A Hidden Place

There was a motion in the darkness beyond the oil tanks. Bone, distracted, looked away.

“I guess I changed too,” Archie said. “I only ever wanted to help him. I guess you know what I mean. But I can’t do that by staying with him. That’s the hard part.” His eyes focused on Bone. There was anguish there but also a kind of strength. Bone felt a shadow of the smaller man’s pain, of this hard-won peace he had arrived at, somehow, in the deep of the night. “We have to leave him. It’s the only way to help him. Christ, it frightens me to be alone! It’s the only thing I was ever really scared of. But if we don’t leave him, Bone, he’ll kill himself. He’s drugged up on crazy vengeance and there’s no sense in him.”

That motion again—a flicker of denim, a sigh like drawn breath. Bone’s hackles rose. He turned to the smaller man beside him. “Archie—”

But there was an explosion that lit up the night. Bone was momentarily blinded, and when his vision cleared he saw Archie on his knees, gagging, and then Archie in a pool of his own dark blood, limply dead.

Deacon stepped out from behind the oil tanks with the pistol in his hand.

He turned on his heel, and the pistol was aimed now at Bone.

The immensity of the betrayal shocked him. Deacon had shot Archie. Archie, who had held his mirror when he shaved. Archie, who had loved him.

“He’s dead,” Bone stammered out.

Deacon nodded. His eyes were wide, his pupils dilated. “Sure he’s dead. I caught him. Son of a bitch! Run away on me, would he? Run away on Deacon?”

“He was afraid for you.” Bone shook his head, aghast. “He was afraid you might get caught.”

“Don’t move!” Deacon thrust the pistol forward. “I heard you two talking! Move out, he said, leave Deacon behind, he said, that’s what you were doing out here in the night—”

“The pistol shot,” Bone managed. “The men in the railyard. They’ll be here soon.”

On the horizon, the blue Calling light guttered and flared.

“He was just waiting for his chance,” Deacon said. “Sneak off and leave Deacon in the lurch. Son of a bitch! I guess I know better.”

“He loved you.”

“That’s a dirty lie.” Deacon pressed the gun forward. There were voices now from the railyard, and his expression hardened. “Give me the money.”

But Deacon had the smell of death about him, a carrion stench Bone could not ignore. He had seen the Jeweled World, the bright beauty of it, and he could only recoil in horror from the ugly thing Deacon had become.

Deacon, he understood, meant to kill him.

“Now,” Deacon said.

Bone darted his big hand toward the pistol. He could not grasp it but only slapped it away. The gun flew through the cold air while Deacon cursed and leaped after it. “I’ll kill you,” Deacon panted, “I’ll kill you, you geek bastard!”

Bone stumbled backward. The sheer scope of it defied understanding. Deacon had killed Archie— here was the steaming carcass to prove it—and now Deacon meant to kill Bone.

There was no one, Bone thought bitterly. No one and nothing he could trust here. Only the Calling. Only the light and the song of it. Nothing human. He was not human, and there was nothing in the human world for him.

Only danger here.

Deacon scrabbled for the gun, and Bone turned and ran.

The scissorbills ambushed him at the hobo jungle.

The came at him with flashlights and guns. He was trapped, encircled suddenly, blinded. His foot caught in a railway tie and he fell clumsily among the gravel and embers. There were four flashlights, bright bobbing flares that disguised the faces behind them, but more men than that, maybe more guns. He stood up slowly and listened to the awe that crept into their voices as they made a ring around him.

“Big bastard, ain’t he?” “It’s him, all right—” “No question.”

“—the one they wrote about in the papers—” “Christ, look at him!”

They pushed him up against the corrugated side of a reefer car.

“He’s not packing anything.” A man stepped forward, and Bone saw his face in the reflected light. Thick, grizzled face. Save for the uniform this might have been one of the hoboes. Bone felt that same gulf again, a revulsion, a blossoming hatred. Such men had beaten him too often before. But now now, not now: he was too close.

The scissorbill shone a light in Bone’s eyes, and the others pressed close behind him. The heat and smell of them were unbearable. “We heard a pistol fired,” the man said. “Same pistol killed all those farmfolks maybe? Huh? You want to tell us where it is?”

There were no words to answer. Bone shook his head.

The scissorbill gri

Bone doubled over with the pain of it.

“Think,” the man said. “Oh, we’ll hand you over to the cops soon enough. They’ll lock you up somewhere—a long, long time—assuming they don’t choose to hang you. But we got you first. And nobody cares if we have a little fun of our own.”

The Calling was suddenly strong in him, stronger than it had ever been before, not a song now but a river of need, a torrent. Bone felt a convulsion coming on. He was full of that wild energy. But he did not convulse.

What happened next happened quickly. He straightened, and the pain and the betrayal and the hatred in him rose to a terrifying crest. He screamed, a high-pitched falsetto scream. And he swung out his fist.

It should have been a futile gesture. It was not. The actinic blue Calling light shone now from inside him. It was electric, an aura, and he knew from their eyes that these men could see it. Bone swung his arm, touching them, full of violent energy, and where he touched them the blue light leaped from the apex of his arm, and the men he touched were gone, then—dead, he supposed, but more than that, quite literally vanished, dispatched (he could not say how he knew this) to the nothingness that lay between the worlds.

His sense of time deserted him. He supposed it only took a moment. When he finished there was no one left around him. In the darkness, he heard Deacon calling his name.

“Bone!”

He ran for a moving freight. He was weary, confused, intoxicated with the Calling. Cattle cars slid by him, gathering speed, shuttering bars of light into the morning mist. Bone tripped and fell forward, stumbled up again. All these cars were closed and locked.

“Bone! Give it back, you bastard!”

The money, Bone thought. It was still in his jacket pocket. Was that all Deacon wanted—the money? If he had it, would he let Bone leave?

Bone hesitated and turned back. Deacon was a shadow ru

And Deacon fired the pistol.

The bullet took Bone in the upper thigh. He roared, twisted, fell. The pain was immense. It spread through him like wildfire, and he could not dismiss it. Rage rose up like sour bile inside him. A second bullet struck sparks from the pebbles near his head, and Bone reached up wildly.

His huge hand caught in the undercarriage of the accelerating freight. It was as if an undertow had taken him. He was dragged forward, Deacon shouting incoherently, and the railway ties gouged cruelly at him. He lifted himself desperately, hooked a foot up.

Deacon fired again, and the bullet scored a bloody pathway up Bone’s prominent rib cage. Two of the ribs were broken instantly. White fire clutched at his heart.

He pulled himself up, screaming. This was a reefer car. No good to him—unless the ice compartment was empty. He inched backward, clinging with his long arms like an insect. His good blue pea coat was wet with blood.

“Bone, goddamn you—” But Deacon’s voice was fading now. The train picked up speed.

Groaning, Bone let himself into the ice compartment. His breathing was labored, and he felt on the verge of a great darkness. In one last lunging effort he secured the lid so it would not lock and fell back on the hard wire-mesh. He lost consciousness at once.