A Hidden Place

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Bone, shivering, pulled the wad of bills out of his pocket.

  Deacon counted it twice. It came to almost three hundred dollars.

  Deacon gripped the fluttering bills tightly, as if the wind might carry them off. “We could go a long way on this,” he said. “A long way. Some warm place. Florida, maybe. What say, Archie? We spend the winter in Florida. Live like goddamn kings. Buy a piece of property maybe.”

  “There’s no Florida property for three hundred bucks,” Archie said morosely.

  “Then we’ll get more,” Deacon said.

  Archie looked at Bone and then back at Deacon. “If you mean—hey, Deacon, I don’t think we should—”

  “One more time,” Deacon said. “Maybe someplace a little ritzier. Someplace they keep more cash in the till. Someplace—”

  “No!” Astonishingly, Archie had risen to his feet. “Deacon, it’s crazy! They’ll spot him a mile away! We’ll all be killed, all of us!”

  Deacon didn’t answer, only sat back against his rucksack and gazed at Archie. In a moment Archie’s rage had faded; he looked foolish, outlined against the stars with the night wind picking at his tattered coat, and he sat back down again.

  “Just one more,” Deacon said. His voice was placid, calming. “I know we can’t carry on with it. All I want is a little extra. You understand. A little something to keep us warm. Something to keep the cold away. You understand, Archie.”

  But Archie was shivering, Archie was hugging himself, and it looked to Bone as if Archie might not be warm ever again.

  He woke up that night after the fire had gone out.

  The embers were cold, the ground beneath him was cold. Bone sat up and hugged his pea coat around himself.

  Amber light from the freightyard washed out over the prairie. Behind a chain link fence, an acetylene torch dropped showers of sparks. The night air was full of metallic smells and the stars above him were icy and strange.

  The Calling sang to him.

  Here I am, find me.

  Now before the time passes.

  Bone, find me, here, now.

  He could not mistake the urgency of it. He sensed that some irreversible process had been set in motion, that he needed to play out his part. His body felt huge and strange about him. In this last week the sickness had come back, the convulsions that bowed him heel-to-crown as if he were about to erupt from this clumsy cocoon and burst forth transfigured. It was time to move on. So close now. He did not need words to know it.

  He moved away from the cold campfire, from the prone bodies of Archie and Deacon, into the darkness. In the shadow of a rust-eaten oil canister he stood to his full height and scanned the eastern horizon.

  She was a light there.

  He thought it for the first time: “She.”

  She was a blue corona that rose and flared like a searchlight against the stars. Bone knew without thinking it that the light would be invisible to Archie or Deacon. It was a sign meant exclusively for Bone, a kind of marker. Here I am. He trembled with the closeness of it.

  The light transfixed him, consumed all his attention for a timeless moment, and he was startled when Archie tapped his shoulder.

  The smaller man was shaking. His knapsack was in his hand. He gazed up at Bone, and there were tears leaking from his eyes.

  “We leave him here,” Archie whispered. “Listen to me. Without us he can’t hurt himself. He’ll be okay. We leave him here, right, Bone? Without us they can’t touch him. He’ll be okay—”

  And Bone, gazing at Archie, was overcome with another realization.

  He was not like Archie or Deacon. 1 am not human. The thought was dizzying, and for a moment he was afraid a convulsion might overtake him. In the glare of that blue light he had glimpsed himself, had bathed for a moment in the secret illumination of the Jeweled World. Bone’s comprehension failed him, but he understood, at least, that he was not like Archie. The gulf between them was vast, vast …

  “Archie, no,” he said. His voice seemed loud in the darkness. “I have to go—“he pointed helplessly—” there—”

  Archie gazed beyond him, not listening, blind to the Calling light. “He changed since we met you. But that’s not true, either. It was nothing you did. Just something he saw in you. I don’t know. You were like the ghost of all the beatings he took. But not beaten. All his old anger came out.”

  There was a motion in the darkness beyond the oil tanks. Bone, distracted, looked away.

