Whispers on the Wind

by Judy Griffith Gill

  He picked up a fork and attacked the meal as Jane set it before him, the desire to seek gold growing less and less compelling with each bite. And with its passing, the strong conviction that this time he knew, also faded.

  Knew? Knew what? He scratched his head, looked down at the plate before him, showing smears of egg-yolk, bright yellow, a few bits of ham, rich pink, brown crumbs of toast and crusty hash browns. He glanced at the big clock on the wall over the stove. Twelve-fifty-four? The window outside showed him it was dark. Nighttime. He gave his head a rapid shake.

  “What are we doing?” he asked Jane. “Why did you cook me breakfast at this time of day?”

  “You wanted to go out,” she said. “You had one of those dreams again. I didn’t want you to leave without food in your belly.”

  His tone was heavy. “The gold.” It wasn’t a question.

  She nodded. He thought that, through her thick glasses, he could read wariness along with resignation. “I’ll get your pack.”

  “Yeah.” The gold. It was up there...somewhere. He thought he had known. In the dream, it had been so clear, like a vision. But now, it was fading the way dreams do when you try too hard to remember them. There’d been a cave. That he knew. And in it, he’d seen the gleam of gold. It had called him. It had called him strongly, almost as if a voice had spoken in his mind.

  He shivered, staring out the wide window wall that faced his fields, with the dark bulk of the Rockies soaring straight up beyond, blocking the stars. What was it out there that called him? And where was it?

  “Now, who could that be?” Jane asked, drawing Angus’s attention to a flickering light well beyond the window wall of the kitchen. Someone stumbled along the side of the east pasture. The light paused, dipped, and he knew the person had parted the strands of wire that kept the stock from the hayfield. The light wove uncertainly onward, cutting a slow but steady path across the freshly plowed and planted field.

  Once, it bobbed out of existence, as if it had been shut off, but as Jane damped the lights in the kitchen, offering a better view of the outdoor scene, he saw that whoever staggered across the ground had fallen. That person now recovered the lightcell and reeled on, traveling in an ever-more erratic pattern as if unsure of the right direction to take.

  One moment, the light bobbed toward the Johannsen ranch-house, close by, but unseen in the dark. The next, it angled back toward McQuarrie’s place, as if whoever was lost out there might have been drawn by the lights and was now confused because they’d been shut off.

  “I’d better check this out,” Angus said, “since I’m already up and dressed.” He tugged on his jacket and fumbled with the fastener. “Looks like someone’s in trouble,” he added as the person fell again, getting up more slowly this time.

  “Heading toward Johannsen’s ranch, by the look of it.” Jane commented. “Maybe Pete’s had too much to drink.”

  “Hmmph.” Angus wouldn’t have been surprised. Pete Johannsen was not a happy man, what with his on-again, off-again relationship with the Worth girl. But who could he have been boozing with until this time of the night? Most everyone hereabouts got up with the chickens and went to bed not long after them, too.

  Just before the fence that separated his east hayfield from the highway, he intercepted the carrier of the lightcell and came to a stunned halt. “Nancy? Nancy Worth?”

  He stared at her. She wore only a short nightshirt, moth-gray in the harsh glare of his of light as he swept it over her, no shoes, not even slippers, despite the crispness of the frost on the grassy verge here. Her eyes held a dazed expression, quickly hidden by her squint as he beamed his lightcell right into her face.

  “What the hell are you doing out here?”

  She blinked and he turned his light off her face. “Angus. Oh. Why are you here?”

  “Why are you in the middle of my field in the middle of the night?”

  “I...I don’t know. I had to go...somewhere. To be...with someone.”

  “Be with who? Peter? Did he call you? Is he sick? Why didn’t you drive? What are you doing on foot and with no clothes on?”

  She shook her head, looking confused. “Not...him, not Peter. Someone else. I...think. I don’t know who. It’s like I did know, but now I can’t remember. This is crazy, isn’t it, Angus? God, I’m cold.” She wrapped her arms around herself, looked down at her feet. “I don’t have any shoes on!”

