A Hidden Place

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “Is it?” Nancy looked up, surprised. The candle flickered. Outside this shack a sea of prairie grass bent and hissed in the wind. She said slowly, “It could be. I guess it could be.”

  But then they heard the first of the gunshots … far away but clear and distinct, pinpricks of sound etched against the vastness of the night.

  * * *

  When they approached the railway trestle both drivers switched off their lights, and the black cars rolled like tumbrils off the main road and across the stub-bled meadow, wheels grinding, engines laboring. The railway trestle was black in the moonlight, stone and iron, and Creath fancied he could smell it, a stink of wood and grease and soot-blackened brick. It was hateful.

  Bob Clawson sat with his belly up against the steering wheel, dressed, for maybe the first time in his life, in clothes that were less than immaculate: old pants, flannel shirt, threadbare jacket—and he’ll likely burn them in the morning, Creath thought. Clawson switched off the ignition and the ensuing silence was like a weight. Nobody spoke. There were six men in the car counting himself. Clawson was the leader. Nobody spoke, Creath observed, unless Clawson spoke first, as if they needed his approval. But Greg Morrow sat in the back seat with his daddy’s big shotgun on his lap and his eagerness was palpable, a presence in the car; Creath had been aware of it for the last quarter mile, when the only sounds had been the rumble of the engine and the hiss of his own strained breathing. “Everybody out,” Clawson said, and it was not much more than a whisper.

  They stood in the moonlight with their rifles. Creath felt faintly ridiculous: this army, he thought, this two-bit infantry, half of us scared of the dark. The other car had pulled up ahead; Tim Norbloom was in charge of that little battalion. Creath felt the heft of the rifle in his hand. They had all loaded their weapons during the ride over, and the phrase that ran through Creath’s head, idiotically, was armed and dangerous. He looked at Greg Morrow, a shadow against the deeper dark … he could not he sure, but he believed the boy was grinning. Armed and dangerous.

  Ahead, Tim Norbloom’s crowd had opened the trunk of the other car. Norbloom drew out the torches: lengths of thick pine doweling or spruce two-by-twos wrapped at one end in oily cloth. Norbloom and Clawson’s group moved together, made a circle to cut the wind. Norbloom handed out four of the torches—Greg took one; Creath did not. Clawson drew a box of safety matches from his jacket pocket. The torches did not want to take the flame at first, the blackened cotton seeming to resist its own incineration, but then Greg’s torch whooshed up all at once, sparking into the night, and he passed on the fire to the others.

  There was no hiding now. They had to hurry.

  They ran across the meadow toward the railway trestle, Creath lagging behind, his breath laboring. The silence, at first, was eerie; but then Greg Morrow let out a long ululating war whoop that seemed to strike a primitive chord in the other men. The trestle was nearer now, their torches casting a red glow against the black bricks of it, their own shadows huge and manic, and others of them took up Greg’s war cry; someone fired a gun into the sky. Echoes bounded back from the trestle arches, and to the men just coming awake in there, Creath thought, it must seem as if a part of hell itself had come to earth among them. They moved sluggishly at first and then more desperately; a pitifully few men to have inspired this army, but that was irrelevant now; now there was no returning. This was bought and paid for. Two hoboes ran shrieking into the cold river, striking out for the other side. Their heads disappeared beneath the black water and Creath could not tell, then, in the flood and panic, whether they survived or were carried away. The vigilantes were laughing, swirling their torches like kids swinging sparklers on Independence Day, but their laughter was not childish … or rather, Creath thought dizzily, it was the shrill and hysterical laughter of a child torturing a cat. There was nothing of innocence in it.

  He stood still, watching. The gun was a dead thing in his hand. My good Christ, he thought, what if she is here? Seducer, temptress, succubus, the source of his sin: but he knew instantly that he could not raise this rifle to her. And Creath felt a lightness in him then, a feverish buoyancy, as if his feet might spontaneously lift him from this cold fallow ground and deliver him up to some thing or place he could not imagine: death, judgment, the stars. He knew that Bob Clawson was gazing at him, had taken stern note of his immobility, but there was no way to respond, and in truth he no longer cared.

