Our Dried Voices

by Hickey, Greg

  XXII

  They waited inside the hall for the rest of the morning. The white powder continued to fall from the sky with no sign of letting up. In fact, it seemed to grow even heavier as the day wore on. When Samuel looked outside a few hours later, a thick, white blanket covered the entire meadow. By the time the bells sounded for the midday meal, his stomach had twisted itself into empty knots, and given the sporadic moans from around the hall, Samuel guessed many other colonists shared his discomfort.

  “What do we do?” Penny asked from the next bed.

  “We have to go to the meal halls,” Samuel said. “We have to eat.”

  Penny nodded and cinched her bedding firmly around her. Samuel rose from his bed, his blanket draped over his shoulders like a cape.

  “Listen,” he began. All eyes turned toward him as a murmur rippled across the great hall. “Listen to me,” he repeated.

  He had barely raised his voice at all, but he might as well have bellowed at the top of his lungs. The hall fell silent at once.

  “There is a problem,” he went on. “There is a problem with the weather. It is cold outside. It is cold in the air and on the ground. But we must eat. We must go to the nearest meal hall. Bring your blankets with you. Take extra clothing off the wall. We may not come back for some time. But we must go now. Do you understand? We must go to the meal hall now.”

  The colonists exchanged blank glances with one another. Samuel was not sure they had understood him. Penny alone climbed out of her bed and followed Samuel to the wall opposite the door. They each removed an extra tunic from one of the poles on the wall, slipped it on over their other one and rewrapped themselves in their blankets. The other colonists stared at them for a moment without moving. Then, one by one, they stood and shuffled to the wall to retrieve additional clothing. Samuel moved to the door, and they followed slowly behind him.

  “The meal hall is close,” he said. “Follow me. We will go quickly.”

  Penny stood beside him.

  “Stay at the back,” he told her. “Help anyone who falls behind. I will come back after I get the first ones inside.”

  “Okay,” she said. He opened the door.

  The wind felt even colder than before. It struck Samuel full in the face and rocked him back on his heels. The colonists behind him screamed. But Samuel withstood the blow and leapt through the door. His feet sank into the soft powder that covered the ground, but he drove his knees upward and ripped his feet from the cold white drifts and began to run. The other colonists followed as best they could, tripping and falling and emerging from snow banks half-covered in the fine powder. Samuel relaxed his pace and allowed the fastest colonists to catch up. He led these few to the nearest meal hall, dragged open the door against the opposing gust of wind and went back to help the rest.

  It took Samuel and Penny thirty long minutes to lead the other colonists over a distance that would have normally taken three. They helped as best they could, but there was only so much they could do. The wind swirled all around them and bit at their exposed faces and hands. The tiny crystals fell in sheets, making it nearly impossible to see and burning their feet with cold until they went numb. Finally they got all the colonists into the hall. Their blankets and bodies were freezing cold and soaking wet. But there was nothing to be done about that.

  The colonists lined up against the wall to receive their meal cakes, quivering and leaning into the hard stone surface like orphaned kittens nursing on a plastic bottle. Fortunately, Samuel had installed a food box in this hall, so there were no squabbles about the sizes of the cakes. Their hands still trembled and their teeth chattered as they held their food to their mouths. Samuel and Penny ate side by side.

  “Thank you for your help,” he said to her.

  “You’re welcome.” She pulled her drenched blanket closer around her. “What do we do now?”

  Samuel shook his head and looked away. He was asking himself the very same question.

  * * *

  The snowfall did not let up as the day wore on. The colonists in Samuel’s meal hall cowered against the walls and shivered in their wet bedding. Samuel knew he faced a problem unlike anything he had dealt with before. In all the previous instances, the obstacle was immediate and easily located. When the doors to the sleeping halls were locked, he investigated the doors. When the bridges were broken, he went to the river to fix them. But how could he fix a problem in the sky?

  And yet he could not even consider that question at the present moment, not when he knew there were four other sleeping halls filled with hungry colonists too immobilized by fear and cold to brave the blizzard and migrate to the nearest meal hall. He would have to lead them if they stood any hope of surviving this latest disaster. So Samuel spent the rest of the afternoon directing the flights of colonists from the four remaining sleeping halls across the frozen meadow to the nearest meal halls. Within a few minutes, his fingers and toes felt as though they were on fire. His face was numb. Soon he lost all feeling in his hands and feet as well. Each time he reached another hall it grew harder and harder to grasp the door handle and pull it open. It slipped from his deadened fingers and the manic wind slammed the door shut in his face. The blankets he had wrapped around his body were so soaked they became entirely useless. But by the end of the day, the job was done and Samuel was back in the meal hall where he had started, huddled next to Penny in the pool of water that leaked from his drenched bedding.

