Mad Dog and Englishman: A Mad Dog & Englishman Mystery #1 (Mad Dog & Englishman Series) (18 page)

“The Cheyenne universe is divided into the visible world in which we live and the invisible world of spirits. The visible world is further divided into three parts, the world above, the world below, and the middle world—the place where people live and interact with plants and animals. There’s a whole pantheon of gods, or spirits if you prefer, of varying power and influence on day to day life. I won’t bother going through them because it serves no purpose as regards your particular question.

“What is important, is the nature of the individual soul. The Cheyenne basically believe that every living thing has a soul. Many non-living things too, such as certain mountains, the directions, the sun, the moon…but I’m getting off into that pantheon I was going to avoid. Essentially, that which lives has a form, a body—a shell in which it exists while it is alive—and a soul or spirit that is released when life ceases. Among the pantheon are spirits that oversee the souls of these life forms. They are a kind of supra-spirit, a great wolf spirit for wolves, a great buffalo spirit for buffalo, a great Cheyenne spirit for people, and so on. These oversee the spirit lives of the souls of creatures that are not currently living.”

Bowen shut his eyes for a moment. “The first fallacy of your reasoning, Mad Dog, is yourself. To my understanding, the Cheyenne doubted that White People, whom they called spiders, had souls. Thus, while they would have conceded there was some sort of over-spirit to watch out for the souls of other Native Americans, even enemies, they thought the White Man had none to be guided. When Whites died, they simply ceased to exist.”

Mad Dog pulled the Saab into the Texaco and found a parking space behind the building near where Bowen’s car sat, still attached to a battery charger. He kept his engine running and the air conditioner straining as he turned in his seat to give the professor his full attention.

“Pardon me, I should correct a possible misconception there,” Bowen continued. “I use the term White Man generically to include the forces of Western Civilization in general. Thus, Hispanics and Mexicans would be included, as would Orientals and people like me, African Americans—Buffalo Soldiers, for example were just Black White Men to the Cheyenne. That is, they were not people. They had no souls.

“Now, by your own admission, you are no more than one quarter Cheyenne and it is possible that, though you almost certainly are descended from the people, you could be less than that quarter. Since you were not raised into Cheyenne culture, I think that very probably makes you a non-person, a White Man, according to traditional Cheyenne standards, and therefore an individual without a soul and thus, by definition, incapable of contact with the souls of Cheyenne or spirits existing within the Cheyenne invisible universe. However….”

“Ah ha!” Mad Dog pounded the steering wheel in delight. “I knew there had to be a however coming up.”

“Yes, well,” Professor Bowen took a deep breath. “That was then and this is now. I understand that the Cheyenne world view has evolved and reconsidered that particular tenet. It’s not that they have become, like so much of the modern world, more politically correct. That wasn’t what led them to decide that non-people, that is the non-Native American population of the rest of the world, might have souls after all. Rather, Cheyenne religious leaders have begun to encounter representatives from that world with whom they feel a certain kinship, people in whom they recognized shared views and behaviors that give evidence of the great life force, that same soul, that makes a Cheyenne a human being.”.

Bowen rapped his knuckles against the Saab’s dash and paused to give it an accusatory stare. He had the habit of gesturing flamboyantly when he addressed an audience and there just wasn’t enough room in the front seat of a Saab.

“But not everyone. You have to give the Cheyenne credit there. Theirs is hardly an evangelical belief system. They look at that immense mass of humanity that threatens to overflow our globe and they do not reach out to embrace them. All men are not brothers, or even humans. There are simply too many people, and not enough souls to go around. It’s like comparing buffalo with cattle and sheep. Buffalo have souls, cattle and sheep do not. They are domesticated animals, as are, Cheyenne theologists would argue, most of humanity, even including some modern Cheyennes. There are only so many souls available. The rest of us are just animals like those sheep and cattle. We’re just meat. Given all that, still, I will have to admit, Mad Dog, that there is a chance that modern Cheyenne spiritual leaders would accept the possibility that you might have a spirit that is separate from your living form, and, therefore, a tool through which you might contact or manipulate spirits within the Cheyenne invisible realm. However, again….” The professor raised his hand as if to ward off interruption and further marshal his thoughts.

