For whoever controlled Lookout Mountain controlled the land; that was the legend. It was a sacred site, after all, and it was a high place. In the Civil War, the War Between the States, there was a battle there: the Battle Above the Clouds, that was the first day’s fighting, and then the Union forces did the impossible, and, without orders, swept up Missionary Ridge and took it. The troops of General Grant won the day, and the North took Lookout Mountain and the North took the war.
There are tunnels and caves, some very old, beneath Lookout Mountain. For the most part they are blocked off now, although a local businessman excavated an underground waterfall, which he called Ruby Falls. It can be reached by elevator. It’s a tourist attraction, although the biggest tourist attraction of all is at the top of Lookout Mountain. That is Rock City.
Rock City begins as an ornamental garden on a mountainside: its visitors walk a path that takes them through rocks, over rocks, between rocks. They throw corn into a deer enclosure, cross a hanging bridge and peer out through a-quarter-a-throw binoculars at a view that promises them seven states on the rare sunny days when the air is perfectly clear. And from there, like a drop into some strange hell, the path takes the visitors, millions upon millions of them every year, down into caverns, where they stare at black-lit dolls arranged into nursery-rhyme and fairy-tale dioramas. When they leave, they leave bemused, uncertain of why they came, of what they have seen, of whether they had a good time or not.
They came to Lookout Mountain from all across the United States. They were not tourists. They came by car and they came by plane and by bus and by railroad and on foot. Some of them flew—they flew low, and they flew only in the dark of the night, but still, they flew. Several of them traveled their own ways beneath the earth. Many of them hitchhiked, cadging rides from nervous motorists or from truck drivers. Those who had cars or trucks would see the ones who had not walking beside the roads or at rest stations and in diners on the way, and, recognizing them for what they were, would offer them rides.
They arrived dust-stained and weary at the foot of Lookout Mountain. Looking up to the heights of the tree-covered slope they could see, or imagine that they could see, the paths and gardens and streams of Rock City.
They started arriving early in the morning. A second wave of them arrived at dusk. And for several days they simply kept coming.
A battered U-Haul truck pulled up, disgorging several travel-weary vila and rusalka, their make-up smudged, runs in their stockings, their expressions heavy-lidded and tired.
In a clump of trees at the bottom of the hill, an elderly wampyr offered a Marlboro to a huge naked ape-like creature covered with a tangle of orange fur. It accepted graciously, and they smoked in silence, side by side.
A Toyota Previa pulled up by the side of the road, and seven Chinese men and women got out of it. They looked, above all, clean, and they wore the kind of dark suits that, in some countries, are worn by minor government officials. One of them carried a clipboard, and he checked the inventory as they unloaded large golf-bags from the back of the car: the bags contained ornate swords with lacquer handles, and carved sticks, and mirrors. The weapons were distributed, checked off, signed for.
A once-famous comedian, believed to have died in the 1920s, climbed out of his rusting car, and proceeded to remove his clothing: his legs were goat-legs, and his tail was short and goatish.
Four Mexicans arrived, all smiles, their hair black and very shiny: they passed among themselves a beer bottle which they kept out of sight in a brown paper bag, its contents a bitter mixture of powdered chocolate, liquor, and blood.
A small, dark-bearded man with a dusty black derby on his head, curling payess at his temples, and a ragged fringed prayer shawl came to them walking across the fields. He was several feet in front of his companion, who was twice his height and was the blank gray color of good Polish clay: the word inscribed on his forehead meant truth.
They kept coming. A cab drew up and several rakshasas, the demons of the Indian subcontinent, climbed out and milled around, staring at the people at the bottom of the hill without speaking, until they found Mama-ji, her eyes closed, her lips moving in prayer. She was the only thing here that was familiar to them, but still, they hesitated to approach her, remembering old battles. Her hands rubbed the necklace of skulls about her neck. Her brown skin became slowly black, the glassy black of jet, of obsidian: her lips curled and her long white teeth were very sharp. She opened all her eyes, and beckoned the rakshasas to her, and greeted them as she would have greeted her own children.
The storms of the last few days, to the north and the east, had done nothing to ease the feeling of pressure and discomfort in the air. Local weather forecasters had begun to warn of cells that might spawn tornados, of high-pressure areas that did not move. It was warm by day there, but the nights were cold.
They clumped together in informal companies, banding together sometimes by nationality, by race, by temperament, even by species. They looked apprehensive. They looked tired.
Some of them were talking. There was laughter, on occasion, but it was muted and sporadic. Six-packs of beer were handed around.
Several local men and women came walking over the meadows, their bodies moving in unfamiliar ways: their voices, when they spoke, were the voices of the loa who rode them: a tall, black man spoke in the voice of Papa Legba who opens the gates; while Baron Samedi, the voudon lord of death, had taken over the body of a teenage Goth girl from Chattanooga, possibly because she possessed her own black silk top hat, which sat on her dark hair at a jaunty angle. She spoke in the baron’s own deep voice, smoked a cigar of enormous size, and commanded three of the Gédé, the Loa of the dead. The Gédé inhabited the bodies of three middle-aged brothers. They carried shotguns and told continual jokes of such astounding filthiness that only they were willing to laugh at them, which they did, raucously and repeatedly.
Two ageless Chickamauga women, in oil-stained blue jeans and battered leather jackets, walked around, watching the people and the preparations for battle. Sometimes they pointed and laughed; they did not intend to take part in the coming conflict.
The moon swelled and rose in the east, a day away from full. It seemed half as big as the sky as it rose, a deep reddish-orange, immediately above the hills. As it crossed the sky it seemed to shrink and pale until it hung high in the sky like a lantern.
There were so many of them waiting there, in the moonlight, at the foot of Lookout Mountain.
Laura was thirsty.
Sometimes living people burned steadily in her mind like candles and sometimes they flamed like torches. It made them easy to avoid, and it made them easy, on occasion, to find. Shadow had burned so strangely, with his own light, up on that tree.
She had chided him once, on that day when they had walked and held hands, for not being alive. She had hoped, perhaps, to see a spark of raw emotion, something that would show her that the man she had once been married to was a real man, a live one. And she had seen nothing at all.
She remembered walking beside him, wishing that he could understand what she was trying to say.
Now, dying on the tree, Shadow was utterly alive. She had watched him as the life had faded, and he had been focused and real. And he had asked her to stay with him, to stay the whole night. He had forgiven her…perhaps he had forgiven her. It did not matter. He had changed; that was all she knew.