Bentley Little - The Burning

"A ghost engine?" Tom said. The triumph was gone from his voice.

"Maybe so," Holman admitted. "Maybe so."

Thirteen

Selby, Missouri

Luke, the previous desk clerk, had been right. This job just flat-out sucked.

Dennis sat behind the counter, reading a Barry Welch paperback about a coven of witches in a Utah time-share community, glancing up every so often to see if anyone on the highway was even considering turning in to the motel parking lot. There'd been no one checking in or out all morning, and the only human contact he'd had was when the grotesquely overweight man in 110 had come in to complain that the ice from the ice machine melted too fast.

Dennis had promised to inform the owner.

He hadn't told his mom or his sister that he was working here. They thought he was still tooling around the countryside, exploring the wonders of this great land. If they found out he was spending his days behind a ratty counter in a fleabag motel in Selby, Missouri, humoring psychotic behemoths, they'd demand his return faster than he could say "I'm fine," his mom with an insufferable I-told-you-so attitude, Cathy with a sense of politely masked disappointment that would be even harder for him to face.

Two more weeks and he was out, he decided. By that time, he should have enough money to coast all the way to the coast.

He turned back to his novel.

"She's a stupid old witch and a*crazy old bitch! She's a stupid old witch and a crazy old bitch!"

Dennis' head snapped up at the sound of the children's singsong voices.

"She's a stupid old witch and a crazy old bitch! She's a stupid old witch and a crazy old bitch!"

He knew that chant. He'd forgotten about it until now, but when he was a little kid, a group of neighborhood boys had said that to his mother when they saw her on the street. Cathy had been too young to know what was going on, but he had been mortally embarrassed, and it was not until his father, home from work, had caught the boys at it, lectured them and threatened to tell their parents that the taunts had finally stopped.

The kids now were also shouting the refrain at an elderly Chinese woman as she walked along the sidewalk in front of the motel, and Dennis experienced a weird feeling of deja vu. He was the adult now, in a position to stop those kids the way his father had done, and he checked to make sure the register was locked, then ran out from behind the counter, out of the office and onto the sidewalk.

"Stop that right now!" he ordered. "Leave that woman alone!"

The old lady hurried off as the kids turned toward him. There were three of them-two skinny dirty boys wearing cutoffs and T-shirts, and one belligerent fat boy in jeans and torn Hawaiian shirt-and they faced him with sullen resentment. "Who are you?" one of the skinny kids demanded.

"It's none of your business."

"Was that your mama?" The fat kid laughed derisively.

"Go home!" he ordered. "Get out of here!"

"No!" they all shouted.

"Now!"

"Chink!" the fat boy yelled at him, picking up a piece of gravel from the sidewalk and throwing it.

He ran at the kid, but the punk stood his ground, and it was only after Dennis yelled, "I'm going to kick your fucking ass!" in the most threatening voice he could manage that the little shit finally took off, his friends following.

Dennis slowed, stopped, as the boys dashed around the corner. What the hell was wrong with kids these days? Even in small towns in the middle of nowhere, they seemed to have lost their fear of adults. When he was little, even the wimpiest grown-up was someone to be feared and respected. Now it took direct threats to coax even a halfhearted response out of them.

He started back toward the motel office. Chink. He almost laughed. Had he ever heard that word in real life before? He'd read it in old books, but that was about it. The word never even showed up in movies, as far as he knew.

Social progress apparently came very slowly to the hinterlands.

Niggers and Kikes.

He flashed back to the "Noose of Justice" at The Keep, and the smile on his lips faded. Suddenly the child's anachronistic racism didn't seem so benign. There was a history of intolerance here, he realized, an entire culture he'd never been exposed to on the East Coast, and more than ever before, he felt like a stranger in a strange land.

He walked back into the office, went back behind the counter, picked up his book and waited for customers who didn't come.

That night, he dreamed of a world that had to be hell. Under a blazing red sky, on an endless expanse of burning sand, he was being herded with hundreds of other young men by tall black creatures on horseback. To his eye, the creatures resembled elongated Abraham Lincolns, but against the red sky they were only silhouettes, no details of their features visible. Around him, the other young men cried and wailed, gnashing their teeth, and he knew with certainty that they were all going to die.

For that, he was grateful. They all were. Anything was better than this existence, and as the fiery red sky turned black, a dark hulking mass loomed out of the nothingness behind them, and a shadow fell that was cool and welcome and familiar.

The shadow of death.

In the morning, Dennis awoke late. This was his day off, and he planned to spend it exploring Selby. He was acquainted with the town in a broad, general, touristy sort of way. He knew where the fast-food restaurants were, the grocery store, the gas stations, the major cross streets. But beyond that, Selby was a blur of indistinguishable homes to him, and he thought it would be a good idea to get to know the community in which he was living, even if he was here only temporarily.

He could have driven, but the town was small and instead he decided to walk. He followed the sidewalk, then turned off Main Street onto Crescent Avenue, where an elementary school segued into a park and then into a junior high school.

There was something familiar about this town. No, not familiar. Welcome. No, not welcome, exactly. Comfortable. No, not that either ...

He didn't know what the feeling was, couldn't describe it. His mother believed in reincarnation and probably would have said that he'd been here before in a previous life. There was some of that flavor to the experience, although he didn't really believe in reincarnation, and once again he had the feeling that he was caught up in something bigger than himself, that there was a reason for him to have embarked on this journey-and a reason he was here in Selby right now.

He followed Crescent to its end. A row of tall trees, their upper branches swaying ominously in a wind that had not made it down to the ground, lined the cross street at which Crescent terminated, and instead of turning left or right on the other street, Dennis continued walking forward. Something led him through the trees, where he found, not the forest he'd been expecting, but what appeared to be the beginnings of a new housing development. There were trees at the edges of the open space before him, but they'd been cut down and bulldozed into deadfalls, and the dusty acreage ahead had been completely sheared of all vegetation.

He paused for a moment to take it all in, then pressed on, walking through deep-tread truck tracks, past color-coded stakes, until he reached the far opposite end of the nascent subdivision. This was the line to which the wilderness had been pushed back, and he climbed over a pile of debris, then passed between trees and overgrown bushes, until he came to the purpose of his journey, the reason he had been led here.

It was a graveyard.

At least he assumed it was. But there were none of the ritual accoutrements usually associated with ceme- teries. No tombstones, no crosses, no mowed grass, no clearly delineated grave sites. There were only occasional irregular mounds within the unmarked open space, and a few intermittent boulders that could have been randomly deposited rocks but appeared to him to have been deliberately placed. Dennis stood at the periphery of the small clearing. An effort had been made to hide this burial ground, to make it appear to be nothing more than an ordinary plot of land, and he wondered why.