Daniel Hecht_Cree Black 02
Read Daniel Hecht_Cree Black 02 Online
Authors: Land of Echoes
LAND OF ECHOES
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Skull Session
The Babel Effect
City of Masks
(first in the Cree Black series)
LAND of ECHOES
A CREE BLACK NOVEL
DANIEL HECHT
BLOOMSBURY
Contents
This book is dedicated to Ruth Storer and Bob Kirk, for teaching me so much, for feeding me and my family so well, and most
of all for being such good friends.
SAM YAZZIE, the boys' dorm night supervisor, was in his room reading when he heard an odd sound from the far end of the building.
He put down his book and tipped his head to listen.
For a few seconds, there was nothing but the noise of wind in the eaves. Then he heard it again: a forced vocalization of
distress. He tried to tell himself it sounded like one of the kids having a stomach problem, heaving up cafeteria food in
the bathroom, but he knew better. It was the same sort of noise Tommy Keeday had made that awful night just a week ago.
He laid the book aside, went into the hall, and stopped again to listen. The building was long and narrow, divided by a corridor
that stretched its whole length. On the right was the room that served as his office and residence, along with the utility
room, two bathrooms, and two six-boy dorms; on the left, the day supervisor's office and four dorm rooms. Sam's impression
was that the sounds had come from the far end.
As usual, the corridor lights were off, but night-lights glowed at regular intervals, and the open bathroom doors spilled
enough light to illuminate the hall. He walked down to the first door and went into the tiled, fluorescent-lit room. Nobody:
no feet visible under the four stall doors, nobody in the showers, nobody tossing it up at the sinks. The ceiling fluorescents
blinked irritatingly, and he made a mental note to ask the maintenance staff to replace the tubes.
When he paused in the hall to listen again, everything was quiet, and his tension eased a little. Maybe it was something outside,
not a kid after all. Maybe the wind, which was high tonight, bearing in from the north and bringing a chill. More likely a
coyote or fox. The two dorms stood apart from the classroom and administration buildings, and the whole school was just a
dot in an endless expanse of rolling sagebrush desert. It was big country, sparsely populated, with plenty of wildlife. A
couple of times a year, coyotes raided the cafeteria trash bins and made a ruckus. Maybe—
The sound came again, a muffled scream and some garbled words, definitely human. It choked off and left only the midnight
silence. A chill crept over Sam's skin as he began to stride down the hall.
It had to be Tommy again. The first time, he'd recovered within half an hour or so, and Julieta and Dr. Tsosie had written
it off: bad dream, exhaustion, stress. After the second episode, they'd sent him to the Indian Hospital in Gallup, a four-day
diagnostic workup that ended with the doctors pronouncing him perfectly healthy.
Now he'd been back for only two days. If this was Tommy getting sick again, it didn't look good for the poor kid. And it would
break Julieta's heart to know her prize new student had some chronic or recurring condition.
Whatever it was. There was something strange about the way Julieta and Joe Tsosie were handling this.
Approaching the north end of the building, Sam stopped at the door to the room Tommy shared with five of his fellow sophomores.
Even in the dim light, he could see six beds and six motionless lumps wrapped in blankets, including Tommy, who looked dead
asleep with mouth wide open, one arm up above his head on the pillow. None of them moved, and the only sounds they made were
the faint wheezes and sighs of their breathing.
Then the stifled cry came again, and the lump that was Tommy moved. It seemed to swell and swarm with bumps that must be knees
or elbows but that didn't look right. Sam didn't move. Part of his mind noticed that the lights were fluttering in the second
bathroom, too. Tommy's blankets humped and shook, and it occurred to Sam that maybe there were two people in the bed, maybe
there was some British boys' school-style hanky-panky going on. But then the mound deflated and he could see it was only Tommy,
tangled alone in his blanket, lying on his back. One side of the boy's face was drawn up as if a string was pulling a corner
of his mouth toward his ear, and as Sam stood, still unable to move, Tommy's body twisted and convulsed. The whole bed shook
with the force of it.
Sam's paralysis broke and he stepped quickly toward the bed. But before he could reach it, Tommy's body went slack.
He stopped again, confused. Tommy now lay fast asleep or unconscious, motionless but for the shallow pumping of his chest.
