The ghosts of Nekhuan (Story)

The plains of Nekhuan are only bearable in broad daylight. Under the pale sun of its long summers, Nekhuan is the vision of paradise with its vibrant greens and the golden wheat crops, undisturbed but by the fluttering of butterfly wings and the song of its little red birds, so unafraid of men they’ll eat from the palm of their hands.
The dimming colors of dusk paint the fields a spectral blue, iridescent in the conflicting light of its twin moons. The clear blue sky barely tinged by the purple glow of the setting sun looks so much like home, but the people don’t dare to linger outside in the evening. They have learned to fear what comes next, when the sky turns gray and the whispers start.
In the beginning, there were those who thought it’s the wind sweeping in from the distant hills. Others blamed the disturbing sounds on the the southern sea. It must be the contradicting influence of the twin moons, pushing and pulling at the waves trying to gain the shore that is suddenly out of reach. The waves swell to make their final move, only to be pushed backwards and the noises they hear are just waterwalls crushing on themselves.
All that was before the incident with John Bercow, the young engineer with a passion for poetry, who’d trade the safety of the colony for a walk in the moonlights. He never read them anything he wrote, but you could see in his haunted eyes the struggles of an artist soul trapped in a world that had no time for fancy words and crafted rhymes. It is precisely because he was already weird that no one noticed the signs. There were no trained psychologists among them, but even so someone should have noticed when he started shunning their company, spending every free minute furiously scribbling in the notebook that he always carried in the breast pocket. But they were all so overworked in the early days, people tended to mind their own business. To do otherwise would only invite more problems that needed to be solved. If John would rather spend the nights wandering around, let him.

They realized something was deeply wrong when John was too far gone. He was supposed to compile a simple spare parts request to be sent back to Earth, but the papers they found on his desk were full of squiggles intermingled with nightmarish non-human faces, like so many characters from a horror comic with terrible threats floating over their heads. Of John Bercow there was no trace, not in headquarters, nor in his room, where they found even more sheets of paper covered with the visions of terror. When they found him eventually, he was hiding in a closet, sitting in a corner with the notebook in his lap. Still drawing. Making the same strange noise the fields made every night. Or at least trying to. He sounded like an owl, a mad one that would not stop hooting as no one answers its call.
They gave him a sedative, hoping he’d back to his old self when he woke up. Later on, they’d blame each other for not locking his door, but who would have thought the friend they’d known since the training days at the space center, the nice guy they trusted with their lives, for on the outpost of Nekhuan you relied on all the others to watch your back, who would have thought that he’ d run away into the night drawn to the ghostly voices as a moth to the flame. They found him after two days, lying dead in an irrigation ditch. Curled in a ball, with his eyes squeezed shut and his hands gripping at his ears so tight there was blood under his fingernails. Hank Sanders, the team’s medical officer lacked the means to perform an autopsy, but something told him even he could have he wouldn’t have found anything.
Can you die of terror, they wondered. Why not?
The protocol was changed after the tragic incident and all doors were to be locked at night. They couldn’t afford to lose another man, as there wasn’t going to be another team coming from Earth for another 12 months, at least.
Things were good for a while. The crops turned out better than expected and there nothing to prevent the establishment of a larger colony. Two, maybe three thousand people could move to Nekhuan as soon as the techies on Earth figured out a way to transport so many people to the farthest corner of the galaxy. Maybe send some experts to unravel the mystery of the spooky sounds, too.
Only the ghosts of Nekhuan would not have their secrets exposed. Not by some yet-to-be-seen experts, not by little Sarah Miles, who spent many hours every night engrossed in calculations, trying to verify any theory that crossed her pretty head. It was none of her business, she was just a biologist whose main task was to analyze soil, quality of crops, purity of air, tedious jobs that would never bring her the recognition she craved. The more she searched for an answer, the more she became convinced it wasn’t the waves or the wind, not even singing rocks that contract in the cool night air. Someone or something was making those noises purposefully. A message or a warning, but definitely rational. If she could solve the enigma, she’d be hailed as a hero and she’d surely get a promotion, maybe even commanding officer.
She was inviting trouble upon herself and the ghosts were happy to oblige. It wasn’t hard since she left the window open at night, there were no rules against t that, again an oversight, but who’d be so crazy as to voluntarily subject themselves to the terror that lurked in the dark that is never really quite dark on Nekhuan.
Sarah grew convinced that whatever it was, it was speaking to her. After a while, she knew they were calling out her name. It came out weird, like someone struggling to pronounce a word in a foreign tongue, but they were calling her. ‘Sa-raah!, Sa-raah!’
It seemed to be coming from the hill where the transmitter was, but she wasn’t stupid, she wasn’t going to die like Bercow. She’ll go in the morning, when there’s nothing to fear. If there’s something strange there, any clue to the origin of the sounds, she’ll find it.

(To be continued)

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