Jack winced again.
“I still had some charge on my cell, so I called the number, mostly just to have something to do. Another bad decision, right?”
Jack lifted one corner of his lips.
“That’s what I do. I run away from good decisions, toward bad decisions. This was the worst, I think. A man came to the bridge and picked me up. He looked young, Asian—in his thirties, tall and skinny but fit, with deep black eyes. He drove an old gray Mercedes. There was someone in the backseat—a woman. She wore a veil and never said a word. She smelled like smoke. We left the city behind. Off the highway, the man and I got out and had lunch at a diner, but the woman never left the backseat. She wasn’t dead—I could hear her breathing.
“After we ate, back on the highway, she started a fire. The guy had a fire extinguisher under his seat. He pulled over and opened her door and yelled and sprayed foam all over. She whimpered but never said a word.”
Jack’s fingers knotted in his lap.
“I thought he looked young, but his tiny black eyes were old. Mostly, he was friendly. The front seat was so comfortable—heated, soft but firm. He did tricks with his silver dollar—one-handed, the other hand on the wheel, pretty clever. The coin did everything he wanted it to—like it was alive and he was its master.
“He remembered my story—what I told him as we drove. We might go on forever, tricks and stories and the long, straight road. I was so out of it, so accepting—still just a little fool, I guess.
“We finally came to a big house out in the woods near St. Paul. There were piles of lumber and stuff all around, but I didn’t see any workmen. The guy told me they had found an old vault under the house with thick walls where things could get really quiet. They put me down in the vault and I slept for a couple of days. It wasquiet. I got better, stopped gritting my teeth and biting the insides of my cheeks. I felt so lucky, and thought maybe I was learning how to feel gratitude, real love. He would visit every day, bring me food and clothes, and I knew from the beginning he wasn’t interested in sex—he respected me. I thought this was a good place. He was good to me. My dreams stopped.”
Ginny had started shaking, little tremors at first, but now her teeth were chattering. Jack reached out to touch her arm, but she pulled it away.
“The last time he visited, he told me we were going to take a walk. We climbed the stairs out of the basement, and the wind was whistling outside. It was cold—below freezing. The air smelled like snow. I noticed that they hadn’t put in carpet or wood floors—just plywood. It was really just an old abandoned house that had never been finished. He said we were going to meet the Queen.”
Jack pulled his hands apart so he wouldn’t bruise his fingers.
“He said the Queen paid him to find special people. Somehow, I saw that the guy’s clothes were actually pretty shabby. She couldn’t be paying him much. And now his skin looked old. I thought maybe I’d found myself a realvampire—a poor one.” Ginny’s voice dropped below a whisper. Jack could barely hear her.
The warehouse creaked. Yards off, a cat meowed. The meow echoed around the rafters as if there were dozens of cats.
“He was as afraid of the woods as I was. I knew the Queen wasn’t the woman who started fires, because we passed the car when we walked into the trees—just parked there, on the dirt driveway. Smoke was drifting out of an open rear window. The woman was inside. I saw her veil move. She was looking right at me but I couldn’t see her eyes.”
“You didn’t run?”
“I couldn’t. I couldn’t even think about jumping the lines because I knew the woman in the car would set fires everywhere, and she wouldn’t even need to leave the backseat. I could almost seeher doing it—hundreds of little blazes dropping from the air. She’d burn the woods, the house, any path I tried to take, anywhere I tried to go.”
“Using fires—like wasps.”
Ginny glanced left for a second, chin down, defiant, working hard to get it all out. “I wonder how many of them are out there, hunting us?”
Jack cocked his head. “No idea.”
“We walked between the trees for five or ten minutes. I thought we were walking in a big circle—we kept passing a black lake covered with green duckweed. Everything was getting dark. There was a storm coming in, low black clouds—lightning.”
“Sideways lightning?”
Ginny nodded. “Then he said something about a moth. Maybe it was theMoth. ‘The Moth is coming to introduce you.’ The trees—I noticed that their branches grew down into the dirt. The leaves moved, independently. But they weren’t really moving, they were just changing—getting bigger or smaller, shifting left or right, but without moving—because the trees were black and solid, like stiff tar. I thought, maybe each time a tree seemed to move, it was becoming a different tree—I don’t know how to describe what was wrong with them. The guy with the coin seemed as scared as I was. He said, ‘The Queen in White expects perfection. That’s part of her charm.’ I asked him how old he was, how old the Queen was, and he said, ‘What an odd question.’
“I think I saw another man—but it wasn’t a man. It stretched up and out until I could see right through it—right through him. We came to the center of the woods. I knew it was the center, but we had never left the circle. Maybe the path was a kind of spiral, but special—curving inward, but not in space. There was like a big lake of frozen jade-green water—all carved up, gouged out. I couldn’t see the sky over the lake—it just wasn’t there.”
Jack didn’t want to hear any more. He shifted a few inches to his right, as if she were a package about to explode.
“The clouds dropped and cut off the trees. Leaves fell like little flat rocks, ice cold. They stung when they hit my head and my arms. The light became gray and icy. The shadows had edges sharp as knives—if you walked over one, it could cut you. Everything smelled like lemons and burning gravy and gasoline—I hope I never smell anything like that again.
“‘Don’t say a word,’ the thin man told me. He pocketed his coin, held out his hand, wiggled his long fingers. I couldn’t help it—I showed him the stone, still in its box. He reached out as if to take it, but instead he backed away and said, ‘Don’t move. Don’t look. I’m sorry.’
“He started running. He left the circle we were on, and I heard him crashing through branches. I guessed that the circle was a trap—I had been hypnotized by the spiral. I couldn’t lift my feet.”
Jack covered his mouth.
“The same clouds…in the sky…like the ones that flew in over the city to get you,” Ginny said. “The man wanted to deliver me to something that didn’t belong here, something angry, sad. Disappointed. I stood between the trees. The leaves were spinning around the Queen or whatever it was in the center…I couldn’t see her. But she was tying up everything into one big knot. Her knot was the center of the spiral. I didn’t believe it, but I understood it—everything that couldhappen was goingto happen, and all of it would happen to me, and some of it would even be stuff that couldn’t happen.
“I was about to see everything,all at once. I turned around—completely around—and the trees spun by, but only halfway, and I saw the man in the trees—he lowered his hands and his eyes were like snowballs in his head. I turned around again, completely around, knowing that I would not see the Queen again until I had spun twice. Does that make sense?”