The land had lain like a thing insensible. The sound of a bird or sight of a rabbit had proved a rarity, and no person crossed their path. At Sandstone they had dog-legged off the interstate onto State Route 20, skimming south along the spine of a mountain and then dipping down to Hinton, an old railroad town, wheeling past white-washed churches and rotted old barns and hillsides blazing red with sumac.
In the roar and spray coming off the Sandstone Falls, they had paused to fill their canteens.
“Night’ll be coming on soon,” Cal had said, scanning the horizon. “Best we camp here, push on at dawn.” By his reckoning, Boone’s Gap was still a good twelve to fifteen miles off.
He’d begun unloading a tent from the pedicab when a touch like a whisper stayed him.
“Let’s finish it,” Tina had said.
So now here they stood, before this gray expanse like a slammed door.
Locking us out, Cal wondered, or something in?
Colleen caught his glance. “It’s your call.”
Why my call? He rebelled at the responsibility for a moment but he knew the answer. Because I brought them here.
Let’s finish it.
But looking at his sister, at her aqua gaze held on the fog, he hesitated. With every mile they had drawn nearer, the voice-voices-had been louder in her mind, a wordless tumult that deafened her, rendered his own voice a mere whisper under it.
Back in Manhattan, he had felt so certain that their only chance lay in confronting this siren force before it grew stronger, while it was still in turmoil, fractured, to know what they were fighting. Now, as his heart battered in his chest, he wondered if he had been wrong to bring her here, if they should have fled, even though he’d been sure there was no hiding place.
Could Nijinsky have fled his God, no matter where he’d run?
No.
But how do you kill a god, even a false one?
You start by stepping through the door.
Cal fetched the Coleman lantern from the pedicab and, lighting it, led them into the fog. The light bounced off the mist, rendering it opaque.
Holding the lantern before him, Cal struggled to see the path, to stay on it, while Doc and Goldie walked the four bikes, Tina floating beside them. Colleen stowed her cross-bow over her back-little use it would be in the fog-and drew out her big knife.
They advanced slowly, silence wrapping itself about them, hearing only the sounds of their breathing, their footsteps on the crackling leaves, amplified alarmingly back on them. The drifting dead grayness filled Cal’s eyes, and he saw nothing, save the ghost of a tree here and there, looming up and shrinking back, seeming to move and shift with the drifting fog. The clammy mist settled on his clothes and skin, bled through, passing its cold into him. He had a sense of being invaded, absorbed by the fog, and felt momentarily as if he were held trapped by it, frozen outside time and space.
Glancing about him, Colleen and Doc and Goldie looked bleached of color, wavered insubstantially. Only Tina blazed clearly. But as Cal watched her, he discerned the fog melting in and out of her nimbus, dancing patterns on its surface like oil on water. It enveloped her, held her in its embrace, seemed to draw her more quickly forward.
She was pulling farther ahead of Cal now, growing misty with distance, like a moon receding behind clouds.
“Stay close, Tina,” Cal called, but got no response. “Tina!”
Then he perceived that she had stopped. She was staring blankly ahead of her, and her voice, when she spoke, was a whisper.
“You open yourself to it, and the world falls away.”
Cal heard an intake of breath beside him and saw that Goldie had gone ashen at the words.
“What is it?” Cal asked.
But before Goldie could speak, they heard the thing running at them, heard its shriek roiling up in the night.
Colleen spun as the figure lunged out of the vapor, slashed wildly at it. Cal dove at her, grabbed her arm and yanked it aside as the body plunged past, smashing into Doc, taking both of them down, the bikes falling in a clatter.
“What the hell are you doing!?” Colleen cried at Cal. But then she saw that the sprawled figure was a woman, breathing hard, crazed with fear. She flailed at Doc in her panic, then halted abruptly as she made him out in the glare of the lantern. She looked about in stunned surprise. She was a big woman, of middle years, Cal could see, tall and solid, with steel-gray hair and clothes that would have been conservatively efficient if they hadn’t been bloody and torn. Rising, Doc tried to help her up, but she pulled free and sprang up with a boneless fluidity that Cal found unexpected and disconcerting.
She whipped about to face the way she had come, as a greenish phospor light exploded out of the mist and a buzzing roar assailed them.
And suddenly, Cal understood what she had been running from.
It towered over them, shambling forward. The living dead heart of it was something that had been a Confederate soldier once, an officer, that much was clear from the glowing gray uniform with the curlicues of braid at sleeve and throat, the brass buttons, the wild and flowing beard beneath burning eyes like the cores of green suns. Through his own terror, it came to Cal that West Virginia had sided with the Union, and that this walking specter might well have been one of the forgotten, unburied dead.
But the man-ghost of this creature formed only the frame, a basis upon which to heap amendment and ornamentation. Hornets swarmed over him in their thousands like a fresh skin, pulsing green as if irradiated, buzzing their rage. And playing over it all, electrical discharges of green-blue energy, snapping wildly like fallen high-tension lines in a storm.
Cal saw that Colleen was nearest to it, that soon it would trample her underfoot. He was on the move already, drawing his sword. Colleen stood her ground, whipping the crossbow off her back as the thing advanced on her. She loaded a bolt and fired. It passed clean through, sailed off into the fog.
The creature paused and regarded Colleen as if it had just grown aware of her. It raised its phantom gun and took aim.
Cal realized he wouldn’t reach them in time. He cried out, just as an enormous explosion rent the air and he was dazzled by a flash of light.
“No!” he screamed. But then he saw that Colleen stood unharmed, saw the apparition blasted away and dispersed to nothingness, the hornets scattering and vanishing into the fog.
Cal looked about him in confusion and spied Goldie standing just behind him, holding the musket he had carried here so lovingly, despite all of Colleen’s jibes. Sparks were still spitting from its muzzle and a golden light played over its surface, which died out as Cal watched. The weapon crumbled away, fell from Goldie’s hands.
“Okay, you win,” Colleen said to Goldie, still shaking. “I’m the asshole.”
“They’re coming back,” cried Tina, floating up out of the mist. The gray-haired woman became aware of her for the first time, and her expression was amazed and beatific. Cal noted-strangely, without surprise-that the illumination from Tina reflected off the woman’s eyes, like a cat’s.
Now Cal heard the angry buzzing, growing in volume, speeding toward them. The hornets. .
“Tina,” Cal spoke urgently. “What you did back at the creek, with that spearman-can you do it again?”
“I don’t know. . I think so.”
“Get close about her, everyone!” They drew in around Tina. She concentrated, and the light about her spread outward to encompass them all.
Then the hornets were upon them, hurling themselves at the swirling light, immolating themselves. Cautiously, Tina moved forward through the fog as the insects pursued them, Cal and the others huddling close, feeling her Corona tingling on their skins as the fog had done, but with none of its frigidity.