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Show air. Lorin followed his parents back to the car, stepping across graves. Some of these people weren't down there any more, he told his brother, pointing at the ground. Stephen stared at the headstone, and then at Lorin. His eyes darted back and forth and then he closed them, and Lorin took his hand. * * * It was a flat, translucent rock, the size and shape of a small potato, and when you held it up to the light you could see blue thready veins running through it. It was kept wrapped up in a piece of old tablecloth at the bottom of the cedar chest in his great-grandmother's house in Randolph, and when Lorin took it out each time he had to remember how the cloth had been folded and what had been on top of it so he would not have his tampering discovered. It all depended on what kind of light you had. Natural light was best for seeing the countless small reticulations that crisscrossed each other between the veins and receded deeper into the interior of the rock until you seemed to be seeing farther than you knew the actual size of the rock would let you. He never dared to take it outside, but holding it up to the window on bright afternoons when all the cousins his age in town were in the hayfields, cupping his hands around it and putting his eye as close to it as the width of his hands would permit, he could see oval glints of sunlight with iridescent edges that winked from green to orange to purple with the slightest movement of his hands or his face. Foreshortening the stone slightly he once brought out a hard jagged line of jet black that streaked down from a point left of center and resolved itself in a web of yellow threads, but he was never able to find the right angle again, and so he never saw it again. Overcast days were good too. The glare from a soft cloud cover was |