Looking around, Tim saw that the wall of wheat around him was quickly receding. At first glance, he thought it was being devoured by the wilderness; then he saw that it was engendering the wilderness. It looked like a gray prison wall melting to release a riotous diversity of botanical forms that had been immured within it for centuries and were now springing forth to an exuberant new life in the sun.
Soon the growth around him was so tall and thick he could no longer see where this process was taking place—though he somehow knew it would go on until the entire valley basin had been transformed. Under the canopy of leaves, ten thousand voices spoke in a joyous babble of chirps, trills, tinkles, grunts, growls, howls, chatters, zings, hums, whoops, cackles, clicks, hisses, roars, and rumbles. The air was alive with birds and insects. Small, spotted wildcats stretched in the trees and ignored the shrill, teasing monkeys. The earth bubbled up black and teeming over wandering burrows. Dark eyes peered out of the grasses and from among the leaves.
Beams from a westering sun stood aslant the forest floor, misted here and there with slowly-passing clouds of gnats. In a pool of light at Tim’s feet glowed the tawny face of a tiger lily, one of the dozen or so flowers he could name on sight, and his favorite. As he hunkered down to peer into it, a ladybug lumbered out of its velvety depths and shuffled its wings uncertainly, as if wondering if it still had the knack of flight. Then it shot up into the air—straight into Tim’s face.
He jerked his head back—and was instantly, if groggily, awake.
He opened his eyes and found an alien creature towering over him—a visitor from the stars, bristling with silver spikes and armored in glossy green. In the tenth of a second during which Tim’s mind struggled to reimpose order and sense on the world, he saw that the creature meant him no harm—accepted him as an equal, seemed to enfold him in its own aura of vibrant power and dignity, as if to say, “It’s all right. I see that you too are alive. No more is required. We are comrades.”
The surface of the creature’s armor suddenly began to cloud, pearling with a liquid iridescence that moved across it like a melting rainbow—and involuntarily Tim sucked in a breath that was almost a sob: never, never had he witnessed anything so majestically lovely as this. It was vastly more than a visual experience of beauty; in an act of unimaginable generosity, the creature was revealing to him the very nature and substance of its life. The iridescence flowing across its surface wasn’t a color, wasn’t the mere reflection of light. It was a vibrant, sublime energy emanating from within, pulsing inexhaustibly from each atom—a conflagration almost beyond control, surging irresistibly outward, so that the tip of each of its spines was a glittering fountain of energy.
Tears were coursing down Tim’s cheeks in a flood, and he made no effort to check them. Astounded, awed, and humbled, Tim was weeping for sheer joy, dragging each breath up from the depths of his bowels.
He had of course long ago realized that what was before him was the cactus he’d spent so many hours with. Recognizing it now made no difference, because now he was recognizing it for what it truly was: not “just a cactus”—indeed not a cactus at all—but rather a unique, unclassifiable individual whose moment in the thundering, never-ending drama of creation would never be repeated here or anywhere else in the universe.
Standing up to look around, Tim saw that the world was everywhere ablaze with the same thrumming effulgence that shook the cactus. Each dry, gray chamisa, each stunted piñon, each blade of grass, each scruffy weed was crackling and trembling and all but exploding with the awesome power that animated it. Hungry to see more, he climbed to the crest of the hill and looked down into the valley of the Rio Grande, already resplendently green. If it had been a sound instead of a sight, it would have been the jubilant roar of a million voices. Every leaf of every tree was radiant, lustrous—incandescent with a power that was unmistakably divine.
A truck chugged uphill along the highway beside the river, a lump of dead matter—a black hole of lifelessness in a landscape scintillant and effervescent with glorious vitality—and Tim thought, “Oh, you poor things. If you could only see.”
Half an hour later, the effervescence began to subside like champagne going flat, and his vision gradually returned to normal. This is how he thought of it. He was like a blind man who had briefly been given the gift of sight simply to experience once in his life the blue of the sky. To such a man, it would be an ecstatic revelation; but he would know without the slightest doubt that—ecstasy notwithstanding—he was merely seeing what’s always there to be seen. And when his blindness returned he would know unshakably that, though invisible to him, the sky is forever there and exquisitely, shatteringly blue. Tim, too, knew that what he’d experienced was no hallucination; briefly given the gift of sight, he’d merely seen what was there to be seen—what had always been there and would always be there.
