THERE were only three men in the shack. They sat close to the table, all three; perhaps it was merely that each wished to be near the others, or in the candle’s rich, golden light. Garcia was tall, lean, and handsome, with deep-set, intelligent eyes.
Hoong looked like a middleweight wrestler, which as it happened he had once been. His broad face was a sculptured mask in which only his darting glance seemed to live.
Davis cannot be described so easily. He was shorter than Garcia, taller than Hoong. His reddish hair had been bleached blond by the sun. His small features looked sunburned, though not badly, and traces of white, protective cream could be seen in the convolutions of his ears. He leaned forward, listening intently to Garcia, whose slow, cadent voice made itself heard without difficulty above the keening of the wind outside.
“It is we men,” Garcia said, “who are the true romantics. We see a girl, she stares at the ground, afterward we observe her studying a wedding gown in a dressmaker’s window. Ah, we say, how romantic, what a tender thing is a woman’s heart!”
Hoong nodded without speaking.
“And it is so. The hearts of women are tender and easily broken, and there are men—we know them—who enjoy hearing the little chimes of the hearts as they break. But romance from a woman? Bah! Nothing.”
This time it was Davis who nodded. Hoong remarked, “Just the same, women all tell you that they’re too romantic.”
“But it proves my point,” Garcia insisted. “When everyone says it is true of them, they cannot know what it is. Men know what it means, courage, and so not all say that they are brave. I give you that example. As easily I could give you a hundred, in the name of God. No, every woman wants a good husband so she will not have to work, six beautiful children she can spoil and order about. She listens at the window when we sing to her and hopes her neighbors listen too, so they will know we have come. But if there were no neighbors, she would care nothing that we came. She preserves our foolish letters, to be sure. They may be of use in the court, and they are in addition the proofs of her prowess. You have your diploma still, mi amigo?”
Hoong said, “With my uncle. He’s keeping a footlocker for me.”
“So do women preserve our letters. Let me tell you of a man I knew once. He married in the church a lovely girl because she had a certain way of looking at him, and little breasts like doves. Her family owned some land also, though it was no better than this. For the ceremony he gave her a fine horse, a Barbary stallion. Her name was Catalina.”
Hoong remarked, “I thought you said it was a stallion.” He spoke in such a way that no one could have known whether he was joking.
“Catalina was the girl, cabrón,” Garcia explained without rancor, “the horse Estampido.” Drafts had covered the tabletop with sifted red dust, almost invisible until it was disturbed. Garcia moistened a finger and wrote Catalina in the dust. “She told me she had dreamed of such a one. I wished to wake her.”
“Surely it’s romantic,” Hoong said, “to dream of a horse.”
Garcia snorted. “If you are another horse, perhaps. For Estampido I found a fine white mare to be his wife, though the carabineros did not like it and there were difficulties.”
Davis said, “I once knew a woman who had been married to a geologist who always dreamed of one particular castle.”
“Bravo!” Garcia grinned; when he grinned, his mouth became a sharp V. “There you have the true romance, the romance of the male—for a woman it would have been a palace, a place of luxury without defiance.”
“I met him myself a few times.” Davis leaned back, staring at the underside of the roof as though he saw a nearly forgotten face among its green thermosetting corrugations. “He was a big redhead; they were both redheads. Is there a thing about women that makes them like men who look like their brothers?”
“Their fathers,” Hoong told him.
“She said he used to talk about it every so often. One of the towers had fallen, she said, and he’d tell her how they were going to fix it, how they’d make the foundation a lot stronger. It had collapsed because of an earthquake, I think.”
Garcia nodded. “For a geologist that would be natural.”
“And he talked a lot about the walls. They had some kind of system that let them add to the walls again and again, over and over, parapet above parapet. That was what she called them. It was all red rock, she said. Something like that.
“He told her about the people too—the people who lived in the castle. There was a Master of Archers who shot against him sometimes; he said this head archer was a dead shot, but mostly he beat him in the end. And there was one certain old man that polished some gold bowls and platters and tended the demon, or whatever it was that lived under the vault; he said maybe it was a god like the one that the Bible calls Moloch, or Ansenef, the blood-drinker from Egypt.”
Garcia said, “The husband was the lord of this castle?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes his father’s ghost came. Then his father was the overlord, and Sigrid’s husband always asked for his advice and always took it. In the castle there wasn’t much difference between a live man and his ghost, she said.”
Hoong said, “Maybe they were all ghosts, huh?”
Davis looked at him sharply. “Were you ever there?”
