The Forbidden Circle Read online

  Toward the end of the second day he found a few withered fruits clinging to a gnarled tree. They looked and tasted like apples, dry and hard but edible; he ate most of them and gathered the last few to be eaten later. He felt miserably frustrated. Probably there were other edibles all around him, everything from the bark of certain trees to the mushrooms or fungi he found growing on fallen wood. The trouble was that he couldn’t tell the wholesome food plants from the deadly poisonous ones, and therefore he was only tantalizing himself by thinking about it.

  Late that night, as he was searching for a windbreak in which to sleep, snow began to fall again, with a strange and persistent steadiness that made him uneasy. He had heard about the blizzards of the hills, and the thought of being caught out in one, without food or protective clothing or shelter, scared him out of his wits. Before long the snow became so heavy that he could hardly see his hand before his face, and his shoes were wet through and caked with the cold and gluey mass.

  I’m finished, he thought grimly. I was finished when the plane crashed, only I didn’t have the sense to know it.

  The only chance I had—the only chance I ever had—was good weather, and now that’s broken.

  The only thing that made sense now was to pick out a comfortable place, preferably out of the damned wind that howled like a lost thing around the rocky crags above him, lie down, make himself comfortable, and fall asleep in the snow. That would be the end of it all. Considering how deserted this part of the world looked, it was likely to be so many years before anyone stumbled over his body, that no one would be able to tell whether he was a Terran or a native of this planet.

  Damn that wind! It howled like a dozen wind machines, like a chorus of lost souls out of Dante’s Inferno. There was a curious illusion in the wind. It sounded as if, very far away, someone was calling his name.

  Andrew Carr! Andrew Carr!

  It was an illusion, of course. No one within three hundred miles of this place even knew he was here, except maybe the ghostly girl he had seen when the plane crashed. If she was actually within three hundred miles of this place. And of course he had no idea if she actually knew his name, or not. Damn the girl, anyway, if she even existed. Which he doubted.

  Carr stumbled and fell full length into the deepening snow. He started to rise, then thought, Oh, hell, what’s the use, and let himself fall forward again.

  Someone was calling his name.

  Andrew Carr! Come this way, quickly! I can show you the way to shelter, but more I cannot do. You must take your own way there.

  He heard himself say fretfully, against the dim voice that was like an echo inside his mind, “No. I’m too tired. I can’t go any farther.”

  “Carr! Raise your eyes and look at me!”

  Resentfully, shielding his eyes against the howling wind and the sharp needles of the snow, Andrew Carr braced himself with his palms and looked up. He already knew what he would see.

  It was the girl, of course.

  She wasn’t really there. How could she be there, wearing a thin blue gown that looked like a torn nightdress, barefoot, her hair not even blowing in the bitter snow-laden wind?

  He heard himself say aloud—and heard the words ripped by the wind from his mouth and carried away, so that the girl could not possibly have heard them from ten feet away, “What are you doing now? Are you really here? Where are you?”

  She said precisely, in that low-pitched voice which seemed always to carry just to his ear and not an inch farther, “I do not know where I am, or I would not be there, since it is nowhere I wish to be. The important thing is that I know where you are, and where the only place of safety is for you. Follow me, quickly! Get up, you fool, get up!”

  Carr stumbled to his feet, clutching his coat about him. She stood, it seemed, about eight feet ahead of him in the storm. She was still clad in the flimsy and torn nightdress, but although her bare feet and shoulders gleamed palely through the rents in the garment, she did not seem to be shivering at all.

  She beckoned—now that she knew she had his attention, it seemed, she would not waste any more effort trying to make herself heard—and began to walk lightly across the snow. Her feet, he noticed with a weird sense of unreality, were not quite touching the ground. Yeah, that figures, if she’s a ghost.

  Head down, he stumbled after the retreating figure of the girl. The wind tore at his coat, sent it flapping out wildly behind him. His shoes were thick, half-frozen lumps of wet snow, and his hair and the stubble of beard were icy streaks of roughness against his face. Now that the snow had obscured the ground to even whiteness, covering the lumps and shadows, two or three times he tripped over some hidden root or unseen chuckhole, and measured his length on the ground; but each time he struggled up and followed the shadow ahead of him. She had saved his life once before. She must know what she’s doing.

  It seemed a very long time that he floundered and stumbled in the snow, although he thought afterward that it was probably not more than three-quarters of an hour, before he blundered full into what felt like a brick wall. He put out his hand, incredulous.

  It was a brick wall. Or, anyway, it felt like one. It felt like the side of a building, and feeling about a little, he found a door which was made of placed wood, worn smooth, and fastened with stiff leather straps, hauled through a rough-cut wooden latch, and knotted. It took him some time to tease the wet leather knot apart, and he finally had to take off his gloves and fumble with stiff bare fingers which were blue and bleeding by the time the knot finally yielded. The door creaked open and Carr cautiously stepped inside. For all he knew he might have found light, fire, and people sitting around a supper table; but the place was dark and cold and deserted. But not half as cold as the outdoors, and at least it was dry. There was something like straw on the floor, and the dim light of reflected snow from outside showed him vague shapes that might have been cattle stanchions, or furniture. He had no way of making a light, but it was so quiet that he knew neither the animals which had once been stabled here, nor their keepers, still inhabited the place.

