Overheard in a Dream (52 page)

“There’s lots of trees down there, Conor,” Becky said and pointed into the abyss below them. “If you kind of stretch yourself out over the rail, you can see lots of trees at the bottom.”

Leaning far over the guardrail, Conor stared into the dusk of the deep basin.

“Why did you want to show Conor this, Daddy?” Becky asked.

“I know,” Morgana replied. “’Cause this is where the man under the rug lives, isn’t it? Huh, Dr Innes? This is the place Conor always talks about.”

Before James could answer, Conor nodded. “Yes,” he said.

James heard the car engine from a long way off. At first it hardly penetrated the antediluvian silence that lay over the vast landscape. It was just a faint drone, like a fly trapped beyond a window pane.

Then Becky said, “Someone else is coming to see this place at night.”

“Hey! That’s
our
truck,” Morgana shouted.

James’s blood ran cold.

Before the car had even pulled into the car park, Morgana was charging up the steps from the viewpoint with Becky and Mikey in hot pursuit.

“Becky! Kids!
Stop
! Come back here.” Grabbing Conor’s hand, James bolted up the steps two at a time to catch the children. James could see Laura at the wheel of the truck and two rifles in the gun rack on the rear window of the pick-up cab. “Kids, get in my car.
Now
. All of you.” He pushed Becky in the direction of the Jeep. “I mean it. Get in and lock the doors until I say.”

“No, it’s just my mum,” Morgana replied.

“Yes, I know it is. But do as I say. All right? Just for now. Conor, you too. Get into the car, lock the doors and stay there until I tell you.”

“Why?” Becky cried

“
Do it.
”

Laura turned the engine off but left the headlights on. For several moments she remained in the cab and didn’t get out. James, trapped in the glare of the headlights, stood staring at the guns silhouetted in the rear window of the cab.

Finally the truck door opened and Laura descended onto the asphalt. “What the hell is going on?” she asked, her voice tense. “What are you doing out here with these kids?”

She didn’t have anything in her hands from what he could tell but she wasn’t moving away from the open door of the truck, so James put himself between Laura and the children in his Jeep.

“Laura, I
know
,” he said as quietly as he could manage.

“Know what?”

“About Fergus. It
is
Fergus, isn’t it?”

“I don’t have a fucking clue what you’re talking about.”

“The man under the rug. The ghost man.”

“Don’t get crazy on me, James.”

“I’m not.”

“Morgana?” she called out. “Can you hear me, sweetie? Get out of the car. Get Conor and come here. It’s time to go home.”

Behind him, James heard a door of the Jeep open and then a second door.

“Morgana, don’t move. Kids? Everyone. Just stay there a moment,” James said. “Get back in the car.”

A numbing calm overtook him. It made all his senses more acute. He could hear birds – owls maybe? – calling far distant across the darkness. He could smell the sharp, cold, sagebrush-scented evening air mingled with the lingering odour
of petrol fumes from the pickup’s engine. He was aware of his feet growing cold. Everything felt detached and unreal.

Around them a most terrible silence grew. Although he couldn’t see them because his back was still to the Jeep, James could sense the children were out of the car, but no one moved and the moment felt eternal.

Then abruptly a shriek from one of the children. “
Conor!
”

James whirled around to see Conor disappear over the guard rail and down the steep embankment.

Becky screamed.

Laura tore past James and around the Jeep to the railing.

Morgana flapped her hands in fright. “It was his cardboard thing,” she wailed, “that cat he keeps in his pocket. He took it out and it came out of his hands and –”

His mechanical cat. The small drawing that Conor had made in the playroom drifted gracefully on an updraft from the chasm below.

Beyond the guard rail Conor had slipped almost immediately on the soft, crumbly soil and then slid about fifty feet down the steep side of the ravine before catching himself on the slope. He remained there, spreadeagled, crying in fright.

Laura vaulted the rail in a single, smooth motion and began sliding down the unstable soil.

“
Laura
! Wait! We need to get help.”

“I know these hills,” she shouted up. “I’ve been up and down them a million times.”

Before Laura could reach Conor, however, his grip gave way. He slid and then tumbled, disappearing over the edge of the outcrop below the viewpoint. To James’s horror, Laura started to slip too and before he could react, she too had disappeared down the steep gully.

“
Mummy
!” Morgana started screaming.

James had seen the rope coiled up with Lars’s other hunting equipment in the back of the Jeep. It was just ordinary nylon rope meant for tying deer to the vehicle, but it was rope.

With trembling hands he fastened it around one of the posts holding the guard railing. He tugged at it several times to make sure it was secure and then climbed through. Knotting it every few feet so he’d have something to grip, he said to the children, “Okay, you three, you stay right here. I mean it. Don’t move from right here. Becky, you’re the oldest. You take care of Morgana and Mikey for me, all right? No fooling around. You’re the grown-up now.”

Cautiously he lowered himself down the steep slope. Clearing the jagged ledge of soil abutting the viewpoint area, James could just make out Laura below him in the wan, moonlit darkness. She was about a hundred feet further down into the ravine, but still far above the floor of the basin.

“Laura?” he called.

She moved. Despite the moonlight, it was too dark for him to be able to tell if she was injured or not.

“Are you all right?”

“Conor’s hurt,” she called up. “Can you get to us?”

James lowered himself to the full extent of the rope but it wasn’t nearly long enough. He remained at least seventy feet above them on the crumbly soil, his weight held by the rope. He’d long since gone from fear into a kind of numbness that left his mind detached and his limbs not feeling wholly like his own, so he hung there over the ledge and contemplated how to get the rest of the way down. In the end, he just opened his hands and let go.

