They fell into a thoughtful silence, considering the implications while Fremont brewed another pot of coffee. He set a full cup down in front of Micah, took his chair, and sat for a while, looking at the lines and creases in Micah’s face. The guy was older than he looked, or he was carrying some damn ugly memories. Either way, Fremont liked him.
“How you feeling? Seen your friend Porter, at all?”
“No. Not a glimmer.”
Fremont picked his coffee up, leaned into the creaking old ladder-back, tilted it up on its rear legs. It groaned under his weight but Fremont ignored it, grinning at Dalton over the rim of his cup. “Guess I oughta go into the exorcism business.”
“Maybe you should.”
“Mind if I ask you a question?”
“Ask me and I’ll tell you.”
“You unnaturally prone to being haunted, at all?”
“No. First time.”
“You do understand the guy wasn’t real, don’t you?”
“Yes, Willard. I do.”
“Why do you think he went away?”
“No idea. They say you can talk sense to a schizophrenic, if he has a willing mind. And I was. God knows I need that problem gone.”
“Don’t get mad if I ask if you do, ah, recreational drugs?” he asked, his manner tentative.
“Not unless we’re including champagne.”
“Because in my troubled youth, I dabbled in that sort of thing.”
“Seeking the path to enlightenment?”
“That too, of course. But mainly to score with chicks.”
“Sex can lead a man to enlightenment, or so I’m told.”
“Well I can’t say the drugs improved my sex life much, but they sure enlightened the hell out of my wallet. Reason I went bankrupt, in the end. But what I took, especially the hallucinators, acid, mushrooms, crystal — hell, even now, years and years later, I still get these flashbacks. Your ghost, maybe it’s a flashback, a vision, like?”
“No idea, but I think the same drug may have killed Porter.”
“You said he committed suicide?”
“It looked that way at the time.”
“And he did it with a hat pin?”
“I was just heating him up. Actually, it was real ugly.”
“How ugly?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“Sure I do. I can take ugly.”
Dalton told him.
“Damn. That is ugly.”
“Yes. It is.”
“But now you’re not so sure? That it was a suicide?”
“No. I have reason to believe that he was exposed to this drug. The same drug I was exposed to, during my last job.”
“What kind of drug was it?”
“We didn’t know at the time. We sent it in to the Hazmat unit to have it analyzed. It came back as a salvia derivative.”
“Salvia? Never heard of it. And I know my mood-altering substances, my friend. No one knows ’em better.”
“Well, we think there was more to the mix than just salvia. But one of the effects of salvia is to effectively short out the cortex, and many times the effect is to induce a major psychotic break. The effects are instantaneous. I had a small packet of it explode in my face—”
“What? Like a booby trap?”
“Yeah. It was inside a terra-cotta cylinder. Spinning. The noise it was making was a lot like the sound we heard last night.”
“Like a swarm of bees?”
“Yes. Exactly. Only much louder, and with a strong underlying rhythm to it.”
“And the sound was coming from this spinning thing?”
“Yes. The cylinder turned on a big twisted sinew, wound up like a coiled spring, as thick as my wrist. The cylinder got shattered but the Hazmat boys rebuilt it, figured out how it would work. If it was set up in a strong wind, the holes and slits cut into the cylinder would act like a primitive flute. Out would come this sound—”
“Funny. What you’re describing, the materials involved, they sound prehistoric, but the mechanism, the idea of creating sound that way, that’s real advanced.”
“The Egyptians had primitive electric batteries. The Greeks knew what atoms were. The Vikings found the New World five hundred years before Columbus, and they did it without a compass. I think this cylinder started out as some kind of musical instrument. When you think of it, the sound it makes is a lot like throat singing.”
“You mean like the Indians? The Plains Indians?”
“Yeah. Exactly like that,” said Dalton, thinking of Pinto.
“Jesus. Fascinating stuff. I’d love to hear one of these things.”
“I hope I never hear it again.”
“Who made this thing?”
“I don’t know who cast it. I’m pretty sure that the guy who used it on me was a Comanche Indian from Timpas, Colorado.”
“Timpas, yeah. That’s Comanche country, all right. I knew a lot of Apaches when Al and Moot and the rest of us were working out of Lordsburg. Never met any Comanches, though. A touchy folk, the Apaches around Lordsburg. Come to think of it, drugs were a big part of their religious life down there. Drugs and chanting….” Fremont trailed off into silence.
“Man. Goyathlay’s Throat. That’s what this sounds like. Goyathlay’s Throat. You ever hear of the Native American Church?”
“Of course,” said Dalton. “It’s a big deal in the Southwest. Supposed to be over a quarter million members, all of them either Apache or Kiowa or Comanche. Started down in Central America about three thousand years ago.”
“That’s right. Grew out of a thing called the Peyote Cult. For them, Peyote was a god, and the visions you had were supposed to clean your spirit, purge you of your sins. Show you the way to truth. Like I said, I had… an interest… in the drug culture and some of the guys I knew were into all this Carlos Castaneda stuff. Remember him?”
“Yeah. Wrote a couple of books about Don Juan, he was supposed to be this Yaqui brujo, a sorcerer, who got Castaneda turned on to the Peyote Cult way back in the fifties. Pretty loopy stuff.”
“That’s the guy. Moot Gibson was really into Castaneda’s books, and he used to talk about this secret peyote ritual — a purification ritual. It involved a lot of prayers. Chanting. They used this kind of long clay tube, and he called this tube Goyathlay’s Throat. When Moot retired he got real involved in this spirit cult, adopted some Indian name, went completely native. He used to talk about Goyathlay all the time.”
“Goyathlay? Was he a god, something like that?”
“No. Goyathlay was the Bedonkohe Apache name for Geronimo. In Apache the name means ‘one who yawns.’ Geronimo was a big deal in the Native American Church. His spirit was supposed to speak out of this thing called Goyathlay’s Throat. I always figured it was just an expression — Moot and his Apache buddies sitting around chewing peyote and seeing visions of the infinite, like in that old movie, Altered States — but this spinning cylinder you’re talking about, maybe Goyathlay’s Throat was a real thing.”
“It sure as hell was real to me. I grew up in Tucumcari. They were mostly Kiowa around there, and they had these secret religious meetings too. When I was a kid I tried to sneak into one, almost got my throat cut for it. They used the mescal button, I think, because peyote wasn’t found in those parts. It grows naturally down in northern Mexico, and the ritual required that the singers had to go out and find it themselves. But the Kiowa used to get it by mail order.”