Chapter Eleven #3
He had been driving nearly half an hour by then, and began to wonder if he had missed the restaurant.
He looked at his phone, but he was in a dead zone.
He was just about to turn around when his headlights picked up a building and, behind it, a second, and as he turned into the lot, he recognized the dolphin.
It was completely dark; the only cars in sight were in an auto-body lot behind the building.
Snow covered everything, and as he slowed, he heard crunching sounds beneath his tires.
Branches, he thought, he hoped, aware seconds later that the restaurant sign above him had shed half of its letters to the earth.
He got out and turned off the lights and waited a moment, watching the snow dust his window.
The postcard must have been a prank, or maybe the meeting had been canceled.
He was very much alone; perhaps, had it not been snowing, he would have taken in the abandoned building, the herd of closely huddled cars, and found it sinister.
But snow softened everything. Now he was just a little disappointed.
He went back inside the car, and turned on the engine.
A low-tire-pressure warning shone on his dashboard.
Must be the cold, he thought; this had happened before.
But as he reversed across the lot, he felt a slapping, and got out to find that he had punctured not one but both front tires.
His lights illuminated the debris he’d just run over.
Two tires! He had a spare in back, though the truth was that in the snow, alone, with a knee that hurt even when he drove, he couldn’t fix one of them.
He took a deep breath. Above him, the remaining letters were barely visible.
ry ou hrimp! Okay, part of the adventure, he told himself, and he already was beginning to craft the story for his kids—the snowy night, the flats—crunch!
—the forlorn diner, the passing car he’d flag for help.
It was then he thought he saw a pay phone by the auto-body shop.
It seemed impossible, it had been years since he had seen a pay phone, but the auto-body shop seemed to come from another time.
He had begun to limp across the parking lot when he noticed, at the back of the restaurant, a dim light coming from one of the boarded-up windows of the diner.
He paused. Many of the local businesses were attached to residences, and just because the Mountain Catch had closed didn’t mean its owner had vacated.
Now his worry shifted, from not finding anyone to finding the wrong person, someone who, suspicious of a nighttime trespasser, decided to stand his American ground.
But what choice did he have?
It was as he neared the door that he heard the murmur of voices.
There was no bell; for a moment, he stood listening.
He knocked. Gently, at first, and then again.
Still no answer; still the voices. Had someone left a television on?
Again he knocked, then louder. He was cold.
He had not brought his snow jacket, or his snow boots—who needed snow boots for a Metropolis discussion? He tried the handle of the door.
It opened. Miles stood, waiting, for anything and everything his imagination had prepared him for, the skeleton hanging from the rafters, Baba Yaga, an old man in overalls seated in his chair before a buzzy, boxy television, rifle propped upon his elbow.
But: nothing. He stepped inside. The room was clearly once the kitchen.
There were empty fish tanks everywhere, and steel sinks piled with buckets.
Baba Yaga’s oven in the corner, cold. The floor was tile, and now he saw a path of melted snow, like some kind of shimmering carpet leading toward a door at the far end of the room.
There he paused. “Hello?” he said again.
The voices were louder now; he heard laughter, not devilish laughter, but warm, convivial laughter, the laughter of friends.
For a moment, he waited at the threshold, and then he turned the handle.
The voices instantly went silent.
“Hello?” said Miles, preparing to meet the coven.
And the door opened onto a dimly lit room, where a projector cast the image of a palace on a screen.
—
Hugh, wearing his Indiana Jones hat, was standing at a lectern. Around him, some two dozen spectators had turned their faces to Miles. It took a moment before he realized that he knew some of these faces. Not only Hugh, but Clem the Rat Man, and Farm Candy, and Olive’s teacher Kayleigh Swan.
Andrei raised a hand in greeting.
And behind him, looming on his scooter, Snowflake Bentley, a scowl across his face, surveying the madness of men.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” said Miles, taking a handout from the table, and settling into the only empty seat, next to a young woman in a wool hat and sweater.
As Hugh began again, the woman leaned toward him, her face suddenly familiar from their walk those months ago.
“You know, I think they’re onto something,” Conservancy Director Serena Rubin said.