The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, volume 15

Mike O’Driscoll The Silence of the Falling Stars

Nothing is infinite. in a lifetime a man’s heart will notch up somewhere in the region of 2,500 million beats, a woman’s maybe 500 million more. These are big numbers but not infinite. There is an end in sight, no matter how far off it seems. People don’t think about that. They talk instead about the sublime beauty of nature, about the insignificance of human life compared to the time it’s taken to shape these rocks and mountains. Funny how time can weigh heavier on the soul than all these billions of tons of dolomite and dirt. A few years back a ranger found something squatting against the base of a mesquite tree at the mouth of Hanaupah Canyon. It was something dead, he saw, and the shape of it suggested a man. Curious, the ranger crouched down and touched it. The body, or whatever it was, had been so dessicated by heat and wind that it started to crumble and when the desert breeze caught it, the whole thing fell away to dust. No way to tell what it had really been, or if it was heat alone or time that caused its naturalization.

Fifty-year highs for July average 116 degrees. Anyone caught out here in that kind of heat without water has a couple of options. You can try to find shade, which, if you get lucky, will cut your rate of dehydration by about fifteen per cent. Or you can just rest instead of walking, which will save you something like forty per cent. But the ground temperature out here is half again higher than the air. Ideally, what you want is a shaded spot elevated above the ground. If you’re lucky enough to find such a place, and if you’re smart enough to keep your clothes on, which will cut your dehydration by another twenty per cent, then you might last two days at 120 degrees max without water. If you’re out of luck, then just keeping still you’ll sweat two pints in an hour. If you don’t take in the equivalent amount of water, you’ll begin to dehydrate. At five per cent loss of body weight you’ll start to feel nauseous. Round about ten per cent, your arms and legs will begin tingling and you’ll find it hard to breathe. The water loss will thicken your blood and your heart will struggle to pump it out to your extremities. Somewhere between fifteen and twenty per cent dehydration, you’ll die.

Which goes to show that there is, after all, one thing that is infinite: the length of time you stay dead. There is no real correlation between what I’m thinking and the SUV that heads slowly south along the dirt road. Even when it pulls over and stops beside the dry lake running along the valley floor, I can’t say for sure what will happen. I’m unwilling to speculate. Even when nothing happens I don’t feel any kind of surprise.

I scan the oval playa with my binoculars. Indians are supposed to have raced horses across it, which is why it’s called the Racetrack. There’s an outcrop of rock at the north end which they call the Grandstand but I don’t see any spectators up there. Never have. Below the ridge from where I watch, there are clumps of creosote bush and the odd Joshua tree. Further north, there are stands of beavertail and above them, on the high slopes of the Last Chance Range, are forests of juniper and pinyon pine. A glint of sunlight catches my eye and I glance towards the vehicle. But nothing has moved down there. I shift my gaze back out on to the playa, trying to pretend I don’t feel the cold chill that settles on my bones. I look away at the last moment and wipe the sweat from my face. Thirst cracks my lips and dust coats the inside of my mouth. There’s plenty of water in my Expedition, parked a half-mile further south along the road, but I make no move to return to the vehicle. Whatever is happening here I have no choice but to see how it plays out.

A shadow moves on the playa. When I search for it all I can see are the rocks scattered across the honeycombed surface of the dry lake. I scan them closely, looking for a lizard or rodent, even though nothing lives out there. The air is still and quiet, no breeze at all to rustle through the mesquites. Then something catches my eyes and the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. A movement so painfully slow I doubt it happened at all. Until it rolls forward another inch. From this distance, I estimate its weight at eighty to a hundred pounds. I glance at the rocks nearest to it but none of them have moved. Only this one, its shadow seeming to melt in the harsh sunlight as it heaves forward again. There’s no wind, nothing to explain its motion. All the stories I’ve heard about the rocks have some rational explanation but there’s no reason at all to what I’m seeing here.

Except maybe that SUV and whatever’s inside it. I look back to where it was but it’s not there. I scan the dirt road to north and south and still don’t see it. I search the playa in case the vehicle drove out on the mud but there are only scattered rocks. The sun is at its highest now, yet I’m not overheating. I don’t feel nauseous and my heart isn’t struggling. Maybe it’s because I’m barely breathing. I stare along the dirt road for an age, looking for something I might have missed. But there’s no trail of dust, or anything else to signal they were ever here.

The guy wore jeans and a loose-fit shirt, the woman had on shorts, T-shirt and a baseball cap. He was leaning over beneath the open hood of the Japanese SUV. A rusting stove lay on its back beside the road and beyond it two lines of rubble were all that marked a building which had long since gone.

The woman’s face creased in a smile as I pulled up in front of the Toyota Rav4. I got out of my vehicle. “You need a hand here?”

“I think we’ve overheated,” she said. I didn’t recognize her accent.

The guy stood up and wiped his face on his shirt. “Bloody air-conditioning,” he said. “I guess I was running it too hard. We’re not used to this kind of heat.”

I nodded. “How long you been stuck here?”

Before the woman could answer, a young girl stuck her head out the back window. “Henry Woods,” she said, reading my name tag. “Are you a policeman?”

“No, I’m a park ranger.”

The woman leaned over and tousled the girl’s hair. “Ranger Woods, meet Cath. I’m Sophie Delauney, this is my husband, Paul.”

