Daniel Hecht - Land of Echoes

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.

Asynchronous breathing," Cree said. "One lung is inhaling while the other is exhaling."

"That's not possible," the nurse said. "It's not anatomically possible!"

But of course it was, because they were looking at it. Tommy lay on the table beneath the bright, faltering lights of the examining room, eyes closed, arms at his sides. Once you understood what was going on, it was easy to see: The left side of his ribs rose and fell rapidly, while the right side drew slower, deeper breaths.

Ashen faced, speechless, Julieta stroked his forehead and gazed at him intensely, as if passion alone would allow her to see inside his skull.

Cree shut her eyes against the pounding pain and held the ice pack back against her forehead. "As long as the two sides don't get into regular opposition, he draws in enough air. But if one side inhales at the same time the other exhales, if they get into rhythm that way, the air just passes from lung to lung. That's what was happening when he came through the fence. He blacked out because he was suffocating. He was just rebreathing his own used-up air."