Time: September 1989

Place: Blackridge, South Dakota Sioux Reservation

It began with a kidnapping in a little house on a desolate corner of the reservation that no one would ever learn about. The home sat almost at the foot of the summer ranges where the tribe's herd of cattle grazed apart from the rest of the tribe. Here Jon Morningeagle, the tribe's chief wrangler, spent much of his time in the same rambling structure where a father even more immersed in the "old ways" than he had raised him. In this house his father, in a drunken fit of rage, had fallen off the front porch and broken his neck to be found by a teenage Jon.

"You leave that child sleep." Miriam Morningeagle said in a sharp whisper. She wore a rough cotton shift she had made, and her long raven hair gathered into a single braid hanging fully to her waist. Her sensitive eyes never smiled anymore but held a distant look. Even her sharp words had been thrown at the air, not directly at her husband.

Jon still wore his T-shirt and faded Levis dirty from the range. He paused at the closed door to little James' room which adjoined their bedroom. He whispered his reply fiercely. "You don't ever tell me what I can't do with my boy, woman." He glared at her for a second and eased the door inward.

Jon had painted Little James' room light green with symbols from Sioux myths decorating the walls and the crib. Jon's father had been shield maker for the tribe and although few still wanted them, Jon served that function on enough occasions to paint the figures well. Over the crib a painted white buffalo head in a medicine shield halo looked down at the sleeping boy with benevolent eyes.

Morningeagle eased the door closed with out-of-character gentleness, but when he turned, the granite lines of his face showed his true demeanor. "I'll do what I please, woman; this is my house."

"Your father's house," she said in a distant tone.

"I keep it up," he insisted. He removed his shirt and jeans and moved into the bathroom.

"I keep it up," Miriam said, her voice a hollow imitation of Jon's. Her fingers idly toyed with her braid as she stared at the door to the child's room. She hummed a tuneless song.

"Have you started that again?" Jon thrust his head from the doorway, his face twisted with annoyance. "You know I can't stand your constant whining."

"Constant whining--" she murmured, then giggled, swaying back and forth. She continued to play idly with her hair.

"If only you'd take us away from this place," she whispered.

"Let it be woman! This is my home, our home. Now come to bed!" Anger flared in Morningeagle's eyes and he pushed from the doorway and crossed the room, his bare feet slapping noisily on the irregular wooden floor. He climbed into the bed with an air of finality. He wedged himself beneath the covers. She stood in the center of the room, her head tilted to one side, listening to the sounds of the house.

"Miriam?" he said in a softer voice that roused her from her lethargy to slowly move to the bed and climb in. He grunted his satisfaction and turned his back to her as she clicked off the night light.

In short order, her husband snored deeply, but even with the weight of a long day upon her, Miriam could not find rest. She listened to the chirping of crickets and the sound of leaves slapping against one another in the gentle breeze. At last she slipped from under the sheets and padded slowly to the child's door. Little James slept with noisy coos amid rumpled night clothes dreaming perhaps of plains filled with mighty buffalo and a stout horse painted bright blue with rockers all of wood. Their strong son had his father's chiseled features showing beneath the baby fat and the same deep coal black eyes as his mother. His name was James, but Jon had said, "When he's old enough my boy's gunna choose his own name, in the old ways." And everyone who knew Jon Morningeagle was sure that it would be just so.

Miriam held one hand through the open door so that light from the window swam about it. Chiaroscuro in the light it had swollen knuckles and rawhide skin that should belong to a woman twenty years her senior. She snatched her hand from the light as if the moon's touch burned the flesh.

Her vision of the room smudged with teardrops.

Slowly she eased the door closed and leaned her forehead on the jamb, letting all her unrealized dreams filter through her lips with one whispered sentence to her son. "You're all we ever had," she said, "all I got left."

She moved with little purpose to the bed and let exhaustion save her from her thoughts.