There was an eerie loneliness to being caught without support on the steep hillside. He could no longer hear the children above, and all around him was the alien landscape, illuminated only by hazy moonlight. James grappled at the crumbling white soil. To his surprise, he didn’t fall when he let go of the rope but remained just where he was.

Immediately, this felt worse because he realized he would actually have to launch himself to get down to where Laura was. He took a long, deep breath, which made him aware he had not been breathing properly for ages. Taking in a second deep breath, he expelled it slowly.

To his surprise, what came to his mind was Torgon. For a fleeting moment Laura’s descriptions of the high holy place in the Forest, of Torgon standing at the edge of the white cliff and looking out over her world filled James’s mind brightly, and he had a momentary sense of being somewhere else. It helped. Briefly distracted, he felt calmer. Gently he pushed against the loose soil and let himself slide downwards.

Laura’s fall had been stopped by a flat ledge and with careful effort James was able to reach her with nothing worse than scrapes on his knees. Laura hadn’t been as lucky. She had removed her shoe and sock from one foot and was using the sock to bind her other foot.

“I’ve done something to my ankle,” she said. Her voice was hoarse with annoyance.

“Where’s Conor?”

“There.”

James peered over the edge of the outcropping to see Conor directly below them. “Is he hurt? Conor? Can you hear me?”

The boy looked up but he didn’t respond.

“Do you have a belt or something?” Laura asked. “Something I can hang onto so I can let myself down over this ledge?”

“No, Laura, don’t. You’re injured already.”

“If I can get him, I can lift him up to you.”

“And what if you can’t? Then you’re both trapped there. Instead, we need to get you back up and then go for help.”

“And leave him here? No. This is my son.” She looked at James. “And it’s my fault he’s down there on that ledge. Because yes. The man under the rug was Fergus.”

A brief moment of surreal awareness flooded James. She was a murderess. She had killed a man. He’d expected everything to change with that confirmation. It didn’t. He didn’t hate her. He didn’t fear her. He didn’t perceive her as evil. All he felt was sadness.

Laura had bits of debris from the fall in her hair. Gently James reached across and pulled a broken stalk of prairie grass out. He flung it away and it fluttered downwards into the basin.

“On that last night, when Alan was gone and I was alone, he raped me. But when it happened, I knew it wasn’t going to stop there. Sooner or later, he was going to kill my child. Maybe me.

“I knew where Alan’s hunting knife was. So I thought,
Fergus, I’ve passed up greater destinies than yours. I’m not going to let it come to this
… So I did what Torgon did.”

“Then Conor appeared at the top of the stairs and suddenly what I’d just done became very real. I felt utter panic. I screamed at him to go back to bed, to get out of there so he wouldn’t see. All I could think to do was wrap Fergus’s body up in the rug by the fireplace. I got it out to the truck, but I
had to take Conor with me. I couldn’t leave him in the house alone. The only place I could think to go was here, to the Badlands. I’d come to know this land so well when I was working on the Pine Ridge reservation. I knew no one can see into the bottom of most of these ravines.”

“And you thought none of this would affect Conor?”

“He was hardly two. I hoped it would be nothing but a bad dream to him.”

There was silence. Confusion flooded over James, as he considered her plight alone on the isolated ranch, fending off Fergus, trying to protect her small son set against the years of trauma in the aftermath of murder.

“Give me your belt,” she said, her voice soft. “I’m going down.”

James hesitated.

“I mean it. Whether you help me or not, I’m going to get him.”

James took off his belt. “All right.”

Laura leaned over the ledge. “Are you ready, Conor? Mummy’s coming for you now.”

T
he roar of helicopter blades sliced through the chilly stillness. Spotlights parted the darkness and within moments the steep slope was swarming with rescuers. Lifted carefully onto a stretcher, Conor was winched up into the helicopter hovering above. James watched the paramedics examine Laura’s injuries and prepare her to be moved. Then finally they came up the slope to him and he was helped into a safety harness too and lifted from the hillside.

The viewpoint and its adjacent car park were alive with activity when James alighted from the helicopter. Conor and Laura had been whisked away to the hospital in Rapid City, but he hadn’t been injured in the incident. He brushed off the attentions of the paramedics to reach the three children.

“It was me and Morgana who called them!” Becky said excitedly. “Morgana’s folks got a radio thing in their truck and, guess what? I turned the truck on all by myself so we could use it!”

“When we get home, I want to phone Mum,” Mikey said, “and I’m going to tell her we had an adventure and you rode
in a helicopter! And you’re a hero, aren’t you, Daddy? ’Cause you saved that little boy and his mum. Just like Spiderman! I can tell everyone you’re a hero!”

“I don’t feel like much of a hero, buddy.”

“We
did
have an adventure,” Becky said. “And we can tell Mum that me and Morgana called the helicopter guys all by ourselves.”

“Yes, and I’m very, very proud of you. All three of you were very responsible.”

“Well, not Mikey,” Becky said. “Know what he did? He peed over the side of the rail. I told him not to. I told him to go into the bathroom like he was supposed to, but he did it anyway.”

“Guess how far this boy in my class can pee, Dad,” Mikey said.

“Come on, you two.” Reaching Lars’s Jeep, James opened the door. “In you go. Let’s get back to town. You too, Morgana. You come with us. Your dad’s going to meet us at the hospital.”

Turning the Jeep out of the car park, James stepped on the accelerator. The car park – brightly lit with emergency lighting – faded in the rearview mirror. They plunged into the brittle moonlit March darkness.

Mikey fell asleep even before James had passed the park entrance. Becky was soon flopped over the top of him asleep by the time they reached the interstate. Only Morgana, sitting in the front passenger seat beside James, remained awake.

She had her elbow braced on the door armrest, her cheek in her hand, and she stared out into the darkness. James glanced
furtively at her, trying to reconstruct from her dark features what Fergus must have looked like.