He hadn’t the slightest doubt that, though he could no longer see it, that joyous bonfire was still blazing all around him and would blaze for as long as there was life on this planet.
Pablo was waiting for him in his place under the rock. Although he looked up solemnly into Tim’s tear-stained face, he offered no greeting. Tim sat down beside him and looked into the sun settling over the distant mountains.
After a few minutes Pablo said: “So. You saw.”
Tim nodded. It was a while before he was sure he could speak. “Was that something you … arranged?”
“No, Tim. Such a gift is beyond even my power to give—though I sensed it had been given.”
Tim nodded again.
“Would you rather not talk, Tim? I’ll leave if you’d like to be alone.”
“No. I don’t feel like talking, but I’d like to hear you talk. I’d like you to tell me …”
“Yes?”
“… what I saw.”
Pablo smiled. “You saw the fire, Tim.”
“Go on.”
“You saw it, Tim.”
“I know, but go on.”
Pablo laughed softly and gestured to the world around them. “This is the smoke of that fire.”
Tim nodded. “Yes. Yes, I see. Go on.”
“Andrea and I are guardians of the fire.”
“Go on.”
Pablo laughed again. “You know whom we serve, Tim.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look into my eyes.”
An endless time passed as Tim gazed into his eyes. At last he said: “I don’t know.”
“Of course you know. What you saw today was a manifestation, Tim. A manifestation of what?”
Tim stared into the hills for a moment. “Of God.”
“The real one, not the one that lives beyond the universe. The one who lives here.”
CHAPTER 50
No one was late. By seven-thirty they were all seated around a table on the second floor of the Herman Litvak Chess Club: Howard, Denise, Ellen, and Aaron.
“I’m afraid we’re in for a long night, but that can’t be helped,” Howard began, clearly addressing Denise and Aaron. “A great many things have happened to Ellen and me in the past three weeks—things you could have no inkling of, things whose meaning and purpose only became clear at the end of this period.
“When I called Ellen to invite her to this meeting two days ago, she didn’t know me from Adam, and she said, ‘Do you think I’m going to believe anything you people tell me?’ And I had to convince her that I wasn’t one of those people. Denise, you know who I mean by those people, don’t you.”
“I suspect I do, Howard,” she replied dryly.
He turned to Aaron. “The last time we met here, you urged me to consider going to the Middle East, Jamaica, or Haiti to find out what I could about those people for you. As it turned out, I didn’t have to go anywhere, because they came to me, and that’s what you’re going to hear about tonight. I know how improbable this sounds, and I can see the skepticism in your eyes, Aaron, but at this point you haven’t heard anything.
“Let m
e start with a sort of overview that will put everyone in the picture. For reasons we may never know, those people wanted two of our people: Ellen’s husband, David, and their twelve-year-old son, Tim. Three weeks ago, give or take a day, David abruptly decided to leave home. This much I know from Tim. There was no warning whatever—no marital discord, no strife, no problems of any kind that he was aware of. Bang, suddenly David felt an overwhelming urge to hit the road, and in a matter of hours he was gone, taking his own car, a green Volvo.
“Two days later they received a phone call from David, or someone impersonating him. Evidently in deep distress, this person said he was calling from the Edgewater Beach Hotel. Tim and Ellen leaped into her car and headed for Chicago. Of course the Chicagoans in this room will know they didn’t find the Edgewater Beach Hotel, which was demolished long ago. On her way back to Runnell, Ellen pulled into a gas station. That’s as much as I know of her story, because it’s as much as Tim knew of her story. It’s also as much as Ellen knows of Tim’s story, because he wasn’t in the car when she left the station to continue on to Runnell. I don’t know what she thinks happened there, but Tim told me he was asleep in the backseat and woke up feeling violently ill. He headed for the weeds behind the filling station and spent the next few minutes emptying his stomach. When he returned, Ellen was gone and the filling station was locked up and empty.
