"You must have heard that!" he said.
I'll admit, my patience had worn down to nothing. "Paul --"
Then he grabbed me with trembling hands and forced me to turn backward.
"There it is," he whispered.
"What?"
"There it is, look at it. Look at it!"
"Get a grip on yourself! There's nothing there."
He let go, and I turned to see him inching backward, into the blazing moonlight.
"I'm the voice," he said. "I'm the voice, not you." Then he shouted, "An echo's not a voice!"
And with a choking cry he turned and ran in blind panic toward the staircase.
I lunged toward him, but Claire grabbed me from behind. She kept me from falling. She held me steady as I watched Paul tumble like a broken puppet all the way down the hillside stairs.
All the way down.
3
From An Obstetrician's Memories by Marcel Dumont:
I have never lost a mother's child, but I have experienced something equally painful: the death, after several years, of a child I once brought into this world. And sadly, that child turned out to be the first I had delivered: Paul Bertrand.
Although he was a neighbour, just as everyone in that small town was a neighbour of mine, I had lost track of Paul over the years until a nurse told me that he had fallen to his death. To my vast regret, I missed the funeral.
On the next afternoon, I paid a visit to his grave. It was a cold day in December, but brightly sunlit; the wind was gentle, the snow had not yet fallen. The cemetery caretaker pointed out the path to follow; the grave was just beyond a winding cedar hedge.
As I walked beside the hedge, my thoughts were distracted by a deep, low chuckling: an unpleasantly repetitive sound of smug exultation. I puzzled over this anomaly until I turned the corner; then I recoiled at the sight of an impossibly tall figure writhing on the soil in front of Paul's gravestone, rolling on the grave as a dog rolls on the carcass of a rotting animal.
The figure surged to its feet, leered down at me -- and in the shadowed eyes, in the deep black sockets of its face, I recognized that hallucinatory giant from the hospital.
I must have cried out; I certainly stumbled backward and twisted to regain my balance. When I looked up again, the figure was gone. As with any other hallucination, the time between its abrupt appearance and equally abrupt disappearance had lasted no more than a few heartbeats.
For a few heartbeats more, I stared down at the poorly-raked soil in front of Paul's gravestone, and told myself that grief had caused this flashback: grief, and fatigue from long, hard hours at work.
I must have been more tired than I realized, for as I turned and walked away, I seemed to hear once more from behind the cedar hedge that low, exultant chuckling, until it faded like an echo in the wind.
*****
Who Would Remain?
After two days of trying to phone her mother, Colleen Lambert was ready to punch the silence. Calling had been the first priority the moment she had been released from jail, and she had kept the phone ringing for minutes at a time. The protest rally continued; the conferences, the teach-ins, the strategy meetings filled the hours on Thursday and Friday; but as time dragged on, Colleen found it hard to focus on politics, and easy to fear that something was wrong back home.
On Friday night she called the Tremblays, the farmers who lived just down the road from her mother's house, and again she let the phone ring for a long time. By that point, she knew that something would have to be done.
And so, on Saturday morning long before daylight, Colleen set out on the two-hour drive north along the Gatineau River to her mother's farm; not even November's first blizzard could stop her. Just beyond a town the size of a stunted church and cemetery, her car struggled up a narrow dirt road into a range of night-black hills. She had spent her childhood there, scaling bluffs of shattered rock and wandering through hollows choked with cedar. Yet now, as the road dipped and climbed through darkness, the land felt like uncharted wilderness. The unlit farmhouses were scattered and few, like outposts on the edge of the world, and the only lights in all these hills were the headlight beams of her car, flickering through tumbling snow.
The dry and powdery snowfall was thinning out at last, and her tires crunched through unplowed drifts without sliding. Against her will, she found herself lulled by the blankness of the road. Yet as she rounded the curve of a low hill, a red heap swept into the light.
She stamped on the brake and watched the heap swerve past her into darkness. Gripping the wheel, she fought the slow, dreamlike skid until the car came lurching to a stop.
