A Hidden Place

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “That’s why she picked us,” Travis said gently. “We’re alone. Cut off.”

  “Like she is.”

  “Maybe.” He added, “When wolves go after a sheep, the first thing they do is cut it off from the flock.”

  “That’s just crazy. She’s so weak!”

  “What about this Bone? What if they do get together?” He thought of his vision of Anna Blaise— wet wings unfolding behind her. “They don’t care about us.”

  “Come tomorrow,” Nancy said. “Talk to her.” She said, her voice rising, “I told you what you wanted to know!”

  “I didn’t make any promises.”

  “Travis, the only goddamn wolves around here are the ones in Haute Montagne, and they are circling, and they have cut me off—both of us—and, Travis, maybe you can ride away from it all, but— goddammit—I can’t, and they’re gonna bring me down!”

  He thought of Anna Blaise in her damp shack, her pale skin stretched fine, her eyes huge and burning; he thought of this Bone, hardly human, tracking her across the night. He closed his eyes. The Jeweled World. He trembled, thinking of it: of what she had been and what she might become. And what he stood to lose or gain in the process.

  “Tomorrow,” Nancy said.

  “Maybe,” he said softly. “Maybe.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Creath Burack nodded, not cordially, at the sullenfaced boy who had come through the door of his office.

  He felt content, alone here in this pineboard room. There was the reassuring rumble of the compressors, the metallic smell of the dust, the calendars tacked on the wall like pieces of mosaic. He had spent much of his life here. He sat in the wooden reclining chair with his feet on an upturned wastebasket. Too long in this position and the narrow bands of the back-support bit into his spine like teeth. He was getting older; comfort, like most things, could be taken only in moderation. He stirred dully, sat up, blinking.

  “Heard you might have a job free,” the boy said.

  Creath Burack squinted.

  “You,” he said, “you’re Greg Morrow, aren’t you? Bill Morrow’s kid?” He nodded to himself. He remembered Bill Morrow, a fat granary worker who used to show up at the First Baptist stinking of flax and bathtub liquor, sullen little dark-skinned wife who had died of rheumatic fever three years back— yeah. “Yeah, I seen you before. Aren’t you working over at the mill?”

  “Got laid off,” the boy said. “Heard about your job.”

  My Christ, the older man thought, but he is not handsome. Round ugly face. And his lip curled like that. Creath felt a swelling resentment of the boy’s youth, plainly misspent. He could think of no good reason not to show this kid the gate. But play him, first, he thought—like a fish on a line. “What job’s that?”

  “The one the shit-heel farmboy lost,” Greg said, maybe sensing that he was not welcome here.

  “Shit-heel farmboy, huh.” Creath was secretly amused. “You got a strange idea how to beg for a job.”

  “Fuck it, I’m not begging,” Greg Morrow said. He turned to the door.

  Some instinct made Creath say, “Hang on a minute.”

  Greg hesitated.

  “It’s not much of a job,” Creath said. “Pick up trash, stand in on the machine sometimes, deliver sometimes, lift and load always.” He smiled. “It pays shit.”

  Greg remained sullen but appeared confused, as if he had been praised and scolded both at once. That was good.

  “Try it out,” Creath said. “See if you can get a handle on it.”

  “Now?” The kid brightened.

  “Right now.”

  That had been before lunch.

  The kid worked straight through, mopping down the loading docks with scalding water and ammonia. Then the work crew filtered back, gazing at Greg with mute curiosity, at the enthusiastic way Creath played foreman to him; slowly they had caught on, finding him scutwork of their own, lolling against the limp boards of the icehouse while Greg Morrow manhandled the big slabs in and out with an inadequate pair of tongs. The muffled laughter became audible, and at one point Greg looked around with a dark, startled suspicion in his eyes. But everyone had turned away.

  After the five o’clock bell he showed up back in Creath’s office, steaming wet and obviously exhausted. Natural enough, Creath thought. He had done the work of two men.

  “What time do I come in tomorrow?”

  “Sleep late.” Creath grinned at him. “The job’s not available.”

