A Hidden Place

A

“Yes.”

“A place,” A

“And very beautiful?” “Often.”

“You dream of it?” “Yes.”

“I dream of it sometimes.” “I know,” A

“Perhaps too powerful.”

She means Bone, Nancy thought. Bone might be dangerous. “Powerful enough to come here… powerful enough to go back.”

“I hope so.”

“Did you find what you wanted here?”

And A

“Is that where I am? In the wilderness?” But it was a silly question. She gazed around herself. This shack, the prairie, the night…

“For a long time, I think,” A

We are all exiles. She said, “I envy you … I wish I had a place to go back to.”

“Here,” A

She held out her hand. Nancy looked dubiously at her.

“It’s all I have to give,” the alien woman said. “Not much. A little.” Nancy touched her.

She supposed, afterward, that what A

I will keep this, she thought. I will carry this memory like a charm and only bring it out when I need it.

A

“Your world,” Nancy said solemnly, “is very strange and beautiful.”

A

“Is it?” Nancy looked up, surprised. The candle flickered. Outside this shack a sea of prairie grass bent and hissed in the wind. She said slowly, “It could be. I guess it could be.”

But then they heard the first of the gunshots… far away but clear and distinct, pinpricks of sound etched against the vastness of the night.

When they approached the railway trestle both drivers switched off their lights, and the black cars rolled like tumbrils off the main road and across the stub-bled meadow, wheels grinding, engines laboring. The railway trestle was black in the moonlight, stone and iron, and Creath fancied he could smell it, a stink of wood and grease and soot-blackened brick. It was hateful.

Bob Clawson sat with his belly up against the steering wheel, dressed, for maybe the first time in his life, in clothes that were less than immaculate: old pants, fla

They stood in the moonlight with their rifles. Creath felt faintly ridiculous: this army, he thought, this two-bit infantry, half of us scared of the dark. The other car had pulled up ahead; Tim Norbloom was in charge of that little battalion. Creath felt the heft of the rifle in his hand. They had all loaded their weapons during the ride over, and the phrase that ran through Creath’s head, idiotically, was armed and dangerous. He looked at Greg Morrow, a shadow against the deeper dark … he could not be sure, but he believed the boy was gri

Ahead, Tim Norbloom’s crowd had opened the trunk of the other car. Norbloom drew out the torches: lengths of thick pine doweling or spruce two-by-twos wrapped at one end in oily cloth. Norbloom and Clawson’s group moved together, made a circle to cut the wind. Norbloom handed out four of the torches—Greg took one, Creath did not. Clawson drew a box of safety matches from his jacket pocket. The torches did not want to take the flame at first, the blackened cotton seeming to resist its own incineration, but then Greg’s torch whooshed up all at once, sparking into the night, and he passed on the fire to the others.

There was no hiding now. They had to hurry.

They ran across the meadow toward the railway trestle, Creath lagging behind, his breath laboring. The silence, at first, was eerie; but then Greg Morrow let out a long ululating war whoop that seemed to strike a primitive chord in the other men. The trestle was nearer now, their torches casting a red glow against the black bricks of it, their own shadows huge and manic, and others of them took up Greg’s war cry; someone fired a gun into the sky. Echoes bounded back from the trestle arches, and to the men just coming awake in there, Creath thought, it must seem as if a part of hell itself had come to earth among them. They moved sluggishly at first and then more desperately; a pitifully few men to have inspired this army, but that was irrelevant now,- now there was no returning. This was bought and paid for. Two hoboes ran shrieking into the cold river, striking out for the other side. Their heads disappeared beneath the black water and Creath could not tell, then, in the flood and panic, whether they survived or were carried away. The vigilantes were laughing, swirling their torches like kids swinging sparklers on Independence Day, but their laughter was not childish … or rather, Creath thought dizzily, it was the shrill and hysterical laughter of a child torturing a cat. There was nothing of i

He stood still, watching. The gun was a dead thing in his hand. My good Christ, he thought, what if she is here? Seducer, temptress, succubus, the source of his sin: but he knew instantly that he could not raise this rifle to her. And Creath felt a lightness in him then, a feverish buoyancy, as if his feet might spontaneously lift him from this cold fallow ground and deliver him up to some thing or place he could not imagine: death, judgment, the stars. He knew that Bob Clawson was gazing at him, had taken stern note of his immobility, but there was no way to respond, and in truth he no longer cared.

He watched Greg Morrow whirling his torch about his head. The firelight seemed to have transformed him: his grin was maniacal and his eyes feverish. Creath guessed that the boy was paying back some old debt, avenging somehow some irretrievable humiliation. The tramps had mostly fled; the guns had been fired but only into the air; the townsmen had begun to huddle together sheepishly now in the stinking darkness. But Greg was oblivious; possessed, he threw the stub of his torch onto the roof of one of these hovels, oily pasteboard sheets that roared at once into flame. Creath felt his heart skip a beat. The heat washed over him and he thought, She could be in there.

Tim Norbloom stepped forward—playing the policeman now—and put a restraining hand on Greg’s shoulder. Just then a figure broke from the burning hovel, ru