world, filled with alien energy, or a holy Indian spirit that had
walked out of the high mountains in search of the ancient nations once
in dominion over the vast Montana wilderness but long lost:
Blackfeet?
Crow, Sioux, Assiniboin, Cheyenne.
He raised his left hand to examine it more closely. His skin was
transparent, his flesh translucent. At first he could see the bones of
his hand and fingers, well-articulated gray-red forms within the molten
amber substance of which he seemed to be made. Even as he watched, his
bones became transparent too, and he was entirely a man of glass, no
substance to him at all any more, he had become a window through which
could be seen an unearthly fire, just as the ground under him was a
window, just as the stones and trees were windows.
The crashing waves of sound and the electronic squeal arose from within
the currents of fire, ever more insistent. As on that night in March,
he had an almost clairvoyant perception of something straining against
confinement, struggling to break out of a prison or through a
barrier.
Something trying to force open a door.
He was standing in the intended doorway.
On the threshold.
He was seized by the bizarre conviction that if the door opened while
he was standing in the way, he would shatter into disassociated atoms
as if he'd never existed. He would become the door. An unknown caller
would enter through him, out of the fire and through him.
Jesus, help me, he prayed, though he wasn't a religious man.
He tried to move.
Paralyzed.
Within his raised hand, within his entire body, within the trees and
stones and earth, the fire grew less amber, more red, hotter, entirely
red, scarlet, seething. Abruptly it was marbled with blue-white veins
to rival the consuming brightness at the very heart of a star. The
malevolent pulsations swelled, exploded, swelled, exploded, like the
pounding of colossal pistons, booming, booming, pistons in the
perpetual engines that drove the universe itself, harder, harder,
pressure escalating, his glass body vibrating, fragile as crystal,
pressure, expanding, demanding, hammering, fire and thunder, fire and
thunder, fire and thunder-Blackness.
Silence.
Cold.
When he woke, he was lying at the perimeter of the forest, in the light
of a quarter moon. Above him, the trees stood sentinel, dark and
still.
He was in possession of all his senses again. He smelled the ozone
crispness of snow, dense masses of pines, his own sweat--and urine. He
had lost control of his bladder. The taste in his mouth was unpleasant
but familiar: blood. In his terror or when he'd fallen, he must have
bitten his tongue.
Evidently, the door in the night had not opened.
