Whispers on the Wind

by Judy Griffith Gill

  The vent at the back of the cave sucked air in from the front, carrying away wisps of smoke with it. Lenore set a few more larger sticks on the small blaze, speculating on the possibility that the vent was wider than it appeared, back there in the darker end of the cave. Could a man, falling from a great height, have plunged through it, breaking his leg and lacerating his scalp? Could he then have managed to climb onto the ledge before passing out? But why would he have done that? The ledge certainly provided no better bed than the floor of the cave.

  No, that plot line leaked like an old skiff, as a writer friend of hers was wont to say. There were too many holes in it. Notably, the narrowness of the crevice, which she and Caroline had examined, and the man’s largely undamaged skin. He was also, she noted, very, very clean, which he would not have been had he somehow squeezed down that rock chimney.

  So...what if he’d escaped from jail? Biting the inside of her cheek, she glanced at him again. Wasn’t there a prison work-camp somewhere along a side road off the highway to the south? She was sure she’d seen signs to that effect, and warnings not to pick up hitch-hikers. Had he ditched his prison garb?

  She frowned at her now briskly burning fire and shut off the stove to conserve its fuel since it was doing little to heat the cave anyway.

  His being an escaped prisoner seemed an unlikely idea. Surely he wouldn’t have dumped his clothes until he’d managed to snag a different outfit. She flashed briefly on the line full of clothing she’d seen being hung out in the sun and wind to dry. Yes, clothing was available.

  And there was always the possibility that he was an escapee from a mental hospital. That, more than any explanation, appealed to her. Except the next most obvious one—that she was the fugitive from the booby hatch and he wasn’t there now any more than he had been when she first arrived at the cave.

  No, she decided, sitting on the ledge beside him again, resting back against her pack, as far as plot lines went, she liked best the one in which he’d been a nude mountain climber, showing off for a photographer who sold his wares to tourists. Maybe the rock chimney was a little wider than she’d thought. Maybe he could have slipped through it. Maybe...

  Thunder crashed right overhead. Lenore jumped, waking from the doze she’d slipped into, her head and shoulders falling off the pack she’d propped herself on. Her inadvertent movement knocked the lightcell to the rocks below. Sliding down to the floor of the cave, on hands and knees she swung her hands carefully, searching for it in the fitful flickering of the dying fire and the faint glow that came through the entrance of the cave, suggestive not of moonlight now, but of a gray, misty dawn. The rain continued to hiss down in a steady stream.

  Oh, damn! Damn! How long had she slept, dreaming that she was with Jon, caring for him, helping him? How strange. In the dream, there had been no need for artificial light in the cave. It was as if the two of them had been surrounded by an illumination that came from everywhere all at once. It had followed her outside, she recalled, making it easy to select the dry, breakable limbs that protruded low on the trunks of mountain hemlock trees. Then, there had been no thunder, no rain, as if a giant umbrella had covered the territory around the cave mouth. She’d had no difficulty in finding dry clumps of grass, the brittle beards of moss she’d used for tinder.

  Yet now, it was dark in the cave. Now, it rained outside.

  Her left hand encountered the lightcell and she scooped it up, switched it on, grateful for the reassuring beam that it issued.

  Dammit, if she had been lying there with her head on her pack, sleeping again, how had she gathered wood, lit the fire? She touched her jacket. It was dry. Clenching her teeth, she did what she had, until this moment, not dared to do.

  She swung the beam of her light, and her reluctant gaze, toward Jon.

  He wasn’t there. Her sleeping bag lay flat on the rock, one corner hanging down toward her. She grabbed it, jerked, and it slithered down, leaving nothing exposed but the makeshift pillow she’d fashioned and her half-empty pack. That...and a brownish stain that might have been blood. Or the residue of something she or Caroline had spilled during a picnic twenty years before.

  “No!” She heard the tight whisper emerge from her throat, squeezed her eyes shut, hoping, and saw nothing but star-shot dark, tinged red, and opened them again.

