The Burning, page 31
As two heavyset men moved to join the line of hand-holders, Angela saw, lying on train tracks behind where they'd been, the body of Derek's mother slit open from throat to groin, her bloody innards spilling onto the railroad ties. Sickened, she looked away, trying hard not to throw up, though she doubted there was anything left in her stomach to disgorge. She felt a distressingly deep void within her, an aching hole that threatened to grow wider and wider until whatever self she had left fell in and disappeared. It was like a sharp stab to the soul to see her friend's mother that way, and to know that his little brother lay somewhere around here as well, murdered and mutilated. She started praying. It was conditioning more than anything else. Habit. Praying made her feel better, gave her comfort in time of need.
Always before when she'd prayed, there'd been uncertainty behind it. She'd sent out her wishes and gratitude hoping they would be heard. But this time to her complete and utter shock there was an immediate connection. She was filled with the unexplainable yet irrefutable knowledge that she was speaking directly to an entity that heard and understood her. Only . . .
Only she was not sure it was God. It was powerful, no doubt about that. But she sensed things about this being, and its attributes were definitely not those she associated with the Almighty. It was close by, for one thing, not an omnipresent force but a specific entity existing within a clearly defined space. For another, it seemed offended somehow, angry, filled with the sorts of petty human emotions that should be beneath a deity. Not that the Lord himself hadn't exhibited the occasional pettiness and petulance from time to time-but that was when he'd been a young God, in the Old Testament, just learning the ropes and trying to figure out the boundaries between himself and his creations.
This thing wasn't young.
She was afraid to stop praying, afraid the connection would be lost. The entity to whom she was talking might not be a god, but she felt safe in its company, protected by her communion with it. And the more she spoke, the more she opened herself and made explicit her fears and wishes, the closer she seemed to come to this awesomely powerful being. She had the impression that it knew who she was, that her coming here had been arranged or somehow preordained, although that made no sense and she could not imagine how she could help, what possible use she could be, what she could bring to the table.
Derek was still hugging her, leaning on her, sobbing and holding her tightly. Her hands were clasped behind his back, her eyes closed as she prayed.
There was movement beneath her feet, accompanied by an audible rumbling, and at that, her eyes snapped open. As a native of Southern California, she'd lived through her share of earthquakes, and those experiences had made her wary and alert to any seismic phenomena, instinctively ready to bolt or seek cover at the first sign of geologic instability. This wasn't an earthquake, though. She knew it immediately. The second her eyes opened, she saw a figure beginning to coalesce from the land surrounding them, elements of earth and sky coming together to form a single beast, as though the substance of each component making up this plain was being drawn particle by particle from its inanimate source by an invisible force and shaped into a monster.
But was it a monster?
It drew itself upward from the ground, rising as tall as a building into the still night air, illuminated by the light of the recently risen moon. It was indeed horrible to look upon, this thing of rock and sand and cloud and brush. Recognizable ingredients had been put together in such a way that the end result was not only unfamiliar but profoundly disturbing. At the same time, she was not afraid of it. She faced the massive figure. There were no arms or legs, but there was very definitely a face. It hovered somewhere in the middle of the thin wavering form: ancient angry eyes, a beak-ish nose, a lipless maw that was at once overlarge and tightly constricted. Yet despite the being's hideous appearance and overwhelming size, she was not really frightened. Awed, yes, but not scared.
She could see through it. Despite its makeup, the creature did not have the heft of solidity, was more apparition than physical presence. Had it been summoned by those chanting men? Was this an agent of protection, some sort of Native American deity they had conjured in order to save them from the dark forces that had drawn them here?
Angela didn't know. All she knew was that this was the being to whom she had been praying, or, rather, the being that had intercepted her prayers.
The spirit of America.
She wasn't sure where she'd heard that phrase before or to what it referred, but the description came closer than anything else to describing the thing that now loomed above the plain.
Derek had pulled away, either the tension in her body, a change in the atmosphere or some sixth sense alerting him to the fact that there was something behind him, and he turned to look. He was scared, but, like herself, not as scared as he should have been given the thing's size and appearance.
The spirit of America.
It might be wrong, might even be blasphemous, but once more Angela closed her eyes and folded her hands.
She began to pray.
The connection was there again instantly, an intimate sharing that was even stronger this time. She had a hard time associating such a delicate process with the monster towering above them. On the other hand, Angela had no problem relating the anger she sensed back to that formidable figure. It was a fury borne of betrayal, a wrath directed at those who had overstepped boundaries: the Chinese, the corpses, the black mold. This was a being that had been here since before there was a country, since before there were people. She had no idea what it was, but the appellation she'd come up with-
spirit of America
-rang true to her, as trite and ridiculous as it might sound, because she sensed within the being a feeling of stewardship toward the land and, perhaps, the people who inhabited it. What the spirit required, she felt, what it demanded within its purview, was balance, an equality of opposites. It could not allow the evil behind the trains to run rampant over the land.
That meant the entity was on their side. This time. But she understood that that might not be the case in the future or may not have been in the past. It was a temporary convergence of interests, and she was thankful for that. Despite the nonthreatening connection she enjoyed with the spirit she understood the potential horror of such power, and knew from the monstrous appearance of the being, a sight that had been permanently etched into her brain, that it had the capacity to be far, far worse than the black trains and their cargo of vengeful dead.
