Page 91 of The Forest of Lost Souls

TO THE GRAND PLATEAU

The three dogs are off leash, responding to voice commands when Sam finds it necessary to speak them away from distractions, which isn’t often. They seem psychic, as though channeling the desired destination from the humans who follow in their wake.

Close behind the dogs, Two Moon carries a collapsible shovel. Having left his backpack at the house because this hike will return them to the glen by nightfall, Sam totes a mattock. They aren’t on their way to a placer mine; however, what they might dig up could have more value than all the gemstones Vida has unearthed since her uncle taught her how to find sapphires and chrysoberyls and other small treasures.

Hiking behind the men, the women talk of Eternal Fawn and Ogden, both gone and yet as present as anyone in this procession. Sun Spirit learned of her grandmother’s first love only when Eternal Fawn was two days from death, having outlived her husband, Jim White Cloud, whom she loved but to whom she had never revealed that she obeyed her parents and broke off a relationship with a Wasicus whom she’d loved even more.

“She said she suffered no regrets,” says Sun Spirit, “although I’m sure I saw a honeyed sorrow in her eyes, a sweet and mournful wondering about what might have been. My grandfather Jim was a good man but closed on himself like night-blooming jasmine indaylight. I suspect your uncle Ogden opened his heart more easily than did my grandfather.”

“Wide open,” Vida confirms, “at all times.”

“For understandable but nevertheless wrong reasons,” Sun Spirit says, “my great-grandparents stood stubbornly against the truest of true love.” Her smile is a charming arc of irony. “And yet, if they had not forbid her to marry your uncle, I would not exist.”

The wolves follow the women, their expressions solemn and their stares brightened by animal eyeshine, surveying the forest as if on guard for a threat they sense but cannot yet see.

75

WHISPER MODE

High above the land, in a rotary-wing aircraft nearly as quiet as a hot-air balloon, Boschvark and Yataghan drift through the early afternoon like sleepers in a dream about being reincarnated as eagles.

Terrence Boschvark loves more than money. He is also passionate about the extravagances that money can buy. The smallest of his many houses encompasses twenty-four thousand square feet of living space, while the largest is three times that size. His car collection, numbering two hundred and nineteen vehicles, includes seven Rolls-Royce classics, including three that once belonged to British kings and queens. He owns four billion dollars’ worth of abstract expressionist paintings so meaningless and ugly that, displayed in one gallery, they would render connoisseurs of such art suicidal with delight. He collects exotic wristwatches ranging in price from fifty thousand dollars to half a million, as if with each purchase he is buying not just a timekeeping instrument but time itself, more years of life and perhaps even life eternal.

Each of Boschvark’s residential properties includes a limited-production four-seat helicopter with the latest Blue Edge technology and state-of-the-art engine muffling, either on site or in a hangar nearby. Powered by a bearingless engine, the Blue Edge main rotor has five double-swept blades, each with three Blue Pulse flaps in its trailingedge that are automatically activated as many as forty times per second. This all but eliminates blade-vortex interaction that produces thethwop-thwop-thwopnoise when a rotor blade impacts the wake vortex created by the blade in front of it.

With a portfolio of fourteen residences, Boschvark therefore owns fourteen expensive rotorcraft capable of traveling in what is called “whisper mode.” Although this stealthy progress through the sky, especially at night, makes him feel superior to humankind and appeals to his inner child, or to whatever corroded version of a child still finds harbor in him, the fleet is not the extravagance it might appear to be. In addition to transportation, these helos double as security ordnance.

Having been secretly customized by a team of retrofitters, each craft is a gunship with a .50-caliber machine gun fed by a drum belt with a six-hundred-round capacity. An airborne weapon of such power is of no use when the need arises to deal with a curious trespasser or burglars or a team of kidnappers; his experienced security staff can deal with those annoyances using conventional means. However, because Boschvark is well connected with the shadow state and with those in charge of the Federal Reserve System, he is aware of the turmoil that will ensue if a catastrophic financial crisis occurs or is engineered. Society will collapse; violence will escalate wildly. Even people as well placed as Boschvark will be endangered if only for a few weeks, until the ruling class can effect the conversion from the current semi-fascist system to pure, glorious, rewarding fascism. His weaponized stealth rotorcraft, along with numerous other precautions, allow him to sleep at night—except on those occasions when people and events have struck in him a fierce anger that fosters insomnia more effectively than five pots of coffee.

