A Hidden Place

He thought of Creath Burack. He thought of Travis Fisher and Nancy Wilcox.

Strings, he thought. Lots of strings there.

He opened a can of beans and chased Hoover, yowling, out the back door.

Night had begun to fall.

In the darkness under the railway trestle Travis dreamed.

His dreams were not coherent. Delirious with the cold, he was ravaged by visions. He dreamt of the Pale Woman, and recognized her from a lifetime of dreams: she was pure, virginal, white-robed; her face was his mother’s face except when it was A

He woke shivering in the darkness as the night freight passed by above him. Sparks showered down and the roaring made his ears ache dully. When the train was gone there was only the sound of the prairie wind rattling in the high beams of the trestle.

He sat up, frightened, the residue of the dream lingering in the dark air. If he closed his eyes he could see her, the Pale Woman, as clearly as ever. She was, he realized, the woman his mother had not been, the woman his mother had failed to be; she was the woman he had looked for in Nancy, too, and most particularly in A

The woman he had not found.

And he thought, shivering in the darkness, stricken: What if there is no such woman? What if she doesn’t exist?

Chapter Thirteen

Nancy spent the next day at the switchman’s shack waiting for Travis to arrive, leaping up with a mixed gladness and terror whenever she heard a sound outside.

“He might come,” A

“He might,” A

Her plain prairie accent, coming from that body, was like a bad joke. But no, Nancy thought, not really. The voice, for all its plai

“He’ll come,” Nancy said, and: “What do you mean—a step away from being what!”

“He’s two people. You must have seen that. Part of him is the Travis who has been so often hurt and victimized, and that part of him is sympathetic. He wants to help. But there is this other Travis Fisher, the Travis Fisher who believes in a kind of female purity, who believes that women ought to be pristine, above nature, incorruptible—all the things he thought I was.”

“Or the things you chose to show him.”

“Maybe I deluded him. If so, it was not by choice. It’s in my nature to be a mirror. Like Creath, he looked at me and saw a hidden part of himself.”

It was at such times, Nancy thought, that A

“He thought I was that woman. But he wanted you to be that woman, too. The woman he once believed his mother was.”

His mother, Nancy thought, yes, my God. “He must feel—betrayed—”

“Betrayed and angry. And that’s the other part of Travis Fisher: this huge anger. A part of him hates us—hates both of us—for not being pure enough or good enough.”

“There were times,” Nancy said, nodding, “the way he’d look at me—”

“He suppresses the hate, of course. He believes in chivalry. And unlike Creath he is not by nature cruel. But the hate has had a good deal of trauma to feed on. It could displace his better instincts.”

“But if he understood—”

“It’s not as simple as that. All this lives in the deepest part of him.”

“Phantoms,” Nancy said scornfully. “Ghosts.”

A

“I thought you couldn’t read minds.”

“Only the deepest parts.” After a moment: “I’m sorry.” Her voice was faint. “I shouldn’t have spoken.”

Nancy was astonished to find her eyes filling with tears. She dabbed her face with the wrists of her blouse. It was all crazy, of course. A

But A

Nancy went out into the meadow—the sun was disturbingly low in the sky—to wait for Travis. He would come. He must. But the meadow was empty and the wind cut through this threadbare winter coat like a darning needle. She hugged herself and went back to the meager shelter of the switchman’s shack. Inside, she let her head loll against the fibrous wallboards and closed her eyes. When she opened them she gasped.

A

Her eyes had rolled up into her head. Her skin, always alarmingly pale, was dead-white now, blood-drained. The convulsions traversed her body; her spine bucked and arched over the thin stained mattress… “A

This was not the Change, Nancy thought dazedly, this was something else. Something new, something worse. She put her arm around the alien woman to steady her.

The contact was electric. So quickly that she could not steel herself, her mind was filled with hideous images.

The earth lurching under her feet. Fear. Fear and the footsteps behind her. A train roaring blackly in the near distance. The cold wind, the footsteps, the gun, the shockingly loud sound of it, pain invading her body in huge radiant arcs—

—and she was distantly aware of the scream that filled the confined space of the shack: it might have been A

Liza Burack picked up the phone on the second ring. She had been answering telephones more eagerly this autumn now that she had come to believe in the possibility of good news. “Yes?”

“Liza!” the voice on the other end boomed out. “This is Bob Clawson!”

She had not seen him since the Rotarian picnic four years ago, but Liza remembered the high-school principal well: the ample belly, the prissy three-piece suit he had worn, coat and all, all through that hot July day, fearful of betraying his dignity to the handful of high-school students who had shown up with their parents. “Good to hear your voice,” Liza said courteously. “Can I help you?”