What John Ross knew for sure when he went to Oregon was that whoever gained control over a gypsy morph acquired the potential to change the future in a way no one else could. It was a goal worth pursuing, even knowing it was also virtually impossible to achieve. He had little working for him, but more than enough to know where to begin. The crucified Knight's memories had told him the morph would appear in a low-tide coastal cave on the upper coast of Oregon near the town of Cannon Beach three days after Thanksgiving. In those memories he found a picture of the cave and the landscape surrounding it, so he knew what to look for.
What his dream of the crucified Knight had revealed to him was not so different from what his dreams usually told him—a time and a place and an event he might alter by his intervention. But usually he knew the details of the event, the course it had taken, and the reason things had gone amiss. None of that was known to him here. He did not know the form the gypsy morph would take when it came into being. He did not know how to capture it. He did not know what would happen afterward, either to the morph or to himself.
It was reassuring in one sense to have it so. Not knowing suggested he was someone other than the Knight on the cross, their resemblance notwithstanding. But it was odd, too, that the Knight's memories ceased with the moment of the morph's appearance, as if the slate afterward had been wiped clean or never come into being. Clearly the Knight felt he had failed in his attempt to secure the morph's magic and unlock its secret. Was this because he had failed even to capture the morph? Or was it because he was hiding the truth of what had happened afterward, not wanting Ross to see? There was no way for Ross to know, and speculation on the matter yielded nothing.
Cannon Beach was a small, charming oceanfront town a little more than an hour directly west of Portland. Bustling with activity generated by the annual appearance of summer vacationers, the town's shops and residences were clustered along a bypass that looped down off Highway 101 to run parallel to the edge of the ocean for about three miles. A second, smaller town, called Tolovana Park, which was really less town and more wide spot in the road, occupied the southernmost end of the loop. Together the two communities linked dozens of inns, hotels, bed-and-breakfasts, and vacation cottages through a tangle of shingle-shake and wood-beam restaurants and fast-food emporiums, souvenir and craft shops, art galleries, and clothing stores. There was a theater, a bakery, two wine shops, a gas station, a general store, a post office, and a whole clutch of real estate agencies. To its credit, Cannon Beach seemed to have resisted the pervasive onslaught of name-brand chains that had invaded virtually every other vacation spot in the country, so that the familiar garish signs touting burgers and tacos and chicken and the like were all blessedly missing.
Ross arrived on a Sunday, having caught a ride west out of Portland with a trucker hauling parts for one of the lumber mills. He was dropped five miles inland and walked the rest of the way to the coast on a sunny, pleasant afternoon. It was still light when he arrived. Cannon Beach was so busy that Ross judged it impossible to differentiate Sunday from any other day of the week. Vacationers thronged the streets, pressing in and out of the shops, eating ice cream and chewing fudge, with shopping bags, small children, and dogs in hand.
Carrying his duffel and his backpack, he limped down the sidewalk with the aid of his black walking stick, the sun glinting off its bright surface and etching out in shadowed nuance the rune carvings that marked its otherwise smooth surface. He looked a transient, and the impression was not far from wrong. He was not indigent or bereft of hope or purpose, but he was homeless and rootless, a citizen of the world. He had lived this way for twenty-five years, and he had become used to it. His service to the Word required that he travel constantly, that he be able to respond to his dreams by moving to wherever they directed him, that when he had finished acting on them he be prepared to move again. It was a strange, wearing existence, and if he did not believe so strongly in the work he was doing, it would have quickly done him in.
Once, ten years earlier, he had lost his faith and given up on himself. He had settled in one place and tried to make a life as other men do. He had failed at that. His past had caught up with him, as he now understood it always would, and he had gone back to being what he now understood he must always be.
Thoughts of that past and this present drifted through his mind as he walked the business district of Cannon Beach. Hemlock, its main north-south street, was the center of almost everything of note, and he did not deviate from its path in the forty minutes his walk required. He was looking for a beginning, as he always did. Sometimes when he was in a larger city, he would simply take a room at a YMCA and go from there. That approach would not do in a vacation town or in the circumstances of his present endeavor. He would be in Cannon Beach until close to the end of November. He needed more than just a six- or seven-day room at the Y.
He found what he was looking for more quickly than he had expected. A small, hand-lettered sign in the window of the Cannon Beach Bookstore, which was located at the south end of Hemlock where the shops and galleries began to peter out, read help wanted. Ross went into the store and asked what sort of help they were looking for. The manager, a sallow-faced, pleasant man of fifty named Harold Parks, told him they were looking for summer sales help. Ross said he would like to apply.
"That's summer sales, Mr. Ross," Harold Parks said pointedly. "It doesn't extend beyond, oh, maybe mid-September. And it's only thirty, thirty-five hours a week." He frowned at Ross through his beard. "And it only pays seven-fifty an hour."
"That suits my purposes," Ross replied.
But Parks was still skeptical. Why would John Ross want a job for only two months? What was his background concerning books and sales? How had he found out about the position?
Ross was ready with his answers, having been through this many times before. He was a professor of English literature, currently on leave so that he could try his hand at writing his own work of fiction, a thriller. He had decided to set it on the Oregon coast, and he had come to Cannon Beach to do the necessary research and to begin writing. He needed a job to pay expenses, but not one that would take up too much of his time. He admitted to having almost no sales experience, but he knew books. He gave Parks a small demonstration, and asked again about the job.
Parks hired him on the spot.
When asked about lodging, Parks made a few calls and found Ross a room with an elderly lady who used to work at the store and now supplemented her own small retirement income with rent from an occasional boarder. At present, both rented rooms were open, and Ross could have his pick.
So, by Sunday evening he had both living quarters and a job, and he was ready to begin his search for the gypsy morph—or, more particularly, for the place the morph would appear just after Thanksgiving. He knew it was somewhere close by and that it was a cave the elements and time's passage had hollowed into the side of the bluffs that ran along the ocean beaches. He knew the cave was flooded at high tide. He knew what the cave looked like inside and a little of what it looked like from without.
But the beaches of the Oregon coast ran all the way from Astoria to the border of California in an unbroken ribbon of sand, and there were thousands of caves to explore. For the most part, the caves lacked identifiable names, and in any case, he didn't know the name of the one he was searching for. He believed he would have to walk the coast for a dozen miles or so in either direction to find the right one.