The Dark Page 11

  I asked if she’d seen any ghosts up there. She shook her head and smiled. No ghosts, just dust, heat, and silence. I understood about the silence but with all those ghosts up there, she’d expected something more. Why hadn’t the inhabitants from Chloride City’s second boom period learned anything from the first? I told her there were more fools in the world than she might have imagined. Gold wasn’t the only illusion that drew people to the valley.

  Did I mean that literally? I wasn’t sure. I wondered if Delauney had seen anything out on the salt flats beyond Badwater, if his mind had been troubled by visions he couldn’t explain. But I saw no sign of his existence in the mirror and didn’t think to ask. Sophie wanted to know about my life and I told her some things that seemed important, others that kept a smile on her face. She told me Paul wanted her to have another child. She wasn’t sure what to do. The dreams and ambitions she’d once had were largely unfulfilled, there were things she hadn’t yet grasped. I understood her to mean that this was something she’d never told Delauney.

  And then he was there, clapping me on the back and giving Sophie a proprietary kiss on the cheek. She fell quiet then, seemed to retreat into herself. I tried to maintain the connection to her but his voice kept intruding on my thoughts. There was nothing to distinguish his words from the other noises in the bar, a wavering chorus of sounds whose real purpose was little more than to fill the silence. A feeling of despair grew inside me as I watched Sophie close herself off. Her smile was gone and the lines around her eyes signaled the dreams she could no longer give voice to.

  Delauney was asking me if it was possible to go to the Racetrack and join Route 190 heading west without coming back on himself. I told him it would add sixty or seventy miles to his journey, most of it on poor dirt roads. He nodded and said they might make the detour on their way out of the valley tomorrow. I asked him what he hoped to see up there. Same as anyone, he said; he wanted to see the moving rocks for himself, or at the very least, the trails they left in their wake.

  I told him he wouldn’t, no one ever did. He believed me, he said, but seeing beat believing any day of the week.

  I WATCH THE shadows compose themselves. The way they move across mountains or desert dunes reveals how fluid identity really is. What we think of as solid has no more real substance than a whisper or a lie. It’s just light and shadow that make the unknown recognizable, that sculpt unfamiliar surfaces into configurations we think we know. We stare a while at these faces or shapes, glad they mean something to us even if we can’t name them, and then we blink and when we look again, the face has changed to something we can’t recognize. We try to retrieve the familiar face, needing to see it one more time to confirm that it was who we thought it was, but the new image persists, erasing the old. It’s like trying to see the two front faces of a line drawing of a transparent cube at the same time—it can’t be done. One face is always behind the other. We close our eyes again and when we look one more time, there isn’t even a face to see, just a shadow moving over rock, sliding into all its dark places. It was the kind of illusion that made me feel less certain about my place in the world.

  I WOKE UP this morning no longer sure I am who I thought I was. I showered, dressed, and ate breakfast, feeling like an intruder in my own home. I sat in the Expedition, spoke to Rydell on the radio, and drove up toward Hunter Mountain, feeling I was watching another man try out my life. I had hoped to find some certainties up there, something to which I could anchor myself, but all I found was that everything flows. I didn’t need to see it to know it was happening. Even the forests of piñon pine and juniper were farther down the mountain slopes than they were the day before.

  In the spring, after heavy winter rainfalls, wildflowers turn certain parts of the valley into a blaze of purple, red, and orange. It wasn’t possible to reconcile such beauty with that scorched and barren hell. If such a vastness could be transformed in what, in geological terms, was less than the blink of an eye, how could any of us hope to ever stay the same?

  All those voices I heard on the radio—how could I be sure that they were speaking to me? If I couldn’t be certain who I was, then how could they know I was the one they wanted to talk to? So when Rydell’s voice came out of the radio, I had no way of knowing if it was really him. Short of driving down to Furnace Creek and standing right in front of him. And even then, there was no guarantee.

  I heard Hannafin—or someone who sounded like her—asking where I was. I wanted to answer her but when I tried to talk, I realized I had nothing to say. I already knew where I was and where I was going. There was nothing Hannafin, or the voice that might have been hers, could do for me that I couldn’t do for myself.