  “I know.” Angus was concerned about the woman, not only her physical state, but her mental condition as well. “Come on, let’s get you inside and warmed up. Jane has tea on.”

  Nancy hesitated for a moment, then gestured at the steep mountainside to the east. “But...up there...”

  Angus wrapped his jacket around Nancy’s shaking body. “Up there...what?” he said, steering her toward the house, only half a klick distant, where the outdoor floodlights Jane had turned on spilled across the new grass of the yard, turning it an electric green. He followed the direction of Nancy’s wistful stare.

  “Someone...Something...” She frowned. “I don’t know. Don’t remember, exactly. But I had to get there. Up there, somewhere. A ship?”

  “Right,” he said, hurrying her along now, feeling the cold himself without his jacket. She was obviously hypothermic, irrational. A ship? On the mountain? Sure!

  “Up there,”—He pointed to the west—“is one hell of a big black cloud that’s going to dump a few tons of rain on us any minute now.” Even as he spoke, the stars began to disappear as if being swallowed by a monster.

  They had just reached the shelter of the porch when the load of rain let loose.

  In no time, Jane had Nancy bundled in a quilt, hands wrapped around a large steaming mug of sweet tea. A pair of Angus’s own heavy gray wool socks came almost to her knees, but despite that, her teeth chattered against the china as she sipped.

  A thunderous hammering on the door sent all three of them whirling around as it was flung open and Peter Johannsen strode through.

  “What’s wrong?” he demanded. “I saw you and Nan out there in the middle of the field. What’s going on, here, anyway?” He crouched before Nancy, took the cup from her and smothered her hands in his. “What were you doing, honey? Were you trying to come to me?”

  Nancy looked at him and her face crumpled as she rocked forward against his shoulder. “Peter...I’m so glad you’re here. You’ll keep me safe.”

  “Sure I will. Come on. I’ll take you home with me and get you warm.”

  Jane tapped Peter on the shoulder. “Jacquie’s room’s all made up and ready. How about you get Nancy tucked in there, and tuck yourself right in beside her? Best way I know to warm up a cold body is with a warm one, and she shouldn’t be going outside again tonight.”

  She gave Angus’s arm a tug when he would have stayed there to stare at the sight of Peter Johannsen lifting Nancy Worth from the chair, quilt and all, gray socks dangling, and carrying her down the hall. “Come on,” she said. “We need to get back to bed too.”

  Wearily, he let Jane lead him back to their own room. In a way, he was glad. He was much too old to be clambering up mountainsides in the dead of night.

  Lenore’s shoulders ached under the weight of the ever-present earthquake kit kept at the ready by every sensible person in the entire Cascadia Corridor, following the devastation of ’31. Her thighs, unused to climbing steep hills, burned with exertion. Her lungs, deprived of oxygen at this high altitude, strained. She clutched the trunk of a tree, holding on, aiming the beam of her lightcell along the faint track through the forest. She rested for only seconds before dragging in a deep breath that failed to satisfy and forcing herself away from the tree.

  She plodded onward. She knew, with the same instinctive knowledge that draws a salmon into its home river from the vastness of the ocean, that she would put no foot wrong that night. She followed each twist, each turn, slipped past craggy boulders dropped from mountain cliffs eons before, skirted trees felled by winter storms, leapt streams and kn
ew, no matter how convoluted the track, that she would find Jon at the end of it.

  Suddenly, without conscious thought, she turned right, and found herself on more level ground, a bench land that led back toward the next steep incline as it curved around the flank of the mountain. The evergreens grew more sparsely here, admitting fitful shafts of moonlight that rose and faded as black and silver clouds scudded across the sky, giving glimpses of a million more stars than ever shone over the Cascadian metropolitan area.

  Lenore cast wary glances upwards wherever the trees were thin enough. Despite the moon and stars, she didn’t like the look of the sky. There was far more cloud now than when she had started out. It boiled up from behind the mountain range to the west, across the valley, rising in a towering column of darkness that broke into wind-tossed bits playing tag with the moon.

