A Hidden Place

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “Now?”

  “Now would be best. While I’m still in control.”

  The implications of that disturbed him, but she seemed very sure of herself, so he said, yes, the truck was just outside; but then the front door slammed, an echo that resounded through the old house. Creath was home.

  Chapter Seven

  They squared off in the second-story hallway.

  Creath, obstructing the stairs, wore a deeply aggrieved scowl. He looked at Travis steadily, appraising him. “You have a lot to answer for,” he said slowly, “you sorry son of a bitch.”

  Travis told Nancy to wait for him outside. She shied past Creath, who allowed her to go, all his attention fixed on Travis. Anna was still upstairs, hidden.

  “I’m taking her out of here,” Travis said.

  “You have more gall than I expected,” Creath pronounced. “You! What would you do with her— pissant farmboy like you?”

  “You’re using her,” Travis said.

  “Shut up. Shut your dirty mouth. Your aunt’s down these stairs.”

  Travis felt his own outrage well up. “You think she doesn’t know! Doesn’t know you sneak up here to rape the girl these nights—?”

  “Rape!” Creath laughed, his eyes rolling. “Rape, you call it? What are you, her white knight?” He advanced, his fists clenched, his thick arms showing swarms of muscle under the layered fat. Sweat showered off him. “She wants it, boy-o. Don’t kid yourself. She wants it, or else why would you be chasing her all over town these nights? Sure, I’ve been up there … and maybe Liza knows as much about me as that Wilcox girl knows about you, you think perhaps? Oh, we are that much the same. The difference, boy-o, is that I own this house, and this house is where she lives, and I decide who’s putting it to her—you understand? I decide.”

  “I’m taking her out of here.”

  “You poor dumb shit,” Creath said, and struck him.

  Travis fell back through the door of the second-story bathroom. His hand caught on the medicine cabinet and a shelf of Aunt Liza’s specifics came tumbling out: Cuticura, Bromo Quinine, Winter Pep cough syrup in an opaque blue bottle. He steadied himself on the edge of the sink, blind with pain. The mirror was broken.

  He will beat her, Travis thought. If I fail at this he will beat her, maybe kill her. The instinct that had drawn Creath to her had turned terribly ugly. There was nothing protective in it now, only a huge injured pride and the formless desire to hurt. He forced himself back into the hallway.

  Creath had already started up the steps. Travis leaped forward and drove his fist into the small of the man’s back.

  Creath whirled, enraged. “You cheap little bastard, “ he began. But then Travis hit him hard in the mouth, wanting desperately to silence him,- hit him again when the older man dropped his guard and staggered back, and then again and again, until his fists seemed to acquire an energy and a rhythm of their own. Travis made himself stop when he realized that Creath was not even trying to defend himself: he was prostrate on the stairway, his eyes gone wide with pain and disbelief.

  Suddenly ashamed, Travis stood up straight.

  “Don’t take her,” Creath said. It came out a whisper from his bloodied mouth. “Goddamn you. Don’t take her. She is my—I—”

  “Stop,” Aunt Liza said.

  Travis turned.

  She had been watching from behind. There was a terrible, sullen calm in her voice. “You’ve hurt him enough. Get the girl and get out.”

  Travis looked down at his own bruised and bloodied fists.

  “Aunt Liza—”

  “Do it. Do it quickly.”

  Dazed, he moved up the stairs.

  “I hope you rot,” Aunt Liza said placidly. “I hope she eats you alive.”

  They broke the rusted lock on the door of the switchman’s shack and helped Anna inside. She seemed already weak, unsteady on her feet. She is ill, Travis thought.

  The shack was barely erect, weathered sideboards flecked with old red-barn-paint, a sagging tarpaper roof. Inside there was a crude wooden shelf and mouldering mattress, a porcelain bowl and mug, in one corner a pyramid of rust-rimmed tin cans. The unaccustomed sunlight through the open door raised up ancient slumbers of dust. Anna slid down to the mattress. Her eyes were distant and she was panting.

  Travis went outside with Nancy.

  “We can’t keep the truck,” Nancy said.

  He nodded. “We’ll be lucky if he doesn’t have us arrested.”

  “This is just the beginning. We bought ourselves a lot of trouble just now, you know that, Travis?”

  “I guess I do.”

  She shrugged at the switchman’s shack. “I suppose I don’t look like much—next to her.”

