Cold on the Mountain Page 23

  She let the words sink in, and Tasket slapped the surface of the table. “Well I, for one, am looking forward to it. Gives me a chance to finally visit a part of the mountain I’ve never seen before.”

  “That’s one way of thinking about it,” Miriam said, smiling.

  “What will happen when we go through?” Bo said. He’d fallen ill so often up there that he wasn’t sure if he’d be much help to them.

  “Nothing. We’ll be just as we are here, though once through, we’ll have to act quickly.” She rummaged in her bag until she found the grimoire. She placed it reverently on the table before her. “There’s powerful magic in Adrienne, of course. But there’s a lot of power among us as well. We’ve lost loved ones. They were taken against their will. It’ll be a rescue mission—an incantation breaking the chains of their captivity.”

  “And if that doesn’t work?” Kelli asked.

  Miriam’s smile was guarded. “Let’s just focus on positive energy, Kelli. More than anything, let’s just focus on positive energy. We’ll need every bit we can muster if we’re going to get them back.”

  ~0~

  Wren managed to keep down two cans of chicken broth. The Bensons stayed with him; he had propped himself up on the couch with a couple of pillows.

  “It’s pretty rare,” he said. His voice remained scratchy, but was regaining its timbre as his strength returned.

  Jasper nodded. “Very rare. Only happened a few times in all the years I’ve been here. Most recently with little Timmy Bennett.”

  “What does it mean?” Phil said. Cammie listened intently. She’d been crying on and off throughout the day.

  Jasper and Wren traded a look. Wren took up the explanation. “The eve of the lottery is a strange time in Adrienne. The spring equinox triggers the opening of the gate, near as we can tell. Like I said, time is different here. So when the sun is in the correct position, the portal swings open. You’ll have to see it for yourselves to understand what I mean.”

  “But why the black hands, Mr. Wren? Please, just come out with it!” Wendy pleaded. She had her daughter on her lap.

  “So there’s been a glow over the town all week. I didn’t see it, of course, but I’ve been through enough of these deals to know that it’s there. It’s kind of like a—like an infrared light that can reveal the presence of watermarks. Anyway, the light is faint right now, but it’ll be really green tomorrow afternoon. Really green. You won’t be able to miss it.

  “This light—well, it reveals certain things. It’s all preliminary, of course. Chances are it means nothing.”

  “Come on, Denny,” Phil said. “We need to know.”

  Wren sighed. He shifted in his seat. “Sometimes, the normals that get stuck in Adrienne actually—well, they actually belong here. It means that, that they’d already cycled through and were just in their childhoods back in the real world. Before…”

  “Before what?” Wendy said, her voice a whisper. She clutched Cammie’s hands, the girls’ palms closed tight. “Before what?”

  “Before they start hurting people,” Jasper said quietly.

  Cammie wailed, turning her face into her mother’s chest. Wendy felt the warmth of her tears through the thin fabric of her shirt. “Well…then it’s a mistake!” she said. “It’s a terrible mistake! Our little girl couldn’t hurt a fly! She’s…she’s a child, for heaven’s sake!”

  “Like I said, we won’t know until tomorrow,” Wren said. “Cammie, let me see your hands, honey.”

  Cammie was oblivious, sobbing. Her mother whispered in her ear, and the girl took a moment to gather herself before showing him her palms.

  They were dark—bruised the color of a dark cabernet.

  “What happens to her?” Phil said. “Does she still get to draw a lot?”

  “Of course. Same rules as before,” Wren said. “But if you all don’t make it through…well, it makes it hard.”

  “What does?” Wendy said.

  “Knowing,” Jasper replied. “Timmy Bennett got stuck here with his folks. That first year, his hands turned pitch black. His parents…they tried to keep him with them, at least at first. But they knew. They knew that he’d done things in a previous lifetime. Terrible things.”

  “And where is he now?” Phil said. He sat with his wife and daughter, rubbing Cammie’s back. “Is he…is he away from his family?”

  “Well, he’s sure not in school, is he girls?” Wren said, and they both nodded. Cammie had stopped crying, and she clung to her mother like a baby Koala.

