Unassigned Territory (28 page)

“I thought nodes were those little things in your neck.”

“You’re thinking of lymph nodes,” Bill told her. “And anyway, you know all of this is just theory, something we’re checking out.” It was a line Bill and Judy fell back upon when they caught themselves sounding too weird. After all, they had not come up with the writing. They were simply trying to verify certain aspects of it, and the suggestion of doorways to other dimensions did seem to connect in some way Delandra was not completely clear about with what had brought Bill Richards into the Mojave in the first place—an investigation into the history of a particular indigenous tribe—and Bill, when not scouring the countryside for time warts and magnetic blow-jobs, could indeed be found poring over a thick, important-looking volume entitled
Mojave Ethnopsychiatry and Suicide: The Psychiatric Knowledge and Psychic Disturbances of an Indian Tribe.
Delandra, unfortunately, was able to remember this title as well. It was that she either had recently been cursed with total recall or had simply found something too grotesque in Bill and Judy to ignore, she could not decide.

She had at last managed to pry from Bill that his college education consisted of a degree in business management from UCLA. Though, of course, he had started out in physics. “But after I had done enough of that I began to see...” he had explained, pausing here to look thoughtfully out a window, allowing Judy time to admire the pose, “that, well...” It was, of course, a difficult thing to explain to laymen. “What I was learning was really all along the conventional laws of science. What I wanted was to completely reevaluate those laws.” Enough said, he had stopped to stare at the floor, a rather satisfied expression on his broad face. And so here he was, reexamining the laws of physics and chasing down time nodes, all the while, Delandra imagined, judging by how the two of them seemed to live, ringing up quite a bill Judy Verity was apparently willing to foot—her father, unlike Sarge in at least that respect, having left in his estate a good deal more than one homemade monster, so that there were times when Delandra guessed Richards was not quite as dumb as he looked and was perhaps doing something more with his business degree than met the eye.

Delandra was suddenly aware that Bill had stopped talking and began at once to search for some new way to goad him, a pastime she had unfortunately discovered she was capable of pursuing for hours at a time. She was saved from this, however, by the arrival of J (Delandra had recently taken to referring to Bill and Judy as B&J, or simply BJ, as in blow-job). “My, these motel walls are thin,”

Delandra said by way of greeting. She was aware of Bill smiling at her out of the sun.

J, as in Job, was not smiling, however, and seemed in fact to be more agitated than usual. She went hurriedly past Delandra, waving a newspaper which she handed to Bill. “You had better take a look at this,” she said. Something in her tone made Delandra sit still, waiting to see what would come of it.

Bill read for a moment in silence, then passed the paper to Obadiah. “Isn’t this one of the people you were telling me about?” he asked.

Delandra was the last to get the paper. She got it from Obadiah and when he stepped over to hand it to her he moved out of the sun and she could see his face for the first time since he’d come down from the rocks. He did not look good.

The paper was the Saturday evening edition of the
Trona Star Eagle,
and what Delandra saw in it, Sunday morning, was a photograph of Lyle Blackledge. There was also a photograph of the Electro-Magnetron. She read through the accompanying article, aware as she did so of the three faces peering down on her from the sky. She guessed they were waiting for some response. She looked back over the pictures, trying to assess what it was she felt. Really, the only thing that came immediately to mind was that somehow, when all was said and done, she believed she would have preferred the company of Jack and Lyle to the company of B&J. “It must be true,” she said at last, passing the paper back to Judy, “only the good die young.”

I
t had begun for Obadiah—the grim revelation of plot—with the date he’d scribbled into a secondhand copy of the first volume of The Books of Bueltar. He had tried several times to make it go away. He had alternately believed and dismissed it—suspected it to be nothing more than a paranoid delusion worthy of Bug House himself. But like some recurring nightmare, the thing was not easily put aside.

He sat now in a cluttered room amid the debris of his research. Upon the coffee table the first volume of The Books of Bueltar lay facedown upon the pink Formica. On the dresser was Bill Richards’s copy of
Mojave Ethnopsychiatry and Suicide: The Psychiatric Knowledge and Psychic Disturbances of an Indian Tribe.
A Bible lay open upon the bed. And then, of course, there was the
Trona Star Eagle,
the one with Lyle’s picture in it.

