NIGHT VOICES by Rob Smith 1 "Shrader!" shrieked a woman at a distance. Shrader swung around on his jet ski. The salt spray bit into his face as he sped forward. Ahead of him was a small flotilla of familiar sailboats. There was something unusual about their deck layouts, but Shrader was intent on pinpointing the origin of the desperate cry. He saw her. She was out on the bowsprit of the starboard most boat. Someone was moving toward her. It was a man, and there was a glint of steel in his hand. "Shrader!" came the cry again. He could not make out either person's identity. He gunned the jet ski toward the boats. He felt the power surging beneath him, but there was no sound from the engine. He raced forward, and then he woke up. Shrader Marks was in his hotel room in Orlando. It took a minute for his heart to stop pounding. This was the third time that he had dreamed the same sequence of events. He was a man who seldom dreamed, and never remembered those that did invade his sleep. He turned on the light and retrieved his watch from the bedside table. It was 3:45 a.m. Next to the watch was the envelope that contained the access card for his room. It was labeled Mark Shrader, a testimony to a common error that plagued his whole life. People seemed to have an aversion to hearing his name in the proper order, but his current and growing aversion was sleeping. He found himself fearing sleep or rather the prospect of dreaming the reoccurring nightmare. It was so vivid in his memory, and so troubling. That's what bothered him most. He could not understand the intensity that this dream worked in his gut. He loved the water. He loved sailing. Why was he seeing these images? And who were the people? Shrader sat up in bed and reached for the book on the night stand. It was Rupert Hartley's classic treatise on the Neolithic stone circles of Great Britain. As usual, he could not open the book without seeing the glances of his more literary friends who shunned his taste in reading. "How can you read a textbook for fun?" was at the center of their amusement. For that he had no good answer except that stone age culture was his passion, and non-fiction in that realm seemed more creative than sci-fi. Reading did not divert him from the memory of his dream. In his mind he started to relive the images. He looked closely at the line of sailboats. He could recognize their basic profiles. They looked like the common boats of the Great Lakes. There were the contemporary lines of the Harbor Bays and the classic lines of the Caledonian Cutters. If there was anything over forty feet in length, it could not have been too much larger. Most of them seemed in the thirty-two to forty foot range. The woman on the bowsprit must have been on one of the Harbor Bay thirty-eights. Who was she? Shrader tried to make her features look familiar. She could have been Cathy. He never could remember her last name. The marina people mostly knew each other by first names. It could have been her, but she and her husband, Phil, didn't sail a Bay. She didn't look the same. "Maybe it was the winter parka?" thought Shrader. It was the first time that the thought had come to his consciousness. The people on the boats were dressed for winter. He shrugged off the image and exchanged his book for the TV remote. He had already spent too much time on a crazy dream. He roved through the late-night channels, forwarding through one old movie after another until he found a news channel. He hated the repetitive sound-bites that passed for news, but he was looking for distraction and not current events. The newscaster was reporting on a gathering of geological scientists in Geneva, Switzerland who were discussing the ramifications of meteor strikes in relation to plate tectonics. The debate was considerably heated. Some suggested that volcanic eruptions could be triggered that would pour enough ash into the upper atmosphere to create a short-term ice age. Shrader's mind began to link the TV images with his book on the Neolithic period. He thought of the early maritime culture on the shores of Labrador. Soon his mind was drifting back to a time he'd imagined, when stone-age peoples lived on the edge of retreating glaciers. They traversed the North Atlantic in dugout canoes as they followed the migratory path the Great Auks moving toward their nesting grounds. It was an old image in Shrader's mind. One that, for an unknown reason, was comforting to a man who felt a kinship with the creatures of the sea. He fell asleep. "Shrader!" cried the same insistent voice from his dream. Behind closed eyelids Shrader fought back his terror. This time he would face his nightmare. He swung his jet ski around and raced toward the flotilla. They were familiar boats. All of them bore the NY numbers of their New York registry. But why were they here in the salt water? He scanned the decks and saw why the cabin trunks looked different. The ports were all covered with plywood. The people on deck were focused toward the woman who was calling to him. It was Cathy. Through the haze he could make out other winter-garbed shapes, but no faces. The others wore surgical masks. Before he could wonder, Shrader was choking. It was not haze that obstructed his vision. It was snowing ash. He could taste the sulfur in it. "Shrader, we need you now!" came a whole chorus of frantic voices. He tried to gun the engine of his jet ski, but the hand grips seemed to vaporize. Quickly he tightened his knees for balance. Instead of an engine's vibration against his thighs, he felt a heartbeat. Whatever he was riding, it was alive. The sound of that heartbeat echoed in his head until it pounded his brain to consciousness. He was back in his hotel, and it was the sound of his own racing heart that flooded the room. |
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