For the first time, Sam noticed that the other boys weren't asleep—how could they be, with the awful noises Tommy made?—
but were lying immobile in some kind of semi-conscious paralysis. David Blanco, in the bed next to Tommy's, lay with his eyes
slightly open, just glistening pale slits. In the deeper shadow at the far end of the room, Jim Wauneka was sitting up, rigid,
motionless. Sam almost called to him but then realized his eyes weren't really open, either—just unseeing slits, like someone
anesthetized or dead.
Tommy's chest and stomach and legs began rising and falling, rippling in a series of convulsions. At first, the movements
were gentle and rhythmic as ripples undulating in a pond, but they quickly grew faster and more vehement until it looked as
if the scrawny body would wrench itself apart. The sheer violence of the movement seemed to knock Sam another step backward.
He felt torn between wanting to run and duty to his charges, between terror and a hideous fascination.
This wasn't right, he knew. This wasn't natural. Nothing he'd encountered in the army or as an orderly in the crisis ward
in Phoenix had prepared him for this. Abruptly he became aware of the great dark sagebrush plains all around the building,
the infinite night sky above hundreds of thousands of square miles of bare red-brown earth, stark rocks, lonely mesas, and
shadowed canyons. He remembered the feeling from his childhood, from the times he'd be herding his family's sheep in the evening
as the stars pricked through one by one and the sun bleached only the very western edge of night and he could feel in the
lonely empty hollow of his gut just how big and incomprehensible the world was. He'd almost forgotten. Now he realized with
a sense of calamity that the world he'd disciplined himself to accept, that he'd spent his adult life buying into and working to master,
wasn't real after all: The world of white America and science and school, jobs and sports and TVs, didn't have an explanation
for this. This was something come out of the world's hidden places, from the old world of the Bible or his grandfather's stories
or the dark legends of witches and ghosts that had been whispered from person to person long before human beings knew how
to write them down.
Tommy made a quiet, awful sound, as if a full-bellied scream had been throttled by a throat too constricted to allow it to
pass. Sam bolted forward, but just as he caught the arching shoulders, the awful tension went out of the boy. One moment Tommy's
right arm had started to push forward and then Sam felt something like a shock through his hands and arms, a vortex of sensation
that buzzed quickly through his stomach, and the boy's arm snapped back and lay limp on his chest. All Sam held in his arms
was a slack, sleeping fifteen-year-old.
Sam felt only an instant of relief as he lowered Tommy back to the pillow. His movements felt as if they were resisted by
a powerful force, some warped gravity or a form of magnetism that influenced flesh and bone. The light bleeding in from the
corridor was really going crazy now. It strobed as if a string of flashbulbs was going off in the bathroom as Tommy began
to shudder and twitch and another wave of convulsions took him.
Julieta McCarty stared across her desk and tried to assimilate what Sam had just told her. He insisted that there was no other
way to look at it. It wasn't a prank or even an ordinary seizure. Some kind of disturbance or force radiated from the Keeday
boy: The other boys had lain or sat unmoving throughout his battle with Tommy, despite the awful noises he'd made and the
thrashing and wrestling. Sam had felt it himself. Now Tommy was in the infirmary, Sam said, doing that thing again like last
time, and the nurse had called Dr. Tsosie.
As an afterthought, Sam informed her that he was quitting, effective immediately.
He didn't have to explain why. Sam was forty years old, a reliable staffer who had served in the army, where he'd been trained
as a paramedic, and he'd earned a bachelor's degree in social work from the University of Arizona; though he'd been born on
the reservation he'd lived a good part of his life elsewhere. But like most Navajos of his generation, he hung uncertainly
between the old beliefs and the view of the world he'd absorbed from white America. In Julieta's experience, even the most
culturally assimilated Navajo believed that some truth lay beneath the traditional fears of Skinwalkers, Navajo Wolves, spirits
of the dead, and the consequences of violating old taboos.
"Sam. You know I'll never be able to replace you." Julieta tried to keep the pleading out of her voice.
"I've had six hours to think about it. I talked to my wife. It scares her for me to be here anymore." He knew what his leaving
meant and was clearly feeling bad about his decision, but he left her office with a resolute stride.
