Dreamseeker's Road (17 page)

Lesser fey…

Well, none of that score-odd company would have risen above the bottom of his rib cage, and most were shorter. Men and women both, they were, but not beautiful as the Sidhe were said to be. Rather, these beings ranged from plain to downright ugly, that judgment derived mostly from their rough, wrinkled skin and a lack of regularity among their features: close-set eyes or receding chins or crooked noses or too-long upper lips. There was no outright grotesquery, merely a pervasive homeliness, which impression was borne out by their clothes: archaic in cut, ranging from sleeveless belted tunics made from squares of cloth pieced together, through doublets and hose and long gowns, to kilts, plaids, and full-sleeved white shirts—all rendered in heavy, loose-woven fabrics dyed in faded colors. Not a few of those garments were torn and mended, and one or two of that number went unshod.

They were also encumbered, mostly with carpetbags or larger cases, and one pair of women sat the seat of a small wagon pulled by goat-sized horses with leopard-spotted coats. Indeed, the beasts looked far happier, cleaner, and better kept and fed than their more human compatriots.

Which was not difficult, for the company looked very unhappy indeed. Not a squinty eye glittered with joy, not a downcast mouth curved with even a tentative smile.

They look like refugees,
Aikin realized, as he stood his ground, dumbfounded.
They look like they've just fled home with whatever they could carry.

The leader—a sturdy man in a gray-green checked tunic worn above stone-colored leggings and bare feet—froze in place just then, and stared at Aikin quizzically: not precisely in shock, but perhaps caught off guard. He stiffened abruptly, and his fist curled on the hilt of a dagger the length of Aikin's hand. Eyes black as a mouse's narrowed in a seamed face above a blunt nose. He ran a hand through shoulder-length hair the color of shadows in an old farmhouse.

And then he shouted.

Aikin couldn't understand a word—so much for what Dave had said about Faery communication being automatic. His response was to stand straighter, take a deep breath, and lift an eyebrow quizzically.

“Slo-wer,” he said in English.
“Mas despacio”
he added in Spanish—and immediately felt like a fool.

Someone flung something dark at him. It splashed against his leg. The smell of spoiled fruit pervaded the air, so cloyingly sweet it clogged his nostrils.

“I'm not your enemy,” he tried again, easing aside to permit the party to pass.

“Mortal man,” someone growled from back in the ranks—and Aikin
did
understand that. “Far from home, ain't he? He goes any farther, he'll know how we feel, to lose the place he came from past regainin'.”

“Shush, Gargyn,” a female voice rasped. “He c'n hear you!”

“Don't give a rotten gourd if he do,” that voice gave back. “His World's destroyin' our'n, 'tis only fair if our'n gets him back.”

“I'm not your enemy,” Aikin repeated, backing even closer to the marge, and wondering if he really should bolt, and if so, how accurate those knives were if thrown, and how sharp. Maybe they were even like elfshot, and would strike him down where he stood. He wondered what happened to those who died upon the Tracks. Dave had never told him. Perhaps he'd never wondered. Or didn't know.

The leader glanced behind him apprehensively, and Aikin got the sense he was worried about something, almost as though he feared pursuit.

“Tell you what,” Aikin said. “You folks pass, I'll follow, and get off where I'm supposed to.”

“Like he c'n tell!” someone giggled.

The leader snapped something sharp in that incomprehensible language, and started off again. The small wagon's axles squeaked ominously as they commenced to roll.

At which point Aikin felt something brush against his calves, and looked down to see the enfield peering at him from between his legs, apparently having sneaked around the refugees through the briars.

He was
not
prepared for the party's reaction.

There was a communal intake of breath, a simultaneous harsh, angry hiss. A murmur of indignation and the sound of fumblings—and then the air was thick with thrown objects, some of which glittered disturbingly.

Aikin raised his hand to shield his face, and felt his forearms sting with countless tiny prickles, somewhere between thorns and broken glass. Someone raised what really was a spear. The point glittered balefully.

The enfield uttered a trill of alarm—and bolted.

