Sunshine

We drove first to the old cabin. I was still clinging to that mysterious sense of someone keeping a protective eye on me, but I was beginning to feel a little rocky nonetheless. Maybe I should have brought the feather whammy instead of hiding it under my apron when I left. As the weed-pocked gravel of what had once been a driveway crunched under my feet, I put my hand in my pocket and closed it round my little knife. I had been not remembering what had happened two months ago so emphatically that the edges of my real memory had become a little indistinct. Standing on the ground where it had begun brought it horribly back. I looked at the porch, where I hadn’t heard them coming from. I looked at the place where my car had no longer been, two days later.

I went down to the marshy reach near the shore, where the stream had run fifteen years ago. It didn’t look like anybody had been there playing in the mud recently. I went back to the cabin. “Yeah,” Pat was saying.

“But it’s been a long time, and they haven’t been back,” said Jesse.

They were just standing there, no gizmos in sight, no headsets, no wires, no portable com screens with flashing lights making beeping noises. I guessed it wasn’t technology that was helping them draw their conclusions.

What a good thing Pat hadn’t walked on my porch this morning, and up my stairs and knocked on my door and, maybe, walked into the front room where the same, if savagely stain-removed, sofa still stood, and the little square of carpet beside it, and maybe even the handle of the fridge door, the same handle that had been there ready to expose a carton of milk behind it if someone pulled on it, two months ago.

What a good thing that good manners dictate that you don’t idly cross people’s probable outer ward circle and knock on their doors unless invited.

Carthaginian hell.

We got back in the car and drove on the way we’d been going, north.

There was a bad spot almost at once. I picked it up first, or anyway I was the one who said, “Hey. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to go any farther this way.”

“Roll up your windows,” said Jesse. He hit a couple of buttons on the very peculiar dashboard I was only now noticing and suddenly there was something like heavy body armor enclosing me, oppressive as chain mail and breastplate and a full-face helm, plume and lady’s silk favor optional. I could almost smell the metal polish. “Ugh,” I said.

“Don’t knock it, it works,” said Jesse. Our voices echoed peculiarly. We drove very slowly for about a minute and then a red light on the dashboard blinked and there was a manic chirping like a parakeet on speed. “Right. We’re clear.” He hit the same buttons. The invisible armor went away.

“Spartan, isn’t it?” said Pat.

“No,” I said.

We drove through two more bad spots like that and I hated the body armor program worse each time. It made me feel trapped. It made me feel as if when I woke up again I’d be sitting at the edge of a bonfire with a lot of vampires on the other side.

It was a long drive. Thirty miles or so. I remembered.

Then we reached a really bad spot. Jesse hit his buttons again but this time it really was like being trapped—held down while Things slid through the intangible gaps between the incorporeal links, reached out long taloned fingers and grabbed me…

Big. Huge space. Indoors; ceiling up there somewhere. Old factory. Scaffolding where the workers had once tended the machines. No windows. Enormous square ventilator shafts, vast parasitic humps of silent machinery, contortions of piping like the Worm Ouroboros in its death throes…

And eyes. Eyes. Staring. Their gaze like flung acid. No color. What color is evil?…

When I came to, I was screaming. I stopped. Even the guys looked shaken. I could see the scuff marks in the road ahead of us, where Jesse had slammed us into reverse. Good thing the driver hadn’t gone under. I put my hands over my mouth. “Sorry,” I said.

“Nah,” said Pat. “If you hadn’t been screaming, I’d‘ve had to do it.”

“What now?” said Jesse. They both looked at me.

“Maybe this is the really big bad spot behind the house,” I said. “I told you there was one. We’re pretty well north of the lake now, aren’t we? Seems like we’ve come far enough, but I keep losing the lake behind the trees.”

“Yeah,” said Jesse. “The road’s well back here, because this is where the big estates are. Were.”