Where Echoes Live Read Free

the only person around, although the low growl of an automobile engine on the unpaved road came faintly to my ears.
    Ahead of me loomed a petrified forest of twisted, surreal shapes. They stood alone, their knobby limbs raised high, some in interlocking groups—eight, ten, twelve feet tall, stained pink and gold by the setting sun. Clumps of dry vegetation clustered at their bases; ground squirrels darted among them. The cold wind rustled the sagebrush and thistles, kicked up white dust devils, whistled and moaned in the towers’ chinks and crevices. The tufa was fully as beautiful as I had expected, but also grotesque and eerie. I felt a chill on my shoulder blades that had little to do with the wind.
    Like a child entering the enchanted forest in a fairy tale, I began wandering through the tufa. When I touched a squat, gnomelike formation, its calcified surface rasped against my skin. I pulled my hand back quickly, as if I’d been burned, then laughed at my extreme reaction. The sound bounced back at me from all sides—high-pitched, hollow, and much too loud in the great silence.
    Soon I reached the shore. The sun had sunk quickly behind the western ridge of hills, and the water was deep indigo now, faintly streaked with pink. Waterfowl bobbed on its rippling surface, mere silhouettes in the gathering dusk. The offshore islands rose like dark turreted castles.
    I knelt down and dipped my fingers into the lake; it was cold as ice. When I raised them and touched them to my tongue, they tasted very salty and bitter. I stood and looked around, trying to imagine the landscape as it had been before man, with typical lack of foresight, began diverting the water of the feeder streams. Where I was standing would have been lake bottom; all the pinnacles would have been submerged, the shoreline somewhere around the outer rim of the alkali—
    In my peripheral vision I caught a quick motion some fifty feet away, beside a hunchbacked giant. I peered over there, saw nothing in the rapidly fading daylight. At first I heard only the sigh and whine of the wind; then there came another sound—the scuff of feet running away over the soft powdery ground.
    I rushed around the pinnacle. Saw no one, nothing but a more massive formation that completely blocked my view. The scuffing noise had stopped. Only the thistles and sagebrush moved, bending to the wind.
    Frowning, I told myself I was being too imaginative. Then the scuffing noise came again, farther to the west in the petrified maze.
    I listened as the sound died out. When I’d heard nothing but stillness for a full minute I shrugged and started back toward where I’d left my car. Probably a hiker, I thought, who came out here to enjoy the solitude and was surprised to find another person cluttering up the landscape. Perhaps one of those whom Mrs. Wittington had referred to as “folks who just want to be left the hell alone.” In an area like this—
    The roar of an engine ripped through the silence.
    At first I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. Then I realized it was to the west, the way the footsteps had gone. A squarish shape—some off-road vehicle or a van?—shot from behind an outcropping and sped across the plain toward the junction of the unpaved road and the highway. Driving blind, without even its parking lights.
    I ran toward my car, but by the time I got there, the other vehicle had turned north on the highway and pursuit would have been futile. Besides, I thought, what good would it have done? Whoever had been watching me from behind the tufa tower had done nothing threatening or illegal. And whatever made him or her flee probably had nothing to do with me.
    Or was this business Anne-Marie had asked me here to look into more serious than I’d assumed?
    Zelda’s was a combination tavern and restaurant, housed in an enormous and architecturally undistinguished knotty pine structure on the very tip of the point. Now