Beyond the Pale (2 page)

Brother Cy clapped his big hands together and laughed like thunder.

“Now, let the show begin!”

Like wraiths in the half-light, the shadowy roustabouts bustled in and out of the tent. Parti-colored banners were unfurled. Collapsible bleachers were pulled from the back of the bus. Fire sprang to life in dozens of punched-tin lanterns, carried inside in a glowing procession until the tent shone gold in the night. Last of all a sign was planted in the earth before the tent’s entrance. It proclaimed in bold, Gothic letters:

And below that, scrawled in crude script like an afterthought:

Brother Cy stepped back, crossed his arms, and surveyed his domain.

“Does all go well?” a clear voice asked behind him.

He whirled around, and a cadaverous grin split his gaunt face.

“Indeed it does, Sister Mirrim.” He reached out to help a woman down the steps of the bus. “Do you see? Our citadel stands once more.”

Sister Mirrim gazed at the tent. Her visage was smooth, even beautiful, but her old-fashioned garb was severe. She wore a tight-bodiced dress of funereal black, as well as high-buttoned shoes, the kind that could still be found to this day in the downtown five-and-dime of any number of dusty Oklahoma towns—the kind that bespoke the unforgiving hardness of another century. Yet, even in the pale light of the crescent moon, Sister Mirrim’s long hair shone flame red and flew about her on the wind.

A child followed Sister Mirrim down the steps, a small girl clad in a black dress that was the older woman’s in perfect miniature. Her hair, however, was the color of the night, and she regarded Brother Cy with wise purple eyes. He lifted her into his arms. She coiled a small, cool hand around his neck and pressed her soft rosebud mouth against his cheek.

“I love you, too, Child Samanda,” Brother Cy said in bemusement.

“But of course you do,” she murmured.

He set her down, and hand in hand the trio approached the tent. The wind whistled through the ropes and lines, conjuring a sorrowful hymn.

“Will they come, Brother Cy?” Sister Mirrim asked, her voice like the call of a dove. “I have been looking, but I cannot see them yet.”

He looked past the tent, down into the valley below, to a haphazard collection of sparks that twinkled in the high-country night. Castle City. There they huddled in the warm light of their little houses, unknowing of the darkness that approached. But it was so distant, this darkness, so strange, and so terribly far away. How could they know? How could they realize that their very souls hung in the balance? Yet somehow they must. That was why the three had journeyed here.

“They have to come,” Brother Cy said at last. “There are so many who have a part to play.”

Sister Mirrim shook her head, her question unanswered. “But
will
they?”

It was Child Samanda who spoke this time.

“Oh, yes,” she whispered. “They will come.” She slipped her tiny doll hands from the larger grips that enclosed them and took a step nearer the lights below. “But there are two whose tasks will be far harder than those of the others. We cannot know if they will have the strength to bear their burdens.”

Brother Cy gave a solemn nod. “Then we can pray, my little bird.”

A chill gust rushed down from the high peaks, and the three looked up to see the tent shake under the blast. Shadows played crazily across the canvas walls, cast from within by lanterns dancing on their wires, as the roustabouts scrambled to brace the tent against the gale. Some of the silhouettes were squat as stumps, while others were oddly tall, with fingers as slender as twigs. Some of them bore what seemed antlers, branching like young saplings from their heads, while others looked as if they walked on crooked legs, tails swishing in agitation behind them. However, rippling
canvas could be a twister of shadows, and a player of tricks. The wind blew itself into nothing, the tent grew still, the shadows slipped away from the walls.

“Come, let us go inside,” Brother Cy murmured.

“To wait for them?” Sister Mirrim asked.

Child Samanda nodded in conviction. “Yes, to wait.”

Hand in hand once more, they turned their backs on the night, stepped into the tent, and left the small mountain town to sleep alone in the night below.

Sometimes the wind blowing down from the mountains made Travis Wilder feel like anything could happen.

