A Hidden Place

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Greg, with that crazy flushed grin fixed in place, kicked through the door. It fell away like pasteboard before him. Dust billowed up. The men pressed closer and then, in the eerie blue light, fell back.

  Creath felt his neck hairs standing erect.

  The thing in there craned its head to gaze at him. A lifetime of religious fears made him step away in deference. These other men shrieked out their dismay … but it is only the natural culmination, Creath thought wildly, the reasonable consequence: we are beyond the pale now, now we consort with demons and angels.

  In truth, he could not say which this was. Clearly the creature was not human. It stood up within the confines of the shack, and Creath was aware of its luminous wings—if they were wings— spread out behind it, peacock vortices of light without substance. And he peered into that face.

  He would have thought there was no capacity for shock left him, but his eyes widened in stunned recognition.

  It was her.

  His limbs felt cold and distant as ice. Demon or angel, he thought, it was her, sweet God, his secret love, loved and hated and stolen from him: he moved his mouth: Anna—

  And she came forward.

  The other men fled back toward the automobile. “Christ, look there,” Bob Clawson was shouting, “another of the damned monsters—on the riverbank!” Creath saw it then, too, hurtling toward them across the meadow, a similar creature. He could feel its anger even at this distance. The car’s motor roared. Now only the two of them were left here, Creath and Greg, equally immobile, staring and helpless. Because, Creath thought, in some way we have always expected this. We have earned it. His thoughts moved with a high, wild lucidity. This is bought and paid for.

  The Wilcox girl, Nancy, broke from the shack and ran for the riverbank, her arms pinwheeling.

  The angel looked at Creath with Anna’s face, inscrutable.

  The demon hurtled toward him.

  Creath turned in a kind of graceless slow motion and saw Greg Morrow raise his rifle.

  “Bone,” Travis said faintly. But there was no calling him back.

  Travis fell to his hands and knees in the frozen meadow. It was all happening too fast for him. Bone fled across the meadow like the ghost of his own rages and fears at last set loose: he will kill them all, Travis thought, God help us, and he thought about Nancy.

  But she had broken free from the shack and was moving toward him. Unmindful of his own pain, he stood and ran to her. She came into his arms but he could not look away; he saw Bone—all light and fire and pain—converging on the townsmen, who scattered before him. Nancy seemed to want to burrow into him, but he pushed her back: “Listen,” he said, “we have to get away. Bone’s crazy, he’s full of hatred—everything he learned here is hatred—and we have to get away from him.”

  “No,” Nancy said. “Anna promised—”

  “She didn’t promise anything! This is dangerous, this has always been dangerous! Nancy—” He tugged at her, “Come on—”

  We can move down and away along the riverbank, Travis thought. That would be good. That might afford them some safety. But he did not see Greg Morrow aiming his rifle across the empty meadow and he could only be helplessly surprised at the sound of it, at the pain of the bullet as it passed through his shoulder.

  The crack of the rifle broke his trance. Greg had fired and missed the demon thing, but seemed unaware of it; Creath watched the boy’s supernatural steadiness as he swung the weapon toward the switchman’s shack.

  The demon was almost on them and Creath was able to hear the sound it made, an eerie and inhuman wailing, a howl compressed of all the sorrow and indignity of the world. It chilled him. The thing must be able to see, Creath thought, must know that it could not reach Greg Morrow before he committed the act he was so obviously contemplating. The boy swung up the rifle barrel toward the thing in the shack—the Anna-thing.

  How beautiful she still was. Strange that he could admit it even to himself (and there seemed plenty of time for admissions in this new lucidity of his, everything moving at quarterspeed): It should be loathsome, the way she had changed. But she was not loathsome. Merely delicate, fragile, embedded in light, wrapped round with amber and turquoise light, winged with light; the beauty in it was ethereal, beyond lust, heartbreaking; it spoke—as it had always, he guessed, spoken—to his deepest nugget of self. He thought of things lost, time lost, opportunities lost, whole lives lost in the living of a life. Tears sprang to his eyes. I am too old to cry, he thought. Too old and too weary and too close to death. Death wheeling toward him on an autumn wind, shimmering.

  It was this beauty that Greg must hate, he thought, and saw the boy targeting his rifle on her.

  Creath sighed. Death so close but not close enough to save her. He imagined he could see the boy’s finger tightening on the trigger.

  His own gun flew up. He was hardly conscious of it. The recoil bucked it into his shoulder. Creath cried out with the pain.

