The Cave of the Winds
by Joanna GardnerCarlin stood on the mountainside and studied the cave entrance at her feet - a long, narrow slit of shadow between two sandstone slabs. Afternoon sun painted the stone gold, and scrub oak tufted through cracks in the shallow slope, the leaves buffed to green gloss by a summer rain the night before.
She was crazy, trying to end the dream this way. Or stupid. Or both. Despair hitched in her throat like a hook. This couldn't possibly work, but she was too tired to think of anything else to do. She lowered herself into the cave, turning sideways so her hips would fit, the weight of her body pressing her palms into the mountain's gritty skin.
Inside, she stepped out of the sun and glanced over her shoulder at what was now the exit. The beam of sunlight seemed as solid as a pillar, as though it held the outside world aloft. She walked away from it into the cave.
Before long she'd left the light behind and entered darkness so complete she could almost feel it on her tongue, as solid and impassive as onyx. Was it watching her, observing her awkwardness and misery, how she tested her weight on every step before moving forward, how her shoulders brushed the walls on both sides?
She'd heard about the cave in the waking world, as well as in the dream. A hiker had died here and hadn't been found for weeks. A woman on the run had vanished inside, but no search had found her. And legends told of tribes in the area long ago who had used it as an entrance to the underworld. Carlin imagined she could feel the presences which had woven themselves into the mineral lattice of the stone's memory now weaving into her.
When the dream began, years ago now, it had been just a blur of blind anxiety that she had never connected with the cave. Only recently had the dream become more clear, its focus tightening on the presence of a real place, one she knew. And then she and Ty had split. She could still see him sitting cross-legged on the living room floor that final night, elbows on his knees and his forehead resting on his palms.
"You know what?" he'd said, and then raised his face to look at her. "It's your call. Either way is fine with me."
She had erupted, naturally, and that had been that. She still couldn't understand his apparent shock at her reaction. How could she stay with a man who didn't care whether she did or not? Part of her still simmered though she also sometimes wondered if it might have been worth compromising for a man who could break up without holding a grudge. And if the problem really had been him, why was he living in New Zealand now, as he'd always wanted to, while she vacuumed the same house, drove to the same job, and dreamed the same nightmare? The nightmare where curved needles dug into the ball of her foot. Where a wild man sawed her spine with a serrated knife. Where a silk dress stood upright and empty on a lawn with a breeze tugging at its skirt. And now, the dream had begun demanding her presence at the Cave of the Winds, ten miles outside town. Every morning she woke more weary than she had gone to sleep.
She shuffled through the darkness until at last she reached a wall. She knelt, groping. Beside her knees, her fingers touched water colder than she'd thought possible, as though the temperature had dropped so far so fast that the molecules hadn't had time to organize into ice and had instead plunged into a new phase of matter, liquid colder than snow.
She rubbed her hands on her jeans and sat beside the pool, her back against the back of the cave. Nothing to do but wait, she supposed. For what, she hadn't any idea. A drip splashed with an echo that rippled up and down her neck.
Before long, Carlin could no longer tell where she ended and darkness began. The speaking breeze was the first indication that time hadn't stopped altogether.
You're here.
It sounded like a dozen voices speaking in sync, a chorus riding a breath of wind that felt her face like a hand. But this wasn't a dream. The sensations were too sharp, too precise, like the hollow feeling in her neck and the scuttling on her skin, a hundred unreal spiders fanning out from the base of her spine. Then she realized she was expected to reply.
"I am." Her voice sounded shrill.
Will you pay the price?
"What price?"
Three unseens.
Her eyes strained against the darkness. "I don't understand."
The wind withdrew up the cave and then rushed back, streaming her hair away from her face.
Invisibles. What you can't touch. Like a memory.
"You want to take a memory from me?"
Yes.
She groped through the murk of her past but couldn't remember anything cohesive, not from childhood, nor from school, not even from the years with Ty. Was there anything worth keeping in that fog?
"Which one? How do I give it to you?"
We choose, and you let us.
"What if I say no?"
We keep reaching for you. Keep calling you.
That meant the dream.
"Then I allow it."
The hand of wind pushed her face and was suddenly behind her skin, an ice pack moving past sinuses and skull and into her brain. The chill filled her head, started down her neck, and withdrew the way it had come, leaving a vanishing impression of winter rain and lapis lazuli.
The voice made a noise, a croon as though cradling an infant, and then it spoke again.
A breath for us.