  Once again the girl had led him to safety. He sank down on the mercifully dry floor, scooped a comfortable place in the straw, took off his sopping wet shoes, dried his chilled and numb feet on the straw, and lay down to sleep. He looked around for the ghostly form of the girl who had guided him here, but as he had expected, she was gone.

  He woke, hours later, out of the deep sleep of exhaustion, to a raging snow-whitened world, a howling inferno of blowing sleet and ice battering against the building where he lay. But enough light filtered through the heavily fastened wooden shutters so that he could see the inside of the building where he lay: empty except for the thick straw and the uprights of stanchions. It smelled, very faintly, of long-dried animal dung, a sharp but not unpleasant pungency.

  In the far corner was a dark mass of something, which he curiously explored. He found a few rags of strangely fashioned clothing. One, a warm, blanketlike cloak of ragged and faded tartan cloth, he took to wrap himself in. Under the heaped clothing—which was ragged but, because of the dryness of the building, untouched by mold or mildew—he found a heavy chest fastened shut with a hasp, but not locked. Opening it, he discovered food; forgotten, or most likely left over for another herding season by the keepers of whatever strange beasts had once been kept here. There was a form of dried bread—actually more like hardtack or crackers—wrapped in oiled paper. There was some leathery unrecognizable stuff which he finally decided must be dried meat; but neither his teeth nor his palate could cope with it. Some pasty, fragrant stuff reminded him of peanut butter, and it went well on the hardtack, made of crushed seeds or nuts with dried fruit mashed up in it. There was some kind of dried fruit, but it, too, was so hard that, although it smelled good, he decided it would need a good long soak in water, preferably hot water, before approaching anything like edibility.

  He satisfied his hunger with the hardtack and the nut-and-fruit-butter paste, and after hunting around, di
scovered a crude water tap that ran into a basin, apparently for watering the beasts. He drank, and splashed a little cold water on his face. It was far too cold for any more meticulous washing, but he felt better even for that much. Then, wrapped in the tartan blanket, he explored the place end to end. He was much relieved, when he found the final convenience, a crude earth-closet latrine roughly enclosed at the far end. He had not relished the thought of either venturing out into the storm, even for a moment, or of defiling the place against the possible future return of its owners. It crossed his mind that the conveniences, and the stored provisions, must have been provided against just such blizzards as this, when neither man nor beast could live without some shelter.

  So this world was not only inhabited, it was civilized, at least after a fashion. All the comforts of home, he thought, returning to his bed of piled straw. Now all he had to do was to wait out the blizzard.

  He was so weary, after days of climbing and walking, and so warm in the thick blanket, that he had no trouble at all in falling asleep again. When he woke again, the light was declining, and the noise of the storm was lessening a little. He guessed, by the gathering darkness, that he had slept most of the day away.

  And it’s early fall. What must it be like here in the winter? This planet might make a great winter-sports resort, but it’s not fit for anything else. I pity the people who live here!

  He made another meager meal of hard crackers and fruit-and-nut paste (good enough, but boring for a regular diet), and because it was too cold and dark to do anything else, he wrapped himself up again, and stretched out in the straw.

  He had slept his fill, and he was no longer cold, nor very hungry. It was too dark to see much, but there was not a great deal to see in any case. He thought randomly, Too bad I’m not a trained xenologist. No Terran has ever been let loose on this world before. He knew there were skilled sociologists and anthropologists who, with the artifacts he had seen (and eaten), could skillfully analyze the exact level of this planet’s culture, or at least of those people who lived in this area. The sturdy brick or stone walls, squarely mortared together, the cattle stanchions constructed of wood and nailed together with wooden pegs, the water tap of hardwood which ran into a stone basin, the unglazed windows covered only with tight wooden shutters, said one thing about the culture: it went with the fence rails and the rude earth-closet latrine, a low-level agricultural society. Yet he wasn’t sure. This was, after all, a herdsman’s shelter, a bad-weather retreat for emergencies, and no civilization wasted much technical accomplishment on them. There was also the kind of sophisticated foresight which built such things at all, and stocked them with imperishable food, against need, even guarding against the need to go out momentarily for calls of nature. The blanket was beautifully woven, with a craftsmanship rare in these days of synthetics and disposable fabrics. And so he realized that the people of this planet might be far more civilized than he thought.

  He shifted his weight on the crackling straw, and blinked, for the girl was there again in the darkness. She was still wearing the torn, thin blue dress that gleamed with a pale, icelike glitter in the dimness of the dark barn. For a moment, even though he still half believed that she was a hallucination, he could not help saying aloud, “Aren’t you cold?”

