Thumbprints Page 4

  When Marcia reached her own house, she saw the car in the driveway; Doug was home. She heard him moving around upstairs as she unpacked her groceries and put them away. Pearl came into the kitchen and meowed, then scampered to the door, still meowing. “I want to go outside. Why doesn’t she let me out? I want to stalk birds, I want to play.”

  Pearl was so unaware, so insistent, so perfect in her otherness. You’d better be careful, Marcia thought violently. You’d better keep your mind quiet when our friends are here, if you know what’s good for you, or you’ll stay in the cellar. And you’d better watch what you think about me. Appalled, she suddenly realized that under the right circumstances, she could dash the cat’s brains out against the wall.

  “I want to go outside.”

  “Pearl,” Marcia said, leaning over the cat. “Pearl, listen to me. Try to understand. I know you can’t, but try anyway. You can’t go outside, it’s dangerous. You have to stay here. You have to stay inside for your own good. I know what’s best. You have to stay inside from now on.”

  Climb the Wind

  They rode out of Orion, growing larger until they filled the sky. They had appeared as small, nebulous shapes, swelling in size until there were thousands of ghostly giants on horseback galloping soundlessly overhead, the stars of the night sky showing through the ripples of their transparent coats and the bodies of their steeds.

  I was too stunned to be terrified of this unexplainable sight. Then a shout came from behind me, and the people gathered in the square were thrusting their arms upward as they cried out to one another in their harsh, alien language. As the apparitions grew larger, covering more of the sky, I could see them more clearly. By the time the horsemen filled the sky completely, the Mongolians around me were silent.

  All of us saw the riders; that much was evident. As frightening as the vision was, I didn’t have to fear that it was my own private madness.

  After a while, I lowered my eyes and looked around at the knots of people who had rushed into the huge square. Most of them were still gazing skyward. I saw no sign of fear; a few of the Mongolians were even smiling.

  “I don’t believe it,” Allen said at last.

  I glanced at him, then looked toward the center of the square. Another horseman was there, a warrior of stone astride a horse that stood on a massive stone base. Our guide had pointed out the monument to us that morning; the stone horseman was Sukhe Bator, Mongolia’s revolutionary hero, the man who had begged Lenin and the Soviet Union to come to his country’s aid. The Russians had come and gone, leaving a legacy of grim, decaying apartment blocks, wide empty streets, and drab monumental buildings, some still with Cyrillic lettering, surrounded by barbed wire. Sukhe Bator was being replaced in his people’s hearts by an older hero, Genghis Khan.

  Again I wondered what had brought me to Ulan Bator, what I had hoped to find here. Perhaps the horsemen in the night sky were a sign.

  More people were gathering in the square to look up at the unearthly horsemen. The Mongolians were strangely calm as they watched the sky, and maybe their composure kept my own fears at bay. I noticed then that the riders seemed to be clothed in long tunics and baggy trousers, with what looked like quivers and bowcases hanging from their belts. I squinted, and saw long mustaches on their faces and coiled braids behind their ears.

  They looked, I thought, like Mongols – not the placid people standing near me in the square, but more like the ancestors who had conquered most of the Asian continent.

  The horsemen were sweeping toward us, shrinking to normal size as they bore down on us. Someone was shouting, but the people near me were frozen. I wanted to run, but realized that I would not penetrate the crowd, that trying to flee might start a panic. A wall of riders, now life size, fell on us in silence, their ghostly forms shimmering – and passed through us, vanishing into the ground.

  We stood there for a long time, until the last of the riders had disappeared. It was past ten o’clock when people began to wander toward the streets bordering the vast square. There had been no sign of panic. Maybe these people assumed that the vision was only another product of advanced technology, a more developed country’s experiment, no different in kind from the trail of a missile being tested, the pale stream of a jet’s passage, or the bright pinprick of a satellite moving amid familiar constellations. I could almost believe that the vision was explainable, cut off from everything as we were; the outside world had become unknown territory.

