The Last Safe Place

by Ninie Hammon

  “This cabin we’re going to, why’s it called St. Elmo’s Fire?” Ty asked.

  “Don’t know. I guess because whoever built it saw St. Elmo’s fire there.”

  She saw his next question coming. “And I don’t know a whole lot more than that about St. Elmo’s fire, either. It’s some kind of weird weather thing. A bright blue or violet glow appears on tall, pointed things like lightning rods or the masts of ships, even leaves or grass or the tips of a cow’s horns. Garrett and I called it firesies and we wanted to see it so bad we stuck a broken fishing pole in the ground for it to land on.”

  Where did that come from? Garrett and I never—

  But they did! She didn’t remember it until she heard herself say it. Gabriella felt a sudden chill so dramatic she looked up to see if a cloud had passed in front of the sun. The image of the “firesies-stick” the two of them had erected with a little pile of rocks took up her whole mind, shoved every other thought and idea and feeling to the side and glowed there in quiet brilliance. The hair on her arms stood up, like it had done that day from the static electricity in the air. Thunder rumbled, but they’d ignored it until it was too late and—

  The thought stopped there. Beyond was a walled-off place, a bunker sealed tight. She never went there, never got anywhere near it, knew that locked inside was the single worst thing that had ever happened to her.

  And the best thing, too.

  Gabriella froze. Yes, the best thing! But what was it? She had no idea. You always paid a price when you built a wall and hid life behind it. When she locked up the dark memories in a bunker she’d locked up that memory, too. In fact, right now, standing here looking up at Mount Princeton, was the first time she had gotten near enough to the bunker to recall there was more locked inside than horror.

  She had known all along that was one of the risks in coming back here. That by being in the place where it had happened, she would somehow break the seal on the bunker and all the awful would flow out of it in a putrid stench. She’d told herself that was the chance she had to take because this was the only place she could think of that she believed her family would be safe. But standing here, looking up at Mount Princeton, she realized that perhaps that wasn’t the only reason she’d come. Perhaps she wanted to be here because some part of her yearned to know what else lay in the bunker in her mind besides the nightmare, wanted to set the enchanted memory free.

  Oh, how she hoped Ty could make some enchanted memories of his own here. He was certainly entitled to beauty and freedom. He had earned a reprieve from the sentence of darkness surrounding his parents and what had happened between them.

  She reached up and ran her hand over the scar on her cheek, then saw that Ty was watching her with an odd look on his face and she jerked her hand away. Maybe that was his bunker memory—hiding under his bed while his father had made good on his threat to Gabriella to “make yo outsides look like yo insides.”

  CHAPTER 5

  A FLEA WITH A PET ELEPHANT. THAT WAS BUENA VISTA, COLORADO. The mammoth, hulking presence of Mount Princeton towered more than six thousand feet above the little town, dwarfed everything to insignificance, cast a gigantic shadow across the valley floor that grew bigger as the sun progressed down the western sky.

  Bueny was a typical Colorado small town with wide streets, neat houses, crisp, clean air and lots of pickup trucks. What had changed since Gabriella last saw it was the artsy, touristy flavor of the place. It seemed there were galleries, RV parks and an outdoor outfitting store every five feet.

  When she drove slowly down the town’s main street, taking it all in, the juxtaposition of cultures was jarring. A leather-faced man wearing scuffed cowboy boots and a sweat-ringed Stetson … next to a yuppie in the latest trendy hiking gear, featuring pants with a dozen zippered pockets and a jacket with a hole for the cord of her iPod ear-phones … beside a shaggy college kid who carried everything he owned in a gigantic backpack and very likely smelled of campfire smoke and marijuana.

  Theo, of course, kept up a running commentary of disparaging remarks: “Check out that bowlegged cowboy. Stand him up next to a knock-kneed woman and they’d spell OX. They start dancing, it look like a egg-beater.”

  Gabriella stopped at the BP station on US Route 285 so Theo could do his business. The car motor had begun to knock sometime late yesterday afternoon and the sound had gotten so much louder today that turning off the ignition felt uncomfortably like a mercy killing.

