Daniel Hecht - Land of Echoes

"Don't know. All I know is those dreams. Maybe the rocks in the dream are part of the thing's memory? Or maybe it's a divided entity, like the one in New Orleans, with a more intentional element in Tommy and a perimortem element that's still out here. Or maybe there's more than one."

The silhouette that was Ed nodded, accepting her impressionistic way of feeling her way through. She felt a surge of affection for him as they walked on in silence. He didn't experience the world the way she did; in fact, his whole training rebelled against her outlook. And yet he believed-he so trusted her, personally, that he accepted what she saw or felt as real and valid. No one else had ever crossed such a gulf to come to her, she realized. Not even Mike, not Joyce, not Deirdre or Paul Fitzpatrick. The thought astonished her. She silently cherished Edgar as they walked.

The drive from the motel had been largely silent, too. Ed seemed wary. For her part, Cree felt as though she had a lot to say to him. She wanted to be with him more… more straight on and not so lateral. It seemed as if they had a lot to catch up on, some important personal developments to discuss, but she didn't know what those might be. Nothing had changed: She had talked to Paul Fitzpatrick earlier tonight, was feeling romantically toward him and planning to go to New Orleans as soon as she could get free; Ed was getting used to that, keeping some distance from her as he figured out his own feelings. They were business partners, collaborators, and good friends. Nothing had changed.

Puzzling over it, she kept coming back to thoughts of Julieta. She sensed a pattern, a sort of mandala of emotion, around Julieta. It had to do with Peter Yellowhorse and Joseph Tsosie and unexpressed or unrequited feelings, with Julieta's emotional arc through so many years of self-denial and self-restraint. But every time Cree tried to inspect it, her thoughts shied like skittish horses.

Ed's whispered voice brought her out of her thoughts. "Could this be it?"

He was looking up at the deep blue walls of the mesa, higher and steeper here, perhaps eighty feet of sandstone. They had arrived at a place where a ravine divided the rock, angling deep into the body of the hill, its nearly vertical slopes sculpted by the elements and topped at the rim by boulders. From what she could see in the dark, it all looked crumbling and fragile. Farther into the mesa, the sloping cleft narrowed and disappeared in shadow.

"Maybe," she whispered.

It was hard to tell in the dark, and yet as she studied the scene its familiarity grew. At first she couldn't tell if she recognized the place from her dreams or from Tommy's drawings, but in a moment she knew it was neither. There was something like a song echoing in the ravine, inaudible but charged with deep emotion. She realized now it had been growing in her awareness as she'd approached, preoccupied with her thoughts. It drew her into the embrace of the cliffs, and made her suddenly breathless.

"Yes," she said.

Edgar knew to give her space. He sat on a boulder a stone's throw from the mouth of the ravine and hunched motionless in his jacket with his broom handle across his lap. As Cree moved silently into the shadows, his shape blurred until he became indistinguishable.

A hundred feet up, she leaned against a fallen slab and tried to release the tension in her shoulders. She labored to keep her breathing from going shallow and panicky. She struggled to master her fear, which filled every shadow with furtive movement, goosing her heartbeat and making her hands and feet tingle. She released her thoughts, gently willing them to stillness so that their clamor wouldn't obscure the secret confessions of the rocks.

Even if the next stage was a perpetual surprise and mystery, she knew this part well-this first part, the act of stepping to the entrance to the hidden parts of the world. It started with a mounting pressure as of something impending. The sense that an event of importance was about to take place, the feeling of movement just out of view. She had known the feeling before she became a parapsychologist, living in that third-floor Philly apartment and sensing from subliminal sounds or vibrations that the resident of the apartment below had come home. Was maybe even standing directly below, only five vertical feet away: so close, yet so separate and unknowing.

Yeah, she thought, except that here your body tells you it's dangerous.

She startled as a pebble tickled down the rock slope from almost directly above. Her heart answered with jarring thuds. She held her breath and waited for more signs that something was moving up there, but no more fell.

Fear was the big impediment. Your body said, Don't come here. Its impulse grew remorselessly: Get ready to run. You should run. Run now!

Runrunrun-

When it peaked, when the instinctive mutters of warning became screams and seemed unendurable, that was the very moment the empathic parapsychologist had to sustain: the intolerable moment of breakthrough. Slow the breath, she chanted to herself. Let go thoughts. Feel the texture of the dark. Hear the hiss in the ears. Don't break the silence. Don't shatter the mood, the moment. The contact.

Most important: Remember, it's made of the same stuff you are. The secret life stuff inside, the quickening light-that's all you are, too.

Sometimes it started with changes in the phosphene patterns, the shimmering retinal star field that was always there behind closed eyelids. In the deep blue dark of the ravine, she didn't need to shut her eyes to observe the phosphene haze. Were there shapes in the swirl? Maybe. Her pulse kicked up.

Without thinking about it, she made her way farther into the cleft, another hundred feet to a place where a dam of fallen slabs and boulders blocked it from side to side. At its deepest, the barrier was only shoulder high, easy to climb over. But she lowered herself to the ground, her back against a rock, facing sideways. An old smell here: wind-weathered stone. She could see the cliffs opposite, some of the ravine above, the gentle downward slope and the curtain of dark beyond which, only a hundred yards away, invisible, Edgar would be sitting, patient and alert.

Physically, he wasn't far. In other ways, he was very distant. In a different world.

She waited for a long time, enduring the sense of imminence. She felt very alone. She sensed the darkness changing subtly as the big globe rolled its belly to face a different expanse of sky, and the blue air got colder. After a while, she found she could see her breath: faint curls of mist that moved slowly away, sucked into the ravine by some imperceptible updraft. She tried not to feel isolated and exposed, but the feeling grew and grew. Reflexively she hugged her knees, made herself smaller.

She felt like she was hiding. She was hunkered here, curled into deepest shadow, trying to compress herself into invisibility, silent as she could be. She was waiting, paralyzed with fright and indecision.

She was hiding because fear was moving, somewhere in the dark, and growing closer.

She'd made a mistake in coming here, she realized. It was too dangerous. Abruptly she felt the others nearby, now waiting, now coming down the ravine, coming out of the shadows for her. She couldn't let them come nearer. But she couldn't move.

Another pebble made an insect noise as it scuttered down the cliff. Cree wanted to bolt up, climb, run, but she couldn't, they'd see her. There was another noise now, a dull tumult that she felt more than heard, a low thrum in her belly. It was shot through with sharp, silver noises. And now there were voices from above and below, calling, warding, threatening.

There was something bad happening out where Ed was, she realized distantly. Somebody or something had come in the dark, and he was out there. They had screwed up badly, thinking it could be this simple. She could hear it clearly now, a rushing and rumbling and something metallic. And in the cleft, urgent wailing voices.