Ancient Echoes (27 page)

She had a teapot and two Chinese cups at her side. She
poured him some tea. He thanked her and took a sip. He tasted it, smelled it,
felt its warmth as it slid down his throat. He then set the cup aside. His gaze
never left Lady Hsieh. She stared back at him in equal wonder.

“I’m dreaming,” he said after a while. “That’s the only
explanation. But it’s a pleasant dream.” He smiled, as she did. Once again, a
sense of connection with this woman, deeper and more profound than anything
he'd ever known, jarred him.

“It's not a dream, but for you, it should be,” she said
softly. “I'm not of your world. And yet, you are the only one who can set me
free. You have begun, but there is more work to do.
Dangerous
work.”

She placed her hand lightly on his forearm. He covered it
with his. The skin of her small, delicate hand was softer than the silk she
wore. He felt its warmth. “You are real. I can touch you. How can that be?”

“You've been searching for me. I heard your call. It made me
happy,” she said shyly. She spoke as much with her eyes as with her lips. He
felt lost in them, the fine lashes,
the
thin feathery
brows that lifted and drew him closer with each word.

She pulled her hand free, but remained leaning towards him.
He noticed the scent of peonies. “After you accomplish your work here, Michael,
you must find your way back. That is where you will find what you seek. There
is nothing here for you.”

He could read the sorrow in her eyes and it filled his heart
with profound sadness. “What is this place?” he asked.

“It is a place where time meets.”

“This makes no sense.”

She clasped both his hands with hers. “My grandmother taught
me the ancient instruction that the alchemist Li Chao Kuin gave to the Han Emperor
Wu Ti. I learned to transform the powder of cinnabar to a yellow gold that gave
prolonged longevity. With such longevity I lived among the blessed
hsien
—beings—of
the island of P'eng Lai. There, I could not die. That is the Chinese way of
alchemy.”

He shook his head. “I don’t understand any of it.”

“I don’t expect you to,” she said with a smile. “But you
should know that I did wrong. What is existence without life?
Without love?
It is torture.” Her dark brown eyes seemed to
read his very soul. He had never seen anyone so beautiful. He felt her
loneliness because it matched his own. “Be careful,” she pleaded. “There are
those who would stop you.”

“Stop me from what?”

She dropped his hands.
“From destroying
this world.
Destroying me.”

Stunned, he refused to listen to such madness. “I would
never hurt you.”

She studied him as if committing to memory every inch of his
face. Her tender gaze filled with regret.
“How remarkable
that you were the one who woke me from my immortal sleep.
You are a good
man, with a good heart, and”—she blushed—“very pleasing to look at. I wish…”
She stopped and sadly shook her head, unable to go on, to say what filled her
heart.

This is madness.
He fought against his too sudden,
too strong feelings for her.
She’s not real.
And yet, he wanted nothing
so much as to touch her again, to hold her. “Tell me everything,” he whispered.

She turned as if hearing something that only she could hear.
“Time cannot be out of step in this way. It brings too much disorder, too much
danger.” She faced him with an intensity that reached his very core. “When the
time comes, follow your intuition. It will save you. I'm sorry, so very sorry.”

 The image shimmered then faded, and he found himself
standing alone on a scrub-covered hillside in the middle of nowhere. The moon
set just beyond the mountaintops. He felt empty inside. Destroy her, she had
said. He would as soon destroy himself. “No,” he whispered, then louder. “No!”

o0o

Charlotte slept lightly and awakened suddenly. Whether
because of a noise outside her tent, or the sudden quiet of the two owls that
had been calling and answering all night, she didn't know. She rarely dreamed,
yet in this place, she'd done nothing but dream of the dead.

Thoughts of the men who had been hunting her, who had killed
her friends, jarred her into action. She took her gun and crept to the opening
of the tent where she peered through the slit.

And saw Michael.

