Montana was a vast state with a small population, but people here were industrious and busy. Even the most rural of lanes carried more traffic than this.
High above, a golden eagle carved the sky with its nearly seven-foot wingspan, gliding in silence, in sole possession of the air. By the available evidence, Erika and the bird were the only warm-blooded beings within miles.
She walked west until she came to the tire-broken weeds, the crushed grass that had not fully sprung back after the passage of a vehicle. She followed this trail, and within ten steps, she entered the forest, where darkness ruled far past dawn.
Light had measurable force; and in space, beyond planetary gravity, it could contribute to the movement of a drifting object if that object lay in the path of a star’s radiance. Light also had weight, and in fact the sunlight lying upon an acre of land weighed a few tons.
For all its force and weight, the sunshine pressing down on this woodland was grimly resisted by the crowded and storied trees, by the braided limbs. At the forest floor, the condition would be always either night or twilight. Currently the palest ghost of the morning haunted the maze of cloistered passages, and rare thin swords of light thrust here and there without effect through gaps in the greenery.
Pines and alpine firs flavored as well as scented the air. The evergreen fragrance was so overwhelming that Erika could taste it, a not unpleasant astringency on the tongue.
Such weak light could not sustain grass or weeds, let alone significant underbrush. Moss might grow on rock formations, and mushrooms in damp corners, but otherwise the floor of the forest and the track on which she entered it were paved only with dead pine needles and moldering cones.
The path followed by the GL550 remained obvious. On both sides of the track, closely grown trees and rock formations and deadfalls of slowly petrifying wood blocked alternative routes.
The stillness of the forest might have been quite natural, but it seemed uncanny to Erika. From time to time, she paused and turned slowly in a circle, listening for a birdcall, a scampering rodent, the buzz of a last insect here on the cusp of winter. Sometimes she heard nothing, and at other times only the crisp cracking of bark as it fissured to accommodate the growth of the underlying wood or the creak of heavy boughs weary from bearing their own weight, and more than once she felt watched.
At last the track ended at the brink of a defile into which daylight cascaded. This declivity was perhaps fifty feet deep, twenty feet wide at the top, less than half that width at the bottom.
The walls of the defile were sheer. No vehicle could have driven down them.
If the Mercedes had followed this narrow path—and there had been nowhere else it could have gone—where was it now?
From the brink, she searched the bottom of the defile once more, but with no satisfaction. The stunted trees and tumbled rocks below were insufficient to conceal the wreckage of an SUV.
Doubling back along the track, she searched more carefully than before, left and right. Again the forest offered no trail even half wide enough for a four-wheel-drive vehicle.
On the county blacktop once more, as she approached the crest of the hill, she was overcome by the expectation that Victor would be waiting for her at the Explorer. She hesitated … then continued to the top.
As she had left it, the vehicle was locked and unoccupied.
Overhead: no eagle soaring. The sky looked cold and barren.
The return to Rainbow Falls took longer than the drive out from it because Erika’s perplexity distracted her. For a while her mind was divided between the memory of the track in the woods and the highway ahead.
She kept checking the rearview mirror. Nothing followed her. Nothing that she could see.
chapter 19
Nummy thought he must be seeing a miracle, the young man turning into an angel right in front of their eyes, silvery and sparkling, a little cloud of fairy dust rising off his face, like a halo around his head. The fairy dust puffed right through his clothes, too, and fluffed out kind of like wings that you could see through. The dust seemed to eat up his clothes, they were just gone, but the young man wasn’t naked, you didn’t have to be embarrassed to look at him. He wasn’t naked because he was sparkling and silvery and fuzzy around the edges and not as much like a man as he was a few seconds earlier. For a moment he was a very beautiful man-but-not-man thing.