I shook hands with both of them and asked Delauney if there was anything they needed. He frowned, then laughed and said he doubted it. “I suppose you’ll tell me I should have hired an American car.”

“No. You just had bad luck, is all.” I leaned in over the engine, saw there was nothing I could do. “Could happen to anyone.”

“Yeah, well, it happened to us.”

I got some bottles of water from the cooler in the Expedition and handed them around. Delauney went back to fiddling with the plugs and points, unwilling, I figured, to accept that all he could do was wait for the engine to cool.

“How’d you find us?” Sophie Delauney said.

“We have a plane that patrols the Valley. Must have seen you here and called it in. I was up at Zabriskie Point, twenty miles north of here.”

“I didn’t see it,” she said, shielding her eyes as she looked up at the cloudless sky.

“I saw it,” the girl said.

“Did you, baby? You never said.”

“I did. You weren’t listening.

“Where you folks from?” I asked.

“ England,” she said. “We live outside London.”

The girl frowned and shook her head. “No, we don’t — we live in Elstree.”

“I know, dear, but Mr Woods might not have heard of Elstree.”

“I always wanted to see England,” I said. “Just never seem to find the time.”

“You should.”

Delauney finally saw that merely willing it wasn’t going to get the engine to cool any faster and came to join us. “Where you headed?” I asked him.

“Not far, by the look of things. Can you recommend anywhere close by?”

“About an hour’s drive will get you to the resort village at Stovepipe Wells.” I don’t know why I didn’t mention the Inn at Furnace Creek, which was closer.

The girl piped up. “Do they have a swimming pool?”

I nodded. “Sure do.”

Sophie drank some water. She wiped her hand across her mouth and said, “Do you ever get used to this heat?”

“Breathe lightly,” I said. “It won’t hurt so much.”

After quarter of an hour, I told Delauney to try it again. The engine turned over and cut out. He tried again and this time it caught. “There you go,” I said. “You should be okay now — just keep an eye on the temp gauge.”

“Thanks for your help, Officer Woods,” Sophie said. “It’s much appreciated.”

“It’s what I’m here for.”

They got in the vehicle. “Thanks again,” Sophie said. I watched as they drove off, the girl hanging out the window, her mother too, staring back at me. Alone in the ruins of Greenwater, I tried to imagine what she saw, wondering if she had seen something in my eyes that I didn’t know was there.

I paid rent to the government for the bungalow I occupied near Stovepipe Wells. It was small but even after six years I didn’t seem to have accumulated enough belongings to fill the available space. Rae Hannafin said it looked unlived in, said if I hated it that much I should ask to be rehoused. She thought I was stuck in a rut, that I had been in the Valley too long and that I should apply for a transfer. But I didn’t hate Death Valley or even the bungalow. Though I used to imagine that one day I would move on, over the years I’ve come to realize that I had reached the place I’d always been heading towards. It’s not just the solitariness — it’s the Valley itself that gets under your skin.

I sat in Arcan’s Bar drinking Mexican beer. It was quiet, a dozen or so people, mostly couples, a few regulars shooting pool, half a dozen familiar faces perched on stools at the counter. Kenny Rogers, someone like that, on the jukebox. The young Hispanic behind the counter made small talk with a couple of girls. I caught his eye, he fetched another beer, set it down in front of me, gave me a scowl and went back to work his charm on the senoritas. Jaime had been working there nearly two years and still complained about the customers treating him like shit. Just because he was Mexican, he told me one time. No, I said, it’s because you’re an outsider.

“That ‘sposed to make me feel better, man?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Because we’re all outsiders here.”

That was about the most I’d ever talked to him at one time. I’m not good at small talk. As a rule I only talk when I have something to say. This is probably a failing on my part. Hannafin says that talk is a social lubricant, that it’s part of what makes us human, even when it doesn’t mean anything. I’m not convinced. Everything we say means something, even if it’s not what we intended. But I had to admit that it worked for her. She seemed to be able to get through to people, make them understand her meaning without spelling it out. Maybe that was what made her such a good ranger, why she would maybe one day make Assistant Chief.

I took a pull on my beer and stared in the mirror behind the counter, looking for something to take me out of myself. It was getting to be a habit. I’d watch other people and imagine their conversations or what they were feeling, see if that made me feel any more human. Sometimes I’d see other men just like me, that same soft hunger in their eyes as they searched for someone or something to help them discover meaning in their lives.

“Hey, ranger.”

I came out of my reverie and stared at the guy who’d spoken.

“I was right.” It was the guy whose SUV had overheated. “I said to Sophie it was you.”

I saw her sitting at a table by the window with her daughter. The kid waved. “You’re staying in the motel?”

“You recommended it,” Delauney said. “Look, ah, let me buy you a drink.”

I was about to decline when I looked at Sophie Delauney again and saw her smile. “Sure,” I said. “I’ll have another beer.”

While he ordered drinks I’ walked over to the table. “Ranger Woods, what a surprise,” Sophie said, and asked me to take a seat. “You live in the resort?”

“ ‘Bout a mile away.”

“Where’s your hat?” the girl said.

“That’s for keeping the sun off my head, not the stars.”

“You look different but I knew it was you. Daddy thought you were someone else.”

“You must have what we call the eagle eye.”

“What is that?”

