Leaving Marineris, Patrick Sean Lee [detective books to read TXT] 📗

He dreamt he’d been walking, which of itself was not so unusual, but this walk had taken him to a place that would remain in his head forever, like a spectacular scene from a movie.
He’d come upon an icy brook that flowed out of a bend in the red landscape, in a place he had never seen before. But that was the strange thing about it; he felt as though he had. Something about it was so familiar. On either mile-high bank an overgrowth of Columbines and St. Andrew’s Cross grew. Partridge Berry and broadleaf fern, with milk-green fronds swaying in the shadows and tangerine light. Cow wheat and Bush Clover. Wild Indigo. And amidst these, Aspen and Birch saplings that bent forward, just slightly, and waved their branches in the rise and fall of breezes that he could not feel. The brook seemed as though its source was the curl of the lush landscape, and not the distant mountains with snow-covered peaks far to the west behind them.
Night had fallen, but still he was warm. He glanced up. The sky above was blanketed with a million stars, pierced at odd intervals by meteors that looked to him like nocturnal spirits with flowing robes breaking into the black of the atmosphere. The smaller moon was near its zenith, brilliant white and full, and an owl—could it be an owl, really?—issued a melancholy call somewhere behind him. Before him, the brook seemed to make a kind of low music as it moved across rocks submerged in its path, or tapped at tendrils of the plants that dipped into it along the bank, and then were forced away. But the only music he could really hear was his uneven breathing. And yet, the air carried the scent of a hundred different flowers, and the sweet, pungent odor of decaying bark and leaves. All of this made him smile as he trudged forward.
At length Patterson sat down in a cleft of the cliff’s wall, in soft sand that gave beneath the fabric of his suit. He thought—he knew—he smelled clover. He blinked, and when his eyes opened again a young woman had suddenly appeared beside him. Her dark hair reflected the light of the moon, her cheek and the profile of her nose, ivory in its blush. She was young; much, much younger than he was, and she did not answer when he said hello. Her silence frustrated him, as he wanted to hear her voice, to see if it matched the low, imagined music of the brook, or the higher whissh

of the breeze through the trees. Or something else more beautiful. As beautiful as her face.
He said hello again, but she did not reply.
This uncomfortable stasis lasted for what seemed to him an eternity; the frozen dumbness that possessed her, and her presence beside him as though he wasn’t there at all. Finally she rose to her feet and brushed the folds of her skirt. She hesitated, lifting her face to the sky ablaze with light, moving her lips as if in prayer. Then when she had finished, she glanced down at Patterson and smiled before she turned and rose effortlessly into the night sky. He would not have minded if the whole of creation had vanished—but not her. How beautiful he had found the full view of her to be in this strange land. He knew her, but did not know from when or where. He meant to follow her, but he could not get to his feet, although he struggled. It

held him down, the sudden searing pain in his back. The withered, thin finger of something. Something strong and deadly, clawing at him, causing his vision to blur and his muscles to fail their commands.
She disappeared from view, a pinpoint now among the million stars into which she merged, leaving Patterson pinned to the sand.
“Wait! Hello!” His voice was cast back at him, a prisoner of the heavily insulated helmet that protected him.
But she did not hear him, or did not care, and then as the anguish inside him intensified, he was suddenly swept away behind her into blackness; naked, choking, freezing.
He woke.
He was home—well, only thirty-five million miles from Seattle, anyway. Ten months had passed, and for nine and a half of them he’d met her every night. At first in the sterile confines of the hold of Archimedes I, always without words. After the landing, at the pinnacle-edge of Olympus Mons, or in the canyons of Valles Marineris. Always just beyond the reach of his hand, though.
Patterson blinked again and again; lay silently in his bunk in the sleeping quarters of the five-man rover and looked blankly upward at the fading image of Maria Neris. The hum of the electric engine created a background metronomic lullabye. There was a sharp, quick rap on the styroprene door, and then it opened. A woman’s smiling face roused him. He turned his head.
Mission Psychologist Adrienne Tereston spoke in her velvety voice. “Good morning sunshine. How were the dreams?”
“Same one. Different locale. We were somewhere in Marineris again…only this time there were trees and flowers. I was dying, too.”
“Interesting,” she said, offering her usual non-analysis. “Just a dream. Hey, Cap wants you to get some breakfast, then suit up. He spotted something drifting upward along the cliff face, he thought. Wants you to go check it out. Said it looked kind of like two figures. One in…” she laughed. “…a dress, for God's sake. Guess we’re all

getting a little punchy, huh?”

Text: (c) Patrick Sean Lee, 2012
Editing: Self
Publication Date: 11-14-2012

All Rights Reserved

Dedication:
925 Words