She was in a high cold place.
Mountains rolled away from her. Peaks seemed to be below her. She had a sense of vast distances, as if she could gaze south to Massachusetts, east to Maine, west to
Vermont ⦠yet she could not gaze. She had no eyes.
She did not need eyes.
Her entire being was a sensory organ.
She was aware of weight, mass, heat, fragility, temperature, colorâan incredible spectrum of unimaginable colors!âtexture, movement, upheaval, solidity, somnolence, energy.
Her awareness was total and generally unresponsive. She observed. She partook.
But she could respond; she knew that.
If there was a threat, she could respond.
She observed the vast mountain chain sprawled around her. It was rather like lying on a bed, looking down along one's own body. But she knew it was not Annie Murphy's body. It was not even female. Gender had become an irrelevant abstraction.
Many things had become irrelevant. Others had acquired allconsuming importance.
She partook of the passage of time as if it were the workings of heart and lungs and intestines within the body; building, repairing, altering, tearing down, redesigning, replacing, removing, a constant process of change that was necessary because existence itself was a constant process of change. But change could be a positive, or negative, force.
With an effort beyond comprehension, the tiny, stubborn seed of Annie Murphy's individual consciousness resisted absorption and struggled to assert itself; struggled to question and know.
What is this?
What am I?
I am in a high cold place.
No.
I
am
a high cold place.
Yes.
Partly.
She redoubled her efforts. With senses that were not mortal senses, she reached out and explored. She could not see, hear, touch, taste, smell. Yet she saw wind. She heard ice. She touched light. She tasted energy. She smelled time.
She was the massive patriarch settlers had named Mount Washington, and simultaneously she was the granite boulder, the glacial erratic Indians had worshiped on Pine Hill. She was Mount
Katahdin and chunks of amethyst in the hills above Kearsarge and grains of sand in the bed of the Saco River.
She was earth, she was stone.
Positive and negative forces coursed through her being, forming a circuit between earth and sky, connecting with clouds, streaking the air with lightning, striking into the silt of eons like the finger of God touching Adam's clay and bringing forth life.
She saw the solar wind and felt its song.
The seasons were hers. She knew, intimately, snow and sun, wind and rain. The least flake of snow was important to her because in its minute way the snowflake, frozen child of Water, would have an incalculably small but irreversible impact.
Every drop of moisture brought change, adding its impetus to the rivers that carved and recarved the face of the planet, swelling the seas that gave birth to the glaciers and gnawed away the land.
Every wind that blew drifted sand, eroded rock, resculptured the surface. Made a difference. Was felt. Must be endured.
The entity in which Annie Murphy's consciousness was suspended was like a flayed giant. It had no layer of toughened skin to protect its raw nerve endings. Those nerve endings were bared afresh by every breeze and raindrop. Earth felt everything done to its body. The shifting of a single particle of soil was measured on the same scale as the shifting of the continental plates. Both affected the being of Earth.
Earth was aware and vulnerable. Every cell of its being was aware of its vulnerability to the forces that acted upon it.
Annie, linked with it, was aware.
The planet knew what winds would blow and what precipitation would fall. In its own self-interest, the massive totality of Earth was continually observing every weather pattern, assessing with the experience of eons what each change would mean for itself. Every change mattered. Every change altered the fabric of its existence.
Earth contained an instinct for survival proportionate to its mass.
That which was still Annie Murphy felt a thrill of terror. She realized she was somehow partaking of the consciousness of something infinitely larger than herself. At the same time, she also seemed to be trapped within various separate aspects of that entity. She was a mountain; she was a grain of sand.
Her terror mounted. In a few moments her identity must surely be stripped from her by sheer force. What had been Annie would be irretrievably fragmented, dispersed among a trillion particles of soil and stone. She would be lost in the ponderous indifference of a planet.
She knew the fear the dead might feel if their brains continued to function while their bodies disintegrated. The fear of being absorbed into the earth, made one with the darkness. Spinning away into infinity. Lost. Lost to life as she knew it. Lost forever.
