The Vanishing (38 page)

Whatever fear or dread he had felt before was gone, and looking at the cat he felt as though he were communing with an old friend.

Even this seemed comfortable, natural, and he stepped off the porch and walked slowly toward the cat, petting hand extended. ‘‘Hey,’’ he said softly. ‘‘Hey, little guy.’’

And then he found himself walking down the path, around the side of the cabin and into the trees. It was dark, but somehow he didn’t stumble, didn’t trip on any of the rocks or pinecones that littered the rough, uneven ground. He hadn’t told Robin or the kids where he was going, hadn’t even told them that he
was
going. He simply followed the dead cat into the forest and up the hill, heading toward . . . toward . . .

Toward that adobe hut at the top.

He hadn’t realized that was his goal, but he understood now that it had been in the back of his mind at least since seeing its complement on the other trail this morning. Robin’s violent reaction to the structure had also piqued his interest. Unfazed by altitude since it no longer breathed, the dead cat moved in its jerky awkward way up the trail. Along the way, he saw writing on rocks that he hadn’t noticed before, and the strange childish symbols seemed to glow in the moonlight.

Then they were at the flat top of the ridge, moving onto the side trail, past the spot where he had first seen the cat’s body, through the gently swaying grass, toward the stand of ponderosas that housed the adobe hut. He lost the cat somewhere along the way, but it didn’t matter. He was where he was supposed to be, and he reached the dark entrance of the small building and, after a quick moment’s hesitation, walked inside.

He could see, somehow, though there was no source of light. Andrew was not sure what he’d expected to find within the adobe structure, but the floor of the single room was dirt, the walls unadorned and there was no furniture. In one corner was a carefully tended tree with bright red leaves that came up to the height of his stomach and had about it the precise configuration of a bonsai. Behind the tree, making it easier to see and stacked against the angled meeting of the two walls, was a pile of white bones that he did not look at too carefully but that he knew were of human origin.

There was a hole in the center of the floor that smelled of sewage, and he was compelled to walk forward and peer into its depths. What he found was a shaft dropping down farther than he could see, lined with mosses and plant stalks that swayed seductively in an unseen wind and made him think of Middle Eastern belly dancers. The sight was hypnotic, and he stared into it for quite some time before finally pulling himself dreamily away. He felt light-headed, almost drunk, and he realized that he had no idea how long he’d been standing there. His legs felt prickly, as though they’d fallen asleep, and his eyes burned, as though he’d been staring for a while without blinking.

He suddenly felt the need to get out of this room. There was another doorway (
or was it the same one?
His sense of direction and sense of time both seemed to have deserted him), and he walked out to find himself on another path that led through the trees to yet another adobe hut. Pressing onward, he saw another hut beyond that . . . and another beyond that. They stretched in a crazy line through woods that did not look like the woods he remembered seeing up here, past mounds of moss as big as men, and he had the disorienting feeling that he’d traveled a lot farther than he thought he had.

The path he was on was no longer dirt but had grown soft, and he looked down to see a ribbon of lush grass winding through a verdant forest toward a collection of adobe buildings built at the foot of a black mountain. At the head of the path, just before the entrance to this village, he saw a whitish shape that shimmied in the moonlight like those belly-dancing plants in the hole. He rushed forward, excited but not sure exactly why.

Then he figured out why.

It was the woman of his dream. Or the female
creature
of his dream. She was beckoning him, calling him with her dance. The lust he felt for her—

—reminded him of the way he’d first felt when he and Robin were dating, a passionate desire that had been reawakened since they’d come up here, although with her memories of this place Robin had obviously not been in the same sort of mood. He was fully erect, and though that made it difficult to run, he continued to hurry forward, needing to reach her yet not knowing what would happen when he did so.

She was not alone, he saw as he drew closer. There were others just like her, walking around naked, and it was only the fact that many of them were male that made him slow his pace.

Come,
she danced.
Come.

Now he was looking at the scene before him more objectively, his critical faculties breaking through the haze in which they’d been shrouded since his encounter with the hole in the hut. What he saw was impossible, though he accepted it unquestioningly. He had stumbled upon—or been led to—a community of these creatures. They were of a kind but not identical, and he saw fur and scales, horns and tails. Their homes had bones visibly embedded in the adobe, and rotting carcasses lay on the ground between them.

He understood that these were the type of beings that had assaulted Robin and her friends all those years ago, and he wondered if that had been the reason for his attraction to her in the first place, if on some subliminal level he had sensed that taint—and wanted her for it.

He told himself that was crazy thinking, but as outrageous as it sounded on the face of it, he could not dismiss such an idea out of hand. Particularly when he considered his own reaction to the revelation of her attack. Rather than cutting the vacation short the way she wanted and being concerned with the feelings this was dredging up for her, he had insisted that they remain and had even contemplated staying longer.

Not only that, but his desire for her had intensified.

He felt guilty, but the guilt turned to disgust as he saw a large male—nine feet tall if it was an inch—hold a small skull in its hand and bite into the cranium as though it were a cracker.

The woman—

—of his dreams continued to dance for him, trying to seduce him. She had only one breast but it was perfectly formed and centered pleasingly in the center of her chest, jiggling slightly as she swayed sensuously from left to right. She thrust her hips forward, moving in and out of the moonlight and shadows, exposing the exaggerated attributes of her vulva, her shiny tail slithering seductively between her legs.

He wanted to jump on her, wanted to rip off his clothes and taste her, touch her, take her. But he resisted, and as the minutes passed, the come-hither expression on her face was replaced with something that more resembled puzzlement. It was clear that she was not used to rejection, and his ability to withstand the temptation even though every fiber of his being longed to be intimately joined with her, made him feel powerful, gave him strength.