  Greg Morrow spun away. The bullet had taken him cleanly. He was dead at once. His rifle fired—the reflexive closing of the fingers—but the bullet went wild.

  Creath felt his own rifle drop to the ground.

  Anna was alive yet. She turned her eyes on him, round inscrutable wells.

  That was good, Creath thought, that she would live. This at least.

  The demon fell on Greg Morrow’s body, appeared to pick it up and fling it—but this made no sense—in a direction that was not any perceptible direction; the body simply disappeared. Creath looked at the demon calmly and saw a face there, indistinct but full of rage; and that, too, he thought, was good and proper, that death should have a face.

  Creath turned to confront the creature, openhanded.

  Death came on him like a flaming sword.

  “Go on,” Travis told Nancy. “Down the riverbank. Hide.”

  She didn’t want to leave him, but she glanced at the figure of Bone—Bone transformed—and retreated sobbing from the meadow.

  Travis could not move. The pain of the bullet wound had radiated through him. All the fatigue of these last few days had come down on him all at once, like sleep. His eyelids were heavy. Strange, he thought, to be on the edge of death and only feel this weariness.

  On his back in the icy meadow, Travis turned his head.

  The automobile had gone. Bone moved in on the two men remaining—Greg and Creath: he recognized their silhouettes in the moonlight—and then Creath raised his rifle (it all happened too quickly to follow); then Bone was on them and they were gone, tossed into that limbo between worlds, discarded. Dead.

  Bone turned back toward him.

  Travis lay helplessly, watching as the monster approached him.

  There was nothing of Bone left in this thing. It was made of light but it was not without substance. Its footsteps pressed into the prairie grass. It smelled of ozone and burning leaves, and Travis did not suppose it could support itself long in this world: it contradicted too many of the natural laws. You could tell by looking. Such a thing ought not to exist.

  The rage and pain of it were still perceptible. It had a purpose, Travis sensed, and the purpose was to protect the Anna-thing long enough for their coupling to take place; it was hostile to every threat. And it knew him.

  The monster hovered over him.

  Your own deepest, hidden face.

  Betrayed, he thought, deceived, yes, striking out now, unbound, no victims left but himself. But if this was himself then he could no longer deny it. He gazed without fear into those fiery eyes. The self submitting to the verdict of the self. Christ knows he had done it to others. Had turned on his dying mother; had turned on Nancy when she needed him; now himself: it was only logical. “Kill me,” he whispered. “Kill me then, if that’s what you’ve come to do.”

  But the creature turned away. It went to the shack; the meadow was suddenly, prosaically empty. Travis gaped up at the stars.

  Nancy ran to him, weeping.

  She staunched his wound
and made a sort of pillow of prairie grass for him. She took off her own cloth coat and laid it over him.

  The night was cold, and Travis was grateful.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Through what remained of the night she kept him warm. Travis was intermittently lucid. He imagined he could see the stars wheeling overhead. When the dawn came he said, “Are they in there?”

  “In the shack? Yes.”

  He sat up, though the effort was murderous. Nancy said, “You need a doctor.”

  He shook his head. He wasn’t bleeding anymore and he could move his arm. It was a clean wound and might not infect. “I need to get warm. I need food.”

  “We could build a fire … but it might draw somebody’s attention.”

  “Build it,” Travis said. “There won’t be anybody coming out here today.”

  He warmed himself at the fire. He still did not trust himself to walk. Dizziness came and went, and nausea. Nancy brought him water from the river. But she knew he needed to eat, too.

  “There’s some food left in the shack,” Nancy said.

  “I wonder how long it takes.”

  “Don’t know. She never said.” It was unimaginable, the prodigies of healing that must be going on in there. She had seen Bone and she knew Anna and she could not conceive of a single creature emerging from that marriage of fire and water, earth and air.

  Travis looked at her. “You know, we can’t go back.”

  “I know.”

  “There’s nowhere much we can go.”

  “I thought maybe west. California, maybe.” She shrugged. “It’s warmer.”

  He nodded.

  Nancy said, “You mean it?”

  “What?”

  “About traveling together?”

  “Yes … I mean, if you’re willing.”

  She gazed at him as if from a distance. “What did you see out there with Bone? What did he show you?”

  Travis shrugged.

  They appeared, Anna and Bone, briefly, at noon.

  The sunlight made everything prosaic. The air was still cool but the autumn sun beat down with real pressure. Everything was outlined in it, Nancy thought, each stalk of grass, the grain elevators black on the horizon, a sparrow swooping across the meadow. There were dust motes everywhere.

