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 know 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.”