Midnight Lamp (39 page)

Ax noted that this was a relief to Stu’s mind, and was very touched. He would not have dreamed of asking for a posse. ‘They’ve got our babe, we have no other quarrel with them. Maybe we can even negotiate, it’s worth a try. What about you? Are you going to make that call?’

‘What call?’

‘Give me a break.’

‘I’m not going to call anyone.’

The rest of the family was coming up, with Sage: Ludmilla, the older daughter and son-in-law, and Violet, the youngest. There was a son also, but he lived in LA. Sage was wearing the mask, and sparking merrily with Violet, a pretty, plump, teenager with freckles on her nose. She’d been respectful of the ancient hellraiser last night; but she’d recovered her bounce. ‘Maybe you’ll get an idea for an immix from this trip,’ Violet swung up to sit on the top rail of the fence. ‘Horses, mountains, the desert moon—’

‘I’ll call it “Ghost Riders In The Sky”, an’ I’ll dedicate it to Violet.’

‘Oh God. You’re kidding.’

‘I’m kidding.’

‘It must have been
so weird
for you, standing where the Beatles once stood.’

‘Hahaha. It may not even have been our first time for that.’

‘Did you persuade him?’ asked Ludmilla.

Stu gave his wife a talk to you later look, and smiled gravely at Ax, ‘Yeah, I persuaded him. Ax is taking Madeleine, I think we’ll put Aoxomoxoa on Big Snow. That’s the white guy with the spotted behind, Sage. He’s a gentle fellow, and very tolerant of children. You keep one of your daddy-long-legs either side, he’ll do the rest.’

‘Madeleine,’ said Ludmilla, taken aback. ‘Well, okay… You like a good horse, Ax? Where are you from, again, in England?’

‘Somerset.’

‘Is that horse country?’

‘Not specially,’ he said, caught by unexpected pain, imagining this large, fair-to-grey Californian nonplussed by the miniature landscape, the sodden levels. ‘It’s orchard country: and wetter than you people would believe, most winters-’

‘When my grandmother’s family came to the Owens Valley,’ Ludmilla told him, ‘this was orchard country. You must know the story. 1913, they drained us, on some swindle, to fill the swimming pools of Los Angeles.’

‘You weren’t born nor thought of in 1913, Mom,’ said her son-in-law. ‘I think you should accept it’s time to let go. If they paid us back now, we’d drown.’

The household laughed, placidly, at one of those family jokes that’s like an old pet. The ranchhands who’d been kept at bay, while Stu had his private word with Ax, came over, interested to add to their rock celebrity collection.

‘I could spare Cheyne here,’ said Ludmilla. Cheyne was one of the horse-wranglers, the only woman among them. ‘She could come with you and handle the horses. You might be wise to take a guide.’

‘I’d be fine with that,’ said Cheyne, looking pleased.

‘They want to be on their own, Ludy. They’ll be okay.’

The air was still, the day would be stinking hot. The horses kept milling, a muffled fusillade of hooves, a whirl of hides like autumn-coloured leaves.

‘They’re spooked,’ remarked Ax, ‘Sage, you should take the mask off.’

‘They’ve been like this for days,’ said one of the hands, ‘The dogs and cats are fussing too. Maybe there’s a quake coming.’

The air temperature was still over a hundred Farenheit when they left Bighorn ranch, late in the day. Stu rode beside the car and horse-trailer as they crossed his fenced pasture at walking pace. At the northern boundary, which wasn’t far from the house at this point, Sage got out to open the gates. It proved a tussle, his hands were clumsy today. A causeway of packed rubble led north east, into shadow-painted hills. ‘You’ll find plenty off-roader trails,’ said Stu, impassive, making no move to get down and help. ‘Most of ’em aren’t marked on any map… So, you two are going after the man who stole your water.’

‘Yeah.’

‘I hope you make it. You know, I think I’m more surprised to see that you’re in a grown-up relationship than I am about the spiritual awakening.’

The skull mask did
impassive
with a sweet fuck you. ‘They keep me for a pet.’

‘You don’t really have superpowers, do you?’

‘Nah. That’s just a story I get my publicist to put out.’

‘Watch out for the guy who calls himself Moloch,’ said Stu. ‘Watch out for the lot of them, bunch of crazy no-knickers Goths and death wish geeks. You could be right the way you’re handling this, but they’re not going to be shy of firing first, and I think that Moloch… I think he’s the one. Well, so long.’