“First, while I would not rule out the possibility of the existence of that invisible realm, and, in fact, I rather admire the rationale for its authenticity, I remind you that there is no independent empirical evidence for its existence. Much like any religion, it must be accepted as a matter of faith.

“Second, it is a faith in which you do not have sufficient knowledge or training to expect, on your first try, to be able to make contact with some malevolent spirit within that world and allow it access into this, our physical world. Such a spirit, in other words, might well exist and have the power to affect us, but it would have no need or use for someone such as yourself, other, perhaps, than as part of some sort of cosmic joke.

“And third, even if you are right and I am wrong and, in an effort to outrage some local citizens and make fun of their own religious beliefs, you were somehow able to make that contact and inadvertently become an instrument of its evil actions, it is now operating within the visible world and it is within that visible world that you will most likely have to find the opportunity to confront and defeat it.

“Finally, if you are, despite all outside appearances, a natural born shaman who, quite casually has been able to release this evil into the world, then you are probably the only one who is also capable of finding a way to suppress and destroy it. In other words, there’s no point in listening to me or trying to explain it to your brother or anyone else because they won’t believe you and they won’t be able to help you. You must simply decide for yourself what is right and what is not and then you must do what you must do.”

“Wow!” Mad Dog said. “A natural born shaman. You know, that just might explain it.”

Neil Bowen looked out the window and rolled his eyes, but he didn’t say anything because it was true. It just might explain everything.

***

Heather English drifted on the edge of consciousness. She was aware of the voice and she was aware of the pigeons, but neither of them seemed connected to her. The pigeons were cooing madly among themselves and the voice seemed to be cooing to her as well, but she didn’t understand what it or the pigeons wanted. She was still very sleepy. It was hard for her to concentrate and connect the words with each other and then connect the words with herself.

“I’ve got you now,” the voice was saying in a kind of soft monotone, almost as much to itself as to her. “You’re safe from her, at last. We’re both safe from her. For now, anyway, and before this is over you’ll be safe from her for good.

“My God, Heather, the things she’s done to us. Do you have any idea what it’s like to have your life swept out from under you, to be accused of atrocities too horrible to imagine, so horrible that everyone thinks there’s no way she could have made them up, no way that she might have some terrible tangled purpose all her own, and so they believe her and they don’t believe you and suddenly you’re not a member of society anymore? She turned me into a pariah, an outcast. I was an exile, even from the company of outcasts and pariahs. I’m something worse than any of them. I’m so detestable that thieves and murderers and rapists feel disgust for me, for the things they believe I did. For years, I had to live with them, locked up among amoral beasts who loathed me, who felt they could somehow diminish their own guilt by abusing me, causing me harm. Can you imagine that, my darling? Can you wonder that I detest her so? That I’ll do anything to save you, to save me, to save everyone from an evil only I can recognize?”

There was something in this that Heather, at some primal level, comprehended. Deep within her subconscious, part of her knew it was important to grasp this, to regain her senses, to resume some control over herself and her situation. By some massive force of pure will, she forced her eyes to flutter open. Shadows, and incomprehensible shafts of sunlight on which she could not clearly focus, greeted her, shapes as baffling as the sound of pigeons, or the voice. She seemed to be suspended high above a shadowy pit into which confused beams of light fell, failing to illuminate. There were ropes and cables down in that darkness, and great lengths of cloth that draped still further. She was lying on a slatted wooden platform, peering through the bottom rung of a railing, suspended between the shadows below and the light and the pigeons and the voice above. She had never seen a place like this. She didn’t recognize the voice. She could only decipher an occasional word and puzzle out its meaning and by the time she had done that, the voice was several phrases further along and the next word she understood was unconnected to the last. She tried to fathom it and the light and shadows swirled in her mind and the cooing and the crooning mingled and the crooning became a shushing sound, an insistent demand for silence just as she heard the terrible creaking of a mighty door. It was as if God himself were telling her to be quiet as he reached out to close the crypt in which she lay and commend her to the darkness she found again behind eyelids too heavy to hold open and consciousness too tenuous to maintain.