  “I guess I changed too,” Archie said. “I only ever wanted to help him. I guess you know what I mean. But I can’t do that by staying with him. That’s the hard part.” His eyes focused on Bone. There was anguish there but also a kind of strength. Bone felt a shadow of the smaller man’s pain, of this hard-won peace he had arrived at, somehow, in the deep of the night. “We have to leave him. It’s the only way to help him. Christ, it frightens me to be alone! It’s the only thing I was ever really scared of. But if we don’t leave him, Bone, he’ll kill himself. He’s drugged up on crazy vengeance and there’s no sense in him.”

  That motion again—a flicker of denim, a sigh like drawn breath. Bone’s hackles rose. He turned to the smaller man beside him. “Archie—”

  But there was an explosion that lit up the night. Bone was momentarily blinded, and when his vision cleared he saw Archie on his knees, gagging, and then Archie in a pool of his own dark blood, limply dead.

  Deacon stepped out from behind the oil tanks with the pistol in his hand.

  He turned on his heel, and the pistol was aimed now at Bone.

  The immensity of the betrayal shocked him. Deacon had shot Archie. Archie, who had held his mirror when he shaved. Archie, who had loved him.

  “He’s dead,” Bone stammered out.

  Deacon nodded. His eyes were wide, his pupils dilated. “Sure he’s dead. I caught him. Son of a bitch! Run away on me, would he? Run away on Deacon?”

  “He was afraid for you.” Bone shook his head, aghast. “He was afraid you might get caught.”

  “Don’t move!” Deacon thrust the pistol forward. “I heard you two talking! Move out, he said, leave Deacon behind, he said, that’s what you were doing out here in the night—”

  “The pistol shot,” Bone managed. “The men in the railyard. They’ll be here soon.”

  On the horizon, the blue Calling light guttered and flared.

  “He was just waiting for his chance,” Deacon said. “Sneak off and leave Deacon in the lurch. Son of a bitch! I guess I know better.”

  “He loved you.”

  “That’s a dirty lie.” Deacon pressed the gun forward. There were voices now from the railyard, and his expression hardened. “Give me the money.”

  But Deacon had the smell of death about him, a carrion stench Bone could not ignore. He had seen the Jeweled World, the bright beauty of it, and he could only recoil in horror from the ugly thing Deacon had become.

  Deacon, he understood, meant to kill him.

  “Now,” Deacon said.

  Bone darted his big hand toward the pistol. He could not grasp it but only slapped it away. The gun flew through the cold air while Deacon cursed and leaped after it. “I’ll kill you,” Deacon panted, “I’ll kill you, you geek bastard!”

  Bone stumbled backward. The sheer scope of it defied understanding. Deacon had killed Archie— here was the steaming carcass to prove it—and now Deacon meant to kill Bone.

  There was no one, Bone thought bitterly. No one and nothing he could trust here. Only the Calling. Only the light and the song of it. Nothing human. He was not human, and there was nothing in the human world for him.

  Only danger here.

  Deacon scrabbled for the gun, and Bone turned and ran.

  The scissorbills ambushed him at the hobo jungle.

  The came at him with flashlights and guns. He was trapped, encircled suddenly, blinded. His foot caught in a railway tie and he fell clumsily among the gravel and embers. There were four flashlights, bright bobbing flares tha
t disguised the faces behind them, but more men than that, maybe more guns. He stood up slowly and listened to the awe that crept into their voices as they made a ring around him.

  “Big bastard, ain’t he?”

  “It’s him, all right—”

  “No question.”

  “—the one they wrote about in the papers—”

  “Christ, look at him!”

  They pushed him up against the corrugated side of a reefer car.

  “He’s not packing anything.” A man stepped forward, and Bone saw his face in the reflected light. Thick, grizzled face. Save for the uniform this might have been one of the hoboes. Bone felt that same gulf again, a revulsion, a blossoming hatred. Such men had beaten him too often before. But now now, not now: he was too close.

  The scissorbill shone a light in Bone’s eyes, and the others pressed close behind him. The heat and smell of them were unbearable. “We heard a pistol fired,” the man said. “Same pistol killed all those farmfolks maybe? Huh? You want to tell us where it is?”

  There were no words to answer. Bone shook his head.

