The Shadowkiller (11 page)

B
en sat up in the bed and the cheap head-board dug into his back until he got one of his pillows into the right position. Lighting a cigarette, he muted
Meet the Press
and looked out from his room in the Comfort Inn over the flat expanse bordering the Columbia River. A United 757 emerged from a gray cloud bank on its approach to Portland International, and Ben acknowledged it was a typical late November day for Oregon. He had shot a TV movie here a few years before and the weather was just like this, except it was May. He remembered Oregonians liked to brag—or despair—that they had webbed feet.

Ben had only a shred of a notion why he was here. He had blown in and out of Eureka so fast, not really thinking about where he was going—other than it was going to be north—that his explanation to poor, sweet Doris had been thinner than thin. He had met her questions with a lot of incomplete thoughts and equivocation, and when they had kissed good-bye, her confused, maybe even frightened look didn't make him feel any better.

He tried to sort between what happened sixty years ago and the dream that had been replaying lately. He was beginning to wonder if the event he so vividly remembered was really just that—a dream. He puffed his cigarette and tried to unearth the real events by sifting through visions and personal mythology, straining to separate hard truth from the fiction of memory. Old, old memory.

He reminded himself that this was something that,
if it really happened,
happened a long time ago:
before
VJ Day, before television, before Orson Welles was fat, let alone dead. Sometimes he felt that after nearly eighty years his brain was worn out. Then he'd surprise himself by being just as sharp as when he was twenty.

But did this happen? This dream chase that at times seemed so real…

Did it happen?

Why had he thrown away a good paycheck, maybe even damaged his credibility,
his career.
Why had he jeopardized so much on this whim? Sure, he had SAG insurance and a great pension and would never be out on the street, but Doris was the loose cannon that kept Ben constantly worrying about money.

His wife of fifty-three years was a very sick woman. Like a zombie under the most pernicious mind control, poor Doris sat in their living room all day long, staring dutifully, even compulsively at their Zenith television. It was a special television, a television manufactured in the Twilight Zone, a receiver that seemed to carry only one station: the Home Shopping Network.

Doris wielded Visas and MasterCards like Hank Greenberg handled a bat, and though Ben had put his foot down many times, she'd go right back to buying with abandon. Ben eventually had to rent a large self-storage unit to house all of her acquisitions. When Ben called the credit card companies and asked them to reduce their limit, they did—but then turned right around and approved her purchases that went over limit and charged exorbitant over-limit fees. He finally gave up, partly because he loved her, but partly out of pity.

On top of that, a few years back, Doris had involved them in a real estate investment scheme that had gone very bad and cost them a boatload of money. Ben had made a small fortune over the years but had never been a great financial manager. Doris's habits had made a sizable dent in their nest egg. Ben still joked that he was probably the only guy who lost money in the real estate boom.

Doctors at the dawn of the baby boom had told Doris she would be unable to bear fruit, and her answer to the theft of her motherhood had been to become a spendaholic. They had considered adoption but Ben seemed to be on location more than he was at home and the timing was just never right. Ben had plenty of guilt about certain parts of his life and most of it centered on Doris. He wasn't sure how he could have changed it for her but felt he might have done better, tried harder.

He found himself lighting another cigarette and as he did so, it hit him again. The subconscious Indian inside his head, the
real
Indian, whispered another message:
Quit.
Only this wasn't a quit-because-it's-bad-for-you message, it was something far more profound. Somehow Ben understood he had to quit because he was on his way to battle and needed his strength. He stubbed out the fresh cigarette as the voice told him to focus on his task.

Purify your mind, your body.

But I'm damn near eighty,
he shot back at the inner voice.

Doesn't matter. To beat it you must be strong, you must be clear of head, strong of limb. There aren't exceptions.

Ben wondered if he was losing his marbles, but this voice seemed so damn clear…and familiar. The words were as loud in his head as if he were wearing a Walkman. Ben grabbed the pack of cigarettes on the nightstand. Before he could talk himself out of it, he went into the bathroom and threw them in the toilet. The powerful torrent from the motel toilet swept the cigarettes away, and it suddenly became clear how he would play this: pure instinct. He would trust his intuition, operate by gut feelings.

Then the voice spoke again.
Use your inner eye to take you to that which you seek.

Ben hadn't thought of that term “inner eye” since he was a kid. Now he was wondering if he was hallucinating.

The voice came again.
Use it, find it, it's there…What you want, what you need is within…and all around.

Ben's father had been a stubborn, pragmatic man who never much believed in Indian mysticism, dismissing it as a romantic construction of white men to entertain themselves and to assuage their guilt for what they had done to his people. But Ben's grandfather had been a spiritual man and, when Ben's father died in a hunting accident, he took the boy under his wing. He treated young Ben not only as a son but as a student, teaching him things that today would fall under the esoteric realm of metaphysics. Ben's grandfather explained to him that there was much about the world we didn't understand, but we had all the tools necessary to do absolutely amazing things: we just had to trust they were there and let them work.

Your inner eye will take you…

He got up, walked over to the window, and opened it. A rush of heavy, chilled air rolled in and passed over his feet. He took a deep breath, scanned the horizon, then closed his eyes. He put all thoughts of Doris and filmmaking and credit card bills out of his head and tried to focus. Though he'd been just ten when his grandfather first showed him how to send his mind out, the knowledge soon came back to him as if the instructions had been given the day before. For fifteen minutes he stood there, settling himself, leveling his mental power on the words of his grandfather.

