by Grant, Ann
“Bullshit, Amy, don’t do that. He’s coming back. He’s going to be here at eight in the morning and he wants to see you.”
He’d found my house. He could have hurt Karin.
I raced down the road with my heart pounding in my throat and my blood roaring in my ears. He’d found my house, but I couldn’t give the device back to him. I couldn’t. Not now, not this late in the game, not when he was torturing people on an island, not when I almost had the answers. Maybe I still had a few hours. By the time I opened the door to the professor’s house, I’d shoved my worries about Luna and the posters I was going to make aside and returned to my obsession.
* * *
The two men were still in the boat. The sky had lightened to the silver color of the sea, so daybreak had to be near. They were coming up on the indistinct shape of another island. I hoped they hadn’t turned around in the fog and ended up back at the same hellhole they’d just escaped. The fog lifted as we came closer and to my relief I saw the waves rushing over a sandy shore. No rocks, no walled rainforest. They’d arrived at a different island.
Antoine threw his legs over the side of the boat and dropped into the surf. “I don’t see a fucking portal, but if it’s here, it’s going up in smoke.”
The prisoner leaped out after him. Both men pulled the boat to shore with grim doggedness, hauled it past the tide line, and stood there, gasping like half-dead fish, until the prisoner’s knees buckled and he collapsed in the sand.
Antoine stared at the palm trees beyond the beach. “Get up, man, get up. There’s a house. I don’t care if Granny Psycho lives there, I’m going to ring the fucking doorbell and get myself a cell phone and a rum and Coke.”
He hoisted the prisoner to his feet. He was right about the house. The white stucco walls and red tiled roof of a luxurious compound appeared through the palms.
The men made it all the way up the beach to the portico outside the main walls when a huge Weimaraner burst around the corner, growling and barking.
Antoine waved his arms. “Hey, no, no, what is this shit? You get away from me.”
The dog bared its teeth. Seconds later, an elegant man with a shaved head wearing loose black clothing came out of the house and gave a hand signal to the dog. It stopped barking and stood guard by his side, ears pricked, but it still looked ready to rip Antoine’s throat out. The man in black folded his arms across his chest. Silver earrings glinted against his blue-black skin.
Antoine gave the man a cagey look. “We’ve been in an accident. You know, we could use some food and—”
“It took you long enough to get here,” the man said.
My heart raced.
“Are you who I think you are?” Antoine asked.
“I might be.” The man’s lips widened over huge teeth. “Come in if you dare.”
Antoine took a step up the beach. “Well, maybe we will, since you’re inviting us. Why don’t you tell Poochie here to take a hike.”
The man’s smile grew even bigger. He snapped his fingers and the dog trotted out of sight. We followed him through a wrought iron gate to an enormous walled courtyard filled with mist. I didn’t see any rum and Coke or cell phones, but a fire burned in a pit in the center of the courtyard. Antoine stared at the flames with satisfaction. If he wanted to torch the place, here was the start button.
The mist obscured two staircases on either side of the fire pit. I floated behind the prisoner as he approached the first one. Wide, worn stone steps led up into even thicker clouds of mist. The prisoner peered up the steps. Distant movement resembled ships on a raging ocean, but clouds swirled across the scene so it was impossible to see anything else. The steps in the second staircase descended into roiling clouds that were just as thick.
Antoine spun around. “Okay, no bullshit now. Where is it?”
The man’s horrible grin kept growing. “If you don’t change your direction, you’re likely to end up where you’re headed.”
“What kind of stupid thing is that to say?”
“That’s an ancient Chinese proverb.”
“It’s those smoky ass stairs, right? Who are you, anyway?” Antoine grabbed a pair of tongs by the fire pit and fished out a burning log.
“The keeper of the Pacific Portal. You came here to destroy it—”
“No shit, Sherlock.” Antoine lifted the burning log. “Where do those stairs go?”