One of the trains blew its whistle, a sound not mournful but chilling. Instead of a long sustained blast, however, the noise was cut off almost as soon as it started.
She opened her eyes, though her hands remained clasped and her mouth kept whispering prayer.
The gigantic figure grinned, its teeth dark in the moonlight and resembling sandstone.
And for the first time she was truly afraid.
Dennis emerged from the passenger car feeling numb and somewhat out of it, as though he'd been anesthetized in preparation for an operation and had only just come to. His vision seemed blurred, his thought processes murky, and when he stepped onto the ground behind the housewife, he did so slowly with legs that felt thick, unwieldy and not his own.
Malcolm followed him out. Then came the rest of the living. The dead remained on board.
There was a maze of tracks on the ground before them and what seemed to be a labyrinth of locomotives, huge black engines that were all different-yet all related. One, he saw with horror, was made of corpses, hundreds of them, covered with mold and forced into the shapes of headlights, catwalks, steel plates and doorframes.
It was difficult to walk, but one beneficial byproduct of his deadened state was the fact that the fear he should have felt remained subdued, tamped down. Intellectually, he recognized the magnitude of the terrible scene that greeted him, but emotionally it did not register, and his heart was not jackhammering into overdrive the way it otherwise would have been.
He stumbled toward the front of his train where it met three others, all four seemingly from the different directions of the compass-north, south, east, west. He bent down, dropping to one knee between two crisscrossing tracks, and scooped up a handful of dirt in his palm. He felt the dirt, smelled it, touched it to his lips. There was blood mixed with this soil, the blood of his people. Chinese immigrants had been massacred at this spot, and that was a stain that would never go away.
He let the dirt fall, slipping through his fingers.
He had been summoned, Dennis realized, but it had not been by the ghosts of his people, as he'd originally thought. Most of them were caught up in this revenge play just like himself, not intentional warriors but conscripts, drawn into battle by forces beyond their control and probably beyond their ken. Despite the fact that he had been welcomed onto the train, expected even, that had not been his destination, merely his mode of transportation. Perhaps those in the passenger car had expected him to join their fight, had thought that all of the living people they were picking up would devote themselves to bringing retribution to white America, but that had not happened.
No, something else had led him here, had called to him across the miles and through the years.
And then he saw it.
In back of the locomotives, above them, towered a strange and dreadful figure he recognized from his dreams. It was the being that had summoned him here, the one whose triangular head he'd seen behind the wall of smoke at the end of the road, the one in his nightmares who had always been in the background, watching, waiting, beckoning him forward, its dark shifting form visible in the sky, above the trees, above the mountains.
Just as it was now.
If the trains were variations on a normal object, bastardizations of known machines, this was something else entirely, a form so singularly horrific and profoundly strange that had he not dreamed of it before, his brain would have been able to find no correlations or comparisons.
And yet it belonged here. As alien as it seemed, it was clearly a natural part of this land, like the mountains and the sagebrush and the rocks and the air. It was a creature of this place, had been here long before this country was settled, and would remain here long after their civilization crumbled to dust.
Dennis looked up into the moonlit sky at the wavering form. Waves of anger and displeasure rolled from it, emotions he understood but that nevertheless frightened him because their origins in this instance were so fundamentally inhuman. It had called him here, brought him to this place in hopes that he could help stop the seemingly inevitable progression of the vengeful malediction. As huge and powerful as the entity might be, it was impotent. At least in regard to this. It could not stop the retaliation to come or it would have nipped it in the bud long ago. All it could do, apparently, was draw to it people it thought could derail the process.
But what was he to do? What could he do? All of this had been put into motion by a freakish convergence of circumstances, by a curse spoken in the right place at the right moment that had burgeoned into a movement now entirely uncontrollable. He could not stop it. He had no power and knew no spells. There was no way anything he did could have the slightest effect on what was essentially the biggest class-action proceeding of all time.
Malcolm and the others were standing close behind him, frightened by the hellish landscape in which they found themselves and uncertain of what to do, looking to him for guidance. Dennis, too, was lost, and for a moment he simply stood there, breathing in the smoky fumes and staring up at the angry face in the sky.
Except the face wasn't all angry. The mouth was smiling. It was a horrible smile, and the teeth reminded him of cactus, but it was a smile nevertheless, and it was directed at the thousands of Native American men who stood on the Point, linked together and winding around the trains over the land like an endless snake, chanting.
Had they conjured up this being, this monster, this ... spirit?
Spirit.
Yes. That's what it was.
The last of the line stood directly in front of him, a short man nearly as wide as he was tall with shiny black hair that from the rear made him look Chinese. Dennis swiveled his head, trying to discern the successive links in the chain, but the line of people was as tangled and complicated as the railroad tracks beneath their feet and it was impossible to tell where it went after the first crossing.
Chain.