  “What the fuck—”

  “We’re not hiring. Thanks anyway.”

  “You bastard, you owe me a day’s pay!”

  “I don’t remember signing anything,” Creath said mildly. “And watch your dirty mouth.”

  Greg did a long slow bum but he did, at last, turn to leave. Creath felt an immense, perverse satisfaction. Damn but hadn’t the kid done a job with that mop!

  But Greg hesitated and turned back to him now, smiling faintly, and his posture took on that easy insolence again. Creath said, “You too dumb to find the door?”

  “Maybe I’m good for something after all.”

  Creath was instantly suspicious. “I don’t get it.”

  “You want her back?”

  “Want who back?”

  “You know.”

  The insinuation was plain.

  Creath felt beads of sweat break out on his forehead. Guilt and doubt gusted over him both at once. By God, he thought, I have put all that behind me.

  Demons of lust, he thought. Demons of—of—

  “I can find her,” Greg Morrow said, and he was smiling now, a secret and insinuating smile. “I know where she is. I can find her.”

  I have put all that behind me.

  “I don’t want to know,” Creath said faintly. “I don’t want to know!”

  “Maybe you don’t. That’s okay. I’ll get lost.” He opened the door.

  “No,” Creath heard himself say. “Wait …”

  “Huh?”

  “Be in at nine,” Creath said weakly.

  Greg Morrow only nodded.

  The kid was gone, then, and Creath sat back, swabbing his forehead with his big checked handkerchief. After a moment he took out the bottle of Saskatchewan corn whiskey he kept in the bottom drawer, Volstead Act or no Volstead Act; he drank from the neck of the bottle. Backsliding. But there were worse demons than Demon Drink.

  The memory of the tent revival came back blindingly strong—the fine high euphoria that had blossomed like a thorny wildflower behind his eyes. The two ecstasies warred inside him. Ecstasy of sin, ecstasy of faith. He felt his heart falter in his chest.

  I know where she is, the boy had said. I can find her.

  Was it possible? That she was still here, still in Haute Montagne, hidden somewhere—was that truly possible?

  No, Creath thought. It’s a ruse, a trick, a lie. It cannot be. It must not be allowed.

  He reached a second time for the bottle.

  God forgive me, he thought. I want her back.

  His hand was trembling.

  Still smarting with humiliation, Greg Morrow nursed the spastic Model T down the south end of The Spur, out past the scabbed towers of the granaries to his daddy’s property, with its sprung doors like torn hip pockets and its elephant’s graveyard of rust-pocked farm machinery.

  Inside, his old man was asleep. Dusk gathered complex shadows about the prostrate form on the sofa in the front room. A bottle of hooch, inevitably, lay on the plank floor next to him.

  Greg experienced a wave of disgust. He harbored no illusions about the sort of man his father was. Shit-poor, he thought, shit-drunk—and shit-stupid.

  He stomped into the kitchen. There were cans of charity food from the churches, a few, in the cupboard. Hoover, one of his father’s five aging and incontinent cats, sat smugly on the wooden counter-top. Greg put out his arm and swiped Hoover down to the peeling linoleum.

  Shit-stupid, he thought, that was the sum of it. This town had reduced his old
man to a kind of ruin, a living analogue of the junk machines rotting in the front yard, and there was no reason for it but a blind, complacent stupidity.

  Greg had not done all that well in school and had left, in any case, when he was old enough to work. But he had discovered a simple truth that raised him above the level of his old man.

  Small actions, he thought, have big consequences.

  You pull strings. That was how it was done. He had watched the people who ran the town, and that was how they did it. Nothing big, nothing showy. A tug here, a tug there.

  And more: Anyone could do it.

  Today, for instance. Maybe he had endured that humiliation at the ice plant. But he had also got himself a job.

  And all it took, he thought, was a word. The right word.

  There were times he wished he could communicate this truth to his father. If they beat on you, he wanted to say, you don’t have to beat back, and you don’t have to take it (though his father had done both, copiously)—you just have to watch. And know. And learn the words to say, the strings to pull.

