“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 wallboards. 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. Maybe 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.”
Travis had begun to sweat, he was not sure why. The air was still cold. “You weren’t a mirror for Creath Burack.”
“But I was! I had to be! How else to survive, to claim his protection?”
“A mirror—”
“Of his deepest needs. Unspoken. Unadmitted. Creath Burack is a deep well of desires and f ears—all buried, hidden.”