Текст книги "A Hidden Place"

Автор книги: Robert Charles Wilson

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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 13 страниц)

Bone was aware of the silence between Archie and Deacon, the way they moved around each other like nervous cats. There was no poker tonight, no debate. Only the sound of the rain drumming on the sod roof.

Archie stood up impulsively not long before darkness set in for the night. He stretched, shot a glance at Deacon, said, “This fuckin’ place!” and ducked through the door in the direction of the outhouse.

Deacon, seated on his bunk, watched the other man go. As soon as Archie was hidden by the rain he stood up.

“I’ll be out for a bit,” he told Bone. “You stay here. You hear me? Stay put.” “Deacon—” “Shut up.”

Bone recoiled from the force of Deacon’s voice. “Shut up,” Deacon whispered fiercely, “and stay put, and that’s all I want to hear from you.” Bone sat still.

Deacon moved out into the rain as Archie had, but in a different direction: toward the farmhouse.

Bone was still waiting—gazing at the rain, his knees pulled up, rocking in rhythm with the Calling inside him—when Archie came back, staring at Deacon’s empty bunk. “Son of a bitch,” he said, and turned almost tearfully to Bone. “Where is he? Oh, Christ! Did he go out? Did he go there!”

Bone pointed toward the farmhouse—a dark shape in the rain through the door.

Archie staggered as if from a physical blow. He looked suddenly small, Bone thought. Small and old. His grief was like a dark aura. “Oh, Christ, Bone– come on, come with me, we gotta stop him, stop him before it’s too late!”

The demand was so heartfelt that Bone did not question it. He ran behind Archie into the rain. He was cold and wet instantly, water slicking his stubble hair, running past the collar of his pea coat into his torn checked shirt and down the knobs of his spine. They reached the farmhouse, and Bone pressed up against a kitchen window. Condensation frosted the glass; he could not see inside; but one wet pane gave him back his own reflection, sunken-eyed, pale, and huge. The kitchen was dark. Archie shouted: “Bone! Bone, the door’s locked! Knock it down, for God’s sake, he’s inside there, Bone—”

But then a light flashed twice in the darkness, the noise of it ringing painfully in Bone’s eardrums. It was Darcy’s big shotgun, Bone guessed. The one that had hung on the wall. And in the eerie silence that followed there was only the drumming of the rain, the rattle of a fallen copper kettle from the kitchen, and the wail of Archie’s weeping.

Digging the hole, Bone thought about death.

The darkness was absolute, though the rain had tapered to a drizzle. He worked methodically with the Darcys’ broad-bladed shovel, fighting the wet ground and the mulch that littered the wheatfield, turning up the rich dark soil. The night wind on his wet clothes made him tremble, and Bone gritted his teeth and drove the shovel savagely into the resistant earth. He smelled of his work.

Death was not such a bad thing, Bone thought. He had wondered, at times, if it was not in fact death that was Calling him, whether that elusive sweetness might not be the sweetness of release from this misshapen body. In some way it might be… but he had been offered death many times and had never accepted. The body resisted. There was an incompleteness about it.

Too, he had seen death often enough among the railway tramps and it was not attractive. There was a kind of shamefulness about a human body after death, Bone thought, the limpness, like a child’s costly doll too casually discarded. To Bone, the dead always seemed insulted: subject to indignities, and passively sullen.

Bone had made the hole shallow but wide. It looked less like a grave than like some kind of crater, broadly dish-shaped, now filling with black water. Bone guessed it was good enough and when he stood up and turned toward the farmhouse he saw the halo of Archie’s lantern bobbing toward him across the denuded wheatfield. Archie had stopped weeping, but his face was set in a rictus of grief, his eyes heavy-lidded and bruised-looking.

“It’ll do,” Archie said. He looked at Bone. “Come help me.”

They moved back through the darkness to the Darcy farmhouse. A single kitchen lantern was burning, and Bone navigated through a gloom of shadows. “Here,” Archie said tonelessly. He put his hands under Paul Darcy’s shoulders. Bone took the feet, spreading the legs until he was able to grasp the body under the knees. This was death, all right. Always the same, Bone thought, that rag-doll pout, as if the farmer were holding his breath to protest the injustice of it. Bone looked without curiosity at the broad red stain across Darcy’s midsection. They lifted up the body and carried it into the wheatfield, to the hole Bone had gouged there.