  The scissorbill grinned and brought his knee up between Bone’s legs.

  Bone doubled over with the pain of it.

  “Think,” the man said. “Oh, we’ll hand you over to the cops soon enough. They’ll lock you up somewhere—a long, long time—assuming they don’t choose to hang you. But we got you first. And nobody cares if we have a little fun of our own.”

  The Calling was suddenly strong in him, stronger than it had ever been before, not a song now but a river of need, a torrent. Bone felt a convulsion coming on. He was full of that wild energy. But he did not convulse.

  What happened next happened quickly. He straightened, and the pain and the betrayal and the hatred in him rose to a terrifying crest. He screamed, a high-pitched falsetto scream. And he swung out his fist.

  It should have been a futile gesture. It was not. The actinic blue Calling light shone now from inside him. It was electric, an aura, and he knew from their eyes that these men could see it. Bone swung his arm, touching them, full of violent energy, and where he touched them the blue light leaped from the apex of his arm, and the men he touched were gone, then—dead, he supposed, but more than that, quite literally vanished, dispatched (he could not say how he knew this) to the nothingness that lay between the worlds.

  His sense of time deserted him. He supposed it only took a moment. When he finished there was no one left around him. In the darkness, he heard Deacon calling his name.

  “Bone!”

  He ran for a moving freight. He was weary, confused, intoxicated with the Calling. Cattle cars slid by him, gathering speed, shuttering bars of light into the morning mist. Bone tripped and fell forward, stumbled up again. All these cars were closed and locked.

  “Bone! Give it back, you bastard!”

  The money, Bone thought. It was still in his jacket pocket. Was that all Deacon wanted—the money? If he had it, would he let Bone leave?

  Bone hesitated and turned back. Deacon was a shadow running alongside this redball freight. The gun was still in his hand. “Deacon—” Bone said.

  And Deacon fired the pistol.

  The bullet took Bone in the upper thigh. He roared, twisted, fell. The pain was immense. It spread through him like wildfire, and he could not dismiss it. Rage rose up like sour bile inside him. A second bullet struck sparks from the pebbles near his head, and Bone reached up wildly.

  His huge hand caught in the undercarriage of the accelerating freight. It was as if an undertow had taken him. He was dragged forward, Deacon shouting incoherently, and the railway ties gouged cruelly at him. He lifted himself desperately, hooked a foot up.

  Deacon fired again, and the bullet scored a bloody pathway up Bone’s prominent rib cage. Two of the ribs were broken instantly. White fire clutched at his heart.

  He pulled himself up, screaming. This was a reefer car. No good to him—unless the ice compartment was empty. He inched backward, clinging with his long arms like an insect. His good blue pea coat was wet with blood.

  “Bone, goddamn you—” But Deacon’s voice was fading now. The train picked up speed.

  Groaning, Bone let himself into the ice compartment. His breathing was labored, and he felt on the verge of a great darkness. In one last lunging effort he secured the lid so it would not lock and fell back on the hard wire-mesh. He lost consciousness at once.

  Bone dreamed.

  In his dreams the Calling light glimmered and flashed, illuminating a horizon he could not see. There was a face he did not recognize—a woman’s face. Her mouth moved, framing a word. Bone. So close now.

  He saw Deacon’s face, too, transformed and vulpine, jaws agape, slavering; and Bone was suffused with a contempt and a hatred so immense that his thinking mind closed against it. Pain and hatred merged, a single great conflagration, lightless but full of heat.

  The train bent into a curve. Bone’s huge body shifted; agony flared. The cold had numbed him, but his wounds were deep. He turned on his side, breathing shallowly. His dreams were full of death.

  The train slowed—an endless time later—and the Calling woke him.

  He fell from the reefer car into blindness and pain.

  The train sighed and groaned, slowing. It was dark here. He could not say how much time had passed. He blinked, motionless, the agony in his leg and chest beating at him. Dark here, by all human perception—but the Calling light was lustrous in the sky (so close) and cast an eerie illumination over the tall dry grass, the distant railway trestle.

  Bone crept into a shallow depression where the prairie grass hid him.