“He stood around for a while not knowing what to do. Then a car that was a match for his father’s pulled up. I strongly suspect that it was driven by one of them—or at least one of their minions. When he heard Tim’s story, the man said he thought he knew where David had been calling from, a cocktail lounge called the Yacht Club, on Bryn Mawr, which apparently is fitted out to resemble the Yacht Club in the old Edgewater Beach Hotel. He took Tim there but found no indication that David had ever been there. As they were leaving, they were stopped by a policeman, who wondered what a boy of Tim’s age was doing in a bar at that time of night. To throw off suspicion, the man claimed to be Tim’s father and signaled Tim to back him up. Tim and the man got back in the car and drove around aimlessly for a few minutes, then the man dropped Tim off at the corner of Sheridan and Ainslee, saying he had an idea to pursue and would be back in a few minutes. Of course he never returned. Instead, after half an hour or so, a bus stopped. A man stepped off and said to Tim, ‘Are you waiting for this bus?’ That man was me.”
He looked at Aaron. “I was returning from the meeting I’d had with you here at which we discussed my going to Syria, Jamaica, or Haiti to find out what you wanted to know about those people. I took Tim up to my apartment, put in a call to Ellen, and got no answer. Doubtless she’ll tell us where she was when it’s her turn. To make a long story short, there was nothing to be done till morning, so we went to bed. In the morning, still getting no answer at Tim’s house in Runnell, I rented a car, took him home, and told him to stay put. He stayed put, but Ellen didn’t return. The next day Tim got something completely inexplicable in the mail from a Las Vegas hotel: a twenty-thousand-dollar check, made out to him. Assuming this to be a lead to his father, I took Tim to Las Vegas, where we learned that David had made a phenomenal win there and then disappeared. When I say it was a phenomenal win, I mean a win that almost defies belief.”
With that, Howard invited Ellen to take up her story from the point where she unknowingly left Tim behind at the gas station outside Valparaiso. Her account took her from Runnell back to the gas station, then on to Chicago and her dealings with the police, her confrontation with “detectives” Wolf and Goodman, her abduction to the house outside Glenwood Springs, Colorado, her abandonment there, the trek to find David’s car in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, where nothing short of a helicopter could have deposited it, and the death of Felipe.
“After talking to you two days ago, Howard,” she went on, “I remembered that Wolf had mentioned your name. Or rather he made a call to someone and asked to speak to either Howard Scheim or Tim Kennesey. He was told that you’d just left.”
Howard gave that some thought and said, “If I have the timing right, he was probably calling our hotel in Las Vegas. In fact, come to think of it, there was a peculiar old lady there who was frantic to keep us from leaving. I mean, she almost physically restrained us. At the time I didn’t think anything of it. Now, in light of what you’ve just told me, I have to assume she was one of them, and her task was to keep us there a bit longer. Possibly the call from Wolf was supposed to send us off on another wild-goose chase for a day or two.”
Ellen had something else to add. “I felt it would be cowardly of me to rush home before Felipe’s funeral. He would have been alive except for me, and of course I knew there was nothing to rush home for anyway, since Tim wasn’t there. I talked to Felipe’s mother a lot during that time, and she told me one thing that I now believe without any doubt, that the native peoples of that area know those people and their doings very well. They don’t call them those people, they call them witches, but they’re not talking about hags on broomsticks, and they don’t talk about them the way we talk about ghosts or angels or UFOs. They’re talking about people they personally know, people they have personal dealings with—when they can’t avoid it. They told me about a place where witches gather that’s not too far from where David’s car was found, done up like a town in an old Western movie. I offered a lot of money to be taken there, but no one was even slightly tempted. I originally scoffed when Felipe told me witches had put David’s car in a spot you can’t even reach in a Jeep, but I’m not scoffing now.”
