The third victim lay where the marshal's deputies had found her, facedown in the dust of Mulberry Street with her arms stretched wide and her fingers curled against the packed earth. Cassius Carrick crouched beside the body and did not touch her, not yet. The morning light came gray and thin through the haze of woodsmoke that hung over Carrick Hollow, and it made the dark stain beneath her look blacker than it was, almost like a shadow pooled in a shallow bowl.
He had learned to look before he touched. Ezekiel had taught him that, back when the old man still rode the circuit and dragged his son along to county fairs and river towns and any place with a pulpit and a congregation hungry enough to sit through a sermon. Look first, Ezekiel would say. Read what the body wants to tell you before you go rearranging the story.
Cassius looked.
The woman was perhaps forty, maybe younger, with brown hair that had been braided that morning and then undone by the fall. Her dress was a plain calico, the kind the farm women favored, and her boots were scuffed at the toes from honest work. No jewelry. No purse. No signs of a struggle beyond the obvious one, the one that ended with her on the ground with her life run out onto the dirt.
He studied the wound in her back. The cut was precise, a single line drawn from the left shoulder blade down to the curve of the spine, deep and clean, the kind of cut a man makes when he knows exactly what he is doing and has done it many times before. The edges of the wound were not ragged. The blood had not fanned out in a wide spray. Whoever had done this had stood behind her, raised the blade, and brought it down once, carefully, the way a butcher opens a carcass.
"Lord have mercy," whispered a deputy standing too close behind him. Cassius did not turn.
"Get back," he said. "Give me air."
He tilted his head and let his gaze travel the length of the body. The woman's face was turned away from him, half-buried in the dirt, but he could see the line of her jaw, the slack of her mouth, the way her eyes had been left open. He wanted to see the eyes. He rolled her gently, one hand under the shoulder, the other beneath the cheek, and looked into the face of a stranger he would not forget.
Her lips had been cut away.
Not the whole mouth. Just the lips, trimmed neatly with the same careful hand that had opened her back, leaving a dark line of dried blood where the smile of a face ought to have been. Cassius felt something cold move through his middle, a kind of stillness, the hush that comes over a man when he understands that what he is looking at is not the work of any common killer.
He set her down and stood.
"Cover her," he told the deputy. "And get the others. I need to see the first two again."
The morgue at the back of the undertaker's shop was small, whitewashed, and smelled of carbolic and sawdust. Cassius had arranged the two earlier victims on the same slate table, side by side, and he stood over them now with his arms folded and his jaw set hard. The first was a drifter named Whitlock who had been passing through on his way to the railroad. The second was a young woman who worked the laundry behind the hotel, a quiet girl who minded her own business and had no enemies anyone could name.
The same wound. The same clean slice. And on each face, the same terrible signature, the lips cut away as neatly as a seamstress trims a hem.
He had seen this before, or something like it. He had read about it in his father's journal, in the worn leather book he carried everywhere and opened only when he was alone, in a place where no one could see the way his hand shook as he turned the pages. Ezekiel had been a circuit preacher, but he had also been a careful reader of older books, and one of the older books he kept in his saddlebag was a slim, soot-stained volume titled A Compendium of Forgotten Sects and Their Marks .
Cassius reached into his coat and drew out the journal. He did not open it in front of the deputies. He carried it to the small window at the back of the room, where the light came in pale and slanted, and he let the pages fall open to the section he had marked with a strip of dried sage.
There. A woodcut, crude and old, showing a circle with a vertical line through it and a series of dots arranged like a choir standing in rows. Beneath the drawing, in his father's careful hand, a note: The Pale Hymn. Last recorded in the hill country forty years past. Believed extinct. Their mark was the removal of the lips, that the silent might join their chorus. The faithful were said to remove their own. The unfaithful, the mark was cut for them.
Cassius read the lines twice and closed the book.
