Chapter The Ceremony - Sarah
THE CEREMONY SARAH
The Chief had been disgusted by this entire process.
Back in the Huntsville visitor’s center, during one of their long talks before he died, the old man had said, “Trapping people against their will isn’t a good way to make any sort of power work,” he’d said.
“It’s probably why we’re in this mess in the first place.
My father said the Te’lo’hi ceremony should last for a few hundred years. It’s barely been five decades.”
“So we fix it. We know how, right?”
“Sarah, you don’t understand. The ceremony, it requires a catalyst. It…
it’s not like the dances and sacred rituals of any tribe I know.
It’s darker. Barbaric. I’m not sure it’s even Indigenous at all.
Dad said the forefathers would have never come up with it on their own.
He said it must have had an outside source. ”
“Like what?” Sarah had said. “Aliens?”
The Chief had fallen silent a long time. “That may not be as unrealistic as it sounds.”
Sarah hadn’t much cared about the forefathers.
She was “Apache, sort of, I guess,” as her mother once described it.
The Chief was a distant relation, and his father had clearly been far more devoted to the old ways, the old world.
In Sarah’s branch of the family, the last people to take any real interest in the old world, were a distant uncle and some forgotten cousins—Thomas and Tabitha and their archaeologist father—all three of whom had vanished off the face of the earth one night in 1955.
“And let that be a lesson,” Sarah’s mother had said.
The lesson, apparently: marry a white man and forget the past, just like her mother had done.
Sarah hadn’t cared about the past, the old tribes, the violence that had paved over them like the tiles of a great white reliquary.
She hadn’t had the fortitude to be that heartbroken by everything that had happened to her people.
She would have been angry and devastated every minute of every day, and who had the time for that? What would it change?
In the visitor’s center of Huntsville, she had said to The Chief, “Whatever’s in that mountain, it’s trying to get out. You know it. I know it. So what kind of catalyst are we talking about here?”
“Murder, Sarah. Your murder. Just like my father’s before you.
” The Chief had held her gaze, sat very still.
“Hence our disgust. The tribes of this continent, almost to a man, hated the idea of a human sacrifice. Any stories you heard about it north of Montezuma were almost always propaganda by the white man. But there’s no getting around it.
My father said it’s what had to be done.
And according to the journal you brought me last time, I’d say he was right.
But think about it, really. Do you have any idea what you’re signing up for? ”
Sarah had studied the old man through the prison’s perforated glass.
They had a room to themselves, which was apparently a favor from the guards on behalf of The Chief, or some friend of The Chief’s, she never understood.
Prison politics were like border politics, as she’d quickly learned: money and power, mirrors and feints.
On a table in front of her, Sarah had laid out a notebook, a felt-tip pen, and a small photograph.
She’d pressed the photograph to the glass. The Chief had studied it for a long time.
He’d said, “Are those your boys?”
Sarah had nodded. She’d tucked the picture away without looking at it for herself. She couldn’t bear to, most days. Not if she wasn’t planning to spend the next forty-eight hours obliterated. “They’ll be seven and nine.”
“What happened?”
“Custody court. I lost.” It was a long story with a simple solution.
She’d once been a ferocious drinker. She’d been blazed on chardonnay one summer afternoon, had gone to pick the boys up from a friend’s house and crashed into a highway embankment.
One broken arm. One sprained little neck.
Two protective orders filed by their father.
Granted. Sarah’s life had been downhill ever since.
Her tenure at the university, her home in Austin: all up in smoke.
And then, last month, she’d started having the dream. The same dream, every night. Every. Single. Night.
A mountain in the desert.
A little motel.
A beam of silver light, washing away the world.
And fear—fear like Sarah had never felt in her life. A sweaty cold horror in the morning. The serrated certainty that this destruction was coming—that this was real—digging through her heart.
Sarah had known that if she didn’t do something about it, that silver light would kill everyone on this miserable fucking planet.
And, most importantly, her boys.