Everything that had led them here was part of a chain, a chain of events set in motion well over a hundred years ago. He was part of that chain, and he grabbed the hand of the squat man, then reached around and held Malcolm's hand. For a brief second, he worried that Malcolm might think he was gay- years of social conditioning didn't just disappear, even in a time of crisis-but then Malcolm grabbed the hand of the professor from Denver, who grabbed the housewife's hand behind him.
Dennis considered joining the chant, imitating the words being spoken all around him and echoing to the skies, but it did not feel right. Next to him, Malcolm started his own chant in Mandarin, something that sounded like a prayer to the ancestors, and Dennis followed suit, speaking in Cantonese, repeating the first thing occurring to him that sounded anything at all like the rhythm of the chant: an old nursery rhyme his mother had taught him as a small child. Behind them, the others began doing the same, chiming in with their own personal contributions.
It felt good to be doing this, but it didn't seem to have any real effect. On impulse, he glanced back and saw the end of the line. All of the living were attached, were connected, but . . . but something was wrong; something didn't look right.
The gap.
Yes. There was a gap at the end of the line between a long-haired young man and the train. A missing link in the chain. He was just standing there, right arm dangling uselessly at his side, while the passenger car stood less than a foot away.
The two needed to touch: the line of people and the train. He knew it instinctively, although the feeling was reinforced by that spirit in the sky. Along with the waves of anger and displeasure he sensed from the gigantic being came an understanding, a knowledge that these two opposing forces had to connect.
And it could be done only by someone Chinese.
There were a lot of factors at work here, a whole host of individual actions, links in a chain, that taken together constituted a unified movement, a surging riposte against the power of the past. He looked up at that face in the sky and felt like a game piece on a chessboard. The Native Americans had not conjured up that monstrous spirit, he realized. It had led them here just as it had him.
He let go of the short guy's hand and pulled Malcolm closer, placing the two men's hands together. Neither objected and neither stopped chanting, and indeed Dennis realized he himself was still repeating the nursery rhyme.
He dashed over to the long-haired young man, took the man's right hand in his left ...
Then shoved his own right hand against the side of the passenger car.
The results were immediate. What felt like a bolt of electricity passed through him, although whether it was going from the train to the people or from the people to the train he could not be sure. He knew only that the energy using him as a conduit was powerful, would no doubt, in other circumstances, fry him until he was nothing but a charred pile of ash.
The three other trains started rolling, backing up, trying to escape. If they had succeeded in moving any length of distance, they would have crashed through and broken some portion of the chain, but already they were dying, stalling, stopping. The closest lost its substance, lightening into a shadow, then faded into the surrounding night. The engine and passenger cars next to it melted like ice cream, the black mold that was this railroad's essence seeping into the rails and ties beneath it. The train made from bodies, the one he suspected was the true train, the father of all the others, got a little bit farther along its tracks, but the figures that made up its components were wailing in agony and gnashing their teeth, squirming about in obvious torment. Those who were the wheels went first, collapsing, falling sideways off the tracks, causing everyone above to disengage and revert to their normal shapes, hundreds of bodies raining about and sliding down the slight slope. They, too, were covered with mold, and the mold melted off them, oozing into the ground. Beneath the black fungus, the dead were little more than ragged corpses, and in a matter of seconds they came apart, as though it was the mold that had held them together individually as well as collectively. Suddenly bones were everywhere, and Dennis saw one skinny Native American man, grinning and chanting, kick a skull across the ground as though it were a soccer ball.
This all happened simultaneously. His own train stayed intact a little longer, perhaps because he was touching it-either drawing power from it or putting power into it-but finally it, too, succumbed, breaking into pieces as though the bolts that had held it together had all disappeared. The panel he'd been palming dissolved beneath his hand, turning into a powder that felt like crumbling dirt, and he wiped it on his jeans.
Other men were kicking bones now, and Dennis felt a small flash of anger. That wasn't right. He looked up, and the figure towering above them seemed more solid now, as though the demise of the trains had granted it strength. It grinned at him, and his anger faded. The face of the thing was still hideous and terrifying, but, damn it, its smile was infectious, and as creepy as it might seem to someone looking on, Dennis stared up at the spirit and grinned back.
As a park ranger, Henry had to be familiar with a host of Native American beliefs, particularly those held by the older lost cultures who had settled the Southwest and left their mark upon the land in the form of ruins, pueblos, drawings and carvings. But despite the rumors and suspicions concerning his own ethnicity, he had never really felt kinship with any of those beliefs.
He still didn't.
He was like a foreign visitor here, but he could not fail to recognize the power and efficacy of what had just happened. Coming together, holding hands, chanting the shamanistic words, had not only exorcised the shadows that had been plaguing them; it had somehow made the trains either disappear or fall apart. There was no doubt in his mind that, given more time, those locomotives would have drained dry every man here and gone on to kill who knew how many others over who knew how many years, the Chinese dead cutting a broad swath across the land in their quest for vengeance. Would white America even have known how to handle such a scenario? Would police and other law enforcement agencies have been able to figure out that there was something supernatural afoot, or would they have doggedly continued looking at everything in a literal fashion, refusing to see associations, assuming all of the deaths were random and unconnected? It was impossible to tell, but it was a moot point anyway. The trains had not progressed to the next level.
