A Hidden Place

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 A

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.

A

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 A

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.

Chapter Nineteen

Through what remained of the night she kept him warm. Travis was intermittently lucid. He imagined he could see the stars wheeling overhead. When the dawn came he said, “Are they in there?” “In the shack? Yes.”

He sat up, though the effort was murderous. Nancy said, “You need a doctor.”

He shook his head. He wasn’t bleeding anymore and he could move his arm. It was a clean wound and might not infect. “I need to get warm. I need food.”

“We could build a fire… but it might draw somebody’s attention.”

“Build it,” Travis said. “There won’t be anybody coming out here today.”

He warmed himself at the fire. He still did not trust himself to walk. Dizziness came and went, and nausea. Nancy brought him water from the river. But she knew he needed to eat, too.

“There’s some food left in the shack,” Nancy said.

“I wonder how long it takes.” “Don’t know. She never said.” It was unimaginable, the prodigies of healing that must be going on in there. She had seen Bone and she knew A

Travis looked at her. “You know, we can’t go back.”

“I know.”

“There’s nowhere much we can go.” “I thought maybe west. California, maybe.” She shrugged. “It’s warmer.” He nodded.

Nancy said, “You mean it?” “What?”

“About traveling together?”

“Yes … I mean, if you’re willing.”

She gazed at him as if from a distance. “What did you see out there with Bone? What did he show you?”

Travis shrugged.

They appeared, A

The sunlight made everything prosaic. The air was still cool but the autumn sun beat down with real pressure. Everything was outlined in it, Nancy thought, each stalk of grass, the grain elevators black on the horizon, a sparrow swooping across the meadow. There were dust motes everywhere.

They emerged from the switchman’s shack, a single being now. She could see none of Bone or A

Nancy thought he might struggle to his feet, even injured as he was, might run away. But he did not. The creature advanced on him and he only looked at it, his eyes wide and fearless.