“So why doesn’t the world look right?”
“These things get in your head. And we feel that—but our minds don’t have the tools to frame it. So they paint the closest picture they can. The closer you are to people, the more likely you are to experience it the same way. If what you’re confronted with is too big, or too sudden, the mind just shuts down. To stop itself from going insane.”
“That’s what happened to you in the woods earlier,” Molly said. “And—”
“Great,” I said. “That’s all been extremely interesting, and I look forward to mulling it over at my leisure. But time’s up. I’m going back out there.”
“I really wouldn’t do that,” Val said.
Ken stood. “He’s right, love. We can’t just sit here like lemons. We have to do something.”
“And this is why,” Val said, wearily, “it’s a blessing that most witches are women. Sometimes randomly ‘doing something’ is the biggest possible mistake.”
“Look,” I said. “Two of our friends are missing. If there are actual demons out there, I’m not abandoning my people to them. If that makes me some kind of patriarchal asshole, so be it.”
“What he said,” Ken added, firmly. “Only, with a lot more swearing in it.”
“It’s a bad idea.”
“We’ve got to do something, Val,” I said. “So I’m asking your advice on what the best thing would be.”
“To be clear,” Ken said, “that doesn’t mean we’ll take it. In the last ten minutes you’ve managed to make Nolan sound almost normal, and that’s a first.”
“The only person with any power over this situation now is Alaina,” Val said.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll add her to the list.”
“You’ll only make things worse.”
Molly stood up. “I’m with you guys. Let’s go.”
Chapter
48
When she stepped out of Olsen’s, Kristy was braced for rain. Even welcoming the idea, after the stifling, trapped air in the restaurant. It wasn’t raining, though—because she wasn’t outside, or not completely.
Instead it felt like she’d come out into some kind of contained space, like a big corridor. It was hard to tell how wide it was because it was dark and thick with mist, but it was clear what direction it was headed. Back toward town.
At first the boundaries of the area were nebulous, formed by her sense of the highway on the right, the cold river beyond, and Olsen’s on the left, all under a ceiling of low cloud laced with branches that curved around her like long fingers.
As she got farther the space started to feel more concrete. Literally so—the mist looked a lot like a wall of brushed concrete. It began to feel claustrophobic again, too, as if she were underground. And also as if something was coming.
She looked back, but couldn’t see anything. That didn’t mean it wasn’t there. She started to walk more quickly.
What had been rough ground under her feet became asphalt. She could still hear the river on her right, swollen by rain, but that too seemed to change as she realized she was hurrying along tiles now, and what she’d thought was the sound of rushing water was actually the beat of her shoes, echoing off walls of dusty concrete. She started to run.
Kristy could run fast, and she knew after a few minutes she should be approaching town. She started to see something ahead, but it wasn’t Birchlake.
It was a staircase, dimly lit at the top.
She didn’t want to go up. She’d watched enough horror movies to know that, whatever else you do, you don’t go look in the small room at the top of the stairs.
And she hadn’t told the truth in the woods.
She had glimpsed the figure at the top of them. It wasn’t there now. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t waiting, whoever she was.
Kristy turned and looked back, but the corridor she’d come along was lost in mist barely ten feet behind. She could hear things in it, glimpse flashes of darkness, though she couldn’t tell how far back they were—as if her mind were struggling to form a picture of something that wasn’t there to be seen.
She didn’t want to go up the stairs, but she didn’t want to deal with whatever was causing the flashes, either.
She ran up the stairs.
There wasn’t a room at the top, or more corridor, but a much wider space. It looked a lot like the main drag of Birchlake, in fact, except that it had a roof.
And everything along the road was different…
…though also the same. She recognized some of the older houses. She spotted other buildings she knew, too, as she walked, though they’d changed. Most had striped awnings and old-looking signs in firm, blocky typefaces. The windows of some stores had prices written on them in white paint. All were dark. The doors were shut.
She passed a newsstand with fifty different papers and magazines spread out over racks. A hardware store, with pot, pans, and utensils hung in rows and piled in baskets and boxes on the sidewalk. One of these had a handwritten sign saying 6¢. This store was dark, too; the door shut.
The next sold musical instruments. Violins, acoustic guitars. Sheet music with engravings of the singers on the front. She passed a small fountain in the middle of the crossroads. The water had frozen into shape, so she could snap off a piece as she went by.
Kristy finally ground to a halt on the other side of it, shivering.
On the corner where the grocery should be—the place where she’d bought snacks on her first night in town—was a small store with a sign saying R ADAMS, GROCERIES & MEATS. The sign for the Stone Mountain Tap was now one for the Stumptown Saloon. The signage looked Victorian. The coffee shop was now a small store selling old radios and clocks, 1930s style—except the radios and clocks in the window all looked brand new.
