A Hidden Place

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “There is no doubt about it. Every woman in Haute Montagne must surely be aware of it. A glance at the headlines is enough. Hard times. Murders. Rebellion. Immorality of an indescribable nature. And we are not safe from it. We must not think we are. But the question is: What can we, as women, do?”

  She was surprised at how easy it was. She ignored the cards. The words came fluently. All this had been pent up inside her, stifled in a misplaced propriety: she had lived too long in her glass house. Now she alluded freely to the past: “I have seen the effects of loose morality, as many of you know, on my own sister’s child, blood of my blood,” acknowledging and dismissing it (Travis is gone away); “and I have seen, too, the power of spiritual revival,” thinking of Creath at the altar, Creath born again. And she alluded similarly—delicately—to Nancy Wilcox: “Our own sons, our own daughters,” the emphasis hardly more than a caress, “are not immune to the spirit of the times,” and it was enough, yes; heads nodded; Faye sat pale and unblinking at the back of the hall.

  How simple it all was, really.

  She finished with her last and boldest proposal: that the Baptist Women of Haute Montagne should petition the city council to impose a twilight curfew “for the protection of our young people.” It went over well. She saw Mary Lee Baxter and Beth McDonnel conferring, nodding. Faye Wilcox, she saw, had further embarrassed herself by skulking out of the hall.

  She sat down once more at the rear of the podium, and the applause, astonishingly, went on and on. Liza acknowledged it with a smile.

  Helena Baxter approached her after the meeting. “I must say, Liza, it was a very dynamic speech. I think everyone was impressed.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I want you to know, you have my support when it comes down to voting.”

  “Really? But I thought—you’ve been so close to Faye—”

  “The times are changing, though, aren’t they? You said as much yourself. Hard measures for hard times. I’ve never had such a sense that we could— well, influence things.”

  Possibly so, Liza thought. Possibly so. And a strange and disturbing thought formed in her mind.

  They believe me because they are afraid.

  Their fear had become Liza’s ally.

  Anna was very sick.

  Nancy had doubled back along the railway tracks to make sure she was not being followed. The rain dripped through the box elders and enshrouded her as she trudged across the muddy fields to the switchman’s shack. How pathetic and inadequate it looked, she thought, huddled against itself in the rain like a cold wet animal.

  The packed earth floor inside was dark and wet. The air was thick with the odor of mildew and rotting wood. Anna lay curled on a blanket.

  Her clothes were wrinkled and old. Her hair was tangled, though Nancy sometimes tried to comb it out. She was asleep, Nancy saw, shuddering in her sleep like a dog.

  Nancy touched her gently and a feeling of the woman’s strangeness, faint but distinct, flowed up her arm. Anna’s eyes opened and the irises were a profound blue, the color of the sky reflected in a clear, still pond.

  “I brought food,” Nancy said, hoarse with the wetness in the air. The rain had found its way into the loaf of bakery bread, and she laid that out on a handkerchief. There were canned goods, too, and she had left the porcelain bowl outside to fill with rainwater.

  “Thank you,” Anna said. She sat up. Her body was emaciated; she was pale and cold. She looked at Nancy. “You’ve been crying.”

  “No … A little, maybe.”

  “It’s hard for you.”

  The commiseration was unnecessary; Nancy shrugged it off. “Anna? Please—how much longer?”

  She closed her eyes a moment. Looking inward, Nancy thought.

  “A week,” she said. “Two weeks. I cannot guarantee it.”

  Nancy sighed.

  “You need help,” Anna said.

  “Yes.” She gazed at the not-human woman. “I need Travis.”

  Anna said nothing.

  “You think I’m crazy.”

  “No. Hardly that.” Anna arranged the food in front of her—her fingers long and china-white, but still with that delicacy of motion Nancy thought of as aristocratic. “Travis is simply—difficult.”

  “You selected him. You chose him.”

