A Hidden Place (22 page)

“You’ve seen this kind of thing before,” Travis said.

Bone did not respond, only stared. Travis took it for a kind of assent.

They crouched, hidden, and listened to the snap of gunshots. Travis glanced periodically at Bone, who seemed wreathed with a fire of his own, a flickering aura,- but it cast no shadows in the darkness beneath the trees and Travis guessed another man might see nothing at all. When the shouting died away and the gunshots ceased Travis and Bone moved closer, Travis imbued with a sense of deep foreboding: now there had been violence, now some invisible border had been passed.

The hobo jungle was in embers. There was no one left here … only the body of a black man Travis had known very slightly, Harley was his name; Harley was dead from a gunshot wound to the back. Travis knelt over the body. He could not bring himself to touch it: a revulsion, not at death, but at his own utter helplessness. I knew this man, he thought.

Bone watched him kneeling … and after a moment Bone extended his arm and touched him.

Visions ran like a river between them. Travis fell back under the assault of the projected memories. This was Bone, he thought dazedly: Bone had seen too many places like this, an ocean of them; had seen men burned, beaten, trampled under foot. The cavalcade of images was stunning, faces and bodies like schools of fish. Travis gazed up in awe at that pale skull of a face. He is the ultimate exile, he thought, king of exiles; and he felt all the fists that had pummeled him, all the blows and curses; saw Deacon and Archie bent over him, then Deacon with a pistol in his hand and Archie dead beside him; he saw the railroad cops gather about Bone in a ring and felt what Bone had felt as he struck out and sent them whirling into the chaos that separates spacetime from spacetime….

“Christ Almighty,” Travis whispered. “You can do that? You can really do that?”

Bone stood erect. His aura deepened. His eyes were squeezed shut, his face disguised beneath his own cold illumination. Sweet Jesus, Travis thought, he
could
be me: the lines of his face rippled like a reflection in deep water. Travis turned away, gasping. So little of humanity left in this creature….

Your own deepest, hidden face.
Was that possible? Maybe so: Bone and the Pale Woman both inside him, Janus-faced, calling over the gaps and chasms of him toward some unimaginable union—

But that made him think of Anna, and of Nancy, and of where the vigilantes might have gone from here. He made himself stand up. “Bone, follow me,” he said.

Bone stepped forward and stumbled. The leg wound, Travis thought: this tremendous energy faltering, the human fraction of him too close to death.

No longer as frightened as he was, Travis put his arm around the alien and the two of them loped eastward, ludicrous in the moonlight, along the frozen bank of the river.

T
he interior of the switchman’s shack was full of radiance, the human parts of Anna hidden beneath this amorphous glow. What remained of the alien woman’s human disguise was so diminished— though still in its fragile way beautiful—that Nancy felt frightened. She thought: in a way I
am
in the wilderness. The wilderness was where you confronted the basic things, Nancy thought, life and death, and here she was, approaching a strange wasteland, face-to-face with Anna’s transformation. There had been nothing in her life to prepare her for this. She was out here all by herself. Out here in the wilderness.

Travis must be near, she thought. Travis and Bone. She risked a glance at Anna—that inhumanly white body in its nexus of glow—and shivered. Maybe Travis had been right all along, there was nothing human in the motivation of these creatures; maybe she had been used … and, used, would be discarded. There wasn’t Anna’s liquid voice to reassure her now. Only a kind of faith. Faith and kinship.

The night was very dark. Please Travis, she thought, please hurry up.

Outside, in the darkness, an automobile engine murmured and stopped … a door slammed shut. Nancy gasped at the sound of it.

“Anna! Anna, wake up, somebody’s here—!”

Anna’s eyes sprang open, but the pupils had eclipsed the whites; blue fire seemed to coalesce into fibrous wings behind her, and she showed no sign of human comprehension.

As they moved along the riverbank Travis supported the alien man’s weight, which was negligible.