The beautiful part went away quick, and you couldn’t believe he was an angel anymore. The not-angel took hold of the woman in pajamas and tore off her head, and out of the not-angel’s open mouth came a stream of silvery twinkle stuff that poured into the woman’s open neck and down into her like she was hollow and he was filling her up with his silver spew. Nummy didn’t see what happened to her head, it just wasn’t there anymore, and he didn’t see how the not-angel and the woman became one instead of two, but they did. Out of the two-in-one came a twisting silvery thing like a corkscrew, it stabbed into the tall man in boxer shorts, and he swelled up like he was going to bust open. Then the corkscrew seemed to turn the opposite way it turned before, and the boxer-shorts man shrank as the stuff of him was pulled into the two-in-one, so it was now a three-in-one.
The three-in-one wasn’t silvery and sparkling like before but more gray and ugly, streaked with bright red. You could see parts of three people put together in ways people never were meant to be, but you couldn’t get a clear picture of it because it didn’t stay still, it was always moving, like clothes tumbling around in a dryer past the little round window, except there was no dryer or window or clothes, just people parts in a big mess of ugly gray stuff, and the bright red turning darker, darker, maroon, and the people parts all fast turning gray.
Nummy slammed up against the cell bars before he knew who did the slamming, and then Mr. Lyss’s wild-monkey face was in Nummy’s face, with the rotten-tomato breath—“Give it to me!”—and Mr. Lyss’s hand was in Nummy’s pocket, pulling out the yellow plastic tube he put there like a minute ago, screwing off the cap. Nummy remembered where the tube came from, he gagged, and Mr. Lyss kept two of the tiny steel sticks and tried to hand the other four to Nummy. “Don’t drop them, might need them.” But Nummy didn’t want what came out of Mr. Lyss’s butt. Gray teeth spit words in Nummy’s face: “I’m not gonna die. You want to die, you die, not me.” And somehow the four lock picks were clutched in Nummy’s fist, the funny-shaped tips sticking out like tiny thorns and flowers.
Stuff was still happening in the next cell, but Nummy didn’t want to see any more. He’d seen so much weird stuff so fast he couldn’t understand what he was seeing, what it meant, so fast he didn’t know what to feel about it while he was seeing it. He still didn’t understand what he’d seen, but now he knew terrible things were happening and he knew what to feel. He was afraid, he was so afraid he was sick to his stomach, and he was so sorry for the poor people it was happening to. He didn’t look next door, kept his eyes on Mr. Lyss pick-pick-picking at the lock, and he could hear the quiet people trying to be heard, but they still couldn’t scream, their screams were little animal sounds trapped in their throats, squeals and whimpers. And moaning like nothing Nummy ever heard before, he didn’t want to listen it was so horrible, not moaning in pain but fear, moaning that seemed to melt Nummy’s bones, so he almost couldn’t stay on his feet. And there were other sounds, wet sounds, oozing and gurgling that made Nummy’s sick stomach sicker.
He didn’t look, but it wasn’t easy trying not to hear, so he talked to Mr. Lyss just so he had something else to listen to, kept asking Mr. Lyss to hurry, hurry. Mr. Lyss didn’t call him a moron or a dumbass or stupid, and he didn’t say he would chew out Nummy’s eyes, he just muttered at the lock in the cell door as he picked at it, muttered and snarled so it seemed like he scared the door open.
Then they were into the hallway and moving, Mr. Lyss leading the way past the cell where people were being killed. Killed. Killed seemed to be the worst thing that could happen to people, but somehow someway Nummy knew they were
being more than killed, way worse than killed, though he didn’t know what could be worse.
At the first of the cells, where no one was being killed yet, a woman reached through the bars, reached out to Nummy, trying to say something to him. But she had a shiny thing on the side of her head, and she couldn’t make words right. Words came out of her thick and wrong, kind of how words came out of Poor Fred LaPierre after his brain stroke. She was more scared than Nummy ever had seen anyone, so he asked her what she was saying, and she said it again, and because he had talked a lot to Poor Fred after the brain stroke, this time he knew she was saying, “Please save me.” Nummy had four lock picks in his fist, but he didn’t know how to use them, and he called after Mr. Lyss to save the woman, but Mr. Lyss looked back and said, “She’s dead already.” Mr. Lyss tried the stair door, it wasn’t locked, Mr. Lyss went through, but Nummy held the woman’s hand, wanting to save her.
