Darkwind: Ancient Enemy 2 (34 page)

She picked up an old sexton from one of the shelves, studying it for a moment.

“I’ve collected some old science equipment years ago,” Joe said as he walked back into the living room. David was drinking a glass of tea as he walked over to the couch. He set the glass down carefully on the coffee table that was cluttered with books.

“You want to watch TV?” Joe asked David.

“Yes, please,” he answered.

Joe pulled a blanket down off the back of the couch and fluffed up some pillows for David. “Lay down here,” he said as he turned the TV on. “It’s satellite TV, not the most reliable, but let’s see what we can find on there.” Joe flipped through the channels until he came to an animal show, something about animals on the African plains.

“You two can help yourself to some coffee or tea,” Joe told Stella and Cole as he set the remote control down on the edge of the coffee table. “It’s there in the kitchen if you want it.”

“Thank you,” Stella said. She followed Cole into the kitchen which was at the front of the trailer. She fixed herself a cup of coffee. The coffee smelled strong, and she thought that both of them might need it.

After David was settled in the couch, tucked down into the blanket and stretched out, his shoes on the floor beside him and the dog on the floor right beside him, Joe came into the kitchen. He took a bowl of what looked like loose herbs and lit the concoction with a lighter. A pungent but not unpleasant smell came from the bowl. He took the smoking bowl and a large eagle feather to the front door and waved both of them slowly over the door as he chanted under his breath. The chanting sounded like a mixture of talking and singing.

“You think that’s going to work?” Cole asked.

Joe walked back into the kitchen and set the burning bowl of herbs back on the counter near the coffee pot. He slid the eagle feather back into a hook over the sink. “It can’t hurt,” he said as he turned around to look at Cole. “I’ve been performing
The Enemy Way
ceremony for the last few days.”

“What’s that?” Cole asked.

“It’s a ceremony to ward off evil spirits, ghosts, and demons,” Stella told Cole. “It’s the opposite of the healing ceremony called
The Blessing Way
.”

Joe just nodded and stared at her. “I could feel something out of balance for at least a week now. A disharmony in nature … an evil that was approaching.”

“Is that how you knew we were out there?” Cole asked.

“Billy Nez sent a friend of ours to come see me not too long ago. He told me what happened to …” Joe glanced into the living room at David, and then he looked back at them and continued in a low voice. “He told me what happened to David’s parents and what happened at the dig site. He asked if I could help. I told him I would do what I could. So I knew you were coming tonight. When you didn’t get here …” He let his words trail off.

Stella crept back into the living room and looked at David. The German Shepard looked up at her from the floor, watching her.

David looked like he was already asleep, breathing deeply. He was so exhausted, so traumatized by what had happened so far. He might be the key to their survival, to many people’s survival, but he was still just a kid who got tired, a kid who couldn’t stay up for two days straight like she and Cole could. He needed some more sleep. He needed to rebuild his strength … and rebuild his power, wherever that came from.

Stella walked back towards the kitchen and stopped and looked at another piece of science equipment.

“I used to be a scientist,” Joe said as if Stella had asked a question. “A theoretical physicist.”

“I remember someone telling me that,” Stella said, joining them in the kitchen.

Joe gestured at the small table and chairs in the kitchen. “Please … sit.”

Cole sat down near the wall with his hands wrapped around his steaming cup of coffee. Joe sat at the head of the table facing towards the living room, and Stella sat down on the other side of the table.

“I’m sure you’ve heard stories and rumors about me,” Joe said to Stella.

“Yes. I heard you were a scientist, but then you gave it all up to come back here to become a medicine man.”

Joe nodded. “I came back here for a certain reason.”

Joe Blackhorn’s home

“W
hen I was young,” Joe Blackhorn said, “the Diné culture was drilled into me. I resisted it; I knew there was a huge world outside the Rez and I wanted to explore it. So many of my family, especially the elders, looked at me like I was a traitor to my people for wanting to leave, like I was some selfish bastard who was willing to turn my back on my people and their ways. They promised me that I would only get hurt if I went out there into the white man’s world and became indoctrinated into the white man’s ways.”

