Blink & Caution

by Tim Wynne-Jones

  “I’m sorry,” you say, and immediately wished you hadn’t.

  “Not as sorry as I am,” she says. “I am the sorriest excuse for a human being whoever walked the earth.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “Yeah, thanks but —”

  “No, I mean it. I don’t know what happened — how it happened. And you don’t have to tell me or anything — I’m not asking you to. But it was a mistake, wasn’t it?”

  “Was it?”

  “It must have been. I know it was.”

  “You do, huh? Suddenly you’re Mr. Know-It-All.”

  “Yeah, I am.” You swallow, rub at your eyes. “I’m not stupid. I know you think I am, but I’m not.”

  She frowns. “I never said you were.”

  “You don’t have to. I can tell. But I don’t care. Because I’m not stupid.”

  “Okay, okay, you’re not stupid. And I’m not the sorriest excuse for a human being. There, are you happy?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “No. I’d be happy if you let me drive.”

  She laughs, and you like the sound of it. You settle back into your seat. You didn’t get much sleep last night in your drop-cloth bed. And today has been like no day you’ve ever even dreamed of — the third day of the weirdness. You yawn — a big one — but keep your eyes on the road, just in case she decides to veer off it and plunge the car into a lake and kill you both.

  “Turn left at the T intersection coming up in two-point-five kilometers.”

  “Anyone ever tell you you’re hot?” you say.

  “Go back to sleep,” says Kitty.

  “I was talking to Direction Lady,” you say. “And I wasn’t asleep.”

  You feel good. Where’s Captain Panic? Must have jumped ship. You don’t feel one bit of badness inside you out here on this winding highway heading north.

  “You are pretty hot,” you say.

  “Shut up,” she says, laughing.

  “Just not as hot as Direction Lady.”

  She laughs. That’s what you wanted. To hear her laugh.

  You’ve got this little job to do, right? You get to this place, park the Jeep, make your way down this private road until you get to the end of it, and there’s the lodge. See if anyone’s there, and get the hell out. Done. And, best of all, there’s two of you.

  “What if, like, somebody else is there?” you asked Alyson.

  She shrugged, and her eyebrows came together, what there was of them, because she’s plucked them right down to narrow gashes. “I don’t know,” she said. “Keep watching, I guess. You know what he looks like, right?”

  “Your father? Yeah.”

  “Well, if he is there — and if I’m right — he won’t be a prisoner. He’s bound to make an appearance sometime.”

  You nodded. Then you remembered something. “Right. He’ll have to come out sometime to use the can.”

  “Right.” She frowned, looked away, as if the memory of that outhouse haunted her all these years later. Then she snapped out of it. She looked at you like you were smart — like you’d been paying attention. Hell, yes! You’d been listening and looking and reading the signs like never before.

  The T intersection turns out to be pretty well the end of Sharbot Lake, even though Kitty didn’t exactly remember the beginning of it. There is no place to eat except a Petro-Can station at the junction of Highway 7. She pulls the car into the lot, and they get out to stretch and use the restroom. Inside, they stock up on chips and chocolate bars and sodas.

  The air is clean out here, even on a major thoroughfare. It’s been a while since Kitty has smelled clean air. But there isn’t time to stop now. Blink is antsy to get going. He pleads with her to let him drive, but she’s not taking any chances. They head off again, west like the lady says. It’s less than an hour away.

  “Turn right, two hundred meters.”

  “You got it, lady.”

  There’s a big stop sign at the corner of Highway 509, and somebody’s attached a yellow balloon to it. The balloon bops around in the wind.

  “Huh,” says Blink. He’s looking at it, too.

  “Somebody’s having a birthday party,” says Kitty. “That’s how folks know where to turn. Hey, why don’t we crash the party?”

  “Very funny,” says Blink.

  Above the yellow balloon is gray-green rock face, a craggy bit of cliff with a ghost-eye tree on the top of it.

  This is the last leg, and in between mouthfuls of Doritos and slurps of Cherry Coke, Blink has started talking excitedly.

