Poltergeist II - The Other Side Read Online Free PDF

wands, snakes they enchanted, snakes they dangled from their mouths.
    Taylor skirted the main event, walked down two backstreets, and entered a pueblo with covered windows, dark but for a single candle burning in the corner. On a rug beside the candle sat an old, blind woman—a Snake Priestess once, now too old for anything but memories and waiting.
    “Hummingbird Grandmother,” said Taylor, sitting cross-legged before her.
    She tilted her unseeing head. “Taylor, Taylor, last of the renegade Koyemshi,” she joked—a reference to the Zuni mudhead Kachinas; they were the sacred clowns, deformed, insane, yet potent. Thus did she think of Taylor.
    “I seek Sings-With-Eagles, Grandmother,” he said. “I would do battle, and he must show me the Way ”
    She nodded. “Even this morning he told me to look for you.” Her opaque eyes were concentric rings of blue, tan, black—like a sand painting. “But he had to leave,” she continued. “I think his wife ran away again.”
    Taylor nodded. “He will be back?”
    She shrugged. “He is eagle. He will come when hunger hurts him.”
    “You know where he went?”
    “To beyond Black Mesa. To his totem rock,” she said, head nutating. “He had that look about him.” She smiled.
    Taylor smiled. “You have needs before I go?”
    “Hunger hurts the hummingbird no less than the eagle, though she has not claws.”
    He went out, drove all the way back to the rabbit felled by the eagle in the desert, retrieved it, and returned to Hummingbird Grandmother. Closing the circle, maintaining the harmony, sensing the pattern, flowing into the weave.
    He spent the rest of the afternoon cooking the rabbit, then he shared the meal with the old woman. It was evening when he headed his truck up toward Black Mesa, and night came quickly, for there were no stars—only a rumbling of clouds so low they fogged his windshield.
    He reached the base of the rock around nine. Not a rock, really; an obelisk. Like a Roman column, fifty feet around, three hundred feet tall, it rose straight up to the sky without so much as a foothold to gain access up its sheer sides.
    Well, hardly a foothold.
    Taylor stood back from it and looked to the top. Lightning struck out from the roiling clouds just beyond it, struck like a serpent’s tongue, illuminating a fall of rocks along one side of the base—a fall of rocks that might provide a grade to start climbing.
    It was another omen.
    Taylor started climbing.
    In the distance to the south, thunder shook the air.
    Thunder rattled the kitchen window as Jess put Carol Anne’s crayon drawings aside.
    “You’re real good at drawing,” she said as if she were sharing a secret with the girl. “Would you like to be an artist when you grow up?”
    “Maybe.” Carol Anne shrugged. “Don’t wanna grow up much.” She had seen, once, what grownups could become.
    “How come?” said Jess.
    “Probably not much fun.”
    “Oh, sure it is!” Jess protested. “I’ve loved being every age I’ve been. They all have their blessings.” Even old age, which most of the young reject or abhor—even this is a special time. “When I was your age,” she went on, “I learned I could do things other folks couldn’t.”
    “Like what kinda things?” Carol Anne wanted to know, half-suspicious, half-intrigued.
    “Well, I just knew things. I didn’t know how I knew. But I did.”
    Curiouser and curiouser. “Well, like what?”
    “Well, when I was your age my aunt lost her bracelet and I knew where it was—two miles from our house, in a place I’d never been.” She paused and stared at Carol Anne, searching deeply for truths in the child she loved so well. “You ever know things and couldn’t explain why?”
    Carol Anne broke into a slow, embarrassed smile.
    “Yes?” pushed Gramma Jess.
    “Yes,” said Carol Anne.
    “Well, my darling, that’s a special gift you and I have. It’s nothing to be scared of, and it’s nothing to be ashamed of. It’s made my