Only eight-fifteen in the morning, and she was already confronted with two pieces of very bad news. It was bad enough that
she'd just lost a linchpin of her residential staff, a man both she and the students admired. But equally disturbing—no,
worse, a sick, strangling fear that clotted in her chest—was that Tommy Keeday had been back only two days and already his
troubles had resumed. Why Tommy, of all of them? The first time his bizarre symptoms had cropped up, they had passed quickly,
and she and Dr. Tsosie had decided to let it go as some flu symptom, maybe, or a touch of food poisoning. But the second time,
the attack had lingered and intensified, and Dr. Tsosie had referred Tommy for an exhaustive diagnostic workup at the Indian
Hospital. The problem was that the symptoms had passed before they'd even completed the hour-long drive to Gallup, and after
four days of testing that had included CT scans, electroencephalograms, comprehensive blood work, and a battery of psychological
tests, the doctors had given Tommy a clean bill of health. He'd shown no cranial abnormalities, no detectable seizure activity,
no sign of any illegal drugs in his system. In fact, he'd shown no symptoms of physical illness at all.
"Probably just dehydration," one smug intern had told her. "Sometimes its effects can mimic seizure activity. It's only temporary.
Make sure he drinks lots of Gatorade."
Remembering his condescension infuriated Julieta—as if a lifelong resident of the area and principal of a boarding school
wouldn't know the effects of the hot, dry climate of western New Mexico on teenagers!—and she mastered her anger with the
hard pragmatism her position required of her. She had to think clearly, couldn't let her emotions get in the way.
That Tommy's symptoms had returned meant that he was a child seriously at risk. But how? The hospital couldn't find anything
wrong with him. And what was she to make of Sam's claim that the . . . disturbance . . . had affected the other boys?
Two lights on her phone had begun blinking demandingly, and abruptly she realized she couldn't be bothered with whatever it
was, she needed to get away from distractions and think this through. She left her desk, stopped briefly to tell the secretary
that she was going for a walk, and hurried out of the administration building.
Outside, it was a perfect mid-September day. The strong north winds that had battered the school last night had died out.
The sun was halfway up the eastern sky, its heat already a smart slap on her face even though a layer of cool air still hovered
above the ground. Arms crossed, chin on her chest, she scuffed across the rear access road to the partial shade of a trellis
she'd had set up as a place for staff to take lunch. A sunning lizard darted away as she sat on the picnic table.
It was a good vantage from which to look at the school. With everyone in class now, the complex was quiet: a little cluster
of one-story buildings, a gravel-surfaced parking lot, a row of five stubby yellow school buses, a white water tower. The
admin, classroom, and dorm buildings were new, built of concrete and surfaced to resemble adobe in gray and pink tones. A
large hogan, eight-sided and built of logs, occupied a central spot between dorms and classroom buildings. Set farther back
amid some cottonwood trees stood the little adobe bell tower and her own sandstone-block house, which now served as the infirmary
until she could raise the money to build another unit.
The school stood alone and diminished by the vastness of its surroundings. To the north and south stretched sagebrush desert,
rolling swells of bare soil and rocks in a red-brown, gray-green mosaic only rarely varied by the dark green of a piñon tree;
to the west, the land rose and broke into the hills bordering Black Creek. Beyond the school buildings to the east, the view
was cut short by a little mesa, its cliffs making a meandering wall that eventually curved out of sight. Far to the north,
the horizon was capped by the rugged line of the Chuska Mountains' southernmost slopes. Above, the vault of clean blue sky,
streaked today with thin, high clouds.
Not another human thing in sight. Beautiful.
And that's it,
Julieta thought desperately.
My life. The one good thing I've ever done. The only thing I've ever done right.
She looked at the place and loved it painfully, and it seemed the sun stung her eyes and brought tears. Starting this school
had been a way not only to give something to the people of the region, it had been a personal crusade—redemption for a life
of stupid mistakes, wasted years, squandered self. It was a line she'd drawn in the sand, the demarcation between past and
future. Whatever neurotic hopes or submerged longings might have shaped her motivations, it had turned into a good thing.
Just starting its sixth year of operation, Oak Springs was the first privately run boarding school for gifted and talented
Navajo kids, and it was now weekday home to sixty-seven high school boys and girls drawn from western New Mexico and eastern
Arizona, most of them from the rez. Every Friday the buses returned all but ten to their homes in remote trailers and hogans
and shacks scattered over an area of fifteen thousand square miles, and every Monday brought them back for another five days
of instruction and, she hoped, inspiration. She'd spent all of the money she'd gotten in her divorce settlement, had campaigned
hard for the rest from charitable foundations and state agencies, and she'd done it, she'd built it and certified it and staffed
it and got it up and going. Every step of the way had been hard, and every step had been wonderful and worth it.