  He watched Greg Morrow whirling his torch about his head. The firelight seemed to have transformed him: his grin was maniacal and his eyes feverish. Creath guessed that the boy was paying back some old debt, avenging somehow some irretrievable humiliation. The tramps had mostly fled; the guns had been fired but only into the air; the townsmen had begun to huddle together sheepishly now in the stinking darkness. But Greg was oblivious; possessed, he threw the stub of his torch onto the roof of one of these hovels, oily pasteboard sheets that roared at once into flame. Creath felt his heart skip a beat. The heat washed over him and he thought, She could be in there.

  Tim Norbloom stepped forward—playing the policeman now—and put a restraining hand on Greg’s shoulder. Just then a figure broke from the burning hovel, running for the river: Anna, Creath thought for one agonizing moment, but it was not; only a hobo, a dark and half-naked man, possibly a Negro. Creath had begun to relax when he saw Greg raise the rifle and sight along it and pull the trigger The explosion in this confined space beneath the trestle was deafening. Creath winced, and when he opened his eyes he saw the tramp, dead or mortally wounded, spreadeagled on the ground. The light of the burning hovel danced on his skin. He might have been bleeding; in this light everything was bloody.

  It changes things, Creath thought. They had come here prepared to kill. But, in the event, they had backed away from it. And it was Greg’s fault mainly: he had misled them, there was no threat in this pathetic slum. Creath saw Tim Norbloom eyeing the boy with frank contempt. Some of the men cursed. The enormity of this was too great; they felt too much like murderers. You, too, Tim Norbloom, Creath thought: that guilt is palpable. In this strange hour his mind was quite lucid and Creath imagined he could read other men’s thoughts. There was a kind of skewed victory in it despite the dead man on the ground, because she had not been here … Anna was still alive, and a part of him exalted at the’ thought.

  The men walked back to the cars. The night had soured on them. Creath, his ears still ringing with the proximity of the gunshots, watched Bob Clawson remonstrating with Greg Morrow, saw the boy’s impassioned response; Clawson went to Norbloom then and the two of them spoke heatedly. Creath heard the sound but could not make sense of it. The trestle was eerily lit by the embers of the Hoovertown and a freight train came highballing out of the east, oblivious.

  Clawson and Norbloom were arguing. Norbloom turned away, his fists clenched, and climbed into the second of the two automobiles. The two parties broke up, and Creath watched Norbloom’s sedan bouncing over the rutted soil. Clawson sat at the wheel of his own car stonily; his cheeks were flushed pink. Creath climbed in last. “Thank God it’s at least over,” he said.

  Clawson looked back at Greg. Greg stared at him.

  “We’re not done yet,” Clawson said grimly. “Norbloom is an idiot. It’s important to finish this. We have begun it and we are obliged to finish it.”

  “One more place,” Greg said evenly. “I’ll show you the way.”

  Please God, no, Creath thought, and Bob Clawson revved the motor.

  Travis saw the trestle fire from a distance and circled to the south, keeping to a line of windbreak trees. White smoke curled up in the moonlight and the cold wind carried the hoarse shouting of the men across the prairie.

  Bone was frightened. Travis could tell. He crouched in a drainage ditch and the alien crouched beside him. The alien must be tremendously strong, Travis thought, to have come even this far. His jacket was a mass of blood and there was fresh blood welling up now, a brighter red in the moonlight. An ordinar
y man would have died. But Bone was not ordinary, not a man. Bone’s eyes were fixed on the trestle and the flicker of fires there.

  “You’ve seen this kind of thing before,” Travis said.

  Bone did not respond, only stared. Travis took it for a kind of assent.

  They crouched, hidden, and listened to the snap of gunshots. Travis glanced periodically at Bone, who seemed wreathed with a fire of his own, a flickering aura,- but it cast no shadows in the darkness beneath the trees and Travis guessed another man might see nothing at all. When the shouting died away and the gunshots ceased Travis and Bone moved closer, Travis imbued with a sense of deep foreboding: now there had been violence, now some invisible border had been passed.

  The hobo jungle was in embers. There was no one left here … only the body of a black man Travis had known very slightly, Harley was his name; Harley was dead from a gunshot wound to the back. Travis knelt over the body. He could not bring himself to touch it: a revulsion, not at death, but at his own utter helplessness. I knew this man, he thought.

