“Christ Almighty,” Travis whispered. “You can do that? You can really do that?”
Bone stood erect. His aura deepened. His eyes were squeezed shut, his face disguised beneath his own cold illumination. Sweet Jesus, Travis thought, he could be me: the lines of his face rippled like a reflection in deep water. Travis turned away, gasping. So little of humanity left in this creature…
Your own deepest, hidden face. Was that possible? Maybe so: Bone and the Pale Woman both inside him, Janus-faced, calling over the gaps and chasms of him toward some unimaginable union—
But that made him think of Anna, and of Nancy, and of where the vigilantes might have gone from here. He made himself stand up. “Bone, follow me,” he said.
Bone stepped forward and stumbled. The leg wound, Travis thought: this tremendous energy faltering, the human fraction of him too close to death.
No longer as frightened as he was, Travis put his arm around the alien and the two of them loped eastward, ludicrous in the moonlight, along the frozen bank of the river.
Chapter Eighteen
The interior of the switchman’s shack was full of radiance, the human parts of Anna hidden beneath this amorphous glow. What remained of the alien woman’s human disguise was so diminished— though still in its fragile way beautiful—that Nancy felt frightened. She thought: in a way I am in the wilderness. The wilderness was where you confronted the basic things, Nancy thought, life and death, and here she was, approaching a strange wasteland, face-to-face with Anna’s transformation. There had been nothing in her life to prepare her for this. She was out here all by herself. Out here in the wilderness.
Travis must be near, she thought. Travis and Bone. She risked a glance at Anna—that inhumanly white body in its nexus of glow—and shivered. Maybe Travis had been right all along, there was nothing human in the motivation of these creatures, maybe she had been used… and, used, would be discarded. There wasn’t Anna’s liquid voice to reassure, her now. Only a kind of faith. Faith and kinship.
The night was very dark. Please Travis, she thought, please hurry up.
Outside, in the darkness, an automobile engine murmured and stopped … a door slammed shut. Nancy gasped at the sound of it.
“Anna! Anna, wake up, somebody’s here—!”
Anna’s eyes sprang open, but the pupils had eclipsed the whites,- blue fire seemed to coalesce into fibrous wings behind her, and she showed no sign of human comprehension.
As they moved along the riverbank Travis supported the alien man’s weight, which was negligible.
He must be hollow-boned, Travis thought, like a bird. But he guessed it was only the shedding of this human skin. The strange light burned brightly about him, and Travis, touching him, was strangely affected by it; the night had come alive with phantom shapes and colors. He sensed dizzily the truth of what Anna had told him: there were worlds within worlds, kinds and shapes of worlds which coexisted with this one, infinitely layered and infinitely complex. He concentrated on following the riverbank by starlight, step by step, frightened that he might lose his way. A misstep, Travis thought, and we could tumble off the Earth altogether.
Bone was dying or coming to life—as much one thing as the other, so far as Travis could tell. Certainly this physical part of him was very weak. Bone could not have come this distance without Travis’s help. But the alien part of Bone seemed to be growing steadily stronger, as if the proximity to Anna were feeding him … we must be a beacon light, Travis thought, down here along the riverbed. Thin shales of ice had formed in the hollows of the ground, and Travis saw his own reflection in them and Bone’s, luminous against the starry sky and almost too strange to bear. In some way, he thought, Bone had become very powerful indeed.
“Just a little farther,” Travis said. He was not sure the alien understood him. It was a reassurance as much for himself as for Bone. “Just a little farther now.” The place where Bone had struck him was throbbing and it pained him when he breathed; Bone lurched against him and Travis bit his lip to keep from crying out. One step at a time, he thought. Steady.
In some way, Travis thought, he is me. Ugly, outcast, betrayed. That ravaged face, these wounds. And I am bearing him toward a healing I cannot share. For me no Pale Woman… But there was no such creature, Anna had said, among humankind; Anna herself was a freak, a kind of monster, as Bone was a monster; human beings, she had said, carried such monsters inside themselves always, estranged or buried, despised and unforgiven…
Walk, he thought. Just walk. The brittle reeds snapped beneath his feet. He looked up, and the stars seemed to dance about him like fireflies. But then, he thought, some conciliation is possible, must be: himself finding and forgiving himself, chasms mended, old wounds healed—
Just walk, he thought.
Landmarks were difficult to follow in this light. He recognized the steeple of the train station and then, it seemed only a moment later, the stand of box elders surrounding the meadow where the switchman’s shack stood. “Up here,” he told Bone. “Up the riverbank. I guess we made it.”
Travis scrabbled up the hard-packed mud with Bone beside him. So close now, he thought. So close. But at the top of the river’s gentle slope he paused.
The moon had set, but in the starlight—and a gentler illumination that seemed to emanate from Bone, from the shack, from the meadow itself—he was able to see the black sedan parked in the dark of the trees and the men who climbed out of it.
“Bone,” he said tentatively—
But Bone stood straight up, his weakness and his humanity both blasted away in a sudden and apocalyptic burst of blue light; across the meadow six figures approached the switchman’s shack and Bone, watching them, roared out his pain and indignation.
He had seen them before. He knew what they were. Bone flew across the meadow on a whirlwind of strange energies, his humanity fading like firefly light: These were killers, murderers, the same cruel species he had seen so often in the railyards-, but now the Other was close, he must not let them threaten her. This new part of him, not human, was hugely strong, and Bone abandoned himself to it.
They were his enemies. They would fall. He felt the lightless flames that danced at his fingertips and thought: They must.
It was his last human thought.
Creath, climbing out of the car in the silent meadow, felt his legs begin to buckle beneath him. It was dark here, past midnight now, the possibility of murder all too imminent: it was written in these men, in their grim intensity. Maybe they were not murderers by nature-—if there was such a thing—but they had sundered, this night, all their daylight inhibitions. This was their Halloween, their bacchanalia. And Clawson was no longer the focus, Clawson had subtly deferred to Greg Morrow, who more precisely embodied the spirit of the adventure. It was Greg who had committed the boldest transgression. It was Greg who had murdered a man.
“Quiet now,” Greg Morrow said as the five men formed up behind him. Only rifles tonight, no torches. “They are out here. I’m sure of it.”
“Fornicators and adulterers,” Clawson said, as if to reassure himself.
“Worse than that,” Greg murmured. And periodically he turned his eyes toward Creath, as if to say: I did not plan this. Some wild trajectory has carried us all here. But it is right and just and—Creath saw this in his eyes—a fitting culmination.
Greg Morrow, Creath saw, was not wholly sane. But, he thought, Christ, which of us is? Which of us out here in the darkness?