A Hidden Place by Robert Charles Wilson Page A

quarters. The gloom was so intense that their lantern did little to penetrate it.
    Bone was aware of the silence between Archie and Deacon, the way they moved around each other like nervous cats. There was no poker tonight, no debate. Only the sound of the rain drumming on the sod roof.
    Archie stood up impulsively not long before darkness set in for the night. He stretched, shot a glance at Deacon, said, “This fuckin’ place!” and ducked through the door in the direction of the outhouse.
    Deacon, seated on his bunk, watched the other man go. As soon as Archie was hidden by the rain he stood up.
    “I’ll be out for a bit,” he told Bone. “You stay here. You hear me? Stay put.”
    “Deacon—”
    “Shut up.”
    Bone recoiled from the force of Deacon’s voice.
    “Shut up,” Deacon whispered fiercely, “and stay put, and that’s all I want to hear from you.”
    Bone sat still.
    Deacon moved out into the rain as Archie had, but in a different direction: toward the farmhouse.
    Bone was still waiting—gazing at the rain, his knees pulled up, rocking in rhythm with the Calling inside him—when Archie came back, staring at Deacon’s empty bunk. “Son of a bitch,” he said, and turned almost tearfully to Bone. “Where is he? Oh, Christ! Did he go out? Did he go there?”
    Bone pointed toward the farmhouse—a dark shape in the rain through the door.
    Archie staggered as if from a physical blow. He looked suddenly small, Bone thought. Small and old. His grief was like a dark aura. “Oh, Christ, Bone— come on, come with me, we gotta stop him, stop him before it’s too late!”
    The demand was so heartfelt that Bone did not question it. He ran behind Archie into the rain. He was cold and wet instantly, water slicking his stubble hair, running past the collar of his pea coat into his tom checked shirt and down the knobs of his spine. They reached the farmhouse, and Bone pressed up against a kitchen window. Condensation frosted the glass; he could not see inside; but one wet pane gave him back his own reflection, sunken-eyed, pale, and huge. The kitchen was dark. Archie shouted: “Bone! Bone, the door’s locked! Knock it down, for God’s sake, he’s inside there, Bone —”
    But then a light flashed twice in the darkness, the noise of it ringing painfully in Bone’s eardrums. It was Darcy’s big shotgun, Bone guessed. The one that had hung on the wall. And in the eerie silence that followed there was only the drumming of the rain, the rattle of a fallen copper kettle from the kitchen, and the wail of Archie’s weeping.
    Digging the hole, Bone thought about death.
    The darkness was absolute, though the rain had tapered to a drizzle. He worked methodically with the Darcys’ broad-bladed shovel, fighting the wet ground and the mulch that littered the wheatfield, turning up the rich dark soil. The night wind on his wet clothes made him tremble, and Bone gritted his teeth and drove the shovel savagely into the resistant earth. He smelled of his work.
    Death was not such a bad thing, Bone thought. He had wondered, at times, if it was not in fact death that was Calling him, whether that elusive sweetness might not be the sweetness of release from this misshapen body. In some way it might be … but he had been offered death many times and had never accepted. The body resisted. There was an incompleteness about it.
    Too, he had seen death often enough among the railway tramps and it was not attractive. There was a kind of shamefulness about a human body after death, Bone thought, the limpness, like a child’s costly doll too casually discarded. To Bone, the dead always seemed insulted: subject to indignities, and passively sullen.
    Bone had made the hole shallow but wide. It looked less like a grave than like some kind of crater, broadly dish-shaped, now filling with black water. Bone guessed it was good enough and when he stood up and turned toward the farmhouse he saw the halo of Archie’s lantern bobbing