  Close now, Bone thought. So close. So close. He held his left hand closed across his chest wound. The blood in his blue Navy pea coat (torn now, ruined) had begun to crystallize. Weakness flooded him.

  I’ll go, he thought. Not far. He stood erect. The stars watched him. The wind bit and probed.

  Bone took a halting step forward, another … but the pain welled up again, irresistible now; and Bone toppled forward into the wild grass; the prairie swallowed him up; Bone closed his eyes, and the stars went dark.

  Chapter Fourteen

  They kept a vigil through the night.

  Anna was often unconscious. The blue light played fitfully over her. At times she seemed awake but oblivious to them, her lips moving wordlessly, her eyes dilated. Travis closed his eyes briefly, and it seemed to him that the room was in some way still visible, but filled with strange translucent shapes, pale emeralds, impossibly faceted diamonds. He sat erect and closed his hand on Nancy’s; they did not speak.

  By morning the crisis had passed. A wan daylight filtered through the wall boards. Anna lay in a heap on her mattress—diminished, Travis thought, rice-paper white, stick-thin, only her eyes animate. She sat up, blinking.

  Nancy cleared her throat.

  “Anna? Is he—is Bone dead?”

  “No,” the alien woman said. “Not quite.”

  “He’s hurt?”

  “Yes.”

  “Still coming?”

  “Still coming. Very close now.”

  “Is there anything we can do?”

  “Not for a time.”

  Nancy stood up wearily. There were dark bruises of sleeplessness under her eyes. She stretched. “I’m going to the river to wash. Travis? You’ll be okay here?”

  He nodded slowly.

  Sunlight washed inward as Nancy opened the door. She left it ajar, and Travis watched her descend the slope of the riverbank. In a moment she was out of sight.

  He looked back at Anna Blaise.

  Now, he thought. If he ever hoped to sort this out, now was the time. While she was weak … too weak, perhaps, to lie.

  “It’s all true, then? What you told Nancy, I mean, about another world and—all that?”

  “Can you look at me and doubt it?”

  She was no longer beautiful, Travis thought, but her voice retained its grace, its seductiveness. M
aybe its deceit. “Nancy is sometimes credulous.”

  “You were the one who told her I wasn’t human.”

  “There is no question of that,” Travis said. “But there are other questions. Nancy believes you mean no harm. Maybe. But this Bone. There have been stories in the papers—”

  “Bone is credulous, too. But not evil.”

  “We only have your word for that.”

  “I’m sorry. What else can I offer?”

  She was motionless, not even blinking. Travis guessed she was conserving her strength. He said, “You didn’t mean to come here?”

  “Not in this fashion. It was a mistake.”

  “Nancy said you and, uh, Bone got separated—”

  “The journey between worlds is arduous even for us. There are storms in the chaos between. A misstep in that labyrinth can be a disaster. Yes, we were separated.”

  “How come—if that’s true—how come nobody came after you?”

  She smiled faintly. “There are more worlds than mine and yours. We were lucky to arrive within the boundaries of a single continent. Bone searched. The time passed. That’s all. Together we can travel back.”

  “Even if he’s hurt?”

  She frowned, shrugged.

  “I don’t understand,” Travis said. “If it’s so hard, so dangerous—why do any of this? Why come here?”

  “Why would anyone travel between worlds? To learn. Do you understand that, Travis? To acquire …”

  “—knowledge?”

  “Wisdom.”

  The sound of Nancy’s singing traveled up from the riverbank. The sun had warmed the air a little. Travis looked almost fearfully into Anna’s huge eyes, but there was nothing there to betray her. Nothing that said this is the truth or this is a lie. “Anna Blaise doesn’t exist, then.”

  “I am Anna Blaise.”

  “But it’s false. A mask.”

  She folded her hands in her lap. Her legs were crossed; she looked, Travis thought, like a frail Buddha. “I am not human. But I have a certain access to human minds. Anna Blaise is in some sense a metaphor of myself, the way a name might be translated into a foreign language. But, Travis, see: if I give back a human appearance it can only be a sort of reflection. A mirror, not a mask.”