“Why should I say anything to him?” Annie replied coolly. She almost laughed again at the relief on his face.
But she knew she could not tell Liam about this. She could not tell anyone. It was impossible to describe. Besides, she could well be accused of witchcraft, the accusation Daniel Foster feared. What other explanation could there be?
But for the first time in her life, she was not curious. She no longer sought answers. Answers seemed … irrelevant.
Turning her back on Daniel Foster, she began climbing the hill toward home.
The boulder watched her go.
Daniel Foster watched her go.
Then he shook his head, slowly.
His most recent offering of Indian corn still lay by the stone. He slouched over to it and stared down. Then, warily, he reached out and touched the stone himself.
Nothing.
A cold rough surface.
No hum.
No pictures, however cloudy, in his head.
Nothing.
He was a skinny, angry man, standing on the side of a bleak November hill with his hand on a huge boulder.
He stood there a long time. Then with a grunt, he put his hand down by his side again and turned away, heading back toward Conway. He left the corn, however. Just in case.
He always left the corn.
And when he came back the next time, it was always gone.
Meanwhile, Annie made her way toward home. As she walked, her head kept filling with unbidden images. They swarmed around her like a cloud of blackflies. Sometimes she even raised a hand and brushed at her face as if to brush them away. But they returned, or some variant of them returned.
She saw clouds above … and below her. Heard wind change its course. Sensed ice pellets high above, ready to fall. At the same time she felt heat, cold, compression, erosion. Was aware of warm blood trickling over a stony surface. Sounds of screaming.
She shook her head again and brushed at her face. When she moved her hand away, she saw her dear, familiar cabin, just across the next field, and broke into a run.
When Liam Murphy returned home for his dinner he found his wife making biscuits. There was nothing unusual about what she was doing. As she did every day, she kneaded the soft dough, cut it into circles with a round tin cutter, dredged the circles in a little melted lard, arranged them two deep on the metal biscuit tray, and set them close to the fire.
“Someday,” she had always said, “we’ll have one of those big cast-iron stoves with ovens in it, like my mother’s.”
Liam paused in the door as he sometimes did, watching her work while she was still unaware of him. In a moment the draft from the open door would make the fire leap up and she would turn around, and smile, and come into his arms.
The fire leaped up but Annie did not turn around. She went on working as if her thoughts were a million miles away.
Johnny and little Mary hurried to their father, however. The boy clung to Liam’s arm with unusual tenacity; the baby lifted her own chubby little arms in a plea to be picked up.
“I’m home, Annie,” Liam announced, surprised she had not already come to him as well.
She glanced around with a start. For one heartbeat her face was blank, as if she did not know him.
Then the moment passed and she was in his arms too, the four of them joined in one big hug.
Yet throughout the meal, Liam could not help noticing the nervous way the children, particularly Johnny, kept glancing at their mother.
While Annie was busy with the washing-up, the boy approached his father. “Somepin’s wrong with Mama,” he said in a confidential tone. “Ever since she went visitin’ this mornin’.”
Liam called across the room to his wife. “Annie, you go visitin’ this mornin’?”
“Not that I recall,” she said, her voice muffled because her back was turned toward him.
“Tarnation, sugar, you can’t go visitin’ an’ not recall! It’s a right smart walk from here to anywhere.”
Annie’s shoulders shrugged dismissively.
Baffled, Liam turned back to his son. “What’s wrong with your mama, Johnny?”
The boy shuffled his feet. “I dunno,” was all he could say.
For the rest of the evening Liam kept a watchful eye on his wife. Most of the time she was herself, merry and bustling. But occasionally she seemed to stop, almost in mid-motion, as if she saw something. Or heard something. Then her eyes held a faraway look, and if he spoke to her, he had to repeat himself more loudly before she would answer.
“Are you feelin’ poorly?” he asked several times. But Annie always insisted she felt fine. And she had not gone visiting. “I just took the children over to May Baldwin’s for the day to give myself a little rest,” she said.
The mere idea of Annie saying she needed a little rest was so foreign to her nature it worried Liam more than anything else.
That night in bed, when he reached for her, she felt as rigid as stone. “Annie?” he said anxiously.
She softened at once beneath his touch and snuggled against him in the old familiar way. Yet nagging doubts continued to gnaw at the back of his mind.
Something was wrong. Johnny knew it, even if he couldn’t identify the problem. Even the baby knew. She would not stay on Annie’s lap anymore, but insisted on getting down almost as soon as her mother picked her up.
Liam Murphy was not a particularly sensitive man, but his family was his world. The subtle disruption in the atmosphere troubled him.
He would have been more troubled had he known that, sometime before dawn, Annie had awakened beside him sweating with fear.
The dream that was not a dream had intruded upon her sleep and dragged her into another time and place. A cold high place. A peak—not Mount Washington, she realized instinctively—whose slopes were fragrant with dark pines. At the foot of the mountain was a crystalline lake that reflected the trees as if they were warriors gathered around its shores.
There were warriors.
No.
A warrior.
No.