  “Good God,” Allen muttered. “What the hell does it mean? You got any ideas, Bill?” He shook his head. “Some sort of light show. That’s it – some kind of display for the tourists.” I could tell he didn’t really believe that.

  At last we left the square, walking back along a street wide enough for a good-sized army to march through, to the concrete box that was our hotel. Allen said nothing on the way; I caught him chewing at his lower lip when I glanced at him. The only traffic along the way was an occasional truck, bus, or run-down jeep. Mongolians stood along the side of the street, murmuring to one another and then gesturing toward the sky.

  A few Westerners were outside the hotel. “Les cavaliers,” a woman said in French, and then I caught the word “ciel,” and knew she had seen the riders, too. Maybe the whole city had seen them. The shabby, dark, mutton-scented hotel lobby was crowded with tourists. Some seemed frozen in place, unable to move; others were shaking their heads and gesturing wildly. A few men were heading toward the bar. I expected Allen, who had attached himself to me during the flight from San Francisco to Beijing, to ask me to join him for a drink. Instead, he walked toward the elevators, muttering something about trying to find a news broadcast on his short-wave radio.

  If I waited around, someone else from the tour would probably show up to offer theories about the heavenly riders while we fortified our nerves with a few drinks. But I didn’t feel like sitting in the cheerless bar rotting my stomach with undiluted vodka; I’d learned the first night here that if I didn’t order it straight, I risked getting it mixed with a wretched-tasting orange soda. The vodka was named after Genghis Khan, and the bartender wore a button with a portrait of the mighty Mongol conqueror who had believed his people were destined to rule all the lands under Heaven.

  I went to my floor. The sixteen people on our tour had been scattered to different floors, but Gil Severn, the tour guide, had the room next to mine. “You won’t like Ulan Bator,” he had warned me over the phone a month before we left the States. “Ugliest city in the world. But it’ll be worth it when we get out in the countryside. Great scenery. Great hunting – or, in your case, shooting.” I had told him that I planned to do my hunting through the lens of a camera. We had been promised an excursion to Karakorum, an optional side trip on horseback to what was alleged to be a typical Mongolian settlement, a visit to a reopened Buddhist monastery, and a flight to the Altai Mountains for three days of hunting before a train trip back to Beijing and more sightseeing there.

  I entered my room, closed the door behind me, and finally acknowledged how frightened I was. That the vision had been a collective hallucination was the most obvious explanation. The Mongolians, for unconscious reasons of their own, had looked up to see images seemingly drawn from their glorious past, and the foreigners visiting Ulan Bator had somehow been drawn into this mass delusion.

  I had brought some paperback mysteries with me and read for a while, but the words on the pages didn’t seem to connect. I had washed, changed into my pajamas and was about to go to bed when someone knocked on the door.

  Allen was in the hall, clutching a bottle. “Did I wake you?” he asked. I shook my head. “Been listening to the BBC.” He held the bottle up. “Scotch.”

  I could smell the scotch on his breath. “Come on in.”

  He sat down in the room’s only chair; I settled myself on one of the narrow beds as he handed me the bottle. “Help yourself, Bill,” he said. “You’ll need it. Those guys on horseback – they’re seeing them in other places, accor
ding to the news.” He ran a hand through his thick gray hair. “Nobody knows what they are.”

  “You mean–” I was trying to absorb this. “The whole world’s seeing Mongols riding toward us from the sky?”

  “Not quite. In Europe, they say folks are seeing guys in helmets and armor. Somebody in Germany was talking about seeing dames with shields.”

  “Valkyries,” I muttered.

  “In the Middle East, they had robes and those cloth jobs Arabs wear on their heads. The BBC was getting a report from Moscow when I was listening – there it’s Cossacks.” Allen’s broad chest heaved as he took a deep breath. “Some TV crews with camcorders tried to get tapes, but nothing came out. It’s like the riders weren’t really there.”

  “What else is going on?” I asked.

  “In some places, it was about the way it was here – people standing around staring at the sky, watching them ride right through everybody and then just evaporating. Other places, people panicked and got into car accidents and such. Nobody said anything about riots, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Some folks got down on their knees and started praying.”