  “Yes. He could have understood. He is still capable of it. And I think the best part of him wants to help. But there is a darker side to him, too, and it is very dark and unpleasant indeed. When he saw me in the Change that part of him was stimulated—its fears and denials. Now it controls him.” She tore a piece of bread from the loaf. “Old, bad pain in him.”

  “But if you can touch him—inside—”

  “Should I force him to come?” The Anna-thing smiled. “If I could, maybe I would. I can’t.”

  “You do make people help you. Even Creath Burack. That time he picked you up.”

  “It’s a kind of camouflage, nothing more or less than that. As significant as a chameleon’s ability to change its color. A reflex. Creath Burack gave me shelter because he saw in me some unclaimed part of himself—a dream he had never allowed himself to acknowledge.”

  “Still,” Nancy said, “it was deceitful.”

  “Not entirely. I paid for what he gave me.”

  We do, Nancy thought. We do that. She said firmly, “I need Travis.”

  “You went to him once.”

  “I’ll go again.”

  Anna shrugged.

  Nancy said, “It is not futile.”

  “There’ll be a price,” Anna said. “A payment. He is at least as lost as I am.”

  Nancy said softly, “I know.”

  The railway trestle offered scant protection from the rain. Everything here was wet, the air was wet, the swollen river roared against its banks. Birds had nested in the high iron spans of the bridge.

  Nancy found him in the humid arch of stone where the iron struts were rooted. Travis sat there, one knee cocked and a cloth cap pulled down low over his eyes. The structure of the trestle made this a kind of cave. It was wet but relatively private.

  She said, “You’re still here.”

  “Nowhere to go,” he said, watching her; “except away from the weather. I’ll do that soon.”

  She nodded and wondered how to begin. But he said, “Nancy—what you want from me—I can’t—”

  “It’s the town.” The words rushed out of her; if she stopped, she thought, she might cry. “It’s the town, Travis, the town is what worries me. You don’t know how it is. They’re all so scared. Not just bad times, but people are afraid of all the murders going on. And more than that. There’s no trust. They suspect me. A police car followed me all along The Spur—just today—a police car! If this goes on—” She shrugged miserably, her coat heavy on her shoulders, her hair wet and matted on her back. “I’m worried about somebody finding Anna. Or else I won’t be able to help her and she’ll die out there in the cold.” Travis was staring at the muddy ground, a constellation of broken glass. She wanted to shake him. “Travis, you understand? She’ll die.”

  “You know what she is.”

  It was not a question. She said, “Does that matter anymore?”

  “Matter!”

  “Well, what do you think she is? A witch? A demon? Some tent-revival devil?”

  That was unwise. He recoiled from her. “You touched her, Nance.”

  “Maybe she’s not human—whatever that means. All right. But it doesn’t mean she’s bad or dangerous.”

  “You don’t understand.” He was frowning, lost in reminiscence. “She was so goddamn beautiful! Not just that, either. Fragile. Helpless. She made me want to—to—”

  “Me,” Nancy said, breaking under the strain of it, crying a little now: “Help me, Travis! I don’t care what you think about her! Help me!”

  He sat that same way, one leg crooked, while the rain fell in sheets across the broad boiling water of the river. He had not stopped frowning. “I guess now you kn
ow what it’s like. It’s no fun.” After a time he said, “I might help.”

  Nancy huddled in her coat.

  “On one condition.”

  There will be a price. A payment.

  Well, but wasn’t there always? It was too much to expect, she thought, that he would help her for some sentimental reason. Obviously he did not love her anymore; all this ordeal had knocked the love right out of him. And out of me, she thought, confessing it to herself: out of me, too. She said, bleakly, “What condition?”

  “Tell me.” He touched her, his hand hot on her. “Tell me what she is.”

  After a moment she nodded yes.

  Chapter Eleven

  Nancy told it the best way she could, shivering in the damp. She wished she could be Anna, could communicate these truths with that same reassuring candor. But she was only herself. She did not look at Travis’s eyes; the fear and the cynicism there were too frightening.