The Pale Hymn had been a sect that rose in the backcountry during the lean years after the war, a splinter of an older church that had twisted its devotion into something else, something quieter and more terrible. They had believed that speech was the first corruption, that the word had been the serpent's gift, and that the only path to purity lay in the surrender of the tongue's instruments. They sang without words, in long, low harmonies that carried across the hollows, and when they found a sinner, they marked the sinner by removing the lips and leaving the body in a place where it would be found.
The sect had been hunted down. That was the story. The marshals and the posses had ridden into the hills, and the Pale Hymn had scattered, and the silence of the hill country had settled back over the land like a quilt. Ezekiel had written in his notes that he had spoken with a man who claimed to have seen the last gathering, in a clearing behind a collapsed church, where the faithful stood in their white robes and opened their mouths and made no sound at all.
Cassius had read it as a curiosity, the kind of strange history that old preachers collected the way other men collected arrowheads or pressed flowers. Now, standing in the undertaker's back room with the smell of carbolic in his nose, he understood that the curiosity had come to find him.
He tucked the journal back into his coat and walked out to the main room of the undertaker's shop, where a knot of townsfolk had gathered despite the early hour. He recognized the blacksmith by the soot on his forearms, and the wife of the hotel keeper, and two of the men who worked the freight line, and a dozen others whose faces he knew but whose names he had not yet learned. They were afraid. He could see it in the way they held themselves, in the small, tight circles they made with their arms, in the way their eyes kept sliding toward the door.
"Where's the marshal?" one of them asked.
"Died of the consumption last winter," Cassius said. "You know that."
"Then who is in charge?"
He let the question hang. He was not a lawman. He was a bounty hunter, and the warrant folded into his breast pocket was for a man named Hollis Crane, wanted in three counties for forgery and the murder of a bank clerk in Tupelo. That warrant was the reason he had come through Carrick Hollow in the first place, the reason he had slept in the hotel and eaten in the diner and planned to ride out the next morning on the trail of a man who, in the long arithmetic of sin, was a small figure indeed.
Now there was this.
"I will look into it," he said, because that was what a man said when there was no one else to say it. "Go home. Keep your doors shut. Do not walk alone after dark."
A woman at the back of the room, the hotel keeper's wife, made a small, wounded sound. "There were three of them," she said. "Three in two weeks. Who will be next?"
Cassius did not answer. He did not know.
He stepped out onto the wooden sidewalk and the morning hit him, cool and damp, with the smell of the river riding underneath everything, that low mud-and-willow scent that always made him think of his childhood. Carrick Hollow had been his mother's home before it had been his, and he had grown up here in the summers when Ezekiel was off preaching, running barefoot through these same streets with a girl two years younger who had laughed at everything he said and called him Cass for short.
Nettie Boyd. The schoolteacher. She was waiting for him on the boardwalk outside the post office, holding a tin pail in one hand and a folded paper in the other, and the look on her face told him that she had already heard.
"Cass," she said, and then she stopped, because she had seen his eyes.
"Three," he said.
"I know."
"Two weeks apart. Same mark. Same hand."
She came down off the boardwalk and stood in front of him, close enough that he could see the small mole near her left ear and the way her hair had been pinned up that morning and was already coming loose. She was brave. He had always known that about her, the way he knew the color of the sky, without thinking about it. She had been the girl who walked up to the drunk men at the camp meeting, the girl who carried water to the workers during the fever summer, the girl who never once had asked him to be smaller than he was.
"What mark?" she said.
He hesitated. He had not told anyone yet. He had not even told the deputies, beyond ordering them to cover the bodies and keep the curious away. The mark was the kind of thing that, once spoken, could not be unspoken, and he was not certain yet how much of it ought to be set loose in a town that was already frightened.
He looked past her toward the far end of the street, where the road bent and the trees closed in, and the hills rose up beyond the town like the shoulders of some great sleeping animal. The Pale Hymn had been a hill sect. That was the geography of it, the country of it, and Carrick Hollow sat in the mouth of a valley that ran back into those same hills like a tongue into a throat.