  “He lives by himself—a fourteen-year-old boy all alone on the outskirts of town. He hasn’t been accepted by the dark ones, and he was abandoned by the normals. Well, that’s not quite right. He just…just kind of drifted away from the rest of us.

  “He’s stuck in between, just waiting for passage back into the world, where I have no doubt that he’ll fulfill his terrible potential.”

  Wendy hugged her daughter fiercely. She whispered again in the girl’s ear, and Cammie nodded with defiance. Phil kissed his daughter’s temple, and Carrie wrapped her arms around her twin sister.

  “Well, she’s with us,” Phil said. “Now, and until we get the hell out of here, and for whatever time we have left in this world, Cammie’s with us.”

  Jasper nodded sadly, and Big Wren just stared at his empty bowl.

  “I’m not bad,” Cammie said, her voice shaking. “You’ll see. It’ll all be better tomorrow. “You’ll see.”

  “Tell you what,” Jasper said, kneeling to make eye contact with her, “you just sleep on it, sweetie. I know a place that we can visit in the morning. It’s a special place that might put this whole thing in a completely different light. Sometimes, it’s not the darkness that causes this.”

  Cammie nodded, her mouth a thin, defiant line. She was a fighter, and that was good. “Okay, Mr. Jasper,” she said. “I’ll go with you.”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Dawn broke cool and clear, the sun a gleaming mirror over the Sierra Nevada.

  Adrienne slept—the calm before the storm. Still, there was a charge in the atmosphere—an aura of excitement that was palpable.

  Energy was building.

  “Come on,” Jasper said, motioning to Phil and Cammie, “this is one of my favorite spots in this whole godforsaken place. If you can just let your mind go blank for a few minutes, it’s actually kind of beautiful. A person can forget up here, even if it’s just for a short time.”

  They made for the edge of town.

  “Mr. Jasper?” Cammie asked when they’d made it to Bronson Creek. They walked along the levy, a final row of bungalows forming Adrienne’s eastern boundary. On the other side of the frigid creek stood a stark, foreboding wilderness; it pressed in thick against the sheer granite walls of Last Chance Mountain.

  “What’s up, honey?”

  “Did that boy—did he ever have a chance to say goodbye to his parents?”

  “Cammie!” Phil said, taking his daughter’s hands in his own. “Don’t ask such questions! Don’t even think them, sweetheart! There won’t be any goodbyes, honey. Not now, and not ever. This is all a big misunderstanding. You’ll see.”

  Jasper nodded. “I actually think your dad’s right,” Jasper said. “Here. Take a look. I noticed it when we’d cleared the last of the houses back there.”

  He opened his palms. They were perfectly pale. “This has never happened to me before, Cammie. Not in all the years that I’ve been here. Whoever’s—whatever’s—doing the accounting up there might have gotten a few things confused, is all. Let me see yours.”

  Cammie withdrew her fists. She took a deep breath as she unclenched them.

  “There, see!” Phil smiled. He brushed away a tear from his daughter’s cheek. “See! I told you, honey!”

  They weren’t fully pink yet, but they were headed in that direction. The mottled bruising was rapidly diminishing. They hiked up a rocky ridge, their spirits soaring, and Cammie watched in awe as her skin lightened with every
step.

  “This way,” Jasper said. Adrienne was behind them. From their elevated vantage, it looked like something out of a Rockwell painting.

  He stepped off the dirt road and down onto a pile of granite slag. At the bottom of the slag, a path led into the woods. “We’ll have to go off trail a ways. Watch your step.”

  They picked their way down into the meadow, following Jasper as Bronson Creek and Adrienne disappeared behind them.

  “What happens if we had just stayed on that gravel road?” Phil asked, knowing the answer but curious all the same. “Have you taken it?”

  “A thousand times,” Jasper replied, “and it always kicks me straight back onto that damned highway. There might be a hundred little cracks in the walls surrounding this place, Phil—and not a one of them leads home. Believe me, brother…I’ve been here a long time. All I’ve ever done is look for a way out.”

  Cammie was smiling now. The faintest tinge of darkness still marked her, but she was almost fully herself again.