Joe took a sip of his tea, thinking for a moment.

Stella glanced at Cole. She could see he was impatient to find out what they were going to do about the Ancient Enemy roaming around out there in the darkness somewhere, but she didn’t rush Joe Blackhorn.

“I had tired of what I called the mumbo-jumbo of my culture,” Joe continued, “of the fear and suspicion they lived with and the depression and apathy I sometimes saw. But I was young then. I was seeing everything through a young man’s eyes … a
selfish
young man’s eyes. I got a scholarship from the government to go to college, some kind of program to help Native Americans or something, and I enrolled at Arizona State.”

“I went to Arizona State,” Stella said.

Joe just nodded, but he didn’t look very impressed with the coincidence. “I think I was there a few decades before you were. And it was a different time then. People weren’t as tolerant to other cultures as they are now. But I toughed it out. I learned and I got a degree in quantum physics and a minor degree in molecular biology. Of course I explored other sciences while at college and afterwards, but I wanted to learn how things worked. There was so much I wanted to learn, and I sought it all out.”

He paused for a moment, taking another sip of his strong tea, and then he continued. “After college I worked for a research company in Phoenix. But I learned rather quickly that sometimes science can be a whore sold to the highest bidder. I began to realize that as a scientist I didn’t work on whatever project I wanted to … many times research projects were funded by either the government or large corporations. And believe me, they expect certain results when they’re shelling out the money; they expect data to be skewed their way. You learn to play along with their rules or you get thrown out of their private club. You don’t buck the system or you get ridiculed. You don’t ask questions, you just accept their beliefs like dogma. I began to realize that the pursuit of knowledge of new truths wasn’t cultivated like I thought it would be. I had this fantasy of scientists discovering things like the great scientists of the past had done: Newton, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Plank, Einstein—scientists who discovered things for the good of all humans, scientists who sought out the truth.”

They were all quiet for a moment. Stella looked at Cole who gave her a grin. “I’m afraid this is a little over my head.”

“I’m sorry,” Joe said. “I’m going off on one of my little tangents about the scientific community.”

“No,” Stella said. “I understand completely. I’ve run into roadblocks along the way in my career. I’ve tried to challenge preexisting notions about archaeology and I’ve been met with the same skepticism and sometimes outright contempt for even daring to challenge the status quo. I’ve been laughed at and even threatened. I’ve always believed there were different reasons for the disappearance of ancient peoples than scientists were proposing; the disappearances of the Olmec, the Inca, the Maya … and the Anasazi.”

“And now you believe you’ve found an answer to your theories?” Joe asked.

“Unfortunately,” Stella answered. “And this is a truth I don’t want to share with the world.”

“I’ve learned over the years that some secrets are kept from people for their own good,” Joe said. “I’ve learned that if many people knew some of these truths, then those truths would shatter their conception of what the world around them is really like.”

Joe sighed and shrugged like none of it mattered anymore. He took another sip of his strong tea. “The more I learned about physics,” Joe continued while still looking down at his cup of tea, “the more I realized that there are so many things we don’t know about even if the scientific community pretends that it does. What is matter built of? Why do the smallest particles blink in and out of existence constantly?”

“Is that true?” Cole asked.

Joe nodded.

Cole looked at Stella for her opinion and she nodded at him, agreeing with Joe.

“Atoms make up all matter,” Joe said.

Cole nodded, indicating that he knew at least that much.

“Well, atoms are made up of even smaller particles: protons, neutrons, electrons, quarks, neutrinos, photons, etcetera. But when we study some of these smallest particles, they are here one moment, then gone, then back again. This world around us that seems so solid is made up of all of these tiny particles that are here and then not here and then here again.”

Cole looked a little queasy at the prospect of that.

“This gives the theories of different dimensions plausibility,” Stella said.

