He skidded to a stop beside herâcareful not to touch the stone.
She tried to give him a blank look, but Annie was not good at
dissembling. “My husband needs to know the weather same as any farmer,” she said.
“Give my gift back to me and I'll do his predictin' for free,” Foster offered.
She looked at him sadly. “I don't know how to give it back.”
“But you sure knew how to steal it, didn't you?” he accused.
“Not on purpose. Swear to God, I didn't do it on purpose. It just came to me. I touched the rock, and it came to me.”
“'Twarn't meant for you. It's mine!” Blood suffused Foster's face. The cords in his neck stood out strongly above the open collar of his blue shirt. Annie was afraid he meant to hit her. She took a step back, away from him, away from the boulder.
He followed like a cat stalking a bird. “You give back what you stole from me.”
“How?” At that moment Annie would have gladly given him the giftâthe curse. To be rid of it forever!
A slow smile curled Foster's lips, though it never reached his eyes. His eyes were like two chips of flint.
“You don't never come to this stone empty-handed, that's what my pa taught me,” he said. “Alluz bring an offering for the stone. If you want somethin', you gotta give somethin'.”
Annie glanced around. She saw no burlap bundle. “What did you bring this time?”
His smile widened. “I didn't bring anything. You did.”
“I didn't ⦔
“Yes you did. You brought yourself.”
A shudder ran through Annie's body. I knew this all along, she thought with horror. I knew the stone would want my blood.
Abruptly, Foster dodged to his left, trapping her between himself and the boulder. “Come to me, pretty Annie,” he said softly. He held out his hand. “Come to me. You owe me a debt. You're gonna pay it. We alluz pay our debts in Conway.”
He's mad! she thought with horror.
Foster reached for her. She shrank back against the boulder, expecting a lightning flash, a monstrous jolt, a moment of unbelievable pain â¦
Nothing happened.
Annie Murphy stood with her back pressed against the rough surface of the granite and stared at Daniel Foster.
He hesitated, vaguely surprised. The length of the woman's torso was pressed against the stone, yet she showed no reaction.
“Don't you feel anything?” he asked.
“No.”
“No hum?”
“No.”
“Don't you ⦠see somethin'? Anything? Kinda murky, like? Like clouds gatherin', and a sense of the weather about to change ⦠?”
“No,” Annie told him a third time.
His face tightened with anger. “The stone's gone dead to you too, has it? You've damaged it somehow, that's what you've done. Fool woman, interferin' where you didn't belong. Outsider. I shoulda known, I shoulda ⦔
What he should have done, Daniel Foster never said. As he spoke, he reached for Annie's shoulder, and the moment his fingers closed on her the words froze in his mouth. He stood like a pillar of stone, mouth gaping, eyes bugging from his head.
Annie felt something run through her like a mighty river. Her body was covered with instant gooseflesh as her hair stirred and lifted. Vision dimmed. Foster's face was replaced by a silvery shimmer that flickered like the outer limits of consciousness. A vast nausea swept through her, followed by a sensation of cold as hot as fire; of heat as cold as ice. A diamond-lit memory of hurtling through the space between the stars â¦
She came back to herself.
She stood beside the Pine Hill boulder. The smell of sun-baked stone was in her nostrils. She could hear wind soughing in the pines on the crest of the hill. Somewhere a bird sang three crisp, sweet notes, paused, then followed them with an elaborate trill.
Daniel Foster stood unmoving. His face was the color of ashes.
Annie's mouth opened. But when she spoke, the voice was not hers. She felt incorporeal fingers fumbling through her mind, selecting words that then were spoken by her lips with a ghastly hollow resonance, as if emerging from some deep cavern.
“We,” said the voice. “We.”
Annie and Foster both stood rooted, unable to do anything but listen.
“We are ⦠earth,” the voice went on, gathering strength and
certainty. “We are earth. You are only ⦠the eyes and ears of the earth. But ⦠you are think ⦠ing, thinking, the earth's thoughts.”
The voice fell silent. The silence swelled, occupying all space, holding Annie and Foster at its center like prisoners in a bubble.
“You ⦔âmore fumbling with concepts in Annie's mindâ“you presume. You must not presume.”
The voice ceased. Annie had a sense of vast dark spaces and intense compaction; flickering fires; unbearable compression, unborn explosion. Whatever had spoken seemed to be moving away from her. Before it was gone, its mystery unexplained, she tried to probe its intellect as it had probed hers, seeking some common experience or emotion. She felt resistance. She pressed harder. The fire of her mind burned through the resistance. Something opened to her.
You are thinking the earth's thoughts.
There was no love, no hate. The entity was incapable of either, as neither was required for its survival. Likewise, it had no understanding of birth and death as humans understood those things.
But it did have a sense of justice. In the vast planetary scale all things must be kept in balance.
The entity was aware of construction and destruction. Of exhaustion and replenishment.
Of give and take.
It took. It gave accordingly, in kind, as it perceived with its nonhuman intellect.
What it gave might be accepted by humans as a gift or a curse, a bounty or a famine. But on the earth's scale, it was always a matter of maintaining the balance.
The earth did not care how humans were affected. They were specks on its surface, apparently unable to make a lasting impression.
Or could they?
