It was all connected, the house and the dolls and the theater and Tom Utchaca’s dead dad, and Stormy’s almost frantic need to meet this filmmaker immediately intensified. Whatever was going on here, it was big, something that he could only barely imagine, but he was filled with the unfounded, absurd but unshakable conviction that if he could figure out the core cause of all of this craziness, he could put a stop to it before anything catastrophic happened.

Catastrophic?

Where had that come from?

“Do you have Rodman’s phone number?” he asked.

Russ shook his head. “He doesn’t have a phone.”

“Do you know how to get in touch with him?”

“My friend carpools with him to school. I could give him a call.”

“Do it.”

Stormy hurried back to his office, gave Ken a quick call. Ken was more familiar with the reservation than he was, knew quite a few people there, and Stormy gave a thumbnail sketch of where he was going and why and asked his friend if he’d come along.

“I’m at the office. Pick me up on the way.”

Russ knocked on the door frame. “Doug says P.P. doesn’t have classes today. He should be home.”

“You have an address?”

“I know where it is.”

“You’re coming with me, then. Let’s go.”

A half hour later, Stormy, Russ, and Ken were bumping along the dusty road across the mesa that led to the pueblo serving as tribal headquarters.

Ken’s accounts of supernatural occurrences were not exaggerated. If anything, they’d underrepresented the degree of infiltration. Stormy pulled to a stop in front of the headquarters. Kachina dolls were indeed walking around, and they were doing so in the open. There were dozens of them on the flat ground in front of the pueblo, lurching, waddling, and crawling in different directions. Several stood like sentries on the ledge above the door, swiveling about. On the other side of the creek that bisected the open gathering area, a group of dead men were standing in a circle, apparently speaking among themselves.

Stormy sat for a moment in the car. The extent of what was happening here was overwhelming, and he marveled at how the few people he saw walking about completely ignored the dolls and the dead. Human beings, he thought, can get used to anything.

But perhaps whatever was behind all this knew that. Maybe it was starting here because the Native American culture was more open in regard to the supernatural, more readily accepting of the nonmaterial world. Maybe this was the first assault in a full-fledged invasion of ghosts and spirits and demons and monsters. Maybe they were easing in gradually, getting people used to them before they… What? Took over the world?

He’d seen too many movies.