He could always hear it coming, long before the first telltale wisps of snow-clean air touched his face. It would begin as a distant roar far up the canyon, nearly and yet not at all like the ancient voice of a stormswept ocean. Before long he could see it, rushing in wave after wave through the forest that mantled the granite-boned ranges that encircled the valley. Lodgepole pines swayed in graceful rhythm, while cloudlike aspen shivered green, then silver, then green again. Moments later, in abandoned fields just outside of town, he could hear the witchgrass rattle a final portent as it whirled around in wild pagan circles.

Then the wind would strike.

It would race down Elk Street—Castle City’s broad main avenue—like an invisible ghost-herd of Indian ponies. Past McKay’s General Store. Past the Mosquito Café. Past the abandoned assay office, the Mine Shaft Saloon, the Blue Summit Earth Shop, and the faded Victorian opera house. Dogs would bark and snap at passing newspaper tumble-weeds. Strolling tourists would turn their backs and shut their eyes to dust devils that glittered with gum wrappers and cigarette-pack cellophane. Dude-ranch cowboys would
hold on to black hats with turquoise-ringed hands while their dusters flew out behind them like rawhide wings.

Maybe he was the only one in town crazy enough, but Travis loved the wind. He always had. He would step outside the buckshot-speckled door of the Mine Shaft Saloon, which he had the dubious distinction of owning these days, and lean over the boardwalk rail to face the gale full-on. There was no way to know from where the wind had journeyed, he reasoned, or just what it might blow his way. He would breathe the quickening air, sharp with the scents of cold mountain stone and sun-warmed pine, and wonder whose lungs it had filled last—where they lived, what language they spoke, what gods they courted, if they courted any at all, and what dreams they dared dream behind eyes of a hundred different shapes and hues.

It was a feeling that had first struck him the day he stepped off a mud-spattered bus—a flatland kid raised between the straight and hazy horizons of Illinois—and drank in his virgin sight of Castle City. In the seven years since, the sensation had come to him with surprising and comforting regularity, never lessening in potency with time. Facing into the wind always left him with an ache of wordless longing in his chest, and a feeling that he didn’t have to choose between anything, because everything was possible.

Still, despite his many musings, there was no way Travis could have imagined, on a chill evening caught in the gray time between the gold-and-azure days of fall and the frozen purple of winter night, just exactly what the wind would blow into Castle City, and into his life. Later, looking back with the empty clarity of hindsight, he would sift through all the strange and unexpected events to pinpoint the precise moment when things began to change. It had been a small happening, so small that he might not have remembered it had it not been for the fact that afterward things would never—could never—be the same again.

It was when he heard bells.

Afternoon sunlight fell as heavy as gold into the mountain valley as Travis Wilder piloted his battered pickup truck toward town. Faint music crackled on the AM radio in time to the squawking dashboard. A paper air freshener shaped like a pine tree bobbed on a string beneath the rearview mirror, all the fake pine smell long since baked out of it by years of the high-altitude sun. The engine growled as he downshifted and swung around a curve at precisely twice the speed recommended by a nearby road sign: a yellow diamond so full of shotgun holes it looked like a chunk of Swiss cheese.

“You’re late, Travis,” he said to himself.

He had spent most of the afternoon on the roof of the ramshackle hunting lodge he called home, nailing on tar paper and replacing shingles torn off by last night’s windstorm. It was past time to be getting ready for the snow that the fat, red-furred marmots foreshadowed. When he finally thought to look up, the sun had been sinking toward the wall of mountains that ringed the valley. Travis never had been good with time. But then, he never had been good with a lot of things. That was why he had come here, to Castle City.

The regulars would start straggling into the Mine Shaft Saloon by sundown, and there were usually a few hapless tourists who had taken a wrong turn off the highway and had ended up in Castle City by accident. Legions of them cruised the twisting two-lanes this time of year, to ogle the gold splendor of the mountain autumn from the heated comfort of their rental cars. To make matters worse, Moira Larson’s book club was meeting in the back room of the saloon that evening. The topic: Nineteenth-Century French Novels of Adultery. Travis shuddered at the thought of facing a dozen book lovers thwarted in their hell-bent desire to discuss implications of class structure in Flaubert’s
Madame Bovary
.