  Bone watched him kneeling … and after a moment Bone extended his arm and touched him.

  Visions ran like a river between them. Travis fell back under the assault of the projected memories. This was Bone, he thought dazedly: Bone had seen too many places like this, an ocean of them; had seen men burned, beaten, trampled under foot. The cavalcade of images was stunning, faces and bodies like schools of fish. Travis gazed up in awe at that pale skull of a face. He is the ultimate exile, he thought, king of exiles; and he felt all the fists that had pummeled him, all the blows and curses; saw Deacon and Archie bent over him, then Deacon with a pistol in his hand and Archie dead beside him; he saw the railroad cops gather about Bone in a ring and felt what Bone had felt as he struck out and sent them whirling into the chaos that separates spacetime from spacetime….

  “Christ Almighty,” Travis whispered. “You can do that? You can really do that?”

  Bone stood erect. His aura deepened. His eyes were squeezed shut, his face disguised beneath his own cold illumination. Sweet Jesus, Travis thought, he could be me: the lines of his face rippled like a reflection in deep water. Travis turned away, gasping. So little of humanity left in this creature….

  Your own deepest, hidden face. Was that possible? Maybe so: Bone and the Pale Woman both inside him, Janus-faced, calling over the gaps and chasms of him toward some unimaginable union—

  But that made him think of Anna, and of Nancy, and of where the vigilantes might have gone from here. He made himself stand up. “Bone, follow me,” he said.

  Bone stepped forward and stumbled. The leg wound, Travis thought: this tremendous energy faltering, the human fraction of him too close to death.

  No longer as frightened as he was, Travis put his arm around the alien and the two of them loped eastward, ludicrous in the moonlight, along the frozen bank of the river.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The interior of the switchman’s shack was full of radiance, the human parts of Anna hidden beneath this amorphous glow. What remained of the alien woman’s human disguise was so diminished— though still in its fragile way beautiful—that Nancy felt frightened. She thought: in a way I am in the wilderness. The wilderness was where you confronted the basic things, Nancy thought, life and death, and here she was, approaching a strange wasteland, face-to-face with Anna’s transformation. There had been nothing in her life to prepare her for this. She was out here all by herself. Out here in the wilderness.

  Travis must be near, she thought. Travis and Bone. She risked a glance at Anna—that inhumanly white body in its nexus of glow—and shivered. Maybe Travis had been right all along, there was nothing human in the motivation of these creatures; maybe she had been used … and, used, would be discarded. There wasn’t Anna’s liquid voice to reassure her now. Only a kind of faith. Faith and kinship.

  The night was very dark. Please Travis, she thought, please hurry up.

  Outside, in the darkness, an automobile engine murmured and stopped … a door slammed shut. Nancy gasped at the sound of it.

  “Anna! Anna, wake up, somebody’s here—!”

  Anna’s eyes sprang open, but the pupils had eclipsed the whites; blue fire seemed to coalesce into fibrous wings behind her, and she showed no sign of human comprehension.

  As they moved along the riverbank Travis supported the alien man’s weight, which was negligible.

  He must be hollow-boned, Travis thought, like a bird. But he guessed it was only the shedding of this human skin. The strange light burned brightly about him, and Travis, touching him, was strangely affected by it; the night had come alive with phantom shapes and colors. He sensed dizzily the truth of what Anna had told him: there were worlds within worlds, kinds and shapes of worlds which coexisted with this one, infinitely layered and infinitely complex. He concentrated on following the riverbank by starlight, step by step, frightened that he might lose his way. A misstep, Travis thought, and we could tumble off the Earth altogether.

  Bone was dying or coming to life—as much one thing as the other, so far as Travis could tell. Certainly this physical part of him was very weak. Bone could not nave come this distance without Travis’s help. But the alien part of Bone seemed to be growing steadily stronger, as if the proximity to Anna were feeding him … we must be a beacon light, Travis thought, down here along the riverbed. Thin shales of ice had formed in the hollows of the ground, and Travis saw his own reflection in them and Bone’s, luminous against the starry sky and almost too strange to bear. In some way, he thought, Bone had become very powerful indeed.