  As she stood beside the ailing Honda waiting for Theo, she allowed the feel of this hauntingly familiar place to settle over her again. She had gotten an odd sunburn the first few days of the summer she’d spent in the mountains years ago. Dressed in jeans and a jacket—it was cold at 11,000 feet!—the Pittsburgh-white skin of her hands and face had gotten fried. Cool air, hot sun—like being in two different climates at the same time.

  She’d repeatedly warned Theo and Ty—mostly Theo with his bare-as-a-baby’s-butt head—about the sun. And that they might have headaches in the higher elevation, usually a result of dehydration.

  “You need to drink lots of liquid. And it’ll take a week, maybe longer, to get used to the air with less oxygen. Don’t overexert yourselves.”

  “So you sayin’ if a bear come running out the woods after me, I’s supposed to walk away slowly?”

  “Are there bears?” Ty’s eyes were huge.

  “Yep, black bears. You leave them alone, they’ll leave you alone—just don’t get between a mama bear and her cub.”

  “Are there mountain lions?” the boy asked.

  “Probably. They keep to themselves, won’t come anywhere near the cabin. You didn’t ask about fish—the finest mountain trout in the whole world! And an ice-cold stream where you can fish for them.”

  Ty was ready to jump out of his skin with excitement. She could barely get him to eat his enchiladas at the Coyote Cantina even by bribing him with honey-filled sapodillas for dessert. Theo didn’t eat but a bite or two of his tacos, scowled at the waitress when his complaint about the heat in Colorado was greeted with the standard response: “Oh, it’s not so bad—it’s a dry heat.”

  But his poor appetite might have been more than his dismay over their geography. Gabriella had noticed he didn’t look right, couldn’t put her finger on exactly what it was, though. It appeared he’d lost some weight, too, got around slower. She supposed that was to be expected when your age was pushing three quarters of a century. Maybe it hadn’t been such a good idea to bring him here. Maybe …

  Then it banged into her mind why they’d come. For a moment, she’d forgotten about the specter that stalked them. They weren’t here on vacation. They’d come to a refuge; they were running for their lives.

  Sticking to her cross-country strategy of staying, shopping in small, out-of-the-way places, she found a small jeep rental dealership in the shadow of a big one. Twenty minutes later, she walked out with a set of keys. For an additional fee, the owner had agreed to allow her to leave her car parked out back until the end of the summer. It took half an hour to pare their few belongings down to what they could jam into the jeep and still have room for passengers and supplies. The rest they stored in the trunk of the Honda.

  Ty called shotgun. Theo sat like a puddleglum in the back with P.D. and the luggage. Gabriella tried to look a whole lot more self-assured than she actually felt when she slid in behind the wheel. Oh, she could drive the thing. The whole time she was at Carnegie Mellon she’d dated a guy whose hobby was four-wheeling and she’d piloted many an excursion in the mountains of West Virginia to explore the surface-of-the-moon terrain of strip mines. Still, the mountain they were about to tackle was another thing altogether.

  “Buckle up,” she said.

  “And make sure yo seats and tray tables is in they upright and locked position,” Theo said.

  The jeep lurched forward a little awkwardly and then they were off toward the cabin that Theo had launched a last-ditch argument against while he moved his uneaten tacos
around on his plate at lunch.

  “Why we goin’ to a place Mr. Gestapo Wannabe might be able to connect to you? Don’t it make more sense to throw a dart at a map, pick somewhere you ain’t never been, rent a house and lock ourselves inside? How he gone find us if we done that?”

  Gabriella explained yet again that there was no possible way for Yesheb to connect her to the house in the mountains, but she had to grant that it certainly wasn’t as anonymous as picking a random house in some arbitrary city. What she was doing didn’t make as much logical sense as Theo’s suggestion, but for reasons she couldn’t explain she was certain that her family’s safety rested in something more than mere anonymity.

  They headed south out of Buena Vista on US 285. When they passed a collection of buildings encircled by a tall fence on the outskirts of town, Gabriella answered Theo’s unasked question.

  “Uh huh, that’s a prison. The Buena Vista Correctional Facility—houses about nine hundred medium security inmates.”