Obadiah picked up the paper and stared one more time into the grainy black-and-white photographs on the front page. He had repeated this gesture many times since Judy had shown up with the paper that morning. He was particularly drawn to the photograph of Lyle for it seemed to him a transformation barely short of miraculous had been worked on it—as if the narrow hick face had in the end managed some degree of dignity Obadiah would not have thought possible, as if the vacant, cramped eyes had taken on the light of something only to be wrested from a profound suffering. This combined with the fascination to be had from the knowledge that somewhere, someone had taken him out—no small task that, no boy’s errand. It was something to chew on. Beyond a narrow rectangular window the beginnings of a sunset stirred the sky. Obadiah had been alone in the room since noon. He had reached a kind of conclusion. He folded the photographs until they were small enough to fit into the breast pocket of his shirt and went outside to look for Delandra.

He found her in the Dart. She was in the back, where the seat used to be, ass on the floorboards, legs crossed at the ankles and swung up to rest on the back of the front seat so that all you could see from the outside were her boots pointed toward the sky. She had the red-faced guitar in her lap and a tall can of malt liquor at her side. There were a couple of empty cans on the floor and Obadiah stepped on one getting inside. It gave beneath him with an empty aluminum crunch. “Obondigas Wheeler,” Delandra said by way of greeting, “you old Bible thumper.”

Obadiah squeezed himself past the front seat from which Delandra seemed unwilling to move her ankles and sat down beside her. He drew his own legs up and rested his forearms on his knees, admiring for a moment the blaze of glory with which the day was giving up its light. The iron-colored ridge had taken on a violet hue with the sky a deep orange behind it. The orange ran to a misty yellow, a bright turquoise, and then, abruptly, to an inky blue. To his left the walls of the Blue Heaven Motel had achieved a certain opalescent brilliance which was really quite remarkable—ice to the evening’s fire.

Delandra let a hand fall across the strings of the Hummingbird and a slightly muted chord clattered about the back of the car. “So Obondigas,” she said. “What’s the lowdown, Brown?”

Obadiah picked up the can which now sat between them and tested it for weight. It was half full. He poured some down his throat and waited for it to hit bottom. The lowdown was what he had come to give. “You know,” he began after some moments of silence, “some of this is starting to make sense.”

Delandra put her head back against a piece of metal. “I was afraid it might,” she said.

Obadiah rubbed his neck. It still hurt from the crack Lyle had given it and there were times when he imagined it was affecting his vision. At the moment, for instance, Delandra appeared to have receded so completely into a shadowed corner that he was barely able to make her out. This scared him. He drank more of the malt liquor and looked outside, toward the walls of the motel. When the illusion had passed he began. “I want to tell you something,” he said. But he felt himself growing short of breath and stopped long enough to finish the malt liquor. He was aware of Delandra watching him and he hoped that his voice would not betray him. What was needed, he felt, was a certain brand of levelheaded seriousness—a tone he might once have achieved in explaining to some befuddled householder that the concept of an immortal soul was not of Judaic origin but had grown rather from the early church’s brush with Hellenistic thought.

“It began,” he said, “with Sarge’s note. The wind, the flash of light, the crystals. It seemed to me at the time there was some biblical connection there—something about crystals having been found at a site where fire was once said to have come down from heaven. Well, I found the incident. It was Elijah’s contest with the Baal worshipers at Mount Carmel. The contest was about whose god was the strongest. Elijah won. When he spoke the Word, fire came out of heaven and consumed the offering. It not only consumed the offering, it consumed the altar, the rocks around it, the whole shot. The crystals were found much later and were, at least according to what I read, an indication there had once been some kind of extreme heat in that area—just like in Sarge’s note. At any rate, I kept thinking about these crystals. As you know, crystals are mentioned in Richards’s note too. I started using the concordance, looking for other references. And it put me on to something—a pattern, if you will.” He quoted for her from the tenth chapter of the book of Daniel, the part about the man in white, his body like chrysolite. “Now it just so happens,” he told her, “that chrysolite is a crystal. This is only one reference out of maybe two dozen, but you can probably guess the pattern—the association of a particular crystal with the appearance of supernatural beings.” Watching her he could not tell if she had guessed anything or not. He cleared his throat and went on. “It fits Bill’s note too,” he said. “And it fits with something the Indian who gave it to him had to say. The Indian claims to be in contact with beings he calls the Others. He doesn’t know where they are from. He claims, however, that one of the things which makes their appearance possible is the possession of a certain crystal. Now this in turn connects with something Richards has been interested in for some time. You’ve seen his book. Well, the book is about a particular group of Mojave Indians—the Table Mountain People. They were Mojaves but they were different from the Indians around them. They were incredibly more advanced, in a number of ways, one of them being their artwork. Then, six, seven hundred years ago, they vanished. Some think their disappearance has something to do with the god they worshiped. The god’s name was Mastamho. Mastamho was supposed to have gone insane. It was something he passed on to his followers and it drove them to suicide.”