  The path meandered through the woods until opening on a clearing; it was bounded by the sheer granite face of the mountain. A tributary of winter runoff had punched through the rock, spilling a tranquil waterfall of maybe a dozen feet down into a shimmering pool. A tiny creek fed out of the pool before twisting into the forest.

  “Okay, Cammie,” Jasper said, “take your coat off and kneel here with me, honey.”

  She draped her coat over a rock and knelt at the edge of the pool. Phil joined them there. “What do you see there in the water?” Jasper asked.

  Cammie peered into the water. Jasper’s question felt like a test of some sort, and she suddenly had butterflies in her stomach. She licked her lips, studying her reflection. “I see a good girl—a good person. I see a girl who loves her family, and who would do anything to keep them safe. A girl who would never, ever hurt anybody else. And I see…”

  “What?” Phil prodded. “What do you see, Cammie?”

  “I see a girl that wants to go home so badly,” she said, her voice catching. She was near tears. “We have to get out of here, Dad. We can’t stay here. Not anymore.”

  “Go ahead,” Jasper said, motioning to the water. “Give it a shot, Cammie.”

  She understood, and she pushed her sleeves up to her elbows and dipped her hands in the water. It was so cold that she gasped, but the water was clean and clear, and she scrubbed her hands in it until the last of the stains had vanished.

  “But how?” she said, turning to Jasper.

  He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, and she dried her hands. “This place picks up on all of it. The anger. The sickness. The hatred. It gathers it all in and, right there along with the dark stuff, it collects other emotions as well.”

  “The fear,” Cammie said, shaking her head in frustration. “That had to have been it. I’ve never been so scared in all my life, Daddy. But coming up here, and getting away from Adrienne—I think it fixed me.”

  She stared at her hands, and then Phil had her; he pinned her to his chest. She was getting big, but not too big to hold. “I know, honey. I’m scared, too. We’ll get through this. Just a few more hours, and we’ll get out of here. I need you to be brave tonight, okay? Just a few more hours.”

  She nodded, blinking back the tears. There had been enough of those, and it was time to be brave.

  They lingered another twenty minutes.

  “Say, Jasper,” Phil said, “if Adrienne is picking up on all of our negative energy, what about you? What’s happening here, boss?”

  Jasper merely smiled. “It’s like I’ve been telling you all along, Phil. I was never supposed to be here in the first place.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Dennis Wren stood before a full-length mirror. His leg was heavily bandaged, and he had dozens of tiny squares of gauze taped carefully to his skin. The swelling in his eyes had receded, but he still sported a pair of world-class shiners.

  “You’ve seen better days, old man,” he said. Gingerly, he settled himself on the edge of the Bensons’ bed. He took his care in sliding into a pair of blue jeans before pulling on a thermal turtleneck and a flannel shirt.

  The thing was, if you wanted a ticket out of town, you had to show up. If there was ever a lottery where “must be present to win” truly had some teeth, it was in Adrienne on the night of the spring equinox.

  He slid into his boots and yanked his old 49ers cap down so the brim obscured the bruising around his eyes. With his jacket, he almost looked like himself; only the limp gave him away.

  Jasper and the Bensons waited on him in the living room. Wendy flashed a bright smile when he limped into the room, and Wren was surprised to find himself grinning back.

  “You look much better, Denny,” she said. “Much better. It’s great to see you up and around.”

  “It’ll do for tonight, I suppose. Got that crutch handy?”

  Darryl Merton had brought over an old crutch he’d received from Adrienne’s makeshift health clinic when he had twisted his knee on the job a few years back. It still had some life left in it, and Wren was able to make it fit.

  They helped him navigate the front steps, and Phil gathered his wife and daughters for one final look at the place they’d called home since their arrival in Adrienne.

  They were emaciated and exhausted, but they had made it to the lottery, and he said a silent prayer that he’d never see the damned place again. He knew the chances were slim, but hope was all he had left.

  It was slow going into Adrienne, which only compounded the surreal nature of what the town had become. The streets were filled. If the Night Camp had been a circus, the lottery itself was Mardi Gras.