  She shouted because the crisp, fresh air that whipped through the topless vehicle on the open road carried her words away. She wasn’t sure Theo heard her.

  “The wind’s blowing your hair, Mom,” Ty didn’t quite have deadpan down but he was close to pulling it off. “Maybe you should roll up the window.”

  The freshly scrubbed breeze on her face and the laughter of her son in her ears vanished. That’s what Yesheb had said—exactly what Yesheb had said—that day when he appeared out of nowhere on a street corner in Orlando and leaned into her rented convertible while she sat helpless at a stop light.

  The remark had been the tipping point. The moment when she saw with chilling clarity that under the trappings of intelligence and good manners resided a being that was neither rational nor civil. That simple attempt at humor had exposed him.

  Because he couldn’t pull it off! It was so clearly a rehearsed behavior, like a windup toy. He couldn’t do humor because humor is the exclusive domain of human beings and Yesheb didn’t believe he was human. And maybe he was right.

  Gabriella is cold and uncomfortable, seated in a high-backed wooden chair with no cushion in a room that with only minor alterations could function as a meat locker. But Bernie is in charge and concern for Gabriella’s comfort never makes it to the higher centers of his brain. All his calculations are focused on the most efficient way to shuttle readers past Gabriella in a freight-train rush.

  “Just sign and move them through,” he tells her. “No small talk. It spoils the image and the image sells books. All your readers think you’re some kind of mythical creature—and a being from the Endless Black Beyond wouldn’t exchange recipes for bean dip with a fan. Keep your mouth shut and the line moving.”

  The signing is in a little store called Twice Told Tales on Atwood Street in the Oakland section of Pittsburgh. It’s a lovely bookstore, smells of old paper and stale pipe tobacco, a nurturing environment where patrons can browse, sit in overstuffed chairs, read poetry, discuss universal themes or existentialism or Stephen King’s latest best seller over a cup of Earl Grey that has tiny flakes of tea in the bottom.

  Gabriella is “in costume”—witch-black dress, long straight hair, pointed bangs, claw-like fingernails and cherry red lips on deathly pale skin. And the scar, of course, revealed in all its glory—no makeup. The combined effect of the author and the atmosphere is conducive to fantasy, so it’s easy for the fans to suspend disbelief and buy into the illusion that it’s all real.

  Cult fanatics have been camped outside the bookstore since early the evening before because the cramped space will limit the number of people who can get their books autographed, though Bernie does everything short of using a cattle prod to keep the crowd moving past Gabriella so their signed copies can be rung up at the old-fashioned cash register in the corner, the kind with buttons that really does ring out “cha-ching” with every purchase.

  Gabriella’s back hurts, her hand is cramped and her butt is numb. She glances at the grandfather clock in the corner and groans. Two more hours before she can go home and get out of this Halloween get-up, make SpaghettiOs for Ty and help him with his homework before bed.

  “… was so scared I had to sleep with the lights on for a month,” says a small, white-haired woman who resembles Tweety Bird’s grandmother. Gabriella merely nods, does not connect or respond. She has gone mercifully brain dead, has vanished into a kind of eyes-open coma where she’s only vaguely aware of the herd of readers passing in front of her.

  Then she spots him. He is tall, six three or four, and stands ramrod straight, dressed in black—turtleneck, sports coat and pants—with a small silver pentagram on a chain around his neck. His hair is pale blonde, his features patrician perfect, his eyes a shade of blue that seems to shift as she looks into them, from light ice blue to the turgid gray-blue of a stormy sea.

  A smile that reveals perfect teeth appears on his face as soon as she makes eye contact. It is a crooked smile, though, odd looking, like he’s taken lessons, worked really hard to learn all the muscle groups he must employ to pull his lips back in a particular fashion that’s defined as “smiling.” But he hasn’t got it quite right so one side of his mouth draws back farther than the other. There is no warmth in that smile. No warmth in him, either. In fact, as he steps up to her table he seems to bring cold with him, as a door left open on a blustery day allows a chill wind to blow through.

