False Memory

When the body hit, it landed with neither a splash nor a thud, sending up instead a sound that had the character of both. Perhaps the water below was not as pure as it had been in ancient days, now thickened by centuries of sediment and perhaps by the grisly remains of others dumped here on previous nights.

Following the slap of impact, a wet and eerie churning arose, as though something that lived below were feeding or perhaps merely examining the dead man, striving to identify him by a braille-like reading of his face and body. More likely, the corpse had disturbed pockets of noxious gas trapped in the viscous soup, which now roiled, bubbled, burst.

For Dusty this was a little piece of Hell on earth, and for Martie, as well, judging by the ghastly look on her face. A precinct of Hell just outside Santa Fe. And the work before them was the work of the damned.

Bringing the second cadaver to the well taxed both him and her, though not solely because of the physical effort involved. The one named Kevin had spilled more blood than Zachary, seemingly most of his six or seven liters, and not all of it had yet frozen to his skin and clothes. He stank, too, apparently having been incontinent in his final throes. Heavy, sticky, as stubborn in death as in his dying, he was a difficult package to move.

Worse, however, was the sight of him, first in the questing beam of the flashlight, slumped against the kiva wall, and then as they half carried and half dragged him through the headlights. His beard of blood, his red-stained teeth and red mustache, his skin gray under a white freckling of snow. In his glazed eyes was fixed such a pure and piercing expression of terror that in the moment of his exit from this world, he must have glimpsed the face of Death himself, bending close to kiss — and then beyond the empty sockets of the Reaper’s bony face, some unspeakable eternity.

The work of the damned, and still more to do.

Laboring in grim silence, neither of them dared to speak a word. If they were to speak of what they were doing, this essential work would become impossible. They would be forced to turn away from it in horror.

They dumped Kevin down the well, and when he hit bottom with an even more solid sound than his partner had raised, the impact was followed by more of that hideous churning. Dusty’s imagination gave him the ghoulish spectacle of Zachary and Kevin being greeted below by their previous victims, nightmare figures in various stages of decomposition yet animated by vengeance.

Though much of New Mexico is parched on the surface, underlying the state is a reservoir so vast that only a tiny fraction of it has been explored. This secret sea is fed by subterranean rivers carrying water out of both the high plains of the central United States and the Rocky Mountains. The wonders of the Carlsbad Caverns were shaped by the ceaseless action of these waters flowing through fractures in soluble limestone; and there are doubtless undiscovered networks of caverns large enough to shelter cities. If ghost ships plied this secret sea, crewed by the restless dead, these two new recruits might pass eternity as rowers in an oar-propelled galley or as seamen tending the rotting sails of a moldering galleon driven by a phantom wind, under skies of stone, to unknown ports beneath Albuquerque, Portales, Alamogordo, and Las Cruces.

An ocean lay below, but no water could be found aboveground to wash the blood from their hands. They scooped up snow and scrubbed. And still more snow and still more scrubbing, until their freezing fingers ached, until their skin was red from the friction, and then until their skin was white from the cold, and yet more snow and more and harder scrubbing, harder, harder, striving not merely to cleanse but also to purify.

With a sudden sense of madness looming, Dusty looked up from his throbbing hands and saw Martie kneeling, bent forward, her face greasy with revulsion, her black hair mostly concealed under a lacy white mantilla. She was scouring her hands with hard-packed snow half turned to prickly ice, scrubbing so ferociously that she would soon begin to bleed.

He seized her wrists, gently forced her to drop the ice-crusted lumps of snow, and said, “Enough.”

She nodded. In a voice shaky with horror and with gratitude, she said, “I’d scrub all night if I could scrub away the past hour.”

“I know,” he said. “I know.”

In fifty minutes — or nearly two episodes of The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show, if measured by the clock of classic radio — Jennifer cantered home, ready to be cooled down and blanketed.

Her shy pacers, Skeet and the blushing man, arrived close behind her. They actually drove into the apartment-complex parking lot and stopped to watch Jennifer disappear into her building.