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Show 10 enough to highlight the minuscule cracks that ran for miles into the rock, but it was subdued enough to reveal the billow of dull violet that occupied one side of the interior. Artificial 1ight-the naked bulb hanging from a cord in the closet, for instance-had a remarkable effect. It was as though a black rubber bathmat punctured with coin-shaped holes were casting a shadow across the inner landscape of the rock. Through the coins of light he could see nothing; they were burnished and opaque. But the shaded part was alive with dark strands of metal that curved and knotted, visible only because of the high-lighting, and shapes that resembled the heads of foxes and other shapes that looked like children's jacks. The surprise, though, came when he discovered he could sit in the back of the closet, half covered by hanging coats and dresses that smelled of mothballs, and hold the stone in the palms of both hands, cupping his eye close to it, and still make things out. He saw wisps of white smoke frozen into the interior that way once, and lost them when he turned the rock slightly toward him to see if they were three-dimensional. Another time he saw the deep cleft of a canyon, but it was upside down, a broken row of pine trees hanging from the ridge over a mottled sky. It did not take him long to realize he was holding his great-grandfather's peepstone in his hands, and to intuit that he would be in big trouble if anyone found out. The stone had quit working in 1910, when his great-grandfather had used it to locate the bodies of two men who had gone to haul timber in the mountains near Evanston and never came back. He had seen them, the story went, wedged under a fallen tree in the Bear River, and a search party had found them crushed by a rockslide in Ogden Canyon, and after that the stone had yielded only random patterns and broken surfaces. * * * |
