Forbidden Spirits

by Patricia Watters

  "You just did it beautifully," Rose said. "I wish I had your gifts."

  Tyler laughed again, this time with cynicism. "No, you don't. Holofernes said it best in Love's Labor's Lost: 'This is a gift that I have… a foolish extravagant spirit, full of forms, figures, shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, motions, revolutions; these are begot in the ventricle of memory.' Sometimes there's so much recalling, my mind gets overloaded, which is why I need to live an uncluttered life."

  Rose placed her hands on his chest, and said, "I hope someday you'll find peace within yourself."

  "That's a dream I gave up years ago," Tyler said. "I have different dreams now." He took her hands and put them around his neck and pulled her into his arms and kissed her. The kiss was beginning to escalate into another open-mouth, passionate kiss when Tundra abandoned what was left of his rawhide bone and began pacing.

  Rose broke the kiss and looked at Tyler, and said, "Tundra's getting restless so I'd better take him back so he can exercise or he'll find a chair leg to either pee on or chew up."

  Tyler crooked a finger beneath her chin, kissed her one last time, and said, "Very soon, he and I are going to have a man-to-man talk about learning to be patient when I'm kissing you."

  Rose laughed, and taking Tundra by the collar, led him down the passageway, but once outside, when she started running around and calling for Tundra to chase after her and play, Tyler rushed up and caught her by the arm to stop her, and said, "If you flail your arms around he'll go into predatory mode, which could be dangerous. The canine teeth of a hybrid are bigger than a dog's, and hybrids have the capability of crushing bones. You need to work slowly around him. What he needs is an old settled dog as a companion. He'll copy the older dog's behavior and learn from it, and it would also give him a sense of being in a pack."

  Rose looked at Tundra, who was staring at her like he understood, which had her smiling, as she said, "Okay, boy, we'll think about getting you a friend as soon as we get our own place."

  "You have an option right here," Tyler said.

  Rose saw that he was dead serious. "That option's still a ways off," she replied. "You need to give everything with us a lot more thought. You want an uncluttered life and I'd be bringing to it a wolfdog and his dog companion, and I'd need a place where I can weave baskets, and there would be the likelihood of kids, so even in our small world there would be a certain amount of chaos when we'd all be talking over each other. How do you reconcile all of that?"

  Tyler touched her face, and said, "My life, and whatever you'd bring to it, would never be cluttered as long as you are in it, angel."

  Rose smiled. "That's what you call your mares."

  "I know," Tyler said. "They're my angels too." He kissed her lightly. "Meanwhile, I'll put Tundra on a lunge line for exercise. He'll get the idea in a few minutes, and once he's learned the routine, it's a good way for you to exercise him in a small area."

  Tyler grabbed a lunge line from the tack room, and after clipping it onto Tundra's collar, led Tundra back into the corral. At first Tundra looked baffled, like he wasn't sure what to expect, but within a few minutes he understood. Tyler started by jogging with him in a small circle at a trot, then gradually he let out the lunge line while praising Tundra, and before long, Tundra was trotting in a circle with his tail wagging and his tongue lolling out of his mouth.

  After another ten minutes or so, Rose said, "I need to get back. Now that Marc's home, I want to get my things together and stay with my folks a couple of days and catch up on some of my chores there, but I'll be back in the morning."

  Tyler led Tundra out of the corral, and after turning him over to Rose, he said, "I want to see you after work tomorrow. Can you come here so we can talk, and other things? I'll fix dinner."

  "The other things will have to wait a little longer because we still have some issues to resolve first, but I do want to see you so, yes, I'll come so we can talk." Rose looked toward the garden and while she was staring at the new fencing, a series of happenings began to fall into place. She hadn't planned on getting into it at the moment, but she wanted Tyler to have a better understanding of what she'd been trying to tell him, so she started in by saying, "You do realize that the tree fell on the fence right after you started drilling in the cavern."

  Tyler shrugged. "Maybe. I don't remember."

