“No,” she said. “You were not meant to. The clock has not struck the hour of understanding.”
“But—.”
She swept the cards from the table and Grey immediately bent to catch the Hanged Man card. He did so, but when he looked up, the table, the other chair, and Mircalla were gone. He shot to his feet and turned. The ghosts were gone, too.
And then, so was he.
Chapter Seventeen
When he opened his eyes the harsh sun of noon nearly smashed him back into unconsciousness.
He flung an arm across his eyes and rolled over, groaning and sick. His head swam and his stomach felt like it was filled with sewer water in which ugly things wriggled and swam. He coughed, gagged, and finally gasped in a ragged lungful of dry air.
To his left he heard a low, weak groan.
Grey turned and saw Thomas Looks Away laying sprawled and sunburnt on the hard ground. Forty yards beyond him stood a tall, crooked cottonwood, and in the sparse shade cast by its withered leaves stood Picky and Looks Away’s horse. Just those two. The other horses belonging to the posse were gone. Grey looked around.
The town was gone, too.
He frowned.
The landscape looked familiar. A pair of hillocks, a dead juniper, an untidy row of chaparral cactus. All of that was the same as it was when he and the Sioux rode up to that painted wooden arch on which had been written the word FORTUNE.
But the town was not there.
He got to his feet and as he studied the land he realized that he was wrong about that.
The town was there.
But it was nothing more than broken timbers laying bleached in the sun. Nothing more substantial than the charred cornerstone of a building was left. It chilled him despite the heat because this was not a new disaster. Those timbers lay like bones of some ancient thing, half covered by the hungry sands. Somehow the town had died and been reclaimed by the desert.
How long ago, though?
Surely he could not have slept for years, and only many years of the unrelenting sun could do this.
“Madness,” he said aloud, and even he wasn’t sure if he was making a statement about the world or his own mind.
Behind him, Looks Away groaned again. Grey reluctantly turned from the impossible wreckage and hurried over to his new companion. His foot kicked something and he saw that there was a full waterskin on the ground by where he’d awakened. He uncapped it, sniffed it, smelled nothing more than water and heat. He took a pull, and although the water was warm it tasted as pure as new melted snow to his parched throat. The second sip tasted every bit as good.
Grey knelt beside Looks Away, uncertain as to whether the man was alive or dead. Or, if his luck was holding steady, something else. He placed a hand on the man’s chest, felt the reassuring thump-thump of a living heart, and blew out a sigh of relief. Looks Away groaned softly and his eyelids fluttered weakly. Then, much as the Sioux had done for him after the ghost rock explosion, Grey gently cupped the back of the man’s neck and helped him raise his head to take a sip.
“Easy now,” he cautioned, “wet your throat with a sip first. There, that’s good. Now take a real pull.”
Looks Away took the waterskin from him and took two long drinks, then, gasping, thrust it back into Grey’s hands.
“By god and all the devils in hell,” the Sioux growled as he struggled into a sitting position. “What the bloody hell happened and where the bloody hell are we?”
“God only knows. Or, maybe it’s the Devil who knows.” Grey stood up. “In either case, take a look for yourself and maybe you can tell me.”
He held out a hand and pulled Looks Away up. Together they walked over to where the FORTUNE sign should have been. Pieces of it lay on the ground, the letters faded to ghosts. Grey watched as the other man turned to look at the landscape and then looked once again at the ancient ruins.
“I don’t…,” the Sioux began, but let the rest trail off into the dust.
“Yeah,” said Grey.
They stood there for a long time, neither man saying another word. What, after all, could they say to this? Nothing in Grey’s experience provided him with a vocabulary sufficient to put what he felt into words. Sure, there were words for some of this deep in his soul, but none of those words would fit into his mouth. He couldn’t have said them at gunpoint. From the strained, frightened expression on Looks Away’s face, he was facing the same challenge. So they left it unsaid.
As one they began backing away from the town. Then they turned and ran for their horses.
However as they approached, Grey saw something that twisted an already misshapen day into an even more perverse shape. There, tucked into a fold of his saddle, was a single heavy pasteboard card.
On the back was a painting of the death mask of some ancient queen, her mouth bloody.
Grey did not want to touch it, and his hand shook as he reached for it.
“What’s that?” asked Looks Away sharply. “Is that a tarot?”
Grey said nothing. He took the card and turned it over, though he knew full well what would be on it.
A hanged man.
Looks Away saw it and cursed softly.
Without another word the two men got onto their horses and fled toward the west.
Chapter Eighteen
Grey Torrance and Thomas Looks Away did not speak at all for the rest of that day. Grey knew that they should. It was probably important to compare experiences, to try and make sense of everything.
But he did not want to.
He was afraid of the sense that it would make.
The world had become a strange place. It was like stepping into a dreamscape. Or like entering one of the fantasy worlds in the dime novels he used to read back in the early days of the war. Back when fantastical adventures were a way to turn away from the endless bloodshed, the weeks of drudgery and boredom between battles, the aches of walking hundreds of miles, the diseases that came with bad food and worse water. Back then the stories of frontiersmen braving the wilds and ragtag bands of soldiers defending small Texas forts and castaways finding treasure on deserted islands were all ways to step out of the moment. They allowed for hope of something better, even if that hope was nothing more than purple prose in some writer’s fanciful scribblings.
That time had past.
The war never ended. The nation became so fractured. The dream of a grand America had been torn apart by greedy and hateful men.
And there was something else.
Something that lurked behind the scenes of everyday life. Something people knew about but never talked about.
The world itself had changed.
Not merely the politics or borders. Not loyalties and plans of empire.
No.
The actual world was different now.
Something had shifted.
It was a darker world. And that thought was true even as they rode beneath this blistering sun. The heart of the world was darker. Its soul was darker.
It wasn’t the same world he grew up in.
Grey knew that much of this had started when the big quake tore itself along the fault lines in the West and dragged most of California into the thrashing sea. That alone might have been enough to fracture the world. At least the American part of it.
But it was only the start, and Grey knew it. Everyone knew it.
It was simply that people didn’t talk about it. The change, the darkness, was like some kind of secret.
Grey thought about that and realized that he had it wrong.
It wasn’t a secret. Not really. Nothing as simple as that. It was more like a night terror. Like a monster hiding beneath the bed. It was something that was not real, but could be real if people were unwise enough to say it out loud. To name it.