  He did not sleep that night; the same thoughts tumbled feverishly through his mind as he shivered on the cold, hard floor. He could not see any way to begin to solve this problem, and he began to wonder if this new catastrophe was even the work of the colony’s attackers at all, since he could not imagine how any person could have caused such a thing to happen. When the sun rose again behind the cloud-darkened sky, Samuel was still half-awake. He had convinced himself he must try to find those people who had caused all the previous disasters in the colony. But he knew nothing about them. They were little more than phantoms, shadowy figures he had once seen lingering around a meal hall in the middle of the night. They had fled over the colony’s fence and across the wide meadow beyond and left only secret messages in their stead.

  Samuel gathered these papers once more. He focused on the three complete rectangular drawings, composed of seven total fragments. He could identify each of the images individually, but doing so told him very little about what the pictures actually meant. Was each rectangle a separate message or did they all fit together? Were they arranged in some particular sequence, and if so, what was it? He sat there against the wall until the midday meal, wrapped in his still-damp blankets, the papers spread out in his lap. He distributed meal cakes in the three halls and returned to his position in the first hall, where he nibbled at his own cake and stared at the pictures. Penny came and sat next to him.

  “I think I remember you,” she said.

  Samuel shuffled through the pictures once more. “What?” he asked.

  “I think I remember you. When we were younger. Children. We used to play together.”

  He racked his thoughts for any semblance of a memory. He could not recall ever noticing her before that rainy afternoon when they had followed the First Hero.

  “We used to play in the river,” she continued. “Sometimes with others, sometimes just us. I would splash you with water.”

  Samuel tried to conjure up an image of himself frolicking in the stream with a younger Penny. The false memory swirled together with countless days of play and sex and meals with an array of nondescript brown faces. How long ago had that been?

  “You never splashed me too much,” Penny said. “You were too afraid of me. Or too kind. But if I gave you a big splash you would go away and climb a tree. You were always a good climber.”

  Samuel nodded dumbly.

  “You don’t remember.”

  He shook his head, afraid to admit it.

  “It is okay. We all look the same.”

  “No,”
he said, his voice thick in his throat. “I know you now.”

  She flashed a half-smile and smoothed out the wrinkles of her drying tunic. Samuel continued to stare at her, as though her face would suddenly hook on to some hazy memory of the past. He rubbed the rough scraps of paper between his fingers.

  “Can I see?” Penny asked, and leaned in for a closer look at the pictures.

  Samuel let her take them. He gazed around the hall at the ragged collection of colonists bundled in wet blankets against the walls, still and expressionless, like human figures carved out of tree bark. They were nothing to him. Yet together they would all sit and eat and freeze in this great, empty hall, and he and Penny would freeze along with them. He forced up an image of her face attached to a smaller, younger girl splashing away in the stream. How could he not remember her?

  “What is it?” Penny asked.

  He did not seem to hear her. “Is this how it all ends?” he whispered, still staring out at the room.

  “What?”

  He awoke from his daze and turned toward her. “Nothing.”

  She waited, searching his face.

  “Is this all there is?” he said, louder now. “Don’t you ever wonder if there might be something else, something more…”

  She frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “This place. This life. Every day. It’s all the same. We wake up. We eat, play in the meadow for a while, eat again…”

  She reached out and touched his arm. Her hand was warm, but he felt a chill inside him that did not come from the weather outside. A brilliant light rose in his eyes and they grew brighter and brighter, like two tiny embers of a fire to warm the cold gray hall.

  “What is it?” she asked, her voice breathless and choked.

  “… Eat, play in the meadow, eat again, go to sleep…” He turned toward her and his eyes blazed as he looked in her direction, but not at her, through her, his gaze directed inward to his thoughts.

  “Let me see those,” he said, and lifted the papers from her lap. He tossed aside the two torn scraps and stared at the three patchwork rectangles. He shifted them around on the floor. It was all there in the words and images racing through his mind. He sorted through this mass of fragmented thoughts as his hands darted over the scraps of paper and rearranged them on the floor. Then he sat back, the seven pictures laid out in front of him.

  He stood up. Penny grabbed at his tunic.

  “What is it?” she asked. Where are you going?”

  He seemed not to notice her for a moment. Then he bent over and pointed to the triangular shapes on the second piece of paper.

  “There.”

  “What?”

  “I’m going there. The mountains. I’m going to the mountains.”

  “What? Why?” The frail edges of her voice quivered and cracked.

  “That’s where they are.” He indicated the first rectangle. “The people with the big heads. The ones who think. The shadow people. They ran toward the mountains. Toward the mountains where the sun goes down. There’s a door there. That’s where they sleep. Where they live.”

  “But how do you know?”

  “What we do every day. It’s where I found them.” He pointed at the now-connected scraps of paper, one after the other, beginning at the stick figure with the arrow pointing toward its head. “In the sleeping hall, in the food box in the meal hall, on the bridge in the meadow, on the creatures from the buildings by the meal halls, in the meadow by the river, in the meal hall, in my bed in the sleeping hall. We sleep, we eat, play in the meadow, eat again, back to the meadow, eat and go to sleep. The same thing every day.” He pointed at the pictures again in succession. “The head of the colony, where everything is controlled, it’s where they live. The ones who think, they sleep in the mountains where the sun goes down. There is a door there, and perhaps a picture like this one.” He pointed at the hand with the eye in the center. “That’s where I’m going. That’s where it ends. That’s where I will find answers.”