The body looked up at them from the hole. Archie, breathing in gasps, poured a spadeful of earth over Darcy’s face, as if he could not bear that silent recrimination. There was something prudish in the gesture, and Archie straightened hastily, shaking his head. “One more,” he said.

This one was more difficult even for Bone. The Darcy woman lay at the opposite end of the kitchen, spreadeagled next to the iron stove (the stove Deacon had called a “puffin’ belly”), and though her wound was similar to her husband’s the expression on her face was even more reproachful. Maybe the indignity was worse for a woman: this nasty business of lifting and burying. By the time they reached the grave Archie was weeping again, a dry weeping that seemed to come from deep inside the cavity of his chest. Mrs. Darcy lay in the shallow hole in her yellow print dress, and Bone saw that the rain had made her expression quizzical, as if she were surprised to be here, staring so fixedly up at the night. Bone suppressed an urge to apologize.

“Bury ’em,” Archie said. He wiped his hands on his pants. “Bury ’em fast as you can.”

Bone drove his shovel into the dirt pile: chuff. It was easier work than the digging had been.

Now the bunkroom was full of light. Deacon was there, filling up his kitbag and Archie’s with oddments from the Darcy household: forks, spoons, canned food. He did not look cheerful exactly Bone thought, but there was a feverish redness to his cheeks, a wildness in his eyes.

“A night’s work,” he was saying. “All in a fucking night’s work. Right, Archie? All in a night’s work—right?”

“For Christ’s sake,” Archie pleaded, “shut up about it.”

Bone stood in the doorway, waiting.

“We move out tonight,” Deacon said. “Find us a train. Moving out, Bone! Find us a train out of here.”

Bone nodded. It was all he had really wanted. He gazed at Deacon hefting his kitbag and wondered for the first time whether these men were really his friends, whether the killing of the Darcys had been, as Deacon insisted, “necessary.” Deacon feeding him in California, Deacon offering him a smoke– that Deacon had smelled trustworthy and Bone had invested his trust accordingly.

This Deacon—literally twitching with nervous energy, his eyes wild with lantern light—smelled very different. There was an air about him of cordite and revenge. He had killed. He had killed with calculation and without mercy. He could do so again.

Deacon motioned to Bone, and the two of them stepped outside for a moment. “This is just between us,” Deacon said, hooking his arm over Bone’s stooped shoulder. “Not that I don’t trust Archie. Don’t get me wrong. He’s my buddy. But he’s a little wild right now—you understand? I got something I want you to hold onto for me, and maybe don’t let Archie know you got it. Understand?”

Bone shrugged.

“Good,” Deacon said hastily, “great,” and he pushed something into the deep pocket of Bone’s blue Navy pea coat.

“Archie!” Deacon yelled. “Time to move out! We want to get down the road before sunup!”

Lingering behind them on the wet road away from the farmhouse, Bone waited until there was a little dawn light and then reached into his pocket and pulled out what Deacon had put there. It was a damp wad of bills, prosaic in his huge calloused hand.

Bone slid the money back into his pocket.

The Calling was louder now, and he listened carefully for the sound of a train.

Chapter Eight

Nancy located Travis on the first chill day of the autumn.

Seasons in Haute Montagne always followed the calendar. Springs were a haste of melting and blossoming; summers declared themselves boldly; autumns hurried toward winters; and winters came down like guillotine blades. She was accustomed to it. The prairie, incising the sky on all horizons, gave up these clinical seasons. But now for the first time Nancy was seriously worried. The adventure was not an adventure any longer. She had lost Travis, and Anna would not tell her why. The cool air and the shedding of the bur oaks seemed full of portents.

She watched the Burack house for a time,– for a time she waited with Anna at the switchman’s hut. Travis did not come to either place.

If he had not left Haute Montagne altogether, she thought, there was only one place he might be.