  “Clap your hands if you believe in fairies,” she said, and clenched her fists at her sides lest she do something so inane as clap her hands.

  The pot of water stood on the little cellstove. She touched it. It was cold. Her mouth was dry. She felt weak, more exhausted than at any time in the weeks before she’d forced herself to seek medical help. It was as if her very substance had been drained away by these recurring dreams. She lifted the pot, sipped from it, slaking her terrible thirst, set it back down carefully and hunkered by the stove, closing her eyes again, gently this time, waiting, waiting, waiting.

  She let her mind go blank, left it open, tried to let it float free, suspending disbelief, but no apparition appeared, injured or otherwise when she opened them again. No bronze-skinned, golden haired man spread his superb body over the rock shelf at her knee-level.

  To remind her exactly how pedestrian her life was, always had been, always would be, her stomach growled, a reminder of the stew she’d packed into two tight-lidded plastic containers the night before. And the loaf of bread she’d brought to supplement the emergency rations of dried food in her pack.

  She quickly rebuilt the fire, stacking a good supply of freshly split, dry poplar around and over the twigs and limbs, watching it catch and snap, flames leaping high to illuminate the cave. Using the last of the water in the pot, she washed her hands, opened one container of stew and put it in the pot before turning on the stove again. Setting the now unnecessary light on the ledge above her, she held the loaf on her knee, sliced off two thick slabs of bread, spread butter on them with the same knife and laid one aside on the lid of the pot. She sank her teeth into the other and enjoyed it while the stew heated. Hunkered by the stove, warmed by the blazing fire beside her, she stirred the stew, sniffing the good, meaty aroma that began to rise.

  She added more wood to the fire, feeling its warmth begin to penetrate throughout the cave, and then sat on the corner of her sleeping bag to eat the stew. As its sustenance filled her, the feeling of weakness diminished. She sopped up the last of the gravy and swallowed the last crust of bread. Taking the pot outside, she rinsed it, filled it again, drank from it and carried it back inside.

  “Now why,” she asked herself, standing erect in the cave and staring at the water, “did I do that?”

  “Because I’m thirsty,” Jon’s voice said and her skin prickled as the hair tried to rise off her scalp.

  Lenore dared not turn and look at the ledge. She watched concentric circles ripple across the surface of the water as her hands began to shake. “Go away,” she said. “My eyes are wide open. I’m awake. You do not exist. I cannot hear you.”

  “Your food smells good. Will you share it with me as you shared the water, before?”

  “Phantoms do not eat.” They shouldn’t be able to swallow water, either, she knew, nor suck it greedily from a wet cloth.

  “But mountain climbers do.”

  She flicked a quick, sideways glance at the ledge, through the heat shimmer of the fire, and saw a leg dangling, a foot twisted awkwardly, tight, shiny skin, more blue than red now, rising toward a bent knee. The broken bone had disappeared, the wound through which it had protruded scarcely existed. She closed her eyes, opened them, then looked again.

  Lifting her head, she saw the rest of him, his head up now, his upper body lifted as he half-rose onto his elbows. His eyes shone green, his hair gleamed. His teeth, when he smiled at her, flashed pure, beautiful white, making her feel guilty for having missed her last dental appointment. He was life-guard gorgeous and awake, infinitely more of a potent presence than he’d been, unconscious. Inside, she trembled.

  “I am very hungry.”


  She knew he was. She felt his hunger as intensely as she had felt her own, knew intimately the degree of his thirst and again the word telepathy clanged an alarm bell inside her.

  No, no, no! The thought brought revulsion as well as renewed fear. She did not want, could not bear the idea of someone messing with her head, getting inside her private thoughts, reading them, knowing her innermost being. Dammit, there were places in there even she refused to go!

  She wanted to scream, wanted to run, wanted to hide. Which was insane, because telepathy was not possible. He was not dipping into her thought-stream and ladling out what he wanted. He could not be, therefore he was not.