The man in black stepped closer. “One staircase goes to the past. Cross those stairs and follow in the dust behind the Ethiopian kings of old, Julius Caesar and Hannibal… or Muhammad, Jesus, and the Buddha. Go a little further and see the beginning of agriculture in 10,000 B.C. Keep going two and a half million years and witness the start of the Stone Age, when mankind first chipped river rocks to make sharp edged tools. Go too far and you might find yourself standing in earth’s fiery, primordial ooze.”
He moved between the huge staircases and crossed his arms. “Or you can take some steps into the future and discover which stocks are selling and when the cures for mankind’s deadliest diseases will be discovered. Go too far and you might find yourself in a world where no human being can live… the question is, how far do you go?”
His voice lowered with a rich resonance. “Do you know where you’re going, Antoine? Do you know where you want to be? You can find out now. In one direction the steps lead to your past, where you can take the road you really wanted, this time say the right words… to Chantelle, the woman you should have married… she’s still there in the mist… you broke her heart, but you can go back again… and see the son you left when you were nineteen… and in the other direction is the future where you can find out where you belong and where your fortune lies….”
Antoine’s mouth hung open, but he shook his head. “Chantelle, huh? That’s all I need, to put up with her big mouth again. And you stay out of my business with my son. Here I am, listening to your line of bull, and they cut my ear off. They’re coming from the future, right? Where’s the fucking future, up the stairs?”
The keeper gave him another horrible smile. “That’s what most people think.”
“I’m gonna torch them both then.” Antoine hurled the burning log toward the ascending stairs, but his jaw dropped when the heavy log vanished in midair. Thick mist poured out of the portal.
The prisoner lunged forward and dragged him away.
“No one can destroy the portal.” The keeper’s rolling laugh grew louder and louder until it seemed to fill the courtyard. Clouds of mist billowed everywhere.
* * *
The prisoner dragged Antoine through two French doors into the house and slammed them shut. Clouds blew against the panes. The keeper’s laughter boomed on and on while endless mist poured out of the portal.
Antoine gaped through the doors. “Whoa, you see that log disappear?”
The prisoner ignored him, raced past the luxurious white furniture, and ripped open inlaid drawers and cabinets, but when he didn’t find what he was looking for, he scrambled into the kitchen where he came up with a gleaming set of cooking knives.
Antoine grabbed one. “Yeah, take his ass out and burn the whole place down.”
The prisoner frantically shook his head and pointed over his own shoulder.
“Ohhh, I see.” Antoine cocked his head. “I get it, I get it. You want me to cut that thing off your back. Well, why the fuck not. I’ve sliced up a few thousand fish, so why not. You get mine and I’ll get yours.”
They headed into the dining room.
“You do me first. Just don’t cut out anything important, like my lungs, or I’ll have to kill you.” Antoine swept the china and crystal off the table, ripped his shirt open, and flopped down on his stomach.
I floated behind the prisoner’s shoulders as he picked up the knife. Antoine had worn a hood at some point and managed to tear most it off, but the base was still surgically attached to his skin. The prisoner didn’t bother with the remnants of the hood and went for the device instead. It was id
entical to the one I had, and when he lifted the corner, I saw the probe that spread under Antoine’s skin. Its monstrous tentacles branched out like raised veins from the man’s shoulders to his spine. I was lucky it hadn’t done that to me.
The prisoner began to saw through the probe where it joined the device. Several unbearable minutes passed. The sawing sound of the knife went on and on until the probe snapped. Taking his time, the prisoner set the box down on the floor as if he was afraid it might explode. Veinlike tentacles under Antoine’s skin began to blacken where the probe had been severed.
Antoine rolled off the table and slapped the prisoner on the shoulder. “You did good, man. You did good. You got that thing off and you didn’t do any damage. Now it’s your turn. Give me the knife.”