  She would have to hurry in case it meant business.

  The rocky soil crumbled under the soles of her hiking boots, slippery in spots, but she made better time now that the ground was more level. She walked on, faster, her heart beating heavily, her mouth dry.

  She longed for water, but stopped for nothing. She jumped the width of a rushing stream, followed its banks to where it bubbled out of a crevice between two rocks. She stopped, head tilted back, looking up a sheer wall of granite, swinging her light beam in an exploratory arc.

  There! Ten feet over, a few feet up a natural staircase, a blackness the beam could not dispel. This was it. The cave. She had arrived, and safely. Now all she had to go was get in there, get the man out. Get Jon.

  She hitched her pack higher, and, using only one hand, the other clutching the lightcell, she struggled to gain the first of those steps, thinking that they had not seemed so far apart when she was sixteen.

  Edging sideways, trailing the pack behind her, she pushed through the narrow cave entrance, recalling how she and Caroline had entered it, seeking only to get out of the weather, and discovered that five feet in, it widened to a chamber large enough to wander around in, intriguing enough to encourage exploration.

  Then, though, they had hesitated at the end of the slit, peering into darkness lit only fitfully by the lighter Caroline had always carried in those days, they had wondered aloud about bears, about cougars, about armed survivalists who might inhabit the cavern. They had giggled, promising each other that bears and cougars would have left tell-tale piles of bones from their prey, and survivalists would have had sentries posted. Besides, if there were any of the latter, maybe they’d be male, and cute, and worth visiting.

  Both were glad to be out of the pounding hail and whipping wind; it made them feel invincible enough to take on any wild animal they might encounter—including survivalists.

  Now, all alone, Lenore was filled with a different kind of trepidation. She sensed no other presence. She felt sick. Had the whole episode been nothing more than a indication of her near-breakdown state?

  Or...was it merely that she was too late?

  “Is anybody here?” she said, emerging fully into the main gallery, a cavern some twenty feet across at its widest, ten feet high at the front, with several shelves and ledges along its sides, which sloped sharply to the floor at the rear.

  “Hello!” Her seeking light beam encountered only bare walls, dusty ledges, and boulders that had tumbled down. A deep sense of loss flooded her. To have come this far and found nothing after being so sure seemed a cruel punishment.

  “Where are you?” she asked, sending the light in erratic, swinging searches. Maybe an earthquake during the twenty years since her last visit had opened another room, where Jon might be hiding: This was no limestone cavern, hollowed out by water, but one left in the formation of the mountain itself, like a bubble in folded cake batter. Earth tremors often shook loose enough of the crumbling, shaley mountain substance to create leads into new caves.

  She and Caroline had explored the place thoroughly, having returned later with proper lights. They had, bravely, they thought, spent the odd night in the cavern that summer and the next. This had been the only chamber then, and appeared still to be. There was a narrow chimney near the center of the back wall, but neither of them would have fit through it, not even at the slim, lithe age of sixteen. Therefore, a man the size of Jon would not have fit, either.

  Despite the clearly empty state of the cave, she called his name. “Jon!”

  There was no reply. She laughed softly, bitterly.

  Of course there was no reply. He didn’t exist. He never had. What was she doing, standing in a cave in the middle of the night, with a storm brewing outside, calling out to a specter created by her strange, ungovernable needs?

  As if in reply to her foolish question, thunder rumbled ominously outside. Great! The threatening clouds were about to let loose. The only thing to do was wait it out. It would be stupid in the extreme to try to outrun a mountain storm.

  Lenore sank down onto a ledge, the same one where she and Caroline had sat out the earlier storm. She turned off the light. Though it did have a solar-power cell, she had no idea how long it might last without recharging. Through the narrow slot of the opening, she saw a patch of moonglow slide into blackness. Moments later, heavy rain hissed onto the cold ground, a full-fledged downpour as rapidly arriving as if someone had turned on a hose.

  And there she sat, trapped in a cave where she’d come searching for a man, or a ghost, who had never for one minute really existed.