A chief. A strong, noble man in his middle years, dressed in deerskins, with soft moccasins on his feet. Feet that knew every step of the way up the mountain. Running feet.
Pursued.
The Indian’s breath rasped in his throat.
He paused once and looked back. The sun, low in the sky, cast bloody reflections on the still water of the lake. Between himself and the lake, hurrying up the slope after him, was a band of men carrying long rifles and shouting encouragingly to one another. “There he goes!” “Up there!” “Lookit him run, the old fool! After him now, git’em afore he goes to ground!”
Chocorua’s moccasined feet ran lightly up the slope toward the summit, hardly disturbing a grain of soil. The air was thin and sweet, like pure water. Nestled amid stony outcroppings were beds of emerald moss, soft as down, upon which a weary man could sleep. But he dared not stop. He ran on.
He left the moss and rocks behind and began the steeper climb to the utmost peak of the mountain. The earth knew his feet; they had made this trip many times before. Since his young manhood Chocurua had climbed the sacred mountain to sing his tribe’s greeting to the rising sun.
Now the sun was dying in the west.
A gunshot rang out from down below, echoing and reechoing among the mountains. Then another, sharper, closer. Lead spang and spattered against stone a man’s length from the running Indian.
They were playing with him. He was a sharp silhouette against the skyline above them, and the best shot among the hunters could easily have picked him off. But it was more fun to chase him and shoot close to him, keeping him moving, adding to his fear.
He heard their laughter below him.
Chocurua knew some of those men. He had sold them otter skins and beaver pelts, and made them welcome among his people as was the custom of his tribe. In hard winters, he had taken some of his own provisions to the white settlers, who seemed to have little gift for pr
oviding for themselves from the natural bounty around them.
On this day he had encountered the party of hunters by the lake, as he was stalking a deer. Although the chief of his tribe and a man with grandchildren, he was proud that he could still bring down a deer quicker than any man of his age.
But the deer he had chosen for his arrow had a fine set of antlers. The white hunters had seen it, too, and were in hot pursuit. They fired their guns but did not hit the deer and it bounded safely out of range. Then, seeing Chocurua, in their frustration they accused him of driving their quarry off on purpose.
When he protested his innocence they turned on him and attacked him in place of the deer.
They would kill him. He had no doubt. He had seen it in their eyes, hot with baffled bloodlust.
Knowing they would kill him, he had fled up the sacred mountain. Perhaps he might have eluded them if he had set off in a different direction, but he did not think so. They were young, some of them mere boys, and they had stamina and speed. So he had chosen to come to the summit to die; to give his life’s blood to the mountain his people recognized as holy. It would be Chocurua’s last and greatest gift to the spirits.
He could go no farther. The hunters were coming up behind him, shouting their triumph. At bay, he turned to face them. He lifted his head and began to sing.
The first shot slammed into his body. He staggered with the impact. He kept on singing. His voice rose through the clear air, chanting the song of the mountain.
The second shot hit him. It took all his strength to stay on his feet. He swayed, then felt the reassuring solidity of stone at his back. Gratefully, he let himself lean against the stone.
The song continued.
The hunters gathered around him in a circle, jeering. “Crazy old fool, stop that godawful racket!” one shouted at him.
The guns spoke.
His right foot was shattered. At the same moment a sheet of white-hot pain enveloped his left leg.
The hunters laughed. They meant to kill him by inches.
Chocurua had reached the end of the chant for the stone. According to custom, he should have begun again, singing through a precise number of repetitions. Instead he drew a deep breath and turned his head slowly, from one side to the other, so he could look each man in the eyes.
In a voice that did not quaver—with the stone at his back supporting him—Chocurua pronounced his curse. Upon his killers, their posterity, their habitations, and even their possessions.
Then he closed his eyes and, with a calm face, resumed the song of the mountain.
The shot that killed Chocurua blew his belly open.
Annie Murphy, in the dream that was not a dream, felt the impact of the shot that had passed through him as it thundered into the stone.
She felt his hot blood splashed across her face.
She screamed.
“Wha’? Wha’?” Liam sat up in bed, befuddled by sleep but already fumbling for the rifle he, like all farmers, kept within reach at night. There was always a chance of some predator attacking the stock.
Annie grabbed Liam and clung to him. She was shaking.
“What is it?” he asked more clearly. “Annie?”
“A nightmare,” she mumbled. “Just a nightmare.”
Liam was surprised. His wife was not given to having nightmares. In fact, if one asked him, he would have said she was the least fearful of women.
“What kinda nightmare, sugar?”
She shook her head and would not answer. What can I say? she thought. Can I tell him I became a rock and an Indian was shot against me?
Can I tell him how I became that rock?
Annie was an intelligent woman. She knew, in the year 1855, there were only two explanations. Madness, or witchcraft.
Neither was acceptable.
“It’s fading already,” she lied. “I don’t remember. I s’pose I was just too tired, Liam. Lie back now, let’s sleep. I’m all right, truly.”
He lay down beside her again, but he was still troubled. There was something wrong with his wife, no doubt about it.
But what?
For the rest of the night, Annie fought off sleep. She was terrified of finding herself in another of the dreams that were not dreams. The memories of stone.
