A Hidden Place

by Robert Charles Wilson

  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 rearview 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.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Travis did not locate Bone until the sun was nearly down.

  The meadow beyond the railway trestle was wide and overgrown with burdocks, nettles, and prairie grass. He had followed twice along the tracks and ranged much deeper before he saw the blue pea coat, like a discarded thing, in a depression where the land sloped to the river.

  He moved close enough to get a better look—no closer.

  This was Bone. And Bone is dead, Travis thought, or very close. He parted the dried weeds carefully. The alien man lay curled on himself, his long white wrists projecting from the cuffs of the jacket, his shoes so eroded as to be functionless, his watchcap clinging to the bony slope of his scalp. The body was immense, Travis thought, even curled and helpless like this. He was able to see the chest wound, or the evidence of it: a long rust-colored patch running up the pea coat, angry swatches of blood and skin peeking through.

  Your own deepest, hidden face. But not this, surely? Surely this was just a broken thing? Pathetic, he thought, but impersonal, like the crushed body of some unfortunate animal.

  “Bone,” he whispered. “Bone.”

  There was no response. An eyelid fluttered … unless
he had imagined it.

  Travis moved closer through the brittle weeds. The sunshine was oblique now and did not warm him. “Bone,” he said, bending over. “Wake up. Anna sent me. Anna said—”

  And Bone’s huge fist lashed out.

  Travis felt it thump into him, lift him off his feet; felt the astonishing momentum carry him backward.

  He sat up slowly.

  The fist had struck him squarely on the chest. It might have broken a rib … he felt a constriction as he gasped for his breath.

  “Bone,” he said faintly.

  The creature stood up. It loomed, a yard away from him, huge as a gantry tower. The eyes, Travis thought. They were like Anna’s—the pupils swollen to fill the sockets—but different, too; colder, somehow; hostile, wary. Bone took one gasping breath and seemed to wince with pain.

  Your own deepest, hidden face … the words mocked him. Not this, he thought. Not this thing. Wounded, betrayed, hardly human for its wounding and betrayal …

  Carefully, Travis stood up.

  They faced each other.

  “Bone,” Travis said.

  The creature looked at him.

  “Bone, Anna sent me. I’ll take you to Anna. I—”

  And he stepped forward.

  Bone raised his hand. Blue fire licked from his fingertips.

  “They hurt you,” Travis said. A part of him had long since panicked; he was not sure where the words came from. Somewhere deep inside him. “They hurt you. I know. You trusted them and they hurt you. I know. Let me help.” He took a step forward and thought involuntarily of his mother his mother who had shamed him, dying and looking at him with an expression he could only interpret as reproach. He had hated her then. Her ravaged body had cried out for his pity and he had withheld it: she was dying, of course she was dying, dying for her sins, for the hideous sins she had committed behind his back. An old, old bargain, Travis thought, and felt a surge of guilt like electricity in him: Christ God, could he truly have been so cruel?—hating her when she was dying, hating her because she was dying?

  He looked at Bone. Maybe Anna was right. Maybe this was what he had been then: this disfigured thing, suffused with pain so entirely that there was no room for kindness, trust, thought. Bone stood, shivering, regarding him from the depths of his dilated eyes. His fists were clenched and white.

  Trembling, Travis reached out toward the monster.

  Shortly before dusk Liza Burack answered the timid knock at the front door and found Faye Wilcox shivering on the veranda. “Why, Faye,” she said, and was suddenly and obscurely afraid: Faye had lost the Baptist Women’s election, Faye was here to exact some strange kind of revenge….

  But Faye said, “May I come in?” and it was so much like a plea, a prayer, that Liza could only nod.

  Creath was still in the parlor, the lights off, dusk thickening about him like a viscous fluid. Liza steered Faye Wilcox past him and into the kitchen. Faye sat at the small Formica table, haphazardly dressed, her hair in loops and tangles down her broad back, and it was a moment before Liza remembered to say, “Coffee?”

  “No. Thank you.”

  Liza stood uneasily with her spine against the kitchen counter. She was conscious of the ticking of the clock. “Faye … if it’s about the election …”

  “Election?” The Wilcox woman seemed not to understand. “Election—no. It’s much more serious than that.” She adjusted her smudged bifocals. “Nancy’s gone. Did you know that?”

  “Nancy? Gone where?”

  “Where he is, I think. Where Travis is. You know, I pray they both get away safely. Truly, I pray for that. Is it un-Christian, Liza, that I should want them both to leave? But if they stay here they will be hurt. Worse.” She looked at Liza directly. “It’s tonight, you know.”

  “I don’t understand … tonight? You mean the men who are meeting together?”

  “Meeting together? Do you believe that’s what they’re doing? Is that why Creath is cleaning his rifle, Liza?” Faye Wilcox put her plump hands palms downward on the table. Her lips were pursed. “They are a posse. A mob.”

  Vigilante, Liza thought. But— “You can’t know that.”

  “How could I not? The rumor is all about town. But you don’t need a rumor to know.”

