"David?" She whispered his name again, almost praying.
Her only answer was the hiss of falling water, like an AM radio tuned to a station so weak it was just a voiceless pulse in the static. It formed vowels and consonants and even syllables at times but never a coherent word. She shivered.
The passing rage had left her cold as well as hollow. She pulled Maureen's damp jacket tight around her and huddled closer to the dying fire. The waterfall muttered behind her back, and she quit trying to force words into its voice. It wasn't David.
The stranger had said David was a blood sacrifice, not dead but dying in some obscene gift to the land. The thought turned her knees to jelly and left a throbbing knife-sharp headache in its wake. She couldn't do a damn thing about it, trapped in the bottom of a fucking hole.
Damn Maureen!
She closed her eyes, tired of forever seeing the same rocks and clumps of moss, the same rough dark circle cutting off her vision overhead. She had to relax and recharge and make one last try at climbing out. Maybe she could loop the rope over a protruding lump of limestone, or tie a rock on the end and see if she could snag it somewhere up above like a grappling hook.
Just relax. She had to let her mind ride on the pulsing hiss of falling water. Forget about Maureen, forget about David, forget about the lump with the dangling arm. She let her empty mind search for the mystic's center, calm in the heart of storm.
Relax.
Listen to the water.
{Touchhh} formed out of the water's song.
{Ssssomething} followed, a hissing tumble of syllables.
{Livinggg} echoed with a sigh.
The voice of the water sounded like David, like his whispered thoughts at three in the morning when they both hovered on the edge of sex-drained sleep. Their words would tiptoe around the edges of telepathy, single thoughts or words or half-formed noises completed in the other's brain.
She opened her eyes, and the sound became falling water once more. Touch something living, it had said. She sat on bare dry rock. The wet moss glowed faintly in the light from overhead. Crimson and gold edges drew fine lines around the fronds of the ferns, as if they shone with an inner light that leaked out into a static corona.
It had to be refraction in the mist, an underground rainbow from the afternoon sun. Her vision buzzed like she had just downed three cups of coffee.
Touch something living. Her hand reached out, tentatively, to a clump of ferns, as if her body had given up on impossibility and the rational forebrain that sneered at such foolishness. Next thing, she'd be reading fiery letters carved in tablets of stone, hearing voices from the burning bush. It was time to call for the men in white coats--maybe they'd pull her out of here.
Her fingers tingled.
{Jo.}
The word jolted her like an electric shock. Concentrating, she reached out again, felt the tingling again.
"David?"
{We are here.}
Her hand jerked away. We?
She gritted her teeth, touched the ferns a third time, and closed her eyes. Something brushed her mind like butterfly wings and then left the memory of a kiss on her forehead.
{Muirneach.}
Beloved. He'd scrounged half of his scanty Gaelic vocabulary out of songs, a dozen dialects from the Shetlands to Cape Breton. You'd think the man would take lessons or at least buy a language tape if he hoped to make a living as a Celtic musician . . . .
"Where are you?"
The signal dissolved into hiss again, spurting out scattered words. { . . . all around . . . everything . . . alive . . .}
Terror knotted deep in her belly. This voice spoke with Maureen's madness and the strange fire that had burned through Jo's hands into the gun. She didn't dare look in the water of the pool. She'd see insanity looking back.
{Do not be afraid.}
Sure. That was what the voices in the Bible always said. Jo whimpered and then managed to form her fear into words.
"What's happening to me?"
{. . . already know . . . of magic . . . you . . . power . . . blood . . . bend land to your will . . .}
"Bullshit. If that was true, I wouldn't be sitting in the bottom of a hole."
{. . . fall because you expect to fall . . .} came through a break in the static.
Yeah, she thought, piecing things together.
And the gun and lighter worked because she expected them to work. And she caught fish because she expected to catch fish, but there were only five because that was the most she could believe in.
"Why are you speaking with David's voice?"
The signal strengthened, as if David-ness needed to think of her to pull itself together. {We are David. We are his blood, his breath, his thoughts. The land is David, and David is the land.}
Ghost fingers walked down her spine and touched her twitch-spot, the freaky bundle of nerves that caused a jerk she couldn't control. David sometimes played with it to tease her, and that was one of his less loveable habits.
"Cut that out, you bastard!"
{You did not believe that we were David.}
"Why do you fade in and out?"
{. . . scattered . . . lose focus . . . distraction . . .}
"So now you've got somebody to talk to as you die," she muttered, half to herself. "Sometimes. Big help."
{Climb . . . waterfall.}
She'd avoided the rocks next to the waterfall. Coated with wet moss and lichen and the same slick green algae that had greased her drop into this hellhole, they were treacherous.
Remember the rope. She grabbed one end of the rope and hauled it in, forming