“It means you see too much,” Sophie said, as she stroked the girl’s hair. I wondered what she meant, what were the things the kid saw that she shouldn’t have seen. “Since you’re off duty, is it okay if we call you Henry?”

I told her it was fine. Delauney came over with two bottles of Dos Equis, a glass of red wine and a juice for the kid. I still felt a little awkward but something about Sophie made it easy to be in her company. She steered the conversation so that I didn’t have to say too much, mostly listen as they talked about their own lives back in England. She taught history in high school, Delauney was an architect. They’d made their first trip to America nine years ago, when they got married and spent a week in New York. Now, with their daughter, they’d come to see the West. They’d flown to LA, spent four days down there, doing the “Disneyland thing” and the “ Hollywood thing”, which was the way Delauney put it, rolling his eyes. They’d driven up to Las Vegas, had two nights there, before rolling into the Valley this afternoon along highway 178. The Greenwater detour had seemed like a good idea at the time. Sophie’s charm made me feel something like a normal human being. Sometimes I lost sight of that and I was grateful to her for reminding me who I was.

I got another round of drinks and when I returned Delauney asked me about the Valley. “What are the best places to see?”

“How much time you got?”

“A day.”

“Don’t try to squeeze in too much.”

“He won’t listen,” Sophie said. “Paul has to turn everything into a major expedition.”

He laughed. “Okay, tell me what I can’t afford to miss.”

I thought about it a while. “When you start to look closely,” I said, “you’ll notice all the things that aren’t there.” I wondered if Sophie understood, if she was capable of seeing what was missing.

She started to say something but Delauney talked across her. “I’ll stick with what is here. Like Badwater, and maybe a ghost town.”

I nodded. “ Chloride City ’s an old silver-mining town about a half-hour north-east of here. Not a whole lot left up there but there’s a cliff above the town that will give you some great views of the Valley.”

The girl said, “Ask about the rocks.”

“The rocks.”

“Daddy said they move.”

Delauney seemed a little embarrassed. “Guide book said that rocks get blown by high winds across the surface of a dry lake.” He sounded sceptical but also willing to be persuaded. “Said they leave trails across the surface.”

I took a sip of my beer. “I’ve heard that, too.”

“Have you seen them move?” the girl asked.

“Never have.”

“I still want to see them, anyway,” she said.

“Maybe,” Delauney said. “But tomorrow it’s the ghost town, okay?”

“You won’t be disappointed,” I said.

Sophie was looking at me. She seemed unconscious of the intensity of her gaze or that I might be aware of it. I wondered what she saw in my face, whether there was something there that revealed more than I wanted her to see. There was a spray of freckles splashed beneath her eyes and across the bridge of her nose. She was beautiful. I wanted desperately to know what was inside her head at that moment, but Delauney leaned close and whispered something to her. Something I didn’t catch. She laughed and her face flushed red and I didn’t know what that meant. It was Cath’s bedtime, she said. I smiled to let her know it was okay, but I could see she was troubled. She told Delauney to stay a while if he wanted. But I felt troubled suddenly too, angry that she was going. I wished he’d kept his mouth shut.

“I gotta go, too,” I said, standing up. “Early start in the morning.”

“No problem, Henry,” Delauney said. “Thanks for all your help.”

I turned to Sophie. “It was good to meet you,” I said, shaking her hand, using formality just to feel the touch of her skin. There was no harm in it. “Enjoy your stay. You too, Cath — keep that eagle eye on your folks.”

Sophie frowned, as if puzzled at something I’d said. I left the bar and set off out into the quiet darkness. It was less than a mile back to the empty bungalow but it seemed like the longest walk I ever took.

Before I came to Death Valley I lived out on the Coast. I was a deputy in the San Luis Obispo ’s Sheriff Department. I was good at the job and had ambitions to make Sheriff one day. There was a woman I’d been seeing and I’d begun to think maybe she was the one. But things didn’t turn out the way I’d planned. Something happened I hadn’t counted on, one of those situations nobody could foresee. There was no time to think and what I did I did instinctively. IAD ruled that it had been self-defence but I knew as well as anyone that the kid never had a gun. After the investigation things began to fall apart at work and my girlfriend began to cool on me. A week after she left I quit the department and spent eighteen months drifting round the Midwest, feeling sorry for myself and listening to songs about regret. Living in Death Valley cured me of that. Like Robert Frost said, whatever road you’re on is the one you chose and the one you didn’t take is no longer an option. I came here, worked as a volunteer, then, after six months, got a ranger’s post and, in time, I saw there was no going back.

Some people find that hard to accept. This morning I got a call to check out a vehicle parked up at Quackenbush Mine. There was a dog in the back seat of the truck, a German Shepherd. Her tongue lolled out her open mouth and she managed a feeble wag of her tail against the seat when she saw me. The window was cracked open a half-inch but even so it must have been over 130 degrees inside. It took me twenty minutes to find the driver, coming down from Goldbelt Spring. He was a heavy-set guy, in shorts and vest, a 49ers cap hiding his close-cropped skull. Had a woman and two kids with him, a boy and a girl about ten or eleven.

“Is that your truck down there at the mine, sir?” I asked him.

“The Cherokee, yeah.”

“Your dog is dying in there.”

“Aw shit,” he groaned, lurching down the slope. “I knew this would fucking happen.”

