Obsidian Tears (Apparition Lake Book 2) Read online

  The land cried out, as before at Apparition Lake, but it was worse now, far worse. The forefathers of the Indian nations cried too, from olden days across time. An ancient evil, an Indian evil, had been awakened. Glenn Merrill was right, Snow on the Mountains knew it for certain. The Ninimbe had returned and all of the world was in grave danger.

  The shaman turned to look out upon that world and the extent of that danger was seared into his mind and heart. The Wyoming moon had risen above the horizon and now lit the landscape at the shaman's feet. The quiet little valley he'd known his entire life had been utterly transformed. Where once a creek had quietly serpentined now a torrent raged. The valley floor once a flat and serene willow marsh, the handiwork of generations of beaver, was now ripped asunder. Now the opposite shoreline had been thrust up by forces below into a jagged sharp-edged ridge that had split down its length.

  He'd guessed as much but now he knew. Snow on the Mountains knew, though he'd been afraid to admit it, even to himself, and could never speak it out loud, that Legend Rock was much more now than the holy place it had been. Legend Rock had somehow become a doorway to the Underworld. With the realization came an anxiety he'd never experienced before. He suddenly felt like he was suffocating as his lungs refused to draw air. His eyes widened, his jaw dropped, an incredible ringing filled his ears and echoed through his head. Tears ran down his cheeks and his body shook. The moment seemed to last indefinitely until the shaman involuntarily vomited at his feet and sucked breath so hard he began to choke and cough.

  This could not be!

  He'd been right in refusing the chief ranger and in coming alone. The danger was extreme and very real. Fighting a rising terror, and feeling his age again, Snow on the Mountains struggled to descend the escarpment without hurting himself. He made it to the valley floor in one piece but took no time to appreciate the victory. Instead, he grabbed a clump of sagebrush from his bag and lit it by the heat of his smudge bowl, then blew it out, so it too was smoldering. He grabbed an empty earthen jar and lid and an eagle feather from his kit and, lifting his smudge stick above his head, started for the opened fissure in the earth.

  Fording the creek in the dark was a perilous endeavor but Snow on the Mountains located a spot where rock and debris had created a small waterfall. The water upstream had pooled and, though deeper, was moving slower. He lifted his cargo above his head and waded in, taking care to find stable footholds. Though the water was waste deep and freezing, he bit his lip and persevered. There was no option. He made the other side and stopped to catch his breath again. He rubbed the blood back into the aching muscles of his legs. Then he pushed up the newly formed ridge.

  Thirty feet from the massive split in the ground the shaman stopped, set down the jar and covered it with the lid, then proceeded on. He reached the brink of the torn earth, tilted his head back, and closed his eyes. He stood unmoving for several long minutes. Then he began to sniff the air, loud, rhythmic sniffs interspersed with quick, sharp exhalations, like a dog on the hunt. A moment of that was enough. “This is it,” he whispered, waving the smoldering sage in one hand and the eagle feather in the other before the black abyss.

  This, Snow on the Mountains knew, was the doorway. This was the mission. Drawing on the holy site behind him for spiritual strength, the Shoshone medicine man would do all within his power to close that door and, the Great Spirit willing, to lock it forever.

  He was at a disadvantage. There was neither sunlight nor fire to carry his words to the Creator. An unfortunate circumstance but not deadly. The Great Spirit would hear him. “He-agh,” he shouted, his voice echoing through the valley. “He-aghhhh. He-agh. He-aghhhh!” He paused, listening, hoping he might hear a reply, the howl of the coyote perhaps (an answer from the creator of human life), as a sign his prayers would be heard. The night remained quiet. Again, unfortunate, but no matter. The shaman had already heard from the spirits. His duty was clear.

  Snow on the Mountains backed off a step from the edge. He raised his hands and started an invocation in his native tongue. He offered his prayer to the south for man's physical nature and then to the north for man's mental nature. He prayed to the east for man's emotional nature and then to the west for man's spirit. He called upon the Great Spirit to close the doorway to darkness. “I ask Appah that it be this way.” He held his breath. All was quiet save for the rushing of the creek at his back.