Centered in the rear-view mirror, something bulged beyond the red stain of the brake lights. She stared for a moment, half-aware of the rumbling motor and the dragging sweep of the windshield wipers. Then she braced herself, took the flashlight from the seat beside her and stepped out into the cold.
Snow squeaked like Styrofoam with every step -- a sound that made her teeth ache -- and the night smelled of car exhaust and ice. The flashlight beam, no brighter than a candle flame, settled on a ragged mound of fabric, vividly red beneath a veil of snow. She paced within the tire tracks and studied the mound at a careful distance, then crossed over and thrust the light forward.
A bathrobe, apparently. Nothing but a red bathrobe.
Bending close, peering through the mist of her own shallow breaths, Colleen saw the light reflected from a pair of dead eyes. She clapped a hand to her mouth and stumbled backward. The dim light wavered and picked out the child's feet, bare and yellowed like old ivory. She swept the beam further and saw the line of tiny footprints partially buried: along with her tire tracks, they formed the only trail in sight.
Like Colleen, the child had been heading northward, and if the prints were any indication, not so long before.
She took a deep breath and crouched beside the body, forcing herself to reach out and feel for any pulse on the chill throat, for any hint of vapor from the gaping mouth. Several minutes later, she forced herself to stop. When she pulled the rigid bathrobe aside to check for any wound, the livid pallor of naked skin sent her staggering away.
Leaning on the car, struggling to breathe, she told herself that she could have set out earlier, driven faster. She could have made a difference; she felt certain of that.
At the door she hesitated, torn between responsibilities. Leaving the body there on the road would deny everything she stood for, but moving it might destroy evidence and any chance of finding out where the child had come from. She had no faith in policemen -- in her social activist work, she had been arrested too many times for her to trust them -- but they would have to do.
Staring at the footprints, she wondered what people would find at the other end of that fading trail. A grieving family? A leering face? Or a trackless field in a windswept clearing, where any hope of answers disappeared?
She left the child on the snow, with a blanket from her car spread carefully upon it -- an empty gesture, far too late.
She had to find the nearest telephone. Speeding down the hillside, she thought of the Tremblays. They knew her mother; they had taken up the haying on her land, now that she no longer farmed. Colleen remembered the frustration of trying to phone them earlier that week. They had better be home, she told herself, and repeated the phrase like a song until their mailbox gleamed in the headlights.
She pulled up beside an old Plymouth white with snow. There were no prints on the way to the kitchen and no lights within. No lights came on when she hammered at the door. When her hands began to ache she gave up and crossed over to the barnyard.
It hardly felt like morning. The black clouds bore angry patches of scarlet; beyond these hills the sun rose, but here the night held fast. She hugged herself against the cold and considered the trackless snow and the silent house, the empty yard and the gaping doorway of the barn. Another detail nagged at her: the silence. On a winter's morning, hungry cattle should have made their impatien
ce loud and clear. She braced herself and set out for the barn.
No one answered when she called, but from the entrance, she could hear the massed breathing of an unseen herd. She fumbled for a light switch and blinked in the sudden glare.
Locked in place between stanchions, a double row of Hereford cattle stood in silence. They ignored her as she walked past them down the aisle; each white head pointed, instead, toward another open door at the far end of the building. Beyond, she could see a barren field and a red crack on the horizon that edged black hills with angry light and turned a line of fence posts into bloody spears. Yet straight ahead, the northern clouds remained as black as burnt-out valleys.
She glanced back at the Herefords. Two dozen heads stared past her toward the outer darkness; their breathing filled the barn with hollow whispers.
At first appearance, the field seemed empty, but when she stepped through the doorway she found herself beside a German shepherd poised with a watchdog's tension. It hardly noticed her; it merely glanced her way when she stammered out a quiet "Hello." Ears upright, body braced and ready to lunge, the dog glared at whatever lay beyond that empty field.