They always say they knew what would happen. Which, instead of justifying what they did, only compounds the situation. He bleated on about how he didn’t want to keep the dog on a leash and how his wife kept on about you had to because that was the rule and so, in truth, it wasn’t his fault, he was just thinking about the dog. I led him back down to his vehicle, got him to open it up and lift the dog out onto the ground. Her eyes were glazed, her body still.

“She’s still alive,” the guy said. “I can feel her heart.”

“Step back out of the way,” I told him. I unholstered my gun, stuck the barrel against the dog’s chest and squeezed the trigger.

The woman screamed.

“Jesus Christ,” the guy said. “Jesus fucking Christ — you killed her!”

“No,” I said. “You did that.” I stood up and checked the vehicle over to see if there was anything else I could cite the son of a bitch for apart from animal cruelty. I gave him the ticket and drove off, leaving him to bury the dog in the dirt.

Heading south on the Saline Valley Road, I heard Rydell’s voice crackling over the Motorola, requesting assistance at an incident in Hidden Valley. I responded and told him where I was.

“It’s a vehicle come off the road, two people injured,” he said. “Quick as you can, Henry. Hannafin’s already on her way down from Grapevine.”

I spun the Expedition around, throwing up a cloud of dust as I accelerated north along the dirt road. My heart was racing like it knew what I was going to find but the truth was I had no real idea what to expect up there.

When I saw the truck turned on its side ten yards off the road, the feeling of anticipation disappeared, leaving me vaguely disappointed. Five kids were seated in a semicircle a few yards away from the vehicle. One of them, a fair-haired kid about eighteen, got up and came over to me. “I think Shelley broke a leg,” he said, nodding towards the others. “And Karl’s maybe busted an arm.”

“You the driver?”

He hesitated before nodding.

“You been drinking? Smoking some weed?”

“No way, man, nothing like that. Just took the bend too fast, I guess.”

All of them were cut and bruised but only the two he’d named were badly injured. Shelley looked like she was in a lot of pain. I was splinting her leg when Hannafin arrived and went to work on the others. When we had them patched up, we put Karl and Shelley in Hannafin’s vehicle and two others in mine. The driver made to get in front beside me but I shook my head. “Take this,” I said, handing him a two-litre bottle of water.

“What for?” He looked bewildered “Oh man, you saying I have to wait here?”

“There’s a wrecker on its way from Furnace Creek. Should be here in three hours.”

The journey to Grapevine took the best part of an hour. The two in the back remained silent for most of that time, either too dazed to talk or wary of saying something that would incriminate their buddy. Or maybe they sensed my own unease, a feeling of disquiet that had been bothering me all day. I’d been expecting some kind of revelation but all I had was the feeling that I’d been asking myself the wrong questions.

There was an ambulance waiting at Grapevine Station to take the two injured kids to the Emergency Room in Amargosa Valley. The other two said they’d wait at Grapevine for the tow truck to show up with their vehicle and driver. In the station office, Hannafin made fresh coffee while I stared out the window towards the mountains bordering Ubehebe Crater. She said something I didn’t catch and I didn’t ask her what it was.

“Is it any different today,” she said, “from how it was last week?”

“They’re the same,” I said, though I knew she wasn’t talking about the mountains.

She handed me a mug of steaming coffee. “You been keeping to yourself lately.”

I felt weary and disinclined to have the conversation she wanted.

“What’s bothering you, Henry?”

I sipped the coffee, trying put my thoughts in some kind of order.

“It’s good to see you’ve lost none of your charm and conversational skills.”

I forced a smile. “I’m sorry, Rae,” I said. “Got things on my mind, is all.”

“Anything I can help with?”

I liked Rae, liked her a lot, but that’s all it was. I wasn’t looking for any kind of relationship. I was never much good at explaining such things — feelings, or their absence. “Just some stuff I have to deal with,” I said. “Nothing that matters too much.”

“A problem shared is a problem halved.”

“There is no problem.”

“I forgot,” she said. “You don’t have problems, ever.” She bit her lower lip, I guess to stop from saying anything else. I didn’t know what she might have wanted to say and I didn’t care. I felt empty inside, empty and lifeless as the salt flats.

I drained my coffee and set the mug down. “None I lose sleep over.”

“I think you should talk to someone.”

“I talk to people all the time.”

“No, you don’t, Henry. If you did you wouldn’t be losing touch.”

“I’ll be seeing you, Rae,” I said, leaving the office. Hannafin was my friend but that didn’t mean she knew all there was to know about me. It was never that simple.

At first I saw nothing on the road. I drove past the Grandstand on my left and headed south another mile before pulling over, somewhat confused. I picked up the radio, intending to give HQ a piece of my mind. But before anyone could respond, I’d got out of the vehicle and was watching the small dust cloud that had appeared away to the south. I grabbed the binoculars from the dash. Between my position and the cloud a vehicle had stopped in the middle of the dirt road. The dust cloud seemed to be moving further south, as if marking the trail of some other vehicle, one I hadn’t seen. Dry heat rippled across the exposed skin of my arms, sucked all the moisture from my mouth. As I stared at the dust cloud it was pulled apart by a wind I didn’t feel.