“Exactly,” Joe said, coming to life a little, getting a little more excited. He seemed to like having someone to talk about science with. Even though he claimed to loathe the politics of it, he seemed passionate about pure science and discovery. “The idea of different dimensions used to be science fiction, but now it’s almost universally seen as science fact.”

“Different dimensions?” Cole asked. “Like where that thing out there comes from?”

Joe remained silent.

“Where did this thing come from?” Stella asked Joe.

“I don’t know,” Joe finally answered. “I can admit when I don’t know something, unlike many scientists. I believe the Darkwind could be from a different dimension or even an alien. I have my theories about it.”

“What are your theories?” Stella pressed.

Joe didn’t answer right away. He leaned his head back a little and sighed, looking up at the ceiling for a moment like he was lost in thought. “After I saw the corruption of science, the weaponization of it sometimes, I yearned to come back home. I yearned for the stories of my people, of my land, the place where I felt at home. Now, some of those stories told by elders that I had scoffed at before didn’t sound so ridiculous to me after learning about the disappearing particles, the Big Bang, the expanding universe, and all of the other things I was forced to accept as scientific truth. I came back and became a
yataalii,
a medicine man. I learned from an uncle and studied as hard as I ever had in college. I learned that this world we live in isn’t the only world there is. There are other worlds all around us, intertwined with us … scientists call these different dimensions. Many scientists believe there are at least eleven different dimensions, and some believe in an infinite amount. Most of the time these worlds are separate from ours, and the barriers between the worlds are strong. But sometimes, under the right conditions, doorways in these barriers can be opened. And there are people, those who are born with certain powers, who can open these doorways whether they realize it or not.”

“People like David.”

“Yes,” Joe said. “Like David.”

“But David doesn’t realize this yet,” Stella said. “He doesn’t fully understand the power he has.”

“David could be causing this, too,” Cole said. “Isn’t that right?”

Stella glared at Cole—she didn’t like that line of thought from him that he seemed to be stuck on.

“In a way,” Joe answered. “Maybe he’s helping to open a doorway for the Darkwind.”

“But not controlling it,” Cole said.

“Not really. But in a way they might be controlling each other, feeding off each other’s energy, driving the other for a while.”

Joe took another sip of his tea and sighed. “I believe that in these other worlds, these other dimensions, there are monsters there—true shapeshifters, true demons, the things we see in the shadowy corners of our nightmares. I even believe that some of us catch a glimpse of these monsters in our nightmares when the barriers between our world and their worlds are the thinnest and the weakest.”

Joe looked at Cole, then at Stella. “You ever have a nightmare that you woke up from that scared you so badly but you didn’t know why? Your heart is pounding in your chest, your skin covered with sweat. You’re tense, ready to run. You try to remember the dream but all you get are fragments of it. Maybe you hear the voice of the monsters in your mind, a scrambled and garbled message like a thousand words mixed together, like a thousand whispers. But for a moment in your dream, you understood those voices, you understood those ancient words, and you understood how everything in the universe worked, how it all fits together.”

Stella felt her skin crawl at the thought of it.

“But then the rational mind takes over,” Joe said and smiled a humorless grin. He took a sip of his tea.

The wind howled outside the trailer, a strong gust rocking it just a bit.

That’s not the wind,
Stella’s mind whispered. It’s that thing out there screaming at us in frustration, calling us, threatening us.

“The rational mind protects you,” Joe said. “It’s designed to protect you, to shut down the memories of your glimpse into their world. There are weak spots between our world and so many other worlds … their world. The Hopi used to call them sky holes, dimensional portals. And beyond those portals was a dark world they called ‘the ocean of pitch.’ I call them weak spots, and I think these ancient things can get through sometimes when those doors are opened.”

“And someone like David can open the door,” Cole said.

“David has already opened the door.”

“Can he close it again?” Stella asked.

“I hope so,” Joe muttered. “Only he knows how to close it even though he may not realize it yet.”

The wind shrieked outside again, a blast of it rocking the trailer. They were all quiet, all of them looking into the living room at the front door.