She put on a heavy cloth coat and took a hunting knife from the attic chest where the relics of her father’s life were stored. She attached the knife to her belt and slipped away from the house. It was an overcast Saturday, and her mother was off at a Baptist Women’s meeting. Fallen leaves pursued her until she was beyond the town, and then there was only the dry prairie grass. She followed the southern bank of the Fresnel toward the railway trestle.

She was frightened, though she tried not to admit it to herself. All her life she had heard stories about railway tramps. That they left encoded marks on people’s doors. That they stole babies. That they would kill you for the money in your pocket. Sometimes, especially these latter years, she had seen such men come into town looking for work. They had seemed less threatening than sad, worn-out, eroded. They wore helplessness about them like a suit of clothes. The church would occasionally feed them, though Nancy’s mother disapproved: “It only encourages them. And the smell!”

Sad. But Nancy did not doubt that they could be dangerous, too. How could such despair not breed anger?

She moved through the empty meadows toward the scabrous iron trestle, burdocks clinging to her skirt. When she saw a faint, line of smoke rising up, she reached inside her coat and closed her fingers on the reassuring whalebone handle of the knife.

It was not a big hobo jungle. Haute Montagne was too far from the big cities, too insignificant a stopover, and too chary a society for that. But there were men who lived here, at least briefly. She saw two huts made of tar paper, tin, and old two-by-fours in the darkness under the trestle. A tiny fire burned fitfully. A few men lay strewn on the ground like sacks of trash, asleep, their limbs at random angles. The sound of the river running came back in echoes from the arch of the railway bridge. She moved as far into that shadowy place as she dared.

“Travis?”

Her voice, too, echoed back.

She thought: He is not here.

But then a shadow stirred in the dark pebbly corner where the trestle met the bank, and Travis stepped forth.

She was relieved that he was not like these other men, some of whom had risen up to stare blankly at her; he was, still, better groomed, better dressed. He looked only down on his luck, not broken. It seemed inconceivable that he could have been living like this… for days, Nancy thought; almost a week since she had left him alone at the switchman’s shack.

“You shouldn’t have come here,” he said.

He had lost weight. He stood before her like a pillar of stone.

“I need help.” His eyes avoided her, and she added, “You left me.”

“Not you.”

“Anna? You mean Anna?” “Let’s not talk here.”

She followed him up the grade of the riverbank, up to the place where the trestle leaped across the water. Travis sat on a concrete abutment, gazing wearily off at the horizon.

“Travis,” she said, making herself brave. “I know there’s something wrong. I asked Anna about it. She wouldn’t explain, but she says it was a mistake—you saw something you shouldn’t have seen. You weren’t ready.” She licked her lips. “It was a mistake. Travis, please come back.”

He was a long time answering. The wind was brisk, and Nancy hugged her coat around herself.

“Maybe it’s true,” he said slowly, “what Aunt Liza believes about Anna. She’s not human.” For the first time he looked at her. “You understand that?”

“No! How could she not be human? She—”

“You’ve been with her. You know.”

Well. Of course there was so much she didn’t understand. Obviously, what was happening was not normal. Normal people didn’t need to be sequestered in ruined buildings for months at a time. But—not human? How could that be?

Travis’s fists were clenched.

“I gave it up for her,” he said. “I had it in my hand. A life. An ordinary life. She seduced me out of it.”

“She’s lost, Travis. I talked to her about it. She’s just lost, is all. I don’t know where she’s lost from, or how she plans to get back… but lost is lost. This town won’t help. We have to.”

She reached for his hand. But he drew it away, and the gesture was so quick and so instinctive that it shocked her. “Don’t,” he said.

“My God. It’s me. It’s me, isn’t it? It’s something I did.”

Travis shook his head no. His eyes, however, were blank.

“I trusted you!”

He turned back toward the bridge. “Travis! Travis Fisher, you son of a bitch! I trusted you!”

The wind tore at her.

He watched from the bridge as Nancy stalked away through the prairie grass. Part of him wanted to follow her. To apologize.