At the moment, in spite of everything that’s gone wrong, his dissatisfaction is mere peevishness, a simmering irritation, which is because he has taken matters into his own hands and will shortly eliminate the bitch Vida and everyone whom she has drawn into her crusade against the Grand Plateau project. He is taking direct action, which he has occasionally done before, always with great success. It’s good to get out of the office, out of the boardroom, and into the field when it most matters.

With Yataghan in the pilot’s seat, the rotorcraft floats twenty feet above the trees, angles down as the land slopes, and hovers over a glen where two horses graze in a section of a meadow that’s enclosed by a split-rail fence.

Yataghan puts the helo down facing the house and kills the engine. The rotor blades silently slice the air one last time before falling still.

“What a dump,” says Boschvark.

Both men carry pistols in shoulder holsters, concealed by sport coats. Those who have moved this far from civilization must distrust people so much that they will greet any visitor with hostility, but they are not likely to open fire without provocation. Mack Yataghan is an earnest and soft-looking individual who might be a bewildered choirmaster late for choir practice and looking for his church, but few would be perceptive enough to see in him a man who could set fire to an orphanage to clear a property and facilitate its sale to his boss for the construction of a thirty-story building of luxury condominiums. As for Boschvark, from his twenties he has modeled his appearance and relaxed way of moving after the all-time most beloved host of a TV show for children, Mr. Rogers; his viciousness, whether in matters personal or inbusiness, always comes as a surprise to those who haven’t already been put through the grinder by him.

By the time Boschvark and Yataghan step onto the loggia, no one has come out of the house to see why a helicopter has landed in the yard. Yataghan knocks on the door, waits, then knocks again, but no one responds. Boschvark tries the door, and it’s not locked, and the two of them go inside, calling hello, asking if anyone is at home.

The house is larger than the average middle-class Manhattan apartment, but not by much. They need less than a minute to confirm that no one is here.

Yataghan notices the two backpacks on the floor by the sofa in the living room. Stitched to the top-pocket flap of one is a patch with a name and phone number. The name is Sam Crockett. The second backpack bears no name, but when Boschvark inspects its contents, he finds a pair of leather gloves small enough to be appropriate for a woman’s hands.

“Wherever they’ve gone,” Yataghan says, “they’ll be coming back for their gear.”

Surveying the twigwork furniture and Navajo rug and woven wall hangings, Boschvark grimaces. “You know where they must have gone. We’d be making a mistake waiting here for them. We catch them on the plateau, we can still take them by surprise.”

76

EVERYBODY DIES

Ranks of conifers soldier on through the centuries, down the slopes in a perpetual green march, to the Grand Plateau, where for whatever reason they have, with rare exception, failed to conquer the three thousand acres of flat territory. Beyond the plateau, when the land slopes down once more, trees rise in phalanxes, their roots wound so securely through the soil and rocks that they can withstand even the winds of winter that shriek through the pass with greater force than in any other season.

Hunting hawks glide on the spring thermals high above. Here below, the soft soil offers small creatures easy burrowing, and tall grass—brown from winter but fast greening—provides cover to them. For now, the plateau is full of busy life, a thriving ecosystem that needs no justification but that should be celebrated in vivid myths, as the upland meadows of southern England and the animals thereof were celebrated inWatership Downand as another landscape entirely was mythologized inThe Wind in the Willows.

Considering José Nochelobo’s determined efforts to preserve this place, how odd it is that Vida has never been here before. She has seen videos and photos and maps, but nothing has fully conveyed the drama and beauty of this immense tableland with forested peaks rising above it on three sides. She’s unprepared for the effect the place has on her. Her heart beats faster. She feelslighter, not lightheaded but buoyant, as if she might ascend in the crystalline air. She puts her crossbow on the ground and hugs herself.

---