Land of Echoes

10

Cree burst gasping out of a chaotic dream into the darkness of the ward room. Something was screaming in her mind.

It took her a moment to remember where she was. She had chosen a bed against the wall farthest from the inner door, near the window that looked out toward the mesa. A pair of night-lights plugged into wall sockets shed enough light to see the other five beds, green-white rectangles in the gloom. The windows were black, the silence so absolute it hissed in her ears.

In the dream, the night-dark rocks of Lost Goats Mesa had twisted and swarmed and metamorphosed into faces, grotesque brows and cheeks and gaping mouths of beings crying from the depths of the earth. There were crowds of them pushing at the cliffs, and there were air creatures, too, sharp electric things in the sky, flying with cruel stabbing motions. The landscape was alive: things pressing against its inner surfaces, straining against each other, contending with each other.

Dream, she told herself. Just a dream. Get a grip. She sat up and took deep, steady breaths to dispel the feeling.

But it didn't go away. Abruptly, she knew with certainty there was something happening nearby, telegraphing itself directly to her central nervous system.

The part of her mind that didn't recoil in fear registered that the night-lights were throbbing gently, erratically. The flicker phenomenon, she and Edgar called it: the tendency for light sources to become unsteady when paranormal phenomena manifested.

A noise came from the window. A muffled stamp or thump, then a.. what? A breath, a deep exhalation. The horses? She listened and heard nothing.

She got quietly out of bed. In her stockinged feet, wearing the sweat pants and T-shirt she'd used as pajamas, she crept to the door of the room. She looked into the hallway and entry area and listened. The dim corridor, lit by several softly pulsing night-lights, stretched away to the bend that led to the dayroom, the nurse's bedroom, and the ward room where Tommy slept.

Ringing silence, charged with a sense of invisible motion.

She walked stealthily down the hall, through the entry, and into the hall on the other side, thinking to check on Lynn Pierce. The silver-haired nurse with the astonishing fleck in her eye had played hostess to the four of them after they'd come in from the horses, starting a fire in the dayroom hearth, making hot chocolate in the kitchen. They had played cards until Tommy's bedtime. It was like no other card game Cree had ever played: five people trying to chat and act relaxed when all felt a rising dread of anticipation. With the night pressed around the building, she had been acutely aware of how isolated they were, not just physically but socially. For the five of them there was no other recourse, no aid or comfort from the larger world of humankind. They were on an island.

She had pushed Tommy pretty hard, confronting him as candidly as she dared, and by and large was not unhappy with his response. He'd been defiant, embarrassed, shy, reluctant. But every patient of every age resisted probing, quite justifiably. She got a sense of an intelligent, complex person, decent and very much wanting to please, but confused by typical adolescent identity issues and troubled by ambivalent feelings toward his dead parents.

And though he tried hard to hide it, he was also terrified by the inexplicable things happening to him.

If only she'd gotten as good a sense of the supposed entity. The dissonance she sensed was so subdued that she doubted her own perceptions. Was the entity in him at all times but languishing in some kind of latency between crises? Or was it simply not there now-did it come out of the desert night each time, settling into him for a while and then leaving again? Or was there nothing there but a troubled teenage boy?

When it had gotten late, Joseph had driven off to Fort Defiance for his rotation at the hospital, and Julieta had gone to her room in the faculty housing building. Cree and Lynn had promised they'd wake her "if anything happened." Hoping nothing would.

Cree continued down the hall past the nurse's office, turned right, passed the dayroom, and paused at the door to Lynn Pierce's bedroom. It was pitch-dark inside, but her eyes had adapted enough to see the mounded blankets and the long braid trailing over the side of the bed. Tense as a wound spring, she warily approached the door to the smaller ward room. It struck her that the night-lights in this hall were throbbing faster.

Tommy's bed was empty.

Cree backed out of the doorway, followed the hall as it doglegged, and found the rear exit door. It was slightly ajar, rocking softly. When she opened it, the chill wind hit her, straight from the north, and she quickly realized that sweat pants, T-shirt, and socks weren't good enough for the high desert in late September. But a sense of imminence propelled her, and she didn't want to take the time to go back for shoes and sweater. She stepped out into the night and shut the door softly behind her.

The exterior light was on, glazing the yard between infirmary and barn with a hard bright silver. Beyond, the corral fence stood like a construction of bones against the darkness. At the far end of the enclosure, just at the edge of the circle of light, Julieta's three horses were vague forms against deep black night.

No sign of Tommy. No motion or sound at all but the wind.

The blue-white area light blinded her. Beyond its sphere of chemical illumination, the night wrapped a curtain of black felt around the infirmary, the barn, the corral.

Instinctively, she went toward the horses. They were facing away from her, heads up, legs braced, alert but absolutely motionless. She opened the corral gate and went inside, feeling blind and very exposed as she crossed the bare, silver-gilded ground. Sharp stones stabbed up through her socks. Her breath came out in wraiths of steam that fled away instantly; her shadow preceded her, looking like a deformed thing. Beyond the curtain of darkness, she could feel the cliffs of the mesa, in her imagination still moving like flesh. As she got farther away from the buildings, the light on the side of the infirmary shrank to a distant sharp point.

She forgot the discomfort of her feet as she got closer to the horses. There was something wrong with them.

Their breath steamed and their tails rippled in the icy wind, but they didn't turn as she approached, didn't whicker or snort. Hadn't they heard her? She stopped ten feet away, suddenly afraid of being among such big animals, aware that for all their docility earlier they didn't know her well.

