She thinks back on her conversation with Ralston. The words he spoke near the end resonate more loudly for her now: “This girl, this Selena, I don’t know her and—understand me on this—I cannot save her. But I can help you, by telling you the truth about what I see. And what I see is a woman who will find what she’s looking for only when she is willing to confront the pain that her father caused her. You have to go back, Natalie, into that past, exhume that skeleton.”
And that’s what she’s done, exhumed the skeleton, and it has led her here. down this road, this dreary backwoods version of memory lane. It has to be right, she tells herself, it just has to be. Either this is where Ralston was telling her to go, or her sense of reality really is becoming totally unglued.
Maureen begged her not to go, then pleaded to be allowed to accompany her. But Natalie recalled something else Ralston had told her: “It’s a trip you have to take by yourself, alone. No one can do it for you, or even with you.”
She interprets that now as a warning: if she showed up with someone else, anyone else, the deal was off. Before leaving Maureen’s place, and a couple of times since, she did think of calling Scopes, mustering the troops and all that. But if there’s one thing she knows, if there’s one thing that life has taught her, it’s that all the cops in the world can’t save a little girl from fanatics prepared to die for the right to kill her. All Natalie would have done by alerting Scopes or even by allowing Maureen to come along is to ensure Selena’s death.
She rubs her eyes and peers wearily into the thick night. It’s all a terrible long shot, she understands that, but in her heart it doesn’t feel that way. In her heart, it feels like going home.
* * *
A few hundred yards back, a second car, its headlights off, slides along in the trailing darkness. Illuminated only by the faint light of the dashboard, the driver pops a couple of pills and swigs them down with a shot of vodka. Good vodka. The sort you buy for a celebration.
Smiling as the pills kick in, he lights a cigarette, making sure to keep its smoldering tip below the level of the dashboard. Staying close to Natalie hasn’t been difficult so far, and it’s obvious her attention is focused on getting to wherever it is she’s going. But he doesn’t want to make any stupid mistakes, especially not now, when they’re so close. And he is sure they must be close. Why else would she be coming out here, visiting nowhere in the dead of night?
He inhales contentedly. Natalie knows where she’s headed. All that remains is to let her lead the way.
Imagining how surprised the others will be, he takes another hit off the bottle and settles in for the ride.
* * *
An hour later Natalie exits the highway at the small town noted in her father’s directions. Past its one gas station, closed for the night, she picks up a rural road that winds for several miles through crop-shaggy fields dotted with the occasional mobile home.
At this point, her father’s directions, which until now have been surprisingly precise, begin to fail her. She comes to a fork, one of those maddeningly perfect Ys that divide the road into options distinguishable only by the fact that one goes right and the other left. There are no signs indicating which direction is the continuation of the route she’s presently on.
She slows down and, suddenly aware of how vague her destination really is, stops. Left or right, she asks herself? Beyond this, her father’s directions say only that her next step is to turn at the next county road—he didn’t remember the route number, and he didn’t say left or right. Either one of these roads could take her to another county road, and how would she ever know it was the correct one?
So does she go left, or right?
She steps out of the car to study her options. A blast of icy wind cuts through her jacket. and her body, too exhausted to offer much resistance to the cold, immediately begins to shiver. According to her father’s directions, that next road, whatever it is, will take her into the woods. The fields she’s driving through are rimmed on both sides by distant lines of a more opaque darkness that she takes for trees. She figures either road could lead to another that leads into the woods. No help there.
The moon, her guiding torch, lies straight ahead, perfectly bisecting the fork. No help there, either.
She could just guess, of course, and if the one doesn’t work out, come back and try the other. But time, hostile since the beginning of this nightmare, has become her outright enemy now. It’s already past ten o’clock, and if the Guardians have chosen tonight to make their exit—and she is certain they have; three days seems like a good time limit for a game of Guess—then she can’t afford any delays.
You may even already be too late.
It’s a whiny voice from somewhere inside her head. At first, she doesn’t recognize lt. She knows it’s not the Aunt Katie voice, coming back to taunt her. She senses that Aunt Katie, quiet now, is silently pulling for her to find her way. Nor is it any of the other ghosts that Natalie could imagine might have something to say to her right now.
Her hand is drawn to her injured cheek and immediately she knows. It’s the same voice that spoke to her in the barn in Normalville, the voice that told her to take the circular saw and run her wrist over the blade, the voice that told her to quit, quit the whole damn thing, stop the world and get the hell off.
It’s her voice. It’s her own sick-of-it-all, screw-this-l’m-outta-here voice.
“Shut the fuck up,” she tells herself. “This isn’t about you.”
She glances around again, listening to the sound of her teeth chattering over the rush of the wind in the fields. Something about the distant line of blackness on the right seems more substantial than the line on the left. The thicker the woods, she figures, the better the hunting. And this place she’s looking for did used to be a hunting lodge.
It’s a total guess, but on the sorry premise that making no decision is the only sure guarantee of failure, she decides to go right. Something about staring at that line of woods—she hopes it’s woods—makes her think about how alone she is out here on this deserted road. The cold and a sudden fear of whatever else might be out there chase her back inside her car, where she hurriedly locks herself in and hits the gas.