* * *
I was back on the couch in the professor’s house. Reeling, I wrenched the probe from my wrist as the now familiar nausea rolled through me. I had to go back before Antoine’s knife ended the connection forever. I raced through the symbols, not even sure what I was touching.
Tingling pain spread through my skin. As soon as the living room walls dissolved into brilliant sunlight, I found myself alone on the beach. I couldn’t feel the water, but the waves foamed through my legs and rushed out to sea. I took a few steps. The incoming waves struck the sand and filled my footprints before the undertow smoothed the sand out again.
Footprints. For the first time here, my body had some substance. I’d travelled without the invisible wall that had always separated me from the experience. The waves were crashing on the shore without the strange distant sound they’d always had before. I was really here.
Several hundred yards ahead the white stucco compound that housed the portal stood in a forest of palms. Mist billowed over the red tiled roof. The prisoner was still in there. My heart raced. I was finally going to see his face and discover his name and stop it all right now.
I half floated, half ran over the sand. I had to hurry. Faster, faster, before it was too late, up the beach, through the dunes, over the portico, to the windows, toward the two men inside the house, one with the knife, the other face down on the table.
Antoine was still cutting the probe.
“Who are you?” I shouted through the window.
A growl sounded behind me. The Weimaraner.
“Who are you?” I shouted again.
The Weimaraner’s lips curled over its fangs. I got ready to kick it in the snout when the prisoner lifted his head. Black eyes, a broken jaw, bruised cheekbones, skin sunburned purple, split lips. A scream rose in my throat.
“Be still before I cut you up,” Antoine told him.
The prisoner met my eyes.
“Naaaaat,” he shouted.
“Ben, no, no, no!”
The connection snapped.
A force ripped me from the island to the professor’s house. Silent walls and silent furniture. No sand, no wind, no sea; no Ben, no answers. Our whole lives before the accident washed away before me, his face, his voice, the loving touch of his hand on my skin, our promises to each other, and now this nightmare. I wept and screamed and pounded the couch until my screams filled every room and no more tears were left in my body.
Chapter 18
“I want to buy a gun,” I told the man in the gun store. I put my Visa on the counter between a taxidermied squirrel and a box of dog licenses. The place was Dead Animal Kingdom: deer heads mounted on every wall, a furry deer butt mounted between two stags, a stiff red fox with a surprised look on its face and a “Made in America” baseball hat.
“What you looking for?” The man put a case of ammo down beside a carousel of rifles.
“Self-protection,” I said. Something to blow somebody’s balls to the wall.
“Well, we have these.” He pulled out two pretty pink stun guns from below the counter. “Mini stun gun, 600,000 volts, or this one, 800,000 volts. You a college girl? Both of these’ll stop anybody coming at you in the parking lot.”
“No, I want something with some power to it.”
He stared at my wrists. “Looks like you burned yourself under them gloves.”
“That’s right, I burned myself. What about that one? No, the big one next to it.”
He brought the gun over, a black beauty that could take out anything with a beating heart. “You got a carry permit?”
“No, what do I do about that?” The gun felt cool and powerful in my hand.
“You buy the gun now or you buy it later. Either way, you go to the sheriff’s office.” He took a greasy pencil and scrawled an address on the back of a receipt. “Go in and fill out an application, which takes four to six weeks, and they notify you by mail when it’s approved, and then you go in again for your photo and you pay the fee.”
Ten minutes later, I walked out with a black Desert Eagle Mark XIX .357 Magnum with a 6 inch barrel and a box of ammo, crumpled up the address, and tossed it out the window. It was way, way too late for me to be a good girl.
The whole thing was a monstrous lie. I’d realized that after I finally stopped screaming and forced myself to face reality. Ben wasn’t lying around with a broken jaw on some crazy island in the Pacific. He’d died on a rural road in Adams County, Pennsylvania, burned to death after his car flipped over in a ditch. They’d pronounced him dead at the scene and identified him by his dental records. You can fake a lot of things in life, and everybody knows what they are, but you can’t fake dental records. You can’t. As much as I wanted to believe he was alive, yearned for it with my whole heart, I knew he was gone. I’d gone to his funeral. I was there when they buried him in the St. Thomas cemetery.
