Текст книги "A Hidden Place"

Автор книги: Robert Charles Wilson

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Chapter Fourteen

They kept a vigil through the night. Anna was often unconscious. The blue light played fitfully over her. At times she seemed awake but oblivious to them, her lips moving wordlessly her eyes dilated. Travis closed his eyes briefly, and it seemed to him that the room was in some way still visible, but filled with strange translucent shapes, pale emeralds, impossibly faceted diamonds. He sat erect and closed his hand on Nancy’s; they did not speak.

By morning the crisis had passed. A wan daylight filtered through the wallboards. Anna lay in a heap on her mattress—diminished, Travis thought, rice-paper white, stick-thin, only her eyes animate. She sat up, blinking.

Nancy cleared her throat.

“Anna? Is he—is Bone dead?”

“No,” the alien woman said. “Not quite.”

“He’s hurt?”

“Yes.”

“Still coming?”

“Still coming. Very close now.” “Is there anything we can do?” “Not for a time.”

Nancy stood up wearily. There were dark bruises of sleeplessness under her eyes. She stretched. “I’m going to the river to wash. Travis? You’ll be okay here?” He nodded slowly.

Sunlight washed inward as Nancy opened the door. She left it ajar, and Travis watched her descend the slope of the riverbank. In a moment she was out of sight.

He looked back at Anna Blaise.

Now, he thought. If he ever hoped to sort this out, now was the time. While she was weak… too weak, perhaps, to lie.

“It’s all true, then? What you told Nancy, I mean, about another world and—all that?”

“Can you look at me and doubt it?”

She was no longer beautiful, Travis thought, but her voice retained its grace, its seductiveness. Maybe its deceit. “Nancy is sometimes credulous.”

“You were the one who told her I wasn’t human.”

“There is no question of that,” Travis said. “But there are other questions. Nancy believes you mean no harm. Maybe. But this Bone. There have been stories in the papers—”

“Bone is credulous, too. But not evil.”

“We only have your word for that.”

“I’m sorry. What else can I offer?”

She was motionless, not even blinking. Travis guessed she was conserving her strength. He said, “You didn’t mean to come here?”

“Not in this fashion. It was a mistake.”

“Nancy said you and, uh, Bone got separated—”

“The journey between worlds is arduous even for us. There are storms in the chaos between. A misstep in that labyrinth can be a disaster. Yes, we were separated.”

“How come—if that’s true—how come nobody came after you?”

She smiled faintly. “There are more worlds than mine and yours. We were lucky to arrive within the boundaries of a single continent. Bone searched. The time passed. That’s all. Together we can travel back.”

“Even if he’s hurt?”

She frowned, shrugged.

“I don’t understand,” Travis said. “If it’s so hard, so dangerous—why do any of this? Why come here?”

“Why would anyone travel between worlds? To learn. Do you understand that, Travis? To acquire …” “—knowledge?” “Wisdom.”

The sound of Nancy’s singing traveled up from the riverbank. The sun had warmed the air a little. Travis looked almost fearfully into Anna’s huge eyes, but there was nothing there to betray her. Nothing that said this is the truth or this is a lie. “Anna Blaise doesn’t exist, then.”

“I am Anna Blaise.”

“But it’s false. A mask.”

She folded her hands in her lap. Her legs were crossed; she looked, Travis thought, like a frail Buddha. “I am not human. But I have a certain access to human minds. Anna Blaise is in some sense a metaphor of myself, the way a name might be translated into a foreign language. But, Travis, see: if I give back a human appearance it can only be a sort of reflection. A mirror, not a mask.”

Travis had begun to sweat, he was not sure why. The air was still cold. “You weren’t a mirror for Creath Burack.”

“But I was! I had to be! How else to survive, to claim his protection?”

“A mirror—”

“Of his deepest needs. Unspoken. Unadmitted. Creath Burack is a deep well of desires and f ears—all buried, hidden.”

Travis said hoarsely, “You used him.” He was suddenly frightened again. The lines of her face were fluid, mobile; he was afraid of what he might see there.

She said defiantly, “I traded my body for his protection when I was helpless. Which of us used the other, Travis?”