She grew as cold as all the glaciers that had ever glittered beneath a polar sky. She was frozen with a fear no human could imagine, yet her consciousness had expanded enough to imagine it.
I am a cold high place, she thought with resounding horror. And I shall be here forever.
Then, bubbling up through her fear like a spring of bright water, came an unexpected wash of sympathy. She felt a huge and tender pity for the flayed giant that was so beautiful, and so vulnerable. The massive peak rearing its head through ice and thunder. The grain of sand, enduring.
This is my land, she thought.
My land.
Oh, my lovely land!
The nerve endings of her spirit intuitively recognized kinship. Her flesh had been nourished by this soil, ingested with the crops she had eaten. She was not separate from Earth. She was one with Earth.
Yes.
As she should be.
Yes.
And it was both terrible and good.
The boulder on Pine Hill had recognized in her the innate devotion to and sympathy for the land that characterized both the Irish and the Indian. The love of place in Annie Murphy had spoken to the stone, and the stone had answered.
Invisible lightning had flashed and a circuit had closed.
When she touched the boulder a second time it had welcomed her in.
Now she was Mount Washington, brooding above the clouds, whipped by gales no human could withstand. Glorying in its strength, grim in its endurance.
Now she was the boulder on Pine Hill, fearsome and holy â¦
“Gawdamighty! Annie? Can you hear me? Gawdamighty! Miz Murphy? Miz Murphy! Talk to me! Gawdamighty!” Daniel Foster feverishly chafed Annie Murphy's hands. She was
aware of him as from a great distance. He was a puny being, less than an ant, a thing of no importance, and he labored frantically over another thing of no importance.
Annie observed.
The boulder observed.
The woman's body lay prone on the beaten earth in front of the stone, with Daniel Foster crouching over her. His face was pale, his eyes were wild. He kept repeating “Gawdamighty!” like a prayer as he struggled to restore her to consciousness.
Annie/boulder observed with a vast indifference. Why would any being wish to spend a few flickers of eternity in a parcel of flesh, isolated from similar fleshly beings by a total lack of communal consciousness, doomed to pain and disease and a swift extinction?
Boulder/Annie watched and pondered these things.
Once Foster shot a glance at the stone. Fear frosted his face.
His efforts were pathetic, but the human impulse behind them touched that which had been Annie Murphy. He had meant her no harm. He was a greedy, penurious man who forced his wife to live above the store when he could have built her a fine frame house with a dozen rooms, if she wantedâbut he was not an evil man. Just flawed. As all humans were flawed in their various ways.
As stone was flawed. Boulder knew about fissures and cracks that would break open under pressure. Boulder knew about fire and heat and crushing weight, bearing down, solidifying.
Annie's thoughts were merged with boulder's thoughts.
Foster felt her hands growing colder in spite of his rubbing. He sat her unresisting body up, head propped against his shoulder, and began gently slapping her face with is free hand. “Annie! Miz Murphy! Gawdamighty, your husband will skin me alive ⦠Annie!”
The mention of Liam reached Annie in some far place. With an effort, she reached out. But it was very hard to break free of boulder. Boulder wanted to keep her, incorporate her heat and light into its cold self. Boulder remembered glaciers, and bitter, grinding cold. Boulder remembered being dragged over the earth by the ice until it formed a great gouge in the soil, like the trail left by a huge animal â¦
No!
Annie made a terrible effort and wrenched herself free. It felt as if every cell of her body was being torn from every other cell.
She screamed with pain and opened her eyes. “Liam!” she gasped.
Daniel Foster's pale face hovered over hers. “Thank Gawd,” he breathed. “Are you all right? Talk to me, Miz Murphy.”
She swallowed, then moistened her lips with her tongue. She tried to remember how to shape lips and tongue. But the only shape they would take was to make the name of Liam.
“We better get you home, Miz Murphy,” Foster said anxiously. “Gawdamighty, I never meant this to happen. I told you not to touch that rock. Didn't I say that? You tell your husband I said that. You tell him I never meant you no harm. But you wouldn't lissen to me. You wouldn't lissen.”
