The Gorgon Field (2 page)

And now Charlie was driving the last miles, according to the map, which had turned out to be much better than the road maps he was used to. Deborah had offered to have them met by the company helicopter, which could take them all the way to the house, but Constance had refused politely and adamantly. She would walk first. The scenery was breathtaking: sheer cliffs with high trees on the upper reaches, piñons and stunted desert growth at the lower elevations, and, watered by the runoff of spring, green everywhere. All the peaks gleamed with snow, melt water streams cascaded down the precipitous slopes, and it seemed that the world was covered with columbines in profuse bloom, more brilliant than Constance had dreamed they could be.

At the turn they came to next, they were warned by a neat sign that this was a dead-end road, private property, no admittance. The woods pressed closer here, made a canopy overhead. In the perpetual shadows, snow lingered in drifts that were only faintly discolored. They climbed briefly, made a sweeping turn, and Charlie braked.

“Holy Christ!” he exclaimed.

Constance gasped in disbelief as he brought the Cadillac to a stop on the side of the mountain road. Below was the Valley of Gorgons. It looked as if a giant had pulled the mountain apart to create a deep, green Eden with a tiny stream sparkling in the sunshine, groves of trees here and there, a small dam, and a lake that was the color of the best turquoise. A meadow was in the center of the valley, with horses that looked like toys. Slowly, Charlie began to drive again, but he stopped frequently, and the houses and outbuildings became more detailed, less doll-like. And finally, they had gone far enough to be able to turn and see for the first time the sandstone formations that had given the valley its name. It was late afternoon; the sunlight shafted through the pillars. They looked like frozen flames—red, red-gold, red with black streaks, yellow… . Frozen flames leaping toward the sky.

The valley, according to the map, was about six miles long, tapered at the east end to a blunt point, with two leglike projections at the western end, one of them nearly two miles long, the other one and a half miles, both roughly fifty feet wide, and in many places much narrower. The lake and several buildings took up the first quarter of the valley, then the main house and more buildings, with a velvety lawn surrounding them all, ended at the halfway point. The meadow with the grazing horses made up the next quarter and the sandstone formations filled the rest. At its widest point, the valley was two miles across, but most of it was less than that. The stream was a flashing ribbon that clung close to the base of the cliffs. There was no natural inlet to the valley except for the tumbled rocks the stream had dislodged. A true hidden valley, Constance thought, awed by the beauty, the perfect containment of a small paradise.

Deborah met them at the car. Close behind her was a slender young Chicano. She spoke rapid Spanish to him and he nodded. “Come in,” she said to Constance and Charlie then. “I hope your trip was comfortable, not too tiring. I’m glad you’re here. This is Manuel. He’ll be at your beck and call for the duration of your visit, and he speaks perfect English, so don’t let him kid you about that.” Manuel grinned sheepishly.

“How do you do?” Constance said to the youth. “Just Manuel?”

“Just Manuel, señora,” he said. His voice was soft, the words not quite slurred, but easy.

Charlie spoke to him and went behind the car to open the trunk, get out their suitcases.

“Please, señor,” he said, “permit me. I will place your things in your rooms.”

“You might as well let him,” Deborah said with a shrug. “Look.” She was looking past them toward the end of the valley.

The golden globe of the sun was balanced on the highest peak of the formations. It began to roll off; the pillars turned midnight black, with streaks of light blazing between them too bright to bear. Their fire had been extinguished and the whole world flamed behind them. No one spoke or moved until the sun dropped behind the mountain peaks in the distance and the sky was awash in sunset colors of cerise and green and rose-gold; the pillars were simply dark forms against the gaudy backdrop.

Charlie was the first one to move. He had been holding the keys; now he extended them toward Manuel, and he realized that the boy was regarding Constance with a fixed gaze. When Charlie looked at her, there were tears in her eyes. He touched her arm. “Hey,” he said gently. “You okay?”

She roused with a start. “I must be more tired than I realized.”

“Si,” Manuel said then, and took the keys.

