Taking her hat, sunglasses, and camera, she tucked the keys under the vehicle’s rubber floor mat, cracked the windows, and left the van in the little shade provided by a small canvas awning attached to the sorting shed. She shouldered her day pack and wove her way through the excavation potholes and trenches, moving towards the escarpment shielding the deep arroyo known as Secret Canyon. She breathed in the morning air, heavy with the scent of sagebrush, and fell into an easy rhythmic stride, enjoying the crunch of scree beneath her thick-soled boots. Cass had come dressed for action, wearing her good, well-worn hiking boots and thick socks, her long-sleeved chambray shirt, her lightweight cargo trousers, and the oversized cotton scarf she used as a sun shield. In her day pack she carried two litres of water; a margarine tub full of raisins, peanuts, M amp;M’S, and dried cranberries; a tube of factor 100+ sunscreen; a folding knife; her emergency first-aid kit with snakebite accessories; and lightweight travel binoculars-everything she needed for a desert assault. If what happened today was at all similar to what had happened the evening before, she would be ready. In any event, she wanted to take some pictures and write some notes, to begin documenting the phenomenon. When her father arrived later in the day, they could sit down together and design a more thoroughgoing investigation. First, however, she intended to test her theory that the phenomenon that Friday called the Coyote Bridge was actually a spacetime anomaly connected to or embedded in the physical landscape of the earth.
After speaking to her father, Cass had gone to bed, but was way too keyed up to sleep, so she spent the night online researching such things as shamanistic flight, soul travel, and astral projection. Most of what she read as she sat in bed hunched over her laptop was incoherent blather-a mixture of New Age tripe and bizzaro fantasy-but she found enough level-headed material to convince her that what she had experienced the day before was not a dream, vision, or mental aberration such as a hallucination or some kind of hysteria. The violent storm, sudden and short-lived; the weird vertigo; the abrupt arrival in a foreign place-these were, apparently, more or less common features of the phenomenon, attested to in many cultures and times. Some writers ascribed mystical significance to the experience and others were quite workaday in their appraisal.
Moreover, while many outlandish claims and explanations were offered, and there was very little agreement among people with startlingly divergent orientations to life-some exhibiting an extremely loose grip on reality-Cass was able to tease out a few common threads: a belief that travel to other dimensions or parallel realities was shared by many different cultures in many different ages, and that such travel was not only possible, it was a practise that could be taught, learned, and mastered. The author of one intriguing article- a woman with waist-length white hair who went by the name of Star Eagle-offered the observation that not only were specific locations on the landscape important for Shamanic Flight, but the specified locations were time sensitive; that is, the would-be flyer would be most likely to achieve success if he or she embarked at sunrise or sunset. Dawn and twilight were the best times to fly, she said.
Hardheaded scientist that she was, Cass would have written off all this as so much malarkey and mumbo jumbo. If not for her own firsthand experience the day before, she would have consigned astral travel to the loony bin along with rainbow worship, crop circles, and almond-eyed aliens. Yet something had happened and, whatever it was, she could not ignore it. Like a good open-minded researcher, she had come prepared to test and document her discovery, however unsettling; plus, she wanted to have something tangible-a few photographs, at least-to show her father.
She walked easily through the desert, enjoying the stroll among the cacti and creosote bushes with the almost giddy sensation of a little girl on Christmas Eve, that flutter in the stomach and a feverish anticipation. When she reached the arroyo she paused for a moment to take a few snaps of the Secret Canyon entrance, still deep in shadow. She could feel the night-cooled air issuing from the mouth of the gorge, wafting over her and dissipating. The darkened opening yawned like a cave and seemed somehow forbidding. Cass hesitated, taking a few more pictures. Finally, as the rising sun cleared the ragged hill line to the east, spilling light across the valley, she drew a breath and whispered a simple prayer: “God, don’t let me break my neck.” She put her arm through the dangling strap of her pack and stepped into the canyon, adding, “Also, please, oh please, don’t let me get lost.”
The walls closed around her. She walked slowly, placing her footsteps with exaggerated care as if measuring distance, alert to whatever sensations she might feel. Aside from the sound of her own footsteps pinging off the high sandstone walls, there was nothing. She had reached the straight track and was a fair way into the gorge when it occurred to her that when she had been here the first time she had been chasing Friday, trying to catch him. So she picked up her pace. A cool breeze gusted down from the stony heights of the undulating walls. She stepped up her pace still more.
From somewhere high on the canyon rim above her, Cass heard a sound like that of a hawk-a keening, whine-like whistle-and felt a spatter of rain strike the back of her hand. She glanced up and got another raindrop smack on her brow. A low mist cloud hung over the gap between the narrow rock walls. She kept moving, noting the sudden change in the weather as gusting wind whipped around her legs, blowing loose sand and dry yucca leaves down the path ahead of her. The mist descended, enveloping her, slicking her face with moisture. In the same moment, a queasy sensation squirmed through her, and her step faltered-as if the surface beneath her feet had dropped half a step lower. She saw light ahead where the sun was burning through the all-enveloping fog and moved towards it, emerging to find herself on a vast plain stretching away in every direction to a horizon of black hills far away.
She had arrived in the Ghost World.
The travel sickness hit her all at once, slamming into her even as she stood looking at the emptiness opening around her. She doubled over and retched into the dust at her feet; hands on knees, she stood for a moment, breathing through her nose until the dizziness passed. She dabbed her lips and rinsed her mouth with a swig from her water bottle, thankful that this time there was no headache. She swallowed some more water and then, raising her camera, began photographing the bleak, monochrome landscape in a wide panoramic sweep to take in the open, empty, bone-dry, flat-as-an-iron volcanic pan around her. The sun stood low in the western sky, almost touching the tops of the far distant hills, illuminating the lines that covered the cinder plain stretched away arrow-straight across a totally featureless wastelandno cacti, no boulders, no rocks larger than any other, nothing in any direction as far as the eye could see… except the mysterious lines. Some of the lines were arrow straight; others curved into immense spirals splayed across acres of empty landscape.
Lowering her camera, Cass squatted down to take a few pictures of the path on which she stood, then put down a hand to feel the gritty texture of the pumice and discovered that the layer beneath was lighter than that which was above.
“Oxidation,” she breathed to herself. “So that’s how they’re made.”
It was simplicity itself: by moving the surface layer off to either side to expose the lighter material beneath, a stripe of light-coloured stone was created. She remembered pictures of chalk drawings presented in prehistoric anthropology lectures at university where, to create a drawing on a hillside, primitive people simply removed the turf to expose the white chalk just below the surface-a technique requiring few tools, but lots of manpower. The principle here was the same.