Annie fought with her vocal cords and finally managed to say, brokenly, “Not your ⦠fault.”
“Thank Gawd you admit that! Well, come on now, let's see if we can get you on your feet and to home. Can you stand up?”
“I ⦠think so.” She was beginning to feel a little more at home in her body. But it was a strange sensation. Her body was so small. And so liquid!
It had the gift of movement, however. Movement was wonderful, miraculous! Just to be able to lift one part of oneself from the earth by the action of bone and muscle â¦
Annie gave a delighted laugh. The laugh shocked Foster almost more than anything else. It seemed so out of place.
Maybe her mind was hurt! Who knows what might have happened to her? One minute she seemed perfectly all right, then the next minute she was lying flat on the ground, not even seeming to breathe, her body as rigid as stone.
He watched, baffled, as she experimented with walking, taking her first steps with all the uncertainty and joyful discovery of a baby.
One foot and then the next foot, Annie thought to herself. Lift them, move them! Move forward!
Her face was split with a grin.
Foster hovered at her shoulder. When she was sure of her balance she reached out one hand and pushed him away. “I can manage by myself.”
“Are you sure? That was awful, Miz Murphy.” Thinking fast he added. “Like you had some kinda fit or somethin'. Are you given to fits?”
With every beat of her heart, her thoughts were growing clearer. “No, Dan'l,” she said firmly. “I don't have fits. Not ever. No one in my family has ever had fits. This was something else. You know that.”
He cringed visibly. “I don't know what you're talkin' about.”
“Yes you do.” She frowned at him. “Now you stand aside, Dan'l. I can get home under my own power, thank you very much.” She bit off her words precisely and forcibly.
“Are you sure? I mean, what're you gonna say to your husband?”
“Why should I say anything to him?” Annie replied coolly. She almost laughed again at the relief on his face.
But she knew she could not tell Liam about this. She could not tell anyone. It was impossible to describe. Besides, she could well be accused of witchcraft, the accusation Daniel Foster feared. What other explanation could there be?
But for the first time in her life, she was not curious. She no longer sought answers. Answers seemed ⦠irrelevant.
Turning her back on Daniel Foster, she began climbing the hill toward home.
The boulder watched her go.
Daniel Foster watched her go.
Then he shook his head, slowly.
His most recent offering of Indian corn still lay by the stone. He slouched over to it and stared down. Then, warily, he reached out and touched the stone himself.
Nothing.
A cold rough surface.
No hum.
No pictures, however cloudy, in his head.
Nothing.
He was a skinny, angry man, standing on the side of a bleak November hill with his hand on a huge boulder.
He stood there a long time. Then with a grunt, he put his hand down by his side again and turned away, heading back toward Conway. He left the corn, however. Just in case.
He always left the corn.
And when he came back the next time, it was always gone.
Meanwhile, Annie made her way toward home. As she walked, her head kept filling with unbidden images. They swarmed around
her like a cloud of blackflies. Sometimes she even raised a hand and brushed at her face as if to brush them away. But they returned, or some variant of them returned.
She saw clouds above ⦠and below her. Heard wind change its course. Sensed ice pellets high above, ready to fall. At the same time she felt heat, cold, compression, erosion. Was aware of warm blood trickling over a stony surface. Sounds of screaming.
She shook her head again and brushed at her face. When she moved her hand away, she saw her dear, familiar cabin, just across the next field, and broke into a run.
When Liam Murphy returned home for his dinner he found his wife making biscuits. There was nothing unusual about what she was doing. As she did every day, she kneaded the soft dough, cut it into circles with a round tin cutter, dredged the circles in a little melted lard, arranged them two deep on the metal biscuit tray, and set them close to the fire.
“Someday,” she had always said, “we'll have one of those big cast-iron stoves with ovens in it, like my mother's.”
Liam paused in the door as he sometimes did, watching her work while she was still unaware of him. In a moment the draft from the open door would make the fire leap up and she would turn around, and smile, and come into his arms.
The fire leaped up but Annie did not turn around. She went on working as if her thoughts were a million miles away.