* * *
Holy fucking hell.
Watching her receding headlights, that’s what the driver of the car behind Natalie keeps thinking:
Holy fucking hell, holy fucking hell—how didn’t she see me?
He can’t believe what nearly happened. Everything was going so great and then the bitch decides to stop, just fucking stop, in the middle of the fucking road.
He gulps down some vodka to soothe his jangled nerves.
So she stops and because he isn’t expecting it he doesn’t notice right away. And by the time he finally does notice she’s—shit, what?—maybe only a hundred yards ahead of him. So he hits his brakes, slams down on them, and thank God for anti-lock brakes, because they don’t squeal and draw attention to him.
Okay, he tells himself. Okay, it’s all right calm down.
But he’s so close she could probably smell the booze on his breath if she tries. And then the bitch gets out of the car. She actually gets out of the fucking car and starts looking around!
At that point he stops breathing. She looks ahead of her, and then to the right, then forward again and over to the left. He can’t see too well because it’s dark out but he can see enough. And he knows she’ll see him if she looks his way. so he just keeps praying, Don’t look back, don’t look back.
And fuck it all if she doesn’t just get back in her car and drive away like nothing happened.
Someone was looking out for him, that’s all he knows.
He knows why she stopped—it’s that fork up ahead. She isn’t quite as certain of where she’s going as he had thought. He isn’t worried, though. If this weren’t meant to be, she would have seen him. But she didn’t see him, and if that’s not a fucking miracle, he doesn’t know what is.
Another hi
t off the bottle and he’s good to go, chasing his guide through the night.
Holy fucking hell.
* * *
The shivering doesn’t stop even with the heater turned so high Natalie can feel her lips burning. Her overtaxed body is rebelling against its lack of sleep and food and its excess of everything else—alcohol, smokes, grief. The weird thing is her skin feels like it’s on fire, like there’s a flame crinkling slowly over it. And the more her body shakes the tighter her skin and everything inside it seems to get, as if she were made from one long rubber band that is slowly being pulled taut, cinched tighter and tighter around the knot of fear in the pit of her stomach. Even her hair feels stretched and twisted and ready to break. She can feel herself getting ready to snap, dry and brittle, and the only question is where the break will finally happen.
Where is the road, she keeps asking herself? Where is the damn road?
Three miles slip by and nothing, just more fields, and she becomes convinced that she screwed up, that she should have gone left. She keeps telling herself to go five, go at least five, and then decide, then panic and turn back. But every click of the odometer, every pitiful tenth of a mile, is an agony of waiting, of scanning the darkness ahead for something that could be an intersection.
Truth be told, she is already panicking, and she doesn’t know how long she can avoid succumbing to it.
There’s a pack of cigarettes in her glove compartment and she lights one before she can talk herself out of it. Just one, she thinks, to stay awake. But the instant the smoke envelopes her in its harsh, dense cloud, she begins to gag. The bitter taste reminds her of Aunt Emily’s chair, and an image fills her head of how it must have looked when it was burning, fat and full of hungry flame. Disgusted, she tosses the cigarette out onto the roadway, sees it die in a shattering of sparks, and goes back to her search, her bleary eyes straining to find a road that might not even be out there.
At four miles, impatience gets the better of her and she decides to turn around. There’s nothing magic about four miles, and she knows it. She asks herself what will happen if she doubles back only to find nothing four miles down the other road either. What will she do then? Keep going, or turn back a second time and return here so that she can continue further down this pointless path?
You’re not being logical, she tells herself. But logic doesn’t help the writhing of her skin, the tightness in her chest.
She has to do something.
“Christ!” she screams, a piercing cry that shatters the grim silence of the night.
Beside herself with rage and frustration, she is just slamming the steering wheel over to make her turn when she sees it, a narrow break in the field up ahead on her right, a small sign with a route number on it. A county route number. The one she’s looking for? She doesn’t care. It’s a road, it fits the description, and it’s here, now, when she needs it. She speeds up and takes the turn, too fast, nearly ending up in a ditch. Her excitement grows when, just minutes later, this new road takes her over a gentle rise and on the other side plunges through a glorious wall of trees, a row of dark sentinels that the moment she’s inside swallow the moonlight whole.
Selena’s moon disappears behind her as if it were never there.
And takes Natalie’s brief happiness with it. According to her father’s directions, she is supposed to follow this road for “about ten miles,” although he wasn’t quite sure of that. He told his secretary to tell her it could be ten, or it could be twelve, or it could be less or more: “It’s been a long time, after all, but try ten.”
At the start of this journey, that didn’t seem so unreasonable. Or at least she assumed she could figure it out from there. But now, out here, her headlights sliding over dense, close-In walls of hemlock and fir, she isn’t so sure. Every now and then a mailbox pops up at her out of the darkness, and through the trees sometimes the glimpse of a house, but there are no numbers, no names, no landmarks to tell her how a particular property might relate to the one her father owned over a decade ago.