  “Where are you going to go with your half of the take?” he says.

  “Moscow,” she says.

  “No, seriously.”

  “Who says I’m kidding? What about you?”

  “I don’t know. Hey, maybe I’ll go to Moscow, too. Maybe we could keep the Wrangler and, like, drive there.” Kitty’s mouthgapes. “Kidding,” says Blink.

  “Mr. Geography,” she says.

  He’s rocking back and forth in his seat like some kid on his way to a paintball competition.

  “Knock it off,” she says. But she’s picking up on his excitement, pressing down a little too hard on the accelerator. She catches a look at the speedometer and pulls back to the speed limit, which is good, because it means she doesn’t have to squeal to a stop when three deer burst from the bush at the side of the road. She swerves, and the Wrangler shimmies a bit as the brakes do their thing. Then she swears a whole lot.

  “You are so strung out,” says Blink.

  “I am not!” she says.

  “It’s cool,” he says. “No one got hurt.”

  This new enthusiasm of the boy’s is maddening. She liked it better when he was half asleep.

  “Are deer always that dumb?” he asks.

  “Always,” she says.

  Then suddenly he’s yelling. “Look at that!” And she almost slams on the brakes again, but he’s only pointing at a sign: a road to some settlement.

  “What about it?”

  “It wasn’t like a town or a village,” he says. “It was a ‘settlement.’ Like we’ve gone back in frigging time or something.”

  She lets out her breath in a long, slow exhalation. She is getting more and more nervous. Less than half an hour ago, she had been feeling good about being out in the open again. But now she feels a bad case of paranoia coming on — the playing out of the nightmare. She feels herself reverting to the girl she became in Toronto. Caution: Watch Your Step.

  “A settlement,” says Blink, shaking his head.

  “Yeah, and next we’ll be seeing ox carts,” says Kitty. “And guys with flintlock rifles.”

  “Whatever.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” she mutters.

  “Flintlock rifles?”

  “No!” she says. “Whatever. This whole setup. It stinks. You do know that, don’t you?”

  He stares at her. “Chill out,” he says.

  “No!” says Kitty. “Blink, I’m not sure about what you think is ahead, but I’ve got this really bad feeling it might be . . .”

  She can’t think of what to say.

  “A chance to make a million dollars?” he says.

  “Ha! I was thinking more along the lines of a Date with Destiny.” He doesn’t say anything at first, but she can almost hear him thinking. “What?” she says.

  “You didn’t see her,” he says. “Up close.”

  “I saw enough. She’s in on this.”

  “You didn’t see her when she cried,” he says.

  “You think a girl can’t fake cry? A girl can fake a lot of things if it gets her what she wants. What she thinks she wants.”

  “She wasn’t faking. I trust her.”

  “You trusted me,” says Kitty. “Look where that got you.”

  “Here,” he says.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Okay,” he says. “I trusted you. And I was right.”

  She doesn’t know what
to say to that. But it doesn’t matter because suddenly Brent is yelling at her again. “Stop! Holy shit! Stop!”

  She slams on the brakes, leaving a trail of rubber on the blacktop. Luckily no one is behind her. She eases the car onto the shoulder. “Are you trying to get us killed?” she says.

  “Look.”

  She looks, sees nothing. He jabs the air with his finger. She looks again, squints. There is a road sign. He’s pointing at the road sign. She reads it. Conboy Road.

  “I don’t get it,” she says.

  “Conboy,” he says. “That’s my name. Brent Conboy.”

  “So you’ve got your own road,” says Kitty.

  He nods. “I’ve never seen my name anywhere,” he says. “It’s, like, so cool.”

  She wants to say, So this is why you nearly gave me a heart attack, but she holds her tongue. She looks at him, sees his eyes shining as if that stupid tilted road sign was an omen or something. And she sort of gets it. “It’s like there’s this place in the world where you’ve got a name they put up on signs.”

  “Yeah,” he says.

  She stares at his profile until he looks at her. “Sorry,” she says.

  “For what?”

