She lay on her back in the grass with her bloody clothes around her ankles and her knees spread and her hands in her crotch. Snotty stuff squelched through her fingers. Then came a paralyzing cramp, and with it something round and hard. A skull. Its curve fit her hands with sweet perfection. It was Justine (if a girl), or Brady (if a boy). She had been lying to all of them about not having made up her mind; she had known from the first that this baby was going to be a keeper.
She tried to shriek and nothing came out but a whispery hhhhaaaahhh sound. The moon peered at her, a bloodshot dragon’s eye. She pushed as hard as she could, her belly like a board, her ass screwed down into the mucky ground. Something tore. Something slid. Something arrived in her hands. Suddenly she was empty down there, so empty, but at least her hands were full.
Into the red-orange moonlight she raised the child of her body, thinking, It’s all right, women all over the world give birth in fields.
It was Justine.
“Hey, baby girl,” she croaked. “Oooh, you’re so small.”
And so silent.
Close up, it was easy to see the rock wasn’t from Kansas. It had the black glassy quality of volcanic stone. The moonlight cast an iridescent sheen on its angled surfaces, creating slicks of light in tones of jade and pearl.
The stick men and the stick women held hands as they danced into curving waves of grass.
From eight steps back, they seemed to float just slightly above the surface of that great chunk of what-was-probably-not-obsidian.
From six steps back, they seemed to hang suspended just beneath the black glassy surface, objects sculpted from light, hologramlike. It was impossible to keep them in focus. It was impossible to look away.
Four steps away from the rock, he could hear it. The rock emitted a discreet buzz, like the electrified filament in a tungsten lamp. He could not feel it, however-he was not aware of the left side of his face beginning to pink, as if from sunburn. He had no sensation of heat at all.
Get away from it, he thought, but found it curiously difficult to step backward. His feet didn’t seem to move in that direction anymore.
“I thought you were going to take me to Becky.”
“I said we were going to check on her. We are. We’ll check with the stone.”
“I don’t care about your goddamn-I just want Becky.”
“If you touch the rock you won’t be lost anymore,” Tobin said. “You won’t ever be lost again. You’ll be redeemed. Isn’t that nice?” He absentmindedly removed the black feather that had been stuck to the corner of his mouth.
“No,” Cal said. “I don’t think it is. I’d rather stay lost.” Maybe it was just his imagination, but the buzzing seemed to be getting louder.
“No one would rather stay lost,” the boy said, amiably. “Becky doesn’t want to stay lost. She miscarried. If you can’t find her, I think she’ll probably die.”
“You’re lying,” he said, without any conviction.
He might’ve inched a half step closer. A soft, fascinating light had begun to rise in the center of the rock, behind those floating stick figures. . as if that buzzing tungsten he could hear was embedded about two feet beneath the surface of the stone, and someone was slowly dialing it up.
“I’m not,” the boy said. “Look close, and you can see her.”
Down in the smoked-quartz interior of the rock, he saw the dim lines of a human face. He thought, at first, he was looking at his own reflection. But although it was similar, it wasn’t his. It was Becky, her lips peeled back in a doglike grimace of pain. Clots of filth smeared one side of her face. Tendons strained in her throat.
“Beck?” he said, as if she might be able to hear him.
He took another step forward-he couldn’t help himself-leaning in to see. His palms were raised before him, in a kind of go-no-further gesture, but he could not feel them beginning to blister from whatever was radiating from the stone.