The sun baked the car at noon, and the heat worked to bring out a lazy heat in us. We made love on our stretched-out sleeping bags, a far different experience from the sport-fucking I’d done on trains in the past, when the rattle of the cars and the noise off the rails drowned out every human sound, causing it to seem that the racket was somehow related to the messy, intemperate character of the act. The winded quiet of our train was like a bed of gentle noise supporting us, enabling sweetness. We fell asleep afterward, and when we woke it had come twilight, and the mountains ahead looked to be considerably closer, their peaks shrouded in a cloudy darkness like battle smoke. We’d be into them by morning, I figured, if the train kept its current pace, and then, maybe, we’d discover if this had been a good idea or merely an ornate form of suicide. The heat faded, the air grew chill, but the car, warmed by its golden blood, kept us relatively cozy. We draped blankets over our shoulders and held hands and watched out the door.
As dusk settled, far out on the plain, what appeared to be a flock of large ungainly birds flapped up from the reeds, their numbers swelling until it covered a considerable expanse of the sky. I noticed the train had picked up speed, and as the flock drew closer, I understood why. Hundreds of black blanketlike objects, their surfaces fattening with wind, their flights unsteady, erratic, making swoops and glides that were more crumpled collapses, but moving inexorably toward us nonetheless. “Oh, shit!” Annie said, and heaved at the door, sliding it shut. I cracked it back open a couple of inches so I could see, and she said, “Are you crazy!” and struggled to push it all the way closed again.
“We need to be able to see what’s goin’ on,” I told her. “Case we have to jump.”
“Jump out into this hellhole!” she said. “That ain’t gon’ happen! Now shut the fuckin’ door!”
When I continued to hold the door open, she shouted, “Goddamn it, Billy! You keep it open, one of ’em’s liable to pry at it and get inside with us! That what you want?”
“I’ll take the chance. I don’t wanna be trapped inside.”
“Oh, and I ain’t got no say. That it?” She got right up into my face. “You think I come on this ride just so you can boss me around? You better think twice!” She hauled off and punched at me, her fist glancing off my cheekbone, and I fell back a couple of steps, stunned by her ferocity.
“I ain’t scared of you!” she said, her shoulders hunched. “I ain’t taking no shit off you or anybody!”
Her eyes darted to the side, the muscles in her cheeks were bunched. Seeing how frightened she was acted to muffle my own fear, and I said, “You want it closed, then close it. All I’m sayin’ is, if the car starts gettin’ tore up, maybe we oughta know what’s goin’ on so we can make a reasonable decision.”
“Reasonable? What the fuck are you talkin’ about? If we was reasonable, we’d be back over Yonder and not fixin’ to die out here in the middle of nowhere!”
The car gave a heave, a kind of twitching movement, and then gave another, more pronounced heave, and I knew a beardsley had settled on the roof and was tearing at it. An instant later the door was shoved open a foot or so, and another beardsley began squeezing through the gap, like a towel drawn through a wringer, its mottled, bald old man’s head pushing in first. Annie shrieked, and I ran to my pack and plucked out my ax handle. When I turned, I saw the beardsley was halfway inside the car, its leathery black sail flapping feebly, the hooks on the underside proving to be talons three and four inches long, a dirty yellow in color. It was such a horrible sight, that parody of an ancient human face, utterly savage with its glittery black eyes and fanged snapping mouth, I froze for a second. Annie was plastered up against the edge of the door, her eyes big, and as the sail flapped at her, the talons whipping past her face, she screamed again.
I didn’t have a strategy in mind when I charged the beardsley; I simply reacted to the scream and lunged forward, swinging the ax handle. I took a whack at the head, but the sail got in the way, folding about the ax handle and nearly ripping it from my grasp. I started to take another swing, but the sail gloved me and yanked me toward the creature’s head with such force that my feet were lifted off the floor. The thing smelled like a century of rotten socks. Talons ripped my shoulders, my buttocks, and I saw the end of reason in those strange light-stung black eyes…and then I saw something else, a recognition that jolted me. But almost instantly it was gone, and I was back fighting for life. I had no way to swing at the beardsley, being almost immobilized by the grip of the sail; but I poked the end of the ax handle at it as it hauled me hard forward again, and by chance, the handle jammed into its mouth. My fear changed to fury, and I pushed the handle deeper until I felt a crunching, the giving way of some internal structure. I rammed the handle in and out, as if rooting out a post hole, trying to punch through to the other side, and suddenly the head sagged, the sail relaxed, and I fell to the floor.
I was fully conscious, but focused in an odd way. I heard Annie’s voice distantly, and saw the roof of the car bulging inward, but I was mostly recalling the beardsley’s eyes, like caves full of black moonlit water, and the fleeting sense I’d had as I’d been snatched close that it was somehow a man, or maybe that it once had been a man. And if that were so, if I could trust the feeling, how did it fit into all the theories of this place, this world. What determined that some men were punished in this way and others sent over Yonder? Maybe if you died in Yonder you became a beardsley, or maybe that’s what happened if you died out on the plain. My suppositions grew wilder and wilder, and somewhere in the midst of it all, I did lose consciousness. But even then I had the idea that I was looking into those eyes, that I was falling into them, joining another flock under some mental sky and becoming a flapping, dirty animal without grace or virtue, sheltering from the sun in the cool shadows of the reeds, and by night rousing myself to take the wind and go hunting for golden blood.
I came to with a start and found Annie sitting beside me. I tried to speak and made a cawing sound—my mouth was dry as dust, and I felt a throbbing pain in my lower back and shoulders. She stared at me with, I thought, a degree of fondness, but the first thing she said was, “’Pears I was right about the door.”
I tried to sit up, and the throbbing intensified.
“I got the bleeding stopped,” she said. “But you’re pretty tore up. I cleaned you best I could. Used up all my Bactine. But that was a damn dirty thing what sliced you. Could be the wounds are goin’ to get infected.”
I raised my head—the beardsley was gone, and the door shut tight. “Where are we?” I asked.
“Same as before,” she said. “’Cept the mountains look bigger. The beardsleys flew off somewhere. Guess they drank their fill.”
“Help me get up, will ya?”
“You oughta lie down.”
“I don’t wanna stiffen up,” I said. “Gimme a hand.”