The boy shivered.

The rain outside, and the wind that blew across the near-desolate room, across the old woman's face as she too lay back in some dream, he knew this but none of it could draw him up from sleep; the crunch and squeal of a door opening, of glass being stepped upon, all of this played at the edge of his consciousness, but he could not tug away from the dream that had grabbed him.

The voice whispered, "Your heart."

His eyelids fluttered open for a moment, and then the boy closed them again, as if the real world were the dream, and his inner world, the truth.

Even the mindpain was only a shredded curtain, blowing against a window of the dream.

The boy dreamed on. His inner eyes opened onto the other world, the one of insane geometries, of orange lightning, of fire that rained from trees like leaves falling, of the birds rising from the water their impossibly pure white wings spreading across the burning sky. As the sky filled with bloody swans, he saw the dark ram with its golden eyes shining as it galloped towards him across the surface of the unbroken water. Then the eels wriggling across the glassy surface, turning the brown water red with their wakes. The ram rode across their backs, its hooves beating like knives on stones. The Azriel Light came up from its breath, forming crystalline in the mist of air, and then burned across the world. What was unspeakable found voice and its bleating froze the air for a moment hacked from the fabric of time as the secret of all stabbed at his ears.

Someone tried to wake him from it. The mindpain came back like a bolt of lightning, burning along his neural pathways. The boy's eyes opened, his dream torn apart.

The man shook him awake and held a hand over his mouth. The room came back with its shadows of curtains and half-opened cupboards. The trill of a mockingbird outside the window. The shroud of dawn. The room that always seemed too small for all of them. The others slept on around him.

The man wore a dark leather jacket and jeans, his dark hair in need of a cut, and the smell from him was almost sweet -- like sage on the desert after a rain.

"You Satan?" the boy asked in a hushed tone of reverence. Fear was not there. He didn't sense it. He didn't feel it from the man, and it wasn't within him. He knew, somehow, the man would be there. He knew just as he knew that his dream had foretold something.

"I could be," the man whispered, his breath all cigarettes, "If you keep quiet, you'll live. Understand?"

The boy nodded. The mindpain blossomed against his small skull. When it came on, as it usually did after one of the Great Meetings, it would blast within his head like the worst headache. Sometimes his nose would bleed from it. Sometimes he'd go into convulsions. He never knew how hard it would hit, he just knew it was PAIN. He knew it HURT. The mindpain didn't let go until it was good and ready to.

The boy felt something pressed against his side.

Cold metal.

"That's right," the man whispered. "It's a gun. I will kill you if you make a noise or try to fight me. Or if you try to do what I know you can do."

The boy began shivering, and wasn't sure if he could will himself to stop. He wanted to be back in his dream. It felt like ants were crawling all over his arms and legs. Ants stinging him all over, and then tickling along his neck. He wanted to swat and scratch, but he was afraid the man might use the gun. The boy had seen a jack rabbit get shot clean in half once. He didn't need to imagine it happening to himself.

But the markings on him, the drawings...

He knew they were moving, the pictures on his shoulders. He wished he could scrape them from his flesh. He wanted to tell the stranger with the gun about them, about how they meant bad things when they began moving, but the boy knew this would do no good.

The man grinned as he lifted the boy up, wrapping a shabby blanket around him. The boy's last view of what he had come to call home was the old woman lying there staring at him. Blood sluiced from between her lips, and tears bled down in rivulets from her eyes. The mattress beneath her was soaked red. Her fingers were still curled around a small amulet she kept with her, nothing more than a locket, a good luck charm.

The boy was too tired to fight, and weakened, too, by the previous day's performance. Mindpain always came after the show. Mindpain was like what the Great Father had called a hangover. It was the morning after. That was a problem for him, it sapped him of strength, and even when he had tried to kick out at the man, he could barely move his legs.

The man would probably kill him. The boy knew this is what kidnappers usually did. He had watched late night TV shows like "America's Most Wanted" and knew that kidnappers rarely kept a kid alive.

The boy tried not to think of the gun.

Tried to remember the Great Father holding his arms out, his hands open to him. "I will be your comfort in the valley of the shadow," the Great Father had said.

This was the valley of the shadow of death. This kidnapper and his gun and his blanket and the red stain on the mattress with the old woman's mouth wide open.

Thinking about it, the boy winced. The hammering in his head grew stronger. Everything hurt.

The pounding of the rain on the roof seemed unbearable. It was a terrible rain, it had come at first as ice and then tiny pebbles hitting the corrugated tin roof, until finally, it was just water. God is pissin' on us on accounta our sins, that's what the old woman who took care of him would say, her Texas twang increasing with her years. She was dead now. She was in whatever Great Beyond existed, the boy knew. She was in the pictures that covered him now, as were all things that were no more. If the mindpain hadn't descended that night, weakening him further, he might've been able to struggle against this evil man who took him. Even though the blanket covered the boy's ears, it was as if the hoofbeats of wild horses were beating down upon him from heaven.

The kidnapper threw him into the backseat of a car. Slammed the door. As they drove off, the boy glanced back at the place he'd called home and knew in his heart he would never see it again. Dawn was just bursting from the far horizon. Rain accompanied it, the first fresh drops hitting the car windows, dirt rinsing down. The pain in the boy's head grew, and he could feel the tingling begin along his back and shoulders. He knew that whatever was supposed to start, all the things that he'd been warned about by the Great Father, would come to pass now.

Through him, the radiance would come, like electricity through the idiot wires of the gods.

His skin felt molten.

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