Uh-oh. “Hm … not quite, Mike.”
His eyes speared me through the forehead. “What do you mean?”
“When God cursed Cain, giving him the Mark, forcing him to wander the earth and know no peace, he also cursed him with immortality. Cain had wandered for more than forty thousand years before creating the Tablet.”
Mike just closed his eyes and rubbed his temples like he was trying to massage away a headache.
The Corolla stayed quiet as a tomb all the way to Midland, Texas, home of oil barons and the only skyline in that part of the state. Its sister city, Odessa, was the armpit of the Permian Basin, boasting only oil and an outstanding high-school football team. Other than that, it was the heart of darkness.
Late lunch, or an early dinner, came from Wienerschnitzel, where I ate greasiest, tastiest Polish sausage known to man. God bless America. Mike ate three, slurping them down with a diet soda, and I could swear I heard his arteries hardening.
After filling the Corolla with gas, we headed out on Highway 20 westbound straight into the middle of miles of nothing except heat blasted white sand dotted with sad-looking scrub. A few small, worn hills provided the only change in altitude I could see and a single railroad track paralleled the highway, passing through the bleached and windswept bones of old towns that had once tried to suckle the milk of prosperity provided by a defunct railway.
The sun began to set before we reached the 10 to El Paso and pulled over onto the shoulder. Even though the Corolla’s air conditioner barely functioned and the sun had just kissed the horizon, the outside air scorched my lungs dry as I took a deep breath. Just like I remembered.
“At least it’s a dry heat,” Mike joked as he fanned himself.
Wow … humor. He must have mellowed out about the Tablet. I tossed him a cheeky grin through the sweat beading on my lips and he returned it with interest. Good. We were all right again.
“If you’re up for another display of Elemental magic,” I remarked offhandedly, “then come on. Otherwise stay with the car. I won’t be long.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t miss this for all the tea in China,” he said.
“Be careful what you wish for, man, because I really don’t want to freak you out any more than I have already.”
“I don’t think I can freak out any more, kid.”
The sand and scrub absorbed my laughter. “Oh, Mike, you have no idea.” My toe connected with a stone that looked to be half fossil while I wiped the sweat from my brow. “The world is filled with magics that the ordinary person never gets to see or is unprepared to see.”
Mike stared out at the barren landscape, drinking in its desolation. After a moment the corner of his mouth crooked upward. He laughed softly at my look of annoyance. “It is my job as a priest to believe in things we don’t or can’t see, so I think I am doing well.” A longer pause, then, “Why don’t you keep your spooker in a safety deposit box?”
I glanced toward the sun half hidden by the horizon and throwing orange and red light into the darkening sky. “I put it somewhere safer than a mere bank.”
By the time the last rays faded Mike and I had trekked about a mile from the Corolla. I whispered a Word and the night resolved itself into brilliant hues of green, gold and red, a psychedelic mash of colors. My hand found Mike’s shoulder and I whispered the same Word in his ear. Vision always smelled of apples. Apple and pears.
With a muffled curse he stopped abruptly and crossed himself. Muttering an apology to God for the language, he rounded on me. “What did you do, Jude?” He rubbed his eyes. “Was this one of your Words?”
“Vision,” I affirmed.
“Why the blazes didn’t you warn me?” he ground out.
“Because you wouldn’t have let me and then you would’ve spent the rest of our time out here hot, miserable and stumbling in the dark.”
Grumble, grumble …
“What was that?”
“I said, next time warn me!” he shot back. “You scared the … wits out of me.”
“But you can see, right?”
Mike craned his neck, sweeping his eyes across the sky then back to earth as he drank in this new vision. The flesh of his face went slack with shock. “Holy moley,” he breathed in awe, crossing himself.
“That’s Vision for you,” I told him. “Gives you sight for distance, dark and even under water if needed, man. Pretty useful.”
My home-grown holy roller continued to gawp at our tri-colored surroundings as I turned round in an effort to orient myself. Trying to find a specific spot in the middle of a west Texas empty was your basic needle-in-a-haystack exercise.
I knew I was in the right place, but even though the area hadn’t changed much, it had changed. Fourteen years had passed since my trek around America hiding my spookers. Everywhere I turned the same vista met my eyes: sand, scrub and rocks.
“Must be going crazy,” I muttered under my breath.
Mike piped up. “Talking to yourself is the first sign of a serious mental illness, you know,” he agreed.
“Shut up, you,” I retorted … quietly. Once again I eyeballed the landscape and still couldn’t find a reference point other than a weather-beaten hill near where we had parked. I noticed that hill the first time because of the notch on top that made it look as if some Jurassic beast had given it a nibble.
Nothing for it but to try something a little more drastic. The Word slipped out of my mouth before I knew it. Clarity was one of the more subtle magics, but horribly effective in the right circumstances. And, for some reason, Clarity smelled like bacon to me.
Accompanied by a swirling sensation all my perceptions altered slightly and my thoughts contracted to a single, bright laser pinpoint. With Clarity you can recall anything, all memories in perfect detail without the stain of time’s inevitable varnish. The storage lockers of my mind opened with a clatter to let all those old dusty recollections air out.
The hill, yes, the hill came back with a brilliantly sharp intensity that took my breath away. An image of how the land used to look superimposed itself on what it looked like now and, startled, I realized how much it had changed. Wind had scoured the sands over and around shrubs, while the occasional rainfall dug small ravines that were filled in again by the hot wind.
Footfalls that had scuffed across the landscape years ago came afresh to my ears, and the path I had taken renewed itself, bringing the old depressions in the sand into hard focus.
My feet led the way with no urging from the rest of me. I saw in the Clarity of the moment that I’d been off by a couple dozen yards … not too bad considering the amount of time that had passed.
There it was. I spied with my little eye something that began with ‘B.’ What in the past had been a large, white, humpy, craggy boulder turned out to be a patch of rock barely sticking up out of the sand, blasted and glowing red in my Vision.
Slowly I crouched a few feet away and dug my fingers into the warm sand near a shoulder-high, musky, earthy-smelling scrub.
The rattling, clackety Language of Earth ushered forth from my throat, tumbling out to land on the surface of the ragged rock. Almost immediately it vibrated, raising a cloud of dust and grit that tickled my nose.
“Back so soon, scion of the Sicarii,” rumbled the stone as it began to rise out of the ground, shedding sand and insects.
“I am not of them, not for a long time.” My voice was dry as the seared air, while the ground trembled beneath my feet.
“Long time you say? Hardly such, I was not even fully covered.” Humor belled through the boulder’s voice in an explosion of subsonic mirth. When the rock finished rising, it stood far above my head, a scarred monolith leaning over far enough that I felt a twinge of fear for my precious self.
“The box, you still have it?” I asked through the smell of cut grass.