"Nettie," he said, low, "did you ever hear your grandmother speak of a people called the Pale Hymn?"
Her face changed. Not much. A small tightening around the mouth, a flicker of the eyes. She was quick, and she was honest, and she had been raised by a woman who had lived through the time when the marshals rode and the posses formed and the hill country burned in places that the map did not name.
"No," she said, and then, after a breath, "Yes. Once. When I was a child. She said the name and then she would not say it again. She made me promise not to ask."
"Did she tell you what they did?"
"She said they took the words out of people."
Cassius nodded, once, and looked away.
The wind came up the street from the river and stirred the dust at his feet, and somewhere a dog began to bark, and the sound of it was thin and lonely in the morning air, the kind of sound a town makes when it knows something is wrong and cannot yet find the shape of it.
"Keep the children close," he said. "And Nettie, if you see a stranger in town, any stranger, you come find me before you speak to him."
She studied his face. "You are not riding out."
It was not a question. He heard the edge in it, the old stubbornness, the girl who had once dared him to jump off the trestle bridge and had not looked away when he did.
"I am not riding out," he said. "Not yet."
She set down the pail, reached into the pocket of her apron, and drew out the folded paper. She held it out to him.
"This was on the church steps this morning," she said. "Pinned to the door with a nail. Nobody saw who left it."
He took the paper. It was heavy, the kind of paper that is not sold in any store in Carrick Hollow, and the ink was black and smelled faintly of something he could not place, something like old lamp oil and iron. He unfolded it, and the words inside were written in a careful, upright hand, the kind of hand that has had schooling, and they read:
The choir prepares. The silent are coming. The throat of the town will be opened, and the hymn will be sung at last. Repent in silence, for the word is the wound.
At the bottom of the page, a mark. A circle. A vertical line. A row of dots.
Cassius folded the paper slowly, slid it into his coat beside his father's journal, and looked out at the street, where the morning was gathering itself into another day, and the hills stood silent against the pale sky, and somewhere in the woods behind the town, someone who had no lips was waiting to sing.
The tavern door banged open against the inside wall, and Cassius Carrick turned on the bench with his hand already on the butt of the Peacemaker.
Nettie Boyd stood in the doorway with her shawl half-falling off one shoulder and her dark hair coming loose from its pins. She was breathing hard, the way a person breathes after running a long way, and her eyes swept the room before they found him. The few locals scattered across the tavern stopped their talk and their drinking and their pretending not to look, and the barkeep set down a glass he had been polishing and went very still.
"Mind if I sit down, preacher?" she said. The old nickname caught him sideways, a small blade slipped between the ribs. She had not called him that in years.
He nodded once. She crossed the room, her boots loud on the warped floorboards, and slid onto the bench across from him. Up close he could see the dust on her hem, the streak of mud on one cheek, the way her hands would not settle in her lap. She smelled of sage and lavender and the sharper green smell of the woods.
"I was at the Carver place this morning," she said. "I go there Tuesdays and Fridays to sit with the wife. You know that."
He knew. Everyone in Carrick Hollow knew Nettie Boyd's habits, because Nettie Boyd had never done a discreet thing in her life and did not see why she should start.
"She told me something last week and I did not believe her. I thought it was the grief talking, the way grief does, filling up all the empty spaces with whatever scraps it can find. But this morning she told me again, and this time she had a piece of paper to show me, and I believed her, and that is why I ran all the way down from the ridge."
Cassius said nothing. He waited. Nettie had always talked faster when she was frightened, and the thing to do was let her run until the road leveled out.
"The Carvers were digging," she said. "Out past the old Carrick mine, in the gully where the creek bends south. The father and the two boys. They told no one, because they thought there was silver in the tailings, enough to save the farm, enough to pay off the bank note that has been choking them since spring. They dug for three weeks, by lantern light, with a pick and a shovel they borrowed from Jeb Mullins and never told Jeb what for. And two days before they were found dead in their beds with no mark on them, they came to the wife and said they had found something. Not silver. Something else. Something they did not have a name for."
