5. Nothing Familiar, Everything Real
5
NOTHING FAMILIAR, EVERYTHING REAL
She’d hiked in wet boots before, though not in clothes covered with landslide mud. Each step made a soft squishing, almost lost between the stealthy movement amid the trees and a whispering breeze. The forest’s grey pillars pressed close, but no roots dared crack or heave the road’s surface.
Which was odd, but no more than the rest of this. Ari was just glad the swelling in her throat was going down and her eyes had adapted to starlight.
A road by definition went between places, so she would eventually get somewhere . With her luck she was probably taking the long way, but she was committed now. It felt good to walk, even with the chafing; occasionally, faint silvery light bloomed on one side or the other, casting long shadows across yellowish stone blocks. She caught a glimpse of more pearl-cabbages once, standing with her toes on the road’s sharp stone lip, and decided more botanical observation could wait for daylight.
Whenever that would happen. And another thing—there was no sign of the storm, the topped mountains, the hollows, or anything approaching normal vegetation. She almost muttered we’re not in Kansas anymore , but she had no terrier to talk to and dear God, she shuddered to think of what Mike would do to a pet of hers. The Hardisons didn’t even have a cat, Wanda prized her expensively fake antique furniture too much.
He won’t hurt anyone ever again . Grim, squirming satisfaction popped up inside her chest before being swiftly strangled; it wasn’t right to feel that way after…
After killing someone. Ari couldn’t even say she hadn’t meant to do it, because the moment she lunged for the gun on the nightstand—for the past few months, he’d taken to habitually setting it there when he got home—she’d known one of them was going to end up shot.
The only surprise was it hadn’t been her. She’d bucked the statistics, for once.
After an endless while of trudging along, she realized the trees were thinning. A faint rushing had replaced sleepy nocturnal birdsong; Ari also discovered the stars were winking out as grey mist rose, creeping alongside her. Still, she was almost startled when the forest decided to pull its arms away.
Ari halted, staring. The urge to rub at her eyes like a revivified Disney princess returned with startling intensity, struggling with sheer wonder; she outright gawped.
No moss, no grass. Instead, bare dry dirt stretched from a fringe of trees, making a softly undulating plain. A flat ribbon of paving arrowed ahead, taking a slight curve before ending at a soaring dark shape with high sharp pinnacles, the only hints of color a few brightly glowing… well, they looked like tall narrow windows. The chiaroscuro was fantastic, depth and weight given to every shadow—if an artist could capture even half the scene’s complex shadings and values of grey the acclaim would be instant.
For the umpteenth time, Ari’s lips shaped a wondering what the hell . The creaking intensified, and when she glanced away from the castle—it had to be, the golden-glowing window shapes were incontrovertible evidence, if merely a rock formation it was a damn uncanny one—she received another shock.
The trees were… moving? Thickening? Spindly saplings at the forest’s edge swelled as the mist tiptoed among them, and the slight creaking sounds were their branches unfurling more fan-leaves. A deeper shadow-tinge inched down the hill, making its own subtle noise; nearby, Ari could see small blades poking up through dry dirt.
Grass, or something else? It certainly looked vegetative. She was deeply glad to be standing on stone, and weighed whether the castle-shape was likely to be something equally bizarre.
Or perhaps harmful.
Nothing had hurt her so far. In fact, the pond’s water seemed to have helped more than a little. Maybe she should’ve taken that bath and done some laundry as well.
Where the hell was her backpack? And where, in God’s name, was she?
Ari realized she had set off down the hill only because her boots still made soft damp sounds, though she wasn’t as soaked as before. Mud dried, flaking free—she wondered about bacterial contamination, and how the people here would react to her appearance. Unless it was just a weird rock formation, which meant she’d have to start worrying about food, fuel for a fire, and the means to strike sparks.
She should have been shivering, teeth chattering. Instead, her soaked clothes were cool but not chilling. Maybe liquid dirt was good insulation.
So far, nothing seemed truly dangerous. Of course that was no indication, and she hadn’t quite ruled out hallucination yet. Nor had she ruled out another possibility—the lightning strike had been massive, the landslide no joke.
If she was dead… well, was this hell? Ari was sure an agnostic who had shot her husband wouldn’t qualify for the place upstairs, and if this was the devil’s country, so far it was proving a lot nicer than the big white house on Hardison Hill. She wasn’t even hungry yet, and hadn’t had to step off the road for a pee break either.
The castle could prove to be worse than Mike and his parents, but Ari still plodded toward it.
There was nothing else to do, really.
The mist kept pace, and so did swiftly growing grass. Now she wondered about the sounds in the trees—critters like the little golden-eyed not-possum, or something else?
Before she was quite ready the castle loomed close, a towering wave of dark stone. It had snuck up on her, or she’d made far better time than expected. The place was massive, but the road led straight to an opening.
More precisely, it stopped at a lowered drawbridge over a dry ravine which had clearly once been a moat. The light had strengthened with the mist, but no dawn took this long.
At least, not where she was from. Ari studied the drawbridge—massive dark timbers, long metal chains bowing under their own weight, each link longer than she was tall—and the aperture it was meant to protect. An inner gate had been there once, now shattered by some unthinkably violent artillery.
Was the place empty? The lights in the towers said otherwise, but there was nobody standing guard. Or maybe they were hidden, just waiting for her to make a wrong move.
The mist didn’t want to approach the castle. It hung back, thickening into a wall, and now she had to choose between waltzing through the gate or retreating into a screen of white fog. It was almost as if she’d been herded along the road, and Ari didn’t like the feeling.
Did hallucinations last this long? Time was subjective, anyone who had taken Psych 101 or longed for summer vacation knew as much, but this was something else. So far, the theory that she was dead and in some kind of weird afterlife held the most water.
Purgatory, probably. Dante would have a field day with this . She tried to think who would best capture the scene—there wasn’t nearly enough firelight for Caravaggio. Goya or Gentileschi would get the shadows right, but not the sharp edges of the castle’s battlements, crisp even at a distance. The architecture looked near-Gothic; the spires were outlandish.
Frankly, the whole thing looked like Salvador Dali having a Pre-Raphaelite nightmare. Velasquez would get the colors, she thought, El Greco the feeling , except for its jarring, almost brutal surrealism. Nothing was familiar, yet everything was real, heavy.
And dark. Her eyes had adapted, but inside without starlight or the greyish glow from the mist…
Ari hesitated. One booted toe touched the drawbridge, a cat’s paw warily testing the surface of a puddle.
Nothing happened.
Feeling faintly ridiculous, Ari pushed at her dirt-stiffened hair. The heavy mass rasped against her shoulders. Her face was clean, sure, but the rest of her probably looked like Swamp Thing.
She tested the drawbridge again, and edged onto its span. Solid as the rest of this strangeness, it held up just fine.
Hopefully, whoever had the lights on wouldn’t be upset at her sudden appearance.
It wasn’t until she had stepped cautiously through the shattered gate into a cobbled bailey that the worst idea in the world decided to show up.
What if it is Purgatory, and Mike’s here too?