“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.”

“If you touch the rock, you won’t be lost anymore,” Tobin said. “You won’t ever be lost again. You’ll be redeemed. Isn’t that nice?” He absentmindedly removed the black feather that had been stuck to the corner of his mouth.

“No,” Cal said. “I don’t think it is. I’d rather stay lost.” Maybe it was just his imagination, but the buzzing seemed to be getting louder.

“No one would rather stay lost,” the boy said amiably. “Becky doesn’t want to stay lost. She miscarried. If you can’t find her, I think she’ll probably die.”

“You’re lying,” he said, without any conviction.

He might’ve inched a half step closer. A soft, fascinating light had begun to rise in the center of the rock, behind those floating stick figures—as if that buzzing tungsten he could hear was embedded about two feet beneath the surface of the stone and someone was slowly dialing it up.

“I’m not,” the boy said. “Look close and you can see her.”

Down in the smoked-quartz interior of the rock, he saw the dim lines of a human face. He thought at first he was looking at his own reflection. But although it was similar, it wasn’t his. It was Becky, her lips peeled back in a doglike grimace of pain. Clots of filth smeared one side of her face. Tendons strained in her throat.

“Beck?” he said, as if she might be able to hear him.

He took another step forward—he couldn’t help himself—leaning in to see. His palms were raised before him, in a kind of go-no-further gesture, but he could not feel them beginning to blister from whatever was radiating from the stone.

No, too close, he thought, and tried to fling himself backward but couldn’t get traction. Instead his heels slid, as if he stood at the top of a mound of soft earth giving way beneath him. Only the ground was flat; he slid forward because the stone had him, it had its own gravity, and it drew him as a magnet draws iron scrap.

Deep in the vast, jagged crystal ball of the great rock, Becky opened her eyes and seemed to stare at him in wonder and terror.

The buzzing rose in his head.

The wind rose with it. The grass flung itself from side to side, ecstatically.

In the last instant, he became aware that his flesh was burning, that his skin was boiling in the unnatural climate that existed in the immediate space right around the rock. He knew when he touched the stone that it would be like setting his palms on a heated frying pan, and he began to scream—

—then stopped, the sound catching in his suddenly constricted throat.