The tavern had gone quiet enough that he could hear the fly buzzing against the window glass. The barkeep had stopped pretending to polish and was watching them with the kind of attention a man gives a man who is about to draw.
"What did they find?" Cassius asked. His voice came out rougher than he meant it to.
"A box," Nettie said. "Iron, old, locked. They broke the lock with a rock and inside there was a book, and a cloth, and a thing made of bone that the wife would not describe to me except to say it was shaped like a mouth. The father wanted to take it into town. The boys wanted to throw it back in the hole. They argued about it for a day and a night and in the end they put it back, all of it, and covered the hole, and the wife made them wash their hands in vinegar and she burned sage over the door and did not sleep for the rest of the week. And then the morning they were found, the hole had been opened again, and the box was gone."
Cassius felt the weight of the paper in his coat, the one with the careful hand and the smell of old lamp oil. He thought of his father's journal, of the page that had been torn out, of the symbol at the bottom of the note Nettie had brought him that morning. The circle. The line. The row of dots. He had seen that mark before, in his father's hand, and he had not known what it meant.
"You believe this," he said. It was not a question.
"I believe the Carvers are dead," Nettie said. "I believe the box was real, because the wife showed me a splinter of the lock that fell off when they broke it, and I held it in my hand and it was iron and it was old. I believe the hole was opened, because I walked out there this morning before I came to find you, and the dirt was fresh and the boards were pulled aside. And I believe something is in those hills, Cassius, something that has been waiting a long time, something that has a taste for silence."
She leaned forward across the table. The lamplight caught the line of her jaw, the small scar above her left eyebrow from the time she had fallen out of the sycamore when they were ten and he had carried her half a mile with blood running into his own eye.
"I also believe," she said, "that you are not going to ride out after your father's killer until you know what killed the Carvers and the Sutters and the others, and that is why I came to find you instead of going to the sheriff, because the sheriff is a good man with a good heart and no more idea of what to do about this than a hen has of the almanac."
He almost smiled. Almost. The muscles in his face started to move and then stopped, as if they had forgotten the way.
"You want me to dig," he said.
"I want you to come with me to the gully," she said. "Tonight, after the sun is down and the moon is up and there is enough light to see by. I know the place. I can take you there in an hour. And if there is anything left to find, we will find it together, because I am not letting you go out there alone, Cassius Carrick, not after what happened to your father, and not after what I saw on the Carver wife's face this morning when she told me about the box."
He studied her. She met his gaze without flinching, the way she always had, the way she had when they were children and the world was smaller and the dark was only the dark.
"Why me?" he said. "Why not your father, or Tom Reedy, or any of the men in this room who would jump at the chance to walk a pretty woman out to a gully in the moonlight?"
"Because you have seen this before," she said. "I know you have. I saw the look on your face this morning when I showed you the paper. You recognized the writing, or the mark, or something, and you have been carrying it around in your coat all day like a stone in your shoe, and if you tell me that is not true I will know you are lying because you have never been able to lie to me, not even when we were small, not even when the lie would have saved you a switching."
The barkeep cleared his throat. "If you two are going to keep on like that, I am going to ask you to take it outside," he said, but there was no real edge to it. He had heard about the Carvers too. He had heard about the Sutters. He had heard the dogs.
"We are going," Cassius said. He stood, and the bench scraped against the floor, and the Peacemaker shifted on his hip. He looked at Nettie. "You have a lantern?"
"I have two," she said. "And a length of rope and a tin of salt and the biggest knife my father owns, which I borrowed without asking and will return or not depending on how the night goes."
"Then I will meet you at the south end of the street in an hour," he said. "Go home first. Eat something. Put on boots you can run in if it comes to that."