  “But Travis? Surely Travis has left?”

  “I believe he has not. Not while Nancy is here.”

  Liza said nothing, only gripped the beveled edges of the kitchen counter. Faye stood up suddenly. “Your own sister’s child! How can you be so hard!”

  Travis is lost, she thought dizzily. She had written him out of the book of her heart. But she thought of Creath with his rifle … of the other men with theirs. “Faye—”

  “No,” Faye Wilcox said bleakly. “It was stupid to come here.” She went to the kitchen door and opened it. The hinges squealed; a breeze danced inside. There was the smell of woodsmoke. It was what Liza had always loved about autumn, that melancholy perfume on the air, the smell of winter stalking somewhere beyond the horizon. A dry leaf, wind-borne, skirled over the kitchen floor. “Pray for them,” Faye said. “Please do at least that much.”

  Liza swallowed hard and nodded. Faye Wilcox closed the door behind her.

  When the time came for Creath to leave the house, the fear Liza felt was for him as much as for Travis: it had lodged in her breast like a living thing. Outside, two big sedans pulled up and sounded their horns. Creath rose from his chair with glacial slowness and went to the door. His rifle was in his hand.

  Liza took his arm. “Creath, don’t go.” He turned to stare at her and she fixed her eyes willfully on his red-checked shirt. His old hunting shirt. “It doesn’t matter what they want. Stay. Something bad might happen … I don’t want you to get hurt.”

  But he pulled his arm free. The oily metallic smell of the gun was chokingly strong. Liza felt her eyes fill with tears.

  “This is bought,” Creath said, and she knew at once that he did not mean the gun in his hand but the whole of it, the men waiting outside, the Baptist Women, the tent revival: all this skein of things and people into which she, Liza, had purposefully woven them; and she took a step backward, her breath catching in her throat. “Bought and paid for,” Creath said solemnly. “We can’t take it back now.”

  No, Liza thought, it cannot be too late … she thought of Faye Wilcox standing like a funeral stone in the kitchen not an hour ago (a posse … a mob … pray for them) and felt fear close about her like a cloak. Creath had opened the door now, had turned his back; a cold gust of autumn air escorted him toward those two black cars idling in the shadows of the box elders; and she thought he will die he won’t come back again-, she thought dear God, forgive me and held out her hand to him, stupidly, imploringly: “Creath—!”

  But the cars were pulling away now, engines growling like animals against the night, and Liza faltered on the old boards of the veranda, alone, clutching her white knit sweater about her throat and thinking: He was right. This is bought.

  Bought and paid for.

  Nancy brought the porcelain bowl to Anna’s lips. She drank a little, and the aura of blue fire—it was constant now—receded a little. “Travis is bringing Bone here?”

  “Travis is attempting to.”

  Nancy sat back, considering it. The sun was gone. On cloudless blue days like this, the darkness came down quickly. The sky beyond the open door of the switchman’s shack was giving up the last of its glow, and she used the time to light a candle. She was surprised to find that her hand was trembling.

  She turned to Anna. How little there was left of her! She had faded almost to transparency, her humanity a frail vessel for this blue light that threatened to burst out of her … to disperse, Nancy supposed, like a puff of smoke; and she would be lost on the wind then, vanished. “Tell me what it’s like,” Nancy said impulsively.

  Anna turned her head. “The Jeweled World?”

  “Yes.”

  “A place,” Anna said. “I’m sorry … I can’
t describe it in terms you would understand.”

  “Not like this place,” Nancy said.

  “No.”

  “And very beautiful?”

  “Often.”

  “You dream of it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I dream of it sometimes.”

  “I know,” Anna said, her voice far away.

  “You must be very powerful … to be able to come here.”

  “Perhaps too powerful.”

  She means Bone, Nancy thought. Bone might be dangerous. “Powerful enough to come here … powerful enough to go back.”

  “I hope so.”

  “Did you find what you wanted here?”

  And Anna smiled faintly. “I don’t know. I think so, yes. A sojourn in the wilderness. You might ask yourself the same question.”

  “Is that where I am? In the wilderness?” But it was a silly question. She gazed around herself This shack, the prairie, the night….

  “For a long time, I think,” Anna said.

  We are all exiles. She said, “I envy you … I wish I had a place to go back to.”

  “Here,” Anna said.

  She held out her hand. Nancy looked dubiously at her.

  “It’s all I have to give,” the alien woman said. “Not much. A little.”

  Nancy touched her.

  She supposed, afterward, that what Anna had given her was a kind of memory, a glimpse into Anna’s own past: it was inexpressible, evanescent; all that lingered was the impression of a great light and warmth and vibrant color, as if, Nancy thought, she had penetrated into the heart of the sun. And the memory, inadequate as it was, contained a small heat of its own; it warmed and reassured her.

  I will keep this, she thought. I will carry this memory like a charm and only bring it out when I need it.

  Anna gazed impassively at her.

  “Your world,” Nancy said solemnly, “is very strange and beautiful.”

  Anna smiled. “So is yours.”