Her voice had subtly changed; it was hauntingly familiar. He said, “That’s dirty—that’s—”

“An old, old bargain. I’m not the first to have made it. And I will not be blamed for it.”

Travis stood up.

He recognized the face now. The face and the voice. “Who’s talking?” he demanded, his own voice shrill and childish. “Who’s saying this? You—or my mother?”

“Both of us, I imagine,” Anna said.

Nancy returned, her hair wet, and pushed through the flimsy wooden door. She saw Travis sitting bolt upright, staring. Anna was as inscrutable as ever.

“Travis?” she said. “Something wrong?”

“No,” he said. “No,” and went to the door. “I’ll be back.” Taking his own turn, she guessed, at the riverside.

Nancy settled down in the shadows, exhausted. “What happened?”

Anna pivoted her head to face her. “Travis wanted to know some things.”

“He gave you the third degree?” She was quietly shocked—surely Anna was too frail for that sort of treatment.

But the alien woman said, “He needed reassurance. I cannot say whether he received it.”

“You told him about being a mirror?”

“Yes. Though I think he understood it, intuitively, long before this.”

Nancy closed her eyes. She needed sleep more than anything. Too much had happened. Weariness moved like a tide in her. “You’re that woman,” she heard herself saying, “the one you say he dreams about—”

“The pale woman. Travis sees her in me, yes. I give back that part of him—that fear, that desire.”

Nancy stifled a yawn. “And what about me? What do I see in you?”

Anna gazed back… frail, emaciated, cast out; like a piece of flotsam, Nancy thought sleepily, washed up on some uncaring reef. …

“Only yourself,” Anna said gently.

When she woke it was past nightfall again. Nancy had slept sitting up_; her back was stiff and she was cold. She had to get back to town, she thought. Her mother might have called the police. Anything might have happened. Travis was beside her.

“We can’t stay here,” he said. “Greg Morrow saw me last night. If he wants to make trouble there’s not much we can do about it.”

“Where else is there to go? Anyway—” She stretched. “—we can’t move Anna. It would kill her. There’s not much left of her but her bones.”

Bones and that terrible light. Anna sat cross-legged on the mattress, hardly breathing. Her eyes were rolled back into her head.

Nancy felt a twinge of concern. “Anna—?”

“He’s near here,” Anna Blaise said suddenly. “He’s very near here indeed.”

And she blinked and looked intently at Travis.

Chapter Fifteen

Creath Burack was careful to park his battered Ford pickup two blocks beyond Bob Clawson’s modest house on DeVille Street. He did not want to be conspicuously odd-man-out among all the fine automobiles parked there. There would be enough of that to come, he thought.

He did not relish this meeting. His gut burned, though he had eaten sparingly at dinner. He sat for a breathless moment gripping the steering wheel as the Ford’s engine cooled.

There are limits, he thought. There are limits beyond which I will not go. He wasn’t stupid; he knew the kind of fear that was sweeping the town. It was impossible to miss. The times had gone sour. There were unemployed men everywhere, families starving, farms turned to dust, murders and gangsterism and reckless talk of revolution. And men like Bob Clawson and his cronies—men of money or, failing that, of staunch propriety—were the scared-est of all.

He thought: I do not know what they want from me. But there are limits.

He climbed out of the automobile.

Liza had made him wear his best Sunday suit. Creath regretted that decision now. The collar nagged at him, the old-fashioned vest was conspicuously tight across his belly It wore on him like an admission of inadequacy. He gritted his teeth and paced out the necessary steps to the Clawson house.

Clawson’s wife, a gushy, nervous woman addicted to the wearing of gloves, met him at the door. “Why, Creath,” she said, “so good to see you,” and led him to the parlor. “The men are all inside. Go on!”

There were times, Creath wanted to say, when you would have crossed the street to avoid me. But he only mumbled, “Yes, Evie, thanks,” and held his hat in his hand.

“The men,” as she had called them, were clustered around a dining room table. The shades had been pulled and the electric lights switched on. The air was already blue with cigar smoke. Creath entered, and the rumble of male voices tapered to a stillness.

He felt the sweat tickling down his ribs.