  And darkness, too, only that’s crazy. How can a man give off darkness like a candle gives off light? She senses something predatory, too, a subtle new pressure, the way the air feels before a violent thunderstorm.

  “Good day, my dear Zara,” he says, totally deadpan. That surprises her. He doesn’t strike her as the kind of man who indulges in illusion.

  “I’m not Zara.” For some reason, it is important to her to make the distinction between reality and fiction. “I’m Rebecca Nightshade.” Which, of course, isn’t really true, either. “Zara is a character I made up.” She tries to make light of it. “Me Rebecca …” She taps the top book on the stack. “Her Zara. Me real, her fantasy.”

  He stands perfectly still, in quiet confidence—only for some reason it feels like the poised stillness before a pounce, the breathlessness of a coiled snake.

  “Your name isn’t Rebecca Nightshade.” His voice sounds like it comes from the bottom of an oil drum or some other deep, dark, echoing place. And there is a certainty in his tone that is unnerving. She had worked hard to keep the shield of the pseudonym between her and the prying public. “And Zara is no fantasy. She is as real as the beauty of my beloved Babylon and as old as the Endless Black Beyond, a kingdom she will rule with her mate by her side.”

  Gabriella catches sight of Bernie at the edge of her vision. He is grinning.

  “You got that right,” she says to the man standing before her, but she looks pointedly and defiantly at Bernie. “Zara is as real as Babylon and we both know how real that is.” She turns back to the tall, blonde stranger. “We’ve already opened the twenty-first century, taken the tag off and everything. Don’t you think it’s a little late to send it back?”

  Out of the corner of her eye she sees Bernie scowl. He doesn’t like her humor. It makes her human and real and neither characteristic appeals to him personally nor satisfies his purposes. Bernie doesn’t like for her to break character. That’s the main reason she does it.

  But the man before her never blinks. There is something chilling about his astonishing good looks. His features are too well-defined, as sharp as a hatchet, poster boy for the Hitler Youth.

  “Sweet Zara, you’re even more lively than I pictured, with even more sparkle. A bit untamed to be sure, but that spirit can be bridled.” He manages to make “bridled” sound menacing. “I’ve been looking for you for millennia. Now, our time has come.”

  Okay, this guy is definitely certifiable. Gorgeous, but crackers.

  Gabriella picks up a copy of The Bride of the Beast and opens it to the cover page in the front. She reach
es for a pen and says formally, “I’m sorry, sir, but you’re holding up the line. Do you want me to write something in particular or just sign it?”

  He leans down close and she smells a hint of garlic his breath mint can’t disguise, a fresh lime aftershave and some other scent that eludes her. It is an earthy smell, like fresh plowed sod or damp leaves, but unpleasant. Moldy leaves, perhaps. And dirt from an open—

  “Write: ‘To my Master and Lord. I will honor you, serve you, obey you and bear you a son. We will reign together, the Beast and his Bride.’”

  His voice is thick and clotted with urgency; his breathing labored. The cold he emanates chills Gabriella to the bone and she begins to tremble. She drops her pen, yanks her hand away from the book and looks up into his face. That’s a mistake. His eyes seize hers and lock on. She falls into their frigid depths, deeper and deeper into the blue that darkens through purple to black.

  His eyes hold her captive. She is only set free when he drops his gaze—like she’d seized an electric cable and couldn’t let go until the juice was turned off. She slumps back in her chair gasping.

  “I will see you soon, my Love,” he says. “I will come for you when it is time.” He straightens up, turns and walks away—leaving the un-autographed book lying beneath her trembling hands.

  Gabriella feels tears well in her eyes and spill soundlessly down her cheeks as she watches him go. She has never been so frightened in her life. Needlessly frightened. The man did absolutely nothing menacing, yet everything was menacing. An image blooms of the hobbits, Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin, crouching against the embankment as the Black Rider sniffs for them on the road above. Sick, mindless fear. How could anything human possibly be so innocently terrifying?

  To Bernie’s vast dismay, she lurches to her feet and retreats to the ladies room and refuses to come out until he clears the bookstore. Then she sneaks furtively out the back door and into a waiting limousine to go home.