Delandra had not spoken in some time. Her face was turned toward the windshield but her eyes were closed, her mouth open, and for a moment Obadiah was afraid she had gone to sleep. When he stopped talking, however, she opened her eyes and looked at him. “Don’t tell me,” she said. “Let me guess. Bill Richards has another idea.”

He was somewhat annoyed that after all of that she was still one step ahead of him. But he knew where he was going. He knew there was a trump card that eventually he would play. “Always the smartass,” he said. “Bill Richards has another idea. One of Mastamho’s powers was the ability to alter his form. He could vanish as one thing and reappear as another. Richards has the idea that maybe the Table Mountain People didn’t commit suicide. Maybe they achieved transference. Maybe that’s how advanced they were.”

“Transference?” Delandra asked.

“They moved on. They adopted new forms.” He stopped here.

A cool wind had begun to sweep the flats. The sky was black and the light which found its way into the car came from the spots attached to the rear of the motel. “One more thing,” he said. He had begun a search of the car’s floor, hoping that he had missed some of the malt liquor, that perhaps a stray can had rolled beneath a seat. “The Indians did these drawings—various bizarre creatures in circles—a lot of the artwork was done on large bowls or dishes, the creatures all linked in some way, then a break in the link, as if there were one creature missing, or, and this is Richards’s idea, as if the creatures around the edge were really all the same creature undergoing various transformations, at last disappearing altogether. At the center of these transformation drawings there is always a rounded object in the middle of the circle, what appears to be a stone. On some drawings the stone has been given a reddish color—as if to indicate it was glowing or reflecting light, acting, in other words, like a ‘crystal.’”

Obadiah gave up looking for a stray can. When he raised his eyes he found that Delandra was looking at him in a way which made him uncomfortable. “So now we come to the Electro-Magnetron.” He was approaching the end. “There seems to be some confusion as to just what, exactly, it was supposed to be used for. I’ve heard one thing from the old woman in the bookstore and read another in Verity’s book. Even Bill and Judy don’t know for sure.”

“I don’t get it,” Delandra said. “Didn’t the old man know what it was for? He built it, for Christ’s sake.”

“The catch there was, he was building it under orders. He wouldn’t know what it did until everything was assembled. And, as you know...”

“There was a part missing.”

Obadiah nodded. “And it’s beginning to look to me like the part may have been the crystal.”

“It’s that hard to find the stuff?”

“Well, that’s just it. What stuff? There are all kinds of crystal around. And none of the references I’ve been citing are very specific. Even the biblical texts—they don’t say the stuff is chrysolite, there are just all of these references to something being like chrysolite. But that gets back to Sarge’s note. He says he found the crystals near the spot where he found the Thing. Which, if it were true, would mean that the stuff he found was probably the right stuff.”

“If it were true,” Delandra said.

“But that’s just it. Don’t you see? Sarge says that when he found the Thing he found the crystals. Now he could have made it up. But there are at least two strikes against that. One is the Thing itself. The other is this pattern. I mean it fits. And there’s one more thing. If you believe Sarge’s note it would support the idea that the deaths of Verity and Sarge were not accidental. Remember what Sarge said? He said he’d asked someone about the crystals. Now suppose this: Verity was looking for this stuff. He was also by that time attracting some pretty marginal types. What if some of these people knew what he was looking for and word got back to them somehow—Sarge doesn’t say who he talked to—that Sarge had some. They might have killed him for it. Then maybe Verity found out, and they killed him too. I’m not saying it happened that way, but it could be something like that. It might explain why the two men died so close together.”