  Revenge was available.

  In his head Greg had kept a running tabulation of every humiliation he had suffered, every beating he had endured. His own and his old man’s. The memories were polished with handling.

  He thought of Creath Burack. He thought of Travis Fisher and Nancy Wilcox.

  Strings, he thought. Lots of strings there.

  He opened a can of beans and chased Hoover; yowling, out the back door.

  Night had begun to fall.

  In the darkness under the railway trestle Travis dreamed.

  His dreams were not coherent. Delirious with the cold, he was ravaged by visions. He dreamt of the Pale Woman, and recognized her from a lifetime of dreams: she was pure, virginal, white-robed; her face was his mother’s face except when it was Anna’s or, somehow, Nancy’s. He knew from looking at her that she was untouched, utterly female, desirable— and he was ashamed of his own arousal. He wanted to touch her, defile her. And in the dream she was always moving away from him, retreating, unapproachable; her purity, like some fundamental principle, was preserved.

  He woke shivering in the darkness as the night freight passed by above him. Sparks showered down and the roaring made his ears ache dully. When the train was gone there was only the sound of the prairie wind rattling in the high beams of the trestle.

  He sat up, frightened, the residue of the dream lingering in the dark air. If he closed his eyes he could see her, the Pale Woman, as clearly as ever. She was, he realized, the woman his mother had not been, the woman his mother had failed to be; she was the woman he had looked for in Nancy, too, and most particularly in Anna Blaise.

  The woman he had not found.

  And he thought, shivering in the darkness, stricken: What if there is no such woman? What if she doesn’t exist?

  Chapter Thirteen

  Nancy spent the next day at the switchman’s shack waiting for Travis to arrive, leaping up with a mixed gladness and terror whenever she heard a sound outside.

  “He might come,” Anna admitted, her white stick-fingers laced in her lap. “If he does, he will have taken a step away from being—” She hesitated. “The thing he might have become.”

  “He’ll be here,” Nancy said.

  Anna was visible in the band of daylight falling through the open door. No one would mistake her for human now, Nancy thought. The Change had progressed too far. It was, Anna had explained, the natural sloughing-off of her humanity. But her need, the sickness of her separation from Bone, was also visible. The exaggerated orbit of her joints, the wildness of her eyes and the thinness of her lips, had only emphasized her decline. Nancy looked at her and thought of a child’s toy, one of those loose-jointed slat puppets connected by bits of string … but made of china or porcelain rather than wood, and with bright blue balls of glass for eyes.

  “He might,” Anna said, “but he might not. You should be prepared for that.”

  Her plain prairie accent, coming from that body, was like a bad joke. But no, Nancy thought, not really. The voice, for all its plainness, was high and lilted, a kind of song, like singing heard far off on a summer night, and it was that voice, the reassurance of it, that helped keep Nancy sane through all this. Physically Anna was frighteningly strange; she was alien, now unmistakably so; but that wonderful half-familiar voice contained a calming cadence, a necessary link to the known.

  “He’ll come,” Nancy said, and: “What do you mean—a step away from being what!”

  “He’s two people. You must have seen that. Part of him is the Travis who has been so often hurt and victimized, and that part of him is sympathetic. He wants to help. But there is this other Travis Fisher, the Travis Fisher who believes in a kind of female purity, who believes that women ought to be pristine, above nature, incorruptible—all the things he thought I was.”

  “Or the things you chose to show him.”

  “Maybe I deluded him. If so, it was not by choice. It’s in my nature to be a mirror. Like Creath, he looked at me and saw a hidden part of himself.”

  It was at such times, Nancy thought, that Anna seemed most wholly alien. Her eyes grew distant, as if she were looking directly into Travis’s skull, peering somehow into the coral growths of his unconscious mind. Nancy had taught herself something about modern psychology; yes, she thought, there is some truth in all this. “He believed in you.”

  “He thought I was that woman. But he wanted you to be that woman, too. The woman he once believed his mother was.”

