“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.”
Travis said hoarsely, “You used him.” He was suddenly frightened again. The lines of her face were fluid, mobile; he was afraid of what he might see there.
She said defiantly, “I traded my body for his protection when I was helpless. Which of us used the other, Travis?”
Her voice had subtly changed; it was hauntingly familiar. He said, “That’s dirty—that’s—”
“An old, old bargain. I’m not the first to have made it. And I will not be blamed for it.”
Travis stood up.
He recognized the face now. The face and the voice. “Who’s talking?” he demanded, his own voice shrill and childish. “Who’s saying this? You—or my mother?”
“Both of us, I imagine,” Anna said.
Nancy returned, her hair wet, and pushed through the flimsy wooden door. She saw Travis sitting bolt upright, staring. Anna was as inscrutable as ever.
“Travis?” she said. “Something wrong?”
“No,” he said. “No,” and went to the door. “I’ll be back.” Taking his own turn, she guessed, at the riverside.
Nancy settled down in the shadows, exhausted. “What happened?”
Anna pivoted her head to face her. “Travis wanted to know some things.”
“He gave you the third degree?” She was quietly shocked—surely Anna was too frail for that sort of treatment.
But the alien woman said, “He needed reassurance. I cannot say whether he received it.”
“You told him about being a mirror?”
“Yes. Though I think he understood it, intuitively, long before this.”
Nancy closed her eyes. She needed sleep more than anything. Too much had happened. Weariness moved like a tide in her. “You’re that woman,” she heard herself saying, “the one you say he dreams about—”
“The pale woman. Travis sees her in me, yes. I give back that part of him—that fear, that desire.”
Nancy stifled a yawn. “And what about me? What do I see in you?”
Anna gazed back… frail, emaciated, cast out; like a piece of flotsam, Nancy thought sleepily, washed up on some uncaring reef. …
“Only yourself,” Anna said gently.
When she woke it was past nightfall again. Nancy had slept sitting up; her back was stiff and she was cold. She had to get back to town, she thought. Her mother might have called the police. Anything might have happened. Travis was beside her.
“We can’t stay here,” he said. “Greg Morrow saw me last night. If he wants to make trouble there’s not much we can do about it.”
“Where else is there to go? Anyway—” She stretched. “—we can’t move Anna. It would kill her. There’s not much left of her but her bones.”
Bones and that terrible light. Anna sat cross-legged on the mattress, hardly breathing. Her eyes were rolled back into her head.
Nancy felt a twinge of concern. “Anna—?”
“He’s near here,” Anna Blaise said suddenly. “He’s very near here indeed.”
And she blinked and looked intently at Travis.
Chapter Fifteen
Creath Burack was careful to park his battered Ford pickup two blocks beyond Bob Clawson’s modest house on DeVille Street. He did not want to be conspicuously odd-man-out among all the fine automobiles parked there. There would be enough of that to come, he thought.
He did not relish this meeting. His gut burned, though he had eaten sparingly at dinner. He sat for a breathless moment gripping the steering wheel as the Ford’s engine cooled.
There are limits, he thought. There are limits beyond which I will not go. He wasn’t stupid; he knew the kind of fear that was sweeping the town. It was impossible to miss. The times had gone sour. There were unemployed men everywhere, families starving, farms turned to dust, murders and gangsterism and reckless talk of revolution. And men like Bob Clawson and his cronies—men of money or, failing that, of staunch propriety—were the scared-est of all.
He thought: I do not know what they want from me. But there are limits.
He climbed out of the automobile.
Liza had made him wear his best Sunday suit. Creath regretted that decision now. The collar nagged at him, the old-fashioned vest was conspicuously tight across his belly It wore on him like an admission of inadequacy. He gritted his teeth and paced out the necessary steps to the Clawson house.
Clawson’s wife, a gushy, nervous woman addicted to the wearing of gloves, met him at the door. “Why, Creath,” she said, “so good to see you,” and led him to the parlor. “The men are all inside. Go on!”
There were times, Creath wanted to say, when you would have crossed the street to avoid me. But he only mumbled, “Yes, Evie, thanks,” and held his hat in his hand.
“The men,” as she had called them, were clustered around a dining room table. The shades had been pulled and the electric lights switched on. The air was already blue with cigar smoke. Creath entered, and the rumble of male voices tapered to a stillness.
He felt the sweat tickling down his ribs.
Bob Clawson pushed forward. The high-school principal looked dowdy and small among these lawyers and realtors and store owners. There was a primness in him he could not shake. But his hail-fellow smile and his extended right hand made Creath feel stupidly grateful. He took Clawson’s hand eagerly. It moved, wetly alive in his grip, like some kind of hairless animal.
“Creath Burack! Good you could make it! You know most of these people, I think?”
By reputation mainly, Creath thought, but Clawson’s welcome had taken him out of the spotlight, and he was pleased to see the faces turn incuriously away from him, the rumble of conversation resume. He would have liked to be invisible.
“Sure,” he said breathlessly.
“I really am pleased you could make it. We’ve been having a lot of discussions here you might find interesting. I think it’s important that people like ourselves get together in a time like this, don’t you?”
“I guess so,” Creath said.
“But surely you’ve noticed it, too? But then it’s all the more obvious from where I sit. I see the young people. Your wife made some astute points in that regard, I understand, in her little speech. I assume you agree with her.”
Creath had not heard the speech. Liza had told him about it. He had listened with only half an ear. It had sounded like the same old stuff to him. The country was going to hell in a handbasket, true enough—but he could not arouse himself to be shocked by it.