He must be hollow-boned, Travis thought, like a bird. But he guessed it was only the shedding of this human skin. The strange light burned brightly about him, and Travis, touching him, was strangely affected by it; the night had come alive with phantom shapes and colors. He sensed dizzily the truth of what Anna had told him: there were worlds within worlds, kinds and shapes of worlds which coexisted with this one, infinitely layered and infinitely complex. He concentrated on following the riverbank by starlight, step by step, frightened that he might lose his way. A misstep, Travis thought, and we could tumble off the Earth altogether.

Bone was dying or coming to life—as much one thing as the other, so far as Travis could tell. Certainly this physical part of him was very weak. Bone could not nave come this distance without Travis’s help. But the alien part of Bone seemed to be growing steadily stronger, as if the proximity to Anna were feeding him … we must be a beacon light, Travis thought, down here along the riverbed. Thin shales of ice had formed in the hollows of the ground, and Travis saw his own reflection in them and Bone’s, luminous against the starry sky and almost too strange to bear. In some way, he thought, Bone had become very powerful indeed.

“Just a little farther,” Travis said. He was not sure the alien understood him. It was a reassurance as much for himself as for Bone. “Just a little farther now.” The place where Bone had struck him was throbbing and it pained him when he breathed; Bone lurched against him and Travis bit his lip to keep from crying out. One step at a time, he thought. Steady.

In some way, Travis thought, he
is
me. Ugly, outcast, betrayed. That ravaged face, these wounds. And I am bearing him toward a healing I cannot share. For me no Pale Woman…. But there was no such creature, Anna had said, among humankind; Anna herself was a freak, a kind of monster, as Bone was a monster; human beings, she had said, carried such monsters inside themselves always, estranged or buried, despised and unforgiven….

Walk, he thought. Just walk. The brittle reeds snapped beneath his feet. He looked up, and the stars seemed to dance about him like fireflies. But then, he thought, some conciliation
is
possible, must be: himself finding and forgiving himself, chasms mended, old wounds healed—

Just walk, he thought.

Landmarks were difficult to follow in this light. He recognized the steeple of the train station and then, it seemed only a moment later, the stand of box elders surrounding the meadow where the switchman’s shack stood. “Up here,” he told Bone. “Up the riverbank. I guess we made it.”

Travis scrabbled up the hard-packed mud with Bone beside him. So close now, he thought. So close. But at the top of the river’s gentle slope he paused.

The moon had set, but in the starlight—and a gentler illumination that seemed to emanate from Bone, from the shack, from the meadow itself—he was able to see the black sedan parked in the dark of the trees and the men who climbed out of it.

“Bone,” he said tentatively—

But Bone stood straight up, his weakness and his humanity both blasted away in a sudden and apocalyptic burst of blue light; across the meadow six figures approached the switchman’s shack and Bone, watching them, roared out his pain and indignation.

He had seen them before. He knew what they were. Bone flew across the meadow on a whirlwind of strange energies, his humanity fading like firefly light: These were killers, murderers, the same cruel species he had seen so often in the railyards; but now the Other was close, he must not let them threaten her. This new part of him, not human, was hugely strong, and Bone abandoned himself to it.

They were his enemies. They would fall. He felt the lightless flames that danced at his fingertips and thought: They must.

It was his last human thought.

Creath, climbing out of the car in the silent meadow, felt his legs begin to buckle beneath him. It was dark here, past midnight now, the possibility of murder all too imminent: it was written in these men, in their grim intensity. Maybe they were not murderers by nature—if there was such a thing—but they had sundered, this night, all their daylight inhibitions. This was their Halloween, their bacchanalia. And Clawson was no longer the focus; Clawson had subtly deferred to Greg Morrow, who more precisely embodied the spirit of the adventure. It was Greg who had committed the boldest transgression. It was Greg who had murdered a man.

“Quiet now,” Greg Morrow said as the five men formed up behind him. Only rifles tonight, no torches. “They are out here. I’m sure of it.”

“Fornicators and adulterers,” Clawson said, as if to reassure himself.

“Worse than that,” Greg murmured. And periodically he turned his eyes toward Creath, as if to say: I did not plan this. Some wild trajectory has carried us all here. But it is right and just and—Creath saw this in his eyes—a fitting culmination.

Greg Morrow, Creath saw, was not wholly sane. But, he thought, Christ, which of us is? Which of us out here in the darkness?

