A Hidden Place

It changes things, Creath thought. They had come here prepared to kill. But, in the event, they had backed away from it. And it was Greg’s fault mainly: he had misled them, there was no threat in this pathetic slum. Creath saw Tim Norbloom eyeing the boy with frank contempt. Some of the men cursed The enormity of this was too great; they felt too much like murderers. You, too, Tim Norbloom, Creath thought: that guilt is palpable. In this strange hour his mind was quite lucid and Creath imagined he could read other men’s thoughts. There was a kind of skewed victory in it despite the dead man on the ground, because she had not been here… A

The men walked back to the cars. The night had soured on them. Creath, his ears still ringing with the proximity of the gunshots, watched Bob Clawson remonstrating with Greg Morrow, saw the boy’s impassioned response; Clawson went to Norbloom then and the two of them spoke heatedly. Creath heard the sound but could not make sense of it. The trestle was eerily lit by the embers of the Hoovertown and a freight train came highballing out of the east, oblivious.

Clawson and Norbloom were arguing. Norbloom turned away, his fists clenched, and climbed into the second of the two automobiles. The two parties broke up, and Creath watched Norbloom’s sedan bouncing over the rutted soil. Clawson sat at the wheel of his own car stonily,- his cheeks were flushed pink. Creath climbed in last. “Thank God it’s at least over,” he said.

Clawson looked back at Greg. Greg stared at him.

“We’re not done yet,” Clawson said grimly. “Norbloom is an idiot. It’s important to finish this. We have begun it and we are obliged to finish it.”

“One more place,” Greg said evenly. “I’ll show you the way.”

Please God, no, Creath thought, and Bob Clawson revved the motor.

Travis saw the trestle fire from a distance and circled to the south, keeping to a line of windbreak trees. White smoke curled up in the moonlight and the cold wind carried the hoarse shouting of the men across the prairie.

Bone was frightened. Travis could tell. He crouched in a drainage ditch and the alien crouched beside him. The alien must be tremendously strong, Travis thought, to have come even this far. His jacket was a mass of blood and there was fresh blood welling up now, a brighter red in the moonlight. An ordinary man would have died. But Bone was not ordinary, not a man. Bone’s eyes were fixed on the trestle and the flicker of fires there.

“You’ve seen this kind of thing before,” Travis said.

Bone did not respond, only stared. Travis took it for a kind of assent.

They crouched, hidden, and listened to the snap of gunshots. Travis glanced periodically at Bone, who seemed wreathed with a fire of his own, a flickering aura; but it cast no shadows in the darkness beneath the trees and Travis guessed another man might see nothing at all. When the shouting died away and the gunshots ceased Travis and Bone moved closer, Travis imbued with a sense of deep foreboding: now there had been violence, now some invisible border had been passed.

The hobo jungle was in embers. There was no one left here… only the body of a black man Travis had known very slightly, Harley was his name; Harley was dead from a gunshot wound to the back. Travis knelt over the body. He could not bring himself to touch it: a revulsion, not at death, but at his own utter helplessness. I knew this man, he thought.

Bone watched him kneeling… and after a moment Bone extended his arm and touched him.

Visions ran like a river between them. Travis fell back under the assault of the projected memories. This was Bone, he thought dazedly: Bone had seen too many places like this, an ocean of them, had seen men burned, beaten, trampled under foot. The cavalcade of images was stu

“Christ Almighty,” Travis whispered. “You can do that? You can really do that?”

Bone stood erect. His aura deepened. His eyes were squeezed shut, his face disguised beneath his own cold illumination. Sweet Jesus, Travis thought, he could be me: the lines of his face rippled like a reflection in deep water. Travis turned away, gasping. So little of humanity left in this creature…

Your own deepest, hidden face. Was that possible? Maybe so: Bone and the Pale Woman both inside him, Janus-faced, calling over the gaps and chasms of him toward some unimaginable union—

But that made him think of A

Bone stepped forward and stumbled. The leg wound, Travis thought: this tremendous energy faltering, the human fraction of him too close to death.

No longer as frightened as he was, Travis put his arm around the alien and the two of them loped eastward, ludicrous in the moonlight, along the frozen bank of the river.

Chapter Eighteen

The interior of the switchman’s shack was full of radiance, the human parts of A

Travis must be near, she thought. Travis and Bone. She risked a glance at A

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.

“A

A

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 A

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 A