  “You look fine.”

  It was a consolation, and she nodded, accepting it. “Well. We need to get that truck back before somebody sees it here. Travis? I can drive it back to the house. Creath doesn’t have anything against me.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And then come back?” He added, “We need to talk. Make plans.”

  “Sure.”

  She drove away.

  Travis went back to the hovel.

  It would take some cleaning up. The corners were black with spider webs. Carpenter ants moved in the wallboards. It was for certain not a good place to bring a sick person … but Anna was not sick, exactly, or so she said; and anyway they had no choice. A month, she had said. And then what? What consummation was she waiting for? But he could not force his thoughts that far ahead. The needs of the moment had assumed a dire priority.

  He looked at her on the mattress. Her eyes were closed; she might have been asleep. He thought again how delicate she was. Without conscious volition he moved to the side of her, put his hands, gently, on her shoulders. It was the first time he had touched her. Even this trivial intimacy was shockingly intense. Her skin was cool; it was as if he could feel her fragility under his fingers. She stirred but did not open her eyes.

  It was strong, he thought, this thing that was special about her—stronger the closer he got to hen Touching her, it seemed as if she had come somehow to embody everything connected with the female sex, was not so much a single woman as an aggregation of femininity, mother and lover, womb and vagina, an exploration and a welcoming home—he blushed at his own thoughts. But it was so. Not merely carnal, as his contact with Nancy had been. There was nothing base in this. The possibility of defilement was not in her. He thought of what Creath had said. And maybe Liza knows as much about me as that Wilcox girl knows about you, you think perhaps! Oh, we are that much the same.

  Travis could not deny the truth of it. But here, for now, it had ceased to matter. He stroked her perfect cheek, and she trembled.

  “Anna?”

  Her eyes were still closed. The tremor in her grew stronger.

  She twitched in his arms, then convulsed.

  Abruptly he was frightened. “Anna? Anna!”

  She was shaking now, rivers of mysterious energy pouring through her. Her eyes came open suddenly—

  And Travis gazed into them.

  It was a mistake. In that moment she was not Anna Blaise. She was not even a woman.

  Not human.

  Her skin felt dusty. Moth-wing skin. Her eyes were huge undifferentiated pupils dilated beyond credibility. He squeezed his eyelids together to shut out the vision, but that only made it worse: on some inner movie screen she was even more acutely visible. He saw her, still somehow Anna, stripped of fat until her bones shone like porcelain through parchment skin, those huge eyes radiating blue fire, rib cage palpitating, fibrous veined wings like rice paper unfolding wetly behind her. And she was watching him, watching.

  He thought of the carpenter ants at work in the rotting wood. He thought of termites, beetles, night moths banging against window panes.

  He stumbled back from the mattress, revulsion searing through him.

  She sat up suddenly—now human again, at le
ast superficially—and stared at him. “Travis! Travis, I’m sorry—I couldn’t help it—”

  He could not speak. He thought of biting into a ripe fruit and finding some foul decay inside. He thought of stepping into a rotten log. He thought— could not restrain himself from thinking—of his mother vomiting blood into the stained farmhouse toilet bowl, the wages (he had thought then) of sin; of her riding to the doctor when she was almost too weak to survive the journey; of the word “cancer” and of his fear of it as she declined toward death in her stinking bedroom….

  … and it seemed to him, in that twisted and infinite moment, that he had penetrated to the heart of things: under female softness, this burrowing nightmare; under the veneer of life, death….

  … and he threw open the door and ran gasping for the air and the clean river water; knowing, despite the way she pleaded from the doorway, that he could not go back there, could not go back in there, no, not ever again.

  Interlude:

  Bone Finds Work

  “Stick with us,” Deacon had said, and he repeated it in the days and nights that followed until it became a litany, a kind of prayer. Bone listened, Bone nodded. Deacon and Archie had fed him; they had refrained from stealing his coat when they might have. In these kindnesses they had earned his loyalty.

  The mountains were behind them. The land now was flat, often arid, summer-baked. The sky was as huge and tangibly present as the earth, blue or arched with cloud; here earth and sky met on equal terms. The sound of the wind and of the trains seemed embedded always in an immensity of silence.