  "Well, it did, because it struck me at the time that it was an odd coincidence," Rose said. "Then when I found you in bed, and you told me the horses weren't responsive because you were dizzy, that was shortly after you returned from drilling through the floor of the spring."

  "Don't try and connect the two," Tyler replied. "Animals sense emotions in humans, and my mares pick it up whenever I'm off."

  "That may be true," Rose said, "but shortly after that, Gypsy came down with mysterious lameness, so bad things started happening after you began drilling in the cavern. This is what I've been afraid of, and although I know you don't want to hear me suggest that spirits could be working against you, at some point you might have to consider that possibility."

  "Okay, I'll consider it," Tyler said, but with a touch of irritation, so Rose knew he didn't mean what he was saying, but was trying to appease her for the moment, which was exactly the spiritual divide that concerned her.

  She was about to point it out when the sound of a vehicle caught their attention, and they turned to see Marc pulling his truck to a halt. The door flew open and he was immediately out of the truck and walking in long strides toward them. From the look on his face, it wasn't good, which Rose imagined was the report on the poisonous gas or gases in the spring.

  "So, what did you find?" Tyler asked, as Marc approached.

  "Nothing," Marc replied. "Not a trace of gasses anywhere in the cavern."

  "Maybe the CO2 escaped when I opened up the passageway and it dissipated by the time you returned with the gas detector," Tyler suggested.

  "That's not likely," Marc replied. "Caverns like Whispering Springs have an enormous capacity to store gaseous CO2 in subsurface cracks, pores, and cavities, and even after opening a natural tunnel like you did, there would still be traceable levels of CO2 or other gases there for some time afterwards."

  "I don't understand," Tyler said. "The dizziness started when I was drilling."

  "Then you need to see a doctor and find out what caused it, because I can guarantee, there are no gasses in Whispering Springs. Are you still dizzy?"

  "Not so much… maybe a little lightheaded." Tyler placed his hand on the base of Rose's neck, and looked at her, and said, "My angel here has a magic touch and a bag full of remedies that probably work better than what the doctor would give me."

  Rose saw that he was serious, but the look in his eyes was telling her other things too, things he didn't have to put into words because his unspoken words of love were almost palpable…

  "Yeah, well, there's one thing more," Marc said. "I was in the cavern for well over three hours and there are no sounds. Nothing at all. The voices in Whispering Springs are silent."

  When Tyler looked at Rose, her face was stricken. He wrapped his arm around her and drew her to him, and said, "Honey, this doesn't mean there aren't any spirits around, only that they aren't in Whispering Springs. But it does prove that my theory's correct."

  "Not necessarily," Marc said. "I talked to the state geologist about the probability of a geyser there, and he said it was unlikely because first, there are only two geysers in Oregon, both the result of drilling, and those are three-hundred miles away, and second, geysers are always located near volcanic areas where magma can heat rocks to boiling to build up enough pressure to shoot the water through the exit hole. He said there might be a slim chance of activating one here if we drilled deep enough, and we're talking over six thousand feet, but when I asked if steam forced through fissures could cause the sounds, he said he doubted if it could make its way up from that depth, but he couldn't rule it out."

  "So, if it's not steam from a geyser, how do
you explain the sounds?" Tyler asked.

  "I don't," Marc replied. "But maybe you should listen to Rose."

  CHAPTER 17

  Tyler had never been a spiritual person, so he couldn't promise Rose that what he believed, or more accurately, didn't believe, would ever change, but he wanted to believe, if only to hold onto Rose, who he felt was slowly slipping away from him. The look on her face when she learned that the cave was silent was stuck in his head. If he hadn't been so single-minded in his quest to learn the source of the sounds, Rose's voices would not be silent, and his non-belief in sprits wouldn't be an issue.

  Still, he wasn't convinced that, after thousands of years of sounds coming out of the mountain, drilling through the floor of the cavern could stop them. But if it had, Whispering Springs would no longer be a sacred place, although the hot spring would still be there for those who wanted to sit in the pool and soak up its healing minerals. That, he did believe in, and he also believed in the effectiveness of Rose's medicinal herbs and her oil massage.