Sitting across from The Chief in the Huntsville Correctional Unit, Sarah had popped the cap on her felt-tip pen and opened the journal to a fresh page. “I don’t care what it takes. I don’t care what it costs. Just tell me what I need to do.”
Now, at the Brake Inn Motel, Sarah unscrewed the cap of the black plastic cylinder in her bathroom.
With a pair of tweezers, she pulled free the roll of film she’d snapped today.
She wiped away the last of the exposure chemicals in which the film marinated, tossed the towel to the floor, held the film to the infernal red light bulb she’d installed above the sink.
She’d been worried she hadn’t given the chemicals enough time to soak, but she hadn’t had the time to wait.
The ceremony needed to start, now. Sarah knew it in her gut.
She’d learned to trust that, if nothing else.
Luck was on her side. Luck, or something else.
The chemicals had done their job: the film was clear.
This afternoon, from her vantage point in the upstairs window of the old house, Sarah had snapped a photograph of the two young women—Kyla Hewitt and someone else—climbing from the white Malibu.
Later, Sarah caught a picture of the two boys, Ethan and Hunter, walking in from the road, moments before she went down to speak to them in the office for herself.
A few minutes after that, on her way out of the office, she’d snapped Stanley Holiday climbing out of his van, his granddaughter visible from the back seat.
And last of all, Sarah happened to glance outside—pure coincidence—in time to see a man in a motorcycle jacket steal across the motel’s parking lot, almost invisible in the growing dark. Snap.
Sarah had first come to this motel six weeks ago, a few days after The Chief’s death.
She’d found nothing but a ruin: broken windows, a collapsed porch.
She’d wandered the empty rooms, sat on a fallen wardrobe, and listened to the silence around her, the wind.
She’d felt no strange power in this land, at the foot of this mountain, in the way the ancestors allegedly had.
The power to ensure that things always work out the way they should.
Sarah hadn’t been sure what that would feel like, but she’d felt nothing but cold.
But when she’d closed her eyes, she’d seen the silver light.
That very night, she’d stepped into a steakhouse in Fort Stockton and sat down across from Frank O’Shea and Stanley Holiday and said, “I can help y’all find your mothers.
” To Sarah’s absolute shock, the men hadn’t batted an eye when Sarah had explained her theory that the men’s moms had vanished during an ancient ritual designed to bend time and space.
“I guess I always knew it must have been something… unorthodox,” Frank O’Shea had said.
“We’ve spent fifty years looking for them in all the normal ways. ”
Stanley had been almost desperate, childlike. “You really think they’re still there, at the motel? That you could save them?”
“Yes. With y’all’s help.” A lie, of course. Sarah had had no idea if the men’s mothers could be saved. She’d been hazy on the ceremony’s details. She’d let the men believe that by helping her—by repairing the broken ceremony—they could free their mothers from the motel’s grasp.
Sarah hadn’t told the men that they would, in fact, be trapping themselves here.
She’d had no idea what would happen after that.
Maybe they could meet their mothers in whatever strange pocket dimension the ceremony would create.
Maybe they’d spend eternity living the same night over and over, blissfully unaware. She hadn’t known, and she hadn’t cared.
Frank O’Shea was famous in Huntsville prison, apparently.
After the stories The Chief had told her about the man, Sarah had felt no compunction about keeping O’Shea trapped here.
She didn’t believe in justice, but it was probably better for society to have two fewer men like Frank and Stanley on the loose.
Sarah had felt a bit worse for the others, though.
Stanley had leapt at the opportunity to help Sarah track down the descendants of the folks who’d disappeared in 1955, or as many as they could find paperwork on.
He’d made some calls. He’d put people under observation.
He’d said over one of their many dinners at the steakhouse, “I’ve been having the strangest dreams.”
And then they’d waited. You’ll know when it’s time to check into the motel, The Chief had written in his last letter, giving Sarah little to do but while away her life savings in a luxury motel in Marfa.
Every morning she’d awaken from her terrible sleep in time to watch a band of golden sun give birth to the desert, again and again, drawing the world out of black nothing like the hero in an old legend.