The morning came at last. She got up, red-eyed, the inside of her head feeling scraped out by weariness, and took the bellows from the hearth to blow life into the banked embers and build up the day’s fire.
Liam was unusually reluctant to leave the house that morning. He kept finding small chores to do that enabled him to keep a watchful eye on Annie. Aware of this, she went out of her way to make everything appear normal. She kept her emotions under iron control and showed him a cheerful surface.
At last he had no option but to go out and tend the stock, fetch the water, chop the firewood.
Annie stood listening to the reassuring sound of his ax as he split logs in the barnyard.
She was surrounded with familiarity. The fire crackled merrily. The smell of good cooking permeated the cabin. Her children’s playful chatter was peaceful music.
Everything was normal. She was Annie Murphy, flesh and blood and bone.
And stone.
It came upon her so suddenly she had no time to prepare. One moment she was reaching for the broom to sweep the floor, the next moment she was a slab of rock on the floor of a riverbed scoured by the sand the rushing water drove across her surface. She lay in cold and darkness as she had lain for centuries; as she might lie for centuries more. Or forever. Cold. Still.
She was back in the warm bright cabin, paralyzed with horror.
Johnny was tugging at her arm. “I ast can we have some buttermilk?” he said in a tone that told her he had already asked the question several times, to no avail.
With a guilty start, Annie recovered herself enough to pour out buttermilk for the children.
She was appalled to realize this could happen to her at any time, with no warning and no protection.
Was it a curse put on her by the stone?
If so, why?
What had she done?
She tried to think of her possible crimes, but could find none that would merit such a punishment.
Perhaps it wasn’t meant to be a punishment.
Perhaps it was something that just … happened. Like the Fosters being able to touch the stone and predict the weather. Perhaps she, too, had a gift for communicating with the stone. With stones.
Just a thing that happened.
Suddenly she recalled a madman who had lived in the tiny village of Bartlett when she was a child. Her father had occasionally driven over to Bartlett to care for him when he injured himself. Annie remembered Dr. McDonnell saying at the dinner table the night after one of those visits, “It’s like he lives in another world. Some of the time he’s with us, some of the time he’s simply somewhere else.”
Was that man mad? Annie wondered now.
Or did he, like herself, truly have a terrible and unwanted access to a world beyond ordinary human senses?
She gazed in horror at her children. Foster had claimed the gift of dealing with the stone was passed down through his family. If so, would Annie’s children inherit the curse that had befallen her?
Suddenly she grabbed up the baby, who had been happily playing at her feet, and pressed little Mary to her breast with such hungry urgency that the child began to cry.
“Mama, you’re hurtin’ Mary!” Johnny protested.
Annie quickly set the child down. “I was just hugging her,” she said. She could not meet her son’s worried eyes.
For the rest of the day, nothing untoward happened, to her vast relief. There were no more of the flashes of altered consciousness she dreaded. She could—almost—convince herself they might have been dreams.
Almost.
For the evening meal she decided to open one of the jars of preserves she had put up the preceding year. Preserves were stored in a cupboard in the dogtro
t, where they would stay cool but were protected enough to keep from freezing. Annie loved opening the cupboard doors and looking at row upon row of glass-encased fruit, ruby and purple and amber, gleaming like the jewels of summer.
She chose a jar of sweet mountain blueberries, Liam’s favorite, and took it back into the cabin. When she had pried up the disc of paraffin wax that sealed the jar, she held the preserves under her nose and took a deep sniff. Her senses flooded with memories of hot summer days shrill with cicadas, and long dark shadows sleeping under leafy trees.
“Mama!” Johnny, who had watched her alertly throughout the day, was scandalized. “You told us never to smell our food!”
Embarrassed, Annie put down the jar. She had felt an irresistible desire to enjoy a human memory. Stones could not appreciate the fragrance of blueberries; could not reminisce about sunny afternoons spent berrying with a small, freckled boy who put more fruit into his mouth than he ever put into his basket.
That was an Annie Murphy memory.
While she was preparing the boiled mutton and potatoes that would be their meal, Liam appeared in the doorway, clapping his mittenless hands together. “It’s jus’ startin’ to get cold,” he reported. “Been mild for a mighty long time now. Reckon we might not see snow till after Thanksgiving, for a change. Might be able to order a little less feed, make up for it with grazin’.”
Annie turned toward him. Her eyes did not seem to see him, however. “No,” she said in a strangely hollow voice. “Order the feed. Order extra.”
“What’re you sayin’?”
“The snow will start by the end of the week and not stop. Blizzard after blizzard.”
“Where’d you hear that?”
She did not answer.
The next morning, Liam left his chores undone and went into Conway. His first stop was the feed store. Money was tight; he did not want to order extra feed if he did not need to, but he would spend the required fee to get advice from Daniel Foster.
Foster, however, refused him. “Cain’t tell you, Liam,” he said succinctly.
“Tarnation, Dan’l, cain’t you give me some idea?”
“Nope.” Foster’s face was as closed as a spring trap.
“Why not?”
The Elementals Page 21