Somehow John Savenue had lifted Ben’s likeness from the obituary or somewhere else and he was using it in a sick fantasy program. The shadows and the whispers didn’t fit into the picture, but I couldn’t get past Ben’s death and dental records. And if John Savenue thought he was going to show up at my house and threaten my sister again, he was in for the thrill of a lifetime when I found him first.
I rang Mike. “I want to talk to you about something.”
“About us?” Cars rushed by in the background. He had to be out on the road again with those stupid shoes.
“No, Mike, I need a favor. You’re still collecting shoes?”
“You want to donate something?” The hope trailed out of his voice.
“No. I donated Ben’s boots at the college, and I’ve changed my mind, and I want to keep them.” I took the gun out while I held the cell phone.
“I’ve picked all those up. I’ve done Gettysburg.”
“You could look for them.”
Silence, then he said, “I just don’t think they’re around now. I mean, what kind of boots are we talking about?”
“Boots, brown boots. You’re taking them to the Grasslands, right? I want to meet you out there to look for them.”
“No, John said nobody can go in there except me because of the construction.”
“Okay, then I’ll stay in the Jeep and tell you what they look like.”
“I guess that’d be all right,” he said, sounding like he didn’t want to do it. I knew he was agreeing just to see me. “I should be out there at ten. That’s my last run.”
“I’ll be in the parking lot.” I put the cell phone on the seat by the gun and headed down the Fairfield Road to pick up Nikki. I wasn’t leaving her out of this fight.
Once I was in the professor’s house, I took the device from the closet and raced through it one more time. It wasn’t working, not in the same way. The probe didn’t shoot out and only half the symbols appeared.
But I found something interesting, a map with a point of light that had to be the Grasslands, and another marker in the deep state park woods behind Catoctin Furnace in Maryland, and more markers through the mountains that ran up the coast of the United States into the Canadian wilderness. The map disappeared, though, and I couldn’t remember how I’d found and wasn’t able to bring it up again.
So be i
t. I hid the device in the closet. I wasn’t going to give John Savenue a chance to muscle it away from me. One last look at the quiet house and I jumped in the Jeep with Nikki in the back and the gun on the seat beside me and drove down the long driveway into the night. I was taking my own car this time. I was never hiding from him again.
We sped past miles of isolated farmland toward the mountains. After the split to Cashtown and the sign to the Grasslands, I took the road into the woods, dimmed my headlights, and opened the windows.
Long, wolfish shadows spread across the road as the whispers rushed past us. We drove until the woods thinned out and the land opened up under the eerie light from the dome that radiated over every hollow and hill. My gut instincts told me John Savenue was holed up in there like a snake.
Another curve in the road, and I turned off the headlights, passed the little white cross at the scene of the accident, swung into the gravel parking lot, and idled the Jeep by the doors with my hand on the gun. Mike’s empty Toyota sat beside the construction equipment on the far edge of the lot. He was still out in the company van.
I turned off the ignition to listen. The whispering grew louder, the voices saying something over and over in an indecipherable stream of words that blended with the sounds of the night, an undercurrent beneath the groans of trees scraping against each other, the distant rush of faraway cars, the stirring of animals in the fields. Urgent, urgent, help me, help me, no, no, no.
Nikki growled and kept her dark eyes on the window. The fur bristled on her back.
Ten minutes later, headlights washed over the ground. The van pulled in, circled the lot, and backed up to the doors. Mike’s pale face peered out the window. He jumped down, rolled out a hand truck, and loaded it with big cardboard boxes, his breath puffing out in icy clouds.
“Come on, Nikki,” I told her and got out with the gun hidden in my coat.