Annie was dimly aware of some ancient memory, old even by the standards of the entity. Creatures, specks, long ago, striving, achieving, changing things ⦠erecting crystalline forms that were ⦠cities? Then catastrophe.
No. The idea was too far back, she could not grasp it. The
thoughts of the entity were slipping away from her altogether. She made a final effort to hold on. But all her focused curiosity could not prevail against the vast shifting of thought that was like a slipping of giant plates beneath the earth's unstable crust. The slightest echo of that shifting was enough to throw Annie to her knees, the link broken.
For a few moments her mind would not work at all. She was a body and nothing more. The heart beat, the lungs worked, but there was no conscious process to direct anything else.
She came to very slowly. Her eyeballs were painfully dry. She had not blinked for a long time. She was on her hands and knees, her vision fixed on the ground some eighteen inches from her eyes. The earth was beaten flat by generations of feet, but seen so close up it had a variety of textures. Annie was looking at individual grains of soil, minute threads of plant life, a tiny scurrying of black ants emerging from one hole and disappearing into another, a few crushed twigs, a pearly sliver of fossilized shell from some remotely distant past.
She blinked.
Her eyes watered profusely.
She swallowed, forcing saliva down her parched throat. With an effort, she lifted her head and looked around.
Daniel Foster was still standing in front of her, his own expression slowly clearing.
“Are you all right?” she said with a rusty voice that was at least her own.
The feed-store owner looked down at her in astonishment. “What you doin' here, Miz Murphy?”
“Don't you remember?”
He shook his head. “I don't remember nothin' since I got up this mornin'. Nothin'!” he repeated wonderingly.
He stared at the woman. She didn't look the same, somehow. He tried to remember how she should look, but his thoughts were cobwebbed.
Annie stood up. She was as stiff and sore as if she had been on hands and knees for hours. When she glanced at the sky and saw how far the sun had traveled, she gave a gasp of disbelief.
“I have to get home!” she cried. “I have to collect the baby and start dinner!”
Being able to say those words brought a peculiar relief to her, as if she were painting an image of normalcy over a window that opened onto an appalling vista.
Foster nodded, beginning to shift his weight from one foot to the other, trying to loosen locked joints. “A-yuh. You do that, Miz Murphy. I gotta get back to town myself. Cain't figger out what I'm doin' way out here anyway. Was I s'posed to go to Portland today? Where'd I leave my horse and buggy?” He turned and looked vaguely toward the road.
Annie glimpsed Foster's chestnut mare tied to a tree in the distance, waiting patiently in the shafts.
But there would be no buggy ride for her. She must walk across fields, and she would have to hurry if she was to be home before Liam and Johnny returned from the day's work, their bellies growling.
Wearing a baffled expression, Foster bade Annie goodbye and started toward the road. The blank in his mind was worrisome. But the more he tried to remember, the more solid his mental fog became. His brain was like a child's slate, wiped clean with one swipe of the cloth.
Everything pertaining to the boulder on Pine Hill was gone.
Annie could feel her own memories fading. She was aware that she had made a giant leap of understanding, but it was going from her as swiftly as the details of a dream fade with the coming of morning.
If I could tell it to Liam right now, maybe I could remember, she thought.
But Liam was not there. And Daniel Foster was hurrying away as if the hounds of hell were after him.
Annie circled around the boulder and began climbing the gentle slope of Pine Hill. Halfway to the top, she turned and looked back at the stone.
I wonder if it's lonely, she thought with a strange stir of sympathy.
No. Stones can't feel things like that.
Stones can't feel.
But they think. They are aware.
With an uncontrollable shudder she hurried on up the hill and through the pines, then began running for home.
I have to get home before it rains, she thought.
She ran under a blazing blue sky.
But by the time she was breathlessly mounting the Baldwins' porch to collect baby Mary, the first fat raindrops were splattering on the dry earth.
The creak of the porch floorboards brought May Baldwin to the door with Mary in her arms. Her jaw gaped open when she saw Annie.
“Lordy,” she breathed.
Annie thought she was astonished by the rain.
“Much obliged,” Annie said, taking the baby from the other woman's arms and turning quickly. “Gotta run or we'll get drenched,” she called over her shoulder. “Much obliged, May!”
She sprang from the porch and pelted off toward the Murphy homestead.
May Baldwin stared after her in stunned disbelief.
Mary screamed and writhed in her mother's arms, making it hard to run. “Hush up now,” Annie panted. “I know I scared you, grabbin' you like that, but we gotta hurry.”
The baby kept on screaming.
When she reached the cabin, Annie let out a sigh of relief. As soon as she was inside she closed the door against the rising wind, and looked anxiously toward the banked fire. There was still a glow of coals; it would blaze up quickly once she got the bellows after it.
She set Mary down and the child, still screaming, scuttled away from her.
“Hush up, now!” Annie repeated. “A person would think you don't know your own mama!”
She busied herself with the fire, keeping one eye on the obviously distraught child. Raindrops were setting up a steady barrage on the roof. “Going to be a good soaking rain,” Annie announced with satisfaction to the room at large. “Last all day and all night, most of tomorrow.”
She could not say how she knew. It was in her bones, like her sense of direction.
The baby cried herself into a violent case of hiccups. Only then did she allow her mother to pick her up. Annie paced up and down the cabin floor, holding the child and crooning to her.
From time to time the child turned wondering eyes on her mother's face.