She nodded, slid off the bench, and pulled her shawl up over her shoulders. At the door she turned back.
"Cassius," she said. "The thing the Carver wife said about the mouth. The one made of bone. She said it was smiling."
Then she was gone, and the door swung shut behind her, and the lamp on the table flickered once, hard, as if something had passed between them in the draft.
Cassius sat back down. He took out the folded paper and laid it flat on the table beside his untouched glass. He took out his father's journal and opened it to the page with the torn edge, and he looked at the symbol his father had drawn in the margin, the same symbol that was at the bottom of the note, and he felt the old weight settle over him again, the weight of a thing he had been running from for a year and that had finally caught him in a tavern in his own hometown on a morning that smelled of dust and lavender and the green breath of the woods.
He closed the journal. He finished the glass. He left a coin on the table for the barkeep, who nodded at him the way a man nods at a man he does not expect to see again, and he stepped out into the street, where the sun was past noon and the shadows had begun to lean the wrong way, and somewhere in the hills above the town, something that had no lips was practicing a hymn it had been waiting a hundred years to sing.
The hour found Cassius at the south end of Main where the road bent toward the river and the last of the clapboard houses gave way to a stand of chinaberry trees, their papery berries dropping into the dust in small dry clatters. The sun hung low and copper, and the shadows of the trees lay stretched across the road like the fingers of a long hand reaching for something just out of sight.
He had walked. He had not taken the horse. A man on a horse makes a shape against the sky, and Cassius Carrick had spent the last year learning not to make shapes against the sky.
He stood with his back to one of the chinaberry trunks, the journal in his coat pocket, the folded note in his hand, and he watched the road. The wind came down off the hills and moved through the trees with a sound like slow breathing, and the air smelled of dry grass and the faint metallic tang that came sometimes from the river when the water ran low.
He had not eaten. He had not put on better boots. He had come because the hour he had set was the hour he would keep, and because a man who runs from a thing he is hunting loses the hunt, and because somewhere in the hills the maker of bone was waiting for him, and Cassius had decided, sitting in the tavern with his father's journal open on the table, that he was done being the one who was followed.
So he waited.
The road stayed empty. A dog crossed at the far bend, moving with its nose down, paying him no mind. A wagon came up from the river and turned at the fork, the driver lifting a hand without looking, and Cassius lifted one back. The ordinary machinery of a town at the end of a long day went on around him as if nothing in the world had changed, and he let it go on, and he kept his eyes on the bend.
The light thinned. The copper went out of the sun and left it the color of a worn coin, and the shadows of the chinaberries lengthened until they met in the middle of the road and held hands.
That was when he felt it.
Not a sound. Not a sight. A pressure at the edge of his hearing, a hum just below the threshold of sound, the way a tooth aches before the cold reaches it. The berries stopped dropping. The dog at the far end of the road stopped moving and stood with its hackles up, and the driver of the wagon, already past, did not turn around but his shoulders climbed an inch toward his ears, as if some part of him felt it too and refused to acknowledge what it was.
Cassius stepped out from the tree.
The bend of the road was still empty. The dust lay smooth across it, and in the last of the light it looked like the page of a book no one had written in yet.
Then the dust moved.
It came from the inside, not the outside. A swirl in the middle of the road, a column no higher than a man's knee, rising slow and twisting, and as it rose the hum grew louder until it was not a hum at all but a voice, a low cold voice that spoke in the cadence of a thing that had been rehearsed for a long time, and the words it spoke were the words his father had read from the pulpit on Sundays when Cassius was small and his mother was alive and the world was the kind of place where the worst thing a man had to fear was a poor crop.
"And the Lord showed me a book," the voice said, "and the book was written within and without with lamentations and mourning and woe."