  In each town they were differently received. In one small grain town they were chased a good quarter mile by the yard bulls. In another a brake-man attempted to shake them down for money; they refused to pay and had spent the night hidden in a reefer car. Bone woke up one morning and found that the redball they were riding had drawn to a stop miles from any habitation because, Archie told him, a band of indigent farmers had blocked a trestle to protest grain prices. Fearful of violence, the three of them crept away from the freight and followed a dirt road at cross angles to the tracks.

  They were in bad financial straits. Deacon had been bringing in oddments of food or coffee or bootleg liquor with his small cache of money; but he had exhausted the bulk of that and gambled away the rest in a game of railyard craps two nights before. “That’s all right,” Deacon said jovially. “I’m to money like a sieve is to water. It’s okay. You rule money or money rules you. I’m a free man, by God, yes I am. We all are. Deacon, Archie, and Bone. Free men.”

  Archie said that was fine but where would they get the withal to eat?

  “Money comes,” Deacon said. “Even in bad times. I remember in 1914—”

  But Bone just smiled vacantly and looked at the sky. Deacon “remembered” often and seldom to any purpose. His talk faded in Bone’s mind to a drowsy hum, as pleasant and as significant as the droning of the insects. The sky in this checkered land was powder-blue, cloudless and fathoms deep. Bone walked, his thoughts extinguished. The time passed.

  Now they were far down this road; night was only a few hours away, and Bone was terribly hungry. Bone felt the Calling in him, a deep persistent summoning; but he had discovered that he could ignore it for a time. All these commonplace physical demands— hunger and pain and the Calling—could be suppressed. For a time.

  Deacon pointed out the grain elevator on the horizon. “Town ahead. Maybe there we get something to eat.”

  “Huh,” Archie said despondently.

  Deacon shook his head. “Doubt,” he said. “Doubt and negativism.”

  “What do you think,” Archie said, “they’re gonna throw food at us? Multiply it, maybe—like the loaves and fishes?”

  “You’re not so fucking smart,” Deacon said. “Just shut up and follow me.”

  The command was too imperious to disobey. Archie followed Deacon, and Bone followed them both.

  It was a meager town. There was a crossroads, a feed wholesaler, a post office next to a coalyard; two side streets of clapboard houses and a scabrous grain elevator silent in the cascading sunlight. The main street was virtually empty. Bone was thankful for that: he disliked drawing attention to himself (the consequences were so often dire) and he had learned to avoid places like this. Had learned to avoid, too, places like the one Deacon seemed to be leading them to, which was the sheriff’s office—the jail.

  Archie hung back. “I’m hungry,” he said, “but I don’t know if I’m that hungry.”

  “You can’t tell,” Deacon said. “Some places like this they run you out of town. Some places put you up a night. Maybe even feed you. I’ve been fed in jails as often as I’ve been beat in ‘em. Quiet town like this not likely to want us on a vag charge … not if we promise to move out in the morning.”

  Bone only shrugged. It made him nervous when Deacon and Archie argued; the conflicts were difficult to grasp and the anger hung in the still air like a poison. Bone had been beaten in jails, too; jails frightened him. But, like Archie, he acquiesced; when Deacon set his mind to a thing he was as implacable as a force of nature.

  Inside the wooden building Deacon spoke to the cop in charge, a small man in a sad brown uniform. “We only want to spend the night,” Deacon said. He said it twice, his voice strangely obsequious and cringing. The small man considered them for a time and then nodded wearily and took them to a cell. The cell was tiny, empty, two stacked beds and a wooden bench. A postage-stamp window looked out on the darkening sky. Bone stepped inside reluctantly, fearing the confinement. This was worse than a boxcar, Bone thought; this was like riding the empty ice compartment on a refrigerator car, sleeping on the wire-mesh bottom and praying the hatch-cover wouldn’t fall shut. The cop closed the cell door and turned to go. Bone’s head swam with claustrophobic fear. Deacon inquired in his cringing voice about food, but the cop only looked at him, shrugged, turned away.

  “Well,” Deacon said, “it’s at least a place to sleep.”

  Bone spent the night on the floor, shivering. The deep waters of sleep eluded him. He floundered for what seemed an endless time in the shallows, drawn back to awareness by his hunger or by the less specific imperatives of the Calling. He dozed until the rattle of the cell door brought him fully awake. He opened his eyes then, twisting his head out of a pillar of morning sunlight.

  The cop stood there and a tall tanned man beside him. The cop was frowning and impatient as Deacon and Archie stirred on their mattresses. The other man betrayed no emotion. Bone sat with his eyes lidded, wary, waiting for Deacon to say something, but it was the cop who spoke first.

