Mystery Walk

too, but ... I suppose you'll put it to good use. Is there a motel around here that might take a personal check?'

'The Bama Inn might. It's in Fayette. There's a Travel-Lodge, too.' Behind him Ramona abruptly turned and walked back toward the house.

'Ah, that's fine. I'll see you, then, in two days. Shall we say at four in the afternoon? We'll be meeting Ryder Shows in Tuscaloosa, and I'd like to get on the road before dark.' He put his wallet away and shrugged into his jacket, all the time staring at Billy as if afraid the boy might change his mind. 'We're set then? It's a deal?'

Billy nodded. He'd made his decision, and he wouldn't back down from it.

'You'll have to work hard,' Mirakle said. 'It won't be easy. But you'll learn. In two days, then. A pleasure meeting you, Mrs. Creekmore!' he called out, but she stood with her back to him. He walked off down the road, his stubby legs moving carefully as he avoided sliding on loose stones; he turned around to wave, and from the porch John suddenly called out, 'Come back soon!'

28

'It's finished,' Billy said, and stood on the ladder to appraise his work. It was a good job; chinks and holes in the roof had been filled in with pitch, and new shingles laid down smoothly and evenly. Midafternoon sunlight burned down upon Billy's back as he descended the ladder with his jar of roofing nails and his hammer. The gloves he wore were matted with pitch, and black streaks of it painted his chest and face. He scrubbed his face and hair with strong soap, then put away the ladder and the pitch bucket.

He let the sun dry his hair as he stood and looked in all directions. I'll be back, he told himself. Sure I will be, in mid-October. But something within him told him that when he did come back, he wouldn't be the same Billy Creekmore who'd left. He walked past the Olds—new brake shoes installed, the tires put back on but one of them already dangerously flat—and around the house to the front porch. John was in his favorite chair, a glass of lemonade at his side, the Bible in his lap. John smiled at him. 'Sun's sure hot today.'

Something clenched hard in Billy's stomach and throat; he managed to return the smile and say, 'Yes sir, sure is.'

Inside, Ramona was sitting in the front room, in the old gray easy chair. Her hands were gripping the armrests; beside her, on the floor, was a battered brown suitcase packed with her son's clothes.

'I'll be fine,' Billy said.

'Tuscaloosa isn't so far away, y'know. If you don't like what you've gotten yourself into, you can just catch the bus and come home.'

'I won't give it up at the first sign of trouble, though,' he reminded her. 'I'll stick with it as long as I can.'

'A carnival.' Ramona frowned and shook her head. Her eyes were red and puffy, but all of her crying was done. Her son was going out into the world, following the winding road of his Mystery Walk, and that was what the Giver of Breath had decreed. 'I went to one of those once, when I was a little girl. The lights cut your eyes, and the noise sounds like a tea party in Hell. They show freaks at those things, poor people who can't help the way they were born. And folks stand around and laugh.' She was silent for a moment. 'Don't let them make a freak out of you, son. Oh, they'll try, just like the folks in Hawthorne have tried; but don't let them. You'll be tested, mark my words.'

'I know.'

'Do you understand'—she turned her face toward him—'that the Mystery Walk is more than the ritual your grandmother took you through? The ritual was to get your head opened up, to expand your senses; it was to make you ready for what's ahead. You began your Mystery Walk when you were ten years old and saw the Booker boy's revenant, but your whole life will be a Mystery Walk, just like mine has been. Events will hinge on events, like a series of opening doors; people will touch and be touched by you, and you must never belittle the power of the human touch. It can work wonders.'

She leaned slightly toward him, her eyes shining. 'You'll have to go into places that are dark, son, and you'll have to find your way out alone. What you saw in the smokehouse—the shape changer—isn't the only kind of darkness in this world. There's human darkness, too, misery and pain and torment that comes right from the soul. You'll see that kind, too.

'But the shape changer will be back, Billy. I'm sure of that. It's still picking at you, maybe even without you knowing it. Your grandmother was never certain of what the shape changer's limits were, or what it was capable of doing. I'm not, either ... but expect the unexpected, always.'

He thought of the boar-thing, and its whispered promise: I'll be waiting for you.

'How did you feel,' she asked, 'after . . . what you did at the sawmill?'

'I was afraid. And I was mad, too.' For a couple of weeks afterward he'd had nightmares of a spinning saw blade grinding his arm down to bloody pulp. Sometimes he felt a fierce, jagged pain stabbing his left eye. Worse then the pain, though, was a hot center of anger that had raged in him until he'd attacked the Klansmen in the front yard; afterward both the phantom pain and the rage had steadily faded.

'Those were the emotions that kept Link Patterson chained to this world,' Ramona said. 'When you persuaded the revenant to give them up, he was able to pass on. You'll have those feelings inside you again; what will you do with them? The next time might be worse. You'll have two choices: you can turn the emotions into something creative, or into something mean and violent. I don't know, that's up to you.'

'I'll handle it.'

'And then there's the other thing.' She gazed out the window for a moment, dreading to see dust rise off the road. That man would be here soon. 'The black aura.'

Billy's heart gave a cold kick.

'You'll see it again. That's why I stopped goin' out, stopped goin' to church or to town; I just don't want to know who'll be the next to die. That night at the tent revival, I saw it around a couple of people who that Falconer boy said was healed; well, those people were near death, and so they stopped takin' their medicine and went home and died. I believe that the human mind can work miracles, Billy: mighty, earth-movin' miracles. The human mind can heal the body; but sometimes the mind can make the body sick, too, with imagined ailments. What do you think went on in the minds of those families whose loved ones went to the Crusade and were told to throw away their medicines and not to go to the doctor anymore? Well, they probably cursed the name of God after their loved ones died, because they'd been filled with false hope and then death struck. They were made to turn their backs on the idea of death, to close their eyes to it; and that made it so much more terrible when they lost their loved ones. Oh, I'm not sayin' give up hope, but everybody gets sick, Christians and sinners alike, and medicines are to be used to help . . . plus a good old-fashioned dollop of sunshine, laughter, and faith. The human touch spreads; when Wayne Falconer played God, he turned good people with brains into stupid sheep ripe for the shearing.'

'Are you sure those people died afterwards?' Billy asked. 'Maybe the black aura got weaker, and they regained their health. ...'

She shook her head. 'No. I saw what I saw, and I wish to God I hadn't because now I know. I know and I have to be silent, because what can one aging old witch do?' She paused for a moment, and Billy saw in her eyes a deep concern that he couldn't fully understand. 'The worst evil—the very worst—wears the robes of a shepherd, and then it strikes down those who've trusted in it. Oh, Lord. ...' She gave a deep sigh, and then was silent.

Billy put his hand on her shoulder, and she covered it with her own. 'I'll make you proud of me, Mom. You'll see.'

'I know. Billy, you're goin' a long ways. ...'

'Just to Tuscaloosa. . . .'

'No,' she said quietly. 'First to Tuscaloosa. Then . . . your Mystery Walk will be different from mine, just as mine was different from my mother's. You'll walk a further path, and you'll see things I never dreamed of. In a way, I envy you; and in a way, I fear for you. Well ...' She rose up from her chair, and in the afternoon light Billy saw all the strands of silver in her hair. 'I'll make you some sandwiches while you get dressed. Lord only knows when you'll have a chance to eat.'

He went to his chest of drawers and got out the clothes he'd planned to wear on the trip—clean blue jeans and a green-and-blue madras shirt. He dressed hurriedly, wanting to have time to talk to his father before he had to go. Then he took the gleaming piece of good-luck coal from the dirty jeans he'd worn atop the roof, and put it in his