  He noted the muffled sound of dirt and small rock as it dislodged from the sides of the abyss and tumbled into the bottomless dark below. The movement of grass and the snapping of bitterbrush and sage could be heard behind him and to each side. His mind told him something moved in all directions but he could not see and the sound had stopped. The hairs raised on his arms and at the back of his neck but he could not stop. Regardless of what may or may not be there, Snow on the Mountains knew, the ceremony must be finished.

  Real silence followed and he knew that, despite his purification, evil was all around. Chanting, he waved his feather in a circle around him, collecting negative energy, sweeping the evil spirits from the ancient holy place. He hurried to the jar, shook the feather into it, then clamped the lid down. He loudly and violently threw up dispelling whatever evil had escaped. He returned to the abyss and began his chant anew. He raised his voice and waved his feather. He made a second trip to the jar to shake his sacred feather clean and purge his stomach of residual evil… and Snow on the Mountains heard them. He had known in his heart they'd been there all along watching, moving, preparing their attack.

  “You waste your energy.” The deep voice, speaking in the language of the Shoshone, seemed to echo from the darkness of the abyss, from the doorway to the Underworld. “Your energy and my time, shaman. Your kind failed before. You fail now.”

  Snow on the Mountains carried no weapon save the small knife always on his hip. He reached for it then and felt the sting of a half dozen small arrows pierce his right leg. The pain shot into his brain like a lightning bolt but he bit his tongue rather than scream. As he withdrew his knife from its sheath, a chorus of vengeful shrieks erupted from the darkness all around and a half dozen more arrows pierced his other leg. Snow on the Mountains crumbled to the ground as the screeching intensified. Growling, shouting, hissing, and wailing filled the air as more and more arrows pierced his body.

  The moon was now high in the midnight air and the shadows of every rock and bush and tree transformed into a demon racing in his direction. The creatures lit upon Snow on the Mountains with vengeful abandon, pounding him with clubs and rocks, ripping his flesh with knifes and spears, tearing at his organs with their teeth. They howled at their victim, at each other, and at the darkness itself. In the end, his shame returned as Bill Pope realized he, too, had failed.

  His screams were drowned by the shrieks of Hell below Legend Rock. That was replaced by laughter rising from the abyss, a laughter the night alone heard.

  Chapter 31

  Before he died, Alice's father, Hridayesh, lived in a small four room house on the prairie two miles outside of the reservation town of Crowheart. As the Arapaho medicine man had no neighbors, save sagebrush plants, his place could be plainly seen from town. Not that it mattered. It wasn't much to look at from that distance; and didn't improve any upon approach. Two Ravens could vouch for that. He was approaching just then, in his old pickup, its bed overloaded as usual, against his better judgment.

  The late shaman's house had a simple slightly pitched roof with, originally, dark brown shingles and a wood slat exterior painted beige, both now faded and wind-blown to a dull brown and duller yellow. There were three metal framed windows in the front, two to the east side of a projecting six-foot-square screened entrance, and one to the west. The last time the outfitter had seen the place, plywood covered the window to the west. It shattered in a storm and had been boarded over but never replaced. Now, Two Ravens noted, scrap wood covered all of the windows. Weeds peppered the yard, jutting up helter-skelter from the ground like prairie dogs surr
ounding the place. The green tufts matched the recycling bin on its side against the house and represented the only real color in view. Otherwise, all was brown as dirt, as brown as Two Ravens' mood, as soiled as the day.

  A tiny satellite dish hung uselessly from the southwest corner of the roof gable. The driest clump of sage on the oldest brush plant on the prairie had more value. Two Ravens would bet real money the television inside hadn't been on once since the shaman had died. The only yard ornament was a waist-high post supporting a gray metal box and glass dome electric meter, the movement of the monitoring wheel inside would have been all-but imperceptible. But it did still move.