Johnny and little Mary hurried to their father, however. The boy clung to Liam's arm with unusual tenacity; the baby lifted her own chubby little arms in a plea to be picked up.
“I'm home, Annie,” Liam announced, surprised she had not already come to him as well.
She glanced around with a start. For one heartbeat her face was blank, as if she did not know him.
Then the moment passed and she was in his arms too, the four of them joined in one big hug.
Yet throughout the meal, Liam could not help noticing the nervous way the children, particularly Johnny, kept glancing at their mother.
While Annie was busy with the washing-up, the boy approached his father. “Somepin's wrong with Mama,” he said in a confidential tone. “Ever since she went visitin' this mornin'.”
Liam called across the room to his wife. “Annie, you go visitin' this mornin'?”
“Not that I recall,” she said, her voice muffled because her back was turned toward him.
“Tarnation, sugar, you can't go visitin' an' not recall! It's a right smart walk from here to anywhere.”
Annie's shoulders shrugged dismissively.
Baffled, Liam turned back to his son. “What's wrong with your mama, Johnny?”
The boy shuffled his feet. “I dunno,” was all he could say.
For the rest of the evening Liam kept a watchful eye on his wife. Most of the time she was herself, merry and bustling. But occasionally she seemed to stop, almost in mid-motion, as if she saw something. Or heard something. Then her eyes held a faraway look, and if he spoke to her, he had to repeat himself more loudly before she would answer.
“Are you feelin' poorly?” he asked several times. But Annie always insisted she felt fine. And she had not gone visiting. “I just took the children over to May Baldwin's for the day to give myself a little rest,” she said.
The mere idea of Annie saying she needed a little rest was so foreign to her nature it worried Liam more than anything else.
That night in bed, when he reached for her, she felt as rigid as stone. “Annie?” he said anxiously.
She softened at once beneath his touch and snuggled against him in the old familiar way. Yet nagging doubts continued to gnaw at the back of his mind.
Something was wrong. Johnny knew it, even if he couldn't identify the problem. Even the baby knew. She would not stay on Annie's lap anymore, but insisted on getting down almost as soon as her mother picked her up.
Liam Murphy was not a particularly sensitive man, but his family was his world. The subtle disruption in the atmosphere troubled him.
He would have been more troubled had he known that, sometime before dawn, Annie had awakened beside him sweating with fear.
The dream that was not a dream had intruded upon her sleep and dragged her into another time and place. A cold high place. A
peakânot Mount Washington, she realized instinctivelyâwhose slopes were fragrant with dark pines. At the foot of the mountain was a crystalline lake that reflected the trees as if they were warriors gathered around its shores.
There were warriors.
No.
A warrior.
No.
A chief. A strong, noble man in his middle years, dressed in deerskins, with soft moccasins on his feet. Feet that knew every step of the way up the mountain. Running feet.
Pursued.
The Indian's breath rasped in his throat.
He paused once and looked back. The sun, low in the sky, cast bloody reflections on the still water of the lake. Between himself and the lake, hurrying up the slope after him, was a band of men carrying long rifles and shouting encouragingly to one another. “There he goes!” “Up there!” “Lookit him run, the old fool! After him now, git'em afore he goes to ground!”
Chocorua's moccasined feet ran lightly up the slope toward the summit, hardly disturbing a grain of soil. The air was thin and sweet, like pure water. Nestled amid stony outcroppings were beds of emerald moss, soft as down, upon which a weary man could sleep. But he dared not stop. He ran on.
He left the moss and rocks behind and began the steeper climb to the utmost peak of the mountain. The earth knew his feet; they had made this trip many times before. Since his young manhood Chocurua had climbed the sacred mountain to sing his tribe's greeting to the rising sun.
Now the sun was dying in the west.
A gunshot rang out from down below, echoing and reechoing among the mountains. Then another, sharper, closer. Lead spang and spattered against stone a man's length from the running Indian.
They were playing with him. He was a sharp silhouette against the skyline above them, and the best shot among the hunters could easily have picked him off. But it was more fun to chase him and shoot close to him, keeping him moving, adding to his fear.