  This person I had become had no more illusions. He was capable of seeing things as they really were. As he drove past the talc mines, across Ulida Flat and north into Hidden Valley, he was aware that the land was watching him. He heard the creak of Joshua trees, the distant groans of the mountain ranges, and the listless sigh of an unfelt breeze. And in those sounds he heard himself also, speaking in his usual voice, his tone neutral, the words precise, as he told them all they needed to know, the way he always did. Only it wasn’t him talking.

  THE suv is pulled off the dirt road onto the edge of the playa. The front passenger’s door stands open. I glance up toward Ubehebe Peak, see no movement among the stands of mesquite. Approaching the vehicle, I move round the back and peer through the windshield. There are two large suitcases behind the rear seat. I continue on round the Toyota till I come back to the open door. I reach inside and grab the carryall on the rear seat. Inside is a money belt with close to four hundred dollars in cash, plus a book of traveler’s checks. There’s also a Nike fanny pack in there with three passports, a driver’s license, and car-hire documentation. I look at the photographs, just for a moment, then put everything back in the carryall. On the floor by the front passenger’s seat, there’s a video camera. It’s a Sony Hi 8 and the tape is about three-quarters of the way through. I sit on the running board, my feet resting on the ground, trying to decide what to do. The last thing I want to do right now is play the tape but I know that if I don’t, I’ll never find the answers I need. Flipping open the viewfinder, I touch the play button and get nothing but blue. I press and hold the rewind, listening to the machine whirr as the world runs back to where it has already been. I watch shadows grow westward from the Cottonwood Range and a strip of broken cloud that pulls itself together as it scrolls back across the sky. After a minute, I release the button and the tape rolls forward.

  Sophie Delauney and her daughter walk out of their apartment at Stovepipe Wells, holding hands. They stop halfway across the parking lot, and Sophie turns, smiles and waves toward the camera before continuing on to the Rav4. The scene changes to a view of Ubehebe Crater from the north rim, stretching a half mile across and five hundred feet deep. The girl skips into the shot from the right, Delauney from the left. Something blurs the picture for a second or two, but I can’t tell what it is—a hand or part of a face in extreme close-up. Delauney talks about how the crater was formed, sounding vaguely authoritative. The kid complains about the heat. Next, I see Sophie and the girl standing in front of the sign at Teakettle Junction. Delauney enters the frame from the left. The girl has a stick and she starts tapping out a rhythm on the kettles and pots hanging from the arms of the wooden cross. Sophie and Delauney start dancing round her, whooping like a couple of movie Indians. They look foolish but the girl laughs. No one seems to notice the single shadow that slips down the mountain behind them.

  The scene changes abruptly, showing the three of them sitting in their vehicle, smiling and waving. After a second or two, I realize there’s no soundtrack. They get out of the Toyota and start walking directly toward the camera, their faces growing in the frame. The jump cut I’m expecting doesn’t happen. Instead, as Delauney draws close, the scene shifts slightly to the left and catches his face in profile as he walks past the spot where the camera had been. It
catches the other two as they walk by, then turns and tracks them to the side of the road. Their smiles have disappeared, and they avoid looking at the camera until something prompts Sophie to glance up and say a single word, which might have been “Please.” Moments later, she takes the girl by the hand and walks out onto the playa. After a second or two, Delauney wipes his face and follows them. The camera pans left and zooms in on the Grandstand to the north, holding the outcrop in the frame for what seems like an eternity. Nothing moves onscreen, even when I hold down the fast-forward button. When I release it, the camera moves upward to capture a clear and cloudless sky. The tape has played almost to the end. The final shot is of Sophie, Delauney, and the kid, three hundred yards out on the playa, growing smaller as they walk on without looking back. And then the screen turns blue.

  My head has started aching and the heat is almost intolerable. I put the camera on the seat, understanding what I have to do. At my vehicle, I grab the radio, press the call button and speak my name. Instead of voices, all that comes out is feedback and white noise. I try once more but whatever I hear, it isn’t human. I lack the will to do this, but there’s no one else. I load half a dozen bottles of water into a backpack, grab my binoculars, and head out onto the playa.

