We Will All Go Down Together (51 page)

Photos had been appended, and Carra flipped through them: karst topography, limestone hell-holes, alkaline barrens of scrub and swamp, bordering and encroached on by various timber sinks. Then some studies of the Lake itself, surprisingly beautiful, its degraded limestone sides supporting cliffs, caves, and the occasional grotto, along with a series of unusually top-heavy rock pillars known as “flowerpots.” A perfect place to disappear in, according to the chart Abbott had somehow obtained from the Ontario Provincial Police, which collated fifty years’ worth of localized missing-persons records.

Flipping the file closed, Carra nudged Jude. “Tell me what this guy Barney said,” she demanded.

Without opening his eyes: “Everything?”

“Skip the pillow talk.”

Jude sat up, shooting a glance at Sylvester, head bent over his phone’s GPS app. “Very . . . heterocentric of you.” Adding, as she raised a brow: “All right, all right. You know about the Stane. . . .”

“Vaguely. It’s this—thing, the Druirs have it—”

“—possibly a meteorite, possibly a pebble from what used to be Faerie itself. Lady Glauce’s bride-price. Well, Wrob claimed that the Stane anchors Dourvale, or at least the big pile of dirt your cousins live in. . . .”

“It’s called a
brugh
.”

“—which most people find impossible to locate, unless they have somebody like you along. That’s because the Stane only responds to Druir blood or some variation thereof. To everybody else, it makes it seem like the brugh isn’t even there, because—well, it is, and it isn’t. It’s in two places at once, Ontario and Scotland, but not just that. . . .”

“—it’s in two
times
at once too,” Sy chimed in. “Right?”

“You’ve heard this one before,” Jude said, slightly disgruntled.

Sy shrugged. “Been a theory for some time at the Institute. Certainly fits with various information about the
other
Dourvale, the original: lots of stories about folks wandering around in a wood they’d never seen before, tripping across what sounds like twentieth-century technology, and being horrified by it. In 1936, an old man was found wandering near Overdeere; he claimed to be ten years old, spoke a dialect so thick they had to get the town centenarian to translate, and died of measles within a week.”

“How’d he get there?” Kim asked, shifting lanes.

“Said he was looking after his Dad’s sheep, and a lady beckoned him away, promised him sugar-candy. But she took him to
a low place instead
,
very dark, and kept me lang.
He got away when she was asleep—another lady helped him,
tall and fair, wi’ hair like leaves.
And then he was stumbling out onto the highway, eight times older than he’d been that morning.”

Kim turned his head, eyes suddenly haunted. “The first chick . . . what’d
her
hair look like?”

A pause. “Red,” Sy replied, at last.

To himself, quiet: “
Bitch.
”

For the next hour, Kim drove hard, pushing the speed limit, slipping in a series of ever-less-soporific CDs: Slipknot turned up
loud,
Corpusse, Malhavoc. By the time Cannibal Corpse rolled around, Jude leaning his head in next to Carra’s, whispering: “Family or not, you’re still going to need a tithe.”

“Cross that bridge when we get to it, I guess. And no, we are not giving them half your damn
soul,
Jude. First off, I’m not even sure they’d want it—but you
will
later on, no matter
how
inconvenient you happen to find it to deal with, right now.”

“So you keep claiming,” said Jude.

Around Chaste, GPS suddenly quit and froze simultaneously, with no warning but a brief greenish flicker. By then, things were getting dimmer, and everybody’s stomach was rumbling, so Kim pulled into a gas station for directions, plus a combined Tim’s and toilet run.

“Where are we, man?” he asked the guy behind the counter, who just grinned.

“This’s Paragon, almost,” he replied. “Where’d you think?”

“Uh . . . we just passed Chaste, so . . . Quarry Argent?”

“Took a wrong turn, maybe. Easy to do when you’re not from here.”

Kim bristled. “Well, I
was
born in Toronto,” he pointed out. “Close enough for jazz?”

“Given ya ended up here, maybe not. Where ya headed?”

“Over—” Kim began; “Dourvale,” Carra put in, perhaps inadvisably, at almost the same time. And took a tiny amount of pleasure in the way the word made the man flinch, then flinch again, once he’d fully registered her features.

“Sorry, ma’am,” he said, finally. “I didn’t . . . you got
family
business, up there? I can—think I got a copy of the right map, still. Let me look.”

