A Hidden Place

Chapter Eighteen

The 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 have 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 river-bank, 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.

How beautiful she still was. Strange that he could admit it even to himself (and there seemed plenty of time for admissions in this new lucidity of his, everything moving at quarter speed): It should be loathsome, the way she had changed. But she was not loathsome. Merely delicate, fragile, embedded in light, wrapped round with amber and turquoise light, winged with light; the beauty in it was ethereal, beyond lust, heartbreaking; it spoke—as it had always, he guessed, spoken—to his deepest nugget of self. He thought of things lost, time lost, opportunities lost, whole lives lost in the living of a life. Tears sprang to his eyes. I am too old to cry, he thought. Too old and too weary and too close to death. Death wheeling toward him on an autumn wind, shimmering.

It was this beauty that Greg must hate, he thought, and saw the boy targeting his rifle on her.

Creath sighed. Death so close but not close enough to save her. He imagined he could see the boy’s finger tightening on the trigger.

His own gun flew up. He was hardly conscious of it. The recoil bucked it into his shoulder. Creath cried out with the pain.

Greg Morrow spun away. The bullet had taken him cleanly. He was dead at once. His rifle fired—the reflexive closing of the fingers—but the bullet went wild.

Creath felt his own rifle drop to the ground.

Anna was alive yet. She turned her eyes on him, round inscrutable wells.

That was good, Creath thought, that she would live. This at least.

The demon fell on Greg Morrow’s body, appeared to pick it up and fling it—but this made no sense—in a direction that was not any perceptible direction; the body simply disappeared. Creath looked at the demon calmly and saw a face there, indistinct but full of rage,- and that, too, he thought, was good and proper, that death should have a face.

Creath turned to confront the creature, openhanded.

Death came on him like a flaming sword.

“Go on,” Travis told Nancy. “Down the riverbank. Hide.”

She didn’t want to leave him, but she glanced at the figure of Bone:—Bone transformed—and retreated sobbing from the meadow.

Travis could not move. The pain of the bullet wound had radiated through him. All the fatigue of these last few days had come down on him all at once, like sleep. His eyelids were heavy. Strange, he thought, to be on the edge of death and only feel this weariness.

On his back in the icy meadow, Travis turned his head.

The automobile had gone. Bone moved in on the two men remaining—Greg and Creath: he recognized their silhouettes in the moonlight—and then Creath raised his rifle (it all happened too quickly to follow); then Bone was on them and they were gone, tossed into that limbo between worlds, discarded. Dead.

Bone turned back toward him.

Travis lay helplessly, watching as the monster approached him.

There was nothing of Bone left in this thing. It was made of light but it was not without substance. Its footsteps pressed into the prairie grass. It smelled of ozone and burning leaves, and Travis did not suppose it could support itself long in this world: it contradicted too many of the natural laws. You could tell by looking. Such a thing ought not to exist.

The rage and pain of it were still perceptible. It had a purpose, Travis sensed, and the purpose was to protect the Anna-thing long enough for their coupling to take place; it was hostile to every threat. And it knew him.

The monster hovered over him.

Your own deepest, hidden face.

Betrayed, he thought, deceived, yes, striking out now, unbound, no victims left but himself. But if this was himself then he could no longer deny it. He gazed without fear into those fiery eyes. The self submitting to the verdict of the self. Christ knows he had done it to others. Had turned on his dying mother, had turned on Nancy when she needed him; now himself: it was only logical. “Kill me,” he whispered. “Kill me then, if that’s what you’ve come to do.”

But the creature turned away. It went to the shack; the meadow was suddenly prosaically empty. Travis gaped up at the stars.

Nancy ran to him, weeping.

She staunched his wound and made a sort of pillow of prairie grass for him. She took off her own cloth coat and laid it over him.

The night was cold, and Travis was grateful.