Page 1 of Beneath the Desert Bloom
CHAPTER 1
THE MOJAVE DIDN’T welcome her. It tolerated her.
Heat shimmered off the highway as Nora Vale pulled up the long driveway and killed the engine. Silence folded over the car like a closing fist. Cicadas buzzed in the brittle brush, their droning pulse almost drowning out the overheated ticking of her car. A dust cloud hung in the air behind her, rising like smoke from a signal fire that nobody would bother to read.
She stepped out, her boots hitting the gravel with a decisive crunch. A hot breeze sent sweat down her spine as she shook out her long chocolate-brown hair, already sticking to the back of her neck. She took one look at the house and sighed.
“Still a fortress, huh, old man?”
It didn’t look much like a house anymore. It looked more like something a doomsday prepper abandoned in a hurry. The stucco walls had faded to a sad, peeling yellow-gray, the kind of color that made you wonder why anyone bothered painting it in the first place. Corrugated tin clung to one wall, rattling with the wind, and a nest of mismatched wiring bristled from the roof.
A lizard skittered out of her path, vanishing under a rusted rain barrel that looked like it hadn’t seen water in decades. The Joshua trees around the place seemed to be leaning away, and the large yuccas had grown out of control.
Nora pulled her sunglasses down and squinted at the house, lips pressed into a thin line. “Hell of a retirement plan, Pops.”
The envelope from the county office felt sweaty and sticky in her hand. She tore it open, pulled out the key and the impersonal note:Estate awarded to Eleanora Vale, next of kin.
No funeral. No neighbors. No one to say they’d missed Orin, or even noticed he was gone. The old man had gone out like he lived, quiet and stubborn.
The padlock on the door was stiff and new. She jiggled the key until the lock gave with a satisfying click. The door creaked open. The heat slapped her across the face, dry and brutal, like walking into an oven. Dust hung in the air, and the smell of scorched paper, old sweat, and sage hit her nose.
She took a step inside, stirring a thick layer of dust on the floor. The place hadn’t seen a cleaning rag in years. Overhead, wind chimes swayed from the ceiling fan. Not the pretty kind from craft shops, but homemade ones made of bones, twine, raven feathers, and bits of obsidian. One had a tiny mouse skull tied in the center. Nora remembered making them with her grandfather, weaving in agate and old buttons and whatever else they’d scrounged up. She was pretty sure at least one of hers was still up there. Crooked, but holding on. She smiled and ran her hand beneath them, letting them clink softly together.
The house hadn’t changed. Not in the ways that mattered. Her family had been out here for generations. Scraping, sweating, going slowly mad. She’d left. But the desert had a long memory.
The furniture was sparse. The same old overstuffed couch, her grandfather’s burnt orange recliner, a rickety coffee table covered in random junk. There was an old tube TV on a stand, complete with VCR. The metal desk was cluttered with yellowed journals and notepads, a box of bullets, bundles of dried flowers wrapped in red string, and a shortwave radio under a makeshift shelf of survivalist junk.
Nora wrinkled her nose. “Still stockpiling. Still paranoid.”
Her eyes landed on the journal on the desk. The leather was cracked but the pages looked recently filled. Curiosity won out over hesitation, and she flipped it to the first page.
May 31 12:41am
He walks still. I’ve just seen him.
The desert doesn’t let go, and neither does he.
Nora shook her head, trying to clear it of the feelings flooding in. Her stomach tightened. No way. She hadn’t thought about him — or it — in years. The Yucca Man. Not since she’d decided it was just old desert nonsense, and her grandfather’s obsession with finding him had all but ruined their relationship. But seeing the words in her grandfather’s deliberate handwriting felt like someone had scraped a nail down her spine.
She pulled her hair back, sweat trickling down her neck. “You were losing it, Pops. Talking to ghosts. Seeing things.”
But the problem was, she did remember. Nights when the sky stretched too wide and too empty, and she felt watched. She remembered her grandfather’s half-mad warnings, telling her to never speak the name through glass or whistle after dark.
But she was a kid back then, scared of her own shadow. Now she was a grown woman with a half-finished thesis and way too much caffeine in her system. She wasn’t about to start believing in cryptids just because the old man had still been obsessed.
She flipped another page, skimming the paranoid scrawls about curses and eyes in the night. A shiver ran through her anyway, and she cursed under her breath. Maybe this place was getting to her already.
A loud clatter from outside made her jerk. A metal bucket rolling across the gravel. She peered out the window, half expecting to see something tall and dark against the bright horizon. Nothing. Just wind and dust.
Get it together, Nora.She wasn’t about to let an old story and a creaky house make her lose her mind.
Nora drifted through the rest of the house in a semi-daze, her thoughts spinning. She found her old bedroom, since converted into some sort of research center. Filing cabinets lined the walls,and the shelves were crammed with cassette tapes, all labeled in her grandfather’s tight, measured handwriting.
Dusk - South Hollow - June 12
Whistling Voices - 3 a.m.
Breathing Tree