  Shivering, despite the warmth now reaching out well beyond the fire, she stepped around the flaming wood—and stared, becoming fully aware that, exactly as she had wished, she now had a big stack of the split poplar from the pile behind her cabin—and she didn’t have the faintest idea how she’d gotten it there.

  She couldn’t think about that now. She spilled the water from the large pot into the two smaller pots, emptied the second tub of stew into the largest one and turned on the cellstove again.

  She risked another glance at the ledge. She frowned at his recumbent, naked form and quickly covered him with the sleeping bag.

  “Thank you,” he said. “It takes a great deal of...energy, trying to keep warm. Especially when one is healing. That is why I required...drink—and required you to drink—before I could wake up. My energy stores had been quite...depleted, first, by healing the break in my leg, and also by bringing the firewood you wanted. Either should have been an easy task. Both were difficult, but necessary. You required warmth as much as I if you were to have strength to share with me.”

  “Yes,” she said, as if she knew what he was talking about, which, in a way, she supposed she did, however little sense it made. The fact remained, the firewood was there and she didn’t recall trekking all the way back to the cabin for it. That would have taken at least ten trips back up that steep mountain track with a filled wheelbarrow, and surely she’d know—her muscles would know—if she’d done something so utterly ridiculous. Unless it, too, was a fantasy.

  The fire it made felt good and warm, though.

  Lenore crouched beside Jon, this time holding the vessel of water to his lips while he drank. Then, backing away, she sliced bread, buttered it, laid it aside.

  She poured a portion of the stew into the plastic container and stuck a spoon into it. Setting it on the ledge beside him, she helped him sit more erect and gave him her pack to lean on. “Can you manage it yourself?” she asked, handing him the food. “Or would you like me to feed you?”

  He smiled again. “You may feed me.” It was, she thought, as if he were bestowing a favor.

  She fed him.

  Chapter Six

  AS SHE BROKE A bit off one slice of bread and put a morsel into his mouth, the term “break bread together” popped into her mind.

  “Breaking bread is an old tradition,” he said, startling her, making her jerk her fingers back from the soft brush of his lips. “It makes us friends.” His words, she decided on reflection, had had a strange ring to them, as if they had been rehearsed, but not well, a certain hesitancy, as if he were forced to translate each one before speaking it.

  Many people had accents, and even if English wasn’t his first language, he could have heard the phrase. It was a thought that could occur to anyone who performed or watched the act of breaking, rather than cutting bread. The term probably came into being before the widespread use of knives as table implements. The thought, the logic of it, reassured her. He was not reading her mind. She shoveled a heaping spoonful of stew into him.

  “The tradition,” she said, aware of sounding pedantic, “is that people who have ‘broken bread’ together, that is, shared a meal, should not be enemies. I don’t believe it’s ever been said that eating from the same loaf automatically makes people friends.”

  He merely looked at her and opened his mouth for more stew. When he had eaten all that she’d put into the plastic container, she offered him more, which he took hungrily, along with great, insatiable gulps of water and three more slices of bread.

  “You said you’re a mountain climber,” she said when he appeared to be replete. “What is your name? I’m sure someone has reported you missing. I’ll have to go and get help, and let the authorities know that you’ve been found.”

  “Help?” he asked, cocking his head to one side. “Why do you need help?”

  Lenore had to laugh at his inane question. “I don’t need help,” she said. “You need it!”

  “Why?” he asked again. “We are together now.” He said it as if, together, they could do anything, Lenore thought.

  “Together, we can do anything,” he said and she backed away from him quickly.

  “Stop that!” she said sharply. “Stop reading my mind!” Then she edged away another foot or two, conjuring up a weak laugh. “I mean, I wish you didn’t act as if you can read my mind. I know, of course, you really can’t. It just...seems that way, sometimes. It makes me...uncomfortable.”

  He looked dismayed and almost comically guilty, like a small child caught in a shameful act. “I will not read your mind again. You let me in, therefore I assumed you to be willing. I apologize for my error.” He did not look as if the words lay easy on his tongue. She wondered if he had ever apologized to anyone else before. A man as beautiful as he was had probably sailed through life getting away with murder.

