A Hidden Place

Chapter Sixteen

That night there was frost on the brittle stalks of prairie grass. Anna was sleeping or comatose, and Travis ate a sparing meal of saltines, chipped beef, and tepid water. She woke at dawn.

The last of her humanity was draining from her. The flesh was taut over her skull, and the skull itself had taken on new contours, a kind of streamlining. Her soiled dress hung limply, and Travis did not wish to know what transformations it might conceal. Her aura pulsed about her, the irises of her eyes had expanded; she gazed at him from azure depths, unfathomable. He began, “You have to leave this place. Listen: Greg Morrow knows we’re here. He’s bound to make trouble. Maybe when Nancy gets back we can take you over to the railway trestle. We—”

But Anna was shaking her head. When she spoke her voice, too, was more nakedly alien, a kind of soft keening; it stood up his hackles, though all she said was, “No.”

“You don’t understand. You’re in danger here.” “In danger anywhere, surely? But, Travis, the time is very near. I cannot leave this place. Listen to me. Bone is close by. But he’s wounded. He needs help.”

Travis sat back on his haunches. It had been the coldest night of this autumn, and his jacket was inadequate, the barnboard walls of the switchman’s shack thin as paper. Anna did not shiver; Travis did. “Near here?”

“Very near.”

“Then go to him.”

She tilted her head. “Look at me. If I stood up, the bones would break.”

He nodded slowly. It was undeniable. He ventured, “I could carry you—”

“We’ve touched before, Travis. And I’m less human now. Human by willpower mostly. It would be difficult for you. Besides, we’ll need some shelter for the duration of the Change. The shack would be best.” She added, “I can describe the place where he is. But there are other things you need to know.”

Travis narrowed his eyes. The candlelight flickered. He thought, she will warn me about him. All this sounded sincere, and he believed much of what she had already told him, but her very strangeness made her impossible to evaluate; the truth, as much as lies, could be a manipulation. He said, “Tell me.”

“He’s been wounded. The wounds are severe. He is not dead—he need not die—but he is very nearly delirious. He has also been betrayed, and in the delirium is buried his anger. This is a dangerous combination. Approaching him cannot be anything but dangerous. Bone is very strong, even wounded. And there is more.”

“What?”

“He has much the same power of reflection as myself, though he exercises it differently. Travis, you need to understand how it is for us in the place we come from. We’re not two separate beings. We—”

“I know,” Travis said. “Nancy told me.”

“Then hear it again and try to understand. You think of us as male and female, Bone and me, because we’ve assumed those avatars. This is terribly misleading. We’re one person. We’re separate because when we came here we had not yet achieved physical union, though we were already paired paired here—” she touched her head, “which is why I have been able to Call him. Apart, neither of us is whole.”

“Male and female,” Travis said. “I don’t see how it’s so different.”

“But you are different,” Anna said fervently “all of you! You’re male and female both at once! Whole from birth! There is no purity, no perfection. A human woman distilled of all her maleness would be inconceivable, insupportable, a kind of monster—”

“Like you,” Travis said.

She nodded calmly “Like me.”

“And Bone—”

“He has assumed a masculine persona. And, Travis, he is quite capable of functioning as a mirror You look at me and I give back your own most fundamental comprehension of a woman. Yes? But Bone may be much more difficult to confront. Not just because he’s wounded. Look at him, Travis, and what he will give you back is yourself. Your own deepest, hidden face. And I cannot honestly promise that you will be strong enough to confront it.”

He turned away from her. The door of the shack had fallen open, and he was able to see a long way out into the fading night, the cold plains of the stars. There was the sound of wind and water running.

He didn’t want to do this—any of this. He thought of all the warm, lit places of the town. Your own face, she had said. Your own deepest, hidden, face. And if he saw that, he wondered, would he understand? Would he know then what had brought him here, why he was huddling in this abandoned shack, an outcast, when he could have been warm, safe, loved?

She was veiled in the flickering darkness. Goddamn her, Travis thought. She had lured him here; he had broken on the reefs of her.

An old, old bargain… which of us used the other!

But there was only one way out of it now. A transformation, she had said, once begun, must be completed. He guessed that was probably true. “Describe the place,” Travis said.

Solemnly, she did so. The trestle, the river, the distant silhouette of the grain elevators. “Do you know where that is, Travis?”

He pulled his flimsy jacket around himself and stood up. “I know,” he said.

The morning was very cold.

The sun rode up high but ineffectual over the town of Haute Montagne.

