Daniel Hecht
Land of Echoes
1
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.
