Bentley Little - The Burning

He felt the way he had as a teenager in algebra class, where, try as he might, he simply could not grasp the concepts his teacher was trying to impart to him; no matter how much he studied, understanding remained frustratingly out of reach.

A shadow passed over the sun, bathing the room in darkness.

Shadow? Sun?

It was heavily overcast and had been since he'd awakened.

Henry got up from the couch, walked to the window. The dark translucent object that had been shading the already filtered sunlight moved away from the glass onto the narrow porch, standing free. It was, as perhaps he should have known, a shadow of human size, the silhouette of a naked woman. One of the twins? From the other window in the kitchenette, another human shadow detached itself. This one, to his surprise, was that of a man. <&>

He turned around. The entire cabin, he saw now, II was aswarm with shadows, both inside and out. On |the porch, a small crowd of swirling shapes seemed to be circling the building, jostling for position as they circumnavigated his home. In the bathroom, the small frosted window appeared to be winking at him as a| shadow near the sink bopped back and forth in front of it. In the kitchenette, the form of a man wavered near the refrigerator.

What the hell was going on?

He was not as scared as he could have been or perhaps should have been, and that was good. Rather than standing there frozen in place, he opened the front door and strode out on the porch, ready to do battle. The caravan of shadows passed over him, around him, through him for all he knew, but he felt nothing. "Get out of here!" he ordered. He lashed out at the moving band, hoping to scatter them, but the shadows continued on, unwilling or unable to stop.

Henry looked out at the desert leading up to his door.

And saw the twins.

They were darker than the other shadows, more substantial, almost three-dimensional, and they were standing in the same spot they had been in his first dream of them.

He was starting to get scared now, but he stepped off the porch and walked toward them anyway. As he did so, the other shadows fled his cabin, dispersing into the air, into the ground, until only the sisters were left. It was as if the others had come to the house to get his attention, to direct his focus toward the twins. There were no features visible on those black blank faces, but he knew they were watching him nevertheless, and they waited until he was within spitting distance before they glided across the sand away from him. To his surprise, they headed not back into the desert but toward the other rangers' cabins.

He wanted to shout at them, wanted to tell them to stay away, wanted to keep them from his friends and coworkers, but he was afraid to speak up. Besides, he knew it wouldn't do any good. He had no control over them.

He wondered if he really wanted to protect the other rangers-or if he simply wanted to keep the twins to himself.

He realized that he already had the beginnings of an erection.

He followed the flowing shadows to Ray Daniels' cabin, where alarm bells went off instantly in his brain. The cabin's shades were drawn, but the front door was wide open-and Ray never left his front door open. The two forms blended with the darkness of the interior, disappearing from sight, and Henry slowed his pace, an instinct for self-preservation warning him not to rush in. Hoping the twins would reemerge, he waited a moment, squinting into the gloom, trying to see any sign of movement, but within the dark doorway all remained still.

And silent.

The hair on Henry's arms prickled. There was no noise, not even the sound of birdsong or lizardscuttle.

Just like in the canyon.

He wanted to run away. Something bad was in that cabin, and there was no way this situation could turn out okay. But he steeled himself for the worst and forced himself to put one foot in front of the other. "Ray!" he called out. "Ray! You home?"

Silence.

Henry took a deep breath, walked up the single step to the porch and poked his head inside the cabin. "Ra-" His voice died as he saw his friend's body.

Ray was lying nude on the floor, what was left of his face gnawed to the bone, the terror in his intact eyes in direct contrast with the death's-head grin of his exposed lower skull. In the ranger's clutching right hand was a corner of the Navajo throw rug he'd bought last year at Third Mesa. His left hand was a stump, fingers nowhere in sight, a puddle of blood pooled around it.

Henry was sickened. But not surprised.

He looked to the left, catching movement out of the corner of his eye. A thin line of light issued from beneath an improperly closed blind in the kitchen, offering faint illumination that revealed two dark figures seated at the breakfast table.

The twins.

They were seated across from each other and though no sound issued from their shadow lips, they were laughing, rocking slightly in their chairs, their bodies jiggling with mirth.

Once again, he had the feeling he was supposed to glean something from this, that he was being given a message or warning, that something was trying to impart information, but he had no clue what it could be.

Confused, scared, but above all angry, Henry strode over to the closest window and pulled the shade nearest him. It rolled up with a loud snap and light poured into the cabin. He moved to the next one, pulled it open. And the next one. And the next one. By the time he looked over at the breakfast table to see the reaction of the twins, they were gone.

Good, he thought, satisfied.

He looked out of the cabin's windows toward the flat expanse of desert to the west. And froze.

In the middle of the sand stood a train.

The sight was more threatening and far more frightening than that simple description made it sound. For the train was bathed in darkness, not merely black, but suffused with an aura of dread that could be sensed even from here. This was no shadow or slightly more substantial shade; it was a concrete presence in the desert. There was an antique steam engine with accompanying tender, four passenger cars and a caboose. He could see a yucca that had been squashed under one of the engine's metal wheels, could see the odd murky heat waves shimmering around its irregular surface. How it had gotten there and where it had come from-

he would not venture to guess, but there was no doubt that it had arrived.

He remembered a story his father had told him about seeing a ghost once on a train in Nebraska. His dad had been riding the rails looking for work, using the freights, as so many migrants had at that time, to get him from seasonal fruit picking in California to corn harvesting in the Midwest. It was night, of course, and he'd lost his lone fellow traveler back in Wyoming when the man had hopped off at his hometown. The night air was cold, and Henry's father was huddled in a corner of the boxcar, wrapped in a stolen horse blanket. It was practically pitch-black, with only a thin sliver of moonlight showing from a crack in the closed door. And then It wasn't.

There was strange luminescence in the opposite corner. Not the radiance of an electric light or a gas flame but a vague gray glow that gradually brightened into a sickly green. For a brief moment, his father said, he'd seen the form of a man, an Indian warrior, and though the ephemeral figure was fierce in its appearance, he had felt no fear. The ghost disappeared, not §< fading away, but blinking out of existence, though a remnant of that gray glow remained for several moments longer. They were passing through an area where the railroad had been built through Indian territory, and his father assumed it was his own

native || ancestry that had allowed him this glimpse of a spirit long departed. Henry thought of that now, looking at the train in the sand. He watched for a few more seconds out the window, then exited through Ray's back door to get a better view. Other rangers, he saw, were walking out of their cabins, too, having also noticed the phantom locomotive. The train was no hallucination; it was really there-not that he'd needed any proof-but he was still a little surprised that other people could see it. Jill was on duty, as was her husband, Chris, but / Stuart, Pedley, Raul and Murdoch were all converging on the well-worn trail that linked the park service housing units.