Several, as it turned out.
Probably doesn’t get much call for them in the normal run of things,
Carra thought, slipping a pack of peanuts into her pocket while holding the man’s gaze, pointedly not offering to pay for them; he just swallowed and nodded. Kim didn’t notice. As she left, he was saying: “Okay, this looks doable, long as you talk me through it a couple of times.”

“Glad to,” the man replied, eyes still on Carra as she made her way outside, where she found Sy and Jude drinking coffee against the side of the van. “No, there’s not really a fairy-tale tradition in Hong Kong, per se,” Jude was telling him. “
Mogwai,
of course, but that’s different—they’re their own thing. The British called them fairies because they didn’t know what else to call them, or sometimes demons, but they’re more like animistic spirits, leftover remnants of the pre-Taoist world.”

“Like Shinto in Japan.” Jude nodded. “Some Christian theologists thought Celtic fairies were demons, too. Or ghosts—the pagan dead, trying to seduce people away from Jesus with big parties and free food. That’s why fairies hung around with witches, and vice versa.”

“Ai-yah, what else were they going to say? But whenever you peel the big-F Fae legend back far enough, you end up with a secret people or lost tribe idea, some sort of historical/evolutionary subdivision, surviving alongside humankind through guile and child-stealing.” To Carra: “Though why they’d
bother,
when they can obviously interbreed with adult humans anyhow. . . .”

Carra thought for a moment. “Because it hurts more,” she replied. “Changeling babies sicken and ‘die,’ leaving human parents unaware their real kid is still alive somewhere,
caught in yon green hill tae dwell
. Years later, they’re so glamoured up they can walk right past their own mother and father without recognizing them, and vice versa.”

“They hate us that much,” Kim said from behind her. She shrugged, sadly.

“Maybe. But then again—I’ve also heard they envy us because we’ve got what they don’t, supposedly: a soul. Dead Fae blow away, like leaves, but humans at least go
somewhere
. I’ve seen it.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know.”

(None of us do.)

Unable to stop herself from thinking, as she said it:
Witches on one side, Fae on the other; witches can sell their souls, but the Fae don’t have anything to sell. So—what about me?

She looked over at Jude, holding his hand up in front of the gas station’s sign for the express purpose of seeing how long it would take his shadow to remember to mimic the gesture, and for just a split second, she wanted to shake him ’til his teeth clacked.
Stupid dogshit ghost,
he’d called it to its face; his nature’s better part, gentle and empathetic, guilelessly good. She feared for it once this trip was over, without her to keep him from stuffing it in a damn box and burying it somewhere.

But then again, when she thought about it further—she feared for all of them, a little.

“My turn,” she announced, heading for the door marked LADIES.

Two hours later, back on the road, squinting against the dark, the rising mist. Sylvester at the wheel, highbeams off to cut the mist-glare, and Carra now riding shotgun so Kim could doze; she was trying to help him negotiate by feeling out in front of them, letting her mind become diffuse, but it was hard when every reflective road-marker came at you like a distracting, cat’s-eye flash.

Sy drove with both hands kept glued to the wheel, as though he could guide the car in the proper direction through sheer need alone, he only held on tight enough. Four wheels, a chassis, and an engine, peeling headlong from highway to road to route, asphalt to tar to dirt and gravel, while the trees clustered in and began to overhang, the towns shrunk to crossings, the sky grew full of cold stars.

Feel ahead. Feel ahead. Open yourself up. Don’t be afraid.

(
I can’t
close
myself, though, ever. That’s the problem.
)

Carra opened her eyes again, only to find Sy staring at her. “What?” she asked.

“Nothing! It’s just . . . you’ve just, uh . . . got something.”

She flipped the eye-shade down, checking the mirror: words, crawling up across her cheekbone like weird blemishes, scattered in stigmata-pimple constellation across her forehead. Having long since trained herself to read backwards, Carra translated and spoke them aloud easily, almost at the same time—

“Now, stop
here,
right here, right NOW!”

Sy did, jerking the wheel so they pulled over sharply, up onto the road’s hidden shoulder. The resultant jerk woke Kim, who let loose with a flood of curses, half in English, half not. But Carra had already opened her door, lurch-stumbling forward, mist fleeing her path as if blown in pace-long slices of asphalt, rocks, dirt; Sy turned the van off before following, striding to catch her up, hug her from behind, automatically holding her steady.