Nothing moved around the SUV. I scrambled up the slope to my right, moving south-west towards a patch of creosote bush. From there I looked down at the road, first at my own vehicle, then at the other, half a mile, maybe less, from where I stood. I squatted down in the scrub, removed the Sig Sauer 9mm from my holster and laid it on the ground. The sun was falling slowly towards the mountain behind me, but its heat seemed to have intensified. A sudden movement caught my eye. I watched through the binoculars as a man got out of the SUV and walked to the edge of the dirt road. He just stood there gazing out at the playa like it was a picture of beauty rather than heat and desolation. Two other people joined him, standing either side. I tried to see what they were looking at but nothing moved out there, not even the goddam rocks. The mountain’s shadow bruised the edge of the Racetrack.

A fourth person had arrived. I watched his lips moving as he pointed across the dry lake. Sound travels a fair distance in this stillness, but I didn’t hear a word. There was something unsettling about the way he held himself, thumb looped into the belt at his waist, that made me feel numb and disconnected. After a few moments the first three set out walking, heading east across the playa. The last guy stood there a while, till they were two or three hundred yards out, then he followed them, taking his time, keeping his distance. A redtail circled above him and when he stopped to glance at it the bird flew off to the north. A line of thin ragged clouds chased each other away across the valley, as if anxious not to intrude. Beads of sweat dribbled from beneath the straw hat and down my face as I worked to fill the silence with the imagined sound of their footsteps crunching across the Racetrack.

Nothing made sense.

Long, thin shadows followed them, clawing the dry mud like the fingers of a man dying of thirst. The figures grew smaller as they receded into the distance. I clambered down the slope to the Expedition and drove south until I reached their vehicle. I thought about calling Rydell but wasn’t sure what to tell him. All I’d seen was some folks setting out across the Racetrack on foot, same as countless visitors had done before them. But if there was no mystery, then why was my heart racing so fast? Why couldn’t I shake off the feeling that this was all wrong?

I stood by the side of the road, no longer able to see any of them, accepting that I had no choice but to follow. Strange, disorienting sensations flowed through my body, setting flares off behind my eyes and thrumming in my ears. I began to walk. The ground was hard and bone dry but, even so, I found a trail of footprints. They were quite distinct but what disturbed me was that there was only one pair, not four. I tried to ignore this and figured how long it would take me to catch up with the group. After thirty minutes, I should have been able to see them but nothing moved out there. I quickened my pace. The mountains to the north and west punctured the sky, opening wounds that bled over the horizon and down onto the playa. Ten minutes later I stopped and listened. Nothing: no birds, no wind, no voices. I unholstered the 9mm again, held it up and fired two shots. And was appalled when I heard nothing. My hand shook as I stared at the pistol. I’d felt the recoil and the smell of cordite on the breezeless air contradicted the silence. I checked the magazine and saw that two rounds had been discharged. It was just the sound that had been lost, a realization that made my isolation more complete. If sound couldn’t exist here, then what could? When I stared at the mountains enclosing both sides of the valley, I knew that even memories were not real in this place. I felt more alone than anyone had ever been, without even the company of the dead. With the light fading, I took a bearing on a western peak and set off towards Racetrack Road.

It took me the best part of an hour to find my vehicle and by then night had settled on the valley. I stared up, overwhelmed by the immense darkness. There was no moon, and the night seemed blacker than usual, as if half the stars were missing from the sky. It seemed the only way to account for the intensity of the night. I sat in the cab, radio in hand. I wanted to speak to someone, hear some familiar voice but I was stopped by a doubt that I couldn’t explain. The feeling of wrongness persisted and had grown stronger in my head. It didn’t make sense at first, not until I’d grabbed a bottle of water from the cooler, turned the key in the ignition and flicked on my headlights. The road in front of me was empty and I was alone with the fallen stars.

I sat in the Expedition in the parking lot, feeling a deep weariness in my bones, the sort that can hold you for hours on end. My hand was on the door but I couldn’t move. I watched cars come and go, people walking by, like this was normal, like nothing at all had changed. I even saw Sophie Delauney walking across the parking lot, hand in hand with her daughter. She stopped halfway across the lot, turned, smiled and waved at me. She seemed unaware of the people around her and I felt my mind melting, my sense of being fading away in her presence. I thought that maybe there were things she wanted to say, words she’d left unspoken. I felt the wrongness of letting her go without talking to her again, at least one more time.

But before I could go to her, Delauney himself walked past, though he appeared not to see me. He carried two large suitcases, which he stowed in the back of the Rav4. A vein began to throb in my temple. Drops of sweat stood out on my brow though the sun was low in the sky and the air-con was blowing. He got in the driver’s seat and started the Toyota. Sophie stood by the passenger door and glanced my way again. She looked right at me but I knew she wasn’t seeing me at all. Whatever look she had on her face, it didn’t mean anything. By the time I got out of the Expedition, she’d climbed in beside Delauney and they were pulling out of the lot.

Later I sat in Arcan’s, nursing a beer. Troubled by what I’d seen, I tried to cloak the strangeness in reason but I couldn’t make it fit. The feeling that I was thinking about someone else had taken root in my brain. That I had no control of my own life nor any clear idea where I was heading. Maybe I’d spent too long in the Valley. Maybe it was time to leave. Only I wasn’t sure I could.

