Bentley Little - The Burning

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.