  “This is Paul Darcy,” the cop said. “Owns a farm near here. You want to work for him, you get meals and a place to sleep. If not, you can clear out now.”

  Deacon blinked down from the top bunk. “Well, that sounds fine.” He showed his yellowed teeth. “Doesn’t it, Archie? Bone?”

  Archie said he guessed so. Bone nodded fractionally.

  Paul Darcy nodded in return but did not smile.

  Darcy drove them in his rattling pickup truck to the farm, a house and barn and silo, a garden and a collection of outbuildings besieged by wheatfields. They climbed down, and Darcy led them to a long, low structure of two-by-fours and barnboards with bunks and mattresses enough for ten men.

  “This’ll be where you stay,” the farmer said (and his voice, Bone thought, was dry, like an amplification of the rustling of the wheat), “as long as it suits you. We can’t pay you but we can feed you.”

  “That’s fine,” Deacon said.

  “I’ll bring something out, then.”

  Bone sensed that the Darcy man was taciturn but not actively hostile; pleased, if anything, that they had come. Deacon and Archie tested the mattresses and said they preferred them to the jail cell. This was a fine place, Deacon said, “a damn fine place.”

  Darcy and his wife brought the food: steaming bowls of beef stew, warm bread to sop up the gravy. Bone ate hastily from his lap, watching
Mrs. Darcy. She was of a piece with her husband, silently benevolent, her body not large but hardened by work. She gazed at the three men thoughtfully.

  The food was good and even Bone’s hunger was satisfied for a time. Mrs. Darcy took the bowls and promised them “a decent breakfast in the morning— before work.” Bone basked in the glow of his satiation. Deacon and Archie were right, of course; this was a good place. Nevertheless he thought: I cannot stay here.

  Here I am. Find me.

  Bone raised the objection that night, their first night on the Darcy farm. Deacon and Archie were playing cards by the light of an oil lamp. The two men sat on hay bales with a wooden crate between them; Bone lay on a cot with his knees against his chest. “I can’t stay here,” he said finally, the words hoarse and awkward in his mouth.

  Deacon played out his hand and lost, cursing. Then he turned to Bone.

  “What’s this shit?”

  “Deacon, I can’t. It comes back. The sickness.”

  “What sickness?”

  Bone shrugged unhappily.

  “Sick in the head,” Deacon told him. “Sick if you leave this place. This is the best berth we’ve had.” He was silent a moment. Bugs dived about the lamp. “Comfortable,” he said. “It has possibilities.”

  Archie shuffled the cards, shuffled them again.

  “Just forget about leaving here,” Deacon said. “We don’t leave for a while yet.”

  Bone retreated into the bunk. He was not sure how long he could stay here. A little longer, maybe. If Deacon wanted it. He closed his eyes against the glare of the lamp and listened to the moth-flutter of the playing cards. Inside him, the voice was more intense.

  It was July, and the wheat needed taking in.

  Bone had never been so close to wheat. It was a new thing to him, strange in its immensity. One day in that long fatiguing first week Paul Darcy stood with him gazing at the wheat that filled the horizon: wheat, he said, was like a child, nine months of cultivation and this terrible laboring at the birth. “It wears you out,” Darcy said.

  The wheat was as high as Bone’s waist. The stalks of it stood up strangely, the scaled wheat-heads dangling at the top like insect husks. The wheat was a golden color, as if it had absorbed some quality of the sunlight, and it spoke to itself in hushed whispers. Bone, like Deacon and Archie, had fallen quickly into the routine of the harvest. They were up before dawn to eat, Mrs. Darcy serving up huge meals of griddle cakes and eggs. Then the work began in earnest. The Darcy farm had been, in past years, prosperous, and Darcy owned two gasoline-powered binders, spidery machines striped blue and ivory beneath their skin of oil and dust. The binders cut the harvest wheat at the ground and compressed the stalks into sheaves; the sheaves were carried up a ramp to a canvas cradle and bound there into bundles. On dry days both machines worked flawlessly, but when the fields were wet, the damp straw eeled into the gears until the gasoline engines screamed in protest. Several of Darcy’s neighbors had joined in the harvest and Bone, pausing among these other men, liked to watch the binders dance their slow, gracile dance between the barn and the fallow ground.