On the second day of the storytelling festival in the garden square, Giles Hammond was in big trouble.
He licked his lips as he looked around the impromptu courtroom. There were few sympathetic faces on the spectators and none on the people behind the bench. The armed guards at each of the three entrances had blank expressions.
The chief Planner, a bald man named Killington, with a walrus moustache, spoke into a small microphone. “Order please. Everybody sit.” The chatter died away. Silence like old leaves filled the courtroom.
“We should be able to keep this brief.” Killington had a habit of muttering, thus telling everyone that his voice was important and they had better make the effort to understand.
“Giles Hammond, you stand charged with spreading lies in a story, don’t you? Tell us why you thought to speak with such audacity about the things in your tale. If you would, please.”
Giles stood to speak. Storytellers were supposed to invent worlds, to let their minds roam free and perhaps in that way stumble onto demon secrets.
But Giles had clearly stumbled onto some actual secret of the Planners. Something about that mountainside in Arizona in his story. It must be a real place. A worm turned over in his belly. He was in more trouble than he’d dared think. He licked dry lips.
He was 34 and had been a storyteller for ten years. Storytelling festivals used to be a chance for him to show off his skill, attend workshops, and hope for a chance to tell on the main stage some day.
But now you were in danger every minute of saying the wrong thing while the Planners were listening. Giles would have stayed at home if he could, but anyone who had ever identified as a storyteller was required to attend. No exceptions.
Just an hour ago he’d been on one of the numerous small platforms. The Chaos above was just as it had been for two years, filled with geometric patterns that made his head ache. But the Chaos cast light and warmth like real sky. If you didn’t look at it, you could imagine the sun was shining.
He ached for real sky, with smoke rising from a chimney on a cold day. And with that ache, came an image of a little house out in the desert, an old native American woman named (for some reason) Benz or Bryn, and a red stone mountain. Nothing more than that, but telling stories that “just came to you” was what they expected of storytellers at this nightmare of a “festival.”
And so, in a voice more formal than his normal speaking voice, he began.
“It was a cold day when I walked up to her little hogan.” Oh crap, he wasn’t sure what a hogan actually was. He’d probably called the modern-style house the wrong thing.
He gestured with his fingers: “Smoke from her chimney was curled against an icy blue sky. In the yard I saw a rusting children’s play set. It was all dingy brown now but you could see it had been red and yellow, like ketchup and mustard.
“And there she was on a bench out front. Her black eyes followed me as I walked up.” He lifted his hand in greeting, because of course a storyteller doesn’t just tell, he shows.
“Her hat looked like kind of like a ranger’s hat that had melted. It was just a lump of felt with a feather stuck in it. She had greying brown hair hanging in two braids. Here’s a weird thing: she had a blanket wrapped around her, turquoise blue with jagged shards of red, and a thick gray sweatshirt under that but she didn’t look like she ever got cold, like she wore warm stuff just so the rest of us wouldn’t feel dumb when it was so cold.”
As he held out his hand, in character, greeting the old woman, he felt himself slip into the story. To disappear into one’s story: that used to be the dream of all creators of story. But now in this demon-haunted world, it meant you had touched on something out there…
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I held out my hand to the old woman. Her name didn’t seem right for her. “Mrs. Benz?” The silence stretched miserably. Finally, she put out a hand back.
When she talked, her mouth didn’t seem to move. “Sit.” Her voice was deep, husky, her face neutral.
Well, I looked around and was going to try to lean against that play set but she patted the bench beside her. So, I sat next to her, trying not to touch her. And there we sat, facing the rust-colored mountain where the evil might or might not be starting.
I knew that a long silence was about to start and I had to sit there through it. When I was a kid, long silences meant I was in big trouble, so it was hard, let me tell you, to stop my brain from raking up all the bad things I’d ever done.
I was so relieved when she talked at last.
“Used to get colder than this. When I was young.”
Now I could reply with something neutral. “Warmer in the summer too, I hear.”
“Mmm. Warmer summers. Maybe too warm. Global warming.”
I forced myself to wait. I was a good reporter but I was used to people you had to press for information. I knew that with this old woman, I had to be quiet and let her come to me.
And she did. “Up there.” She gestured with her chin.
“Yes, I think something is happening up there. I hoped I was wrong.”
The cold seeped into my bones as I sat still, waiting.
“I used to go up there.”
I knew what she was waiting for me to ask about the picture. I saw clearly in my mind’s eye the picture I’d seen earlier that day as I scouted for background on a story I couldn’t quite believe. But my wife worked for the government and she said she knew.
“At the visitor center, there’s a picture…?”
“Yes.” An incredible canyon shot, a massive bluff filling the bottom of the frame with warm reds, threads of vegetation adding a lacework of life under a luminous late afternoon sky. And on top of the bluff, tiny in all that grandeur, the gleam of a human figure, a naked woman wearing a hat that might have been a ranger hat.
“He started out to take the picture of me. Just me. I’d taken off everything except the hat. He liked that.” Her face was stone. “I was a desert goddess, he says. Brown as the rocks in the sun and warm as honey.”
Yes, I could picture her as a younger woman, cross-legged in her glory at the top of that cliff. I could see her with eyes closed against the light, head thrown back, rich brown hair hanging in the same two braids at her side.
“He started to take a picture of a nude woman,” she said calmly, emotionlessly. And then her voice got hard. “The voice of his father stopped him. He couldn’t take a picture of a naked woman. Not just a naked woman, you see. He stepped back to get a wider view, put more things in the shot.
“I heard him go, but I kept my eyes closed. Damn, my sun was so important to me then. I guess each step back he took, more things come into view and he saw the picture different. Soon I didn’t hear him no more. He kept going further, I guess.”
I stole a glimpse of her. There were tears in those proud old eyes. “When I finally looked around, he wasn’t nowhere. Next day, they found just his camera, caught on some snag, side of the cliff. Dunno if he took more’n that one shot they got in the visitor center. No sign of him, no sign of anyone up there ever again, and I just let him go.” The tears didn’t fall.
I looked away but her hand gripped mine. “I can take you there. I can show you where we was. That’s what you want, in it?”
I nodded, not wanting to look at her. “We should go in the daytime,” I said.
She snorted. “You know nothin’ about this place if you think anybody’d go up there in the dark.”
Now I did look over at her. What did she know? Was she just telling me that only an idiot would go rock climbing in the dark?
But her face was stone again. I’d have to go with her tomorrow and see what was there.
Giles felt the end of the story rising like a black wall and was back in his body, in his right self. “That’s all for now, folks,” he said, glad for the new rules that didn’t require a story to be complete in any one telling, or even be any good. But he sensed that there was much more to this story. “Come to my performance tonight and hear more of the story.”
He stepped off the stage to very mild applause. And to three armed guards.
“Put your hands behind your head please and come this way.”
As they led him away, a woman with hair so black it was nearly blue detached herself from the crowd and followed with cool amusement.