Colleen took the hint and watched for any movement. Nothing broke the quiet, yet after a moment she felt a slow stirring in the air, a mood of hushed anticipation. The dead winter landscape concealed life within stillness. In the hissing of crystalline snow through stiff grass-blades and the tidal rush of distant pines, she felt something else: a whisper as final as a fading breath, as revelatory as a moonrise. She felt that she, too, would understand if she stood there and listened for something in the distance, something calling from the northern sky.
Then a cold touch warned her that the wind had heightened; if anything, the temperature had dropped in a moment. Colleen looked around her at the empty field and shook her head. For a moment there, a vague impression had come to her like a half-remembered dream, only to fade away when she tried to recall it.
Turning back to the doorway, she spotted a line of boot prints partially filled with snow. From the side of the barn they trailed along the fence posts into the northern field. As far as she could see in the twilight, there was no returning track.
She looked up to find the dog watching her. When their stares met, the dog jerked its muzzle northward again. Something anxious in the movement -- as if she had caught it off guard at a moment of supreme urgency -- made her hasten through the barn and past the silent house to the shelter of her car.
~
Yet even in the car she felt exposed. The gloom of night persisted, and disquiet nagged at her until she finally swept into her mother's driveway and came to a sliding halt before the darkened house.
Something was clearly wrong. Her mother always rose early and went outside even in the foulest weather, to show the world that her cane was a safety device but never a crutch. Yet today the snow around the porch was undisturbed, the chimney smokeless.
Colleen opened the door onto a kitchen dark and cold.
"Mother?"
She thought of the phone, picked up the receiver and heard the normal dial tone humming in the silence, but that left her with the same troubling question.
"Mother!"
She bounded upstairs three steps at a time to her mother's bedroom. Something smooth and straight almost tripped her up; she groped about on the carpet until she touched her mother's cane.
Weak daylight filled the room when she tugged the curtains open. A heap of blankets covered the bed; she pulled them away and felt her heartbeat stutter in a frozen, dreamlike instant.
Diane Lambert lay with her knees and torso clenched like a fist, fully clothed, with a sweater, insulated socks, even a pair of winter gloves, as if she had dressed to go out before changing her mind.
When Colleen reached down and gripped her shoulder gently, her eyes flickered open.
"Mother? It's me, Colleen."
Her mother frowned. Then her eyes widened as if in sudden recollection, and she turned her head to stare at the wall on the far side of the room.
"Mother, what's wrong?"
Colleen took hold of her mother's head and carefully turned it until they were face to face, but that stare never wavered from the wall across the room: the wall on the northern side.
"Mother, look at me. Damn it, look at me!"
Diane closed her eyes. When she opened them again she seemed to recognize her daughter for the first time.
"The door," she said, with hardly more than a whisper.
Colleen sighed with relief. "You never answered the phone. What's been going on here?"
She drew the blankets back over her mother and tucked them into place. "Look at you, you're shivering."
"Colleen." Her mother scowled, as if a memory had tugged at her. "The door is open."
"The door's closed. But mom, it's winter. Close every door in the house and you'd still freeze. Why didn't you light the stove?"
There was no hint of fever on her mother's face, no sign of illness, and yet....
"When was the last time you ate? Look, I'll warm up something fast, get you on your feet again. And then I really think you should come back with me. I don't want you here on your own."
Diane blinked several times, rapidly, as if something had prompted her. "It's time to go, Colleen."
"When you've had some food, we'll go."
"We all have to go, now. All of us."
Tears welled in her mother's eyes. Colleen stared back, struck into silence. For the first time, she watched her mother cry; it shocked her that tears alone could make her feel so helpless.
"Let me get the food, okay? I'll be right back."
Retreating downstairs to the kitchen, she felt that helplessness increase. A social activist, a fighter, she had stood up to cabinet ministers and corporate CEOs, high-profile legal firms and armed guards at barricades. She had never backed down from any confrontation. But never had she come across anything like this, and with no one to face, no opponent, she could think of nothing to do but flee.