The dust column thickened. It took the shape of legs, then a torso, then a coat that was not dust at all but cloth, black and stiff as if it had been starched with something other than water. The shoulders filled in. A neck appeared, long and thin, and a head, and the head was the head of a man, and the man had no face that Cassius could see clearly because the last of the light was failing and the man's head seemed to drink the light in rather than give it back, and the eyes that looked out from under the brim of a black hat were the color of skimmed milk.
The Pale Stranger stood in the middle of the road.
He was tall. He was thin. His coat hung on him the way a coat hangs on a post, and his hands were long and pale and hung at his sides, and he did not move, and the wind did not touch him, and the dust that had made him lay at his boots in a perfect ring as if it had been placed there by a careful hand.
Cassius drew his pistol.
"You move another step," he said, "and I will put you in the ground."
The stranger tilted his head. The motion was wrong. It was too far, the way a bird tilts its head, and the smile that came onto the colorless face was the smile of a thing that had studied smiles in a book and had not quite learned them.
"Son of the preacher," the stranger said. His voice was cold and precise, each word set down like a stone in a pattern. "I have walked a long road to meet you. I would hate to be put in the ground before I have said what I came to say."
"Then say it fast."
The stranger did not move. He looked at the pistol as if it were a curious insect, and the pale eyes did not blink, and the wind chose that moment to come back through the chinaberries and move the loose cloth of his coat, and for a moment Cassius could see that the coat had no buttons, only holes where buttons had been, and the holes were stitched shut with something that was not thread.
"Your father," the stranger said, "was a good man."
"He was."
"He was a faithful man."
"He was that too."
"And you are his son, and you have his jaw, and you have his hands, and you do not have his faith, and that is a pity, because faith is the only armor a man has against what is coming for you."
Cassius felt his finger on the trigger. He felt the cold of the steel against his palm. He felt the old weight in his chest, the weight of the journal in his pocket, and he thought of his father reading from the pulpit, and he thought of the way the journal had fallen open to the torn page, and he thought of the symbol in the margin and the symbol on the note, and the two symbols were the same, and the same was a thing with no name that lived in the hills and wore a face made of bone.
"What is coming for me," Cassius said, "is going to be sorry it tried."
The stranger's smile widened. The smile did not reach his eyes. His eyes stayed the color of skimmed milk and the depth of a well with no bottom.
"Isaiah," the stranger said. "Chapter thirty. Verse thirty-one. 'For through the voice of the Lord shall the Assyrian be beaten down, which smote with a rod.'"
The words hung in the air. They hung the way a held note hangs, and as they hung they grew colder, and as they grew colder the hum came back, the hum that was not a hum, the hum that lived under the skin of the world, and Cassius felt it in his teeth and in the back of his skull and in the place where the journal sat against his chest.
He pulled the trigger.
The pistol roared. The flash lit the road and the trees and the face of the stranger, and the ball went where it was aimed, square into the chest of the black coat, and the stranger did not fall. The stranger looked down at the place where the ball had struck, and there was no hole, only a darkening of the cloth as if the cloth had swallowed the lead, and the stranger looked back up at Cassius, and the smile was still there, and the eyes had not changed.
"Fire and powder," the stranger said. "How quaint."
Cassius cocked the hammer again. He had one ball left. He had one ball left in his life, and the stranger knew it, and the stranger took a step forward, and the dust moved under his feet without being kicked, and the hum grew louder, and somewhere in the hills a sound answered it, a long thin sound that might have been a hymn and might have been a howl.
"Here is what I came to say," the stranger said. "The man you hunt is in these hills. The man you hunt has been in these hills for a long time, longer than your town, longer than your father's father. He made a place for himself in the dark, and the dark is fond of him, and he has been waiting for a Carrick to come looking, because the Carricks are the kind of men who come looking, and the man you hunt has need of a Carrick's blood to finish what he began a hundred years ago."
He took another step. He was close enough now that Cassius could see the holes in the coat where the buttons had been, and the holes were stitched with hair. Not thread. Hair, long and pale, and the hair moved in a wind that did not touch the rest of the cloth.