  “The Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” I said softly.

  “Maybe that’s what some folks thought.” Allen leaned back; his ruddy face seemed paler. “And here we are stuck in a place where it’s hard to find out what’s really going on.”

  “Maybe it’s just as well we’re here,” I said. “The Mongolians seem to be taking it in stride. We might be in more danger back home.”

  “Maybe, but hell – my kids are there. They must be wondering what they’re going to see when it’s night. Wish we weren’t so damned cut off. I’ve got a good mind to try and get a call through to my son.” He took the bottle from me.

  “This might be a one-time thing,” I said.

  “Hope you’re right.”

  “There’ll probably be some more news by morning. Anyway, we’ve got that trip to Karakorum coming up tomorrow.” I was trying to sound confident. “Better get some rest.”

  “Yeah.” Allen got up. “The scientists’ll figure it out. There has to be a reason.” He ambled toward the door. “See you, Bill.”

  When he was gone, I stretched out, but couldn’t sleep. For a moment, I thought of knocking on Gil’s door and asking him what he thought of the phenomenon, then glanced at the pocket alarm clock on the night table. It was past three in the morning; he’d be asleep, and we were supposed to start for Karakorum in the morning.

  I didn’t like sharing a room while traveling; it was worth the extra expense to be able to retreat to my customary solitude when traveling companions got on my nerves. Apparently Allen felt the same way, since he was the only other person on this tour traveling as a single. Now I was beginning to wish I had offered to share a room with him. It would have helped having someone to talk to, and we could have listened to more news on his radio. I could have turned on the battered TV in my room, but any news I picked up there, assuming any was on, would probably be in Mongolian.

  New experiences – that’s the reason I gave others for traveling. It was easier than admitting that I had little else to do and that depression set in if I stayed home too long. Saying I had made some good investments and had taken an early retirement sounded better than telling people that a trust fund had eased my way through life. To speak of needing change and adventure in my life hid the fact that the journeys I took were usually safer than some might think; I was a tourist, not an adventurer. I would go home and regale my acquaintances – I couldn’t call most of them friends – with stories of my latest trip until it was time to plan a new excursion.

  This trip to Mongolia was different from my other travels because I wasn’t just trying to avoid depression or to distract myself from a largely pointless existence by coming here; I was looking for something else. I had read about these people and their history years before, when their land was inaccessible. Maybe the country’s remoteness was what had attracted me. Mongolia had become for me a dream of deserts and steppes, of nomads who wandered and could lose themselves in their largely empty land. Sometimes I imagined that I might in another life have been like one of the horsemen who had conquered the world, even while knowing that I was more like one of their aimless, worn-out descendants who had lost it.

  I had indulged in some vague notion of testing myself in an environment that remained one of the harshest on Earth. Yet I had come here with other tourists and a guide who would smooth my way here as my family’s attorney and trust fund did at home. Had I been looking for real challenges, I could have found them in my own country, among those with too many problems and not enough resources to solve them.

  Despair was seeping into me again; my chest ached as I took a deep breath. In the morning, we would leave Ulan Bator; there would be enough activity during the trip to Karakorum to distract me and make me able to sleep soundly tomorrow night. Eventually, I would go home with stories of my Asian sojourn and the mysterious horsemen I had seen; I did not expect them to reappear. By then, the vision would be analyzed and an explanation for it found; my world would be safe once more.

  Breakfast, served in the large and dreary hotel restaurant, was nearly inedible sausage, rice, and tepid bitter-tasting tea. Allen had still not arrived when we started eating. A couple of people at our large table complained about the food; we had been in Ulan Bator for two days now, with nothing to eat except badly cooked fatty lamb, rice, and something that had looked like blackened carrots and tasted like charcoal. Gil explained that there was a food shortage in the city, that most of its citizens had even less to eat.

  “Never liked fruit,” Sandy Rayburn said as he sawed at his sausage; he was an attorney with a chubby boyish face who looked barely old enough to be a college freshman. “My mom could never get me to eat fruit. Now I’d give anything for an orange.”