“In this guy’s dream castle?” Hoong shrugged. “I don’t know. You’d have to ask him.”
Garcia said softly, “No, amigo, Captain Hoong has never been there. But you have, I think. So it was a real castle after all?”
Davis nodded, the movement of his head so slight as to be nearly imperceptible. “In a way it was. He came back from a field trip down the rift. She said she could tell right away that something was wrong. I guess maybe she kissed him and sat in his lap. That was how she acted with me when I was feeling dusty.”
“As you are feeling now, poor little one. I myself prefer blondes, and should I marry again that is what I will have. But it is no small thing to lose a woman one loves.”
“I just wish I could show her to you. She had blue eyes, like the sky back home, and the longest legs you’ve ever seen. The line of her legs was just so graceful and tender—know what I mean? No artist could have programmed it. She had freckles all over. She hated them and said they were ugly, and she put some kind of goop on them to make them lighter. But they were pretty, really. When she soaked in the tub, it looked like she was sprinkled with little rubies. It was like she belonged to some other kind of people, not white or black or anything else we know about. I used to try to get her to stand up; sometimes she would, but she always had a little apron for herself, you know? In front, made out of bubbles.”
Hoong whistled sharply and tunelessly, his face as blank as ever.
“She was the most beautiful woman on the world, and I told her that over and over. I don’t think she ever really believed I was serious.”
Garcia nodded. “Fortunate for you she did not. But you say the husband’s castle was a real place? You have not said anything about that, only that he was disturbed.”
“That’s right.” Davis paused. “After three or four days, she said, he started talking about it; then he wouldn’t shut up or talk about anything else. She said he acted, too, as if he hadn’t told her about his dreams at all; now he told her again, beginning back when he was a kid. She said he told her things he hadn’t mentioned before, besides the old dreams. He told her a lot about hunting with hawks, except the birds weren’t hawks—she couldn’t say just what they were. I asked what he’d called them, but she couldn’t remember.
“Then he said he was going there again and he wanted her to come with him. She wasn’t authorized, but he had a lot of pull. The tech who usually went got sick leave, and he and Sigrid took the creeper.”
Hoong said, “Pretty dangerous for a gasper. Did she know her way around?”
“She’d had Basic; everybody had to take it, back when she came. But that was all.” Davis paused again. “She got back all right.”
Garcia had been inspecting his nails in the light from the candle. They were short but very dirty, and he began to scrape beneath them with a bit of sharp metal he fished from a pocket. “She came back all right. But he did not, this field man, this geologist with the so-beautiful wife.”
“No,” Davis said. “He didn’t come back at all.”
“But he had no help in that from you?”
Davis shook his head. “I wasn’t even there. I was way up in the snow-lands. Everybody knew that.”
“I would hope so, for your sake.”
Hoong asked, “What about the castle?”
“They went a long way down the rift. I went myself later, and it was over a hundred kilometers. You know how it is—days aren’t much over an hour long when the sun’s clear of both rims, and there are more shades of red in the rock than anybody’s got names for; but morning and evening seem like they go on forever, with everything shadowy and almost black.” He paused. “That’s when people see leapers, they say.” After a moment he added, “I never saw one myself.”
“I have,” Hoong told him. “I was doing a survey, me and an operator, Rosa something—she wasn’t black but one of those dark girls that sweat all the time.” He shot a glance toward Garcia, but if the tall man felt the hit he did not show it.
“We were setting up, and this Rosa was putting together a signal pole. A couple hundred meters ahead was a side canyon, and the sun was right there, shining between the cliffs. The leaper jumped across so I saw it against the face of the sun. It looked black, but naturally anything would have.”
Davis said, “Was it like an ape? Somebody I knew said hers looked more like a big ape than anything else, except there were too many arms.”
“It looked like some kind of cat to me,” Hoong told him.
“It didn’t look so big at that distance, but we went up there later and checked out the cliffs, and it must’ve been bigger than a tiger.” For an instant the lids of his dark eyes flew wide in a tiger’s fierce stare. “Anyhow, I told Rosa what I’d seen, and we spent a couple of hours scouting around; but we didn’t find anything.”
Garcia was still cleaning his nails. “Superstition. What would they eat?”
“Who said they have to eat?”
“Then how would they leap, mi amigo? Even you will concede that energy is required.”
“Only if they have mass. And anywhere you’ve got sunlight you’ve got energy.”
Davis cleared his throat, and Garcia glanced up from his nails. “You have your own theory, I take it. Is it the vast cities beneath the ground? That is what some believed before the sonic tests.”
