"The wound?"
"The wound in the earth. The wound we have seen in our dream."
"In the desert."
She nodded. "What the people need is a healing, to bring the heart and mind together; what the mind tells them is that they need more power, and in this way the wound grows deeper. I am only telling you my dream."
Jack's look softened, interest creeping into his eyes, fighting the pain.
"In the dream we share, a tower has been built in the desert," she said, feeling confident enough to include him now. "My people use the medicine wheel to open their hearts and hear the voices of our gods; although we call out to the sky to hear them, we know the gods live inside us and that is where we must listen."
"And the tower?"
"This tower is like our medicine wheel, except it calls out to the darkness. A wound is open beneath it in the earth and the Black Crow Man asks the darkness to rise out of the wound and send its power over the earth."
"And this is how the darkness wins," said Jack.
"This is how time ends. This is how the people are destroyed; because they have opened the wound and allowed the Black Crow Man to invite this darkness into the world." "Who is this man?"
"In each of us, the false voice of the mind. In the dream he is the one who leads the people to the wrong path and calls out the darkness from deep inside the earth."
"And in the real world," said Jack, "he is my brother."
She hesitated. "I believe that is so."
"Who are the Six?"
"The ones who are called to stop him."
"Called by whom?"
"That is not for us to say."
"But you and I are among them."
"We were given the dream. Yes, I believe that was the reason."
Jack sat silently, face contorting as he struggled with waves of emotion. She watched compassionately but made no movement toward him; he would have to reach for her.
"How? How can we stop him?" asked Jack, raw fear on his face, voice breaking. "I've tried before and I've failed. I've failed myself as well. I've let the darkness in." His voice fell to a whisper. "I'm afraid. Afraid that I'm not strong enough."
Walks Alone took another breath and looked at him directly for the first time; this was the moment.
"You must heal yourself. Before you try again," she said. He stared at her, the last armor of protective rage melting away, vulnerable and real, tears pooling in his eyes. "I don't know how to begin," he whispered. "But you will try to stop him, anyway." "Yes."
"Then you will fail again. Is that what you want?" "No."
"You have no choice then."
He shook his head, agreeing. Tears ran freely down his cheeks.
She took his hands and held them tight. He looked at her. "I will help you," she said.
The first scream from the adjoining berth woke Doyle instantly from a restless sleep. He rushed out his door, followed quickly by Innes; both men paused and listened at the door to Jack's compartment. A rhythmic chanting reached them, the woman's voice, and the musky odor of burning sage. Falling and rising above the chant they could hear low moaning, then another protracted scream that stood their hair on end.
"Good Christ," said Doyle.
"Sounds like he's being roast on a spit," said Innes.
Doyle pushed through the door; the sight greeting them stopped them in their tracks.
The cramped room blisteringly hot. Jack lay flat in the narrow space between seats, Walks Alone kneeling beside him. Jack unconscious, naked to the waist, his torso daubed with diagonal streaks of red and white paint; Mary Williams, wearing a loincloth and halter top, displayed some of the same colors patterned on her face. Smoke from two smudge pots, burning sage, choked the close air. A long wooden pipe lay on one of the seats and a four-foot length of willow stick, topped with an eagle feather, rested on the floor near Jack's head.
Both of them drenched with sweat, Jack writhed in agonizing pain as she rotated her hands, as if rapidly kneading dough, above his rib cage. Lost in fevered concentration, her features tense and sculpted, repeating over and over again the same incomprehensible incantation, she did not even glance up at the Doyles' arrival.
Another dreadful scream broke Jack's lips and his body bridged off the floor, taut as a bowstring. Realizing his cries could be heard up and down the length of the car, Doyle thought to close the compartment door, but he could not respond to the impulse when he saw something appear in her hands as she quickly raised them from Jack's chest:
A wobbly transparent mass of pink-and-red tissues about the size of an oblong grapefruit, a hot black jellied nugget burning in its center, mottled all around with curved bands of a sickly gray substance that like ribs seemed to give the object structure.
Something fetal, a larva, more insectoid than human, thought Doyle. He turned to Innes; his face had gone white as an egg. Doyle felt strangely reassured; at least Innes was seeing it, too.
The woman's hands continued to agitate, vibrating at such an impossibly high rate it made it difficult for them to determine whether the queasy handful was being shaken by her or animated by its own odious energy. Part of their minds questioned whether she held anything in her hands at all.
Jack's body collapsed hard onto the floor.
Doyle grabbed Innes and pulled him back out into the hall, closing the door quickly behind them. They stared at each other in shock, Innes blinking rapidly, his mouth working but producing no words.
Doyle raised a finger to his lips and shook his head. Innes walked immediately back to their cabin and retrieved a bottle of whiskey from his bag. Sitting down across from each other on their bunks, the brothers plied themselves with measured, medicinal doses and waited for the whiskey to expunge the repellent memory from their brains.
They said nothing further about it; no more cries were heard from next door during what little remained of the night.
SKULL CANYON, ARIZONA
The posse had already spend one hell-raising evening overrunning the Skull Canyon Hotel, and as the liquor began to flow on this second night, it seemed unlikely the town could contain them much longer.
The group was currently suffering a heated division about which menace to society they should hunt down first: the Chinaman or that back-stabbing, snake-eyed, double-dealing, son-of-a-whore convict Buckskin Frank McQuethy. But they were agreed that whichever one of these running dogs they caught up with first would get fitted for a hemp necktie pronto and swing from the nearest tree.
Sheriff Tommy Butterfield felt the most personal sense of betrayal; he'd gone to bat with the governor about Frank, for Christ's sake. Put his trust in the man, laid his own political future on the line, and this was how Buckskin repaid him: a note pinned to a stable wall and vanishing into the night. The rat bastard could be halfway to Guadalajara by now. Tommy had been able to persuade the posse to ride on to Skull Canyon according to Frank's instructions that morning, but when they got there and found him gone again, the call for retribution turned into a chorus.
Throughout the next day, the talk grew meaner and the interrogation of the hotel staff rougher, until finally one of the clerks admitted that Frank had not gone off toward Prescott as they'd originally told the posse—according to Frank's orders under a severe threat of death, he was fast to add—but had been seen riding west toward that religious settlement. Where the actors and Chop-Chop the Chinaman had been headed in the first place. Now the room really fell into an uproar.
We'll ride there tonight, went the prevailing sentiment, ride in shooting and root out both of 'em; God take pity on anybody who stands in our way. All that remained was figuring out how to find the place.