Old Arcan himself came in the bar and made one of his regular attempts at playing the host. He claimed to be a direct descendant of one of the first men to cross Death Valley, but nobody believed it. His ex-wife told someone he’d been born plain Bill Judd. I watched him move from one guest to another, carefully selecting those on whom he wished to bestow his hospitality. Thankfully, I wasn’t among them.

I found myself thinking about Sophie Delauney. They were the kind of thoughts I had no business thinking, that caused pleasure and pain in equal measure, but I thought them anyway. Some lives were full of certainties but mine seemed to be made up only of “what-ifs” and “maybes”. It should have been no surprise that it had become less real to me.

I ordered another drink and stared into the mirror behind the counter. The people in there seemed to have purpose in their lives, to know what they were doing, where they were going. If I watched long enough, paid attention to the details, maybe I’d discover how to make my life more real. Arcan was holding forth to the group of Japs sitting round a table across the bar. Jaime was working his routine on a blonde girl at the end of the counter. She looked bored, and I guessed the only reason she was tolerating his bullshit was the lack of any other diversion. I wondered if the real Jaime was having any better luck than the one in the mirror. And here was Sophie Delauney, standing just a few feet behind me and watching my reflection watch her, or maybe it was her reflection watching us. Do mirrors take in sound the way they do light? I don’t think so. I couldn’t hear anything, no music, no talk, not even the clink of glasses. It was a long time before I remembered myself and thought to say hello. But a second before I did, she beat me to it. she climbed up onto the bar stool beside me and caught Jaime’s eye.

He was there in a shot. She pointed to my half-empty bottle of Dos Equis, told him to bring one of those and a glass of Merlot. I said I hadn’t expected to see her again. She shrugged and told me they’d had a long day. Drove down to Badwater where Delauney had decided to hike out on the salt flats. Went half a mile before the heat got to him and he returned to the car. Later, they went to Chloride City. She wasn’t looking at me as she talked, but at the guy in the mirror, the fellow who looked just like me but whose thoughts were not the same as mine. The ache in her voice seemed to hint at some inner turmoil. I wanted to offer words of comfort and reassurance, tell her everything would be okay. But thinking the words was easier than saying them.

I asked if she’d seen any ghosts up there. She shook her head and smiled. No ghosts, just dust, heat and silence. I understood about the silence, but with all those ghosts up there she’d expected something more. Why hadn’t the inhabitants from Chloride City ’s second boom period learned anything from the first? I told her there were more fools in the world than she might have imagined. Gold wasn’t the only illusion that drew people to the Valley.

Did I mean that literally? I wasn’t sure. I wondered if Delauney had seen anything out on the salt flats beyond Badwater, if his mind had been troubled by visions he couldn’t explain. But I saw no sign of his existence in the mirror and didn’t think to ask. Sophie wanted to know about my life and I told her some things that seemed important, others that kept a smile on her face. She told me Paul wanted her to have another child. She wasn’t sure what to do. The dreams and ambitions she’d once had were largely unfulfilled, there were things she hadn’t yet grasped. I understood her to mean that this was something she’d never told Delauney.

And then he was there, clapping me on the back and giving Sophie a proprietary kiss on the cheek. She fell quiet then, seemed to retreat into herself. I tried to maintain the connection to her but his voice kept intruding on my thoughts. There was nothing to distinguish his words from the other noises in the bar, a wavering chorus of sounds whose real purpose was little more than to fill the silence. A feeling of despair grew inside me as I watched Sophie close herself off. Her smile was gone and the lines around her eyes signalled the dreams she could no longer give voice to.

Delauney was asking me if it was possible to go to the Racetrack and join route 190 heading west without coming back on himself. I told him it would add sixty or seventy miles to his journey, most of it on poor dirt roads. He nodded and said they might make the detour on their way out of the Valley tomorrow. I asked him what he hoped to see up there. Same as anyone, he said: he wanted to see the moving rocks for himself or, at the very least, the trails they left in their wake.

I told him he wouldn’t, no one ever did. He believed me, he said, but seeing beat believing any day of the week.

I watch the shadows compose themselves. The way they move across mountains or desert dunes reveals how fluid identity really is. What we think of as solid has no more real substance than a whisper or a lie. It’s just light and shadow which make the unknown recognizable, which sculpt unfamiliar surfaces into configurations we think we know. We stare a while at these faces or shapes, glad they mean something to us even if we can’t name them, and then we blink and when we look again the face has changed to something we can’t recognize. We try to retrieve the familiar face, needing to see it one more time to confirm that it was who we thought it was, but the new image persists, erasing the old. It’s like trying to see the two leading faces of a line drawing of a transparent cube at the same time — it can’t be done. One face is always behind the other. We close our eyes again and when we look one more time there isn’t even a face to see, just a shadow moving over rock, sliding into all its dark places. It was the kind of illusion that made me feel less certain about my place in the world.

I woke up this morning no longer sure I am who I thought was. I showered, dressed and ate breakfast, feeling like an intruder in my own home. I sat in the Expedition, spoke to Rydell on the radio and drove up towards Hunter Mountain, feeling I was watching another man try out my life. I had hoped to find some certainties up there, something to which I could anchor myself but all I found was that everything flows. I didn’t need to see it to know it was happening. Even the forests of pinyon pine and juniper were further down the mountain slopes than they were the day before.