He acted arrogant at times, even cocky, with his
intelligence and the successes he’d had, but it was almost as if he were
putting on a show, a strong face to the world so that people wouldn’t see the
real Michael. She could sense that he held locked inside a deep sorrow, perhaps
because she had done the same for so many years. Where she had burrowed into a
mundane life to avoid facing all she had lost, he did the opposite. He seemed
to seek danger in his travels, as if he used them as a means to run from his
troubles, or perhaps, to run towards them. And he seemed to do so with little
care or concern for the dangers he would face. Perhaps, she thought sadly, even
welcoming them.

She wondered if he would talk to her.

o0o

Michael heard his name. He turned to see Charlotte standing
outside her tent.

He spoke quietly so as not to wake the others as he
approached. “I couldn't sleep.
Strange dreams.”

“You aren't the only one,” she admitted. “You're trembling.”

He wasn’t aware of that until she mentioned it. He felt half
frozen. She took his hand to draw him into the warmth of her tent. He knelt
because the tent was small, and she touched his forehead to check for a fever.

“I’m not sick,” he said, yet felt oddly comforted by her
touch, her concern.

She sat, cross-legged, and he did as well, then she placed
the back of her hand against his cheek. “You feel like ice. Get into the
sleeping bag. You’ve got to warm up or you might become ill.” She had him lie
down, and eased a corner of the bag over her cold feet and legs.

 “What were you doing out there?” she asked.

He didn’t answer the question—he wouldn’t know how to.
Instead he asked, “Do you believe any of this, Charlotte?
A
vortex to another time, another place.
You're the realist. I want you to
tell me I'm dreaming and none of this is real.”

His words surprised her, and she studied him before
speaking. “Why do you say that?”

“I’m not sure.” He stopped himself from saying all he wanted
to, how, usually, he felt only emptiness, as if he was adrift and didn't know
how to stop himself. But here, he had found an anchor...and doubted it was
real.

Cold, she slid further into the unzipped sleeping bag with
him, turned onto her side, bent her elbow into position and rested her head on
her hand. “Tell me what's troubling you, Michael,” she said. There was nothing
sexual about her actions, but merely as a one seeking to understand his
troubled mood.

“Do you know what it's like to feel empty inside?”
he asked.
“
To wonder why you go through each day?”

“Yes, I do,” she admitted. “But I'm surprised to hear you
say that. I would have thought you have everything—money, fame, an exciting
profession that takes you all over the world, and I'm sure more women than you
know what to do with. What more could you want?”

He answered without hesitation. “Perhaps…to not feel
hollow?”

Her blue eyes met his, and she nodded. She understood.

He remained silent, however. As much as he wanted to open
up, he couldn’t. He wasn’t that way.

No longer was he trusting, able to “share” or to bare his
soul. Once he had been, but no more. Once, he knew a woman—or thought he
did—the two of them had grown up together. She knew his family, knew how cold
and unfeeling it was, how everyone in it ignored the youngest child. Only with
her could he share his deepest secrets and reveal his wildest dreams.

And still, their ending haunted him.

He had loved her, but it hadn’t mattered.

After that, women seemed to come and go in his life. He'd
been “in lust” often enough, even to the point of contemplating marriage, but
his instincts told him happily ever after didn’t exist for him.
Deep-in-the-heart-and-soul love was as alien to him as the galaxy of Andromeda.
So he kept traveling as far and as fast as possible…but he couldn't outrun
himself.

Charlotte waited, her expression open, trusting, empathetic.
What kind of fool was he? He opened up to a figment of his imagination, and
wouldn’t talk to this compassionate woman who had been through so much he
should have been the one offering her comfort, rather than vice versa.
Sometimes he disgusted himself. He forced himself to speak.

“I've tried to fill my days with people, possessions, places
to go and things to do,” he whispered, “but...I don't know. It hasn’t worked
out the way I expected…or, I expected too much.”

“You never talk about your home, or your family,” she said.

He thought about his life outside, back “home.” But where
was home? He had a house in California he never visited. It was a storage dump
and mail drop, not a home at all. He filled it with valuable possessions from
his trips, and paid a housekeeper, gardener, security experts, and a bookkeeper
to assure everything ran smoothly in his life.
And for what?
“There’s not much to talk about.”

