“We need help, Aaron.”
“I’m not leaving you.”
“God, you’re stubborn. I want to pound you with my fists.”
I looked around us. “This isn’t a bad place to be. They can’t see us. We have the gun. It could be worse.”
“You have to go for help.”
“Out here, there is no help.” I sat down and put my arm around her. “Let’s rest a little while. Cotton and Spud and Maisie know we’re here.”
“What time is it?”
I looked at my watch. Then tapped on the glass.
“It stopped?” she said.
“I must have knocked it against a rock.”
But Jo Anne was not one you put the slide on. “What time did it stop?”
“Exactly midnight. Even the second hand is straight up.”
Had we stepped out of time? I had no idea. The shadow of a large object raced across the boulders around us. I tried to get my binoculars on it, but it was moving too fast. Then I smelled a stench that was unmistakable, one that makes you gag, one that you associate with a rendering plant or hair burning, one that could have come from the stacks in Poland during World War II.
Jo Anne choked as though she had swallowed a fish bone. “What are they doing out there?”
“Who knows?”
“Tell me.”
“I’m going to take the binoculars down the trail. Here’s the gun. I’ll be right back.”
“Aaron, I don’t want these people or creatures or whatever they are to get their hands on me. Understand what I’m saying?”
“Yeah, but it’s not going to come to that,” I said.
“Lose the charade and promise you won’t let them get me, Aaron,” she said.
“I won’t let them get you, Jo Anne.”
* * *
I WALKED BEHIND THE boulders along the deer trail to a spot where I could see the bus and the people who had gathered at the head of the canyon. I focused the binoculars on a tab
le rock that seemed to serve as an altar. A bonfire was burning on it, and Mr. and Mrs. Lowry were standing up the slope from it, the firelight flickering on their faces. She wore a black ankle-length dress with a white lace collar similar to the one worn by the wife of Rueben Vickers. Mr. Lowry was also dressed in black and wearing a wide-brimmed, tall-crowned hat that had a silver buckle on its band, as either a Puritan or a French musketeer might wear.
Below them, on the other side of the bonfire, were Lindsey Lou and Orchid and Jimmy Doyle and Marvin Fogel and people I had never seen. They all seemed to be waiting on something or someone, perhaps the creatures flying over the canyon, maybe an entity that had more power than all of them together.
I shifted the glasses and was suddenly looking at the faces of Cotton Williams and Spud Caudill and Maisie, who was probably the only woman in the world who had ever believed in Spud. I stepped backward, behind the boulder, unable to accept what I had just seen. Maisie and Spud and Cotton had become acolytes in a demonic cult?
I closed my eyes and tried to think, then realized that something was wrong, that the body language of my friends was out of sync with that of the people around them, their expressions wan and resentful. I looked again through the glasses. Cotton had a rope around his neck; Spud’s fedora was gone; Maisie’s scarf was knotted around her mouth; all of them had their wrists tied behind them.
Then I saw the birds that Jo Anne had seen, except they weren’t birds, nor were they witches on brooms. They had faces like bats and wings that were singed and streamed ashes. A stick figure leaped back and forth across the bonfire, then skittered up into the rocks. But none of this explained the odor that was like incinerated offal.
I lifted the glasses again and focused them on the bonfire. I did not believe what I was looking at. It was too cruel to be real. The humped and charred remains of a human being, wrists bound in back, head slumped, was in the center of the flames. The victim was slight of build, with arms that could have been pipe cleaners. Stoney? Was there not one person who would try to protect this innocent kid? I thought I had seen the worst in human beings in Korea, and I mean our F-86s strafing miles of civilian refugees as they fled south on foot, hoping for safe harbor. I looked at the fire and wanted to weep. No, I wanted to kill the people who had done this.
I went back down the trail to Jo Anne and squatted beside her.