  “Just a little farther,” Travis said. He was not sure the alien understood him. It was a reassurance as much for himself as for Bone. “Just a little farther now.” The place where Bone had struck him was throbbing and it pained him when he breathed; Bone lurched against him and Travis bit his lip to keep from crying out. One step at a time, he thought. Steady.

  In some way, Travis thought, he is me. Ugly, outcast, betrayed. That ravaged face, these wounds. And I am bearing him toward a healing I cannot share. For me no Pale Woman…. But there was no such creature, Anna had said, among humankind; Anna herself was a freak, a kind of monster, as Bone was a monster; human beings, she had said, carried such monsters inside themselves always, estranged or buried, despised and unforgiven….

  Walk, he thought. Just walk. The brittle reeds snapped beneath his feet. He looked up, and the stars seemed to dance about him like fireflies. But then, he thought, some conciliation is possible, must be: himself finding and forgiving himself, chasms mended, old wounds healed—

  Just walk, he thought.

  Landmarks were difficult to follow in this light. He recognized the steeple of the train station and then, it seemed only a moment later, the stand of box elders surrounding the meadow where the switchman’s shack stood. “Up here,” he told Bone. “Up the riverbank. I guess we made it.”

  Travis scrabbled up the hard-packed mud with Bone beside him. So close now, he thought. So close. But at the top of the river’s gentle slope he paused.

  The moon had set, but in the starlight—and a gentler illumination that seemed to emanate from Bone, from the shack, from the meadow itself—he was able to see the black sedan parked in the dark of the trees and the men who climbed out of it.

  “Bone,” he said tentatively—

  But Bone stood straight up, his weakness and his humanity both blasted away in a sudden and apocalyptic burst of blue light; across the meadow six figures approached the switchman’s shack and Bone, watching them, roared out his pain and indignation.

  He had seen them before. He knew what they were. Bone flew across the meadow on a whirlwind of strange energies, his humanity fading like firefly light: These were killers, murderers, the same cruel species he had seen so often in the railyards; but now the Other was close, he must not let them threaten her. This new part of him, not human, was hugely strong, and Bone abandoned himself to it.

  They were his enemie
s. They would fall. He felt the lightless flames that danced at his fingertips and thought: They must.

  It was his last human thought.

  Creath, climbing out of the car in the silent meadow, felt his legs begin to buckle beneath him. It was dark here, past midnight now, the possibility of murder all too imminent: it was written in these men, in their grim intensity. Maybe they were not murderers by nature—if there was such a thing—but they had sundered, this night, all their daylight inhibitions. This was their Halloween, their bacchanalia. And Clawson was no longer the focus; Clawson had subtly deferred to Greg Morrow, who more precisely embodied the spirit of the adventure. It was Greg who had committed the boldest transgression. It was Greg who had murdered a man.

  “Quiet now,” Greg Morrow said as the five men formed up behind him. Only rifles tonight, no torches. “They are out here. I’m sure of it.”

  “Fornicators and adulterers,” Clawson said, as if to reassure himself.

  “Worse than that,” Greg murmured. And periodically he turned his eyes toward Creath, as if to say: I did not plan this. Some wild trajectory has carried us all here. But it is right and just and—Creath saw this in his eyes—a fitting culmination.

  Greg Morrow, Creath saw, was not wholly sane. But, he thought, Christ, which of us is? Which of us out here in the darkness?

  They crept through the trees. Creath felt his own cold sweat breaking out on his forehead. He shivered with it. There was frost on everything, a starry glittering. Winter cutting close. And he thought: well, what if she is here? What then?

  There was no answer in him. He felt the heft of the rifle in his hand. But all these other men had rifles, too.

  Greg bulled ahead to this pathetic tumbledown shack, the place where the half-crazed railway switchman Colliuto’ had lived until some kids found him dead of exposure back in the spring of ‘25. The years and the weather had not been kind to the place. Slat walls, tar-paper roof, a hole up top, where a stovepipe might once have exited, plugged now with a bird’s nest of hard mud and prairie grass. Cold and filthy inside there, Creath thought. Surely it could not be occupied—but a faint light leaked through the wallboards.