***

The Strand Theatre, like most of downtown Buffalo Springs, had long since been abandoned. Unlike many remnants of the city’s more prosperous past, it had not yet been torn down. The sheriff’s Chevy slid into the alley between Jackson and Van Buren Streets and stopped behind the windowless brick cliff that was the Strand’s backstage.

“Wynn some” came out of the passenger’s door with a borrowed .44 Colt semi-automatic at the ready. It had been a hard choice, Wynn or French, but the madman who’d taken his daughter was clearly after Heather Lane. If the man realized his mistake and got by the sheriff, she needed competent protection. That was not Wynn. Wynn, the sheriff finally decided, needed to be where he could keep an eye on him. French would escort Ellen and Heather Lane back to Sourdough Ranch and stay with them until relieved.

“Looks like they never got around to fixing that door,” the sheriff said. Wynn nodded, the sheriff had filled him in on what he’d learned from Ellen Lane on their drive from the courthouse.

The door was padlocked, but a piece of heavy equipment had torn it away from one of the bottom hinges, leaving an opening a kid like Ellen Lane could have slipped through with ease. It was a struggle for the sheriff, but he was just trim enough to squeeze in, and found himself rewarded for his effort. A motorcycle was parked only a few yards inside the door that could evidently be swung quite a bit wider if necessary. Heat still radiated from the machine’s manifold, not that the sheriff had any doubt that this was the means by which his Heather had been stolen away.

“I can’t get through,” Wynn complained. He was shorter and rounder than the sheriff, evidence of a slower metabolism and a weakness for desserts.

“Quiet!” the sheriff hissed, not that Wynn had spoken above a whisper. “Wait in the alley if you can’t get in. I’m going to take a look.”

It was dusky and silent inside the abandoned theater. Dimmer than it might have been, with Wynn stuck in the damaged door, blocking most of the sunlight. There were no windows to supplement the hot flash of brilliance that spilled around Wynn and across floorboards warped by heat and rain and snow and a Kansas wind that had sandblasted them nearly every day since the door was originally damaged.

The motorcycle sat among curtains that, at first glance, seemed plush and expensive. As the sheriff’s eyes adjusted, they turned out to be just ancient and dusty.

There must be windows somewhere because the power to this building would have been shut off for years and yet there was enough light to reveal a confusion of boxes and spotlights and cables, even a few pieces of what must once have been scenery stacked against the rear wall. The source of that light seemed to be high overhead in the loft above the stage. Shadows hung up there amidst poles and ropes and pulleys, but through them an occasional shaft of light tentatively probed the gloom.

More curtains separated the stage from the theater’s auditorium, but they were in no better condition than the ones hanging beside the motorcycle. Through occasional gaping tears the sheriff could see the empty trough that had once been an orchestra pit and rows of vacant seats sporting stained and tattered fabric. Abandoned, the theater had taken on the aspect of a set itself, the perfect place to search among phantoms of operas long past for a modern murderer, a frighteningly real villain given to torture and mutilation and the abduction of the sheriff’s young daughter.

The dust was everywhere, and it was through the dust that the sheriff trailed his quarry. The footprints of a small man wearing athletic shoes whose outline looked familiar covered the stage. One set was different than the others, made broader because of the heavy burden it carried. They led across the boards, weaving their way through a forest of drapes and between a complex topography of boxes, all of it spotted with the droppings of a flock of pigeons whose cooing, far above, provided the only sound the sheriff could hear.