“What was that?” he wanted to know, as she peered down at her forearms—handwriting still forming itself, tracing along the road-map of her veins, stuttering like badly dried ballpoint. Some of it was spidery, some Palmer Method rounded, equally antique, though the words themselves were curtly, explicitly modern: HERE/NOW. NOW HERE. NOWHERE. YOURE HERE.

CARRA YOURE FINALLY HERE.

This last up her wrist, swerving to avoid the blue double-tree humping across her hand’s back. Behind them, Jude had already scrambled free, quick and lithe; Kim came last, scrubbing his eyes as she checked her palm for the rest, and gasped.

“The hell
are
we?” Kim demanded—so she showed him.

“DOURVALE,” Sy read over her shoulder.

Jude snickered, then guffawed outright. “Oh waaah.”

The mist, job apparently done, boiled away in all directions at once, allowing Dourvale village to suddenly spring up all around them: a time-bleached square half-mile of Colonial Revival faux-saltbox houses laid out in regimented lines, neat corners and trim right angles barely softened by a half-century of decay.

Trees had grown up through the once straight-laid plank sidewalks, roots wrecking porches and heavy limbs breaking off cornicepieces. Here and there, uncleared seasonal loads of leaf mulch were slowly causing the roofs to tip, sag, or collapse. What few windows remained unshattered reflected only green and black, layered shadows of new growth on top of old. The weeds rose ankle-high, bush and flower lunging higher, ’til gravity made them stoop or break: Deadly Nightshade, nettles, thistles, poison ivy, dandelion, goldenrod, Queen Anne’s Lace. Milkweed pods sagged, popped and empty, having already thrown their fluffy contents to the wind to drift and tangle everywhere the spiderwebs hadn’t already reached.

Around them, the air sang, dully. Cicadas, scratching inside bark; grasshoppers, playing their legs like fiddles. Sussurant lap of Lake water. A distant chime of bluebells, tolling.

And everywhere, the stones—rocks standing unbroken, straight, upright, or at an angle, nether portions submerged in earth so fast they’d take a forklift to shift. Child-sized or adult-, larger than both, smaller than either: exposed glacial chunks, bone-grey and flinty. Each with its featureless uppermost section—its head, its face?—seemingly turned their way, craning or cocked, to mark their position.

Something knows we’re here,
Carra thought, feeling a shiver brush her nape. Then looked down once more, just in time to see confirmation cross from her right palm to her left, like a rash: YES YES YES YES YES.

THEY DO.

THEY ALL DO.

“Christ Almighty,” Kim said, softly. “I was up here three days, back when Galit first . . . I
slept
in these woods, in my car. Looked everywhere, twice. And I swear to you, I saw
none
of this, then. Not one goddamn speck of it.”

“I believe you,” Carra said. “But it doesn’t matter.”

“Of course it—”

“No, Josh.” She tried her best to smile in a way that might seem comforting. “So you didn’t see it, and now you do—why do you think that is? Because it wasn’t
there
before? Or because something’s different?”

“Well. . . .” Kim stopped, considering. “I’m with you, this time.”

Carra nodded, still smiling, letting him have a minute—if her time at the Freihoeven had taught her anything, it was that stuff like this took much longer to sink in when you weren’t used to it. Jude, meanwhile, just rolled his eyes so hard they all but crossed. “Fucking
mundanes
,” he said to nobody in particular.

“Shut up, Jude,” Carra told him, without turning.

“Oh, but if I do, how will handsome here ever learn? Which he really does need to do
fast
from now on, considering where we’re going. . . .”

“How about you just let Carra handle all that?” Sy suggested, gently. “Like we agreed to, remember?”

Jude hissed. “Waaah, how could I forget?” To Carra: “Okay then, genius—which way? Do you even know?”

Carra pointed right, then flashed him both palms to demonstrate why. On one palm, in blocky capitals, was written: GAHERIS WILL GIVE YOU IT, IF YOU ASK NICELY. On the other, a slightly more helpful injunction: GO RIGHT.

Jude snickered, instantly defused: “
Awesome.
” Kim simply stared, mouth open.

“That’d be Gaheris
Sidderstane
,” said Sy.

“I’d assume, yeah.”

“Okay. Back in a sec.”