  Her voice was quavery and small in the silence. Anna, she said carefully, was from another time and place, another world, very far away in one sense, but in another very near; a world that was very ancient but that had always had a tenuous connection with this one … and she closed her eyes, and the words echoed in her memory….

  “The passage between is freer for us,” Anna had said, her eyes wide and her emaciated body very still, “though it can work the other way, too. There is the ancient human tradition of the vision-quest, the spirit-walk. The Greeks at Eleusis, the American Indians in the wilderness, the stylites on their pillars. They all want the same thing. To see—if only for a moment. A glimpse of the Jeweled World.” And Nancy, listening, had felt a curious kind of recognition, intuitive, as if she had seen that place, too, as if it had been vouchsafed to her in some long-forgotten dream. A shining antipodes. She saw it in the darkness. A landscape of perfect shapes.

  “Faerie,” she said breathlessly. “The land under the hill.”

  “In a way. But a real place, too. Substantial. The laws of nature function differently there, I think, but they do function, and as remorselessly as here. A place, not a land of abstractions.” She sighed, a papery sound. “When we cross—and we have our own vision-quests, our own spirit-walks—we’ve been called by other names. Demon, succubus, changeling …”

  “But you’re not that.”

  “It depends,” Anna said, her smile sphinxlike, “on who you ask.”

  Nancy struggled to shape her thoughts. “But I mean … in spite of everything, it doesn’t seem as if … I mean, you know history and you speak English and you have a name …”

  All that, Anna said, was a kind of camouflage. When she’d entered this world she had put on humanity like a suit of clothes … but a real humanity, flesh and blood and psyche; there was a physical change. Creath Burack had found her newly minted, days old; lost, but with a functioning human body and a store of human knowledge. “All the teeming voices of humanity are there to delve and borrow …”

  “You read minds?”

  “In a sense. The minds beneath minds. I can’t read your thoughts, if that’s what you mean.”

  “You invented Anna Blaise.”

  “In a way I made her out of parts. But I am Anna Blaise. Anna Blaise is a translation of myself.”

  “There was Creath. And Grant Bevis. And Travis Fisher.”

  “Understand,” Anna said. She touched Nancy’s forehead, and again there was that quaver of strangeness. “In here, you—all of you—are many things at once. Male and female. Adult and child. Paradoxes upon paradoxes. Whereas we are made more simply. Think of Anna Blaise as the pole of a magnet. Think of the way a magnet works on iron filings—quite without volition.”

  “Magnets,” Nancy said, “have two poles.”

  “You are,” Anna said, “very astute.”

  Nancy took a cigarette and gave one to Travis, the last of a dearly bought packet of Wings. She trembled, lighting it. The dampness of the air almost smothered the match flame. She allowed herself to look at him as he inhaled a lungful of smoke, held it a moment, released it like steam into the cold. His face was unreadable.

  “Lost,” Travis said. “You said she’s lost?”

  And Nancy felt a surge of hope.

  Two of them had journeyed here together.

  It was not traveling in any sense Nancy would recognize, Anna had said, but she could imagine it that way if she wished: an ocean voyage, say. There had been a storm; in effect the two of them had been shipwrecked. Lost and separated in a huge and quite foreign land. They were essential to one another; separately they were powerless, embedded in their disguises, more human than not. Alone she was powerless even to attempt to leave this place. Together it might be possible … but they had lost one another. They were castaways.

  She had needed a place to conceal herself. The elementary femaleness of the Anna Blaise persona helped: Creath had secreted her in the boardinghouse like a buried treasure. It had not been pleasant but it had been necessary; the environment in which she found herself, its seasons and its people, was wildly hostile. And, touching her, Nancy found herself imagining it: Anna-made-human lost in the prairie darkness, disoriented, Creath Burack wrapping a blanket around her, pulling her into the car, into the hot miasma of his maleness, the stink of his cigars,- Liza Burack gazing on with a disapproval that would mature into a kind of stony, impotent hatred. In all this, her terrible aloneness.

  “But this Other,” Nancy said. “He’s looking for you?”

  She nodded.

  “Has been—since you moved in with the Buracks?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s like you?”