Bob Clawson pushed forward. The high-school principal looked dowdy and small among these lawyers and realtors and store owners. There was a primness in him he could not shake. But his hail-fellow smile and his extended right hand made Creath feel stupidly grateful. He took Clawson’s hand eagerly. It moved, wetly alive in his grip, like some kind of hairless animal.

“Creath Burack! Good you could make it! You know most of these people, I think?”

By reputation mainly, Creath thought, but Clawson’s welcome had taken him out of the spotlight, and he was pleased to see the faces turn incuriously away from him, the rumble of conversation resume. He would have liked to be invisible.

“Sure,” he said breathlessly.

“I really am pleased you could make it. We’ve been having a lot of discussions here you might find interesting. I think it’s important that people like ourselves get together in a time like this, don’t you?”

“I guess so,” Creath said.

“But surely you’ve noticed it, too? But then it’s all the more obvious from where I sit. I see the young people. Your wife made some astute points in that regard, I understand, in her little speech. I assume you agree with her.”

Creath had not heard the speech. Liza had told him about it. He had listened with only half an ear. It had sounded like the same old stuff to him. The country was going to hell in a handbasket, true enough—but he could not arouse himself to be shocked by it.

“I go along with her a hundred percent,” he said, and wondered miserably if he ought to have come at all. He did not like these men and he was certain they had not petitioned to have him here, he was here on sufferance strictly. Then why had he come? Because of Liza, he thought—her stern conviction that this would better them in some way. And for more pragmatic reasons. There in the corner with a glass of brandy was his banker, a man named Crocket, who held the mortgage on his house; seated at the table was Jeff Baines, the realtor to whom Creath must turn when, inevitably, it came time to sell the ice plant; and there by the potted Chinese evergreen was Jim St. Hubert, the undertaker who would one day escort him into the cold weedy soil up at Glen Acres. In pieces and fragments these men owned him. He was beholden to them.

Clawson seemed to sense his discomfort. He poured Creath a drink from a bottle of Canadian blend. “It’s important, times like this, to mend fences. Man to man. We hang together or we will hang separately. You understand?”

In truth he did not. He murmured, “Yes.”

“That’s good. That’s fine. You finish your drink, all right? Pretty soon I’ll make my little speech.”

* * *

There were chairs for everyone. Creath sat at the back, bent almost double in his effort to remain inconspicuous. The room had grown unbearably hot and his body, under these layers of dark cloth, was slick with sweat. Bob Clawson’s “little speech,” once begun, showed no signs of winding down.

The sentiments were all familiar. Vice and sedition were abroad in the land, and the law was helpless to deal with it. “I don’t mean that as any kind of slur on the work of Tim Norbloom there. We’ve talked, haven’t we, Tim?—and he agrees that something more has to be done. I want to emphasize that we are working in privacy here. The nature of the work demands it. Many of us are public servants, Tim Norbloom and myself are just two examples, and our work might be compromised if word of this got out. But we are willing to assume that risk. We assume it because we know what every right-thinking citizen in Haute Montagne must at least suspect: that hard times call for hard action.”

Creath drained the teacup of whiskey Clawson had given him, closed his eyes to better feel the alcohol working. He found himself impatient with Clawson’s fine rhetoric. You can’t bullshit a bull-shitter. By God, he thought, I know what you are dressing up with your fine perfume.

And he thought quite involuntarily of Greg Morrow. I know where she is.

Was that possible? Anna Blaise still in town, still here in Haute Montagne—could that be?

He closed his eyes. Her face was there in the inner darkness.

“We are all aware,” Clawson said, “of the way unemployed men and railway transients have been gathering on the outskirts of town. This has not been a pressing problem, though many of us do worry about the safety of our women, and I think we’ve all been more astute about locking our doors lately. I know I have—haven’t you?”

Heads nodded. Creath forced open his eyes, stared glazedly at the scuffed tips of his shoes.

“But the problem may be of greater proportion than we have suspected. I’m talking about the outright seduction of our daughters. I’m talking about young girls making clandestine visits to the shanty-town at the railway trestle. I’m talking about what can only be described as a very real and terrible danger to the lives and morals of our children.”

Clawson paused, and there was the embracing silence of absolute attention.