  His mother, Nancy thought, yes, my God. “He must feel—betrayed—”

  “Betrayed and angry. And that’s the other part of Travis Fisher: this huge anger. A part of him hates us—hates both of us—for not being pure enough or good enough.”

  “There were times,” Nancy said, nodding, “the way he’d look at me—”

  “He suppresses the hate, of course. He believes in chivalry. And unlike Creath he is not by nature cruel. But the hate has had a good deal of trauma to feed on. It could displace his better instincts.”

  “But if he understood—”

  “It’s not as simple as that. All this lives in the deepest part of him.”

  “Phantoms,” Nancy said scornfully. “Ghosts.”

  Anna shrugged. “Travis’s virtuous woman is a kind of ghost, yes. Like your ghost.” Nancy frowned. “The ghost,” Anna went on, “of your father. Or the man you invented out of the memory of your father. The ghost you’ve been trying to placate all these years …”

  “I thought you couldn’t read minds.”

  “Only die deepest parts.” After a moment: “I’m sorry.” Her voice was faint. “I shouldn’t have spoken.”

  Nancy was astonished to find her eyes filling with tears. She dabbed her face with the wrists of her blouse. It was all crazy, of course. Anna was not human; Travis was right; she could hardly be expected to understand how real people thought or felt. “It’s not really like that.” She turned back defiantly. “He was—he—”

  But Anna held up her hand, pleadingly. “Truly, I’m sorry. I have to rest now.”

  Nancy went out into the meadow—the sun was disturbingly low in the sky—to wait for Travis. He would come. He must. But the meadow was empty and the wind cut through this threadbare winter coat like a darning needle. She hugged herself and went back to the meager shelter of the switchman’s shack. Inside, she let her head loll against the fibrous wallboards and closed her eyes. When she opened them she gasped.

  Anna was convulsing.

  Her eyes had rolled up into her head. Her skin, always alarmingly pale, was dead-white now, blood-drained. The convulsions traversed her body; her spine bucked and arched over the thin stained mattress….

  “Anna!”

  This was not the Change, Nancy thought dazedly, this was something else. Something new, something worse. She put her arm around the alien woman to steady her.

  The contact was electric. So quickly that she
could not steel herself, her mind was filled with hideous images.

  The earth lurching under her feet. Fear. Fear and the footsteps behind her. A train roaring blackly in the near distance. The cold wind, the footsteps, the gun, the shockingly loud sound of it, pain invading her body in huge radiant arcs—

  —and she was distantly aware of the scream that filled the confined space of the shack: it might have been Anna’s, or hers, or both.

  Liza Burack picked up the phone on the second ring. She had been answering telephones more eagerly this autumn now that she had come to believe in the possibility of good news.

  “Yes?”

  “Liza!” the voice on the other end boomed out. “This is Bob Clawson!”

  She had not seen him since the Rotarian picnic four years ago, but Liza remembered the high-school principal well: the ample belly, the prissy three-piece suit he had worn, coat and all, all through that hot July day, fearful of betraying his dignity to the handful of high-school students who had shown up with their parents. “Good to hear your voice,” Liza said courteously. “Can I help you?”

  “Actually, it was Creath I wanted to speak to.”

  “Creath is putting in an extra horn at the ice plant.”

  “Bull for work? Eh? Well, that’s good. That’s fine. I can call again another time.”

  “May I tell him what this is about?” Liza was curious now, because Bob Clawson was town council, Bob Clawson was white collar, Bob Clawson didn’t phone up just anybody … and at that long-since picnic he had avoided the Buracks the way he might have avoided a rabid dog.

  “Just a little group some of us are getting together,” Clawson said amiably. “I heard about your speech at the Women last week. Meat and potatoes Americanism, my wife tells me. Not enough of that going around these days.”

  “Bad times,” Liza said automatically.

  “Some of us are more than a little concerned.” Liza imagined who “some of us” might be: Bob Clawson knew every judge and lawyer and realtor in the county. “We wanted to get together, talk about doing something to protect the town. Thought Creath might be interested.”