Mountain spirits, he thought in disbelief, then cast the thought away.
"You're dead, Michael," he said. "Have the decency to stay that way."
Beside him, Michael shimmered and vanished. Maybe that was all it took, he thought. Just tell them to go away and they would. He smiled despite the shiver that swept through him. Very accommodating, these mountain spirits.
He glanced back at the empty seat several times after that, trying to prevent any reappearance by telling himself that if he kept watch, it wouldn't happen. He was anxious to get clear of this fog and these mountains now, to get far away from them. Then he could get some sleep and stop hallucinating. He hadn't realized how tired he was, and when he coupled that with the traveling conditions and his mental state, he could understand why he was seeing dead people.
I don't think you should keep going this way, a new voice said. I think you should turn back. This road doesn't belong to the living, Logan.
His father was sitting next to him now, a less clear apparition than Michael, but real enough that it caused him to start. His father wouldn't look at him, staring straight ahead as Michael had, an ethereal presence that suggested he could vanish in an instant's time. As Logan continued to stare at him, he did just that. He shimmered, melted into mist, and was gone.
And Logan looked back at the highway just in time to slam on the brakes and swerve to avoid a huge boulder blocking the center of the road. The Lightning skidded along the moisture–dampened road toward a low guardrail and a drop that fell away into blackness. Logan pumped the brakes and pulled the wheel all the way over so that the vehicle was sliding sideways and out of control.
It stopped beside the guardrail with inches to spare. The engine killed with a grunt, and the steady hum turned to a soft ticking in the night silence.
Logan sat without moving, staring at nothing. He closed his eyes and waited for his heart to slow and his breathing to steady. It was all right now, he told himself. But maybe he had to stop after all. Maybe there was nothing for it but to wait for morning and to try to sleep until then.
No rest for the wicked, whispered Michael.
No rest for the living, said his father.
He sighed and opened his eyes. There was no one there. He was alone, locked inside the AV, the soft lights of the dash and the slow ticking of the engine the only signs of life.
Outside the AV, the fog was closing in like a living thing, tendrils tightening about the vehicle, shutting off the sky and the earth, wrapping like a spider's webbing. At first, he thought he was mistaking what he was seeing. It was so deliberate, so purposeful. But then everything disappeared in a sheet of damp white, and he knew that despite what common sense and reason told him, there was something out there and it was trying to take control.
Should have turned around, said Michael.
Never should have come, said his father.
Faces began to appear outside the AV, ghostly apparitions that materialized one by one and then pressed close to the window glass. Eyes as blank as bare walls peered from faces etched by pain and suffering. Such eyes could not see, and yet it felt as if they did. Hands reached out and brushed the glass, and he flinched. They were all around the Lightning now, and their numbers were increasing by the minute. He reached quickly for the starter, intending to get out of there. But the motor would not catch. It would not even turn over. The vehicle was dead.
He sat staring at the controls, and then looked up again at the faces. He recognized the ones closest. They were the faces of men and women he had fought beside while he was with Michael. They were the faces of slaves and victims he somehow remembered out of so many he had tried to free. All of them were dead now. He knew it instinctively, not just from their apparitional appearance, but from what he felt inside, too. They were ghosts, and they were there to haunt him.
But what did they want?
Two new faces came into view, sliding through the crowd until they were right up against the driver's window. His throat tightened. It was his older brother Tyler and sister Megan, gone all these years, their faces unchanged, frozen in time. They stared at him blankly, dead–eyed and directionless, but aware, too. They knew he was there, inside the Lightning. Like all the others, they had come looking. Like all the others, their need was a mystery he could not decipher.
He squeezed his eyes shut. They were not going to disappear like Michael and his father. They were more than smoke and mist, more than insubstantial specters, more even than ghosts conjured by imagination. They were creatures of magic and spirit life, brought to him to achieve something, and they would not depart until he responded to their presence.
He opened his eyes and stared out at them. Sometimes you had to confront the dead as well as the living, the past as well as the future. Sometimes the two were so inextricably interlocked that there was little to distinguish between them. It was so here. Mountain spirits or something more insidious, there was a joining that reasoning and common sense could not undo.
He seized his staff, opened the door, and stepped outside the AV to confront whatever waited.
The outside air hit him with a blast of cold that nearly knocked him backward, an icy rush that cut right to his bones. The wind was blowing hard, something he hadn't realized before because its force was having no effect at all on the ghosts crowded around him. They neither advanced nor gave way as he emerged, but held their ground and swung their blind gazes in his general direction. A few lifted their hands as if to touch him, but their efforts were feeble and more demonstrative of need than intention. Shivering in the sharp chill of the wind, he brought the black staff around in front of him, letting the natural light reflect off its surface. The wind howled in response–or perhaps it was the ghosts – and the deeply etched runes flared with inner light, with their infused magic, fiery and bright.
The spirits of the dead fell back, and for an instant Logan believed they would disperse. But in the distance behind them and farther up the road, a strange darkness had begun to gather. More ghosts were emerging from its roiling mass, pressing forward to join those already surrounding him. He watched them approach, half disbelieving what he was seeing, half recognizing the inevitable.
The dead had not appeared of their own volition; the dead never did. They were either summoned or sent; he knew that much from his time as a Knight of the Word.
But what was the source of the darkness to which they were responding?
He gripped the black staff and started forward, pushing through the gathering of spirits, their white emptiness giving way, their ephemeral presence dissipating and re–forming as he passed. Only a confrontation with their source would resolve what was happening. If he was to break free of this–whatever this was–he would have to face down the thing that was causing it, the darkness from which these spirits emerged. It hung thick and impenetrable as he approached, but even as he reached its edges he still could not put a name to it.
He brought up the staff, its magic already summoned and flowing over him in a bluish light, encasing him in its armor. He felt the warmth of its protection enclose him and was reassured. He lashed out at the blackness, ripping at it as he would a piece of cloth. It split apart easily, unable to hold together, collapsing before him, and a fierce joy engulfed him, a sense of empowerment.
But the split lasted only a moment, and then almost effortlessly the blackness repaired itself, the jagged tear resealing. More ghosts emerged from its dark breast. More faces pressed forward. Again, he attacked. Again, the blackness split apart and again quickly resealed and re–formed, unaffected. If anything, the roiling mass appeared to be an even larger and more inexorable presence.