But he could not forget what had happened in the switchman’s shack. The thing Anna had become. The experience defied comprehension. He knew only that it was real, and that the Anna-thing was not human, and that she had seduced him into betraying any hope he might have had of a future here in Haute Montagne.

To the west, workmen were erecting a tent for the traveling revival. A clanking and the cry of muted voices came across the prairie. The tent revivals always came to Haute Montagne in the autumn, Nancy had said. It was a signal of impending winter, as unmistakable as the racing of the dark clouds across the sky.

There was nothing left for him but to move on … to move on the way these other men did, riding the boxcars and the flatcars. Racing the snow, looking for work. Travis had resigned himself to it.

But not yet, he thought, though he could not explain even to himself why he felt that way: not just yet.

He would stay here a while. Off west, the fluttering banners of the tent revival rose on their guy wires to the gray sky.

He thought: There is unfinished business here.

Chapter Nine

Creath Burack, dressing for the tent revival, regarded himself in the bathroom mirror and thought, she is gone.

The mirror was cracked where Travis Fisher had broken it in their scuffle. Weeks had passed, but Creath had not been able to summon the energy to make repairs. A sliver of glass, stiletto-shaped, had fallen away from the backing; a black fissure divided his reflection.

She was gone. He could not erase that single terrible thought from his mind.

It should not matter. He had told himself so. If anything, things had improved. Liza was bustling in the bedroom, singing to herself… and when had he last heard her sing? A year ago, two, three? And he knew—it was impossible not to know—that it was Anna’s absence that had lifted the cloud from her. That was good—wasn’t it?

But he thought, She is gone. Sweating, he moved the shaving brush in its cup and methodically lathered his jaw.

Well, he told himself firmly, it doesn’t matter. None of it matters. Not Anna Blaise and not his humiliation at the hands of Travis Fisher. Flesh is flesh, he thought; she was a woman, she was gone. It happened.

But in some strange way it was not the sex he missed. Pausing, his eyes on his own eyes in the broken mirror, he allowed himself to remember.

With her, everything had been different.

There was a sweetness in her, Creath thought, remembering the touch of her body impossibly smooth against his own. It had made him cry out against his will, sobbing with the sweetness of it. It was a pleasure that cut deep, that stirred him in secret places and made him aware of all the things he had lost. Not just the failing of the ice business or the disappointments of his marriage, but a broader loss: in her arms he felt, too keenly, the narrowing of life itself. You start out, Creath thought, you are a river in full flood; but life meets you with its dams and deadfalls and all its interminable arid places. You lose speed, depth, urgency, desire. You become a trickle in a desert.

He had been borrowing against the wellspring of her, he realized now: stealing back a facsimile of his youth; reveling, in those clumsy bedroom moments, in all the things he might have been and wasn’t.

Now there was nothing left in him but the loss. Only that painful awareness.

He loved her. He hated her. He—but it was a thought he suppressed, grinding his teeth together– God forgive him, he wanted her back.

Liza tapped at the door. “Don’t want to be late!” she called out.

He had allowed Liza to talk him into driving her to the tent revival. There was not the strength in him to resist her anymore. And, in truth, he was not strongly opposed to the idea. These last few weeks memories had seemed to shake loose like autumn leaves inside him, and one memory that came often was of the revivals he had ridden to as a child in his father’s horse-drawn wagon, excited at first by the bustle of it and then, in the hot cavern of the tent, caught up in some itinerant preacher’s evocation of the afterlife, intoxicated by the choral voices, until he imagined he could see that golden city glittering in front of him, until it shone in his dreams, benevolent and full of solace. But the solace, like the dreams, faded,– and then there had been only real life, grindingly ordinary, powerful and familiar. The dreams were a cheat, and he had taught himself to despise them.

Now, in some essential way alone, he longed for that consolation.

“In a minute,” Creath called through the door. “I’m shaving.”

“I’ll wait in the truck,” Liza said.

He made his mind blank, shaved himself thoroughly and rinsed his face, and then turned away from the fractured mirror with an unspeakable sense of relief.

They parked in the meadow and walked to the tent at dusk, Liza beaming and nodding hellos. Tent revivals always made her think of heaven.