A nervous whistle escaped his lips. “You are really,
really
late.”

Of course, Max would be at the saloon.

Max Bayfield was Travis’s one and only employee. Max was supposed to be working the day shift today, although more likely he was poring over the saloon’s books, trying to find money between the lines. Travis supposed that was what he got for hiring a refugee accountant from New York, but at least there would be someone there to pour a drink if a customer asked. Then again, it wasn’t really a great idea to let Max wrangle the bar on his own during busy hours. Travis could only hope Max wasn’t hovering around the jukebox again, telling customers that while listening to classical music temporarily raised one’s IQ, country-western songs—with their simplistic melodic structure and repetitive rhythmic schemes—did just the opposite.

His sense of urgency redoubled, Travis punched the accelerator, and the truck flew out of the curve like a rock out of a slingshot.

He was about a mile from town when a dilapidated shape flashed past the truck’s cracked windshield. Hulking beside the road were the remains of a house. Although he had passed it countless times, like always, Travis found his gaze drawn toward the ruin. The old place had burned years ago, long before he had come to Castle City, yet somehow he knew that even before it caught fire, this had been an ugly building. It was squat and sprawling, with rows of small windows that stared like hateful eyes at the beauty of the mountains. Now the structure was nothing more than a shell, the husk of some gigantic beetle that had died next to the road.

According to the stories Travis had heard, the house had been an orphanage once. Built during the days of the Great Depression, the Beckett-Strange Home for Children had endured for decades as one of the largest orphanages in central Colorado, but about twenty years ago the place had burned. By then orphanages were well out of fashion, and the Home was never rebuilt. Travis couldn’t say he was sorry. There was something … 
wrong
about the ruin. He wasn’t sure what it was, but often when he passed it he found himself thinking dark thoughts. Thoughts about fear, or suffering, or mayhem. Maybe it was just that he knew people had died in that fire. Not any of the children—they had all escaped—but several of the Home’s workers had been trapped in their rooms, and they had all been burned alive. At least, that was
what the rumors told. Travis didn’t know if the stories were true, but if there was ever a place for ghosts, it was the remains of the Beckett-Strange Home for Children.

The old orphanage slipped out of view, and Travis fixed his gaze on the road ahead. This was the time of day when deer were inexplicably compelled to leap out and fling their bodies in front of moving cars. He kept his eyes peeled. Except a moment later something caught his attention, and it wasn’t a deer. He downshifted, his hurry forgotten. Gears rattling in protest, the pickup slowed to a crawl.

It was a billboard.

Tires ground on gravel, and the truck rolled to a halt on the shoulder of the road. Travis peered out the driver’s side window. Like so many wooden artifacts in the high country, the billboard was bleached and splintering but curiously intact. The thing had to have seen a good sixty or seventy mountain winters in its existence, and even the most recent advertisement plastered across its face was long faded. However, he could still make out the ghostly shapes of people wearing clothes that had been fashionable two decades ago, laughing as they sucked smooth, delicious smoke out of white sticks propped between long fingers.

Hinges groaned, and the truck’s heavy door swung open. Travis climbed out. Cold air sighed through clumps of dry weeds, and he was glad for his thick sheepskin coat. Beneath this he wore faded blue jeans and a tan work shirt. Travis was a tall man, just on the lean side of big, but he had an unconscious tendency to hunch his broad shoulders. At thirty-three years his face was boyish, and when he smiled, his crooked grin suggested a mischievousness that was not altogether misleading. His hair was the exact color of dull yellow sandstone, but his beard, which he sometimes let grow against the winter cold, or simply out of sheer laziness, had sparks of copper and gold in it.