A few miles further, they took the Rugrat and trailer off the track and parked them in a roofless cove, backed and walled by scrub covered hillocks. They led out the horses, Madeleine, Big Snow the Appaloosa gelding, and Paintbrush, the little chestnut and white pinto: saddled up Madeleine and the Appaloosa, and erected the ponyfold thing they’d been instructed to use as a holding pen. Sage practiced his riding a little, then they settled the animals with feed and water, and unpacked their own kit. The assault rifles, which they had barely had a chance to try, were easy and solid to assemble and handle (damn sight more fun than the SA/80, an inimitably British weapon, difficult and proud of it). They checked over the rest, speaking little, glancing at each other with sharp grins. So far so good. They had imagined themselves breaking her out of a military lab, when they amassed this gear. But so far so good: still in phase.

There were no visible livestock, no sign of human presence except for the track; that vanished quickly into sagebrush, whichever way you looked. The hills had turned a rosy caramel with the twilight, the sky shading from colourless pallor to charcoal. Ax remembered a flight he’d once taken over the Caucasus in a light plane, one of his ‘Ax Preston’ journeys, and felt the same stir of wonder, the same irrational tug of longing… They packed everything again, unloaded fuel from the back of the Rat and set a fire in a circle of stones. They had her talisman with them, they were taking it in turns to carry it, but they used ordinary matches, not the tinderbox. Neither of them had any appetite. They drank water, and agreed they would eat in the morning.

The fusion rush had dropped them at last. Stone cold sober, Ax sat thinking of the ruin that might fall (Anne-Marie’s phrase) on Stu Meredith’s family; on that chirpy, freckle-faced teenager. Does Stu know what we may have brought on him? I think he suspects; and so does his wife. They’d talked with the seniors alone before they left: in the big homely kitchen, full of horse-memorabilia. Ludmilla was like Stu. Mention
Lavoisier
, and she won’t meet your eyes… On the other side of the fire Sage was propped on an elbow, the flames catching gleams in his hair; his face in shadow.

‘I wonder what a horse like Madeleine is worth, in dollars.’

‘Huh? I’m sorry Ax, I’ve no idea what fancy horses cost.’

‘It doesn’t matter. What are we going to do with them? We don’t want horses, but we can’t just leave them. If we turn them loose they’ll head straight home, and then Stu will think we are fucked and call the federales—’

‘I’ve been thinking we’re gonna need them, Ax. If our side’s planning to fry the enemy’s telecoms and digital devices, there’ll come a point when we have to dump the Rugrat, before it dies under us… I think Stu may have called the feds as soon as we were off the premises. He was in two minds.’

‘You’re right, I saw that. Oh, well. It’s high summer and we’re next door to Death Valley. At least we can rely on the weather.’

‘Hahaha. Ax, I wish you had not said that.’

‘Sorry. D’you feel like coming over to my side of the fire, at all?’

Sage came over. They sat shoulder to shoulder, watching the flames. Will you ever let me touch those scars?, Ax wondered. I want to touch them every time I see them, I want to kiss those knotted strands across your flank, that hold your life inside, the idea of them turns me on, it’s perverse, and we won’t go into it now: but another time. If there’s ever a good time.

‘I don’t see us getting away with non-violence, bodhisattva.’

‘Doesn’t seem likely, my dear.’

Ax had lied to Stu. They had no intention of trying to negotiate, unless close reconnaissance revealed a very different situation than had been advertised. They went over the plan, not to it, wide open. The specialist equipment they must take, the kit they could discard now they saw the picture… The guerrilla mood rose in them, out of the past. You
never
know what’s really going to happen on the bridge at midnight, it’s fatal to try and lock a mission into shape. The night grew chill. They spread their sleeping bags and lay down, rifles at hand: putting aside all hope and fear for a few hours of much-needed oblivion.

They crossed the Inyo range very early, and hit a dirt road that bisected the next valley as the sun rose. They were now within ten or fifteen miles of the ghost town (paper maps varied, and there was no entry on the Rat’s gazetteer). They were deploying
conceal
, using the ‘beaten-up farm truck’ (the Rugrat had a little repertoire of fun, secret characters). With an incongruously shiny horse-trailer, but that was probably normal enough. They worried that the mask feature would fail, the way it did in Carlsbad, but they couldn’t drive the AI car naked through this paradoxical landscape, where anything could be hidden and there was nowhere to hide. Sagebrush, grey mudstone washes, red boulders and parched grass shaded into crumpled foothills on either side of the trail; the scoured, unearthly peaks of the White Mountains stood in the north. They saw no other vehicles. Nothing moved but the white-rumped flicker of pronghorn taking flight: jack rabbits, birds of prey and piñon jays, and one pallid, trotting fox-like creature. Pockmarked metal signs announced surreal attractions, most of them far away in more famous parts of the Great Basin. It was as if someone had tried and failed to launch a tourist industry on a hot version of Mars. Painted rocks, bubbling mud, hot springs. No battles, no burials, no sermons in stone.

