John Saul - Nathaniel

"It's Nathaniel," he muttered. "I bet it's Nathaniel."

Suddenly the sound of a screen door slamming jarred his reverie, and he heard Eric's mother's voice.

"You boys all done? Want something to eat?"

Michael looked up at Mrs. Simpson. She seemed to be a long way away, and he couldn't really see her very well. He shook his head. "I-I better get back to Grandpa's house."

"Would you like a ride?" Mrs. Simpson asked. "It's past midnight."

Again Michael shook his head. "I can ride my bike. I'll be okay."

His head still pounding with pain and his vision oddly blurry, Michael mounted his bike, whistled to Shadow, and rode off into the night. When he was gone, Ione Simpson put an arm around her son's shoulders and started toward the house. "Is Michael all right?" she asked. "He seemed sort of-odd, just now."

Eric frowned up at his mother. "He was weird," he said emphatically. "Out in the barn, he started acting funny, and then he said he had a headache." Michael had said something else, too, Eric thought, something about Nathaniel. He considered telling his mother that as well, then changed his mind. No point in getting his mom all riled up over that old ghost story. But it really was weird. And a little scary. Eric felt a shiver start crawling up his spine.

It was as he came around the curve between the Simpsons' farm and his mother's that Michael first became aware of the lights.

Far off to the left, dimmed by the distance, he first thought they were fireflies. He slowed, then stopped the bike, dropping one foot to the ground to maintain his balance. Shadow, his hackles slightly raised, crouched beside him. Michael squinted into the darkness, trying to determine shapes and forms, but there were none. Only a faint glow, broken every now and then as something passed between himself and the source of the lights. Frowning, the pain in his head increasing by the moment, he started the bike moving again, concentrating on the lights until the dark shape of his mother's house cut them off. And then, as he came to the driveway, they reappeared, and he suddenly knew where they were.

Potter's Field.

His mind flashed back twenty-four hours, and he saw what his grandfather had described-a woman, her back bent as she stooped over, wandering in the night, searching, constantly searching for what she would never find.

He remembered the tale, and as his headache worsened, he tried to shake it from his mind. He couldn't.

He dismounted the bicycle, and began walking it up the driveway until he stood in the shelter of the house, concealed from whatever might be lurking in the field. Still, whatever was there was too far away for him to see clearly. He stayed where he was for a moment, indecisive. Then Shadow, whimpering softly, slunk away into the darkness. Michael made up his mind, leaned the bike against the side of the house, and followed the dog.

He came to the fence that separated his mother's property from Mr. Findley's. Barely pausing, he slipped between the strands of barbed wire; then, crouching low in the dim moonlight, he scurried across to Findley's barn. His head was throbbing now, but it seemed to him he could begin to make out forms in the faint light emanating from the field.

And then, as he and Shadow slipped into the darkness next to the barn, he heard the voice, the same voice he'd heard before: flat, toneless.

"Michael."

It wasn't a question, and Michael knew it. The possessor of that voice knew who he was. He pressed closer to the barn.

"Nathaniel?" he whispered.

"Come in," the voice urged him. "Come in."

As if in a trance, Michael moved around the barn and lifted the bar from its brackets. Swinging the door open just enough to let himself through, he slipped inside, then pulled the door closed behind him.

"Over here." The voice drifted eerily out of the darkness, seeming to come from nowhere and everywhere. "Over this way."

And then, though the voice had not told him which way to go, though he could see nothing in the pitch blackness of the barn, Michael began moving through the darkness, knowing with the passage of every second that he was coming closer to Nathaniel. It was as if Nathaniel was reaching out to him, guiding him, showing him the way through the darkness with his own eyes.

And Michael's headache was suddenly gone.

He drifted down the aisle between the rows of stalls, his footsteps echoing in the emptiness. Then he paused. Though he could still see nothing, he reached out a hand, and immediately touched a door handle. Lifting the latch, he pulled the door open and stepped into the tack room that lay beyond. He was close now, very close. He could feel Nathaniel's presence.

"Here," the voice of Nathaniel told him. "You can see from here." Michael crossed the room, his senses vibrating with a strange kind of awareness, a feeling of sharing himself with another, and sharing that other as well. Then he was standing near the outer wall of the barn, and Nathaniel was with him.

"Closer," Nathaniel urged him, his voice no longer filling the little room, but seeming to emanate from inside Michael's own head. "Stand closer, and see with me."

There was a tiny gap in the barn siding, and Michael pressed his eye against it. The moonlight outside seemed to have grown brighter, and suddenly Michael could see clearly across the fields to the cottonwoods along the river.

And near the cottonwoods, he could see the lights. Three of them, oil lanterns, their wicks turned low, set in a triangle. And inside the triangle, the form of a man.

"Who is it?" Michael whispered in the darkness.

"My father."

"What's he doing?" he asked.

"Do not speak," Nathaniel's voice commanded. "If he knows you are with me, he will try to kill you."

Michael fell silent, knowing deep within himself that the words, though incomprehensible, were the truth. He waited. In a moment the strangely toneless voice came to him again. "I have been calling you. Why did you not come before?"

Michael was silent, but his mind was working, remembering.

His father's funeral, when he had seen this barn, seen something here that no one else had seen.

Watching the barn from the window of the room that would be his, knowing what it looked like inside, though he'd never been here.

Night before last, when he'd come to the barn, knowing that there was something waiting for him.

And now, tonight.

When finally he spoke, he spoke only within himself. "I couldn't hear you. Did you call me tonight?"

And the answer came back, also from within. "Yes. I saw him in the field and felt you near. I called you here so he would not see you."

"But what's he doing?"

"Sending one of us away. One of us was born tonight, and he is sending him away. Just as he sent me away. He does that to all of us… if he can." And in those words that sounded only in his head, Michael could feel a terrible loneliness. Then the voice came again. "I have been waiting for you a long time."

"Why?"

"I need you. And you need me. We are alone, Michael. There is no one else. Do you never feel the loneliness?"

Michael trembled in the darkness, but then Nathaniel touched him, and he felt calm again.

"Will you take me outside?"

Michael frowned in the darkness. "Now?"

"Yes."

"He'll see us."

"It does not matter. He cannot hurt us, if we are together. He hurt that one, though."

"Who?"

"The one who was born tonight. I felt it coming, and called out to it. It was a little boy."

"There was a foal…" Michael whispered, then fell silent. Once again, that strange vision flashed into his head, only now the faces were clear, and he could see what was in Dr. Potter's hands.

"Not a foal," Nathaniel's voice came. "A boy. A little boy. But he knew that the boy was mine so he brought him here. Now he is burying him. Look."