Davis shook his head. “You’re not eating, Garcia. But you’re expending energy.”
Garcia opened his mouth to reply, then shut it again and pushed out his lower lip. At length he muttered, “Stored for so long? Perhaps. Quién sabe?”
“Anyhow,” Hoong continued, “both of us heard it that night. Sometimes it howled and sometimes it screamed. A lot was like howling and screaming together.”
“El viento.”
“Crap,” Hoong said. “Nobody pays attention to the wind. You get so you tune it out. Besides, we could hear the wind too, when we listened, and this was different.”
“As you wish. You said that you yourself saw this castle, amigo?”
“That’s right. After Sigrid told me about it, I made her take me out there. It wasn’t easy, but we traded a man I knew out of a day’s use of his vehicle. We had to promise we’d say we’d stolen it if we got caught.”
Garcia grinned. “And would you have said that?”
“Hell, no. At least I wouldn’t have. Sigrid would have, maybe. It was one of the half-tracked creepies, a bullet on a good surface and dig itself in up to the floorboards in sand or dust. We were most of the day getting there, and most of the night getting back.”
“But when you were there? What did you see?”
“Not what she’d seen, that’s for sure. Just a big red rock sticking out of the side of the rift. It was ragged on top, so it did look a bit like a castle if you shut your eyes a little. And there were columns sticking up from the top. You know what I mean? Left by the erosion. Some of them had fallen over.”
“So you went up to look.”
“That’s right,” Davis said, “we climbed the walls. Sigrid didn’t want to, but I talked her into it. She’d been up there with her husband—that’s what she’d told me—so I made her come with me. To tell the truth, I thought that if I left her down on the floor alone she’d take the creepy and run off in it; she was that scared. Ten to one she’d have gotten stuck, and maybe we’d both have died.”
“Which would not have been desirable, certainly. Doubtless she knew the best slope as well. Was it a bad climb?”
“Yeah, it was—almost up to the toplands. The air got thin as hell. A couple times I was afraid she was going to pass out, and once I thought I was. I had us roped together, though. Do you think they’ll ever really make it rain?”
Hoong nodded. “Sure. But we won’t be around to see it.”
“I guess not. Listen, there really isn’t anything left to tell. We got up there, and it was one hell of a climb. When we got our breath, we walked all around—it was pretty big—and saw a whole bunch of rocks with funny shapes, and then we rappelled back down. Getting down was a lot easier than climbing up.”
“And that’s all?” Hoong asked. “Just funny rocks? I don’t believe you.”
Davis shrugged. “I can’t help that. That was it. Some of the rocks had marks on them, but they didn’t mean anything, they were just black marks, like there was coal in them or something. They wouldn’t rub off.”
“Pictures?” Garcia suggested.
“No. Mostly just wiggly lines. If you looked long enough, you could see snakes, and faces and things, but you can do that if you look long enough at anything, even real writing.”
“Pictographs,” Hoong said. “Want to see me write my name in Chinese? My grandfather showed me.” He moistened a finger as Garcia had earlier and sketched the character in the blood-colored dust.
“It wasn’t much like that,” Davis said. “More like Arabic, or maybe Hebrew. But I can’t read them, so how would I know?”
Garcia spat into the corner. “As you knew what you saw was not writing, I suppose.”
“Listen, I had her husband’s old hammer. You know those things? It had a head like a real hammer’s on one side and a chisel blade on the other; I used the chisel and split one of those rocks, and there were more marks inside.”
“No doubt the señor would have said that it was a petrified book, and you opened its pages—possibly for the first time in a million years. The woman saw no more than you yourself?”
“That’s right.”
“You know,” Hoong said slowly, “I’m surprised she doesn’t try to help you now, if she really loved you.”
“She liked me. I was crazy about her—I told you that—and I guess I got her on the bounce. She was afraid to sleep alone, all that stuff. But she loved me after a while; I know she did.”
Garcia whispered, “Yet perhaps not quite so much when you had made her climb?”
“More than ever then,” Davis told them. “She’s dead, all right? I don’t want to talk about her any more.”
As if he had not heard Hoong asked, “Why should she love you when you made her do something she didn’t want to do?”
“Because she did,” Davis said. “She wanted to just as much as I did—more. But she needed somebody to make her do it. She needed me to say come on, Sigrid, we can’t back out now, quit horsing around and do it. Haven’t either of you ever known a woman in your lives?”