They identified the unmarked turn-off by landmarks and headed east until the town appeared like a mirage above the foothills: a Martian maquette, a cluster of alien right-angles, with a glint or two of glass. Ax drew up and tapped the dash. A pocked sign, tiny in the distance, sprang into focus through the windshield glass. LAVOISIER. They stared, heart-shaken, at the place where she was. There seemed to be earthworks: a rampart and a ditch around the camp, classic style?

‘I can feel us pushing our luck,’ muttered Ax.

He turned the Rat around. They drove on, to the auto dump, at the end of a vagrant spur of the paved but disintegrating 168, where they’d decided they would leave the horses. A lopsided white caravan stood derelict among the wrecks. They led the animals out, let them stretch their legs, put them back in the aircon trailbox, and disguised the box with a grimy shroud of black plastic borrowed from a heap of engine blocks. ‘We need a third man,’ said Ax, depressed that Stu’s horses might die of heatstroke if things went wrong. The dump had been reccommended as covert roadside parking, but it could be days before Stu came looking.

‘Or a platoon,’ agreed Sage. ‘Too bad. We’ll have to make do.’

The Rugrat became a mirror for the sagebrush. They headed uphill, the paradoxical emptiness swallowed them.

Lavoisier had been founded in the eighteen fifties, named by a French émigré after the scientist Lavoisier, father of modern Chemistry, who had lost his head in the Revolution. Manufacturing bath salts, and conceived as a healthful resort above the heat of the valley floor, it had become prosperous, lawless, amazingly violent; and faded into decline. In the late twentieth century it’d been revived as a New Age spiritual centre of some kind, but those settlers’d had to quit because the water supply had become too alkaline. The no-knickers Goths and death wish geeks had been in possession for about five years, according to the Merediths. They tanked their water in. They had no land fit for pasture or cultivation, and the guidebooks and ranger info nowadays warned tourists to stay away: but there must be money coming in from somewhere. Maybe some of them had city jobs, and commuted. Nobody local went near the place.

At five in the afternoon they were in a waterless arroyo on the other side of a fold of the Panamints from Lavoisier, dressed for the heat in desert shades of grey and tan; carrying their packs. It was very hot. One of those signs memorialised a boulder as big as a car, rammed into a crevase high in the wall by the flashflood of 2003. They stood and looked up at this gravity-defying feat.

‘I’m in a constant state of
déjà vu
,’ said Ax. ‘I knew this landscape before I was six, on tv screens, cinema screens, videogames. It’s not supposed to be real, and here I am. Fuck, actual
rocks
look familiar. I think this ravine must have featured in an episode of Star Wars. Or several episodes of Star Wars.’

‘If you say so. I always thought those sets were plastic.’

‘You must have been a terribly cynical little boy.’

They were alone in the once and future world, naked warriors obeying an oracle. Maybe the people who left the petroglyphs would have understood. ‘The first warning we’ll get,’ said Ax gloomily, ‘is when our own digital devices are zapped.’

‘We have til Friday.’

‘We don’t know that. Fuck, better just go for it.’

About a hundred metres further on they reached the Hole in the Wall: a balcony of red stone, the undercurve weather-carved into the blurred resemblance of drapery and garlands of flowers. They climbed the steps into an open-fronted cave, where worn tables and chairs stood in the dusk. A counter along one side of the cave held a meagre display of handwoven baskets and polished fossils; a tray of glossy, delicate animal skulls. Behind it a fat man read a paperback book by the light of a solar-cell lamp. He had a shotgun on the counter. They sat at a table, chugged their own water and ate dried fruit and jerky. The fat bloke came over, frowning, leaving his gun behind.

‘Hi. Anything I can do for you?’

‘Was this really a notorious outlaw hideout?’ asked Sage.

‘Naw, not really. There are Holes in Walls all over, this one is just a place. Are you guys hiking? This is very bad country for hiking, in the summer time.’