  Alice had, by definition, lived with her father at the time of his death. But, truth be told, neither the old Arapaho holy man nor the Ghost Dancer ever did anything with anyone else. She cleaned for him, and cooked for him, assisted him on the rare occasion when nobody else would do, and nursed him in his one (his terminal) illness from her real home, a small trailer parked on the far side of Hridayesh's house on a concrete pad at the top of their cracked driveway. As Two Ravens reached the house and turned into the drive, Alice's trailer came into view.

  The trailer was white, officially, but dirt blasted like every other man-made thing within a hundred miles and as brown and drab as the rest of the reservation at that time of the year. As absent of color, it occurred to him just then, as the Indian princess was of emotion. He parked and climbed out to stare unhappily at another object in the drive, the black and sunbaked 1990 two-door Chevy Camaro owned by the Loan Department of a bank in Jackson and operated by the oldest, tallest, and least friendly, of Alice's team of Ghost Dancers. Speaking of which…

  The door to the trailer came open and the towers, male and female, stepped from the trailer and stopped to stand on the drive on either side of the wrought iron stairs. The gatekeepers, male and female, followed, stopping on the stairs. Alice stepped into the doorway. As always she looked both incredibly gorgeous, now in jeans and a t-shirt, and decidedly unapproachable behind her quartet of dancers, her gang, and behind her scowl. For a long silent moment, the five of them stared at Two Ravens. Finally, Alice spoke. “What do you want?”

  “Bill Pope is dead.”

  “I know.” Alice said. She hesitated an instant, then added, “We know. What do you want?”

  “To talk with you.”

  “It's a free reservation.” Her chorus laughed. “Go ahead and talk.”

  Two Ravens did what he always did in Alice's presence, he stared at her. “I said,” he repeated. “I'd like to talk with you.”

  Alice hesitated again, considered, then nodded. “Do me a favor?” she asked her friends, without taking her eyes off of Two Ravens. “I'm low on sage, mugwort and sweetgrass if it's to be had. Run out for a few minutes, see if you can find any. This won't take long.”

  With a couple of suspicious looks at Alice, and a whole lot more at Two Ravens, the group did as their spiritual leader asked. They cleared the doorway, rounded the trailer, and headed away on foot into the prairie. Two Ravens watched them go then turned back to find Alice still watching him. He raised a brow, waiting for an invitation to enter. Instead, Alice squatted in the doorway, blocking it, and sat on the stoop with her bare feet on the second of the three steps. Then she raised an eyebrow herself in what was, apparently, the only invitation he was going to get.

  “I said that Snow on the Mountains is dead.”

  “And I said, I know. I've heard.”

  “But you don't care?”

  “How dare you? How dare you condescend to come all the way out here to ask that of me? Who are you to ask that?”

  “You said it yourself. It's a free reservation. Who must I be? And you didn't answer the question. Don't you care?”

  “I do care,” she said, with anger in her voice and fire in her eyes. “I've cared all my life for all the good it's done me.”

  “We're not talking about you.”

  “What are we talking about, John Two Ravens? Why did you pester me the other night with your so important white park ranger friend? Why do you come here to me now with your news? The Crowheart cemetery is full of dead Indians, many of them younger than either of us, yet I have no memory of you coming here to share your grief with me when each of them died. Now the medicine man of the Snake People is dead. And here you are. What was Snow on the Mountains to me? What is Bill Pope's death supposed to be to me, daughter of a disgraced and dead Arapaho holy man? What is any of it to me, daughter of nothing? Why have you come here? What do you want?”

  He hesitated. Now that the question had been asked, Two Ravens felt at a loss for an answer. “We need your help.”

  “We?” She sneered. “Who are we? The Shoshone?” Her sneer became a loud forced laugh.

  Two Ravens clouded, his lips tightened to a thin line. But he took a breath and shook it away. Anger, he knew, was not the way. He nodded instead. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, the Shoshone. More than that, the Arapaho. And more than that –”

  “Your friend? The Yellow Legs?”

  “Stop it!” Two Ravens took a step her way, then halted. No, anger was not the way. He took another breath and when he spoke again did so with calm. “There have not been any Yellow Legs since the end of the Reconstruction. The Indian wars with the Union are done. A century and a half is long enough to get over it.”