He could not see as well as he had only a few seconds previously. The moonlight seemed dimmer. Shadows appeared darker, and there were more of them. From within one of those shadows came a man who made his way past the milling creatures, around the dancing seductress and up the grass-carpeted path, a human being like himself wearing only dirty, raggedy clothes. He seemed uncomfortable and ill at ease, and he stood in front of Andrew for several long moments as if unsure of what to do.

Or as though he was waiting for instructions.

That was more like it, and even as Andrew’s brain articulated the thought, the filthy man attempted a smile and held out his hand to be shaken, like a parody of a bad salesman. Andrew did not shake it, and the hand slowly dropped back to the man’s side.

‘‘Who are you?’’ Andrew asked. ‘‘What are you doing here?’’

‘‘I . . . am . . . here . . . for . . . her.’’ He spoke slowly, and his speech was thick and awkward, as though he hadn’t spoken English in a long, long time. At the word ‘‘her,’’ he absently reached down to touch his penis, and Andrew saw that while it was hard, it was also bruised and scraped, red and bloodied.

This man, too, he understood, was in the thrall of one of the females.

Andrew was not sure he’d put it that way, but it was clear that the desire had become obsessive, so much so that the man had turned his back on human beings and civilization and had come out here to the wilderness to live with these . . . whatever they were.

No, Andrew realized, and for the first time since arriving in California he knew for certain that he did not belong here, this was not for him. He might have been called, but he did not have to answer.

More than anything else in the world, he wanted to see Robin and the kids right now, wanted to be with them, wanted to be traveling east on that highway home.

‘‘We . . . can . . . help . . . them,’’ the man said in that maddeningly slow, dumb voice.

‘‘Help them do what?’’

The man’s mouth hung open and his eyes moved up as his brain searched for the word. Frustrated, he shook his head.

‘‘I’m not helping anyone do anything,’’ Andrew said. ‘‘I’m going—’’
Home,
he’d planned to say, but just at that second soft hands reached around from behind him, one snaking around his neck, one cupping his crotch. The fingers, white and slimy as they were, knew what they were doing and even through the thick material of his jeans manipulated him expertly. He tried to pull away, but she was stronger than he was—and part of him did not want to pull away.

‘‘You . . . help . . . or . . .’’ The man made a high-pitched whistling noise that sounded like something made by a ceramic flute, and the sound was echoed by the beings all around them.

He could guess what that meant, and to his mind the chuckling that followed confirmed it.

If he were a religious man, he would have prayed.

But he was not.

So instead he cried.

Twenty-six

John Sutter was not the man he had been.

Neither, Marshall supposed, was he.

The two of them had not had a falling out—not exactly—but the friendship was strained between them. If it could even be called a friendship anymore. ‘‘Business partner’’ was probably the most accurate description of their relationship, but even that implied more contact than they had with each other these days. For the most part, Sutter attended to affairs in Coloma and around the fort, while he saw to things farther afield, and the less they had to see of each other the better.

He’d been gone for two months this time, although one of the reasons was a freak spring snowstorm that had kept the high-line trail impassable for nearly a week. He’d even made it to San Francisco, and he’d found it relaxing to be in a real city, to be away from the wilderness and among the monuments of men. On the way back, he found himself thinking that there was probably a lot of carpentry work to be found in such a growing city, and he decided that the next time he was out that way, he would try to look for a job and leave the diggings behind permanently.

He didn’t have the stomach anymore for a life in the wild.

His party arrived at the fort, and he sensed the difference immediately. It was nothing concrete, nothing he could point to with any specificity, but no one came out to greet them, and the few people they saw were surly and preoccupied. The buildings themselves seemed shabby and untended, and while there weren’t weeds actually growing in the gravel of the courtyard, they would not have been out of place. Life at the fort had changed, and Marshall wondered if that was merely because he’d been absent for a while or if Sutter’s previously iron grip had faltered.

There were quite a few unfamiliar faces at the various posts. He knew the men who’d returned with him and recognized a few people here and there, but for the most part Sutter seemed to have replaced most of his dependable old hands with newer workers whom Marshall couldn’t identify and who did not look particularly trustworthy.

The captain was not in his office, but Marshall and Claude Lake, his second in command on the trip, gave an abbreviated report and a stack of invoices and paperwork to the rather belligerent young man who was manning the office, telling him to make sure that Sutter knew they were back. Claude went for a drink with the others, but Marshall was tired and said that he just wanted to go back to his place and catch up on some much-needed sleep. On the way, he walked by the storage room where he had shot the female creature—

—but he passed by without even trying to open the door and look inside, his muscles tense and knotted.

His own cabin had remained untouched, but there was another cabin being built nearby, in view of his side window, and he realized that although this was his home, it did not
feel
like home to him anymore. He had some money saved up, not a lot but enough, and he decided that rather than wait until his next journey to San Francisco, he would collect his pay from Sutter and start looking for a new situation immediately.

He was through with this.

Marshall found an old whiskey bottle, downed its contents, then slept soundly through the rest of the day and well into the night, undisturbed by dreams.

It was the tapping on his door that woke him up. ‘‘Hold on!’’ he called, groggily getting out of bed and stumbling toward the door to unlatch it.

He wasn’t sure how long the tapping had been going on, but it was low, not loud, and he sensed that it must have been sounding for quite some time in order for its percussive rhythm to capture his attention in his sleep. And it was
tapping
, not
knocking
, a light, continuous rapping on the wood that he should have realized instantly was far too even and far too consistent to have been made by any person. But he was still sleepy, was at the door already, and he unlatched and opened it.