The Hole (24 page)

“Then you see if you can figure it out,” Evajean said, handing him the book.

Elliot took it. The cube was light, maybe only a quarter of a pound, and the side felt slick, almost oily. The pages inside were thick like good quality stationary and, up close, he could see that what he’d thought was the yellowing of age was really just the paper’s naturally dark cream color. Evajean was right about the look of the symbols. Squiggles and mathematics like characters and things that looked like the designs on a piece of sheet music filled each page top to bottom, margin to margin. Each letter-if they were letters-was tiny, only an eighth of an inch tall, and they were packed together without spaces. Elliot didn’t recognize any of it.

“I have no idea what this says,” he told Evajean. “This could be what the crazies speak.”

“Yeah,” Evajean said. “I guess it could.”

“They speak their own language, you know? You can tell listening to them. Of course this might be something else entirely, but the crazies were talking to us-talking to me-and we found this book in the same place they were. If I had to bet, I’d bet they’re the same thing.”

Evajean took the book back from him. “How are we going to translate it?”

“I don’t know. If there was a university still running, we could find a professor, someone who can read ancient languages, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

Evajean laughed. “If there’s a whole university still running,” she said, “we can give up on the Hole entirely and settle down in that college town. Maybe eat Ramen.”

Elliot laughed with her but he knew translating this book was critical. They’d found it for a reason and it had been what drove the crazies away in Nahom, what killed them in such spectacular fashion. The book had power and it was the same kind of power, he was sure, that made the crazies crazy and the people of Nahom have their shadow spirits.

They might have left the crazies behind and escaped the pursuing creatures, but Elliot wasn’t willing to accept the worst was passed. They were heading to the Hole and it might answer their questions, but those answers would only be a continuation of the oddities already experienced. Everything tied together. And more likely than not, the Hole would only confound.

They would have to wait to find out what the Hole meant, however. That night their concern became just getting there.

The sun was a few hours down when Elliot first noticed the shimmer low in the sky. Evajean had fallen asleep, leaned against the door with Hope again in her lap.

Elliot leaned forward over the steering wheel and squinted out into the dark. Up ahead, due west, and lower than the sparse clouds, a line of light flickered. It reminded him of photographs of the Northern Lights, though the colors stuck to oranges and muddy yellow. At first he took it for the lights of a city, but quickly realized the extent of it, the distance it stretched to the north and the south, was just too great. No city was the that big.

He didn’t wake up Evajean, though. She needed the sleep because he’d made up his mind that, in the morning, he’d force her to remember what had happened in Nahom. He’d force her to tell the truth. Of course, he didn’t
know
she was lying, but her evasiveness resulted from somewhere. And Elliot was tired of it. He wanted to figure this thing out.

After a few minutes more, the lights were brighter, more distinct. He could see a top to them, a spot in the low sky where they cut off. He slowed, staring up.

It was a wall of light, maybe a mile or more tall-without anything to judge it by, telling for sure was impossible. But it was bright and-he squinted again-
thick
. The light was filling the truck’s cab now, the color of a sunset.

Evajean sat up, blinking. “It’s morning,” she said.

“No.”

She licked her lips and looked around. “It’s morning. I slept-”

“It’s not morning,” Elliot said. Pointed ahead of them. “Look.”

Evajean sat forward, still not fully awake. “What is that?” she said.

“It’s light,” he said. “It’s a big wall of light.”

“Why are we still driving?” She turned to face him. “Why are you driving toward it?”

“I want to see.”

Evajean laughed. “Stop the car, Elliot.”

He did, not bothering to pull out of their lane. “That’s where we have to go, Evajean,” he said. “It’s between us and Colorado.”

“We can go around it.”

“No, I don’t think we can. It’s huge. And it’s just light. It’s like the aurora borealis.”

“How do you know?”

“I don’t.”

“So it might kill us,” she said. “It might be a fire or maybe its that stuff you said came out of the box, the stuff that killed all the crazies. And it could do exactly the same thing to us.”

