The pollen just lay there for a moment, a frosting of yellow specks over the dark brown blotter—but then, as the hair on the back of his neck began to crawl, he saw very clearly that it was moving. It crept across the blotter as if each bit of pollen was a tiny insect, but an insect moving in a purposeful way.

It formed into symbols even he could read. And last time he had looked, there was no scientific power on earth that would make corn pollen crawl into readable patterns.

A ragged circle around the tape cassette, with an uneven slash across it. A rough arrow pointing away, to the west.

Nothing vague or requiring interpretation. If she was calling on Medicine Spirits for advice, she had made certain it was advice he could read as well as she. Once again, his skepticism had been shattered. He looked up from his frozen contemplation of the pollen on the blotter, to see her watching him sardonically.

“I hope that’s enough for you,” she said, without inflection. “I asked for something you could understand and see for yourself. Anything more than this, you’d better ask from Grandfather.”

He swallowed, with a little difficulty.

“I—ah—think that will do,” he replied. Suddenly the idea of legwork had a lot more appeal.

Over the next several days, he had a few more occasions to have his skepticism shattered. Mostly, though, she didn’t do it on purpose—but there were plenty of times he saw things—half-seen people and animals—around the house; appearing and disappearing without warning. Once, he heard her talking and heard something else answering, but when he opened the door to her office, there was no one else there. It was unnerving, to say the least, and he kept feeling as if he were off-balance and that everything he had always thought was true had suddenly come into question.

Finally it all became unnerving enough that he couldn’t take it anymore. Something was going to have to break, one way or another. Either he was going to have to leave Tulsa, give up on this problem, and go back to his friends in North Dakota, or—

Or else he was going to have to take a good look at himself and his world and rethink everything he had accepted as true.

He didn’t make a conscious decision; the morning was clear and cool, the sky cloudless—and instead of driving to Jennie’s office, he found himself taking the opposite direction. Before long, he found himself on a dirt road, halfway between Catoosa and Claremore, out in the middle of nowhere.