Poltergeist II - The Other Side

Poltergeist II - The Other Side Read Online Free PDF Page A

Book: Poltergeist II - The Other Side Read Online Free PDF
Author: James Kahn
Tags: Movie
standing alone under the low moon, arms across her chest, head leaning to one side, staring back at him. Then she was out of his glare, swallowed again by darkness, and he drove off.
    Back to the main road, east on 40 once more until he reached Diablo Canyon; then up the canyon and into the Painted Desert. He was in the Navajo Nation now.
    Just past the Little Colorado he sensed the sunrise nearing, so he stopped his truck and walked out into the desert. This was a magic time to be here, and Taylor needed all the magic he could gather now. It was the moment when Changing Woman—who was the child of Darkness and Dawn—most clearly revealed herself. It was a time of extraordinary beauty.
    He crossed over a rise so the truck would be out of sight and sat facing east. As he fingered his medicine bag the sky turned from black to thick gray, suffused this with violet, then lightened it by adding peach, then amber, then robin’s-egg blue . . . then the magenta sliver that was the sun, striking him abruptly, his shadow instantly racing across the sand and then stopping, like a fifty-mile-long knife poised at his back.
    Taylor chanted:
“In beauty may I walk,
    All day may I walk,
    Beauty before me, with it I wander.
    Beauty behind me, with it I wander,
    Beauty below me, with it I wander,
    Beauty above me, with it I wander,
    On the beautiful trail I am.
    With it I wander.”
    This was the Night Way, the Way that cured anguish. There would be much anguish where he was bound, and though he was learned in these Ways, he always had more to learn. And it was from the earth that one learned. From the harmony of the land.
    Here, the land of his people, the Dineh: there was profound meaning in every butte and mesa.
    A remoteness, too, was here—in the soul of the land and of the people. And of this person.
    Taylor watched an eagle circle high above and suddenly dive, as if pulled by an invisible wire. It hit the ground with a screek, then took to the air again with a rabbit squirming in its talons. Eighty feet up the rabbit writhed free and sailed to the ground in a slow, graceful arc not ten yards from where Taylor sat. The eagle, uncertain of Taylor’s intentions, flew off into the sun.
    Taylor stood, walked over to where the rabbit lay, crouched beside it. It was bloody but alive: paralyzed by terror or, more likely, a broken neck, its eyes stared wildly up at him. He placed his hand on its chest. Its heartbeat was nearly a trill.
    He asked the animal’s forgiveness, in deference to the intricate interrelationship of all things; then, quickly twisting its head, he killed it. At the moment of death he brought the rabbit’s mouth to his own and inhaled deeply, drinking the Sacred Wind of Life.
    And just as he did this he heard the eagle sing. This he took as an omen, and he returned to his truck to continue his search for the old magus.
    Just within the border of the Hopi Nation Taylor found the desert mule path that took him past the arroyo where Sings-With-Eagles kept his trailer. It was up on cinder-blocks—an old, rusting, twelve-foot Airstream, its windows broken, its door long gone. A mangy dog stood barking near the hitch. Taylor called out, but he could feel no one was home.
    Next he went to Sings-With-Eagles’s Kiva—the sacred underground chamber used by the Hopi for storing fetishes, ringing chants, working magic. He located the Sipapu—the opening—to the old man’s personal underworld by following a finger of rock that pointed to a pile of dead cottonwood that kept the Sipapu in shadow most of the day. The fire pit in the Kiva was still warm, the totems carefully spaced around its perimeter, but Sings-With-Eagles was not there.
    It was noon when Taylor got to Second Mesa, and the Snake Dance was in progress. Hundreds of dancers, masked, feathered—some possessed—chanted and reeled in the ancient ceremony, twisting amid the thousands of snakes they’d gathered from the desert, snakes they hypnotized with yucca
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