Then one of the people being killed in the middle cell at last screamed, a scream like an icy wind blowing all the way into Nummy’s bones, a hard icy wind that lifted him and carried him to the stairs, up the stairs behind Mr. Lyss, leaving the woman behind, all of the people behind, the killed and the soon-to-be-killed.
chapter 20
Returning to Rainbow Falls, Erika almost forgot the cinnamon rolls, but fortunately she had to drive past the Jim James Bakery, the sight of which reminded her why she had come into town in the first place.
She would have been distressed if she had disappointed Jocko. He was her only friend, but he was also the closest thing she would ever have to a child, and he was a perpetual child who would never grow up or grow away from her.
In a world that would regard him as an outcast or as a sideshow freak, or even as a dangerous monster to be terminated with dispatch, he depended on her not only for his home and sustenance, but also for his happiness. In turn, she depended on his dependence. They were each other’s defense against loneliness, a mutant child and his two-hearted mother, unrelated except by the fact that they were products of Victor’s hubris, pledged to each other at first by necessity but now by mutual affection.
In the bakery, as she stood at the counter waiting for her order, she hoped that however their lives might intersect Victor’s again, they would survive him as they had miraculously survived him before.
After she received the cinnamon rolls in a large white box that she carried with both hands, as she approached the door to the street, a tall man appeared at her side. “Let me get that for you, miss.”
His boots, jeans, checkered shirt, fleece-lined denim jacket, and Stetson were common working-man gear for Rainbow Falls and environs, but the man wearing them was unusual for a few reasons, not least of all because of his size. He must have been six feet four, wide in the shoulders, narrow in the hips.
As he spoke, he swept his hat off, nodding in a courtly manner, and she saw that he was strikingly good-looking, with blond hair and gray-blue eyes. His face was perfect for the kind of Western movies that once starred John Wayne but that no one made anymore.
“Thank you,” she said as he opened the door and ushered her out of the bakery.
Putting his hat on once more, following her onto the sidewalk, he said, “You must be new in town.”
“Not that new,” she said. “I’ve been here nearly two years.”
“Then I’ve been blind for a while and didn’t know it.”
She smiled, unsure of his purpose in saying such a thing. She decided against a reply as she crossed the sidewalk to the Explorer.
“I’m Addison Hawk. May I get the car door for you, Miss … ?”
“Erika,” she said, but offered no last name. “Thank you, Mr. Hawk.”
He opened the passenger door, and she put the box of cinnamon rolls on the seat.
As he closed the door, Addison Hawk said, “It takes twenty years at least for locals to think of a newcomer as one of them. If ever you need to know anything about the way things work around here, I’m in the phone book.”
“I take it you’re not a newcomer.”
“I’ve lived here since nine months before I was born. Been to Great Falls, Billings, Butte, Bozeman, been to Helena and Missoula, but I’ve never seen any reason to be anywhere but here.”
“I agree,” she said as she went around the front of the Explorer to the driver’s door. “It’s a wonderful town—the land, the big sky, all of it.”
As she drove away, Erika checked the rearview mirror and saw Addison Hawk staring after her.
Something had happened that she did not entirely understand, something more than an encounter with a friendly local. She thought about it all the way home, but the subtext of the conversation eluded her.
chapter 21
Running up the stairs behind Mr. Lyss, Nummy knew he was now a jailbreaker like in the movies. Things didn’t always—or even usually—turn out okay for a jailbreaker.
The door at the top of the stairs had a small window, the window glass had wire in it, and Mr. Lyss looked through the glass and the wire before he tried to open the door, but the door was locked. The old man said a bunch of words that should’ve gotten him cooked by lightning, but he was still uncooked when he set to work on the door with his lock picks.
