A few things remained constant. The earth under his feet, the sky overhead, the road down which he could drive. For centuries there had been tales of other worlds, and people had read them or listened to them or watched them on The Twilight Zone, interested and amused but never taking them very seriously.
It was always an amusing subject for casual conversation among friends, and offered room for speculation. Occasionally there had been stories of mysterious disappearances, usually explained away with bored amusement by some scientist with too much else on his mind.
To deal with the expanding world around us was quite enough. Mike Raglan found no place in his thinking for yet another dimension, for a world here, right alongside our own. He was not mentally prepared to deal with it. He could understand the possibilities without knowing any more about the physics of it than the average man who can’t explain how his television set works.
Mike Raglan did not want there to be another dimension. He did not need one. He was having trouble enough dealing with the three he had. Yet he remembered primitive people with whom he had dealt who accepted such ideas, who did not even think of them as a cause for wonder. Often their language could cope with such ideas with no adjustments whatsoever, and the same was true of their thinking.
What of the Australian aborigines and their “dream time”?
Mike picked up the daybook. Reluctantly, hesitantly, he turned the pages to where he had stopped reading.
Immediately, I gathered what was important to me. My plans, notebooks, and the few books I’d brought along for reading. A half-dozen books I would leave, for one day I might return, briefly at least.
It is not easy to see a dream die, and this home upon the mesa was a dream I’d had since boyhood. Suddenly, reluctant to go, I glanced around.
And there she stood.
VI
My first impression was that she did not look like a girl who would leave a sunflower on a man’s table, nor put one behind a dog’s collar.
My second impression, simultaneous with the first, was that she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.
She stood just outside my door in the sunlight. Her hair was very black, parted in the middle and done in two knots on the back of her head. Her skin was the color of old ivory, her eyes very large and dark.
The next thing of which I was aware was Chief. He was growling, but uncertainly, as if confused. At once I realized this could not be the person Chief had permitted to touch him.
She motioned, indicating I should follow, so I stepped to the door and watched her walk to the kiva. With a walk like that she had no need to beckon.
Yet I hesitated. Chief was holding back, pressing against my leg as if to prevent my going. There was something here he distrusted, and rightly so. She paused at the kiva’s edge to look back. When she saw me still standing in the ruin’s door, she beckoned again. I shook my head. For an instant I thought I glimpsed a flicker of irritation on her face, but it might have been my imagination.
Beautiful she certainly was, yet “striking” might have been a better description. However, there was about her a subtle sense of evil, of foreboding. Despite her beauty, every sense in me warned me I should shrink from her, that I should draw back, that here was evil.
Her clothing seemed to be of the same material as the cardigan left me by the girl of the sunflowers, but of finer thread, figured with an Indian motif, but much more sophisticated than any American Indian garment I had seen. She wore turquoise jewelry of the finest quality.
“You have fear? Of me?”
Her voice was low, a lovely sound, holding a little of invitation, a little taunting.
Unwittingly, not knowing what to say, I said the wrong thing.
“I must wait. I have builders coming to work on my house.” My gesture took in the area.
“No!” Her tone was strident. “There must be no one! No one, do you comprehend?”
“I am sorry. This land is mine. I shall build a home here.”
“What do you say? The land is yours? All land belongs–” She broke off suddenly. “Come!” Her tone was imperious. “I show you!”
“I cannot,” I repeated.
From her manner I gathered she was not accustomed to refusal, but in this situation she was obviously uncertain how to deal with it. “Now! Come, or you will be sent for. You will bring the wrath upon you.”
A moment she hesitated. Then she descended into the kiva and disappeared.
Instantly I had the impression that I should get away, as far, far away as possible, and as quickly as it could be done.
Ten minutes later, this book tucked into my pocket, I was hurrying down the trail. My four-wheel-drive vehicle was waiting at the end of the road not far away, a rarely used trail. I had almost reached it when somebody hissed at me from a clump of rocks and juniper.
Turning sharply, I faced a slender, lovely girl with a sunflower in her hair.
“No! They wait for you! You must not go!”
“What do they want from me?”
“They wish nobody here! They take you. They get from you all. Then they kill.”
“Who are you?”
“I am Kawasi. I am runaway. They find me, they kill.”
“But you speak English?”
“I speak small. Old man tell me words.”
“But she spoke English, too. The other one.”
“They have four hands people who speak. No more.”
“Four hands?”
She held up her hands, closed her fingers, then opened them. Four hands, twenty people.
“We go now. I show.” Turning quickly, she went down through the rocks, rounding a boulder into an ancient path, steep and narrow, that led down to the river. In the shadow of the cliff, she hesitated. “You must cross river or wait until darkness and float down to great lake.”
“What will you do?”
“I go back–if I can. It is not always. Only through kiva is always, that not possible for me.”
“You come through at another place?”
“It is a sometime place. Only sometime.” She gestured. “Long time past my people live all about here. Bad times come. Much dry. Wild, wander-about people come. They fight us. Take our corn. Some people walk away, some go back to old place, where we come from before. Much evil there.”
“But you are not evil.”
“I am not. She is. She has very high place. We fear. You fear, too. You sleep with her, you die. She is Poison Woman.”
“Are you Indian?”
“What is Indian? I do not know ‘Indian.’ ”
“Your people lived here? Where?”
“Nobody live here. Special to gods. Priests come to plant witch plants on this mesa. My folk live far away. Big cave, many house. On other side we have big house, many rooms. Here all fall to pieces, I think.”
Cliff dwellers? They could have been. The Hopi had a legend they had come into this world through a hole in the ground. Might it have been from another dimension? From what some called a parallel world?
“And your people now?”
“Over there. Many are gone. They are slaves or dead. It is evil, over there.”
“You spoke of the woman who came for me as a ‘Poison Woman.’ What did you mean?”
“From childhood they fed on poisons. Not enough to kill, but enough to make free of poison. They special to the gods. Their flesh is soaked with a poison from secret herbs. They do not die, but any man who lies with them dies. When a man has an enemy he sends a Poison Woman to him.”
Until it grew dark we hid among the rocks and juniper, and although searchers came close they did not find us. Then we worked our way east by old trails, scarcely seen in the night.
Friday. I have returned. I have escaped them for the moment. I have hidden what was possible, and a map as well.
Mike, if you get this, for God’s sake, help us!
Kawasi urged me to cross the river but I was sure we could escape them without that. We were more than twenty miles from a paved road and I wanted one more attempt at my Jeep. Under cover of darkness we got close. Nobody seemed near. Leaping into the Jeep, I thrust my key into the ignition and the Jeep roared into life. There was a shout, a rush from the darkness, but the car leaped forward. I struck a man across the face and we were away. A mile down the road we turned into another track.
Town, when we reached it, was more than sixty miles away and safe, or so I believed. We ate in a small restaurant, almost at closing time. Kawasi asked many questions about the cafe, cars, buses. I explained about ordering meals, buying tickets and clothing. Taking money from my pocket, I gave her a hundred dollars and some change. “If anything happens to me, get my book to Mike Raglan at Tamarron.”