They crept through the trees. Creath felt his own cold sweat breaking out on his forehead. He shivered with it. There was frost on everything, a starry glittering. Winter cutting close. And he thought: well, what if she
is
here? What then?

There was no answer in him. He felt the heft of the rifle in his hand. But all these other men had rifles, too.

Greg bulled ahead to this pathetic tumbledown shack, the place where the half-crazed railway switchman Colliuto’ had lived until some kids found him dead of exposure back in the spring of ‘25. The years and the weather had not been kind to the place. Slat walls, tar-paper roof, a hole up top, where a stovepipe might once have exited, plugged now with a bird’s nest of hard mud and prairie grass. Cold and filthy inside there, Creath thought. Surely it could not be occupied—but a faint light leaked through the wallboards.

Greg, with that crazy flushed grin fixed in place, kicked through the door. It fell away like pasteboard before him. Dust billowed up. The men pressed closer and then, in the eerie blue light, fell back.

Creath felt his neck hairs standing erect.

The thing in there craned its head to gaze at him. A lifetime of religious fears made him step away in deference. These other men shrieked out their dismay … but it is only the natural culmination, Creath thought wildly, the reasonable consequence: we are beyond the pale now, now we consort with demons and angels.

In truth, he could not say which this was. Clearly the creature was not human. It stood up within the confines of the shack, and Creath was aware of its luminous wings—if they were wings— spread out behind it, peacock vortices of light without substance. And he peered into that face.

He would have thought there was no capacity for shock left him, but his eyes widened in stunned recognition.

It was her.

His limbs felt cold and distant as ice. Demon or angel, he thought, it was her, sweet God, his secret love, loved and hated and stolen from him: he moved his mouth:
Anna
—

And she came forward.

The other men fled back toward the automobile. “Christ, look there,” Bob Clawson was shouting, “another of the damned monsters—on the riverbank!” Creath saw it then, too, hurtling toward them across the meadow, a similar creature. He could feel its anger even at this distance. The car’s motor roared. Now only the two of them were left here, Creath and Greg, equally immobile, staring and helpless. Because, Creath thought, in some way we have always expected this. We have earned it. His thoughts moved with a high, wild lucidity.
This is bought and paid for.

The Wilcox girl, Nancy, broke from the shack and ran for the riverbank, her arms pinwheeling.

The angel looked at Creath with Anna’s face, inscrutable.

The demon hurtled toward him.

Creath turned in a kind of graceless slow motion and saw Greg Morrow raise his rifle.

“Bone,” Travis said faintly. But there was no calling him back.

Travis fell to his hands and knees in the frozen meadow. It was all happening too fast for him. Bone fled across the meadow like the ghost of his own rages and fears at last set loose: he will kill them all, Travis thought, God help us, and he thought about Nancy.

But she had broken free from the shack and was moving toward him. Unmindful of his own pain, he stood and ran to her. She came into his arms but he could not look away; he saw Bone—all light and fire and pain—converging on the townsmen, who scattered before him. Nancy seemed to want to burrow into him, but he pushed her back: “Listen,” he said, “we have to get away. Bone’s crazy, he’s full of hatred—everything he learned here is hatred—and we have to get away from him.”

“No,” Nancy said. “Anna promised—”

“She didn’t promise anything!
This is dangerous, this has always been dangerous! Nancy—” He tugged at her, “Come on—”

We can move down and away along the riverbank, Travis thought. That would be good. That might afford them some safety. But he did not see Greg Morrow aiming his rifle across the empty meadow and he could only be helplessly surprised at the sound of it, at the pain of the bullet as it passed through his shoulder.

The crack of the rifle broke his trance. Greg had fired and missed the demon thing, but seemed unaware of it; Creath watched the boy’s supernatural steadiness as he swung the weapon toward the switchman’s shack.

The demon was almost on them and Creath was able to hear the sound it made, an eerie and inhuman wailing, a howl compressed of all the sorrow and indignity of the world. It chilled him. The thing must be able to see, Creath thought, must know that it could not reach Greg Morrow before he committed the act he was so obviously contemplating. The boy swung up the rifle barrel toward the thing in the shack—the Anna-thing.