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 ever 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.”