  She felt like a fool, waiting there in darkness thick enough to choke on. She turned on the light again. She wanted to pretend to herself that the events of the past three nights—four, this one included—had never happened, which, of course, they had not, except in her own, distressed mind.

  She was definitely a mental case. Fit only to be locked up. The best thing she could do for herself was wait for the storm to blow itself out then hike back down to the cabin and ride Mystery to McQuarrie’s ranch, where she’d trade horse and fantasies for car and reality.

  Then, she would hold herself together long enough to drive out of the mountains to where she could lock onto the nearest east-west glideway that would connect her vehicle with the westernmost north-south one, and go home. Then, she would visit her doctor again and this time demand to be admitted to a psychiatric institute for her own safety.

  She was clearly insane.

  But...If you thought you were crazy, could you be? Probably not. She could take some comfort in that.

  “All right,” she said aloud, “let’s sort out the dreams then, find a satisfactory explanation for them, if being nuts isn’t it.”

  She’d known for a long time that she wanted a long, secure, satisfying relationship and ultimately, a child, maybe more than one. That could account for the fantasies, for their graphic eroticism. She simply had needs that weren’t being met, especially in the months since she’d broken up with Frank. No, for much longer than that, which was why she had broken up with him. Making love for five or ten minutes every Thursday evening after watching a holo Frank claimed would get him “in the mood” simply hadn’t been adequate for her. She wanted more. Much more.

  She blew out a long breath. Frank had not been the right one for her and she doubted, deep inside where most doubts lay, that the right man had ever been born. For that reason, her mind had created him out of whole cloth. She smiled wryly, wondering if, during one of those dreams, she and the man ever actually made love, she would end up with a phantom pregnancy?

  She’d once known a woman whose poodle had suffered from the delusion that it was pregnant. It showed all the signs and symptoms, got fat and waddled, but never produced a litter.

  It was time she faced up to the undeniable facts that her dreams had about as much chance of being met, given her age, as that poodle’s did, given its owner’s vigilance. Besides, who in their right mind ever really wanted to get fat and waddle?

  Weary from her day’s exertion, from the long, hard hike, still fighting a disturbing sense of loss, she pulled out her floatpad, u
nrolled it, and stretched out on it. It maintained her body temperature, conformed to her shape, and kept her a comfortable few inches off the rock. She set her pack behind her and leaned her head and shoulders on it to rest for the trek down the mountain. She slumped farther down, extended her aching legs, turned off the light and laid it close at hand in case she needed it. She let weariness overcome her and closed her eyes.

  Closed her eyes, sensed his presence, opened them again and he was...there. There...and yet not there, more like one of the imperfect holo-images projected by a toy one of her friends had owned during their childhood before such things had been perfected.

  Except...she saw his dry, cracked lips move, she heard as if he had spoken, a glad, echoing cry: Minton!

  Chapter Four

  MINTON DRAGGED HIMSELF THROUGH the field in which he had materialized. His skin burned from the coarse vegetation scraping his belly and limbs. He cast out a beam, searching for Wend, who was much more to him than just the Octad’s healer, but his own birth-mate. He needed her, sought the solace and belonging he would find with her or, in a lesser way, with the others, even one of the others, but there was none, no one.

  Then, for a startling instant, he sensed Jon! He tried to focus, but the ephemeral touch was already gone. He knew it had been real. His Kahinya told him it had, exulted with him that the Octad’s leader lived, however precariously. There was hope!

  He crawled on as moonlight flooded around him. He knew not where he was going, nor really where he was, except half-buried in vegetation that scarcely struck him as edible. He was hungry, thirsty, and his Kahinya provided just barely enough warmth to keep him alive. That he was naked suggested he had completed the translation alone. But...translation from where? To where? He had only vague memories of other places, of day, of night, of day again, and now, here he was in another night with dawn again approaching. He recalled other times of being naked and alone, of translating again and again in the ever-fainter hope of finding someone of his own on the vastness of this alien planet, Earth.