Tucker Anderson slept.
He slept and he dreamt.
This alone would have elicited a measure of curiosity for he
seldom retained any recollection of his night-time escapades. What little he
did recall he often wished he hadn’t, instead longing that those harsh realms
had dissipated with the dew in the nourishing heat of day.
Tonight however Tucker suffered not through the haunting
shadows of regret but rather experienced something new.
He found himself alone on a vast tropical beach. Yet this
solitude brought neither fear nor unease but filled him with a sense of
completeness he had not felt since coming to Donner Ranch. He could feel the
grains of fine white sand sift gently between his toes as he stood barefoot in
the heat of the day. Before him, the sea swept out in perpetuity meeting the
land with a persistent whooshing noise. No waves of any magnitude rode atop its
surface. Instead, the slow undulating expanse of aquamarine carried off to the
horizon which seemed infinitesimally far away and was free from any
obstruction. No sun reflected upon its surface but the day was as bright and as
warm as an equatorial noon.
At first he didn’t want to move as if his own footprints
might sully what was otherwise pristine. It was curiosity, as it always is,
that drove him onward, taking tentative steps into the sand, which depressed
and enveloped his feet in a blanket of warmth. With some difficulty he reached
the waterline where the walking was easier. He turned his back to the sea,
soaking in the nonexistent sun and saw that the island’s interior was a rich
tangle of underbrush. Tropical palms, ancient in their broadness raised their
branches high into the blue sky and from them thick vines dangled, swaying ever
so slightly in the breeze.
He became aware of movement above and below him. Above, the
sky rippled with the passing of many elegant birds of varying hues with long
gaudy plumage. Their resplendent tails, which trailed behind them like kite
strings called to mind the birds of paradise of New Guinea. These spectacular counterparts
made no noise but surrounded him in great swooping arcs as if displaying their
brilliance for him alone.
Beneath him scuttled thousands of tiny iridescent crabs; a
sea of these miniature crustaceans parted with each step. Some shimmered as if
coated with oil. Others were mildly translucent and their clockwork organs
pumped and pulsed. Tucker watched their wave-like movements as they crested the
beachhead and skittered into the forest, disappearing from view.
It was at this time that he realized that the birds too had fled,
no longer miming their way through their acrobatic routines. He could not say
where they had gone, for he had been watching the forest and had seen no sign
of their disappearance. He felt strangely saddened by their departure.
He followed after the crabs, though they left no tracks,
towards the jungle. There seemed to him a curtain which shrouded the island’s
interior. The forest edge was clearly visible with its mossy tree trunks and
slick-looking stones, but everything beyond was obscured somehow as if
something didn’t want him to see.
He lingered little on this though for the air was warm and
the breeze pleasant. He walked along the forest line, traversing much of the
coastline, though he could not be sure of his progress for the swell-less sea
provided little in the way of point of reference. He proceeded until he reached
a small stream spilling out into the sea. He could have easily crossed it for
it was only a foot wide and an inch deep but something stayed his feet. There
seemed to be a queer mist coming from its surface and Tucker felt a chill. The
water was cold, quite cold in fact. He could feel it on his exposed calves. His
eyes followed the stream back to where it emerged from the jungle. The
undergrowth was thick and the trunks of palms which had fallen in time
immemorial lay crisscrossing its banks but the path was clearly evident. As far
back as he could see the same cool mist rose. The shadows which obscured the
forest’s secrets seemed thicker, more palpable here. Tucker heard something
like whispers echoing as if deep inside something hollow, a cave or canyon
somewhere. The voices were indiscernible but something in them invited,
beckoned.
From the safety of the shore he watched as shadows twirled
and twisted into something resembling a human shape. It rippled and swelled at
times losing shape entirely becoming little more than a passing wisp, a morning
fog clinging low in the valleys. Other moments it seemed achingly familiar, a
vivid dream forgotten with the morning’s cleansing light. Suddenly, in the way
only dreams allow, the shape appeared with clarity and standing ankle-deep in
the freezing stream was a woman, little more than a teenager dressed in a red
chambray shirt and a tight black miniskirt. In the recesses of his brain there
was a simultaneous moment of recognition and revulsion. He looked away trembling.
“Don’t look away from me,” the thing spoke. It spoke in the
voice of Caroline, or rather Caroline-that-was, Caroline-of-the-Dream. “Am I so
disgusting to you now? It has been so long.”
Tucker said nothing but noted that silence had fallen over
the island, no lapping of waves, no whooshing of palms. He realized with a
start that he was wearing a suit, his suit.
“I know that you hate me, that you hate yourself,” she spoke
in a voice soft, consoling. “I’m not here to bring up the past. To try for
something that has long been lost. You have been missing some things for so
long. I’m here to suggest that you find them.”
His skin, which had been crawling, warmed strangely.
“It’s time to step out. Not for me. Not even towards me or
the memory of me. But for yourself. Towards what you can be, what you need to
be. It’s not hard Professor Anderson. Just a step.”
She extended her hand or an appendage that seemed to him a
hand for it drifted and wafted as smoky tendrils. The figure before him was
Caroline but not Caroline. A fragment of a memory incomplete and warped yet not
displeasing. It felt sanitized somehow, redeemed. Her voice spoke with
something deeper than words, deep and enthralling. It called to mind many
things: a spring breeze through an open window, Joe Castiglione’s voice on a
summer night, freshly dried linens, and the answer to a long searched for
question.
