet thoughts smoothed over the desperate ones to hold herself together. She would have given anything to have her own misshapen flesh back to shield her from the rawness of this experience, and for a tantalizing second she saw it form beneath her—the colors of her blue jeans and blouse, slightly transparent but with unclothed forearms and hands extending from the blouse's sleeves. But all vanished with her excitement over the sight, and she spiraled.

Adrian concentrated on her mother, tried to remember what her daddy had looked like the last time she'd seen him, tried to relax—found herself hovering behind the giant's left shoulder. The old man stared right through her. He kept asking the giant about God and time and nutty stuff. And she could feel the giant's deep sadness pushing through the fancy lacework of his clothes. Adrian longed again for her own body to shield her from the pain of it, and blue jeans and blouse formed beneath her.