In the spring, after heavy winter rainfalls, wild flowers turn certain parts of the Valley into a blaze of purple, red and orange. It wasn’t possible to reconcile such beauty with that scorched and barren hell. If such a vastness could be transformed in what, in geological terms, was less than the blink of an eye, how could any of us hope to ever stay the same?

All those voices I heard on the radio — how could I be sure that they were speaking to me? If I couldn’t be certain who I was, then how could they know I was the one they wanted to talk to? So when Rydell’s voice came out of the radio, I had no way of knowing if it was really him. Short of driving down to Furnace Creek and standing right in front of him. And even then, there was no guarantee.

I heard Hannafin — or someone who sounded like her — asking where I was. I wanted to answer her but when I tried to talk I realized that I had nothing to say. I already knew where I was and where I was going. There was nothing Hannafin, or the voice that might have been hers, could do for me that I couldn’t do for myself.

This person I had become had no more illusions. He was capable of seeing things as they really were. As he drove past the talc mines, across Ulida Flat and north into Hidden Valley, he was aware the land was watching him. He heard the creak of Joshua trees, the distant groans of the mountain ranges and the listless sigh of an unfelt breeze. And in those sounds he heard himself also, speaking in his usual voice, his tone neutral, the words precise, as he told them all they needed to know, the way he always did. Only it wasn’t him talking.

The SUV is pulled off the dirt road onto the edge of the playa. The front passenger’s door stands open. I glance up towards Ubehebe Peak, see no movement among the stands of mesquite. Approaching the vehicle, I move round the back and peer through the windscreen. There are two large suitcases behind the rear seat. I continue on round the Toyota till I come back to the open door. I reach inside and grab the carry-all on the rear seat. Inside is a money belt with close to four hundred dollars in cash, plus a book of travellers’ cheques. There’s also a Nike fanny pack in there with three passports, a driver’s licence and car-hire documentation. I look at the photographs, just for a moment, then put everything back in the holdall. On the floor by the front passenger’s seat, there’s a video camera. It’s a Sony Hi-8 and the tape is about three-quarters of the way through. I sit on the running board, my feet resting on the ground, trying to decide what to do. The last thing I want to do right now is play the tape but I know that if I don’t I’ll never find the answers I need. Flipping open the viewfinder, I touch the play button and get nothing but blue. I press and hold the rewind, listening to the machine whirr as the world runs back to where it has already been. I watch shadows grow westwards from the Cottonwood Range and a strip of broken cloud which pulls itself together as it scrolls back across the sky. After a minute I release the button and the tape rolls forward.

Sophie Delauney and her daughter walk out of their apartment at Stovepipe Wells, holding hands. They stop halfway across the parking lot and Sophie turns, smiles and waves toward the camera before continuing on to the Rav4. The scene changes to a view of Ubehebe Grater from the north rim, stretching a half-mile across and five hundred feet deep. The girl skips into the shot from the right, Delauney from the left. Something blurs the picture for a second or two, but I can’t tell what it is — a hand or part of a face in extreme close-up. Delauney talks about how the crater was formed, sounding vaguely authoritative. The kid complains about the heat. Next I see Sophie and the girl standing in front of the sign at Teakettle Junction. Delauney enters the frame from the left. The girl has a stick and she starts tapping out a rhythm on the kettles and pots hanging from the arms of the wooden cross. Sophie and Delauney start dancing round her, whooping like a couple of movie Indians. They look foolish but the girl laughs. No one seems to notice the single shadow that slips down the mountain behind them.

The scene changes abruptly, showing the three of them sitting in their vehicle, smiling and waving. After a second or two, I realize that there’s no soundtrack. They get out of the Toyota and start walking directly towards the camera, their faces growing in the frame. The jump cut I’m expecting doesn’t happen. Instead, as Delauney draws close, the scene shifts slightly to the left and catches his face in profile as he walks past the spot where the camera had been. It catches the other two as they walk by, then turns and tracks them to the side of the road. Their smiles have disappeared and they avoid looking at the camera until something prompts Sophie to glance up and say a single word which might have been “please”. Moments later, she takes the girl by the hand and walks out onto the playa. After a second or two, Delauney wipes his face and follows them. The camera pans left and zooms in on the Grandstand to the north, holding the outcrop in the frame for what seems like an eternity. Nothing moves onscreen, even when I hold down the fast-forward button. When I release it, the camera moves upwards to capture a clear and cloudless sky. The tape has played almost to the end. The final shot is of Sophie, Delauney and the kid, three hundred yards out on the playa, growing smaller as they walk on without looking back. And then the screen turns blue.

My head has started aching and the heat is almost intolerable. I put the camera on the seat, understanding what I have to do. At my vehicle I grab the radio, press the call button and speak my name. Instead of voices all that comes out is feedback and white noise. I try once more but whatever I hear, it isn’t human. I lack the will to do this, but there’s no one else. I load half a dozen bottles of water into a backpack, grab my binoculars and head out onto the playa.

