Mason had seen all that in his first glance. He'd spent two years redirecting her anger and fear, merging them with her hunger to learn and helping her focus them on her work. He'd goaded or finessed her into disciplining her talents. He'd helped her accept that her urgent fascination with the paranormal was not compulsion but passion, not useless but crucial. Most important, he'd believed in her and affirmed that the empathic techniques she used to commune with ghosts and those haunted by them were valid and necessary.
But his methods were, as he liked to put it, "rigorous." He'd plunged her into experiences of the paranormal that drove her nearly to insanity. One of the first, long before she was ready for such an encounter, had been the New Jersey motel ghost. She'd lived in the squalid, piss- and cigarette-stinking room for a week as she slowly got to know the revenant of a serial killer whose dying moments consisted of remembering his murders. Mason had seemed to relish every detail, including Cree's terror and distress.
Huge tubes of blue steel intruded suddenly across her field of vision, jolting her out of her recollections. Just as startled, the other passengers gasped and laughed uneasily. The tramcar had reached one of the support gantries partway up the mountain, and as it came to the peak of the first swoop of cables and changed incline it bounded gently, suspending gravity and leaving Cree's stomach hanging. The gargantuan tower's passing revealed how fast they were moving and how high they were.
Below, a vast space had opened between the car and the slope. To the west, the grid of Albuquerque's streets stretched out on a plain so flat it could have been pressed by some titan's rolling pin. Beyond lay a breathtaking sweep of desert, slightly hazy with distance, bounded at the far horizon by purple mountains.
Cree gawked like the rest of the passengers. What was it about the Southwest? Maybe the New Agers of Santa Fe and Taos had it right after all, and it was a magical land, a place of Earth energy convergence. She had spent only a week in Arizona, three years ago, and had never been to New Mexico, yet the place felt familiar, as ifthe size and smell and feel of it had been latent in her blood for a lifetime. The light was stronger, purer. The sun was more immediate and commanding. Here on the Sandia ridge, the mountains were carved with gullies and clefts as expressive as the lines of ancient faces. Between dense stands of pine, towers of rock thrust naked from the escarpment; you could feel the geology here, millions of years of tectonic and mineral processes exposed to the eye.
That's what it was, she decided: Time itself was here. And time was big and there was lots of it. Good to remember.
Cree's ears popped for the fourth time. Another gantry loomed, and again the car did a hydraulic-suppressed lurch before beginning its final ascent. Three minutes later, they swung up into the arms of the receiving station, bumped softly, and eased to a stop. She stepped out with the other passengers onto a platform hung out over the nearly vertical slope. Just above was a small visitor center topped by the huge red wheels of the tram machinery, paused now; to the left lay a series of red-painted wooden decks, joined by stairs and ramps and cantilevered out over the mile-high cliff.
Below was the whole world.
The space and scope and light walloped Cree. She bellied up to the railing, feeling as if she'd stepped out on an airplane wing. When she fought off the vertigo and remembered to inhale, she found the air sweet and crisp and twenty degrees cooler than at the bottom.
The tourists had mostly dispersed by the time she pulled herself away from the rail and scanned the platforms for Mason and Lupe. She spotted thern on the farthest deck, past the restaurant, and began walking the meandering ramps toward them. Mason was staring outward at the grand view, but Lupe's round head swiveled as Cree approached. Wordlessly, she turned Mason's chair so he faced Cree.
He looked Cree up and down with eyes disconcertingly quick in his slack, fleshy face. After a long moment he tipped his head back toward Lupe. "I told you she'd ripen well! A fine, lush bit of woman flesh if there ever was one. I am always right in these things. Always." His voice had once been a rich and dignified baritone, but it hadn't survived the ruin of the rest of him.
Lupe regarded Cree disapprovingly, as if blaming her for Mason's lack of propriety.
"Hello, Lupe," Cree said. "Hello, Mason." Some physical contact seemed called for, but Lupe offered no opening, and the thought of touching Mason repelled her. When she put out her hand, Mason brought it briefly to his lips.
He wore an expensive charcoal suit tailored to minimize his growing deformity, but it couldn't hide the deterioration that had taken place since last she'd seen him. Though he was no older than his early sixties and his hair was still mostly black, his big body appeared to be collapsing in upon itself. He lurked deeper in his chair, chin nearly riding on his chest. His high, square forehead and strong jaw were well formed but now only made him all the more grotesque, a parody of the handsome man he'd once been. A thin green cylinder of oxygen was strapped to the chair, Cree noticed, its clear plastic tube and nose feeder looped on one of the handles.
"Your lecture was superb," Mason gurgled. Looking up at her exposed his face to the sky, and the light seemed to give him discomfort. "You struck precisely the right tone for speaking to the great unwashed of academia in terms their rigidly compartmented little intellects could grasp. Yet never the bald, craven appeal to the popular taste we see so much of these days." The big head twisted to the side again and he said to Lupe, as if scolding her, "I told you she would mature. I told you she would shine!"
"So what brings you to Albuquerque? Surely not the conference-"
"I live not far away now-Santa Fe. To the extent that I can be said to live" Mason chuckled. "Or to do so in any one place. I am mostly between here and Switzerland. Returning to Geneva tomorrow, in fact. One of the reasons I contacted you. It was most fortuitous, your coming at this time. Still enjoying Seattle? Your little outfit, what's it called…?"
"Psi Research Associates."
"— is it doing well? Doing a brisk business in ghastliness?"
"Yes."
"And your partner-the engineer, the physicist…?"
"Edgar Mayfield."
"Yes, our good Dr. Mayfield. Has he recorded the irrefutable physical evidence he so ardently desires?" Mason's expression conveyed his low opinion of Edgar's technological approach to paranormal research.
"Physical evidence, quite a bit. Irrefutable-that's up for argument."
"But he hasn't succeeded in winning your heart with his efforts, has he. Because, one can safely assume, you're still searching for your dead husband and remaining chaste as a statue of the Virgin Mary." A glint of malicious amusement lit the hooded eyes.
Cree tried not to stiffen. "You know, Mason, I've never considered your sadism to be your most admirable characteristic."
"And just what would that be, Lucretia-my most admirable characteristic?"
Cree was tempted to say something hurtful. But, as she'd inventoried on her way up, she did admire a great many things about him. Even now, even as he did his best to be offensive, she could feel something noble in him-synesthetically, it came across as a rich crimson-and-peach- toned glow, steady and fine, just visible beneath the blackened, warted surface of his affect. Mason was the ultimate frog prince, always awakening her desire to free him from his enchantment, too ugly to bear to kiss. He was a hideous, aging man being eaten alive by some unknown malady, collapsing upon himself in a wheelchair, and he broke her heart.