“Fortunately,” he said, “one of our young people has been courageous enough to step forward with this information. The problem is not yet widespread, but it could become so. And that is why we must come together.”

Creath stood up. He did not mean to. Some instinct impelled him, or the liquor. “Who do you mean? Who came to you?”

Heads turned. He thought: dear God, what have I done?

Bob Clawson looked at him uneasily. “A former student at the high school,” he said quickly, “and I’ve taken the liberty of asking him to join us so you all can meet him and hear what he has to say.” Clawson opened the parlor doors behind him. “Come on in, son.”

Greg Morrow stepped inside, smiling.

The rest of it was hazy in Creath’s mind, a blur of perception. Greg described the assignations he had witnessed, or claimed to have witnessed, down by the railway trestle. Clawson added something about “the obligation—no, the duty we feel to do something about this while we can,” and then the mounting burble of voices. Creath stood in a corner, smiling falsely when he could force himself to do so, drawing strength from the reassuring confluence of the two walls.

Then, an eternity later, as these well-dressed and authoritative men of means began to filter out one by one, Bob Clawson approached him with his hand once more extended.

“Creath, I know you’re as concerned about these issues as the rest of us. For your own sake and Liza’s. And I want you to know you can be a big help to us.”

No, Creath thought. Leave me out of it. I will not be a party to this thing. It was true, he had wanted a reckoning with Anna Blaise, had wished he could expunge her from his life altogether (because, in all truth, the wanting of her was still huge within him: Christ God, he thought, I want her even now, even now)—but there was no redemption in what these men wanted, only some filthy act of violence born out of their fear and their boredom.

I am not a saint, Creath thought. He had done many things he was not proud of. He had hurt people. He would gladly have killed Travis Fisher… would yet, perhaps. But not this.

He thought: she could be out there.

I know where she is.

“A big help,” Bob Clawson was saying, his hand on Creath’s shoulder. “A husky man like yourself. And don’t think it won’t be noticed. We are all friends—all of us who sat in this room and pledged ourselves to the betterment of the community. And friends do things for friends. I think you must understand that.”

No, Creath thought. Debts forgiven, considerations made; it was tantalizing but insufficient. No, he thought, not even for that. I won’t—

But he saw Greg Morrow gazing at him across the oaken table, that insolent smile playing faintly across his lips. And he understood then that Greg Morrow was smarter than he had thought. Greg Morrow understood the tidal flow of wealth and power in Haute Montagne, how to use and manipulate it: Greg Morrow, humble as his station was, had invaded the Byzantine social structure of the town’s prime movers… had done this terrible thing quite consciously Greg, catching his eye, smiled oh-so-faintly. And Creath understood. The communication was explicit. Crawl, the smile said. Crawl like you made me crawl. Crawl for the rich men, or you can kiss your shitty business and your swivel chair and your cheap cigars good-bye. Because these men will break you.

Creath tore his eyes away.

Bob Clawson frowned. “We can count on you, can’t we, Creath? It means a lot to all of us. After that wonderful speech your wife gave, I wouldn’t want to think you’d backed out on us.”

Creath felt his lower lip trembling. He was afraid he might begin to cry. The textured fleur-de-lis wallpaper threatened to close in about him. He needed to be out of this place.

“Yeah,” he said faintly. “You can count on me.”

Greg’s smile broadened, and Creath fumbled for the door.

Chapter Sixteen

That night there was frost on the brittle stalks of prairie grass. Anna was sleeping or comatose, and Travis ate a sparing meal of saltines, chipped beef, and tepid water. She woke at dawn.

The last of her humanity was draining from her. The flesh was taut over her skull, and the skull itself had taken on new contours, a kind of streamlining. Her soiled dress hung limply, and Travis did not wish to know what transformations it might conceal. Her aura pulsed about her, the irises of her eyes had expanded; she gazed at him from azure depths, unfathomable. He began, “You have to leave this place. Listen: Greg Morrow knows we’re here. He’s bound to make trouble. Maybe when Nancy gets back we can take you over to the railway trestle. We—”

But Anna was shaking her head. When she spoke her voice, too, was more nakedly alien, a kind of soft keening; it stood up his hackles, though all she said was, “No.”