  “You should be ashamed.” Alice stood and grabbed the door frame with both hands. She seemed on the verge of either leaping out at him in attack or shoving herself back in retreat. Two Ravens wasn't sure which. But she merely stood there, gripping the frame while her fingers turned white. “Our people will NEVER get over it!”

  “Our people? I'm here because our people are in danger. I'm not talking about injuries a century old. I'm talking about real danger, threatening all of us, today. I'm talking about the arrival of a new evil come to conquer the Indians all over again. You're living in the past. You've lived your whole life in the past. I'm talking about today! I want to tell you about it because I know that you can help. If you can only see through your bitterness and anger, I know that you – above all others here on the reservation – can help our people.”

  She climbed down from the trailer and closed the door. “I have herbs to collect. I use them to help my people, sick Arapaho Indians. That's what I do with my herbs.” Barefoot, she started away after her gang into the open prairie. As she went, she shouted over her shoulder, “Sounds to me, Two Ravens, like you've been smoking yours.”

  Chapter 32

  “I caught a fish!”

  It was an interesting statement from someone who wasn't fishing and, in fact, wasn't anywhere near water. The exclamation was made in a Yellowstone restaurant booth over diet sodas and poised lunch menus. Two out of the three listeners at the table understood perfectly.

  Alice's group of ghost dancers, her gang in some folk's eyes, tended to hang out when they weren't dancing and Alice was disposed to being alone. So there they were without Alice. At times like this, they also had a habit of getting into moderate levels of trouble. They were not criminals. They had no specific malice in their collective hearts. But having been raised among the poorest of the poor, at the same time being on display for passing tourists, they'd learned to appreciate where money could be found. They liked money a lot and didn't like tourists at all. Keeping in mind that, to their way of thinking, anyone who was not an Arapaho was a tourist, the situation left the field wide open for whatever deviousness came to mind.

  The group was in reality a pair of couples and they had latched onto Alice in the way that those outside of society's mainstream of acceptability often do. One, at first, then all, had gone to her for medicine and healing when the beads and rattles of the 'old ones' had gotten to be too much for them. They'd stayed for the friendship and philosophy. And they'd been all-in when Alice turned her anger and her knowledge of the Ghost Dance into a way to strike a blow for Indian liberty – by getting the whites to drop jingle in their pockets. “Le
t them pay and applaud,” Alice would say, “until the day we take it all back from them.”

  Bly and Cochise were the smaller pair, the gatekeepers. Bly, rather ironically, meant 'high' in their native language. How could her parents have known she would wind up so petite? Her dancing partner and boyfriend, Cochise, was really named Arnold Williams, but he didn't like that. His mother, renowned for her beautiful voice, spent months before his birth singing every baby name she knew and eventually fell in love with the simple high-low sounds of the syllables in 'Ar-nold'. She loved to call his name, “Ar-nold!” And always sang it.

  Arnold had grown to hate it. He met a young Apache at a Pow Wow, became emotionally drunk on the colorful exploits of Cochise, and borrowed the name of the great Apache leader. From then on, like Abeque insisting on being called 'Alice', he insisted on 'Cochise'. His mother, if you're wondering, still sang “Ar-nold!” when she wanted him.

  The taller pair of dancers, the towers, were Elina and Bodaway. The name Elina meant 'pure' or 'intelligent'. The latter was quite possible; she was usually quiet and, therefore, seemed smart. The former, if rumors mattered, was highly doubtful. Bodaway had seen to that. Bodaway was the eldest of the quartet and the title holder on the black Camaro that got the group around. He rarely spoke, giving the impression he too was a deep thinker, but his name meant 'Firemaker'. Do with that what you will.

  There was no doubt about it, when she was around Alice led their group. But when they weren't in the Ghost Dancer's presence it was feisty little Cochise who found devilment for them to do.

  That's apparently what he'd done when he joined the ghost dancers, minus Alice, in their booth at the Old Faithful restaurant. Despite the lack of pole or tackle he said, “I caught a fish!”

  As usual, of the four, Bly looked perplexed. “You're not talking about fish, are you?”