“What's odd,” she said softly, “is being here…this place is
filled with ghosts. It has a sense of the
Other
. I
suspect that appeals to you, Michael.”

“The spiritual?”
He scoffed. “I
don't believe in ‘the spiritual,’ whatever that is.” Thoughts came to him of
Lady Hsieh.
Or, I didn't
, he thought.

The expression on her face told him she wasn't convinced.
“Sleep, Michael,” she whispered. “It will help.”

“I may be able to now.” He got out of the sleeping bag.
“I’ll give you back your bed.”

She stepped out of the tent with him.

“You’re a good person, Charlotte,” he said. “Thank you.”

He turned to leave. “Michael,” she whispered. He turned and
she put her arms around him in a quick hug, then eased back and brushed her
hand against his face in a gentle stroke. “Anytime you want to talk, Michael,
I’m here.”

“I know,” he whispered.

With that she nodded, and went back into her tent.

To his surprise, he found himself oddly comforted by the
somber but understanding woman. He got into his sleeping bag and fell into a
fitful sleep dreaming of the sound of a
sanxian.

DEREK HAMMILL AND his men camped near
the pillars. He kept someone on guard the entire night so that if and when the
four searchers reappeared he could follow them. But they didn’t reappear.

It was morning.
Decision time.

They could stay here and fail in their mission, or continue
on.

Hammill was no fool. He and his men had seen the students’
tracks as well as the searchers’. They saw that all the tracks went up the
mound to the pillars, and none came back down. What the hell was up there?
Where did they all go?

His men were spooked. It had been simple to get someone to
stand guard. No one could sleep. He heard them talking among themselves about
the pillars, the lightning and thunder around them and nowhere else, the
strangeness of the area.

He had tried to make outside contact, to request direction.
Should they follow or not?
But his sat phone had crapped
out. He believed the same static or electricity or whatever in the hell caused
the damned pillars to vibrate and make noise had also knocked out
communications.

He could walk back until the phone worked again, but who
knew how many miles that would be? He suspected they would have to climb the
mountain, get out of this valley. That would take hours.

If, after all that, he received an order to continue on
between the pillars, the searchers would be so far ahead they might be
difficult to track. Following fresh tracks was one thing; following those more
than a day old required a lot more skill. Even now, it would take a while to
catch up.

No, Hammill reasoned, he didn’t have time to go back for
instructions. He had to make his own decision.

People didn’t disappear into thin air. Something up there
simply couldn’t be seen from ground level. The men were nervous, but they were
seasoned fighters, and had done enough wet work for PLP that they couldn’t stop
now.

He stood. “We’re climbing up there, and we’re going through.
We will not abandon the mission.”

MELISSE AND DEVLIN inspected the
area where Vince had gone to sulk the night before. He had run back to camp
howling, screaming, and blithering that human-looking monsters had stared at
him and wanted to kill him. Or eat him. Or tear him limb from limb.

The two found no tracks or signs that anyone or anything had
been out there.

The group broke camp and hiked for two hours before they
spotted a creek. They stopped. Hunger made them weak. They had little hope of
catching fish with their wooden hooks and grassy lines, but they needed to try.

Rachel and Brandi searched for nuts, roots, and berries.
Rempart and Vince found firewood. Devlin and Melisse fished.

Devlin had fished many times with his father. Now,
slack-jawed, he looked down into the creek. Suppressing a whoop of joy so he
didn’t scare the fish away, he cast his line.

Salmon and steelhead trout were anadromous fish. Born as
freshwater fish in the headwaters and tributaries of the Salmon River, they
made an eight hundred mile journey down the Salmon to the Snake River, the
Columbia, and the Pacific Ocean. After living as ocean-faring fish for one to
three years, depending on the species, they found the mouth of the Columbia
River for the reverse journey upstream, climbing more than 7,000 vertical feet
in altitude, to arrive back at their spawning grounds as freshwater fish once
more.