  There are no tracks in the honeycombed surface. I walk five hundred yards due east, a little farther than I had seen them go before the tape had stopped. I figure they must have been looking for the rocks, or at least for one of their trails. I look north to where the slanting sunlight blurs the edges of the Grandstand. Shielding my eyes, I turn my gaze southward and pick out a few rocks of varying sizes scattered across the dry mud. There’s little else to see out here, no signs of life. I head south and try not to think about the tape and the expressions on their faces as they had trudged past the camera. Almost twenty minutes pass before I am walking among the silent, unmoving rocks. Though I don’t want to admit it, their watchful stillness bothers me. I don’t want to think about what they’ve seen. Instinctively, I lay a hand on the Sig Sauer at my hip, drawing some comfort from the touch of the gun. There’s a picture forming in my head. It’s the haunted look in Sophie’s eyes as she stared at the camera for the last time, just before she took the child’s hand in her own and started walking. I’d like to think she looked back one last time, but I really can’t be sure.

  I search among the lifeless rocks for an hour. The ground is flat and the rocks are neither plentiful nor large enough to provide cover for anything much bigger than a gecko. Finally, as the sun falls toward Ubehebe Peak, I sit down on a rock, feeling dizzy and nauseous. I drink about half a liter of tepid water and pour the rest over my head. I raise the binoculars and see the vehicles where I left them, two dusty sentinels watching over the playa. As I shift my gaze northward, I’m startled by a flash of light from the mountains above Racetrack Road. I turn back to the cars, then search the slopes above them, looking for something up there in the creosote. I lower the binoculars and feel a tightness across my chest. I breath slowly, head hanging between my knees, and that’s when I see it for the first time, the faint trail cut like a groove in the dried mud. It ends at the rock between my feet. It wasn’t there when I sat down, I think, but I’m not certain. I’m spooked a little by it, even more when I notice more trails terminating at the other rocks lying nearby. I try to picture a rain-softened surface and a hundred-mile-an-hour wind pushing them along, but it’s all in vain.

  The flesh crawls on my back and for some reason, the air feels cooler. The silence is weird, and when I hear the two shots ring out, I need no further prompting to leave the rocks behind. I pick up the backpack, unholster my pistol, and set off at a slow trot north toward the sound of the gunfire. I don’t think about what has happened, about the mess Delauney has got them into. Instead, I concentrate on getting there, on locating their position even though there are no further sounds to guide me toward them.

  I pass the vehicles on the road, a half mile or so to my left, without having seen anything I don’t recognize. But I keep on, another mile, until I realize I’m heading right toward the Grandstand. I don’t turn back. There’s no point, even though I won’t find anything there. Nothing alive. Yet I have to see.

  THERE’S NOBODY AT the Grandstand. I drink another bottle of water to quiet my despair. Shadows stretch out across the playa toward the outcrop, painting the surface the color of blood. For a while, I stare at the rocks, losing track of time. There are a dozen or so, scattered in a wide circle round the outcrop. Had these shapes seen Sophie? I grind the dust and dirt from my faithless eyes and when I open them again, I see that the rocks have drawn closer. The last rays of sunlight pick out their newly laid trails. My heart is racing, and the band across my chest tightens even more. At first I think I’m having a heart attack, that I’m really dying, but after two minutes, I realize that isn’t possible. I focus on the nearest rock. It’s eighteen inches high, a little more than that from back to front, weighing, I guess, about three hundred pounds. The ground is bone-dry, not even a whisper of wind. Even though I haven’t seen it, I accept that the rock has moved. It’s too late to matter a damn. I don’t feel anything as I set off toward the road.

