he looked back down, Tobin was gone. He forced his tired legs to run, shoving through the grass, filling his lungs to call. Then there was no more grass to shove. He was in a clearing—a real clearing, not just beaten-down grass. In the middle of it, a huge black rock jutted out of the ground. It was the size of a pickup truck and inscribed all over with tiny dancing stick-men. They were white and seemed to float. They seemed to move.
Tobin stood beside it, then put out one hand and touched it. He shivered—not in fear, Cal thought, but in pleasure. “Boy, that feels good. Come on, Cal. Try it.” He beckoned.
Cal walked toward the rock.
↗
There was a car alarm for a bit, and then it stopped. The sound went into Becky’s ears but made no connection to her brain. She crawled. She did it without thinking. Each time a fresh cramp struck her, she stopped with her forehead pressed against the muck and her bottom in the air, like one of the faithful saluting Allah. When the cramp passed, she crawled some more. Her mud-smeared hair was stuck to her face. Her legs were wet with whatever was running out of her. She felt it running out of her but didn’t think about it any more than she had thought about the car alarm. She licked water off the grass as she crawled, turning her head this way and that, flicking her tongue like a snake, snoop-sloop. She did it without thinking.
The moon came up, huge and orange. She twisted her head to look at it, and when she did, the worst cramp yet hit her. This one didn’t pass. She flopped over onto her back and clawed her shorts and panties down. Both were soaked dark. At last a clear and coherent thought came, forking through her mind like a stroke of heat lightning: The baby!
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’d 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 that 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. He could not tell if these images had been carved into the stone or were painted on it.
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, hologram-like. It was impossible to keep them in focus. It was impossible to look away.
Four steps 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.”