That afternoon I called my old traveling companion Whirlie Henley and asked if he was available for a walk in the woods; I would pay the same rate as before.
“You ain’t goin’ after long, tall, and vicious again, are ya?” he asked.
“It’s a related matter,” I told him. “But I can guarantee we won’t be running into her.”
“How the hell you gon’ do that?”
“Trust me. She’s not anywhere near West Virginia.”
“You still chasin’ after her?”
“You might say.”
Grudgingly, Henley accepted my offer and we arranged to meet two weeks from the day at Mickey’s—it would take me that long, I believed, to convince Ariel we should make the trip. As things turned out it took me only ten days. She flatly resisted at first on the grounds she might miss an opportunity to contact Isha. I told her it seemed that Isha was a persistent sort and I cited the plethora of material in her book relating to predestination. “If there’s any truth to it,” I said, “you can’t avoid another encounter.” Acceding to this argument, she tried another tack, saying she had no wish to return to a place where she had been so miserable. I hadn’t informed her of my actual reason for returning; she was in a fragile mental state and I did not want to risk upsetting her to the point that she would blow off her tour. Instead I’d told her I had business in Green Bank and now I suggested that while I was taking care of it, she could visit the Krishna temple in Moundsville. “You’ll make ol’ Shivananda’s day,” I said. Her memories of the temple were not altogether unpleasant, and finally she relented. Six days later, after a thirty-minute drive followed by a ten-minute walk, Henley and I stood beside a massive, richly tagged boulder at the confluence of two streams, shaded by a venerable water oak. Its leaves had turned, but few had fallen. The air was damp and cold, the ground soaked by a recent rain.
“You told me what you’re lookin’ for,” Henley had said when I met him at Mickey’s, “I coulda saved you some worry. Everybody ‘round Durbin knows the Damsel Oak. Witchy women come out here to cast spells. High school kids use it for partyin’. Thing’s damn near a tourist attraction.”
While Henley watched I dug with a short-handled shovel, excavating a trench around the boulder. Ariel’s description stated that Ah’raelle had buried her equipment deep. Given that she had been working with her hands, I had not expected “deep” meant other than the extreme end of shallow. A couple of feet down, maybe. But I had no luck at that depth. Sweaty and irritated, my shoulders aching, I took a break.
Perched atop the boulder, Henley removed his Mountaineers cap, ran a hand through his graying hair and said, “Willowy Woman was pretty damn strong. You might hafta go down a ways.”
“No shit.” I examined my palms. Unblistered for now, but not for long.
“’Course we might have the wrong rock.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Then somebody coulda already dug up whatever it is you’re after.”
“So how the Mountaineers doing this season?” I asked, hoping to cut short this litany of woeful possibility.
Henley’s breezy mood soured. “Doin’ all right.”
“Yeah, I caught part of the Syracuse game. That was a Little League game, they would have applied the mercy rule and shut it down.”
“Boys had some injuries was what it was.”
“Sure, that’s it.”
The stream chuckled and slurped along in its banks. Henley appeared to be listening to it.
“Maybe you better get on back to diggin’,” he said. “Ain’t much light left.”
The sun lowered and a starless dark descended. The occasional rustle from the surrounding woods—that was all the sound except for the rush of the water and my grunts. Henley built a fire and cooked. After a meal of beans and franks, though I was fatigued and sore, I jumped down into the trench again, working in bursts, taking frequent rests. Around ten o’clock, at a depth of five feet, I struck something on the stream side of the boulder. I scraped dirt away from it, then fell to my knees and pried it free. A case covered in dark red material. My hands were so cramped I could barely pick it up, and when I managed to get a grip I discovered it weighed in the neighborhood of sixty pounds. I remembered how easily Ariel had leaped from the hollow, holding it in one hand. Like Henley said, she had been pretty damn strong.
I dragged the case to the fire and sat cross-legged in front of it. With the fire leaping, casting the case in a hellish light, and the shadows of flames dancing on the side of the tent, I felt like a shaman staring at a magic box. I’d assumed it would be tricky to open, but was surprised to find that there was only a simple catch. Emergency equipment, I told myself. Designed for those who were losing their memories and might not be able to deal with something more complex. That did not explain, however, why they hadn’t secured it with a lock keyed to DNA. Perhaps they allowed for the possibility that the person stranded might be critically injured and require help in accessing the case. Overcome by fatigue, it was not until that moment I understood the magnitude of what I had found or considered the difficulties that might arise from the discovery. Cold, I grew colder yet.
“You gon’ open it or what?” Henley asked, squatting at my side.
“Maybe you don’t want to see this.”
“I been waitin’ around all day for it!”
“There’s people who might ask you questions about what’s inside. They’re not good people.”
Henley tipped back his cap, rubbed his forehead with a knuckle. “You think it’s drugs or somethin’?”
“I don’t know what it is.”
“Hell, I’ll take a peek if you don’t mind,” Henley said, kneeling. “Seein’ how she like to half-kill me, I reckon I got a stake in things.”
Sap popped in the fire; silence seemed to gather itself into something big and black and bulging above the trees.
I lifted the lid.
Inside the case was a gray metal panel indented with several dozen shallow depressions—three dozen to be exact—most occupied by silver cylinders, each slimmer and shorter than a fountain pen. Four held larger items, also silvery in color, but with claw-shaped ends. I had no idea what I was seeing. My initial assumption was that they were tools, but thirty-two tools of the same shape and size…it made no sense. I lifted one from the case. It had to weigh half a pound. The metal was warm, signifying a heat source within.
Henley picked another up and held it to catch the firelight, turning it this way and that. I set my cylinder back in the case and when I glanced at Henley again I saw that he appeared to be frozen in place, staring at the cylinder with a confused expression.
“What is it?” I asked.
He gave no answer and I touched his arm. The muscles were rigid.
“Whirlie?” I said; then, after a pause, “You hear me?”
He remained unmoving, not even a twitch.
For several minutes during which I began to fear for him and wondered how I would explain a catatonic redneck, Henley did not stir; then, expelling a hoarse sigh, he dropped the cylinder and sank onto his side. Greatly relieved, I asked what had happened.
“I can’t sort it out,” he said dazedly. “It was a buncha pictures and things.” He sat up. “They started comin’ when I was studying it up close and pushed in the ends. Go on…give ’er a try. Didn’t hurt or nothin’. It’s just weird.”
Holding a cylinder up to eye level, I did as he had instructed. I felt a weak vibration in the metal. Then the pictures and things started to come. For the duration of the experience I was a receiver, accepting a flow of information relayed as images, and was unable to gain a clear perspective on what I was seeing. If, like Henley, I’d had no knowledge of the situation, I would have been mightily confused, and even given the knowledge I did have, I was somewhat confused, my head so full of strangeness, I too had difficulty sorting it out. But I understood that the cylinders contained what would be essential should one of the Akashel encounter an emergency and be stranded far from home: memories.