Everything was just the way she imagined heaven would be: the glad greetings, the tremor of excitement, the sweet voices raised in song. Lantern light suffused the high spaces of the tent, and the mingled smell of canvas and naphtha rose up like incense. She arranged herself on a bench with Creath beside her in his red-checked coat.

She was still astonished that he had agreed to come. Ordinarily, he displayed a vulgar disdain for spiritual matters. He was religious, she had observed, only among the Rotarians, and that only perfunctorily: the Christ-the-businessman school of doctrine. And even that had lapsed with the demoralization of the ice business. For years Liza had tried to lead him into something deeper, but until now she had not succeeded.

But maybe his presence here was not so shocking. Since the fight with Travis and the departure of Anna Blaise, he had been in many ways a new man. Slower, she thought, yes, as if he had lost his sense of direction. But slower to anger, too, and more humble. The anger was still there, of course, buried in his sullen silences; but with the anger a confusion, an uncertainty.

She was shed of Anna Blaise and was shed, as well, (though this was not a Christian thought) of her sister’s boy. And now Creath was with her at a tent revival. Now, she thought, why, now, anything is possible.

The song leader conducted them through “The Old Rugged Cross,” leaning on the beats so that the music swayed with a ponderous grace, like a sailing ship moving in a gentle swell. Liza, singing, seemed to rise and spread out. Creath only mumbled the verses, dutiful and uncertain, but Liza rang them out clear and high, each word a tolling bell.

Two benches ahead, Faye Wilcox turned and cast a furtive glance backward. Liza pretended to ignore her, stretching out an amen sonorously. Faye looked distracted, she thought, even disheveled. Not to mention jealous.

But that was logical. The Baptist Women’s executive committee was holding its elections next week, and for the first time in years, Liza had been nominated for the post of chairwoman. The nomination had been seconded; she had already begun preparing a speech. She was a new woman. Her life had begun again.

The other candidate was Faye Wilcox.

Liza sat with her arm entwined with Creath’s. The music faded. Briefly, the only sound was the autumn wind whipping the canvas suspensions. Then the preacher entered: a tall, somber, hawk-faced man bent aggressively at the waist. He gazed at the crowd, a Bible poised in the crook of his left arm, rimless eyeglasses glittering in the lantern light. His theme, the paper handouts said, was “What Have You Done For Jesus Lately?”—and when he spoke his words lashed out like lightning.

Liza let the sermon flow over her. What mattered, she thought, was not the sense of the words but the sound of them, that diving and leaping of aimed syllables, arrows of God. It was the way, when she was a child, she had perceived her father’s gruff commands: incomprehensible but so authoritative. The thunder of wisdom. She closed her eyes.

She lost track of time over the course of the sermon. The larger cadences of it were like breaking waves, sin and redemption, heaven and hell, echoed in the sighs and moans of the congregation. Stirring at last, surfeited, she glanced at Creath, expecting to see the animal passivity that had so marked him these recent days. Instead, he was sweating, though the tent was still autumn-cool. His lip and forehead were covered with bright pinpricks of moisture. His eyes were large. Liza felt a stirring of alarm… was he ill? The doctor had said something about blood pressure… But there was an unmistakable attentiveness about him, too. He was listening. He leaned forward on the bench, intercepting the words with his body. It was the call to salvation, the sermon burning itself out in a fiery rush: “So many of you are enslaved,” the preacher shouted, “enslaved to drink, enslaved to lust, enslaved to every sin imaginable to man!”

She saw Creath mumble, “Yes”—and then watched, stunned, as he stood and ambled bearlike down the crowded aisle.

The revival emptied out soon after, the crowd streaming away into the autumn night. Those with cars had parked in the big meadow behind the train station. Liza instructed Creath to meet her at the truck and hurried ahead. She did not want Faye Wilcox to get away unbloodied. “Faye!”

The Wilcox woman turned, her face constricted and flushed in the torchlight. She held her handbag in a two-fisted grip. Her knuckles were white.

“Liza,” she said.

“It was all so fine,” Liza said, “don’t you think?” “Yes.”

