And the feel of hot, soulless evil.
Old Nathan stood up, moving with an exaggerated care. I’m too durn old fer sech goins-on. . . . “Blame lucky thing I hain’t bruck yer table down, me threshin’ about thet way,” he grumbled aloud.
He stretched, feeling the tenderness of his muscles. They had locked rigidly against one another while the vortex of power the cunning man summoned tried to crush his mind against immovable blackness.
Mebbe there was a better feller somewhars t’ do this thing; but less’n he showed hisse’f right pert, Nathan Ridgeway meant t’ do whativer an old man could.
“Thankee, Sarah,” Old Nathan said. “I reckon it might serve.”
He touched the painted face softly, then raised the locket by its loop of ribbon. This time he would stand.
The locket twisted over the interior of the box while the cunning man mumbled not-words. The face glinted—spun behind the unpainted back—spun again. . . .
To the women facing one another across the table, it seemed as though the corners of the portrait’s mouth were rising into a sneer.
Old Nathan saw nothing. Streaks like the beams of sunlight drawing water through the clouds slid blindingly across the surface of his mind.
The latch rattled an instant before the cabin door burst open. The women looked up. Ellie’s hand thrust out, then froze. The long rifle leaned against the far wall.
Bully Ransden stood in the doorway, wild and disheveled. There was a glitter of madness in his eyes, and his powerful arms hung down like the forelegs of a beast.
Beams of light rotated and rotated back. The cunning man raced past them like a fish rushing along the in-slanting walls of a weir.
None of the four figures in the cabin moved. The locket ticked against the bottom of the puzzle box.
And vanished.
* * *
Old Nathan was naked. The damage wreaked on his privates at King’s Mountain by a Tory musketball was starkly evident.
He stood at a portal whose upper angles stretched beyond conception. The surface beneath his feet was wood, coarsely finished but seamless. The gigantic door that stood ajar before him was patterned with the same grain as that of the lid of the puzzle box in another place and time.
When the cunning man glanced back over his shoulder, he saw a forest like that on the site where his cabin now stood—but from the time before young Nathan Ridgeway began girdling trees and clearing undergrowth with a brushhook.
“Come t’ be comp’ny t’ me, Nathan?” called Chance Ransden from across the threshold. He giggled in a fashion that Old Nathan remembered from life—
For wherever this was, it was not life.
Chance was naked also. His appearance was that of a powerfully built man in the prime of life, the way he had looked the night he disappeared. Allus hed the luck uv the devil, Chance did. Nairy a one uv the scars, not even the load of small shot Jose Miller put into what he thought war a skunk in his smoke shed, showed whin Ransden hed clothing on. . . .
“I hadn’t airy scrap uv use fer ye whin ye were alive, Ransden,” Old Nathan said coldly. He stood straight, facing forward. He could not conceal the ancient injury to his manhood, and to attempt the impossible would be a sign of weakness. “I’ll be no comp’ny t’ ye now, ‘cept t’ tell ye t’ be off whar ye belong. Leave yer son be!”
Chance giggled again. “D’ye want to see my boy Cull naow, Nathan?” he asked.
The portal opened slightly. Hunched behind the elder Ransden was the naked, cringing figure of his son. The image of Bully Ransden was bruised and bloody, as though he had tried to fight a bear with empty hands. He threw Old Nathan a furtive, sidelong glance past the legs of his father.
“Ain’t he the dutiful lad?” Chance cackled. “He warn’t whin I last wore my body, but he’s larned better naow.”
“Git up an’ fight him, boy!” the cunning man snarled. He felt sick in the pit of his stomach to see a proud man like Bully reduced to this. “He don’t belong here. Drive him out!”