Deborah led them into the house. The house kept changing, Charlie thought as they entered. From up on the cliff, it had not looked very large or imposing. The bottom half was finished in gray stone the color of the granite cliffs behind it. The upper floor had appeared to be mostly glass and pale wood. Above that, a steep roof had gleamed with skylights. It had grown as they approached, until it seemed to loom over everything else; none of the other buildings was two stories high. But as soon as they were inside, everything changed again. They were in a foyer with a red-tile floor; there were many immense clay pots with greenery; trees, bushes, flowering plants perfumed the air. Ahead, the foyer widened, became an indoor courtyard, and the light was suffused with the rose tints of sunset. The proportions were not inhuman here; the feeling was of comfort and simplicity and warmth. In the center of the courtyard was a pool with a fountain made of greenish quartz and granite.

“Father said it was to help humidify the air,” Deborah said. “But actually, he just likes it.”

“Me, too,” Charlie agreed.

“It’s all incredible,” Constance said. They were moving toward a wide, curving staircase but stopped when a door opened across the courtyard and a man stepped out, leaning on a gnarly cane. He was wearing blue jeans and a chamois shirt and boots. His hair was silver.

“Father,” Deborah said, and motioned for Charlie and Constance to come. “These are my friends I mentioned. They got here in time for the sunset.”

“I know,” he said. “I was upstairs watching, too.” His eyes were on Constance. They were so dark, they looked black, and his skin was deeply sunburned.

Deborah introduced them. He did not offer to shake hands but bowed slightly. “
Mi casa es su casa,
” he said. “Please join me for supper.” He bowed again and stepped back into what they could now see was an elevator. “And you, of course,” he added to his daughter, and the door closed on him.

“Well,” Deborah said with an undercurrent of unease, “aren’t you the honored ones. Sometimes people are here a week before they even see him, much less have a meal with him.” She gave Constance a searching look. “He was quite taken with you.”

As they resumed their way toward the stairs and started up, Constance asked, “Does he have rheumatoid arthritis?”

“Yes. Most of the time it’s under control, but it is painful. He says he feels better here than anywhere else. I guess the aridity helps.”

The courtyard was open up to the skylights. On the second floor, a wide balcony overlooked it; there were Indian rugs on the walls between doors and on the floor. It was bright and informal and lovely, Constance thought again. It did not surprise her a bit that Carl Wyandot felt better here than anywhere else.

Deborah took them to two rooms at the southeast corner of the house. There was a spacious bathroom with a tub big enough to lie down in and float. If they wanted anything, she told them, please ring—she had not been joking about Manuel being at their disposal; he was their personal attendant for the duration of their visit. Dinner would be at seven. She would come for them shortly before that. “And don’t dress up,” she added at the door. “No one ever does here. I’ll keep on what I’m wearing.” She was dressed in chinos and a cowboy shirt with pointed flaps over the breast pockets, and a wide belt with a huge silver buckle.

As soon as she was gone and the door firmly closed, Charlie took Constance by the shoulders and studied her face intently. “What is it, honey? What’s wrong?”

“Wrong? Nothing. That’s what’s wrong, nothing is. Does that make any sense?”

“No,” he said bluntly, not releasing her.

“Didn’t you feel it when we first got out of the car?” Her pale blue eyes were sparkling; there was high color on her fair cheeks, as if she had a fever. He touched her forehead and she laughed. “I felt something, and then when the sunset flared, it was like an electric jolt. Didn’t you feel that?”

“I wish to hell we were home.”

“Maybe we are. Maybe I’ll never want to leave here.” She spoke lightly, and now she moved away from his hands to go to the windows. “I wish we could have had a room on the west side. But I suppose he has that whole end of the house. I would if it were mine.”

“It’s just a big, expensive house on an expensive piece of real estate,” he said. “All it takes is enough money.”

She shook her head. “Oh, no. That’s not it. All the money on earth wouldn’t buy what’s out there.”

“And what’s that?”

“Magic. This is a magic place.”

They dined in Carl Wyandot’s private sitting room. Here, too, were the decorative Indian and Mexican rugs, the wall hangings, the pots with lush plants. And here the windows were nearly floor to ceiling, with drapes that had been opened all the way. He had the entire western side of the second floor, as Constance had guessed he would. When she saw how he handled his silverware, she knew Deborah had been right; they were being honored. His hands were misshapen with arthritis, drawn into awkward angles, the knuckles enlarged and sore-looking. He was a proud man; he would not permit many strangers to gawk.