  A frown had crossed her face. “No.”

  “A man.”

  “In his human avatar, yes. Nancy, listen: among us male and female mean something very different. Apart, we’re very nearly two distinct species. Bone is not like me.”

  “That’s his name? Bone?”

  “The name he was given. His disguise is poorer and his nature is more elementary. He’s been searching, yes, but we’ve only just made contact. It’s easier,” she said faintly, “when the need is more profound.”

  A tramp, drawn by the cigarette smoke, stood staring at Nancy and Travis. She had taken to wearing the whalebone knife as a matter of course and her hand strayed to it now. The tramp’s face was a cipher, eyes lidded and expressionless. His hands were buried in his pockets.

  “Come on,” Travis said.

  The rain had tapered off, though the thick gray clouds still tumbled overhead. The prairie was shrouded and wet-smelling, the horizon invisible. They walked a distance along the railway tracks, Travis scuffing up the gravel between the ties. She wondered what was going on in his head. Whether he believed her … but he must, she thought; it was no more fanciful than his own intuition; it was Travis, after all, who had insisted that Anna was not human. “Bone,” he said abruptly, “what the hell kind of name is that?”

  “He’s not like her.”

  “She needs him?”

  “She’s sick.”

  “Sick how?”

  “Sick with the separation. They were never meant to be apart so long. Their time ran out, and it’s hurting her.”

  We can’t sustain ourselves this way, she had said: we can’t sustain our humanity. Or be sustained if we lose it. The changes must come….

  “This Bone: he’s sick, too?”

  She said, “Yes, but it’s not the same kind of sickness. The need is intense in both of them. Bone is different: he doesn’t talk much, he has trouble with ideas, maybe doesn’t even know for sure where he is or where he came from. Only that he’s trying to find her. He’s like an animal following an instinct. He’s big, he’s very strong, but the time is running out for him, too. But he knows where to find her, which direction to go: she thinks he’ll be here. Soon.”

  “Christ God.” He shook his head. “Nancy—”

  “You saw some of it, didn’t you? You saw her Change.”

  “I don’t eve
r want to see it again.”

  The afternoon had edged on. The sun was headed down. Nancy felt cold, tired, hungry. Her flat-soled shoes were all scuffed up and there were burdocks clinging to her cloth coat.

  “I don’t trust her,” Travis said, still, gazing back at Haute Montagne where it stood on the prairie, the towers of the granaries stark against the sky. How small it looked from here, Nancy thought. “She could be anything,” he said, “you ever think of that? We don’t know what she is or what this Bone is. Only what she tells us. And she’s lied before.”

  “I believe her,” Nancy said.

  “Maybe she picked us because we’d believe her. Not Creath, not Aunt Liza, not anybody else in town.”

  “Because we’d understand.” Oh, Travis, she thought, I’ve touched her, I know—but how to explain that? “Out at the tracks that night, she saw something in you, a goodness—”

  “Or a gullibility.”

  “Travis, what is it? Why does she frighten you so?”

  He was a long time answering. The answer had sprung up in him but there was no way to articulate it: because of what Mama was, he thought, because of how she died; because of what he had done with Nancy and what he had wanted to do with Anna Blaise. The whole sour mess of it. He felt torn inside: some wound there had been opened. Fundamentally, he distrusted the femaleness of the Anna-thing; like all femaleness it concealed too much.

  “It had to be us,” Nancy was saying. “She took a chance, you know, telling us anything at all. But she needs somebody. She can’t live out these two weeks without somebody to bring her food, somebody to help her through the Changes—somebody who’ll know and somebody who’ll do it anyway. You know anybody else who’d do that? Anybody else back there!”

  “It’s only a town,” Travis said.

  “They hate us.”

  He looked at her. She was skinny and dragged-out looking. Her hair was tangled. “You still believe that? You’re too good for them?”

  She straightened defiantly and her eyes went shiny with tears. “This town,” she said, “this goddamn town—I am too big for this town!”

  And a look of surprise washed over her.