Thief Of Souls

was magic. The town scoffed at him in the light of day. But when someone was deathly ill, it was always Radio Joe they wanted spilling sands on their floor, and evoking the ancients in the secret dark of night.

At times like this, when the distant sky burned, and Radio Joe called on the spirits, Lara and Jara began to feel that eerie sense of magic, thick as the smoke on the wind.

“He’s louder than usual,” said Jara.

Lara turned to look out of the window where they could see Radio Joe, sitting before the small fire on his lawn. He shook the ceremonial spices to the left and right; he wailed and invoked; he danced and stomped around the flames, and it did seem as if the flames grew higher as he tended them with his ritual.

“The crash must have really spooked him.”

The fact was, it was hard not to be spooked by it. The plane had come roaring right over their heads, be­fore it disappeared over the canyon’s edge. And al­though Jara and Lara rarely left the confines of their home, tonight the brother and sister strode out to speak to Radio Joe, leaving behind the strange, twisted foot­prints that can only be made by conjoined twins.

***

It was rarer than rare. Impossible, if you believed the experts. Siamese twins born male and female. In every other way they were identical. The survival of conjoined twins usually depended on their level of con­junction. Jara and Lara were severe thoracopagus. They had four legs, but the two central ones were withered and useless. The bones of their hips were fused, and they shared a liver, a pancreas, and a confused intes­tinal tract. Both their hearts were separate and strong, free from defects; but since their bloodstreams were connected, the two hearts often fought one another, like two drums beating out disparate rhythms.

Hospitals had offered to separate them for free years ago, but their parents both feared the dangers of the operation, and despised charity, so they refused those early offers. Then, as the twins grew, all those excited surgeons found other projects, and so Lara and Jara ultimately fell into the canyon of the forgotten. In times past, conjoined twins were killed at birth. Western medicine used to call them “monsters” before the ad­vent of modern compassion. In spite of it Jara and Lara always tried to see beyond their hardship. Sometimes it was a blessing, to be able to be so close. To almost know the other’s thoughts. To share more than most others on earth. But there were only three people who could look at them and not see freaks. Their mother, their father, and Radio Joe.

***

“The spirits spoke to me tonight,” Radio Joe told them, as they warmed themselves around his fire. Lara and Jara grinned at one another.

“Was it AM or FM?” asked Jara. The old man often told tall tales to local children, of spirits that spoke to him through the radios and TVs he repaired.

“No. This time for real.” He closed his eyes and offered an open-palmed chant to the flames.

“What did they sound like?”

“They came in the voice of the mountain lion,” he told them. And even as he said it, they heard the gut­tural roar of the great cat somewhere close by.

The twins pulled themselves up quickly, but Radio Joe didn’t stir. He opened his eyes, and turned slowly to look up at them. The fire painted a stroke of madness in his ancient eyes. “They called for you,” he said. “You did not quest after your spirit. So your spirit has quested after you.”

In truth few of the teenagers in town went on vision quests anymore. Radio Joe never missed an opportunity to rebuke them for it.

The roar came again. It sounded strange—different from roars they heard before. It sounded more powerful than other lions. There was a lion that had attacked a woman a few weeks before; surely this was the same one. With most of the neighborhood gone, the twins knew they would have to take care of it. How surprised the others would be when they discovered that the freakish pair had dispatched the troublesome cougar.

“Are you going to shoot it?” asked Radio Joe.

“Once it’s had a taste of human blood it won’t stop,” said Jara. “It has to be destroyed. I know it’s not what you believe but—'

“Use my rifle,” Radio Joe said. “It’s in the shed.”

***

Tonight the world seemed to end at the rim of the canyon. As the twins stood there, gazing out across the great expanse, they could still see an orange glow far below, on the canyon floor. Smoke from the smoldering wreckage had blown to the canyon wall, filling the space beneath the cliff with a haze lit pale blue by the gibbous moon.

They had followed the strange roars of the mountain lion to this spot—and although they could catch hints of its gamy scent, the smell of smoke masked it as they neared the rim.

They looked down into the pit of the canyon.

“Do you think it went back down?” asked Lara. And the answer came as a single earth-shaking roar behind them.

It awakened in them a searing terror, and they real­ized at this awful, vulnerable moment that they feared death far more than they had imagined.

They turned in a ballet-smooth motion to see not one, but four mountain lions stalking toward them, out of the shadows of the Arizona night. Their mouths were covered with the fur and blood of their latest kills.

Jara raised his rifle but did not know which creature he should aim at. “Don’t move,” Jara said.

There was something about these beasts that was not right. It was the way they walked—their paws stepping in perfect unison as if they were all reflections of the same beast. And it was common knowledge that moun­tain lions did not hunt in packs.

The quartet of beasts opened their mouths to roar, and only now did the twins understand why the sound had been so strange. It had been the sound of all four of them roaring at once.

Backed against the half-mile drop to the canyon floor, Lara and Jara knew their lives were about to end one way or another. But the lions stopped ten feet away and held their position. Dark eyes fixed on the twins. Perhaps they were confused by the sight of Siamese twins, or perhaps it was something else. Out of no­where, a voice spoke to them.

“I understand now.”

The twins heard the voice, but it was as if the voice had originated deep within their own minds.

“I understand.” This time the thought had come from the direction of the great cats. Although Lara didn’t pretend to understand all the mysticism of the old ways, she felt sure this was a vision— the kind Ra­dio Joe often spoke of. The kind of vision that opened the door to one’s destiny.

Jara, on the other hand, wasn’t so convinced. He held the rifle on one of the creatures, unwilling to let his guard down.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“Completion,” said the four voices. “Mine and yours.”

“We don’t believe in animal spirits,” said Jara.

“I don’t think that’s what they are.” Lara raised her hand and pushed down the barrel of Jara’s gun.

“What are you?” demanded Jara.

“I am nothing, ' said the voices. “I am nothing with­out you. Because you are the point of focus. You are the one.”

Although the twins did not yet understand the full implication, the truth of it rang deep within them. The suggestion of them being at the focus of anything was a powerfully charged notion. They had lived so much of their lives in hidden anonymity, that it was more than just their curiosity that was piqued. It was a call to their souls.

“What do you mean?” the two asked in unison.

But they didn’t need to ask, because they implicitly knew. Jara and Lara were the point of focus. That meant that these creatures had not arrived here by ran­dom means. They were directed here by an ordered series of events. Then an image flooded the twins’ minds, and they instantly saw how these creatures came to be.

The bacteria aligned.

A powerful force injected perfect order into the river’s current, and the bacteria aligned!