  It is not cold where I am.

  This, Carr told himself, was absolutely freaky. He said slowly, “Then you’re not here?”

  How could I be where you are? If you think I am there—no, here—try to touch me.

  Hesitantly, Carr stretched out his hand. It seemed that he must touch her bare round arm, but there was nothing palpable to the touch. He said doggedly, “I don’t understand any of this. You’re here, and you’re not here. I can see you, and you’re a ghost. You say your name is Callista, but that’s a name from my own world. I still think I’m crazy, and I’m talking to myself, but I’d love to know how you can explain any of this.”

  The ghost-girl made a sound that was like soft childlike laughter. “I do not understand it either,” she said quietly. “As I tried to tell you before, it was not you I attempted to reach but my kinswoman and my friends. But wherever I search, they are not there. It is as if their minds had been wiped off this world. For a long time I wandered around in dark places, until I found myself looking into your eyes. It seemed that I knew you, even though my eyes had never looked on you before. And then, something in you kept drawing me back. Somewhere, not in this world at all, we have touched one another. I am nothing to you, but I had brought you into danger, so I sought to save you. And I come back because”—for a moment it seemed that she was about to weep—“I am very much alone, and even a stranger is better than no companion. Do you want me to go away again?”

  “No,” Carr said quickly, “stay with me, Callista. But I don’t understand this at all.”

  She was silent for a minute, as if considering. God, Carr thought, how real she seems. He could see her breathing, the faint rise and fall of her chest beneath the thin, torn dress. One of her feet was smudged: no, bruised and reddened and bloodstained. Carr said, “Are you hurt?”

  “Not really. You asked me how I could be there with you. I suppose you know that we live in more than one way, and that the world you are in now is the solid world, the world of things, the world of hard bodies and physical creations. But in the world where I am, we leave our bodies behind like outgrown clothing or cast snake-skins, and what we call place has no real being. I am used to that world, I have been trained to walk in it, but somehow I am being kept in a part of it where no other of my people’s minds may touch. As I wandered in that gray and featureless plain, your thoughts touched mine and I felt you clearly, like hand clasping hand in the darkness.”

  “Are you in darkness?”

  “Where my body is being kept, I am in darkness, yes. But in the gray world, I can see you, even as you can see me. That is how I saw your flying machine crash and knew it would fall into the ravine. And I saw you lost in the snowstorm and I knew you were near to this herdsman’s hut. I came here now to show you where food was kept if you had not found it.”

  “I found it,” Carr said. “I don’t know what to say. I thought you were a dream and you’re acting as if you were real.”

  It sounded again like soft laughter. “Oh, I assure you, I am just as real and solid as you are yourself. And I would give a great deal to be with you in that cold, dark herdsman’s hut, since it is only a few miles from my home, and as soon as the storm subsides I could be free and by my own fireside. But I—”

  In the middle of a word, she was abruptly gone, winked out like a breath. For some strange reason this did more to convince Carr of her reality than anything she had said. If he’d been imagining her, if his subconscious mind had hallucinated her, as men cold and alone and in danger did hallucinate strangers from their deepest wishes, he’d have kept her there; he’d at least have let her finish what she was saying. The fact that she’d vanished in the middle of a phrase tended to indicate not only that she had really been there, in some intangible sense, but that some unknown third party had a superior power over her comings and goings.

  She was frightened, and she was sad. I am very much alone, and even a stranger is better than no companion.

  Cold and alone on a strange and unfamiliar world, Andrew Carr could understand that very well. It was just about the way he felt himself.

  Not that she’d be all that bad as a companion, if she were really here. . . .

  Not a great deal of satisfaction out of a companion you can’t touch. And yet . . . even though he couldn’t lay a hand on her, there was something surprisingly compelling about the girl.

  He’d known lots of women, at least in the Biblical sense. Known their bodies and a little about their personalities, and what they wanted out of life. But he’d never got close enough to any one of them that he felt bad when the time came for them to go off in opposite directions.

  Let’s face it. From the minute I saw this girl in the crystal,
she’s been so real to me that I was willing to turn my whole life around, just on the off chance that she was something more than a dream. And now I know she’s real. She’s saved my life once: no, twice. I wouldn’t have lasted long out in that blizzard. And she’s in trouble. They’re keeping her in the dark, she says, and she doesn’t even know for sure where she is.

  If I come out of this alive, I’m going to find her, if it takes me the rest of my life. Lying wrapped in his fur coat and blanket, in a musty heap of straw, alone on a strange world, Carr suddenly realized that the change in his life, the change that had begun when he saw the girl in the crystal and had thrown over his job and his life to stay on her world, was complete. He had found his new direction, and it led toward the girl. His girl. His woman, now and for the rest of his life. Callista.

  He was cynic enough to jeer a little at himself. Yeah. He didn’t know where she was, who she was, or what she was; she might be married with six children (well, hardly, at her age); she might be a ghastly bitch—who knew what women were like on this world? All he knew about her was . . .