Her voice spoke.
“Just a step” he heard.
“No harm.”
He stepped, now
naked, with one trembling foot into the cool stream.
“Only warmth.”
He felt neither chill nor pain as he experienced the water,
now rushing, rise up his legs; instead, there was a filling, a freshness, which
rose progressively. Tucker closed his eyes. He heard at once the graceful
wingbeats of the birds around him, the scurrying of the crabs, the whooshing of
the waves on the beach. He closed his eyes more (for it seemed possible to do
so) and sank deeper into the darkness. It felt refreshing, a thought which both
tantalized and terrified. There was no stopping now, as he simultaneously rose
and fell into the darkness and the light.
He heard a voice that was not Caroline’s.
“Wake up.”
He heard the voice.
He heard and obeyed.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tucker awoke reluctantly. He was still in his bunk surrounded
by his meager possessions: a sweat-stained
Red Sox hat, a tattered copy of Walden. He rose and silently pulled on his
jeans, which lay crumpled on the floor beside the bed. He slipped into his
boots and rose shirtless in the rooms enfolding darkness. Old floorboards
creaked beneath his footsteps. Closing the door to the room that, he in gratitude,
received as compensation, he made is way down the silent hallway lit only with
the dull light of the moon, that false and fickle orb. None of the house’s
other occupants woke, but Tucker gave no conscious thought either way.
Mechanically his body moved as if a loom set in motion long ago in a distant
time by unseen hands and left to spin endlessly for eternity.
He crossed the field to the barn, the grass wet with dew, beaded
on his slick boots. He slipped into the darkness, the stalls on either side,
lit by the pallid moonbeams. The horses initially stirred but settled when they
saw who had entered. It was this gift, this calmness he elicited, that had won
him the job at Donner Ranch when he had arrived six months before. Having
little background with animals or horses in general still he managed to quickly
befriend the ten equine occupants. Owners Marjorie and Bill first viewed this
trait with skepticism but quickly came to trust their strangely literate guest.
Soon he had their complete trust, won by his hard work and humility. He did not
view himself better than any task, mucking stalls with diligent resolve. At
dinners, to which he soon became a guest, he often spoke in words which seemed
to come from some deep tome or rippled with some unseen power, a power of
words, of poetry that captured the attentions of all who heard him. Yet he said
few words, made few personal requests and generally carried about his personal
business with an openness and simplicity that called to mind the innocence of a
child. In short, he was viewed as a man of benevolent shadows.
Into the shadows he strode now, stopping at the stall of Roy
Neary, a magnificent sorrel quarter horse he had quickly befriended upon
arrival. Roy accepted the saddle Tucker offered without complaint and hardly
needed reins to be led out to the meadow, so pleased was he that his friend and
frequent companion had roused him. Tucker mounted the horse fluidly and with
absolute confidence led him into a trot.
In the moonlight they reached the edge of the pasture
surprisingly quickly. Tucker dismounted and opened the gate. Together, the pair
crossed the eerie country filled with shadows and ghosts lurking behind each
copse of trees and dilapidated barn. With efficiency, Roy crossed several irrigation
ditches without truly breaking stride. Tucker offered no nod of approval but
rode one, eyes fixed ahead as the country passed in an unrelenting blur. They
passed through neighboring farms: the Richardson’s, the Archer’s, and the
Slalley’s. Miles and minutes faded behind and still they proceeded undaunted by
time or exhaustion. Roy seemed to catch his rider’s focus and slipped across
the countryside with wraithlike efficiency. He was only beginning to tire,
though never slackening, as his rider pulled back his reins at the face of a
grassy hillock. The hill did not however draw Tucker’s attention but rather the
field beyond. He dismounted and with unsteady steps walked twenty to thirty
feet away from the horse.
A veil of fog hung over the grass which licked at his
kneecaps with each gust of wind. The sky was cloudless and impossibly starless,
a canvas of violet intruded upon only by the ethereal moon which shone in its
pale fullness. The disgraced college professor walked forward absently about five
feet before stopping. He heard again the hollow indistinct whispers surround
him like a cloud of bats, hovering, swirling. He dropped to his knees, more
content than he had ever remembered being. Ray stirred nervously. Tucker felt
the wave of warmth hit him bringing with it sweet assurances. All pain and
regret, guilt and fear slid aside like a discarded garment, a derelict identity
now lost. The breeze increased whipping the grasses against his face as he
knelt.
His eyes were beyond the point of registering images for he
was lost in this perfect state of bliss inclining every ounce of gumption into
making out the voices swirling about him. Had he comprehended, what he would
have seen was a vast, perfectly round borehole nearly fifty feet in diameter spread
out before him. The hole’s sides were of packed earth, unnaturally smooth. It
descended for depths unknown and from this cavity the unrelenting songs arose,
ghostly, yet inviting. Distant and unseen, he knew that far below the cool
mist rose. Tucker heard nothing, saw nothing but the dark ribbons that were
leading him on.
Ray stamped but his rider and friend knelt oblivious,
entranced. One thing though Tucker did perceive: a voice seeming to coalesce from
the shapeless void. At first he did not understand but gradually he heard the
whisper. The whisper he had always heard
became clear:
“Come.”