The awful noises rose from below, the people being killed, and Nummy tried to tune them out. He tried to sing a happy song in his head to drown out the terrible cries, just in his head because Mr. Lyss would for sure bite his nose off if he sang for real. But he couldn’t think of any happy songs except “Happy Feet,” and you had to do a little dance when you sang “Happy Feet,” you just had to, and because he was a clumsy person, he shouldn’t try dancing on the stairs.
Mr. Lyss picked and picked at the lock. Suddenly he said the dirtiest word Nummy knew—he knew six—looked out the small window again, opened the door, and left the stairs.
Nummy followed the old man into the hallway, then right toward an exit sign. They passed closed doors, and there were voices behind some of the doors.
Grabbing at Mr. Lyss as they moved, to get his attention, Nummy whispered, “We should tell somebody.”
Slapping Nummy’s hand away, Mr. Lyss went through the door at the end of the hall, but they weren’t outside like Nummy expected to be. They were in a mud room.
“We should tell somebody,” Nummy insisted.
Looking over several quilted jackets hanging from wall pegs, Mr. Lyss said, “Tell them what?”
“People is being killed in the basement.”
“They know, you moron. They’re the ones doing the killing.”
Mr. Lyss took a jacket from the rack and slipped into it. On the arm was a police patch. The jacket was too big for the old man, but he zipped it up anyway and headed toward the outer door.
“You’re stealing,” Nummy said.
“And you’re a cheese-brain ninny,” said Mr. Lyss as he went out into the alleyway.
Nummy O’Bannon didn’t want to follow the old man with his bad smell, bad teeth, bad breath, bad words, and bad attitude, but he was still scared, and he didn’t know what else to do but follow him. So now he was a jailbreaker and he was keeping company with a coat thief.
Hurrying along the deserted alleyway at the coat thief’s side, Nummy said, “Where we going?”
“We aren’t going anywhere. I’m leaving town. Alone.”
“Not all in orange, you can’t.”
“I’m not all in orange. I have the jacket.”
“Orange pants. People know orange pants is jail pants.”
“Maybe I’m a golfer.”
“And your jacket’s so big it’s like your daddy’s jacket.”
Mr. Lyss halted, turned on Nummy, seized his left ear, twisted it, and pulled him—“Ow, ow, ow, ow”—out of the alley, into a walkway between two buildings. He let go of Nummy’s ear but pushed him hard against a wall, and the bricks were cold against his back. “Your grandma’s good and dead, is she?”
Trying hard to be polite, trying no
t to gag on Mr. Lyss’s stink, Nummy said, “Yes, sir. She was good and now she’s dead.”
“You have your own place?”
“I have my place. I know my place. I keep to it.”
“I’m asking do you live in a house, an apartment, an old oil drum, or where the hell?”
“I live in Grandmama’s house.”
Nervous, Mr. Lyss glanced left along the passageway toward the alley, right toward the street. His bird-that-eats-dead-things face now looked a little like a sneaky rat’s face. He grabbed a fistful of Nummy’s sweatshirt and said, “You live there alone?”
“Yes, sir. Me and Norman.”
“Isn’t your name Norman?”
“But people they call me Nummy.”
“So you live there alone?”
“Yes, sir. Just me and Norman.”
“Norman and Norman.”
“Yes, sir. But people they don’t call him Nummy.”
Mr. Lyss let go of the sweatshirt and pinched Nummy’s ear again. He didn’t twist it this time, but he seemed to be promising to twist it. “You’re getting on my nerves, moron. What relation is this Norman to you?”
“His relation is he’s my dog, sir.”
“You named your dog Norman. I guess that’s one step up from naming him Dog. Is he friendly?”
“Sir, Norman he’s the friendliest dog ever.”
“He better be.”
“Norman don’t bite. He don’t even bark, but Norman he can kind of talk.”
The old man let go of Nummy’s ear. “I don’t care if he sings and dances, as long as he doesn’t bite. How far is it to this house of yours?”
“Norman he don’t sing and dance. I never seen one that did. I’d like to see one. Do you know where I could?”