There are no tracks in the honeycombed surface. I walk five hundred yards due east, a little further than I had seen them go before the tape had stopped. I figure they must have been looking for the rocks, or at least for one of their trails. I look north to where the slanting sunlight blurs the edges of the Grandstand. Shielding my eyes, I turn my gaze southwards and pick out a few rocks of varying sizes scattered across the dry mud. There’s little else to see out here, no signs of life. I head south and try not to think about the tape and the expressions on their faces as they had trudged past the camera. Almost twenty minutes pass before I am walking among the silent, unmoving rocks. Though I don’t want to admit it, their watchful stillness bothers me. I don’t want to think about what they’ve seen. Instinctively, I lay a hand on the Sig Sauer at my hip, drawing some comfort from the touch of the gun. There’s a picture forming in my head. It’s the haunted look in Sophie’s eyes as she stared at the camera for the last time, just before she took the child’s hand in her own and started walking. I’d like to think that she looked back one last time but I really can’t be sure.

I search among the lifeless rocks for an hour. The ground is flat and the rocks are neither plentiful nor large enough to provide cover for anything much bigger than a gecko. Finally, as the sun falls towards Ubehebe Peak, I sit down on a rock, feeling dizzy and nauseous. I drink about half a litre of tepid water and pour the rest over my head. I raise the binoculars and see the vehicles where I left them, two dusty sentinels watching over the playa. As I shift my gaze northwards I’m startled by a flash of light from the mountains above Racetrack Road. I turn back to the cars, then search the slopes above them, looking for something up there in the creosote. I lower the binoculars and feel a tightness across my chest. I breathe slowly, head hanging between my knees, and that’s when I see it for the first time, the faint trail cut like a groove in the dried mud. It ends at the rock between my feet. It wasn’t there when I sat down, I think, but I’m not certain. I’m spooked a little by it, even more when I notice more trails terminating at the other rocks lying nearby. I try to picture a rain-softened surface and a hundred-mile-an-hour wind pushing them along but it’s all in vain.

The flesh crawls on my back and for some reason the air feels cooler. The silence is weird and when I hear the two shots ring out, I need no further prompting to leave the rocks behind. I pick up the backpack, unholster my pistol and set off at a slow trot north towards the sound of the gunfire. I don’t think about what has happened, about the mess Delauney has got them into. Instead I concentrate on getting there, on locating their position even though there are no further sounds to guide me towards them.

I pass the vehicles on the road, a half-mile or so to my left, without having seen anything I don’t recognize. But I keep on, another mile, until I realize I’m heading right towards the Grandstand. I don’t turn back. There’s no point, even though I won’t find anything there. Nothing alive. Yet I have to see.

There’s nobody at the Grandstand. I drink another bottle of water to quiet my despair. Shadows stretch out across the playa towards the outcrop, painting the surface the colour of blood. For a while I stare at the rocks, losing track of time. There are a dozen or so, scattered in a wide circle round the outcrop. Had these shapes seen Sophie? I grind the dust and dirt from my faithless eyes and when I open them again I see that the rocks have drawn closer. The last rays of sunlight pick out their newly laid trails. My heart is racing and the band across my chest tightens even more. At first I think I’m having a heart attack, that I’m really dying, but after two minutes I realize that isn’t possible. I focus on the nearest rock. It’s eighteen inches high, a little more than that from back to front, weighing, I guess, about 300 pounds. The ground is bone dry, not even a whisper of wind. Even though I haven’t seen it, I accept that the rock has moved. It’s too late to matter a damn. I don’t feel anything as I set off towards the road

The sky is almost dark by the time I reach the two vehicles. The Rav4 stands empty like a ruin. I sit in my own vehicle and try to call HQ to report the missing people. But once again I get no proper signal, no voices other than my own to trouble the darkness. I keep trying but nobody responds. After a while, I return to the Toyota. The camera is still on the seat where I left it, the tape stopped in exactly the same place. I press play and watch the blue screen, trying to see beyond it to what’s on the other side. I let it run for a minute but it’s a waste of time. Just as I’m about to stop it, the blue turns to white, which slowly reconfigures into a honeycombed pattern which moves back and forth across the frame. In quick succession three shots ring out on the tape, the first sounds since Teakettle Junction. I am calm, I don’t feel any fear, not until another minute has passed and a fourth blast sounds out and the screen fades to black.

Outside, I peer into the dark and see the more intense darkness of the Grandstand looming up out of the Racetrack. It’s no closer than it was before, I tell myself, though I no longer feel any inclination to trust my perceptions. An hour has passed when I climb back into the Expedition. Nobody has come. This time, when I call HQ, I do finally get something, a voice reporting an abandoned SUV out at the Racetrack. I shut the power off quickly, drink more water and try not to imagine the rocks gathering out on the playa. I think about the voice I heard and what it was saying. Speaking only to myself I respond, “You won’t find anything out there.” And after a minute’s silence I add, “They’re gone.” Hearing something, I get out of the car. I walk to the side of the road, feeling the weight of the night as it falls on the Valley. I can’t see anything but I look anyway, knowing that the rocks are edging their way up from the south. I tell myself someone must have heard them, that someone will come. These are the certainties that sustain me. I can’t stop myself from listening so when they stop it comes as a shock. Then, before I can register it, they start moving again, heading west, towards the road. I have no strength left. I sit down in the dirt to wait for someone to arrive even though I already know that nobody is coming here, that no one else belongs. The truth is I have as much right to be here as the dark. It’s reason that’s out of place here, that doesn’t belong. Reason can’t explain the rocks that roll, the moans of night or the flakes of sky that drift quietly down to Earth, which, given time, I probably could.