  He gathered his blankets around him and moved toward the door.

  Penny stood up. “Wait,” she said.

  He stopped and looked back. He thought she would ask to go with him.

  “It is almost night,” she said. “It will be dark and cold. Stay until morning. Please.”

  Samuel hesitated. “Okay,” he said. He walked back toward her and gathered the scraps of paper into his tunic. “I will leave in the morning.”

  Together they sat down again to wait out the rest of the day and night. When darkness fell she lay very close to him. Samuel slept quite soundly, Penny hardly at all.

  XXIII

  Samuel decided to set out after the morning meal. Penny remained at his side throughout the morning, but said little. They passed out meal cakes together and sat alone at one of the tables in the middle of the hall. Penny held her cake in her lap while Samuel ate. When he had taken his final bite, she stood and unwrapped the blanket from her body, leaving only a single thin bedsheet covering her tunics.

  “Here,” she said, as she extended it toward him. “You will need it more than me.”

  He took the blanket and thanked her. Then she handed him her uneaten meal cake. He took that as well, stowed it in the pocket of his tunic and thanked her again. He stood up. They stared at each other for a long while, the only two people in the middle of the hall, the other colonists folded against the walls. An overwhelming feeling of pity came over Samuel. She was so close. He wished she could come with him right now. Yet something inside him told him that she was not yet ready to join him, that he must face this test alone.

  “I’ll be back soon,” he said. Only as the words escaped his lips did he envision what might happen after he discovered whatever was out there, and he realized that he really did intend to return to her no matter what happened. Penny bobbed her head and her lips quivered, and Samuel felt something inside his chest shudder. He put his hands on her shoulders and squeezed them firmly.

  “I will call you Penny,” he said, speaking her new name for the first time, “if you like it.”

  “I do like it,” she replied, and her face brightened to leave only the smallest trace of lingering shadow.

  Penny wrapped her arms around Samuel and pulled him close in an embrace, squeezing him as hard as she could. He wrapped his arms around her and squeezed back. Her neck smelled like the river at the first light of day, clean and still and shimmery in the early morning rays. She released him and nudged him toward the door.

  “You must leave now,” she said. “It is a long way to go.” She did not look at him.

  Samuel bowed his head and gathered his things. “Goodbye, Penny,” he said. “I will see you when I return.”

  “Goodbye.”

  He stepped outside and took his first steps into the snow and did not look back.

  * * *

  That had been some hours ago. The snowfall had continued, unabated, throughout the night and the drifts now rose almost to Samuel’s knees. The soft white layers had transformed the meadow and reminded him of the foam spurting from the hole in the meal hall floor. The thick snow smoothed the gentle rise and fall of the land and clung to the trees, the old, gnarled branches reborn in sheets of purest ivory. Samuel passed beyond the fence line. The extra poles hung, half-removed from their supports, wooden skeletons peeking through white funeral shrouds, buried and forgotten long ago. The sun had started its descent in the sky, invisible behind the dark clouds though it lent them a faint, smoky glow that extended from above Samuel’s head and out in the direction toward which he now walked. The snow had fallen, and continued to fall, over the meadow outside the fence as well, and over the mountains in the distance, covering much of the hard black rock in soft white folds, except for a few sharp streaks of ebony where the rock was too narrow to hold the fluffy powder and had sliced through the drifts.

  The bedding Samuel had wrapped around his body and feet was wet all the way through and he was soaked to the bone. He had long since
lost feeling in his face and toes. He kept his hands wrapped inside the blankets but his fingers tingled with the onset of numbness as well. Yet he pressed on. He still carried Penny’s morning meal in the pocket of his tunic, and though he was quite hungry, he was determined to save it as a reward to himself once he reached the mountains. He refused to stop now, banished from his mind any thought of turning back. He had come this far, and to go back now would not just be to admit defeat, but to resign himself, Penny and all the other colonists to a slow death in a cramped meal hall, trapped inside forever by the snow and cold. Besides, he had quickly learned he only grew colder as his pace slackened, and so he made every effort to move as fast as he could, straight as an arrow toward the black mountains and the pale gray sky.

  The afternoon wore on. Fatigue set in. Samuel pressed on, forgetting everything he had left behind him, his mind occupied only by a concerted resolve to ignore all thoughts of his painfully freezing body and focus on the sight of the ever-approaching mountains ahead. His stomach began to growl insistently. He thought about eating some of the meal cake, but he could not bring himself to expose his hands to the elements in order to raise the food to his mouth. Soon the old feeling of nausea returned and replaced the hunger in his stomach, though there were no colonists around this time to cause it. He shivered violently. The sun continued its descent in the sky and the faint glow behind the clouds settled over the mountains. The temperature continued to drop. In a few hours it would be night, and Samuel knew he must make the mountains soon after sunset, as he would not long survive the even more frigid chill of the darkness.