A long silence settled over the sleeping Morningeagle family, filling the house with the calm of a glassy sea just before a storm.

In the middle of the child's room, toys scattered the floor awaiting his future pleasures, and a dot of light blinked into existence without an apparent light source. No beam shone in the window or reflected off any shiny toy or surface. The point of light coalesced in the center of the room about four feet off the floor, and grew into a vertical line of coherent luminosity that touched the floor. Without a sound, it burst into the image of what might well have been a Gnome of European legend.

The little man-thing was thin and gray with two huge eyes and a bulb head that throbbed with a myriad of green-gray veins. It had no mouth.

Clutched tightly in the withered arms was a tiny bundle of flesh--a baby.

The child was young and curiously lifeless. It was a perfect image of James Morningeagle.

The silent invader took two steps to the crib, bent over the railing and gently slid the strange twin under the covers. Six-digit hands lifted the real Morningeagle child and carried him to the center of the room. The two figures collapsed into a vertical line of light, and were gone.

When the dead child was discovered, the inner turmoil of the parents turned to anger and accusation. When the doctors could find no reason why the tiny heart had stopped beating, the anger turned to unreasoning hate.

The following day Jon mounted his best horse and headed off into the mountains moving north. It was the last anyone saw of him.

Miriam refused to leave the house, never shed a tear after the first morning, and two weeks after Jon vanished she tried to kill herself with one of her husband's antique guns.

After she left the hospital Miriam went to stay with her parents and it was said that she sobbed in her sleep.

The house became tribal property after a time, but no one would enter the place. Eventually it rotted away.

--

Time: Spring 1990

Place: Oklahoma, United. States

Phillip Simon screamed. His eyes shot open and suddenly he was awake. His bedclothes were clammy with sweat. He panted, his thick black hair hung in moist ringlets veiling his eyes. "What..." he tried but could not finish the thought. He touched the blanket and stared at his hand as best the semi-darkness allowed. "It was a dream again." He felt calm to think it, so he said it aloud. "I was dreaming." But in words it didn't ring true. He had been remembering: He was in a gray concrete cell, six feet by eight feet that smelled of urine, ammonia and sweat, with one small square of light set high up in the wall opposite the door. The moon-glow cast dim shadows into the room; long gray lines snaked from metal bars planted firmly in the sill and slithered across the floor to slumber across the foot of Simon's bunk.

In a few minutes, he gathered his wits enough to rise. He stripped off the damp pajamas, throwing a bathrobe over his broad muscled shoulders. He paced to the sink set in the wall opposite his bunk and grabbed the towel from the rack, wiping sweat from his face as he bent to peer at his reflection in the small steel mirror illuminated by a stark slice of moonlight.

Deep lines from exposure to the sun and wind lined Simon's craggy face, though his tan had long since paled from confinement. Beneath bushy brows his eyes shone hazel with flecks of pure green and brown that gave them warmth. His mouth twisted in a line turned down at the corners in a perpetual frown. The laugh lines had not faded with his confinement in spite of the leathery roughness of his whole continuance.

In the medicine cabinet sat a bottle of contraband tequila the guards let him keep. Simon uncorked the small medicine bottle and drank.

He tried not to think about it all, that maybe the situation had been predestined: That the German would also practice Hwa Rang Do, that they both should enter a tournament in Oklahoma City, that Simon should pass the dressing room and hear her plead with the German to marry her: that Phillip Simon and the German should both love Cynthia.

When he entered the match the inner Simon knew he was going to kill his rival. At last, after all the months of the trial and confinement, Phillip Simon believed that death had been a conscious wish; so he willed himself to die but as the time approached, his resolution to accept things calmly faded away. As the days wound down toward his death, he had only one regret in an eventful life, one love he had spurned as Cynthia had spurned him, and it was the inner ghost that haunted him at night named Liza.

"Only two days to go," he whispered to himself. He paced to his bunk and willed himself to lie down. The tequila warmed him inside in spite of a shudder at the remembered appointment. He closed his eyes with deliberation, wondering what might come after...