“You don’t understand. You’re in danger here.” “In danger anywhere, surely? But, Travis, the time is very near. I cannot leave this place. Listen to me. Bone is close by. But he’s wounded. He needs help.”

Travis sat back on his haunches. It had been the coldest night of this autumn, and his jacket was inadequate, the barnboard walls of the switchman’s shack thin as paper. Anna did not shiver; Travis did. “Near here?”

“Very near.”

“Then go to him.”

She tilted her head. “Look at me. If I stood up, the bones would break.”

He nodded slowly. It was undeniable. He ventured, “I could carry you—”

“We’ve touched before, Travis. And I’m less human now. Human by willpower mostly. It would be difficult for you. Besides, we’ll need some shelter for the duration of the Change. The shack would be best.” She added, “I can describe the place where he is. But there are other things you need to know.”

Travis narrowed his eyes. The candlelight flickered. He thought, she will warn me about him. All this sounded sincere, and he believed much of what she had already told him, but her very strangeness made her impossible to evaluate; the truth, as much as lies, could be a manipulation. He said, “Tell me.”

“He’s been wounded. The wounds are severe. He is not dead—he need not die—but he is very nearly delirious. He has also been betrayed, and in the delirium is buried his anger. This is a dangerous combination. Approaching him cannot be anything but dangerous. Bone is very strong, even wounded. And there is more.”

“What?”

“He has much the same power of reflection as myself, though he exercises it differently. Travis, you need to understand how it is for us in the place we come from. We’re not two separate beings. We—”

“I know,” Travis said. “Nancy told me.”

“Then hear it again and try to understand. You think of us as male and female, Bone and me, because we’ve assumed those avatars. This is terribly misleading. We’re one person. We’re separate because when we came here we had not yet achieved physical union, though we were already paired paired here—” she touched her head, “which is why I have been able to Call him. Apart, neither of us is whole.”

“Male and female,” Travis said. “I don’t see how it’s so different.”

“But you are different,” Anna said fervently “all of you! You’re male and female both at once! Whole from birth! There is no purity, no perfection. A human woman distilled of all her maleness would be inconceivable, insupportable, a kind of monster—”

“Like you,” Travis said.

She nodded calmly “Like me.”

“And Bone—”

“He has assumed a masculine persona. And, Travis, he is quite capable of functioning as a mirror You look at me and I give back your own most fundamental comprehension of a woman. Yes? But Bone may be much more difficult to confront. Not just because he’s wounded. Look at him, Travis, and what he will give you back is yourself. Your own deepest, hidden face. And I cannot honestly promise that you will be strong enough to confront it.”

He turned away from her. The door of the shack had fallen open, and he was able to see a long way out into the fading night, the cold plains of the stars. There was the sound of wind and water running.

He didn’t want to do this—any of this. He thought of all the warm, lit places of the town. Your own face, she had said. Your own deepest, hidden, face. And if he saw that, he wondered, would he understand? Would he know then what had brought him here, why he was huddling in this abandoned shack, an outcast, when he could have been warm, safe, loved?

She was veiled in the flickering darkness. Goddamn her, Travis thought. She had lured him here; he had broken on the reefs of her.

An old, old bargain… which of us used the other!

But there was only one way out of it now. A transformation, she had said, once begun, must be completed. He guessed that was probably true. “Describe the place,” Travis said.

Solemnly, she did so. The trestle, the river, the distant silhouette of the grain elevators. “Do you know where that is, Travis?”

He pulled his flimsy jacket around himself and stood up. “I know,” he said.

The morning was very cold.

The sun rode up high but ineffectual over the town of Haute Montagne.

Home, Nancy had gathered up the last of her money and a change of clothes and folded them into a linen bundle. She tucked an old tintype photograph of her father into her pastille box and clicked shut the lid. She supposed this was a kind of leave-taking, a final good-bye… but she must not think about that.

At the foot of the stairs her mother was waiting, standing between Nancy and the front door, her face doughy and pale where it was not touched with feverish highlights of red.

“Stay,” Faye Wilcox said. “You’d be mad to go out again now.”

“Mama, please,” Nancy began.

