“The spirits spoke to me tonight,” Radio Joe told them, as they warmed themselves around his fire. Lara and Jara grinned at one another.
“Was it AM or FM?” asked Jara. The old man often told tall tales to local children, of spirits that spoke to him through the radios and TVs he repaired.
“No. This time for real.” He closed his eyes and offered an open-palmed chant to the flames.
“What did they sound like?”
“They came in the voice of the mountain lion,” he told them. And even as he said it, they heard the guttural roar of the great cat somewhere close by.
The twins pulled themselves up quickly, but Radio Joe didn’t stir. He opened his eyes, and turned slowly to look up at them. The fire painted a stroke of madness in his ancient eyes. “They called for you,” he said. “You did not quest after your spirit. So your spirit has quested after you.”
In truth few of the teenagers in town went on vision quests anymore. Radio Joe never missed an opportunity to rebuke them for it.
The roar came again. It sounded strange—different from roars they heard before. It sounded more powerful than other lions. There was a lion that had attacked a woman a few weeks before; surely this was the same one. With most of the neighborhood gone, the twins knew they would have to take care of it. How surprised the others would be when they discovered that the freakish pair had dispatched the troublesome cougar.
“Are you going to shoot it?” asked Radio Joe.
“Once it’s had a taste of human blood it won’t stop,” said Jara. “It has to be destroyed. I know it’s not what you believe but—"
“Use my rifle,” Radio Joe said. “It’s in the shed.”
Tonight the world seemed to end at the rim of the canyon. As the twins stood there, gazing out across the great expanse, they could still see an orange glow far below, on the canyon floor. Smoke from the smoldering wreckage had blown to the canyon wall, filling the space beneath the cliff with a haze lit pale blue by the gibbous moon.
They had followed the strange roars of the mountain lion to this spot—and although they could catch hints of its gamy scent, the smell of smoke masked it as they neared the rim.
They looked down into the pit of the canyon.
“Do you think it went back down?” asked Lara. And the answer came as a single earth-shaking roar behind them.
It awakened in them a searing terror, and they realized at this awful, vulnerable moment that they feared death far more than they had imagined.
They turned in a ballet-smooth motion to see not one, but four mountain lions stalking toward them, out of the shadows of the Arizona night. Their mouths were covered with the fur and blood of their latest kills.
Jara raised his rifle but did not know which creature he should aim at. “Don’t move,” Jara said.
There was something about these beasts that was not right. It was the way they walked—their paws stepping in perfect unison as if they were all reflections of the same beast. And it was common knowledge that mountain lions did not hunt in packs.
The quartet of beasts opened their mouths to roar, and only now did the twins understand why the sound had been so strange. It had been the sound of all four of them roaring at once.
Backed against the half-mile drop to the canyon floor, Lara and Jara knew their lives were about to end one way or another. But the lions stopped ten feet away and held their position. Dark eyes fixed on the twins. Perhaps they were confused by the sight of Siamese twins, or perhaps it was something else. Out of nowhere, a voice spoke to them.
“I understand now.”
The twins heard the voice, but it was as if the voice had originated deep within their own minds.
“I understand.” This time the thought had come from the direction of the great cats. Although Lara didn’t pretend to understand all the mysticism of the old ways, she felt sure this was a vision—the kind Radio Joe often spoke of. The kind of vision that opened the door to one’s destiny.
Jara, on the other hand, wasn’t so convinced. He held the rifle on one of the creatures, unwilling to let his guard down.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“Completion,” said the four voices. “Mine and yours.”
“We don’t believe in animal spirits,” said Jara.
“I don’t think that’s what they are.” Lara raised her hand and pushed down the barrel of Jara’s gun.
“What are you?” demanded Jara.
“I am nothing, " said the voices. “I am nothing without you. Because you are the point of focus. You are the one.”
Although the twins did not yet understand the full implication, the truth of it rang deep within them. The suggestion of them being at the focus of anything was a powerfully charged notion. They had lived so much of their lives in hidden anonymity, that it was more than just their curiosity that was piqued. It was a call to their souls.
“What do you mean?” the two asked in unison.
But they didn’t need to ask, because they implicitly knew. Jara and Lara were the point of focus. That meant that these creatures had not arrived here by random means. They were directed here by an ordered series of events. Then an image flooded the twins’ minds, and they instantly saw how these creatures came to be.
The bacteria aligned.
A powerful force injected perfect order into the river’s current, and the bacteria aligned!
The same order flowed its way up the food chain until the alignment of those billion bacteria had distilled down into the alignment of these four dangerous predators.
“And you . . . " said the four voices again. “You are the point of focus.”
If it were true, thought the twins, then it was something more than fate, and more than destiny. It meant that the unknowable forces of nature had not spat the twins out as freaks, but as vessels for something greater than themselves.
“I can give you what you need. What you long for,” said the voice. “I can give you completion.”
As they heard those words, they finally knew what it would mean to be the point of focus. They had lived lives of incompletion—from their own bodies, to the games of chess they never finished. They were like a tune, straining on the penultimate note, waiting for resolution. They were incompletion, and nothing was more desirable than to finally be complete.
“What do we have to do?” the twins said simultaneously.
“You already know,” came the answer.
Yes, they did know.
Jara raised his gun at the beasts . . . and released four deadly blasts.
The cats did not flinch, or shy away. Instead they each received the bullet through the brain, and collapsed to the dust, one after another. The twins realized what was about to happen next even before it began, and the knowledge made it even more joyous. The moment the creatures were dead, and their spirits were released, Lara and Jara could feel the four dissolve together, funneling into them. Now the twins could truly hear each other’s thoughts, feel each other’s beings. The four incomplete spirits that had inhabited the cougars, meshed together, weaving into a single great spirit that wound itself around the twins like a cocoon.