Brimstone.
UPSTAIRS IN THE ROOM THAT MADE HER BLISSFULLY happy with its four-poster bed and fluffy white duvet, Quinn sat at the pretty desk with its curved legs and polished surface writing up the day’s notes, data, and impressions on her laptop.
She loved that there were fresh flowers in the room, and a little blue bowl of artfully arranged fresh fruit. The bath held a deep and delightful claw-foot tub and a snowy white pedestal sink. There were thick, generous towels, two bars of soap, and rather stylish minibottles of shampoo, body cream, and bath gel.
Instead of boring, mass-produced posters, the art on the walls were original paintings and photos, which the discreet note on the desk identified as works by local artists available at Artful, a shop on South Main.
The room was full of homey welcoming touches, and provided high-speed Internet access. She made a note to reserve the same room after her initial week was up, for the return trips she planned in April, then again in July.
She’d accomplished quite a bit on her first day, which was a travel day on top of it. She’d met two of the three focal players, had an appointment to hike to the Pagan Stone. She’d gotten a feel for the town, on the surface in any case. And had, she believed, a personal experience with the manifestation of an unidentified (as yet) force.
And she had the bare bones for a bowling article that should work for her friends at Detour.
Not bad, especially when you added in she’d dined sensibly on the grilled chicken salad in the hotel dining room, had not given in to temptation and inhaled an entire pizza but had limited herself to half a slice. And she’d bowled a strike.
On the personal downside, she supposed, as she shut down to prepare for bed, she’d also resisted the temptation to lock lips with the very appealing Caleb Hawkins.
Wasn’t she all professional and unsatisfied?
Once she’d changed into her bedtime flannel pants and T-shirt, she nagged herself into doing fifteen minutes of pilates (okay, ten), then fifteen of yoga, before burrowing under the fabulous duvet with her small forest of down pillows.
She took her current book off the nightstand, burrowed into that as well until her eyes began to droop.
Just past midnight, she marked the novel, switched off the lamp, and snuggled into her happy nest.
As was her habit, she was asleep in a finger snap.
Quinn recognized the dream as a dream. Always, she enjoyed the sensation of the disjointed, carnival world of dreamscapes. It was, for her, like having some crazy adventure without any physical exertion. So when she found herself on a crooked path through a thick wood where the moonshine silvered the leaves and the curling fog rippled along the ground, a part of her mind thought: Oh boy! Here we go.
She thought she heard chanting, a kind of hoarse and desperate whisper, but the words themselves were indiscernible.
The air felt like silk, so soft, as she waded through the pools of fog. The chanting continued, drawing her toward it. A single word seemed to fly out of that moonstruck night, and the word was bestia.
She heard it over and over as she followed the crooked path through the silken air and the silver-laced trees. She felt a sexual pull, a heat and reaching in the belly toward whatever, whoever called out in the night.
Twice, then three times, the air seemed to whisper. Beatus. The murmur of that warmed her skin. In the dream, she quickened her steps.
Out of the moon-drenched trees swam a black owl, its great wings stirring a storm in that soft air, chilling it until she shivered. And was, even in the dream, afraid.
With that cold wind stirring, she saw, stretched across the path, a golden fawn. The blood from its slit throat drenched the ground so it gleamed wet and black in the night.
Her heart squeezed with pity. So young, so sweet, she thought as she made herself approach it. Who could have done such a thing?
For a moment, the dead, staring eyes of the fawn cleared, shone as gold as its hind. It looked at her with such sorrow, such wisdom, tears gathered in her throat.
The voice came now, not through the whipped air, but in her mind. The single word: devoveo.
Then the trees were bare but for the ice that sheathed trunk and branch, and the silver moonlight turned gray. The path had turned, or she had, so now she faced a small pond. The water was black as ink, as if any light the sky pushed down was sucked into its depths and smothered there.
Beside the pond was a young woman in a long brown dress. Her hair was chopped short, with the strings and tufts of it sticking out wildly. Beside the black pond she bent to fill the pockets of her brown dress with stones.
Hello! Quinn called out. What are you doing?
The girl only continued to fill her pockets. As Quinn walked closer, she saw the girl’s eyes were full of tears, and of madness.
Crap. You don’t want to do that. You don’t want to go Virginia Woolf. Wait. Just wait. Talk to me.
The girl turned her head, and for one shocked moment, Quinn saw the face as her own. He doesn’t know everything, the mad girl said. He didn’t know you.
She threw out her arms, and her slight body, weighed heavy with her cache of stones, tipped, tipped, tipped until it met the black water. The pond swallowed it like a waiting mouth.
Quinn leaped-what else could she do? Her body braced for the shock of cold as she filled her lungs with air.
There was a flash of light, a roar that might have been thunder or something alive and hungry. She was on her knees in a clearing where a stone rose out of the earth like an altar. Fire spewed around her, above her, through her, but she felt none of its heat.
Through the flames she saw two shapes, one black, one white, grappling like mad animals. With a terrible rending sound, the earth opened up, and like the waiting mouth of the pond, swallowed everything.
The scream ripped from her throat as that maw widened to take her. Clawing, she dragged herself toward the stone, fought to wrap her arms around it.
It broke into three equal parts, sending her tumbling, tumbling into that open, avid mouth.
She woke, huddled on the lovely bed, the linens tangled around her legs as she gripped one of the bedposts as if her life depended on it.
Her breath was an asthmatic’s wheeze, and her heart beat so fast and hard it had her head spinning.
A dream, just a dream, she reminded herself, but couldn’t force herself-not quite yet-to release her hold on the bedpost.
Clinging to it, she let her cheek rest on the wood, closed her eyes until the shaking had lessened to an occasional quiver.
“Hell of a ride,” she mumbled.
The Pagan Stone. That’s where she’d been at the end of the dream, she was certain of it. She recognized it from pictures she’d seen. Small wonder she’d have a scary dream about it, about the woods. And the pond…Wasn’t there something in her research about a woman drowning in the pond? They’d named it after her. Hester’s Pond. No, pool. Hester’s Pool.
It all made sense, in dream logic.
Yeah, a hell of a ride, and she’d die happy if she never took another like it.
She glanced at her travel alarm, and saw by its luminous dial it was twenty after three. Three in the morning, she thought, was the dead time, the worst time to be wakeful. So she’d go back to sleep, like a sensible woman. She’d straighten the bed, get herself a nice cool drink of water, then tune out.
She’d had enough jolts and jumps for her first day.
She slid out of bed to tug the sheets and duvet back into some semblance of order, then turned, intending to go to the adjoining bath for a glass of water.
The scream wouldn’t sound. It tore through her head like scrabbling claws, but nothing could tear its way out of the hot lock of her throat.
The boy grinned obscenely through the dark window. His face, his hands pressed against the glass bare inches away from her own. She saw its tongue flick out to roll across those sharp, white teeth, and those eyes, gleaming red, seemed as bottomless and hungry as the mouth of earth that had tried to swallow her in her dream.