“But the lovely Sigrid is dead? She fell, perhaps, while you were climbing down?”
“No, she died in bed, back in the city. We were in bed together, and I didn’t kill her. That was what some of them said, but there wasn’t a mark on her; or anyway there wasn’t when the M.E. examined her.”
Garcia nodded. “We will return to that, I think. But was it while you were climbing down that she saw the leaper?”
“I didn’t say she’d seen one. I never said that.”
“Ah, but certainly you did, mi amigo. You said it was by twilight that they were seen, and when you spoke of one who had seen one, you employed the feminine. We are not men of genius, perhaps, Hoong and me. Still, we are not fools. It was while you were climbing down?”
“No. It was while we were still up on the castle.”
“You said that was near the topland. Twilight there is not long.”
“There was still bright sunshine up there,” Davis admitted,
“but it was nearly dark down in the rift. She looked over the wall. There were a lot of formations that were like walls—you know, strata that had been tipped on end by geological pressure and combed out by erosion.”
“And thus looking down she saw it—perhaps it was thumbing its nose at her. You said it had many arms.”
“That’s right, but she wasn’t sure how many—four at least, she said. Maybe six. It was jumping from rock to rock as if it was coming up to join us. Except that it didn’t, it never got there. Or—”
He fell silent. Garcia said softly, “Sí?”
“Or if it did we couldn’t see it. I’ve thought about that sometimes—what if you can’t see them up close?” He glanced at Hoong. “Does that make any sense?”
“Sure. Camouflage can be like that, sometimes.”
“Anyway, I looked down, but I couldn’t see it … and then we waited. We didn’t have any weapons, just the hammer.”
“I want to know what it was she told you.”
Davis nodded as though Hoong had read his thoughts and he, Davis, had expected them to be read. “Up there was where she told most of it, while we were waiting. Before it had just been odds and ends, about her husband’s dream and her going out there with him. I’d known she was frightened of the place, but before then I hadn’t really understood why.
“They had come out in the creeper, not taking quite so much time to get there as we had. She said most of that section was still in deep shadow; but just as they drove up the sunlight lit the castle, running down the sides of the towers—the big stone shafts—like wildfire and lighting the battlements. Her husband pointed out each tower to her and told her something about its history. They hadn’t had to climb the way we did, with pitons and so forth; there had been a path up the side of the cliff.
“She said she thought she had been hypnotized, although she was never conscious of it, and she didn’t think her husband had done it consciously either. But while they climbed the path he kept talking to her, kept telling her things, and as he talked the red rock formation she’d seen disappeared. When we’d come, it had looked kind of like a real castle from the bottom of the rift; it was only when we’d climbed up that we saw it wasn’t a real castle at all.
“But when she and her husband had come, it went the other way. The closer they got, the more castle-like it looked, until she could see the sentinels on the walls, she said, tall and wrapped in dark red cloaks, and banners with hairy tails like wolves, so light it seemed like they floated in that thin air. There were ports in the walls like for gates or windows, and she saw shapes pacing back and forth like the lions in a zoo.
“Then she looked again, and it wasn’t really a castle at all. She said it was like the time her folks had taken her to Mammoth Cave when she was a kid, and at first she’d thought it was just a hole like the neighborhood kids dug sometimes in the side of a hill; but when they got inside, she understood that their little caves were just bad copies of this, and this was the real thing, millions of years older than any kid and full of power and magic. That’s what she said.
“That was what she saw gripping the cliff face then—the thing that all the castles and forts on Earth had been copied from. It was a ship, she said, and it was an emblem. Right then she knew it could come into your dreams if it wanted to, and you couldn’t stop it, and she knew it was too old ever to die.
“Something came fluttering toward them, she said, like a pigeon flies on Earth. It had four wings like a dragonfly’s, and a circle of topaz eyes around a pointed head; when it got close to them, the head bloomed like a flower, and the petals were edged with needle teeth.
“She said her husband whistled to it. Whistle was as near as she could come to the noise he made. She said she’d never heard anybody whistle like that, and she’d never thought anybody could. The flying thing landed on the crown of his head like a helmet then. It put all four wings down over his cheeks and his neck. It put its head under one wing, and it seemed like it was whispering in his ear.
“She was almost too scared to speak, but she said, ‘Jack, what’s that? What is that thing?’ And he turned and answered her, but it was in some language she didn’t understand.
“He took her hand then, gently she said, and pointed. The castle was sticking out what you call a natural bridge to them, sticking out a long, narrow tongue of rock that fell away at the edges but looked pretty strong down the middle. When it got to the path, her husband stepped out onto it.”
