The ringing was now very loud in his head, but it had also stopped growing; it had stopped growing sometime during the night. The growing had been so gradual for so long that he couldn’t be certain it had stopped at all, but after some hours he determined for himself that it was not growing any more. The only time it grew was when he would walk toward the gnarled twisted window of the oak and look down the tracks westward into the fog off the river. That was when it occurred to him. For a moment he indulged himself in believing it was the whistle of the train, but he knew that wasn’t it; he did not turn there in the cantina to ask if the innkeeper heard the sound since he had, after all, always heard the things others did not hear, like the music of fields, like the…
And then he knew what it was he now heard. Then he remembered the night he had heard it thirty years before. And for a moment he was furious with himself, and then he remembered that he had, after all, spent half the lifetime since he first heard this sound trying in vain to disprove it ever existed. And though he had never disproved it mathematically and empirically, he realized he had disproved it to his heart: even in passionate pursuit of it, he would not believe it.
He watched down the track westward into the fog off the river and listened as he had listened, paralyzed, on another beach at the end of a train of footsteps. Then he went downstairs.
When he stepped onto the tracks he faltered a moment; as he had done thirty years before, he was compelled to turn and go back the way he had come. But he did not turn. He did not doubt, on the sixth day of the sixth month in the sixth year of his sixth decade, that a dream destroys what is not fulfilled; what was rare was not that he had forgotten this dream, since he was born, after all, in a country that had forgotten the dream of which it was born: rare was that, once having for gotten it, he had come to remember it again. Rare was that, once having feared it, he had made himself brave. The porter ran along the platform in agitation. “Don’t want to go down there, mister,” he cried, “that train may come any time. Could come today. It’s long overdue, could come in the hour. It won’t slow down when it comes, you know that.” Lake walked on down the track. The planks beneath him were sturdy but pliable from the wet air. Some thirty feet down the track he was tempted to turn and look at the huge oak coiling up through the clouds; he could still hear the porter and he thought he heard the innkeeper calling him as well, both of them shouting into the twilight they couldn’t see. It was warm out on the tracks. When Lake reached the fog he continued walking, through the vapor and splattered sunlight, the spray and heat on his face. For a while he walked out of fog; the tracks curved gently; then he walked back into it. All the time he walked the ringing, which he now understood was not in his ears but somewhere down the tracks, became louder as he came closer to it. When he had gone three miles down the track he emerged from a swath of fog out over nothing but wide endless blue river, where there was only the track extending on into the clouds ahead and a figure kneeling in the distance before him. The sound suddenly stopped. He kept walking until he reached her.
She hadn’t changed so much. Older, of course. No longer the girl who had evaporated among the moors fifteen years earlier but a woman; there was a line or two around her brow, and the lips were not as deep red but a bit weathered in color. Yet her eyes were the same, incandescent and depthless, and her hair was a wilder swarm than ever; it glistened with the mist of the river. There was no telling how long she’d been kneeling here in the sun on the planks of the railway. She watched as he came to her. She did not pull away as he knelt down before her and, his hands shaking, shredded her dress down the middle. The dress fell on the tracks behind her and she fell too. His hands ran down her arms to her wrists, down the sides of her body to her hips, down her legs to her ankles. He hovered over her. Her hair hung across the edge of the tracks and blew in the wind. Above was the drained and livid sky and beyond was the long black rip of the monstrous oak; in her a weary clock still ticked. She shuddered with the bedlam of unsounded chimes. For a while neither of them seemed to breathe. Then she felt him exhale across her thighs and taste the red ribbon of her black curls; a new wetness exploded in her. The hot rail of the tracks ran against her face. His glasses fell from his eyes and bounded across the wood. He tried to bring her into focus, and when she grabbed his shirt and pulled him into her, he took in his hands her hair, splayed across the track behind
