I do love the winding up part.
“Look at his face,” she insisted. “See the open mouth, the big eyes. It looks to me like he’s scared. And this guy, facing him. The dark clothes. Something in his hand.”
“Voldemort? Oops. Forgot. Not supposed to say it, right?”
The look again, only cranked up to eleven. Yes, this is our foreplay. Sad, but, hey, it works.
“I’m serious. I think there’s something there. Maybe a gun.”
I gave it another glance. It could be a gun. Then again, it could be pretty much anything you wanted it to be, given that the blob-like entity holding it was so far removed from what humans really look like, it made Picasso’s figures look like Normal Rockwell’s.
“Kids play soldier and cowboy and alien hunter all the time; that’s what boys do. So even if it is him . . . maybe that’s just him and something from some cartoon show or a friend of his, who knows. Could be anything.”
“So why was it on Michelle’s desk, among her papers, not on the kitchen wall or in his bedroom like the others?”
I didn’t have an answer for that—or, rather, I had way too many answers to that. Also, my brain was pretty much maxed out by real life. The fanciful flights of Alex’s imagination, sweet and charming as they were, would have to wait.
“I have no idea,” I simply replied, taking the drawings out of her hand and setting them down on the coffee table. I rolled over and crowded her against the back of the couch, and kissed her hungrily. Then I remembered where we were and pulled back. I stood up and held out my hand to her.
“Why don’t we discuss this in my office?”
As Tess followed Reilly into the bedroom, she couldn’t stop thinking about the drawing.
Maybe Reilly was right. Maybe she was reading way too much into it.
Problem was, the annoying little curiosity demon that lurked in the dark recesses of her mind was all restless and clamoring for her attention.
The demon was still bouncing around inside her as she locked the door behind her and felt Reilly turn her around and pin her against the wall. It definitely wasn’t on her mind for the next hour or so, but after that, as she fell asleep in his arms, it was back, front and center, running amok and demanding an audience.
28
Farther up the coast, a very different kind of demon was hurtling across an entirely different landscape.
Navarro was back at the secluded beachfront villa in Del Mar, sitting cross-legged on a polished teak deck beyond the pool house. The sea was a stone’s throw away directly in front of him and the low moon was bearing down on him like an interrogator’s spotlight as he just sat there, quiet and serene—on the outside, that is.
Inside, things were radically different.
He’d been at it for over an hour, sailing through tunnels of fire and abysses of endless darkness, diving and soaring and spinning through kaleidoscopes of color and fields of surreal visions from his past and his future.
He’d done it before, of course.
Many times.
For those who weren’t accustomed to it or who didn’t know how to tame it, the brown, sludgy concoction he’d ingested could have disastrous consequences, both immediate—vomiting, pissing on themselves, an utter conviction that they were dying, screaming and begging to be saved from a terror that seems unending—and longer term. But not for Navarro. He knew what he was doing.
He’d first taken this particular psychoactive brew in the highlands of Peru, long ago, and had been coached through its usage by a blind shaman. The lucidity it instilled in him was overwhelming at first, but he’d learned to focus it, and with each use it grew more effective.
He pulled back from the edge and burst into a field of blinding white light, and felt incredibly clear-headed. His breathing slowed right down, calmed by the inner peace that bloomed from deep in his core, and he opened his eyes.
He breathed in a big lungful of sea air and held it in for a long moment, relishing a newly awakened super- sensitivity to everything around him. The waves lapping against the shore, the crickets in the trees—he could even hear the crabs scuttling across the sand. And in his mind’s eye, he could now see things, ones he’d missed or hadn’t noticed, with exhilarating clarity.
The drug had worked like magic. Just as he knew it would. He’d been taught by the best, ever since his lifetime fascination with what ethnopharmacologists called the “sacred spirit medicine” had started in his early teens.
It was a fascination that had served him well.
For like all kids, Raoul Navarro grew up believing that magic existed. The difference was, he never stopped believing in it.
He grew up in Real de Catorce, a village of steep cobblestone streets and rundown Spanish colonial houses that sat perched on the side of a mountain in the one of the highest plateaus of Mexico. Built up and then abandoned after a silver-mining rush a century ago, Real’s saving grace was as the gateway to the Wirikuta desert, the Huichol Indians’ sacred peyote harvesting ground. It was a place where a penniless kid like Navarro could scrape together a few dollars by finding the elusive little peyote buttons that hid under mesquite bushes and selling them to
The experience was life-changing.
It taught him that the spirits were everywhere, watching his every move, and he decided he wanted to learn their ways.
He hung out with the shamans and taught himself to read, eventually devouring everything he could get his hands on, from the works of Carlos Castaneda to the writings of the great psychopharmacolo-gists and ethnobotanists. But as the real world proved to be a heartless, unforgiving place, he embraced the inevitable career option of so many of his peers and got sucked into the violent climb up the drug-trafficking totem pole—and found out he liked it. He didn’t only like it—he had a talent for it. And so, as his power and his wealth grew, he was able to indulge his fascination even more.
With his growing resources, he traveled across Mexico and then farther south, into the jungles and rainforests of Guatemala, Brazil, and Peru, where he befriended anthropologists and sought out isolated peoples that devoted as much time and energy to understanding the invisible realms of gods and spirits and the time- bending pathways to our pasts and futures as we devoted to figuring out the mysteries of global warming and nanotechnology.
Always seeking to open channels to new dimensions of consciousness and reach new heights of enlightenment, he spent a lot of time and money endearing himself to and worming his way into the trust of secretive tribal healers and shamans. Under their guidance, he experimented with all kinds of psychoactive substances and entheogens—mostly plant-derived concoctions that played a pivotal role in the religious practices of the tribal cultures he was exploring. He started with more easily accessible, local mind-altering substances like psilocybin mushrooms and