  She shrugs. She leans her forehead on the steering wheel, closes her eyes. She wills Spence to come down out of the sky and comfort her, lay his hand on her shoulder again. Then suddenly there is a hand on her shoulder.

  “You okay?” says Blink.

  “What do you think?”

  He squeezes her shoulder. “I think we don’t have much choice what to do. You know?” She nods. “Like, we’ve come this far.”

  She nods again. And she thinks just how far she’s come. How far back in time this car ride into nowhere really began.

  “Nothing’s going to happen,” he says. “Trust me.”

  “Oh, good,” she mutters. “Now I feel a whole lot better.”

  She checks over her shoulder, puts the car in drive, and pulls back onto 509. She concentrates on the road. This boy has such faith, she thinks. She doesn’t. She can only see that it is going to go badly. And here she is chauffeuring him to whatever badness lies ahead. How has this happened? Why has she crossed paths with this odd blinking boy? Then the answer comes to her: to tell him. To tell someone.

  “After what happened . . . after what I did . . .” She finds her mouth is dry. She remembers her soda, takes a swig.

  “I’m listening,” he says.

  “After that . . . what I was talking about . . . I felt like nothing was real. It was”— and this is new to her, the first time she’s thought of it —“it was as if I were the one who was dead. Ikilled my brother. But I killed myself, only I didn’t know it. And all this — everything that has happened since then is just . . .”

  “Purgatory?” says Blink. She glances at him nervously. “Right?” he asks her. She shrugs.

  “My family wasn’t all that religious,” she says. “I sort of know what purgatory is, but . . .”

  “It’s like this big chill-out,” says Blink. “God is so pure, he can’t look on any evil — not even the tiniest of sins. That’s what my mother used to say. So even if you’ve been this totally good person all your life, you’re probably not good enough for heaven. So you have to hang out in purgatory for whatever — a million years or two — to clean up your act.”

  A weak smile lights up his brown eyes. “Just because I didn’t pay attention in geography,” he says, “doesn’t mean I don’t know where purgatory is.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Grew up there. I mean, my mother was living in it already. And I guess the idea rubbed off on me.”

  Kitty doesn’t speak. There was more to say . . . or was there? What good was talking, anyway? Then she feels his eyes on her again and realizes that she likes it. Likes him checking on her, like a patient in a hospital who wakes up from time to time and there’s someone sitting beside her bed.

  “Is that sort of the place you feel you’re in?”

  “Maybe,” she says. “Walking around, waiting for someone to tell me, Oh, by the way, you’re dead.”

  She glances quickly at him, her eyes uneasy, as if maybe he’s the messenger with the news. But instead of saying anything, he reaches out and touches her again, softly on the arm. And this time she places her hand on his, squeezes it but not too tight.

  There is kindness in his face: all that hope brimming in his eyes! But then the person who would finally tell her she was dead probably would be an angel, she thinks.

  “Are you the one?” she says.

  “What?”

  “You know. Like I said.”

  He screws up his face. “The one who’s going to tell you you’re dead?”

  She frowns. “I guess not,” she says.

  “Well, don’t sound too disappointed.”

  She smiles and lets go of his hand.

  “I’m sort of in the same boat,” he says. “I mean, I feel like I’m not anywhere.”

  He tells her how he felt up there on the sixteenth floor of the Plaza Regent, as if none of what he was seeing was really happening — none of it real.

  “I had this dream the other night that instead of throwing me the room key, the guy named Tank actually noticed me standing in the ice room and shot me.”

  “Exactly!” says Kitty. “That’s what I meant.”

  “And everything after that was just trying to, you know, come to grips with being dead.”

  “I know. Which would explain why we’d come across a road with your name on it,” she says. “If it were true, I mean. Like we’re actually driving to somewhere that doesn’t exist on a mission that can’t be completed. That’s purgatory maybe.”

  Then Kitty slaps the steering wheel. “Welcome to my world,” she says. They bump fists.

  “So we keep going, right?” he says.

  “Why?” she says.

  “Until we find a road with your name on it.”