  The sky is almost dark by the time I reach the two vehicles. The Rav4 stands empty like a ruin. I sit in my own vehicle and try to call HQ to report the missing people. But once again I get no proper signal, no voices other than my own to trouble the darkness. I keep trying, but nobody responds. After a while, I return to the Toyota. The camera is still on the seat where I left it, the tape stopped in exactly the same place. I press play and watch the blue screen, trying to see beyond it to what’s on the other side. I let it run for a minute but it’s a waste of time. Just as I’m about to stop it, the blue turns to white, which slowly reconfigures into a honeycombed pattern that moves back and forth across the frame. In quick succession, three shots ring out on the tape, the first sounds since Teakettle Junction. I am calm, I don’t feel any fear, not until another minute has passed and a fourth blast sounds out and the screen fades to black.

  Outside, I peer into the dark and see the more intense darkness of the Grandstand looming up out of the Racetrack. It’s no closer than it was before, I tell myself, though I no longer feel any inclination to trust my perceptions. An hour has passed when I climb back into the Expedition. Nobody has come. This time when I call HQ, I do finally get something, a voice reporting an abandoned SUV out at the Racetrack. I shut the power off quickly, drink more water and try not to imagine the rocks gathering out on the playa. I think about the voice I heard and what it was saying. Speaking only to myself, I respond, “You won’t find anything out there.”

  And after a minute’s silence, I add, “They’re gone.”

  Hearing something, I get out of the car. I walk to the side of the road, feeling the weight of the night as it falls on the valley. I can’t see anything but I look anyway, knowing the rocks are edging their way up from the south. I tell myself someone must have heard them, that someone will come. These are the certainties that sustain me. I can’t stop myself from listening, so when they stop, it comes as a shock. Then, before I can register it, they start moving again, heading west, toward the road. I have no strength left. I sit down in the dirt to wait for someone to arrive, even though I already know that nobody is coming here, that no one else belongs. The truth is, I have as much right to be here as the dark. It’s reason that’s out of place here, that doesn’t belong. Reason can’t explain the rocks that roll, the moans of night, or the flakes of sky that drift quietly down to Earth, which, given time, I probably could.

  AFTERWORD

  My favorite ghost story is Lucius Shepard’s “How the Wind Spoke at Madaket,” though the nature of its ghost is difficult to pin down. It’s not a ghost story in the traditional sense, though like the best of them, it relies on implication and suggestion rather than explication to achieve its visceral effect. We’re never sure what triggers the elemental force at the heart of the story; its wonder lies in its am
biguity. There’s an unsettling contrast between the evocation of peace and solitude and the moments of brutal, vividly described elemental violence. But what comes across most strongly is the interaction between character and place, the notion that landscape informs our consciousness at a deep level, that the forces that shape the physical world—wind, rain, heat, and so on—are analogous to the emotions that sculpt our imaginations. Few stories evoke a sense of place so hauntingly as to make me want to go there. This one did.

  Born in the Midwest, which he insists is by far the weirdest part of this country, GAHAN WILSON emigrated to New York City and has lived in various locations on the East Coast, ranging from Key West to Boston ever since.

  Gahan Wilson’s cartoons may be what he’s most famous for but he’s a master of macabre writing as well. His cartoons, which presently appear mostly in Playboy and The New Yorker, have been gathered in something over twenty book collections through the years. He has written and illustrated a number of children’s books, a couple of odd mystery novels, several anthologies, and a collection of short stories that have appeared in a variety of magazines and in books such as this one. He has been and (if fortune smiles) will continue to be active in various film and television enterprises.

  THE DEAD GHOST

  GAHAN WILSON

  SINCE WE’RE TELLING ghost stories, I do have one I’ve kept to myself so far, except for the lawyers and so on, but there’s nothing in the agreements I signed that says I can’t pass it on to you as long as I don’t use the names of any specific corporations, so here goes.

  You remember I got banged up pretty badly last year. I can’t go into details for security reasons, but it happened during a search-and-destroy op for the Organization which ended with a nut-case scientist blowing up his underground lab instead of the Senate Building. They rushed me to the hospital, where I was very efficiently diagnosed, then operated on, and by the time dusk came around, I was lying on a nice little bed in a nice little room, all skillfully reassembled with most of me wrapped into various bandages and the rest of me tucked into high-tech casts.