Then he saw it!

His eyes were shut, but he saw it. He sat--frantically erect and rubbed his eyes until they teared. Then he opened them again, amazed to see only the bare grayness of the cell.

Relax, it can't be a mercy to go crazy this late in the game. He smiled a humorless smile and lay back down. Once more he tried for sleep.

It was back! Inside his eyelids, staring straight at him with lidless eyes fixed squarely at him, a face! It had a round, bulbous head with bony ridged brows above a parchment expanse where a mouth should be. A grotesquery Poe would quake at.

"What is it, Simon?" Tanner was the night guard on duty in the row. He was a man of forty, bald, but undiminished in other ways by the years. Once he may have felt compassion for the men he dealt with, but time had formed a thick scab over his feelings. He had no time for a killer's aberrations.

"Whadd'ya want; a reprieve?"

"Don't you see it?" The prisoner gasped. "There, man, there!" He gestured frantically, pointing to the center of the cell. It was not new to Tanner, he'd seen a lot of men on death row slip their knot in the final days.

"It's all right, Simon," the guard said, his voice rough. "Just calm down and relax. Your nerves are shot is all. It ain't real; just keep telling yourself."

"I'm not mad, you idiot, it's there! Why don't you see it? Those eyes!" Simon pressed into the angle where the walls met, his blanket wrapped partially around him.

"Now simmer down and shut up, or I'll give you something to put you to sleep." Tanner waved his sedative to emphasize his point, tapping the club on the bars with a 'clack-clack' Simon started to say something, thought better of it and lowered his eyes in a vain effort to avoid the spectral head that remained at a fixed distance squarely in his line of sight.

Tanner took the gesture as one of submission, slid the viewing panel shut and returned to his paper.

Simon stood alone in the cell with his private apparition. He did his best to absorb that fact and deal with it.

After a time he forced himself to speak to it. "Why are you haunting me?" Silence settled heavily about him testing his nerves further. After a time word shapes formed in Simon's mind as clearly as the face of his tormentor.

"Be calm, Phillip Simon, I am Tar-Myk."

"I really am insane." Simon sat quietly; while what he was sure was a shattered corner of his mind, spoke to him.

"I am of a race, old before yours was born, who seeks now to aid young worlds like yours. We need your help to guide the course of events on your tiny world." The image shimmered for a second, the head becoming distorted, elongated. It flickered like a television image.

Simon gasped a sigh of relief; his vision was at last deserting him. However, the nightmare resolved itself into solidity and continued.

"You have abilities, which once amplified by our science, will aid your planet. We are prepared to aid you in your current situation."

"Situation!" Simon was so within the grasp of the apparition that it seemed no more insane to conduct a conversation than to merely listen and certainly no worse to argue! "I'm gonna fry in two days!"

"Not if you agree to be our corporeal representative."

Simon stared at the phantom head and tried to make sense of the whole thing. So maybe it is just a fractured part of my own head. Play along, and maybe it'll go away. After all, how many people had such a bizarre vision that made promises. Aladdin, or Faust perhaps?

"All right," Simon acquiesced. "Get me out and it's a deal."

A sudden sharp pain pierced his left arm where a living beam of white light appeared. When he looked down the light vanished, leaving behind a small abrasion.

"You will not die," Tar-Myk said.

Simon started to speak, but the head wavered, shrank, and faded, leaving him alone in his cell. "My God!" he murmured.

When the final day came for Phillip Simon, he was led noisily down the gray corridor crying and yelling. "I don't want to die. You promised, you promised!"

A minute before the executioner threw the switch Phillip Simon grew quiet. His eyes closed, and only by careful observation could his executioner see the rise and fall of the prisoner's chest.

Then death came with a quick hood of darkness as with the lights, a life winked out. All that remained of Phillip Simon was the smell of burnt flesh and ozone and an unused shell.