  Dark ones and normals spilled out into the streets, everyone heading for the Dowager’s back acreage.

  “Up there,” Wren said, motioning toward a quiet group sticking to the sidewalk on the left. Directly across the street, a throng of dark ones moved boisterously toward the lottery grounds. “Let’s fall in with our people.”

  They picked up the pace and, when they caught up to the normals—maybe twenty all told—there were heartfelt (though gentle) embraces as Big Wren’s presence put a jolt of pure joy through the group.

  “We thought you were gone, Denny! Done for,” an older woman with dark-rimmed glasses said. Her grin was luminous—luminous and infectious. It wasn’t long before everyone was beaming.

  “Not yet, Alison,” he rasped, “it’d take a bit more than Albert Fish to put an end to me. C’mon. Let’s get on up there and see what’s what, shall we?”

  More normals joined their group along the way. By the time they’d reached the Dowager’s home, there were at least seventy or eighty of them, now rivalling the dark ones in their ebullience. Big Wren had that effect on people, and the dark ones didn’t like it.

  They jeered the poor souls whose only crime was taking an unmarked shortcut as they slipped, unimpeded, into the lottery grounds. The normals were forced to slide into one of a half dozen lines, their ledgers at the ready.

  “Well, this ought to be interesting,” Phil said, herding the girls into the space between himself and his wife.

  “Just hand it over,” Jasper said. “They’ll take care of the rest.”

  The rovers had taken up positions at a series of gates. At each station, a bookkeeper furiously scrawled in a ledger while the Dowager’s “men” scrutinized each passbook. The line moved slowly, but Phil took heart. He didn’t see anyone being denied access to the lottery.

  Folks had put their work in, it seemed.

  “Passbook,” the rover with the slick hair and shiny sunglasses said when it was the Bensons’ turn. Wendy handed it over, and he tipped his glasses up to scrutinize the sum. He turned and conferred with the bookkeeper.

  “So how are you all, uh…how are you feeling?” he said. He wore a patronizing smile. “You look a little peaked there.”

  Phil stepped forward. He lifted his shirt to reveal a severely protruding ribcage. “Yeah, we’re hungry,”
he said, “but of course you already knew that, right? We’re hungry and we’re tired, and we’re ready to go home.”

  The rover whistled in appreciation. “Wow. Nice work on the weight loss, Phil! Sooo,” he said, drawing it out while he studied the ledger on the desk beside him, “it was mighty close, but ya’ll pulled your figure. Here’s hoping you get your ticket out of town, eh? Go on right ahead.”

  Phil let his shirt drop; he could hear his heartbeat in his ears, and his palms were slick.

  They were in.

  ~0~

  As they made their ascent, Bo felt the familiar pangs of nausea creeping in. He clutched Kelli’s hand. “It’s starting,” he said.

  She winced. “I’m so sorry, Bo. Can you make it? It’ll only be a short while if everything goes as planned.”

  He grinned. “That’s a pretty big ‘if’ we’re talking about here.”

  She squeezed his hand. “Just focus on your brother. We’re bringing him home tonight. That’s all that matters, Bo.”

  He rolled his window down, taking the air in measured sips.

  The energy on the mountain had changed. Bo watched in awe as an enormous flock of birds floated across the face of the sun, casting them momentarily into shadow. As they negotiated one blind corner, Anna was forced to slam on the brakes. A herd of deer, including a few majestic bucks and a pair of shaky-legged fawns, picked their way across the road.

  The animals were retreating, and they seemed restless.

  “I’ve never seen anything like this,” Miriam said, her fingertips on the passenger window. “Can you all feel it? This mountain is awake. This is a place of tremendous power right now, and it’s building.”

  “So what does it all mean, Miriam? Do we have a fighting chance at actually doing this thing?” Tasket asked. He wore his service pistol on his hip, and Bo pictured another piece discreetly housed in a shoulder holster beneath his ICSO jacket.

  “We have as much chance as anyone else that’s ever stumbled into Adrienne, I think. There,” she motioned toward a collection of smaller peaks just off of Kelli’s window, “do you all see that?”