“Evajean, how much weird stuff have we seen since we left Charlottesville? How much have I seen that you don’t even remember? Let’s just go see what this is because if we don’t, we’re going to be running away from it. The whole goddamn world has
changed
. It’s not the same as before. And we’re part of that or else all this shit wouldn’t be happening to us-it would’ve ignored us if we didn’t have a role to play. Right now, more than finding the Hole, more than even staying safe, I want to know what that role is. So every damn weird thing we see, I’m driving this truck right at it. If you don’t want to, we’ll see if we can find you a vehicle in the next town we pass and you can take as many of the supplies as you want, and you can drive home or try to drive around that thing up there. You can do what you want. But
this
is what I want to do.”

Evajean sat quite pushed Hope away when he nuzzled into her arm. She didn’t talk for several minutes and gave no indication she’d heard anything he’d said. Elliot even wondered in the light had triggered another trance.

But then she cleared her throat. “Okay,” she said.

“Okay? Okay, what?”

“Let’s go,” she said. “Let’s see what it is up there.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Let’s do it. I want to find the Hole, you know that, but like you said, it’s all bound to be part of the same thing. So we’ll figure out what’s going on. I mean, what else do we have to do? Besides find a little house, settle down, and repopulate the human race.”

Elliot laughed at this, then started the truck again and accelerated toward the curtain of light.

“I’m sorry,” Evajean said after a few minutes.

“For what?” The light was now more distinct but was difficult to focus on. Elliot’s eyes kept slipping from one spot to another, unable to find anything but ephemeral blobs of shifting color.

“You’ve gotta be really frustrated with me. About not being able to tell you what you want to know. I wish I could remember, but I can’t.” She sighed. “Are you afraid of me?”

“No,” he said, but that wasn’t entirely true.

“If you’re right, about what I did, then I killed a whole lot of people. And you’ve been weird ever since we got out of that place.”

Elliot shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not really
scared
, so much as just- I suppose it’s that I don’t know what else is going to happen. You still have the box and we know it’s a book but we don’t know what it does.”

“Or what it did.”

“That too. Does this make sense? That I’m not scared of you-”

“Yeah,” Evajean said. “Really, I think I’m scared of me. Why is this happening?”

“The thing that’s still bothering me,” Elliot said, “is how we got to be the only people left besides Nahom and just happened to be across the street. That’s why I’m not scared of you-because this has to do with both of us. I’m just as much a part of it as you are.”

“Maybe it’s just that I-like I did in the town-maybe there’s something about me that stops the plague. Since you were right there, across the street-”

“What about everyone else who was there, too? My wife, my daughter? Henry? Why weren’t they saved by your-by your aura?”

“So it’s something special about you, too.”

“That’s what I think,” Elliot said. “You said- I remember you saying that Henry talked you into moving to Charlottesville.”

“Uh huh.”

“Well, you know Clarine is the one who got us to move there, too. I never would’ve ended up in Virginia if it hadn’t been for her.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Maybe they had something to do with it, as well. Clarine and Henry.”

“That’s nuts.”

“Yeah,” Elliot said.

“Henry didn’t know anything about this.”

“He’s the one who told you to go to Colorado.”

“No-” Evajean said, but stopped.

“He told you that’s where the Hole is. If we hadn’t being going to Colorado, we wouldn’t have ended up in Nahom, we wouldn’t have found the box.”

“But what about you?” Evajean said. “There’s your story about Montana, too. That-was it a trucker?-that story you heard. How the Hole was in Montana? We’re only driving to Colorado because I said I’d go to Montana after, if we didn’t find anything.”

Elliot nodded. “You’re right. But think about it. It’s because of Clarine and Henry that we ended up living across the street from each other. And it’s because of Henry that we found Nahom.”

“I don’t think Henry had anything to do with it.”

“You’re sure?”

“Henry had
nothing
to do with it.”

“Okay,” Elliot said. “Maybe I’m just in a conspiratorial frame of mind.”

“Yeah,” Evajean said.

“I’m sorry then.”