And there, the building that held the apartment Kristy was staying in. The old general store. The stucco looked fresh and the display windows at street level were no longer whitewashed. They held rows and rows of dresses, displayed on wire frames.
The door was open.
Kristy approached cautiously. Her holding assumption was that this was a dream. Or Nolan’s idea about some natural gas leak. Or…something. She still had to be careful. Dreams are real when you’re inside them. Emotions, too. If something scares you, then you’re going to be scared, and Kristy felt she was scared enough already without putting herself in the way of something that might be even worse.
But this was the only open door on the street, and she didn’t want to be outside. It was cold and the mist was getting thicker. She felt bad and it seemed like she’d spent a long time out on the street, maybe years, trying to get in. She didn’t want that anymore.
She paused on the threshold. She knew the space beyond. She’d seen it when she and Nolan and Ken had broken in. That must be how her dreaming mind was able to fill in the rough dimensions of the interior. It was dark, but she could tell it was full.
Dresses on racks. Dresses on mannequins. Dresses folded on the shelves. Far, far too many dresses.
And…there was someone in there.
Kristy knew this before she could tell how she knew. There was something different about the darkness, as though something was making it even darker from within.
Then she heard a faint scraping sound.
“Hello?” The word was out of her mouth without thinking. She immediately wished she hadn’t spoken.
No response. That didn’t mean she was alone. Not getting a response is what makes you feel alone when you’re not. She took a single step into the store. Though dresses crowded in from every side—even hanging from the ceiling, in row after row after row, on old wooden hangers—there was a narrow pathway through the middle.
She took another step. Glanced back at the door to the street. Though she didn’t want to be out there, she didn’t want to be trapped in here, either. She looked around for something to brace the door with. Couldn’t see anything.
It’d be okay. She’d wake up eventually,
right?
And, Kristy thought as she took a few more slow steps into the store, now would actually be a good time to wake up. A great time, in fact. She didn’t care how lame it was—and she knew for a fact that Nolan got fired once for suggesting it as a fix in a script (after six months of rewrites he’d stopped caring)—for Kristy it was getting to the stage where the Oh, it was all a dream reveal couldn’t come soon enough.
“No,” said a voice. “Not that one.”
Kristy froze. A woman’s voice. She couldn’t tell where from. Somewhere in the dresses.
“No,” the voice said, again. More emphatically.
Kristy glanced back at the door again. Still open. Did that mean it was going to stay that way, or was this a last chance she’d better take? She didn’t know her subconscious well enough to guess what game it might be playing.
“No, no, no.” This was quieter, and the voice hitched hard on the last “no.” The three words together were enough for Kristy to get a rough fix on its direction.
Near the back of the store, on the right. As she looked that way, a dress flew up into the air. It sailed slowly back into the darkness.
Silence for a moment, then that quiet metallic sound again, like something being scraped against something else.
Kristy took another tentative step along the path.
“Obviously not,” the voice said. It wasn’t addressing Kristy. It was talking only to itself. “You will look like shit in that.”
A ripping sound, cloth being savagely shredded, then the scraping noise again. “And in that.”
The scraping sound. “Even worse in that.” Scrape. “Don’t even joke, you ugly bitch.”
The words were increasingly hard to understand as the hitching in the voice grew more pronounced. More ripping. Another dress flying up into the air. More scraping.
And sobbing, mixed in with a low moan, the sound of a body or soul in pain.
Kristy carefully parted the dresses in front of her. This revealed a small clearing in the dresses, like one between trees deep in the woods.
A woman stood in the middle of it.
It was Gina. She was wearing a worn-looking house dress. Her face was wet with tears. There were scratch marks down her cheeks, from her own fingernails.
She looked blearily at Kristy. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“This is a dream,” Kristy told her. “And I’m going to wake up now. You should, too.”
“God, you’re dumb,” Gina said. She sounded tired, wretched, old. She sat down abruptly on the floor. “Of course it’s not a dream. This is how it always is.”
Chapter
49
The rain was still lashing down outside the Tap. It still wasn’t making any difference to the fog. After the things Val had told us, this combination felt less strange—in one way at least, but a lot stranger in many others. It was nearly dark now.
I stepped out, staying under the awning. Ken joined me. Through the noise of rain hammering onto the fabric above our heads, I heard barking, some distance away. The sounds were very low, however, spread far apart.
“That’s not really a dog, is it,” Molly said.
The sounds suddenly got closer together and higher in pitch, until they sounded much more like hysterical laugher.
“Nope,” Ken said.
I turned to Val, still sitting inside at the table. “Which way should we go?”
She shrugged. “I have no idea where your friends are, Nolan. They probably don’t know either at this point. Like I said, the only person who—”
“I heard. But why does Alaina have power over them?”
“Witches do. Sometimes. It’s the reason they were tolerated down the ages. They arrange for these things to get what they want, to keep the peace. Objects. Animals. Even people, sometimes. Children. It’s not nice, but that’s the way it works. And that’s why they were never trusted, and often made to live outside town. Put there to form a barrier against the outside things, like a human stop sign.”
