Daniel Hecht - Land of Echoes

"Walking where?"

Before he could answer, a shadow eclipsed the window light. They both startled. Cree looked up to see Raymond through the dusty glass, averting his face, lugging a heavy plastic water carrier. In another second he was gone.

Tommy had lost the train of thought.

"What does it feel, Tommy? Do you think it's just angry or is there another feeling there?"

That idea troubled him. "Doesn't always seem angry."

"So what else? Hate? Love? Fear?"

One of his eyes stayed fixed uncertainly on her face while the other spun away as if tracking the flight of an invisible butterfly. He made a deep, guttural noise, uh-uh-uh-uh, then muttered something incomprehensible.

Cree waited, but when he didn't say any more, she pressed on: "Do you think I could talk to the chindi? If I did, if you heard me talking to you like you're someone else, you don't ever have to worry. I'm not forgetting about you, okay? I'm always on your side. You know that. Can I talk to it?"

He didn't answer. Now she wasn't sure it was Tommy in the eyes. She felt him slipping away and the strange body beast arising with its numbing charisma, its colossal confusions.

"Tommy," she said quickly, "when it's you I'm talking to, you tell me. Okay? Say, 'I'm Tommy.' Can you do that? So I know who you are."

Tommy's eyes took on a sad and distant look, too old for fifteen, and he didn't answer her directly. But he seemed to steady. "I did what you asked," he said.

"What was that?"

"You said I should draw what it felt like."

"Right! Can you show me?"

His left hand gestured weakly at a notebook on the floor against the north wall.

Cree retrieved it, opened it. The renderings were almost too ghastly to look at: painfully labored pencil sketches of what looked like conjoined twins. Too many limbs, multiple deformed heads, bulbous shapes like cancerous growths. She tried to hide her shock.

"It's not so good. I had to do it left-handed." He shut his eyes, exhausted. "You want to know who's Tommy, that's who."

The claim frightened her, even though she wasn't sure just what he meant. There were so many questions. "If I asked you to draw what you want to be, what would that look like?"

He looked stricken. Then his face stiffened, a mask intended to keep her out. "I don't know," he mumbled. It was a terrible admission.

He observed her reaction in her face. "I'm Tommy," he managed. Wanting to please her. He looked so worn, ravaged. "Tired now. Got to sleep." He shut his eyes and she thought he was gone until his croaking voice startled her: "Sorry."

She stayed kneeling there for a time, just probing the shifting tides of presence inside him: irregular waves lapping a beach, higher and lower, uneven eddies and flows. When she was sure he was asleep and breathing reliably, she crossed to the other side of the hogan, laid a sheepskin on the floor, and sat on it. At intervals, Tommy's right hand and arm startled her, turning suddenly, flexing, making what looked like abortive movements, and each time her fear spiked at the thought of it coming alive. But so far it hadn't. She tried to relax and get some control of herself. Her body desperately wanted sleep, but she had a lot to consider.

Narrative: So far, she hadn't really glimpsed a story unfolding in the ghost's impulse-no reliving of the period just before death, no crucial memory from earlier times, not even a random visual image of the world the ghost thought it was in. There was its cycle of physical actions, which matched Tommy's description of walking, then maybe fighting. Afterward, there was the repeating sequence of convulsing and the arm pushing up. But she'd learned nothing that would help her identify the entity or determine what motivated it.

But she had gotten a tantalizing general sense of its character. This ghost conveyed a sense of vigorous physicality. It also had a burning will, or drive. Determination. Oddly, though, running through all that vigor and drive was desperation, as if the vitality were deliberately mustered to overcome resistance. Fatigue, maybe. Or the cold Tommy mentioned. Or sickness.

Or age. Garrett? This ghost's nature was reasonably consistent with a man accustomed to making things happen his way, getting what he wanted. Garrett had been fit for his years but was having to work harder and harder to keep signs of aging from view. Climbing the dragline boom was clearly the act of a man desperate to defy the encroaching limitations of age.

She wished Tommy had been able to tell more about the ghost's affective complex. Not just angry. But there was anger there at times, rising to murderous rage. And remorse, too, she'd felt it. Of course there was. Most people left life with some measure of regret for things done or left undone; regret and the desire to atone was the engine that animated many revenants. If this was Garrett, homing on Julieta, it could be remorse for the things he'd done-his betrayals and cruelties, the years of feuding. Because Garrett had still felt some love and desire, as Donny had more or less admitted. And, unquestionably, there was a powerful strain of tender longing in this ghost. Also some fire in the belly, lust or desire; Cree was increasingly sure the ghost was male.

Of course, one of the people who died at the ravine could also have had all those characteristics, too. The determination she felt could be their desire to retrieve the goats or to fight off the soldiers; the desperation could be the simple will to survive against long odds.

What about the parents? Could that driven quality be something as mundane as a drunken man's attempt to overcome his alcoholic stupor in order to operate his car? It didn't seem likely. Everything this ghost felt was sharp, acute, impassioned, not at all fogged and numbed. And this ghost seemed to be reliving a lengthy pre- or perimortem experience of walking and fighting, utterly inconsistent with the parents' instant death due to massive head trauma.

But it was all speculative. She really couldn't say without a deeper encounter with the entity. Deeper and deeper. She had reflexively pulled away during Tommy's last crisis, but she couldn't afford to keep her distance any longer. Tommy was fading away. He was dying. His survival depended on what she could learn directly from her encounters with the entity. She'd have to open herself completely to the ghost. Submit to its invasions.

She shuddered as she recalled that terrifying, incomprehensible strangeness of her own arm, then started as someone rattled the hasp on the door. A crack opened and Ellen's face looked warily inside. Behind her were Raymond and Ellen's eldest son, Dan, a young man in his early twenties with a painful-looking, flaring red nose.

Ellen offered a cautious smile and beckoned to her. "Time for the next shift," she whispered.

They sat on the bare ground. The family had set up camp back by the big sheep shed: smoldering fire pit, pots and pans hung on posts, plastic water carrier, rumpled sleeping bags. Cree smelled the coffee before she sat down and her whole being cried out for a dollop of it. Ellen found a pair of tin cups and poured murky coffee from the smoke-blackened percolator.

The afternoon air was cool. Cree sat near the fire where she could pick up a little warmth from the coals, breathing the pinon smoke and burning her lips on the metal rim of the cup. From here, she could see east, past fences to higher land half a mile away, more thickly covered in trees and brush. The sun was lowering to the west, putting the near ground in mixed shadow and sunlight.

"You've done this before?" Ellen asked doubtfully. "Fought with a chindi?"

Cree grinned. "I know I don't look like I know what I'm doing. But the answer is yes. That's what I do. I investigate ghosts and I help people who are troubled by them."