When she saw the telephone she remembered the child. She dialed the emergency code and waited with growing anger for someone to pick up the phone on the other end. Then she went down the list of civic numbers taped to the wall. She tried the police, the operator, the Gatineau Memorial Hospital, the nearest garage, and anger gave way to anxiety.
She slammed the phone back in its cradle and felt the sudden weight of complete silence. What was going on out there? Her mother had no access to the Web, and her only radio was an old AM type that hardly worked in these hills; it was boxed away somewhere. There was no radio in Colleen's second-hand car. So much for any news.
In the meantime, she was freezing. She soon had a fire roaring in the wood stove, a can of soup warming in a pot, and a sense of accomplishment that she recognized as hollow.
She sank into a chair, propped her elbows on the kitchen table, and rubbed her face with cold hands. All the worry and stress had left her feeling weak. But the room was getting warm, and in this quiet moment she had time to cross her arms on the table, to rest her head there, to close her eyelids, if only for a moment. In this quiet moment she could hear the crackling and the hissing of firewood, and in this quiet moment she could hear a voice that called inaudibly from the silence of the burnt-out sky. She walked in a forest alive with the rustling of dead leaves, the brushing of pine needles, the furtive stirring of animals. The door had opened; the time had come for everyone to die. Something spoke to her and said, "If the people were gone, who would remain?" She listened to the furtive sounds and replied, "The animals." When the black clouds in the northern sky took on a hard edge of scarlet, she suddenly understood. "The animals would remain," she said, "the animals... and you."
She opened her eyes to darkness and sat up with a start. The kitchen lights were off -- the power had failed. The fire was out, and a cold wind sliced the air. She groped her way to the porch and found the front door open, the snow gusting in from the night outside. She went to
slam the door but noticed something on the front step, a blemish on the almost phosphorescent pallor of the snow. Two sets of footprints: hers, from that morning, coming in, the other set going out.
"Mother?"
Upstairs, quickly; an empty bed, the blankets scattered. Then back downstairs and out into the wind. From her car she took the flashlight, and swept its fading beam over the yard. Footprints, clear and sharp, lead out to the driveway and beyond.
With a grating protest, the engine stuttered to life. The world leapt at her in the headlight beams: a swirling tunnel of snow with a line of footprints like holes punched through paper.
The car skidded from the driveway; she wrenched at the wheel until the snow-tires gripped the road. The blizzard had just begun, and with every twist in the road the air thickened with white. She felt something snap beneath the tires and thought of her mother's abandoned cane.
Now the prints were scattered with the flailing of someone on hands and feet. They veered off the road and trailed beside a fence; she could see them at the rim of the headlight beams, and up ahead, a figure threshing in the snow. The car slid and shuddered to a halt.
Her mother hardly noticed her. Dragged to her feet, leaning on Colleen's arm, she marched alongside with mechanical, repetitive strides. Colleen led her to the car and pushed her onto the front seat.
While her mother sat quietly, staring ahead and gasping for breath, Colleen examined her hands and feet. No frostbite: the insulated socks, the heavy clothes, the winter gloves her mother had worn inside the house had kept her alive out in the cold, but without Colleen to make a difference, how long would her mother have lasted?
Snowflakes as dry as salt crystals tumbled through the headlight beams, and the wind piled them into steepening drifts.
"The weather's getting bad," Colleen said. "We can't reach town, and if we get stuck on the road, we'll freeze to death. We'll have to go back."
A crunching U-turn brought her face-to-face with her own tire tracks, the rapidly-fading signs of her rescue attempt. Colleen glowered at the sight , then reached over and clicked her mother's seat belt into place. "But if I have to nail the doors shut to keep you inside, I'll do it."
Skidding down into a deep hollow, she felt the spinning tires chew their way to the road and yank the car forward. The snowdrifts up ahead were smaller and she allowed herself to breathe again. Her fingers ached on the steering wheel; she relaxed her grip and was flexing her hands when someone staggered onto the road ahead of her.