Air swirled around her head, elbows, shoulders, ribs, then gathered at her sternum and touched her skin, like a frozen face kissing her chest. The follicles on her scalp tightened, and the organs in her abdomen shifted. A missing memory was one thing, but what would it mean to let this wind interrupt her lungs? Her hands went to her chest.
"What will it be like? Will I pass out? Or die?"
Surely you have one breath to spare.
Possibly. But she had to end the dream. She leaned back, bracing against the rock.
"Yes."
The wind assembled at her chest again and was through her skin, through her ribs and swelling to fill her thorax. She drew in air, as much as she could, felt it fill her mouth and throat and then the wind intercepted it and raced away.
Starbursts exploded in her vision against the blackness of the cave, chilled crystals of amethyst and amber. Her ribs seemed to sink in on themselves as she sucked at the air. She heaved again, and again, and at last life entered her empty lungs.
The voice wound around what it had taken, then rolled away, somersaulting up the cave.
Carlin knelt beside the pool and splashed icy water over her face. The cave had taken a memory and a breath, and she was all right. Fatigue frayed the seams of her consciousness, but she could do this. Whatever else the wind wanted she would give.
Ready?
This time the voice went through her, vibrating in the root of her tongue.
"What would you like?"
Don't be afraid. Just one, that's all.
She sat up straighter. "Afraid? One what?"
One climax.
"What do you mean?" Then she understood. "An orgasm?"
Yes, orgasm, climax. The words jostled each other.
She held her hands out, warding the wind away.
"Surely something else would work. Strength, from a muscle? Or touch, like the feel of rock." She flattened one palm against the wall. "Or taste. Orange, or salt."
No. The wind rose. A climax.
"But..." There wasn't a pleasant way to say this, not to herself, not to doctors, not even to a disembodied breeze in a lightless cave. "I haven't ever had one. I don't think I have any to give." The words hovered in the air like invisible shards of glass. "But if you find one you can have it."
The wind fingered her skin. Air pressed against her as though it had a body, its chest against hers. Her abdomen clenched and then the wind was within her, cold and groping.
She felt a pull and then pain, like flesh ripping in her gut, but she held back her cry. Her pulse beat in her belly, lashing at the inflamed nerves as the wind swept away. She slumped forward, arms holding her stomach.
We found one.
"Congratulations," she panted.
Are you afraid of it?
A vision of the stunted thing flashed into her mind. Clay-skinned, as though locked too long in a basement. Purple shadows cutting caverns around sunken, bloodshot eyes. Tiny pointed teeth. A spitting hiss.
"Yes." She lay on her side, face pressed against the stone floor. She felt slack and useless, like an old rubber band.
What would you like us to do with it?
Drown it, throttle it, lock it up. "Whatever you want."
The wind wrung in on itself and whooshed away.
"What about the dream?" she called after it.
Then the wind was there again. It flipped her onto her back.
We're returning this, it said from between her thighs.
"What?" She curled over, pressed her legs together. "No!"
Stop that. Do you want to keep the dream?
"No. Keep that - that thing, and take the dream too."
You take this, and we'll take the dream.
"But I have to give three unseens. I can't take one back."
Our rules, not yours. We can change them.
She bit her lower lip. Be stalked by the nightmare, or let the lunatic wind back inside? Her abdomen still throbbed.
"All right," she whispered. She sat up.
And there was the wind, cold between her legs and reaching up, cold there too, and then - a flood of fire, a lava tsunami, a wet inferno that washed away the earlier pain. Carlin let out a sound and her hands went to her secret place, trying to wrap like the wind around the cataclysm.
Her bones seemed to ripple inside her - vertebrae rising from a pelvis and supporting a skull, arms hanging from their shoulder girders, thighs connecting to knees, ankles and feet. The foundation, the support structure, that which would remain after muscle and sinew fell away. She had never sensed herself in three dimensions before, only as a flat creature, a photograph, a reflection in a darkened window.
And for the dream, drink from the pool.
"That's it?"
That's it.
The pool. Its image formed in her mind: perfectly round edges and the water gleaming silver, as though in moonlight.
She knelt again and cupped her hands. Her thighs trembled as she raised the water to her mouth. She knew even before it touched her tongue that it would taste of glacier and granite, and that its arctic progress would course down her throat, seep into her tissues, and enter the lattice of her body like filaments of liquid quartz.
©Joanna Gardner
Joanna Gardner lives in New Mexico with two dogs and one husband. Her work has appeared in Reflection's Edge, The Rose and Thorn, Rosebud, and others. You can visit her online at www.joannagardner.com.