“Madre de dios! What happened next?”
“He tried to pull her after him. And she wanted to come, she said. But when she tried to step out onto the bridge, her foot went right on through it. She nearly fell, and she jerked back as hard as she could. He called out to her just like any man would if he’d seen his wife almost fall like that. But he didn’t call Sigrid. He called her something else, something she said she could never twist her mouth enough to pronounce. But she knew it was her name.”
“She turned away and ran down the path, but soon it wasn’t really a path at all, she was just scrambling and slipping, she said, down the lower part of the cliff. It wasn’t until she was in the crawler that she knew she’d sprained her right wrist. She tried to neutralize the deadlock with her right hand the regular way, and it hurt so much she couldn’t get it. She had to reach across to do it and start the engine.
“That was when she spotted the leaper. It was keeping just ahead of the sunlight racing down the cliff face, and it looked like the shadow of an ape with too many arms.
“Then it was gone, she said, as if the light had caught up with it and it had hidden in some crack in the red rock like the other shadows. She shut the crawler’s bubble and jerked out the throttle. She could have stalled it, I guess, but it was a good machine. She got back all right.”
“But subsequently died,” Garcia said dryly. “Died in the bed with you, no? How much after, amigo? A year, perhaps?”
Davis shook his head. “Couple of months.”
Hoong asked, “What was the mark?”
Davis did not answer.
“You said there weren’t any marks on her when the medical examiner saw her. So there was one before that. What was it, and how’d you got rid of it? You might as well tell us.”
“A hand,” Davis said. “It was the mark of a red hand, a big hand with long fingers.”
“Ah!” Garcia chuckled. “Around her throat, amigo?”
“No, not on her neck.” Davis spoke slowly, as men do when they force themselves to recall things they would sooner forget. “It was on her right hand, just like somebody with blood on his hand had shaken hands with her. I tried to wash it off. For a real long time I scrubbed at it. Finally I even rubbed some of the cream she put on her freckles on it. But the cream didn’t work, either.”
“Yet the medical examiner failed to see it. I find that interesting.”
“I got out the big knife she used to chop vegetables with. I thought maybe I could scrape it off her hand.” Davis spread his own hands in appeal.
“Of course,” Garcia said. “But that too was ineffective?”
“I’d had this dream that night—I dreamed she hadn’t gotten away from him, and he was pulling and pulling, stronger all the time, taking her with him. I had her other hand, and I tried to follow them; but I slipped, the stone bridge was like glass, and I fell, and the leaper was down in the rift waiting for me.
“So when it wouldn’t scrape off, either, I tried to cut it off, except I couldn’t.” He turned toward Hoong, desperate for reassurance. “I tried and tried, but I was just hacking her up. I thought dead people didn’t bleed, but she bled and bled. God, what a mess!”
Hoong nodded. “Sure. Bound to be.”
“Then I tried to cut her whole hand off. I pulled her partway off the bed, so I could lay her arm on the floor and chop at it. That didn’t work either. It’s not as easy as they make it look on the nets.”
Hoong said, “A machete, that’s what you needed.”
“Or a hatchet, amigo.” Garcia’s eyes were sad, though half a smile played about his lips.
“But I got it in the end. I checked a power saw out of the toolroom and took it back to our place. I wrapped her hand in a couple of towels and dropped it in the incinerator. They never found it. Everything they saw was mine, and there wasn’t a mark on her.” He struck the table with his fist.
No one spoke.
“Anyway, that’s why I’m here,” Davis said.
Garcia nodded to himself.
“I think it got her scent when we went back. She died that night in bed; maybe it got mine then. Did I tell you?”
Neither man answered him. The silence thickened until it seemed to fill the dark corners of the shack and press against the candle flame like smoke.
At last Hoong said, “Whatever happened to your wife, Pepe? To Catalina?”
Garcia shook himself as though wakening from an evil dream. “He trampled her,” he whispered. “That black stallion, that big Estampido. He trampled her one hot afternoon toward the end of August.”
Hoong told Davis, “The guys train those stallions to fight down there just like you’d train a Doberman. The stallion goes for you when his trainer gives the signal.”
Seeing Davis’s face, Garcia took him by the shoulder. “Her heart, amigo. He trampled upon her little heart, that is what I meant to say, when she watched him mount the mare. The heart of a woman is such a fragile thing, so easily broken.”
Outside and far away, something shrieked louder than the keening of the dust-laden wind.