But she did not run down the Track, neither toward the company and past them, or back the way Aikin and she had come.

Instead, she leapt through a gap in the briar wall he had not noted before, and disappeared.

“Wait!”
Aikin yelled, fearing to lose even that shaky ally, in the face of obvious hostility. And with that he spun around and plunged after.

Something bright swished by his ear. Something sharp—a briar, probably—tore at his thigh as he leapt through the gap in the thorns. And then everything
changed.

There was no mutter of indignant voices, no clatter of thrown objects upon dry ground. The quality of light had altered, losing the pervasive glow of the Tracks. Come to think of it, so had the terrain. There were no sky-tall trees now—no trees at all, in fact—merely high, rolling moorland and blasted heath beneath twilight skies.

A backward glance showed no horde of waist-high refugees, either—and no Straight Track for them to trek upon. He scrambled back there—and found nothing. Nothing save a thinning of the moss, where it lay behind sparse-spun whorls of briar.

But the Tracks had been
activated
!
The wee folk had to have been going
somewhere
!

Well, they certainly weren't activated now. Probably, this was more of that supposed temporal dislocation: the speed of bodies upon the Tracks much faster than the speed by which they would be perceived by an observer. A flash in the eye, the activated Track would have been, to someone where Aikin stood. A shooting star of magic along something even more arcane.

Maybe.

But speaking of things arcane, nowhere in any direction was there any sign of the enfield: the enfield upon which he relied to reaccess the Tracks: the Tracks he must follow to get back home.

A drop of cold scraped his cheek, and he raised a finger to touch that icy runnel: a single drop of rain.

Clouds scudded through skies grown ominous and gloomy.

Abruptly, fear clenched Aikin's heart in fists of iron.

Before he could stop himself, he was crying.

But what else could a mortal man
do?
He was lost in an unknown country beside an invisible road, neither of whose laws he remotely understood.

Chapter X: Rude Awakening

(Jackson County, Georgia—Saturday, October 31—morning)

A mime in urban cammos was hunting rabbits with green plastic hand grenades, lobbing them off two-dimensional cliffs at human-sized bunnies that, with a stark-naked Alec McLean, danced to rock and roll. Explosions kept time to the beat and sent up blood-colored fireworks with each burst. Someone—probably that white-faced Faery woman at the base of a mesa that suddenly looked a lot like the buildings on Clayton Street—was going to very high-tech town on a complex keyboard-synthesizer thing. It sounded like King Crimson or Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, the way she'd sample some random noise, then drag it out to a tortuous dissolution, extracting melody along the way. Just now she seemed to have sampled a doorbell, because there was certainly a protracted, jingly ringing, repeated at intervals.

On the fourth repetition, David came groggily awake. “Fuck,” he grunted. “Fuck you, tel'phone!”

He considered letting the answering machine do its thing—or yelling at Alec to assume that errand. Only, the machine wasn't picking up until the sixth ring, and he didn't think he could listen to its insistent angst that long. Plus, the nightstand that held the damned thing was closer to his bed than his roomie's—and Alec
had
had a world-class awful night, until he'd abdicated. David knew: he'd nursed him through two gut-wracking, guilt-tripping hours. If he heard a slurred, “Gotta find 'er, man; gotta
find
'er,” one more time, he was gonna shoot somebody. Probably Alec himself. That'd put him out of both their miseries.

Rrrriiinnnnggggg!

“Fuck,” David growled again, and fumbled an arm from under the cover, to send his fingers stumbling over the nightstand like an overweight, drunken tarantula. He missed twice, though he found the wet washcloth he'd bathed Alec's face with, and the water glass he'd finally managed to empty into him, in the name of brotherly affection.

Rrrriiinnnnnggggg!

“Fuck brotherly affection”—as he finally got the receiver off the cradle, dragged it to his ear, then retracted both beneath sheets that seemed to cover only his upper half.

“'Lo…?” he mumbled, making a point to sound even sleepier than he was.

“This David?” a hoarse female voice wondered. The slight country twang sounded familiar, but mind-fogged as he was, he couldn't place it.