“Olsen’s,” I said. “That abandoned bar up the road. What’s the history?”
“Her family used to own it. It was popular, in a sketchy way. Then some bad things happened there, and it was never the same. Closed a long time ago.”
“But why’s it outside town?”
“Bars often are,” Molly said. “Zoning, or to keep whatever happens there out of plain sight.”
“True. But what did Val just say? About living outside town?”
Val blinked. “Huh.”
“That really never occurred to you?”
“You’re losing me this time, Nolan,” Ken said.
“Kristy was right,” I said. “We know that. Alaina wasn’t out in the woods the whole time. Maybe the first two days. She got provisions and equipment from the twins after that, but they didn’t know where she was hiding out.”
“You think she was in that bar?”
“Because I wonder if that was the original site of her family’s house.”
“But the cops would have looked there, surely.”
“Of course—on day one. And maybe again on day two. When she wasn’t there. But then it’s been searched and proved empty, and nobody goes back. So she moves in.”
“Jesus,” Val said, looking pained. “It’s a shame I didn’t start talking to you guys earlier.”
“Doesn’t mean she’s there now,” I said. “But it’s a place to start—and on the way to her dad’s house. Matter of fact, it might make as much sense to start with him.”
“True,” Ken said. “We assumed he was boarding up the house last night to keep things out. It could be he was doing it to try to keep Alaina in.”
“It won’t have worked. And you’ll get nothing from Bryan Hixon,” Val said. “He’s spent the last eighteen months trying to stop Alaina from going down a road she can’t avoid.”
“Didn’t her mother die in a car accident, while drunk?” I asked. “Maybe that was the road he was trying to steer her off.”
“It’s not an easy life. That’s why the Knack is here to help.”
“How’d that work out with Alaina’s mom?”
“I wasn’t here then.”
“You’re here now.”
Val looked down at the floor, breathed out heavily. Then stood up. “Okay, you’re right. Let’s go talk to him.”
As soon as the Tap door was locked behind us, the mist got thicker.
“Quicker the better,” Ken said. “It’s going to be full dark soon, and I doubt that will improve matters. If we can’t see anything, then what we think we see is going to get even worse.”
Yet none of us moved. It didn’t feel good out there. It felt unsafe. It felt like walking into an after-hours bar on a back street in some city you didn’t know, and being able to tell immediately that strangers were not welcome. The kind of place where there would be old blood stains on the carpet and a stray tooth in the urinal, where people always left in a worse state than when they arrived and yet still came back again. Maybe that’s no coincidence. Maybe there are unseen things living in some of those bars.
I went to the edge of where I was still protected from the rain. I thought I heard the sound of crying, not too far distant—but a gust of wind swept it away. “Let’s go.”
We started off in single file, keeping close to the wall. Within seconds we were soaked to the skin again. The rain was like a hail of tiny little bullets. It didn’t take long to get to the corner. The rain suddenly got even harder, and thicker, pouring in from the right.
I turned against it and saw why. A large fountain loomed in the mist at the crossroads, benches around it. It had been there before, briefly, but was now much bigger, and the wind was so fierce that it was blowing the water as far as where we were standing. It made no rational sense for it to be there, which might mean it made some other kind of sense, but I was too beset to work out what it might be.
We ran across the road. As we reached the other side there was a loud,
low thudding noise from a couple of streets away—accompanied by a shudder that was enough to send Val sprawling. I grabbed her arm and pulled her with me to the side of the next block, where we all huddled together for shelter against the wall.
Molly had to speak loudly against the sound of the wind. “What’s big enough to do that?”
“Nothing,” I said. “It’s not a real vibration. But it means it’s something we really don’t want to see, even if we could.”
“You learn fast,” Val said.
“Have you dealt with something like this before?”
“No. Much smaller events. A single demon on the loose. People think they hear a knocking, or see a ghost. That’s the most I’ve ever had to cope with.”
“So you have no useful advice at this point?”
“Sorry.” The thudding sound again, but with a tearing note to it—and it seemed closer this time. “Keep moving. That’s all I’ve got.”
As soon as we were around the corner the wind dropped. The mist opened up for a moment, too—but only to reveal that the next stretch of road was gone.
In its place was an expanse of tiles that stretched from building to building across both sidewalks and the street. The tiles were utilitarian, cream-colored, once shiny but now scuffed and chipped.
An object drifted across the space. A shopping cart—one of those that are fashioned like a small truck or fire engine—designed for you to push small children around in, to keep them happy or at least patient while you wander.
It sailed down the street toward us in a series of graceful revolutions, wheels squeaking. When it was level with us it stopped. We watched it carefully. It was motionless for five seconds—and then hurtled in our direction.
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