"Your father found the place," the stranger said. "Your father wrote it down. Your father was a faithful man, and faithful men are useful, because they believe the things they write, and a thing that is believed is a thing that can be used."
Cassius fired the second ball.
The flash, the roar, the stranger looking down at his chest, the darkening of the cloth, the same as before, and the stranger smiling that smile that did not touch his eyes.
"Two quaint things," the stranger said. "And the pistol is empty. And the sun is down. And the hymn is beginning."
He raised his right hand. The hand was open. The fingers were long and the nails were black and the palm was the color of tallow, and in the palm there was a mark, and the mark was the symbol from the journal, the symbol from the note, the symbol that Cassius had been carrying in his coat pocket for a year without knowing what it was.
"Come with me," the stranger said. "Come and see what your father saw. Come and hear the hymn that has been waiting a hundred years for a Carrick to sing it."
Cassius threw the empty pistol in the stranger's face.
The stranger did not flinch. The pistol passed through the place where his face had been and clattered on the road behind him, and the stranger's face was still there, and the smile was still there, and the hand was still raised, and the hum was now a sound, a low droning sound that came from the hills and from the road and from the trees and from the ground under Cassius's boots, and the dog at the far end of the road began to howl, a long broken howl that was not the howl of a dog at all.
Cassius reached into his coat. His hand found the journal. His hand found the folded note. His hand found the wooden whistle his mother had given him when he was six, the one he had carried in his pocket for twenty years for no reason he had ever been able to name.
He put the whistle to his lips.
He did not know why. He did not know what the whistle would do. He only knew that the hum was inside his head now and that the stranger was walking toward him and that the hymn from the hills was getting louder, and that if he did not make a sound of his own the sound of the stranger's world would be the only sound in it.
He blew.
The whistle made no sound that anyone in town would have heard. The whistle made a sound that only Cassius could hear, a high thin note that lived in the bone behind his ear, and the note was the note his mother had taught him without teaching him, the note she had hummed when she was putting him to bed, the note that had no name in any book he had ever read.
The stranger stopped.
The smile left his face.
For the first time the pale eyes changed, and the change was not a change of color but a change of depth, as if a window had been opened in a room that had been sealed for a long time, and through the window something was looking out that the stranger had not expected to see.
"What is that," the stranger said. His voice was no longer cold. His voice was no longer precise. His voice was the voice of a man who has walked into a room and found a door where he thought there was a wall.
Cassius blew the note again.
The hum from the hills faltered. The droning sound from the ground thinned and broke and came back thinner, and the dog at the end of the road stopped howling and began to whine, and the wind that had not been touching the stranger's coat began to touch it, and the coat moved, and the hair that stitched the buttonholes shifted and lay flat.
"You cannot," the stranger said. He took a step back. The step was the first step backward he had taken, and it was a small step but it was a step, and the dust that had lain in a perfect ring around his boots stirred and lost its shape. "That is not a hymn. That is not in the book. That is not what he taught us."
Cassius lowered the whistle. His hand was shaking. His whole body was shaking. The note was still in his head, behind his ear, in the bone, and it was louder than his heartbeat.
"My mother," he said, "was a woman who did not explain herself."
The stranger took another step back. The pale eyes were wide now, and the mouth that had smiled was open, and the teeth behind the lips were not the teeth of a man but the teeth of something that had been wearing a man the way a man wears a coat.
"She died," the stranger said, "before we found her."
"No," Cassius said. "She died after she taught me what she taught me. And what she taught me is older than your book."
He raised the whistle again.
The stranger turned. The motion was not a man's motion. It was the motion of smoke caught in a draft, a long unwinding, and the black coat streamed out behind him and became a shadow, and the shadow became a column, and the column became a swirl of dust in the middle of the road, and the dust scattered, and where it had been there was nothing but the smooth page of the road and the last of the light and the wind in the chinaberries.
The hum was gone.
The hymn was gone.