  She shivered again, remembering her speculations about his origins. Ted Bundy, a twentieth-century mass-murderer, whom she had studied in an online psychology course, had been an extraordinarily handsome man, too, a fact that had probably led his victims to like him, to trust him, to fail to be suspicious of him and his motives.

  “It is not my way to intrude,” he continued. “But, impaired as I am, and with you expressing no objections in the beginning, I thought it was acceptable for me to borrow from your strength and health.” He reached down and slid a hand over his injured leg before covering it with the sleeping bag. She gasped, expecting him to pass out again at the pain he must have caused himself, but apart from a slight wince, he appeared unaffected.

  “You are...still bothered by something,” he said, then added quickly, “I can see it in your face. I was not entering your mind. I will not. I have promised.”

  Lenore stood from her seat on the ledge and stepped down, facing him from several feet away, meeting his puzzled green gaze. “Damn right I’m bothered by something,” she said, refusing to be taken in by his guileless look, his crazy promise. Of course he wouldn’t read her mind “again.” He had never done so in the first place. There was no way he could, and she didn’t need any promise of his to be certain of that.

  “I’m bothered by a whole lot of stuff here, buster. Suppose you just quit being coy and tell me who you are, what you’re doing here, and where your climbing companions are.”

  Now pain showed in his eyes, in the curved lines that bracketed his mouth. In that moment, he looked older than the twenty-seven years, max, she had given him. “I do not know where my...companions are,” he said, and she understood somehow, that to him, emotional pain was worse, by far, than any physical discomfort his broken leg might cause. “That is why I require your help. To find them. They need me. I am their leader. I am responsible and I...lost them.”

  “Who are they?”

  “My Octad.”

  His words, so simply spoken, forced her in some odd manner to recapture the desolate, lonely feeling she had experienced shortly before leaving the cabin. As if an echo had rung out in the cavern, she realized that “Octad” was the word she had been unable to understand, that she had, in her dream, believed meant a combination of she, them, and it. Octad. The eight. Odd, how she understood it now. Or...did she? Once more, she experienced the image of hand-linked skydivers, but also had the sense it meant much more. Maybe she, herself, had come up with the word Octad, req
uiring something her mind could accept.

  She had the odd feeling it could mean “family” but the perception of a much deeper relationship remained. Or was it simply that she lacked the customary concept of family, having never really had one? She wished, strongly, for a means to understand this entire event, to understand him, who he was, why he was here, and why he had called her to him.

  Without knowing quite how she had gotten there, she found herself standing beside him as he reclined on the ledge. She reached out, unable to prevent herself from giving in to the curiosity that drew her, and touched just one glowing bead on his necklace.

  It was as if a small electric current zipped up her finger, though her hand, her arm, and snapped her lids closed over her eyes. In that instant, she saw a garden—no, she was in a garden—lush and rich and flower-filled. She smelled incredible scents from blossoms growing in thickly planted beds, rioting across lawns, hanging—dripping—from delicately limbed trees and shrubs. The predominant colors, pink and yellow and green, glowed under a sky of turquoise blue. A placid stream meandered past. Fish jumped, silver in the sunlight. Birds with exotic plumage and sweet calls flitted from tree to tree. It was a Maxfield Parrish setting and she yearned to wander through it, to accept the peace engendered by the landscape. It reflected...no, projected, a sense of homecoming, a recognition of perfect harmony, a knowledge that here was sanctuary from all that could ever bring harm or discord. She longed to follow that stream, to discover where it led, to circle past the trees that blocked further view, knowing somehow there would be other incomparable vistas revealed with each step she took.

  She staggered slightly from the impact of the vision, and the movement unlocked her fingertip from the golden bead of light, breaking contact. She remembered to breathe as she stared at Jon, watching him watching her.

  She clenched her teeth, resisting with all her might the desire to touch that bead again, to return to the warmth of that unreal garden.