“Yeah,” he managed, through a yawn.

“Uh, well…this is Cammie,” the caller continued uncertainly. “You know: Aikin's…friend, and—well, I was kinda wondering if he spent the night at your place last night.”

David scratched his side. “Not unless he sneaked in after I crashed.” Then, more alertly, having noticed the nervous edge on the young woman's voice, “I mean, he did the Halloween thing with us last night, but he split early. Like, one minute he was there, and the next, he'd just…disappeared.”

“He does that,” Cammie replied. “But…like, I'm moving, see, and he was supposed to help me haul some stuff in his truck this mornin', only he didn't show, and he's always real punctual, and I keep gettin' his machine, so I figured maybe he'd unplugged his phone or something. But then I remembered he'd said something about partyin' with you guys, only I wasn't
sure
if you guys were pickin' him up, or if he was gonna drive, so I thought if he
had
gone with you, he'd have stayed over at your place—I mean, I knew it was a long shot…”

“Yeah,” David grunted, because he'd only caught about half of what he'd heard. He shifted to a more comfortable sprawl. The sheets promptly oozed to the floor. A glimpse at his watch (nestled inside Cutter's vest on the floor) showed that it was late morning—and
far
later than he wanted it to be. The sun was shining in the unshaded window with a vengeance, its cheery yellow beams narrowly missing Alec's face.
His
sheets had barely shifted since David tucked him in. The guy looked too damned peaceful. “Yeah,” he repeated, inanely.

“No, but see,” Cammie went on breathlessly, “I called one of my friends out at Whitehall to see if his truck was there and then call me back, so she did, and she said it was, but then my friend went over there and knocked, and nobody answered, so she looked in his window and saw his costume and stuff just thrown around his room like he took it off in a hurry. And—”

“So he's prob'ly out collectin' leaves or something…”

“Not if he was gonna help me move that stuff! You're his buddy, you know what a time nut he is: he's
never
late. If he even
thinks
he's gonna be, he calls.”

“So you thought maybe he'd got real drunk or something, and we'd stopped by his place on the way back and dropped off his truck…”

A troubled pause. “Yeah, I guess I kinda thought something like that—but I'm kinda worried now. See—well, this is gonna sound
really
crazy, but…he's been, like, real preoccupied the last couple of days, and I know he keeps a journal—he tapes it while he's drivin', and then transcribes it on his PC. But anyway, this friend of mine had loaned him a bunch of lecture tapes, so while she was over there, she saw some tapes and a player in his truck and thought they might be hers, and she needed 'em back, and the truck was unlocked, so she just reached in and got 'em. Only she stuck one in, you know, to see if she'd got the right one. And she backed it up a little, and it was Aik workin' on his journal…and the part she caught—just the tail end—was him sayin', ‘It's Halloween eve, and I'm goin' to town with some friends, and then I'm gonna let the enfield out, and
really
party.'”

David sat bolt upright. “
Enfield?
You're sure the word was
enfield
?”

Cammie's control was weakening. “That's…some kinda
gun,
isn't it, and I think Aik's got one, so I got scared, and all. I mean, he's been actin'
real
strange lately, and…”

David was on his feet, abruptly all attention. “It's cool—I think. Not what you think, anyway. But— Oh crap, I guess I'd better get over there.”

“Want me to meet you? I mean, if something's
happened
…”

“Nothing has,” David assured her firmly, adding a silent,
I hope,
before continuing. “I think I know what he meant, and if I'm right—”

“He's not gonna…
shoot
himself, or anything, is he?”

“No,” David said with conviction. “Look, this is something…secret between him and me; something we've…been workin' on that I can't tell you about. So just hang tight, and I'll go over to his place and check things out. Did your friend take that tape?”

“She, uh, kinda freaked and thought it might be…evidence, or something. It's where she left it. She didn't even lock the truck.”

David couldn't stifle a grim chuckle.

“It's
not
funny!”

“Yeah, well, sometimes you gotta laugh to keep from cryin'.”

“So you really think Aik's okay?”