The fifth member of the party was Ramón. Thirty, forty, older? Constance could not tell. His eyes were a warm brown, his face smooth, his black hair moderately short and straight. He had a lithe, wiry build, slender hands. And, she thought, if she had to pick one word to use to describe him, it would be
stillness
. Not rigidity or strain, but a natural stillness. He did not fidget or make small talk or respond to rhetorical questions, and yet he did not give the impression of being bored or withdrawn. He was dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved plaid shirt; in this establishment, it appeared that only the servants dressed up. The two young men who waited on them wore black trousers, white dress shirts, and string ties. They treated Ramón with perhaps a shade more reverence than they showed Wyandot.

Charlie was telling about the day he had run into one of the arsonists he had put away, who was then out of prison. “He introduced me to his pals, told them who I was, what I had done, all of it, as if he was proud. Then we sat down and had a beer and talked. He wasn’t resentful, but rather pleased to see me again.”

Carl Wyandot nodded. “Preserving the order of the cosmos is always a pleasing experience. He had his role; you had yours. But you can’t really be retired after being so active, not at your age!”

He was too shrewd to lie to, Charlie decided, and he shook his head. “I do private investigations now and then. And Constance writes books and does workshops sometimes. We stay busy.”

Deborah was the only one who seemed shocked by this disclosure.

“Actually, I’m planning a book now,” Constance said. “It will deal with the various superstitions that continue to survive even in this superrational age, like throwing coins into a fountain. That goes so far back that no one knows for certain when it began. We assume that it was to propitiate the Earth Goddess for the water that the people took from her. It has variations throughout literature.”

“To what end?” Carl Wyandot asked. “To debunk or explain or what?”

“I don’t debunk things of that sort,” she said. “They are part of our heritage. I accept the theory that the archetypes are patterns of possible behavior; they determine how we perceive and react to the world, and usually they can’t be explained or described. They come to us as visions, or dream images, and they come to all of us in the same forms over and over. Civilized, educated Westerner; African native who has never seen a book—they have the same dream images, the same impulses in their responses to the archetypes. If we try to bury them, deny them, we are imperiling our own psyches.”

“Are you not walking the same ground that Carl Jung plowed?” Ramón asked. He spoke with the polite formality of one whose English was a second language, learned in school.

“It’s his field,” Constance said. “But it’s a very big field and he opened it to all. His intuition led him to America, you know, to study the dreams of the Hopi, but he did not pursue it very far. One lifetime was not long enough, although it was a very long and very productive lifetime.”

“Did he not say that good sometimes begets evil? And that evil necessarily begets evil.”

“Where did he say that? I don’t recall it.”

“Perhaps I am mistaken. However, he knew that this inner voyage of discovery can be most dangerous. Only the very brave dare risk it, or the very foolish.”

Constance nodded soberly. “He did say the brighter the light, the darker the shadow. The risk may be in coming across the shadow that is not only darker than you expected but larger, large enough to swallow you.”

Ramón bowed slightly. “We shall talk again, I hope, before your visit comes to an end. Now, please forgive me, Don Carlos, but it is late.”

“Yes, it is,” the old man said. “Our guests have had a very long day.” One of the servants appeared behind his chair; others seemed to materialize, and the evening was over.

“Thank you, Mr. Wyandot,” Constance said. “It was a good evening.”

“For me, as well,” he said, and he looked at Ramón. “You heard what he called me. Please, you also, call me that. It sounds less formal, don’t you agree?”

Deborah walked to their room with them. At the door, she said abruptly, “May I come in and have a drink?”

Someone had been there. The beds were turned down in one room, and in the other a tray had been brought up with bottles, glasses, an ice bucket. Charlie went to examine the bottles and Constance said she wanted coffee. Deborah rang, and it seemed only an instant before there was a soft knock; she asked Manuel to bring coffee and then sat down and accepted the drink Charlie had poured for her.