"Hey, Breeze," she whispered. "Madie. Spence." But they didn't move. They just stood with their necks arched erect. Their chins were raised in an attitude of listening, but their ears were pressed flat against their heads.

It took her a moment to realize that they were making a sound after all. It was a dry, fast rustling noise that didn't make sense until she got closer and saw that they were shivering, all three of them, their bulging haunches and shoulders and great neck tendons standing out, hard with tension. The noise she was hearing was the vibrating contraction of the surface muscles of their great bodies, the quick shifting of their hides. A sound like a tree of dry leaves rattling softly in a winter wind, or the palms of two dry hands rubbing rapidly.

It appalled and transfixed her. Not right, her mind was screaming, wrong wrong wrong-

She had been standing there in the dim light for several moments, terrified and perplexed, when abruptly she realized there were other shapes in the night. The darkness beyond the fence was suddenly full of faint, uprearing gray-silver shapes where there should have been only empty desert. Nightmare forms just visible against the black. She felt her stomach drop.

She stared into the gloom and suddenly knew the monstrous night beings as horses-six or eight pale horses with heads stiffly erect, ears back, glazed eyes. Motionless. Cree caught one jagged breath as she recognized them: the little band of free-roaming grays and palominos she and Julieta had seen on the way in.

Like Julieta's horses, they stood locked into shivering, stiff stances. After a moment she saw a shadow slide in among them, eclipsing their phantom glow.

It was Tommy Keeday.

What was he doing? Dancing? He ducked under one horse's belly, disappearing and then emerging again to slide his body among the rigid animals. Even in this faint light, Cree could see that he was wearing only pajama pants, no top, no shoes, and that his movements were oddly stylized. He took queer, uneven steps, a crablike sideways shuffle with one arm upraised to stroke a shivering flank and the other pressed down at his side. Several times he seemed to be stepping over invisible objects on the ground, trying to stride over them, checking himself, trying and checking again with rhythmic, repetitive motions. His head remained cocked to the right.

The gray stallion stood closest to the fence, and as Cree's night vision improved she caught the glint of one round eye.

Tommy turned and began his complicated dance toward the corral, facing Cree directly but giving no indication he'd seen her. When he came near the fence, his left arm groped forward, his right leg took a half step and held his weight as his left leg bent sharply at the knee and drew up several times before setting itself tentatively down. By the time he reached the rails and inserted himself through them, his body had contorted in a sideways bend and his limbs weren't cooperating with each other at all. Erratic puffs of steam came from his open mouth and vanished with the wind. She heard the faint, uneven rasp of breath.

Pawing at the air, his left arm reached for something that didn't exist. His right leg stepped through while his left leg stood and then went down on one knee, tangling him on the lowest rail.

It struck Cree that there were two people coming through the fence.

When he'd managed to get most of his body through, he fell forward onto the ground, directly onto his chest and chin. Only after he'd lain facedown for a moment did his limbs start moving again, the agonized effort of an overturned turtle or beetle, trying to right itself. After he'd flopped onto his back, he lay facing the cloak of sky with one arm pushing up and out and snapping back and one leg scraping the soil in slow, deliberate motions.

Thirty feet away, Cree stood unable to move, sick with horror.

After a moment his arm dropped and he just lay there. Only his bare chest was moving, a lateral ripple, lifting on one side and falling on the other with the sinuous flexibility of a belly dancer. His mouth was stretched wide, a black round hole in his face, but no steam came from it. No breath came from his open throat.

Cree's hypnotic terror shattered as she realized she was watching a boy suffocating. "Tommy!" she shouted. She lunged forward to help him just as the world exploded.

As if their invisible bonds had snapped, the three horses in the corral burst to life, pivoting away from Tommy. The gelding's wheeling shoulder struck Cree and sent her flying backward. She landed on her back, bounced hard, sat up immediately into a storm of flailing knobby legs as the mares hurtled past her, over her, shrieking. Something hard hit her head and knocked her flat, a string of firecrackers went off between her ears. The impact stunned her, but she jerked herself upright again and stared around her through the bloody yellow explosions in her head. Julieta's horses were back near the barn, wheeling and snorting as they raced up and down the far fence line. The phantom horses on the far side of the fence were gone. She heard their fading hoofbeats and their dwindling screams, so like the screams of women.

A yellow beam lit the ground as she struggled to her feet and lurched toward Tommy. Julieta's voice called from the infirmary door. Cree fell before she got to the boy, but she managed to crawl the rest of the way on her hands and knees. Tommy's chest continued its writhing, his mouth gaped for air but none came. When she dared to touch his skin, it was ice-cold.

Not knowing what else to do, she put her mouth over his and blew into it. The convulsing chest changed its rhythm but didn't seem to receive any air. She took her mouth away, shoved hard on his breastbone with both hands, put her lips over his and exhaled again.

The flashlight beam panned wildly, and she heard Lynn Pierce's voice as well and knew that the nurse and Julieta were running toward them, that's why the light gyred and came and went so jaggedly. She felt herself go distant and confused, but pulled her mouth away from Tommy again. This time she saw blood on Tommy's cheeks and realized it was her own, she was bleeding from her forehead and raining drops of red onto him. And it didn't matter, what mattered was getting air into the fish-gaping black mouth. She put her hands against his chest and brought her weight down hard once more. Before she could lean to his face, a wave of dizziness broke over her, rocked her back so that she lost her balance. But as she fell away, she heard a gasp at the back of Tommy's throat, and immediately another. And then Julieta was there, and light, and Lynn's hands holding her shoulders so she wouldn't topple.