He sorted through the CDs in his car, wishing he'd brought along more. It was strange how his musical requirements had changed on this trip. The recent rock CDs and downloads he'd listened to endlessly in his bedroom back home had quickly lost their luster, and the music he craved was quirkier, more individualist fare. One CD he wished he had now was a self-titled release by Brigit's Well, a classically trained Celtic duo. He'd bought it at an Irish festival a few years back, after hearing the two women perform, and though he'd listened to it only sporadically since, the haunting tunes had stayed with him, and at odd times he found himself thinking about the music.
Like now.
The buildings thinned out. He passed a lumberyard; the fenced lots and downscale offices of plumbers, roofers, construction companies and tree trimmers; and a sprawling junkyard filled with endless rows of cars, bikes and other wheeled vehicles, before the city was replaced with farmland.
A nice place to visit, he thought.
But he wouldn't want to live here.
It was still early afternoon when he returned to the hotel. He tried calling some of his friends back in Pennsylvania, but none of them answered, and after leaving voice mail messages, he dialed his mom's number. Cathy was still at school-he'd call her after dinner-but it was still nice to talk to someone from the real world, even if it was only his mother.
He spent the remainder of the afternoon watching reruns of old comedies on TV, losing himself in the mass media of the larger culture in order to keep from thinking about the smallness of the town in which, for the moment, he lived.
He was scheduled to work at five in the morning, the beginning of a thirteen-hour shift, but he could not sleep, and sometime after midnight Dennis found himself walking down the sidewalk carrying a flashlight. He tried to pretend he was simply out for a stroll, attempting to tire himself out so he'd be able to sleep, but the truth was that he had a specific destination. And he knew exactly what it was.
The graveyard.
Bulldozers and heavy equipment had been hard at work during the day on the land adjacent to the street, but as before, the forest beyond the deadfall was untouched, and the hidden cemetery was exactly the same as it had been earlier this morning.
Protected
He could not help wondering about the site's improbable survival, and the thought sent a chill down his spine.
The mounds looked different at night, more uniform, less random, darkness smoothing out the distinctions, making the place look more like a regular graveyard. There were shadows here now, shadows created by the moonlight that had no obvious source and that moved stealthily around the edges of the clearing even in the total absence of wind.
Only ...
Only one of the shadows was not a shadow at all. It was a man, an old man, who came limping in from between the trees at the opposite end of the graveyard and knelt down before one of the not-so-randomly positioned rocks. He was carrying what looked like a black cloth bag, the kind magicians sometimes used in the service of a trick, and as Dennis hid behind a tree, holding his breath and hoping he would not be seen, the man withdrew a live chicken from the bag. Grasping the clucking, thrashing animal by the neck, he slit its throat with a knife that suddenly appeared in his hand, and as the animal spasmed its last, he held the wound open wide, letting the blood fall onto the protruding rock. The man was whispering something, a chant perhaps, but Dennis could not make out any of the words.
What was this? Some sort of Santeria ritual? It seemed unlikely here in the white-bread bowels of the ,4idwest, but he could think of no other explanation or the bizarre rite he was witnessing.
The kneeling man placed a finger on the rock, in the blood, then touched it to his forehead and bowed deeply.
Dennis could not see the old man's face-for all he knew, the man was Hispanic and a Santeria practitioner-but he was glad of that. Something told him he didn't want to see the features of that shadowed face.
Maybe it wasn't Santeria but Satanism.
The idea did not seem as far-fetched as it should have, and Dennis tried not to make any noise as the man crammed the dead broken chicken back in the black bag. If push came to shove and a fight broke out, he had no doubt that he could physically take the old guy ... but he was not sure that was all that was at work here.
The man stood and spoke out loud two words that could have been Spanish but sounded like "bo sau"- "revenge" in Cantonese-then hobbled off the way he had come. A darkness descended over the graveyard upon his exit, and Dennis realized that for the few moments the man had been there, the moon had shone its light directly onto the spot where he'd been kneeling.
Dennis crept out from behind the tree and stepped into the clearing, walking carefully around the suddenly uniform mounds, shining his flashlight on the ground until he reached the blood-soaked rock. The small standing stone was wet and shiny, and where the blood had spilled on the adjacent ground there were two jet-black stains in the shape of Chinese characters. He wished now that he had allowed his mom to teach him to read and write Chinese the way she'd wanted to. But it was too late for that now, and the best he could do was commit the characters to memory and try to find out later what they meant.
Bo sau.
Revenge.
He wanted to touch the bloody characters but was afraid to do so. There was an aura of malignancy about the shapes, a sense that whatever venom they possessed could be imparted to anyone who touched them, and Dennis backed fearfully away, wondering what exactly the old man had done. He had never been so frightened in his life, and though he continued to think he'd been meant to see this, he still did not know why. For the first time, it occurred to him that whatever had led him here, whatever had compelled him to take this trip, might not be so benign.
He turned back the way he'd come, vowing never to return to this spot.
This spot"? Hell, there was no reason for him to stay in this town. He'd earned enough cash to get him to Colorado at the very least, maybe all the way to California if he skipped a few meals and spent a couple of nights in his car. He could go back to the motel right now, pack up his stuff, catch a few winks, then, in the morning, collect what he was owed from the owner and be off. If need be, he could get another crappy job in another podunk town and stay there for a week or so to pick up some extra cash.
But he was not going to remain in Selby another day.
That settled it. Feeling better, feeling lighter, as though a great burden had been lifted, Dennis made his way past the deadfall, over the graded land of the soon-to-be subdivision and back onto the sidewalk.
Ten minutes later, he was sorting through his belongings and filling up suitcases, thinking about what he'd need before he hit the road.
If only he'd packed his Brigit's Well CD ...
Fourteen
Flagstaff, Arizona
In her dream, Angela was living in a tent in the woods with an ugly little monkey that was her baby. She was hiding but from whom or what she did not know, and that made her feel even more tense and anxious than if she had known the identity of her pursuer. She peeked out from between the flaps of her tent to make sure no one was near the camp, listened for a moment to ensure that she heard no unfamiliar noises in the surrounding woods, then quickly emerged, baby in one hand, pail in the other, to get water from the creek a few yards down the hill.
The baby chittered in her arms, showing its fangs.
There was no sign of anyone about, no indication that another person was anywhere near the woods, but something felt off, something felt wrong, and she wished she had waited to get the water.