“The choir, the singing—” “Yes.”

“—the sermon—” “Yes. It was fine.” “Creath was very moved.” “I saw him, Liza.”

“Well, you must have. But what about Nancy?” The killing blow. “Is she ill? One hears such terrible stories—not that I give them any credence—”

But the Wilcox woman only turned and stalked away.

Liza felt a perverse flourish of pleasure. Let her go, she thought. It doesn’t matter. Let her go.

Anything is possible, Liza thought blissfully.

The switchman’s shack was a good quarter mile away, but if she listened closely Nancy could make out the murmur of voices from the tent revival. She reached for the door, and the beat of her pulse drowned out the singing.

“You came,” Anna Blaise said.

Nancy sighed, the sound of it closed up in the darkness of the shack. Travis’s words echoed through her mind. Not human. It made no sense… though there was, yes, that indefinable quality about her, a kind of ethereal lightness, a not-thereness. And that quality had grown more intense over the last week. She was paler than ever. A strong light, Nancy thought, might shine right through her. “It wasn’t easy getting away.”

“Your mother?”

“There’s a tent revival in town. You know about tent revivals?” “I’ve heard.”

Her eyes, Nancy thought. The stillness and wideness of them. “I don’t know how much longer I can keep this up. She wanted me to go with her. It was important to her. If I don’t go it makes her look bad. She begged. And threatened.”

“She could hurt you?”

“Not physically. Not anymore. I guess she could kick me out of the house. Might—if it comes to that.”

Anna said, her voice softly musical in the darkness of the shack, “I’m sorry to have brought this on you.”

“I would have gone with her tonight. But you said it was important.”

“It is.”

The silence stretched out. Nancy said, “I saw Travis, too.” “I’m sorry about Travis.” “He asked for an explanation. I couldn’t give him one.” “I know.”

“He said—” She licked her lips. “He said you weren’t human.” “Nancy—?” “Yes?” “I’m not.”

The shack was very dark indeed. Only a faint beam of moonlight played through the gaps in the wallboards. From far away Nancy heard the sweet massed voices of the revival choir. She said carefully, “I don’t understand.” Fear had uncoiled like a spring inside her.

“Travis saw too much too soon … he didn’t understand either. But now you must. I’ll need your help tonight.”

“I don’t know what you mean!”

“Shh.” The voice was soothing now. Motherly. Nancy’s heart beat in her chest… but she stayed. She did not run.

Anna explained. It was like listening to a bedtime story.

“I am,” she said, her voice cadenced and singing, “a long, long way from home. …”

After dark Travis worked his way along the river-bank to the switchman’s shack.

He was not sure what had brought him. A restlessness. An unease. A need to once more see—like the tongue’s need to probe an aching tooth. The night was cold, and the stars arched overhead in a cruelly vacant sky.

She is a witch. A monster. Not human.

He thought of Creath sneaking up the stairs, seduced by her femaleness.

She was that debased thing his mother had become, he thought, tainted by her sex, but worse, a hundred times worse…

Mama, I’ll protect you, said the six-year-old in him.

His head had become a cacophony of voices. But this one does not need protection, Travis thought.

The door of the shack gaped open then, and Travis hid himself among the fragile ruins of the summer’s pussy willows. Two figures in the moonlight. He recognized Nancy at once. The shape leaning against her could only be Anna. But an Anna changed… luminous with faint blue fire, which was strange enough, but changed in other ways, too… her bones more defined within that frail body, her eyes very wide, her arms elongated.

It was true, then. What he had seen a week ago was not an hallucination. She was changing. She was not human.

But surely Nancy must be able to see that?

They were squatting at the riverside now, Nancy sponging the Anna-thing’s forehead with river water, and where the water touched her skin the feverish blue light seemed to fade. Far off, there was the sound of motors revving as the tent revival ended.

Changing, Travis thought. Though not precisely the way he had expected.

He squinted at the faint figure of Anna at the riverbank, and ancient fears rose up in him.

If this goes on, he thought dazedly, then soon, soon, there would be nothing left of Anna Blaise at all.