  So he left his place at daybreak, and in the colorless light of dawn, headed for the trail to the spring. Before leaving, however, he checked on Gypsy. She still hadn't eaten, and she was standing at the half-door to the pasture, looking out. She even whinnied for the others, which he took as a sign that she was better, maybe because he'd soaked her foot twice the day before. But not wanting her to get anxious or depressed by being separated from the others while he was at the spring, he opened the door to the pasture so she could be with them if she wanted.

  He made his way over the trail to the cavern, and once inside, he stripped off his clothes and immersed himself in the pool and sat where the rock ledge was closest to the bottom so the warm water would reach up to his neck. He wanted to be as deep as possible so his senses would be neutralized and he could focus intently on listening for the sounds. He was certain they were there, just weaker, because the opening in the floor would allow steam to escape more quickly.

  The wall of the pool behind him sloped back slightly, and where he sat was curved and smooth, as if shaped and polished by the movements of hundreds of thousands of people over the centuries. Resting his head back, he closed his eyes and listened. It seemed unusually quiet, and for a while the silence was soothing, like a balm for his cluttered mind.

  But as the minutes ticked by in absolute silence, a feeling of apprehension began to settle over him, like the eerie silence before a storm. He'd read about fossil caves, which were caves that had lost their formative streams and could be totally silent, but Whispering Springs wasn't a fossil cave, and there had always been sounds—occasional drips of condensation, a rodent scurrying off, sometimes hisses, or chirps, or squeaks, which he figured were bats. But while he sat in the pool straining to hear something, there were no sounds at all, not even the sound of voices sifting up from the ranch, or horses whinnying, or cattle bellowing, or even farm machinery in the distance. It was like being in a noiseless vacuum.

  After a while he found himself no longer just listening for the voices, but for anything. But as he sat with his eyes closed and his ears straining to catch even one sound, he heard nothing, and it came to him that sound was a physical thing that he didn't just access it with his ears, but with his whole body, and when sound was totally missing, his brain told him it was disturbing because without sensory input, he was alone with his thoughts.

  He also realized, as the silence became profound, that his hearing was becoming more acute, and at last, he began to perceive something. Faint at first, it gradually grew louder, but as he excitedly welcomed the sounds of the voices, they didn't come. Instead, he became aware of his heartbeat as if greatly amplified, and the throb of blood flowing through his veins, and air sifting into his lungs, like being in a wind tunnel. There were other sounds too, like his stomach gurgling, and a little clicking sound, maybe an organ opening and closing. He was suddenly struck with the awareness that in the absence of sound, his ears were doing their best to find something to listen to, anything, and when they heard nothing, he became the sound.

  It was disorienting, hearing with his whole body. So he concentrated on hearing through the sounds of his body. His mind focused, he began to feel a strange, skin-crawling sensation, and with it, his breath became short and his chest tight, like he was smothering. A feeling of overwhelming dread took hold, like something unimaginably horrible was about to happen and he was powerless to prevent it. Then images of Gypsy began racing through his head. She was struggling, and stumbling, and confused and needing him...

  Alarmed, he stood abruptly and climbed out of the pool, and after dragging his clothes over his wet body, he rushed out of the cavern and raced over the trail at a near run, stumbling several times and having to catch himself as he negotiated the uneven trail. There were moments when he was almost overcome with shortness of breath and heart palpitations and dizziness as he ran, and other moments when there seemed to be a slowing down of time because his legs couldn't take him back fast enough, all the while his mind was filled with images of Gypsy struggling.

  And then he saw her in the pasture, walking in an awkward, disjointed way. He'd never seen her move like she was, even banging her hip on the hay trough, as if her spatial awareness was off, and her head was close to the ground, as if she were about to go down.

  "Gypsy, baby, stop," Tyler called out, as he rushed toward her, knowing it would be impossible to get her up and to the vet if she went down, but already she was on her knees and when she lowered her rear end he could see the pain in her eyes, yet she made no sound and gave no indication except for the strained look on her face.