“Turn your eyes in, Benjamin, turn them in. Find your clarity, seek a oneness with all things. When you find it, you will have the key in your hand, and you will be free. Your mind is your spirit eye, your eye of true sight. Use it the way it was truly intended and you will see everything.”

Now in an instant he was ten again and felt his grandfather at his side.

After a few more minutes of concentration, the cold bite of the window air had vanished and the mental effort lifted like a weight. He felt a peace that he couldn't have experienced as a child or younger man and he knew that it was an essential element of making this work. Ben's thoughts multiplied and soon the images in his head—places, faces, bits of his life—were racing, faster and faster like a speeded-up film, until the images blurred. Then, despite the incredible speed at which they were moving, he began to divine a pattern, or more accurately,
an understanding.
It was as if thoughts were taking identifiable forms and shapes in his mind, like letters to a reader, but in Ben's case he was reading, with complete understanding, a language he hadn't known ten minutes before. It was a language of pure thought, some sort of elemental truth, the unlocking code for which was either already in his mind, lying dormant, or was something he somehow conjured.

Ben's mind swirled and sparkled with flashes of light like metallic confetti tossed past a strobe light. The image clarified and suddenly he had the sensation of flying, climbing, transcending time and space. Weightless, bodiless, he first let the vision carry him, enjoying for a few moments the sensation of flying without benefit of a machine. Then he found he could exert control over this journey, to give it a purpose. He could now see his dark dreams, the thing in the forest chasing him, off to the side of the main field of view, and he consciously pushed his thoughts to take him to whatever it was he had been sensing, the thing that was drawing him to it.

His journey through space and time made a turn as if it had somehow gotten the scent, and it now bore him north, through clouds, rain squalls, even snow. Then he burst into blue sky, the sun actually hurting his dream eyes. Below him spread an endless forest, white-capped mountains, alpine lakes, dirt logging roads…

He swooped into a valley, flying low over the crowns of towering hemlock and fir, his inner eye registering minute detail. To Ben all forests had their own characteristics, even personalities, like people, and this forest was not in Oregon, he knew that, and it wasn't in British Columbia, he'd worked on location there four or five times. No, but this forest was somewhere north and near a big city. He knew that too; he
felt
it.

His mind eye swooped down into the trees and dodged around huge trunks, through the soft, filtered light at the forest's floor. He knew he was still in his hotel room, but in another way he wasn't. He knew he was going somewhere, swept along by these mystical winds, his mind as open as it had ever been. He was being taken or taking himself, he didn't know which, but he let it go, allowing this crystalline daydream to play out.

Cresting a ridge, he plunged, like one of those dizzying Imax shots, into a steep ravine and leveled out over a creek, emerald green from snow runoff. Along the rocky banks he flew, down the middle, maneuvering the twists and turns like a helicopter. As the surrounding walls steepened, and the morning light just didn't have the energy to go that deep, his visual clarity dropped. But the vision was so vivid it took his breath away. He also could sense his hands hanging on to the window frame but he felt displaced from them, like his body was in one place and his consciousness was somewhere else.

Around a corner, passing over a bend in the stream that had accumulated a tangle of driftwood amidst a natural cairn of river rock, he saw a shape ahead, the form of a person standing in the rippling water. But as he drew near, he knew it was not a man. In that dim light at the bottom of the canyon, surrounded by forest that came close to the water's edge, this huge shape turned and in an instant he saw its face…

Not human…

Oh-Mah.

Its eyes found his…and its thoughts were—

Ben's eyes jerked open, wrenching him back from his journey. In the safety of the hotel room he instinctively looked for a cigarette and remembered they were gone. He sat down on the edge of the bed, shaken less by his success at hurtling his consciousness out of his body than by having connected with this creature. And this one was just like the thing that once chased him. In that short contact it had all come back. What happened sixty years ago was no dream and he knew what he had to do next.

He took deep breaths to get his pulse back down. Rattled not only by the vision but by the certainty of what it was and what it was doing—and would continue doing—and with the image of the beast's surprised, rage-filled face burned into his mind, Ben also knew he would need all the help he could get.

He knew he must continue north. While still at Paramount he had understood that his answers lay in the north, but now he was dialing in
where
in the north he was going. Seattle. This thing was near Seattle. How exactly he knew that he wasn't sure but when he pictured flying into Seattle, something felt right.
Remember, you're on instincts now.
This creature, this Oh-Mah was near there and Ben's future was tied to it.

After a few moments he had gathered himself enough to make plans. First, he needed a base of operations, so he phoned his nephew David, an IT technician who lived with his wife and two little girls south of Seattle in Burien. David not only idolized his uncle but also shared Ben's interests in myths and legends. David was thrilled Ben was coming and said he'd get Ben's room ready immediately. Ben then called the airline and booked the next flight to Sea-Tac Airport. He knew what he was heading toward and it was no movie effect, no guy inside a suit working armatures. This was all too real, and though it scared him, it thrilled him too. And what thrilled him was being an Indian again—something he'd left on his own cutting room floor so many years ago. No more could he deny it was in his blood, and that blood was compelling him north to a meeting with his past and with his destiny…whatever that might be.

The vision of the old, small two-leg had been strong, so much so, he turned and looked down and around the creek for it. He felt it, its mind voice. It was old, it was different. It was one of the small two-legs the elders told of. The special ones who could hear his mind voice as he heard theirs. The ones who lived in the forest, the ones who named him and his kind. He had learned that long ago but it had never mattered until now.