  A road with her name on it. Right. Keep your eyes peeled, she tells herself. But instead of Pettigrew Road, there don’t seem to be any more roads at all, other than the one they’re on.

  Then the voice of the dashboard lady startles them both.

  “Bear left, five kilometers.”

  Highlands. The word comes to you, like a word you know but never had the chance to use before because there aren’t any highlands in the city. And so even though the sun is halfway down the western sky, you feel that as long as you keep climbing, it will never get dark. You can see so far. And there’s another word that you never had much use for in the city. Far.

  But the dashboard lady is finished now. She’s given her last directive. There are no maps of this place in the GPS unit.Probably no cell service, either. You’re on your own. And even though Alyson warned you this would happen, it feels spooky, after the discussion you’ve been having with Kitty.

  The forest seems to close in, and those highland glimpses of a far horizon are soon enough lost.

  “About twenty minutes after we pass through Snow Road, we’re supposed to come to this broken-down log cabin on a rocky rise high up on the right.”

  “There are tons of broken-down log cabins,” says Kitty.

  “Yeah, but this one has a tree growing right through the middle of it.”

  Kitty starts to slow down. “Whoa, what did you say?”

  “Alyson told me there’s a tree growing through —”

  “I heard that. But she hasn’t been here since she was — what’d you say? Eleven?”

  “I know. That’s what I said —‘You remembered this from when you were eleven?’”

  “And she said . . .”

  “She got all kind of shifty looking, then told me she had been here again. This summer. On a little adventure — that’s what she said — with some guy.”

  “Ah, poor Blink,” says Kitty. “You’re taking it pretty well.”

  “Cut it out,” you say. “She’s so not my type.”

  You both laugh.


  “A total Ice Queen,” you say, and are about to go on when Kitty interrupts you.

  “There,” she says. And up on a rise is the landmark in question: a cabin pierced by the thick trunk and heavy branches of a giant oak.

  “Okay,” you say, excited now. “It’s about five hundred meters on the left.” You sit forward, your hands on the dash. “And we’re supposed to take it really slow when we turn off, because the entrance dips down real steep.”

  “Got it,” says Kitty, “and there’ll be this small army waiting for us.”

  You peer to the left and right. “They must be hiding real good.”

  She slows down but doesn’t stop — drives right by the turnoff.

  “Hey!” you shout.

  “Shh!” she says.

  “But you missed —”

  “I didn’t miss anything,” she snaps. She’s crawling now, her eyes flitting to the rearview mirror, although there hasn’t been any traffic for ages.

  “What are you doing?” you say to her, looking back as you round a long, slow bend. Your turnoff disappears behind you.

  “I thought you said you were going to play this your way,” she says. “So that’s what I’m doing. We’ll find our own place to park, okay?”

  You nod. Alyson had told you exactly what to look for, exactly where to go. And you’d trusted her because she had cried. You’re still sure she wasn’t lying to you, but Kitty is right. You know that, as well.

  There is another turnoff on the left not so far along. She pauses at the lip of the hill, surveying the scene before her. You want her to hurry up, but you know she’s right. Be patient, boy.

  She groans. “Well, here goes nothing,” she says. Then she eases the Jeep down the steep and rutted entranceway.

  There is a sign nailed to a tree: TUMBLE ROAD.

  “Hey,” you say. “It’s the same name she told me. Weird.”

  “Yeah, so that other turnoff and this one are the same road, which is good. Because we’re like a good country mile from where they’re expecting us.”

  “No one is expecting us.”

  “Fine. But I’m a lot happier here, if that’s okay with you.”

  She isn’t really asking, so you keep your mouth shut.

  She drives slowly now, looking for someplace to pull off. Light glints through the trees in an eerie way — too bright — like there’s a Close Encounters mother ship over there, just landed in the forest. It’s not sunset yet, but the two of you are wrapped in shadows. Then you come to a rough cleared place, and she veers right into the brush, so that it rubs against the sides of the car. You instinctively pull your arms in tight against your sides. It’s like panhandlers all around the vehicle bending down to look inside.