“I should point out,” Howard said, “that Ellen and I can only give you two strands of this story. The strand that connects these two strands is David’s, which is pretty much a total mystery and likely to remain one. We can name a few places where we know he went, but we have no idea what drove him from one to the other. We don’t know, for example, if he was in the Volvo when it was deposited in the mountains. We don’t how he ended up driving a flashy red Corvette on loan from a drug dealer in Vail—but I should tell the story in order, from the time Tim and I got on a plane to go to Las Vegas.”
When he was finished, he said, “About the only thing that’s completely clear is that Andrea’s house was meant to be David and Tim’s final destination, where some ‘great purpose’ was going to be achieved. Andrea said David couldn’t come that far, but she was obviously speaking metaphorically. David was there at one time, beyond all doubt, because he sent Tim a letter from there, the letter that brought us to Taos and to Morningstar Path.”
“I’ve got a couple questions,” Aaron said with the air of someone who has a lot more than just a couple questions. “I’m sitting here listening to all this—I don’t know what to call it—this epic melodrama, about a whole lot of people I never heard of, and I’m trying to figure out why you think I should be listening to it. Don’t interrupt, Howard. You know I’m not stupid. Tell me if I’m right. You got involved in this whole mess because of the thing I asked you to look into for me. Is that what you’re saying?”
“I don’t have any doubt of it, Aaron. Andrea knew all about the reading Denise did for me when I consulted her on your behalf. She knew all about the evening I spent at Joel Bailey’s establishment with Verdelet and Délices on your behalf. It’s inconceivable that mere coincidence planted Tim directly in my path minutes after you told me I should go anywhere in the world I might find the answers you wanted.”
“I’m not arguing with you, Howard. But I’ve still got a question.”
“Go ahead.”
“If these people are who you think they are, then why the hell did they have to go through all this elaborate rigamarole to get David and Tim to where they wanted them to be? If they’re the people you want me to think they are, they could’ve done it with a snap of the fingers, couldn’t they?”
Momentarily stunned by the question, at once so obvious and so obtuse, it took Howard a full minute to think of an answer that would mean something to Aaron. “If God was rea
lly God, Aaron, why did he have to go through all that elaborate rigamarole to free his people from the Egyptians—the plagues, the locusts, the boils, the maggots, the hailstones, the killing of the first-born, the parting of the Red Sea, and so on? Why not just snap his fingers and make all the Egyptians vanish instantly? Or, even better, why not just snap his fingers and transport his people to the Promised Land instantly? Wouldn’t that have been a more impressive display of his power?”
Aaron nodded, chuckling softly. “Yeah, you got me there, Howard. No argument.”
“There’s more to it than that,” Denise said, “or maybe just another way of looking at it. God didn’t just want his people to be transported to the Promised Land. He wanted them to reach the Promised Land transformed by their journey. The same is true of David and Tim.” Drawing a set of Tarot cards from her purse, she made a brief search and laid a card face up in the center of the table.
“The Fool,” she noted. “A blithe young traveler—unarmed and with all his meager belongings on his shoulder—gazes blissfully up into the heavens, unaware that his next step will take him over the edge of a mile-high cliff. This is the zero card,” she continued, “the card before even the first card in the deck. It isn’t the archetype of a dolt but of a person at the beginning of the hero’s journey, setting out with utter trust in the benevolence of the universe and putting his fate entirely in the hands of the gods. In essence, it’s where we all begin—if we begin. The end of the hero’s journey is this.” She turned over another card. “The Magician. Years older now, the Hero is the master of all the Tarot suits, which you see laid out on the table before him—wands, pentacles, cups, and swords. This means he’s seen it all, come through it all—wealth, poverty, weakness, power, hardship, joy, sorrow, strife, deception, love, and danger—and now he stands alone, completely poised, completely balanced and at rest. No halo surmounts his head. Rather, it’s the symbol of the infinite. Magician, with its suggestion of performance and conjuring, isn’t quite the right cognomen for him. In some decks he’s more correctly call the Magus. This was David’s destination, to become one of them, but he fell short. As Andrea said, he just couldn’t make it, and we’ll probably never know why.” She turned to Ellen. “You met a man in a bar at the Holiday Inn who said he’d talked to David.”