Home, Nancy had gathered up the last of her money and a change of clothes and folded them into a linen bundle. She tucked an old tintype photograph of her father into her pastille box and clicked shut the lid. She supposed this was a kind of leave-taking, a final good-bye… but she must not think about that.

At the foot of the stairs her mother was waiting, standing between Nancy and the front door, her face doughy and pale where it was not touched with feverish highlights of red.

“Stay,” Faye Wilcox said. “You’d be mad to go out again now.”

“Mama, please,” Nancy began.

“I hear things,” her mother said. “I am not in the position I once was. But I hear things. Things are happening in this town. Your name is mentioned.” She licked her lips and seemed for a moment to lose her way … as if, Nancy thought, her rope bridge of words and phrases had collapsed beneath her. “It’s not for myself,” she said finally, softly. “I’m worried what could happen. People are talking about guns.”

“I’ll be careful,” Nancy said.

“You were right, you know. What you said last time. He’s not dead. Or he wasn’t when he left. He just left. Left, I guess, the way you’re leaving.” She looked up from the floor. “Is it so awful here?”

“Not awful at all,” Nancy said, feeling five years old.

“Was it my fault?” “No.”

“Well.” She straightened her shoulders. “If you go, you ought not to come back. I don’t mean that to be cruel. The way the town is…”

“I know.”

“I wish I had some money to give you.” “I’ll be all right,” Nancy said. “I have to go.” And Faye Wilcox stood aside, though the motion seemed to pain her.

At twenty past noon Jacob Bingham, the owner and proprietor of Bingham’s Hardware Store—located conveniently on the busy 200s block of Lawson Spur—smiled at Bob Clawson, the high-school principal, who had just sailed through the big front door like an autumn breeze.

Clawson made a show of examining the electrical fans, the steel-bladed lawn mowers, the fishing reels and fly rods. Then, smiling, he presented himself at the cash counter. Dressed to the nines, as usual. In the glass display case there was a selection of Bowie knives.

“Fine knives,” Clawson commented.

“Wonderful knives,” Jacob said amiably. “Do anything for you. Open a tin can, gut a fish, slit your throat. In the market?”

“No,” Clawson said, “I guess not now. You have that package ready for me?”

Jacob brought it forth from the storage drawer beneath the counter. The package was heavy and it was wrapped in brown paper. It smelled slightly oily. He smiled. “Watch yourself, now.”

Clawson extended both arms and Jacob loaded him down.

“We’re very much in your debt,” Clawson said. Jacob Bingham frowned. “I understood there would be payment?”

“Of course,” Clawson said hastily. “I was speaking metaphorically ”

“Well. Don’t fall down with that, now. You need help with the door?”

“I’ll be fine.”

Jacob watched him leave. Cool air swirled in the door as Clawson struggled out.

It was shaping up to be a fine day, he thought. A fine autumn day.

Outside, in his car—half past noon by the clock on the civic building—Bob Clawson plucked at the brown binding twine until the knot unraveled, then spread back the oily leaves of paper. Thus revealed, the two .22-gauge hunting rifles lay in his lap, greased and slick, alien things. He had not personally handled a rifle before. The complexity of slots and levers was daunting. But surely it could not be as complicated as it looked. One aims, he thought. One fires.

He saw Tim Norbloom’s police car in his rear-view mirror. The police car pulled abreast of him, and Clawson rolled down his window, conscious of the weight of the guns in his lap.

“Pleasant day,” Norbloom said, his big Nordic horseface framed in the darkness of the patrol car.

Clawson suppressed the instinctive distaste he felt for the man. “Very nice. Indian summer.”

“Everything on for tonight?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Bingham came through?” “Yes, indeed.”

“Then I’ll be seeing you later.”

“We’re gathering at eight,” Clawson said.

“Yessir.” Norbloom shot him a mock salute. “I’ll be there.”

Clawson smiled perfunctorily and paused to savor the excitement growing inside him.

Liza watched with great trepidation as Creath brought up his hunting rifle—disused these many years—from the basement, and began to clean and oil it. He bent to the task like a man possessed, his eyes intently focused, and when she spoke to him he did not respond.

Surely there was nothing dangerous in this? Liza felt as if events had somehow gone beyond her… but surely Bob Clawson would not be party to do an enterprise that was physically dangerous?

“Creath,” she said tentatively. “Creath, if this is something … if you don’t feel you should be involved. …”

But he lifted his head to gaze at her, and the expression on his face was a combination of implacability and silent horror so intense that she could not bear the weight of his attention. She looked down, and when she looked up again he had gone back to his work, polishing the rifle barrel so intently that it seemed he might grind it to dust. Please God preserve him, Liza thought, and drew the curtains against the impending night.