Her skin begins to crackle again. What if, after coming this far, after everything that’s happened, the Portal Guardians really are out there in the night somewhere but she can’t find them?
And then an even more terrible thought occurs to her: What if they kill Selena while she’s bumbling around just minutes away, literally down the road, unaware of how close she really is, unable to tell them she’s ready to cut this deal with the devil?
The road forms a serpentine canyon through the woods, and following it, Natalie becomes acutely aware of the drone of her tires, the slow hiss of the faceless trees as they pass. With the moon gone, she feels the darkness more intensely. She remembers scary stories the children of Normalville sometimes used to tell each other at night about monsters lurking in the forests around the house—how they’d hide behind the trees and as you walked past just reach out and grab you and mash you into little edible bits. She never did like those stories, and the memory of them disturbs her.
She does not want to be out here at night. She does not want to be out here at all.
Hours seem to pass as the odometer climbs from seven miles to eight, nine, ten. At twelve, she stops again, hoping like hell for a driveway, a little sign, a break like she had with finding this road. But there’s nothing, nothing at all, and her eyes blur with tears because she is convinced, utterly convinced, that this is just a road in the woods. Not the road she’s looking for, not the road that will take her to Selena, just another strip of directionless asphalt meandering its way through the trees.
Staring blankly, almost stupidly ahead, her eyelids heavy with fatigue, she lifts her foot off the accelerator and lets the car drift forward. It occurs to her that maybe she should go back to one of those houses she passed early on, knock on the door, see if anyone’s home. On the off chance this is the right road, maybe someone around here remembers her father or the hunting lodge. Maybe one of those houses is actually the house, the one she’s looking for.
It seems like her only hope, but she can’t bring herself to do it. She doesn’t have the energy anymore, doesn’t think she can hold herself together long enough to endure a Plan B, and turning around means defeat. It means giving up, going home empty-handed. without Selena, without Stephanie, without anything but the haunting memory of failure. So she keeps drifting forward, her mind barely afloat on the dimming edge of consciousness.
Five minutes later, she sees the light and her car drifts off the rood and into a tree.
* * *
Selena squirms in Peter’s lap and wonders if it’s time yet. When he came back to her bedroom, he told her they would be leaving soon. They just had to wait an hour or so and then they could go.
She’s asked him a bunch of times if it’s been an hour yet and every time the answer has been a curt no. He doesn’t say so, but she can tell it annoys him, her asking so frequently, although it’s not the same as when her father used to yell at her on trips for asking how much longer it would be until they got there. Peter doesn’t seem upset so much with her as with the slow pace of his own watch. So she figures it’s okay to ask him again.
“Is it time yet?”
This time he doesn’t even glance at his wrist. “Yeah,” he says, almost to her surprise. “Yeah, it is, it’s time. It’s past time.”
His tone is anything but positive, but Selena doesn’t think much about it. She is barely able to contain her own delight. Home, she gets to go home. It’s finally time. “Really?”
“Really.”
“Who’s taking me?”
“l am.”
“You are?”
“Of course. Who else did you think?”
Selena wraps her little arms around his waist and hugs him close. This is almost too good to be true. Peter’s going to take her home. Not one of the others, not some stranger, not someone who might be mean, but Peter!
“I’m going to miss you,” she tells him.
“Don’t be silly,” h
e says. “Now, come on, let’s get moving.”
He carries her out into the hallway and down to the main bedroom, where several of the others are hanging out. “Saddle up,” he tells them.
“It’s time?” one of them asks in a surprised voice.
Selena, riding on Peter’s back, feels his body stiffen. “I just said so, didn’t I?”
“It’s just that Sara—”
“We’ve waited long enough!” Peter’s bellow is so loud it scares even Selena. She’s never known him to be angry like this, and she’s not sure she likes it. “Now get moving,” he yells. “Atlantis is waiting, but it won’t wait forever and neither will our portal.”
The others scamper into action. Peter watches them for a few seconds and then heads for the stairs. “Just don’t know when it happened,” he mutters.
“When what happened?” Selena asks.
“When I lost them,” he says, speaking more to himself than to her, like adults do when they’re upset. “When they started thinking Sara was better than me.”
“Sara isn’t better than you,” Selena says, surprised that anybody could think otherwise.
Peter reaches back and pats her head. “Thanks,” he says.
Downstairs, he orders the group hanging out in the living room to get moving, too. Like the others upstairs, they seem surprised and reluctant to move without Sara telling them they should. Selena can feel the veins bulge in Peter’s neck as he confronts them. She wishes he wouldn’t be so angry, and she doesn’t see why it really matters if the others are willing to get ready for their trip or not.
“Why don’t you just take me first?” she whispers in his ear. “Then while you’re gone, everyone can get ready and you won’t have to get so mad at them.”
“Selena, please.” he says, brushing off her suggestion with the inattention of a distracted parent. “I told you all,” he continues to the others, who still aren’t moving. “It’s time. Now let’s show some hustle.”
Ring of Years Page 28