  Dropping to his knees, Tyler knelt in front of her, and pressing his forehead to hers, he said, "Angel, give me some idea what's wrong." Still, he got nothing, except for an awareness that Gypsy wanted him there, and when he sat with his legs out, she rolled onto her side and lowered her head into his lap, and he slipped his arms around her neck...

  …If you can put your arms around your horse while he's laying down, that's a sign of total trust. This is their most vulnerable position...

  The words came, almost as clearly as when they were spoken by an old wrangler his dad hired years before, who arrived about the time he'd gotten Caesar. The man was at the ranch no more than a couple of weeks before he moved on, but in that time he passed on a plethora of information about working with abused horses...

  …Haven't there been times in your life when things happened like a domino effect…

  He'd barely had time to analyze that thought when, from high above came a protracted rasping scream, like a kree-eee-ar, beginning as a high pitched whine and slurring downward, reminding him of the voices in the mountain. He looked up to find Diana gliding into view, soaring with slow, deep wing beats, then stretching out her wings and playing with the wind. As she caught a current, occasionally hovering and beating her wings directly above him, Tyler watched her as he'd never watched anything before, and as his gaze followed the course of Diana's flight, it was almost as if he were watching himself flying, because there seemed to be no division between them. It was a strange and unfamiliar feeling, one he'd never experienced.

  Diana made one last circle and glided down to land on the fence post, fluttering her wings momentarily before folding them against her body. It was oddly comforting having her there, and as he held Gypsy's head, tears welled because he could feel Gypsy slipping away. He wanted to rush into his quarters and get his cell phone and call Rick, but he felt a stronger urge to stay where he was.

  "Gypsy, baby, hold on," he said, close to her ear. "We'll get you up and over to the clinic, but you've got to fight whatever it is that's got you down."

  As he continued to hold Gypsy's head, Tyler's hands started tingling, and his heart starting racing, and he didn't know if was because he was lightheaded or because the dizziness was coming back, but it was almost as if waves of energy were pulsing through him.

  In his peripheral vision he saw Diana with her wings p
rotracted, and when he looked at her, he got the feeling of an altered sense of time, and with it, his perception became different. Diana and everything around her—the sky, the trees, the fence post—looked as if they were breaking into tiny pinpoints of colored light, like pixels on a computer screen, and the more he looked into the scene, the deeper and more pixelated it got, as if he were looking into another dimension, and from that dimension, into yet another dimension where colors became more vivid, and sounds more manifest, like hearing white noise in his head. The trees, the fields, the sky all seemed more alive and shining with a new radiance, and the fragrance of flowers was all around him.

  The shift kept deepening and deepening, and as it did, the clutter in his head diminished and decreased until there was complete peace and silence in his mind, and when he looked at Diana, she appeared to be radiating energy and beauty. Then he began to feel as if he were part of an intertwined web-like connection to everything in the universe. There was no him, no boundaries, no feeling of beginning or end, just infinity. Nor was it disturbing or frightening. It was beautiful and wondrous, and he felt full of vitality, as though the whole universe was living and breathing. He was completely lucid and aware of everything that was happening, yet he was unable to explain it, only that he didn't want to break the spell.

  But while his mind was trapped in a strange dimension, mist that came in on a whitish-blue light touched him on his face and hands and wrapped around him, as if in an embrace, like being surrounded by unconditional love. A strong sense of a presence seemed to somehow press down from above. It was limitless, stretching through the solar system from infinity, yet, the whole of this space was filled with this powerful force.

  A strange feeling bubbled up from his chest into his throat. It took a minute to recognize it as joy, and he was mortified. How could he feel joy at a time like this? But it was irresistible. Tears were running down his face, and yet he was smiling, while a part of him was wondering what the hell was going on. A moment later he was having a vision. He wasn't dreaming. He wasn't hallucinating. He knew his name and where he was, and that he was holding Gypsy's head, but he was also in the cavern looking into the pool, with the feeling of joy bubbling up inside, and somehow he understood that even though Gypsy was dying, she'd never be alone, that he and Gypsy were inextricably connected, as they were to every living thing on the planet...