Джек Макдевитт - A Voice in the Night

The forest sighed his name.

Imagination, of course.

The river was loud around the bend. The jogging path crunched underfoot, and wings fluttered in the trees.

“Arnold.”

Clearer that time. A cold breeze rippled through him.

The sound died away, smothered in the matted overhang. He drew up gradually, slowed, stopped. Looked around. He blinked furiously at the leafy canopy overhead. The river was gray in the failing light. “Is someone there?”

A sparrow soared out of a red oak, and tracked through the sky, across the top of the windscreen, out over the water, over the opposite bank and into Minnesota. It kept going.

The current murmured past a clutch of dark rocks in the middle of the stream. Somewhere, in the distance, he heard a garage door bang down. He pushed off again. But he ran more slowly.

“Arnold.”

He tumbled to a halt. Froze.

There was no mistaking it this time: the sound was only a whisper, a distant sigh. But it spoke his name. Breathed it, exhaled it. It was compounded of river and wind and trees. He heard it in the wave that rolled up the pebbled shore, and in the tumble of dead leaves.

It was not a group of kids hiding behind boxwoods. It was not anybody he could imagine. It was not a human voice at all. His heart pumped.

Courage had never been among Arnold Whitaker’s virtues. He feared confrontation, feared doctors, feared pain, feared women. And, although he did not believe in ghosts, and in fact made it a point to smile cynically at tales of the supernatural or the paranormal, he had no taste for dark places, even for the short walk from his garage to his house when the moon was full. (He had, as a child, seen too many werewolf movies.)

He stopped near a black granite boulder, turned his back to the river, and surveyed the woods. He was in the wind screen that circled Fort Moxie, a narrow belt of trees seldom more than a hundred feet wide. No one moved among the box elders and cottonwoods. Nothing followed him down the jogging path. And, in a final sweep of the area, he saw that nothing floated on the river or stood on the opposite shore.

The black boulder was one of many in the area that the glaciers had pushed down from Manitoba, and deposited when they began their long retreat at the end of the last ice age. It stood about shoulder high, and its rough surface was cool.

Arnold remained still. The trees swayed gently in the early autumn wind. Birds sang. The river burbled.

The quickest way out was to leave the path, cut through the wind screen, and descend directly into town. But that required him to make an admission he wasn’t prepared to make. The day was far too pleasant, too sunny, too placid, to allow himself to be frightened by the wind. Wasn’t that what they always said in haunted house movies? It’s only the wind.

He discovered that he was crouched beside the boulder. He forced himself to stand, and, with steps that suddenly took wing, he bolted. He followed the path in and out of the trees. Arnold ran full tilt, racing through filtered sunlight. Occasionally, where the path curved, he did not. He leaped over logs, cut across glades, pushed between bushes. He emerged frequently along the river bank, only to plunge back into the trees. Eventually, still following the path, he veered away from the Red, and sliced downhill through the last vestiges of the wind screen. He was gasping when he came out onto Lev Anderson’s fields, and crashed exhausted through the back door of the Fort Moxie Historical Center.

He scared the devil out of Emma Kosta, who was on duty, and her friend, Tommi Patmore. Emma jumped up from her desk and spilled a cup of tea, and Tommi, who was sitting with her back to the door when Arnold threw it open, literally fell out of her chair. Arnold shut the door, tried to latch it, gave up, hurried to Tommi’s aid, and had to go back and try again with the door because it didn’t close tight, had never closed tight, and the wind blew it open.

In the end Tommi had to manage for herself. Both women stared in bewilderment at him. “Why, Arnold,” said Emma, “whatever happened to you?”

He had virtually collapsed against the wall, exhausted by his effort, lungs heaving. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all. What makes you think anything happened?” He needed another thirty seconds before he could get out the rest of it: “I was just jogging.”

Arnold Whitaker was the proprietor and chief clerk at the Lock ‘n’ Bolt, Fort Moxie’s hardware store. He was in his mid-thirties, a man of modest proportions and unremarkable features. He tended to be self-effacing, had never been known to offend anyone, and was generally mindful of the civilities: he held doors for women, told jokes only on himself, and spoke in carefully-modulated tones. No one had ever heard Arnold raise his voice.

His customers thought of him as solid and dependable, in the way that a good wrench and good bolts are solid and dependable. Nothing fancy in his makeup, no slick housing or plugboard wiring; just good, plain metal, carved to specification, and used within the parameters of the instruction manual.

Arnold was a bachelor. He lived upstairs over the hardware store in a spartan two-bedroom apartment. The furniture clashed: the rattan table undermined the spirit of his rolltop desk; the seductive effect of the black fur-covered sofa was utterly destroyed by the conservative gold-brown wingback armchair. Arnold had acquired most of his furnishings at sales in Fargo and Grand Forks. His clothing also reflected a tendency to put considerations of budget over those of taste. Indeed, it might be said that Arnold’s propensity for discounts reflected a natural tendency to avoid anything in life for which he might have to pay full value.

He owned a good television, fifty-seven inches wide with ultra HD resolution and wraparound sound. He spent a lot of time watching TV, and he’d gotten the price he wanted last President’s Day. A high-priced discontinued stereo dominated the living room. Walls throughout the apartment had been converted into bookshelves, and they were filled with hardware catalogs and paperback techno-thrillers.

He slept in the middle room, which was dominated by a double bed that was seldom made up, and an ugly bureau missing several handles. (He was looking for a good replacement.) A smaller television and a VCR were set in one corner, and a rubber plant in another. A picture of a former girlfriend whom he had not seen in years stood atop the bureau.

The back room looked out over the northwestern quarter of Fort Moxie. Houses in the border town were widely separated, even behind the commercial section. Lots were seldom smaller than a half-acre. Few streetlights burned back there, and consequently the area got thoroughly dark at night. Which was why Arnold had chosen his rear window to set up his telescope.

The telescope was perhaps the one thing Arnold owned that he had bought at retail. It was an Orion 10014 SkyQuest 2080 with a rolling base and a navigation knob. It gave him spectacular views of the moon, and of Jupiter and Saturn, especially on cold winter nights when the air seemed to crystallize, and the molecules and dust crackled and fell to earth, exposing the hearts of the great planets.

Arnold’s secret ambition, one that he had never shared with anyone, was to find an incoming comet. To be there first, and to break the news. Comet Whitaker.

His neighbors knew about the telescope, and they assigned its existence to some minor idiosyncracy, the exception to the general steady flow of Arnold’s life.

Arnold, by the way, was liked by almost everyone. He did not give rise to passions: no one in Fort Moxie drifted off to sleep dreaming of him. And no one could recall ever having become really angry with him. He was just there, a presence downtown, reliable, polite, as much a part of the town as the post office or route 11 or the wind screen. What people liked most about him (though probably no one could have put it in words) was that Arnold really enjoyed hardware. Hammers and chisels, their polished wood stocks gleaming, the metal heads bright and clean, delighted him. He handled jacks and screwdrivers and boxes of tacks and lighting fixtures with obvious affection. Even his younger customers made the connection between Arnold’s solid, dependable lifestyle, and the nuts and bolts of his trade.