“I hear things,” her mother said. “I am not in the position I once was. But I hear things. Things are happening in this town. Your name is mentioned.” She licked her lips and seemed for a moment to lose her way … as if, Nancy thought, her rope bridge of words and phrases had collapsed beneath her. “It’s not for myself,” she said finally, softly. “I’m worried what could happen. People are talking about guns.”

“I’ll be careful,” Nancy said.

“You were right, you know. What you said last time. He’s not dead. Or he wasn’t when he left. He just left. Left, I guess, the way you’re leaving.” She looked up from the floor. “Is it so awful here?”

“Not awful at all,” Nancy said, feeling five years old.

“Was it my fault?” “No.”

“Well.” She straightened her shoulders. “If you go, you ought not to come back. I don’t mean that to be cruel. The way the town is…”

“I know.”

“I wish I had some money to give you.” “I’ll be all right,” Nancy said. “I have to go.” And Faye Wilcox stood aside, though the motion seemed to pain her.

At twenty past noon Jacob Bingham, the owner and proprietor of Bingham’s Hardware Store—located conveniently on the busy 200s block of Lawson Spur—smiled at Bob Clawson, the high-school principal, who had just sailed through the big front door like an autumn breeze.

Clawson made a show of examining the electrical fans, the steel-bladed lawn mowers, the fishing reels and fly rods. Then, smiling, he presented himself at the cash counter. Dressed to the nines, as usual. In the glass display case there was a selection of Bowie knives.

“Fine knives,” Clawson commented.

“Wonderful knives,” Jacob said amiably. “Do anything for you. Open a tin can, gut a fish, slit your throat. In the market?”

“No,” Clawson said, “I guess not now. You have that package ready for me?”

Jacob brought it forth from the storage drawer beneath the counter. The package was heavy and it was wrapped in brown paper. It smelled slightly oily. He smiled. “Watch yourself, now.”

Clawson extended both arms and Jacob loaded him down.

“We’re very much in your debt,” Clawson said. Jacob Bingham frowned. “I understood there would be payment?”

“Of course,” Clawson said hastily. “I was speaking metaphorically ”

“Well. Don’t fall down with that, now. You need help with the door?”

“I’ll be fine.”

Jacob watched him leave. Cool air swirled in the door as Clawson struggled out.

It was shaping up to be a fine day, he thought. A fine autumn day.

Outside, in his car—half past noon by the clock on the civic building—Bob Clawson plucked at the brown binding twine until the knot unraveled, then spread back the oily leaves of paper. Thus revealed, the two .22-gauge hunting rifles lay in his lap, greased and slick, alien things. He had not personally handled a rifle before. The complexity of slots and levers was daunting. But surely it could not be as complicated as it looked. One aims, he thought. One fires.

He saw Tim Norbloom’s police car in his rear-view mirror. The police car pulled abreast of him, and Clawson rolled down his window, conscious of the weight of the guns in his lap.

“Pleasant day,” Norbloom said, his big Nordic horseface framed in the darkness of the patrol car.

Clawson suppressed the instinctive distaste he felt for the man. “Very nice. Indian summer.”

“Everything on for tonight?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Bingham came through?” “Yes, indeed.”

“Then I’ll be seeing you later.”

“We’re gathering at eight,” Clawson said.

“Yessir.” Norbloom shot him a mock salute. “I’ll be there.”

Clawson smiled perfunctorily and paused to savor the excitement growing inside him.

Liza watched with great trepidation as Creath brought up his hunting rifle—disused these many years—from the basement, and began to clean and oil it. He bent to the task like a man possessed, his eyes intently focused, and when she spoke to him he did not respond.

Surely there was nothing dangerous in this? Liza felt as if events had somehow gone beyond her… but surely Bob Clawson would not be party to do an enterprise that was physically dangerous?

“Creath,” she said tentatively. “Creath, if this is something … if you don’t feel you should be involved. …”

But he lifted his head to gaze at her, and the expression on his face was a combination of implacability and silent horror so intense that she could not bear the weight of his attention. She looked down, and when she looked up again he had gone back to his work, polishing the rifle barrel so intently that it seemed he might grind it to dust. Please God preserve him, Liza thought, and drew the curtains against the impending night.