“Yeah,” Evajean said.

This latest argument, and the silence that followed, carried on long enough to get them to the wall of light. And a wall it was, they quickly learned. A barrier through which continued travel proved impossible.

Elliot stood five feet away, the heat pleasant on his face. He turned back to look at Evajean. She leaned against the side of the truck, hands in her pockets, staring forward at this new reminder that reality had become very different through the course of their journey. Hope sat on the dashboard, barking, the sounds muffled by the glass.

He shifted his attention back to the wall. It warped and churned, yellows and browns and oranges, the surface slick and bulging like blown glass. He stepped forward. The heat wasn’t bad, closer to a campfire than an inferno, but getting too close would burn him nonetheless. Hands outstretched, he took a couple of steps closer.

The details of the wall were difficult to focus on. Everything shifted, his eyes along with it, such that staring too long resulted in a mild headache.
What is it?
he thought.
It’s not light. It’s something else.
As far as he could tell, it went on forever in both directions, north and south, and cut directly across the wide lanes of the freeway. They’d have to find a way around if they were to continue. Even if the truck could handle the heat, Elliot had the feeling the barrier was solid, that it would repel them as effectively as concrete.

“We’ll drive north,” he called back to Evajean, “and see if we can get around that way.”

The wall mesmerized him. As to the north and south, it seemed to continue forever upward, curving back away from them gently like a dome. Where it plunged into the ground, the asphalt glowed in a thin, bright line. He walked across the road and past the curb, following it. In the dirt and grass, the line was paler but still noticeable, the color of molten steel.

“How are we going to get north?” Evajean said from behind him.

Elliot turned. She was standing a few feet away, staring beyond him at the barrier. “What do you mean?” he said.

“There aren’t any roads. There’s this one, but we can’t take it anymore and it doesn’t go north, besides.”

“I don’t know,” Elliot said. “Go back? Drive back until we hit something heading the right direction?”

“Yeah,” she said.

“I don’t trust the truck off road, if that’s what you mean.”

“Yeah.”

“If it breaks down,” he said, “we’ll be pretty much stuck. Out here, on the highway, we can maybe find something else, but out there”-he pointed across the endless grass-”we’re out of luck.”

“Okay,” Evajean said. “We’ll go back and find another away around. I wish the truck had one of those road atlas books.”

“Me, too,” Elliot said.

“You ready?”

“What do you think this is?” he said, looking again at the barrier.

“Who knows?” she said. “More of the same. More stuff we don’t understand.” She started back to the truck. “Come on, Elliot. I’m exhausted. I can’t keep my eyes open. Anyway, if we can’t find a way around, you’ll get lots of other chances to look at that thing.”

“You’re probably right,” Elliot said and followed her.

Hope stopped barking as soon as Evajean opened the truck’s door. Once settled, the two of them fell asleep within minutes, while Elliot drove east.

Shortly before the sun came up, Elliot found a promising exit and took it, now driving roughly north, parallel to the barrier. Evajean woke up some time later and they stopped long enough to eat a quick breakfast of apples and oatmeal warmed on the engine block. Hope devoured a few strips of jerky.

Elliot lost track of where they were but getting back to the highway only meant turning around, so he didn’t worry about it and just drove. Off in the distance to their left, the barrier could occasionally be seen, but it was mostly lost in the glare of the cool September sun.

“What do we do if we can’t find a way around?” Evajean said.

“We will. That thing can’t go on forever.”

“Yeah,” she said, “it can. We’ll have to go back. Give up on finding anything out.” She took a small bite from her apple. “Whatever it is, the Hole, I bet it’s on the other side.”

“That’s probably true,” Elliot said.

“It’s- I bet it’s the Hole that’s making that thing.”

Elliot remember Evajean standing tall in Nahom, the golden box-the golden book-held high over her head, and a field of energy forcing back the crazies. He shook his head. “Regardless, we need to try to get around it. If the Hole’s back there, if it’s the cause of that light, then it’s a lot more than just where they’re taking the dead.”