"The bottom's false, thin?" Ellie asked, glancing toward the little box beside Old Nathan's hand. Her lips curled. "Cain't we chop hit open?"
"Hain't like thet, child," the cunning man said. Sarah Ransden eyed them without expression from beside the fireplace. "Thar's a gate, so t' speak, but not . . ."
He gestured, rubbing his fingertips together as if attempting to seize the air. "Not on this world. Not all this world—" his index finger drew a line across the dirt on the tabletop "—has airy bit t' do with what's on t' other side uv thet gate, so I couldn't force hit."
Without speaking, Sarah reached into the bosom of her dress. She drew a locket up and over her head. The ornament was suspended on a piece of silk ribbon so faded that its original color was only a pink memory.
Sarah opened the spring catch and held the locket out to Old Nathan. Inside was the miniature portrait of a man, painted on ivory. "Thet's Chance Ransden," she said in a distant voice. "Thet was my husband whin I married him."
Old Nathan set the locket down on the table and examined it. The artist had been skillful, not so much in the depiction of physical features—the face on the miniature was thinner than that of the Chance Ransden the cunning man remembered from ten years past—but rather in the sheen of the spirit glinting through the skin. No single detail in the painting was objectively right, but the result had the feel of Chance Ransden.
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.