  They emerged from the switchman’s shack, a single being now. She could see none of Bone or Anna in this creature. She was reminded instead of a sort of bird—those structureless wings of light behind it, a graceful arch that suggested a body, swirls of darkness for eyes. It did not fly but hung suspended in the air, buoyant. She held her breath. The creature was difficult to look at and seemed to possess too many angles, as if a stained-glass church window had been folded and folded on itself, the delicate rose and amber light caught up in labyrinths the eye could not trace. It moved toward Travis.

  Nancy thought he might struggle to his feet, even injured as he was,- might run away. But he did not. The creature advanced on him and he only looked at it, his eyes wide and fearless.

  Dear God, Nancy thought, what did he learn out there?

  The creature hovered. She saw one wing come down. Its membrane of light moved across Travis— or through him—like a caress. The gesture was at once so tender and so entirely alien that Nancy felt a tingling at her neck. Then the creature moved away, rose up or diminished; she could not say which.

  She went to Travis. With an expression of slow wonder he peeled away the bandage Nancy had made for him.

  The wound was closed; there was only the hint of a scar.

  “They know us,” he told her, hoarse with awe. “They know us yet.”

  And then they were alone. The creature that was Anna and Bone moved away across the meadow in an impossible motion that made her blink and avert her eyes. Gone, she thought, vanished into the lanes and pathless alleys between the worlds … and for a moment she was stricken with an inexpressible longing. Her memory of the Jeweled World was strong in her and she thought, I want to follow, follow … but Bone and Anna were gone where there was no following, vanished along some invisible axis. There was only the prairie—prairie grass, buckbrush, dry foxtail and lupine running in swells to a distant shore of sky; summer and winter, spring and fall contained in it (somehow) all at once—and Nancy thought: why, I guess it is enough. It is enough.

  She moved with trepidation into the dark hollow of the vacant shack. It seemed now as if she had lived much of her life in this confined space—made alien, curiously, by Anna’s absence. The door had fallen away when Greg Morrow kicked it. Fingers of sunlight probed into all the secret places. The mattress was tawdry and stained, Anna’s old clothes in a heap on it, and Bone’s there, too, his old blue pea coat— bloodstained—discarded in a corner.

  She folded the dress neatly and put it aside. It was a small gesture but soothing. The blue pea coat was heavy with blood but deserved, she thought, the same act of respect. But when she lifted it in her hand a bundle dropped from one of its pockets.

  Nancy, curious, reached for it.

  Coda

  The freight car they rode out of Haute Montagne was crowded, and Nancy was dismayed by the people who filled it. These were not just hoboes like the men she had seen under the railway trestle but whole families, men and women and children, migrating westward with winter and poverty hard behind them. Outcasts, she thought, exiles, and how easily we might have joined them, become indistinguishable from them. … In truth, she thought, we are not much better off, despite the money that had fallen from Bone’s pea coat (enough to buy food, pay a little rent)—but, too, she thought, in some way we are different. It was written in Travis’s face.

  The granaries and the water tower fell away behind them. A cold wind came through the slats in the freight car and made her press into Travis’s shoulder. He held her with a gentleness she had not sensed in him before. She looked at his face and he was frowning into the gray distance, worried, she guessed, about where they were going and what they would do there; but there was a second quality in him that was unfamiliar, utterly new. He sensed her attention and smiled at her. And it was the smile, Nancy thought wonderingly, of a man who has just forgiven someone, or who has been, himself, forgiven.

  * * *

  There were no funeral services held in Haute Montagne in the month of November. No one would say (though some suspected) that Creath Burack was dead. Liza lit a candle in the parlor window each night all that cold month in the hope that her husband might find his way home. But he did not, and come the first snow Liza laid away the candlestick in a bureau drawer, secure between a lavender sachet and a neatly folded linen tablecloth. For him, as for her, there was no returning.

  About the Author

  ROBERT CHARLES WILSON was born in Whittier, California, in 1953, but has lived in Toronto, Ontario, since the age of nine. He has worked at a number of jobs, including as a film extra and most recently with the Ontario Human Rights Commission. His wife, Janet, attends the University of Toronto, and his son, Paul, attends First Grade. His short fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. A Hidden Place is his first novel.

  Table of Contents

  Prelude: Bone in California

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Interlude: Bone Finds Work

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Interlude: Bone Loses Faith

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Coda

  About the Author

  >   Robert Charles Wilson, A Hidden Place