There was no answer in him. He felt the heft of the rifle in his hand. But all these other men had rifles, too.
Greg bulled ahead to this pathetic tumbledown shack, the place where the half-crazed railway switchman Colliuto had lived until some kids found him dead of exposure back in the spring of ’25. The years and the weather had not been kind to the place. Slat walls, tar-paper roof, a hole up top, where a stovepipe might once have exited, plugged now with a bird’s nest of hard mud and prairie grass. Cold and filthy inside there, Creath thought. Surely it could not be occupied—but a faint light leaked through the wallboards.
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 river-bank, 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 quarter speed): 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.