  “God,” Isabel Monahan murmured. She was a tall, lanky, middle-aged woman accompanied by an equally tall and lanky husband called Tug who had a vaguely Southern accent. “I don’t suppose it’s even possible to get a cup of coffee. Don’t they know that Americans need their morning coffee?”

  “I’ll see what I can do.” Gil stood up, smiling lopsidedly; I had seen that smile before, in Beijing, when he had informed us, exhausted as we were, that we would have to wait three hours longer than expected for our plane to Ulan Bator. “Now we were all supposed to be packed and waiting in the lobby by nine, but there’s been a change of plans. Looks like we’ll have to stay here one more night – Tserendjav, our Juulchin guide, tells me he hasn’t been able to get us the jeeps we need. So you’re free until about one – take a stroll, or catch up on some sleep if you like. We’ll go over to the National Museum this afternoon and by tonight we should know about arrangements for going to Karakorum.”

  “Might as well sleep,” Tug Monahan said. “This town doesn’t have a whole lot of attractions.”

  “You all know about – well, about those sky riders,” Gil went on; his smile faded. “They’re being seen everywhere. I think the officials here are a bit more worried than they’re letting on, but I’m hoping our plans won’t be disrupted.” He looked down. “I’ve got to meet Tserendjav and straighten things out. See you a little before one, in the lobby.”

  Most of the others looked resigned. Tug Monahan opened his mouth, as if about to ask a question, but Gil was already retreating toward the distant doorway.

  “Well,” Isabel Monahan said. “We’d better make it to the Altais. They’d better not screw that up. That’s the main reason we came.”

  I could believe it. Most of the people on this tour were hunters or at least played at being hunters, and during our flight, the Monahans had chattered about their earlier safaris. Apparently one of their main pleasures in life was blasting away at wild animals, and places like Mongolia and Siberia were likely to be the new big-game hunting grounds. Africa was played out, and the Mongolians and Russians needed hard currency. Isabel was aiming to bag an oryx, while Tug was afte
r a big-horned Marco Polo sheep.

  I was suddenly disgusted with the Monahans, with all of the hunters getting ready to plunder this land.

  “Don’t complain, Isabel,” Lynda Gerber murmured; she was a small bony woman with short gray hair, leathery skin, and deep wrinkles around her eyes and mouth. “Half the fun of traveling to a place like this is telling everybody how difficult it was when you get home. Inconvenience is part of the deal.” Lynda and her companion, a stocky middle-aged woman whose name I’d forgotten, also planned to use cameras instead of guns; they had mentioned that while we were cooling our heels in Beijing.

  “That business last night,” a bald man named Harvey muttered. “They were like ghosts. Thought I was going mental.” He poked at his uneaten sausage. “If I’m going to see delusions, I’d rather see them at home.”

  I excused myself and left the restaurant. Gil was in the lobby talking to Tserendjav, the guide from Juulchin, the Mongolian tourism agency. He was smiling placidly as Gil leaned closer to him. Tserendjav had a thin mustache, a wrestler’s massive build, and wore a pin with a portrait of Genghis Khan on his collar. He had met us at the airport and had stood in the front of the bus grinning, saying nothing as Gil pointed out the sights, such as they were, on the way to our hotel. Gil had spoken to him only in Russian; I wondered if Tserendjav knew any English.

  Allen emerged from an elevator; I hurried to him. “Hope you haven’t packed yet,” I told him. “Gil just told us that we’re going to be staying here until tomorrow.”

  “I am packed. Didn’t want to leave it until the last minute.” He glanced in Gil’s direction. “So what’s the itinerary?”

  “Nothing until a museum trip at one. You didn’t miss much by skipping breakfast.”

  “Didn’t think I would.” He moved closer to me. “Frankly, I’m not sorry we’re staying. Wouldn’t surprise me if Gil’s already trying to figure out how to get us home.” He lowered his voice. “Got the BBC this morning. All anybody’s talking about is those riders. A report was coming in from New York while I was packing.”