I went down to the marshy reach near the shore, where the stream had run fifteen years ago. It didn’t look like anybody had been there playing in the mud recently. I went back to the cabin. “Yeah,” Pat was saying.
“But it’s been a long time, and they haven’t been back,” said Jesse.
They were just standing there, no gizmos in sight, no headsets, no wires, no portable com screens with flashing lights making beeping noises. I guessed it wasn’t technology that was helping them draw their conclusions.
What a good thing Pat hadn’t walked on my porch this morning, and up my stairs and knocked on my door and, maybe, walked into the front room where the same, if savagely stain-removed, sofa still stood, and the little square of carpet beside it, and maybe even the handle of the fridge door, the same handle that had been there ready to expose a carton of milk behind it if someone pulled on it, two months ago.
What a good thing that good manners dictate that you don’t idly cross people’s probable outer ward circle and knock on their doors unless invited.
Carthaginian hell.
We got back in the car and drove on the way we’d been going, north.
There was a bad spot almost at once. I picked it up first, or anyway I was the one who said, “Hey. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to go any farther this way.”
“Roll up your windows,” said Jesse. He hit a couple of buttons on the very peculiar dashboard I was only now noticing and suddenly there was something like heavy body armor enclosing me, oppressive as chain mail and breastplate and a full-face helm, plume and lady’s silk favor optional. I could almost smell the metal polish. “Ugh,” I said.
“Don’t knock it, it works,” said Jesse. Our voices echoed peculiarly. We drove very slowly for about a minute and then a red light on the dashboard blinked and there was a manic chirping like a parakeet on speed. “Right. We’re clear.” He hit the same buttons. The invisible armor went away.
“Spartan, isn’t it?” said Pat.
“No,” I said.
We drove through two more bad spots like that and I hated the body armor program worse each time. It made me feel trapped. It made me feel as if when I woke up again I’d be sitting at the edge of a bonfire with a lot of vampires on the other side.
It was a long drive. Thirty miles or so. I remembered.
Then we reached a really bad spot. Jesse hit his buttons again but this time it really was like being trapped—held down while Things slid through the intangible gaps between the incorporeal links, reached out long taloned fingers and grabbed me…
Big. Huge space. Indoors; ceiling up there somewhere. Old factory. Scaffolding where the workers had once tended the machines. No windows. Enormous square ventilator shafts, vast parasitic humps of silent machinery, contortions of piping like the Worm Ouroboros in its death throes…
And eyes. Eyes. Staring. Their gaze like flung acid. No color. What color is evil?…
When I came to, I was screaming. I stopped. Even the guys looked shaken. I could see the scuff marks in the road ahead of us, where Jesse had slammed us into reverse. Good thing the driver hadn’t gone under. I put my hands over my mouth. “Sorry,” I said.
“Nah,” said Pat. “If you hadn’t been screaming, I’d’ve had to do it.”
“What now?” said Jesse. They both looked at me.
“Maybe this is the really big bad spot behind the house,” I said. “I told you there was one. We’re pretty well north of the lake now, aren’t we? Seems like we’ve come far enough, but I keep losing the lake behind the trees.”
“Yeah,” said Jesse. “The road’s well back here, because this is where the big estates are. Were.”
“Okay,” I said. “So we walk.” I opened the car door and clambered stiffly out. This was harder than it would have been if I hadn’t been squashed by SOF technology four times, especially the last time when it didn’t work. I patted my stomach as if checking to make sure I was still there. I seemed to be. The cut on my breast was itching like crazy: the sort of variable itch that reinforces its performance by regular nerve-fraying jabs of pain.
My jackknife seemed to be trying to burn a hole through its cotton pocket to my leg. I wrapped my hand around it. The heat was presumably illusory, which perhaps explained why the sense of being fried felt so comforting. I set off through the trees without looking behind me. They’d follow, and I had to get myself moving before I thought much about it or I wouldn’t do it at all.
I didn’t bother trying to figure out where the bad spot ended. I went down to the shore of the lake and turned right. Walking on the shore, while awkward, all shingle and teetery stones and water-tossed rubbish, wasn’t so bad as walking through the trees. I was in sunlight out here, and the memories were under the trees. I hadn’t walked on the shore before.
It was the right bad spot. I came to the house much too soon. I could half-convince myself I was enjoying walking by the lake. I like walking by water in the sunshine. I’d often enjoyed walking by this lake. Before. I stopped, feeling suddenly sick, and waited for the other two to catch up with me. “I’m not sure I can do this,” I said, and my voice had started to go funny again, as it had last night, when I told them you don’t hear vampires coming.
“It’s daylight, and we’re with you,” said Jesse, not unsympathetically.
I said abruptly, “What if we get back to the car and it won’t start? We’d never get out of these woods before dark.”
“It’ll start,” said Pat. “You’re okay. Hold on. We’re going to walk up the hill toward the house real slow. You just keep breathing. I’m walking up on your left and Jesse is walking up on your right. We’ll go as slow as you want. Hey, Jesse, how’s your nephew doing with that puppy he talked your folks into buying him?”
It was well done. Puppy stories got me to the stairs. By that time Pat had me by the elbow because I was gasping like a puffer demon, except they always breathe like that, but having a hand on my elbow was too much like having been frog-marched up those stairs the last time I’d been here. “No,” I said. “Thanks, but let me go. Last time, you know, I had help.”
The porch steps creaked under my weight. Like last time. Unlike last time, the steps also creaked under the weight of my companions.
Almost dreamily I went through the still-ajar front door and left across the huge hall toward the ballroom. It was daylight, now, so I could look up, and see where the curl of grand staircase became an upstairs corridor lined by what had once been an equally grand balustrade, but some of the posts were cracked or missing. There were still glints of gold paint in the hollows of the carving. In the dark I hadn’t known the railings were anything but smooth. I wouldn’t have cared.
The ballroom was smaller than I remembered. It was still a big room, much bigger than anything but a ballroom, but in my memory it had become about the size of a small country, and in fact it was only a room. As ballrooms go it probably wasn’t even a big one. The chandelier, very shabby in daylight, still had candle stubs in it, and there was a lot of dripped wax on the floor underneath. There was my corner, and the windows on either wall that had bounded my world for two long nights and a day in between…