"I see."
"Do you?" said Linda. She folded her arms across her chest. "Understand, Mister Satterly. Your companion might very well die tomorrow. There's nothing you can do about it. I didn't want it to happen this way, but there it is."
Satterly raised his voice. "You keep saying that things aren't the way you want them, so why don't you do something about it instead of forcing it all on me?"
"Because I was outvoted, Mister Satterly. I have children, and the people who outvoted me have guns. And they don't really like me very much as it is. That's my reality."
He followed her up a steep wooded trail. Halfway up the hillside, she stopped and walked away from the trail, beckoning him to follow. Something metal glinted in the filtered moonlight. A truck.
"What the hell?" said Satterly. It was a flatbed truck, mostly buried in drifting snow but recognizable. The bed of the truck held a number of open containers filled with metal rods in varying quantities.
"That explains the rebar everywhere," Satterly said.
"This stuff has saved our lives a dozen times," she said. "It's strong, it's durable, and the Fae avoid it like the plague."
"How did this thing get here?" said Satterly, baffled.
"I'm getting to that," said Linda.
They continued up the hill. Farther along, a yellow tow truck was wrapped around the trunk of a stout pine, its exposed edges mottled with old rust.
"We never found out what that guy's name was," said Linda, pointing at the truck. "No wallet." She shrugged. "When we buried him, we called him Joe, because that's what it said on the side of the truck, but he didn't look like a Joe to me."
Satterly said nothing, only goggled at the truck as he walked past it.
"This is my car," she said, pointing. A Volvo station wagon rested on its end in a ravine, its taillights pointing skyward. From where Satterly stood, he could reach out and touch the rear bumper.
"You're from Georgia," he said stupidly, pointing to the license plate. Then he noticed the registration tag on the plate. It had expired in June of 1994.
"How long have you been here?" he said, turning toward her.
"Fifteen years," she muttered. "We've been here fifteen years."
As they neared the top of the hill, Satterly began to notice a light emanating from there, steady and blue. It cast long shadows through the tree trunks. Glancing to the left, Satterly noticed that the ravine that held Linda's Volvo continued up the hillside, carving an ever-narrower depression into the earth. Curiously, as the ravine neared the top of the hill, it grew more rounded, more regular, smaller, until Satterly would have sworn it was a drainage ditch, something man-made. The source of the light was at the top of the ravine.
It was a blue sphere of light embedded in the ground, the size of a softball. It glowed with its own radiance, its makeup uncertain. Satterly took a step back and tried to comprehend what he was seeing.
The ravine narrowed even further, becoming shallower as it ascended the slope, finally diminishing in size to a perfectly rounded trench the size and shape of the blue patch of light. The glowing circle was nestled at the top of the depression, as though someone had been rolling it through the mud, leaving the ravine in its wake.
"There it is," said Linda simply. Satterly reached forward to touch the circle and she grabbed his hand. "Careful of the boundary," she said. "It's sharp; it'll take off your finger if you're not careful."
"What the hell is this thing?" said Satterly, kneeling and peering into the circle. He looked back at the ravine. "Did this little thing dig out that huge hole?"
She nodded. "It used to be much bigger," she said.
"What is it?"
"That, Mr. Satterly, is the blue sky of the planet Earth," said Linda. She knelt next to him, laying the pistol across her knees. "Or at least what you can see of it from here."
Chapter 28
"Why couldn't you just walk back through?" said Satterly, gazing into the blue orb. "When it was bigger, I mean."
"I'll show you," she said. She picked up a stick from the ground, illuminated by the sphere's light. She poked the end of the stick into the light and they watched as it was torn to splinters by an unseen force.
"According to Hereg," she said, "the same force that's causing it to contract is distorting the membrane between the worlds. His spell is going to enlarge and smooth out the boundary." She dropped the stick and wiped her hands on her pant legs. "That's what he says, anyway. Who knows how much of it is true?"
"He's been in that cage a long time, I gather."
"Yes, we caught him trying to steal food from us about eighteen months ago. We'd built the cage to hold some of our more precious belongings, but with the storms and the cold weather, we had to move them. Again, locking him up like that wasn't my choice, but without him, we'd probably be dead by now."
"I gather that you and Jim Broward don't always see eye to eye," said Satterly, turning away from the light.
"You gather correctly," she said. "I don't think he's a bad man, we're just… very different. He's got his people, his son Chris, who was guarding you just now, and Meyer and jenny, they're a younger couple. My son and I, we tend to see things differently from them."
"Sounds like it's been a long fifteen years," said Satterly.
"You can't even begin to imagine. There have been bad times. My husband was… he died in an argument with Jim about five years ago. Some times the Fae come; there's a city about a day's ride from here, you know. A place called Sylvan, in Seelie territory."
"Yes," said Satterly. "That's where we're headed."
"And the girls, the children." She bit her lip. "I worry about the children, the ones that were born here. All the time."
"Why do the girls all have bandages on their ears?" Satterly asked.
"I don't want to talk about that," said Linda.
"Tell me how you got here," said Satterly.
"It's a long story," she said. "Ancient history now."
"Up to you."
She leaned back on the ground, her hands stretched out behind her. "It was June," she said. "My husband and I were driving our son Jamie to camp in Tallulah Falls, Georgia. We'd just moved to Atlanta from Rochester, New York. We thought maybe Jamie would meet some other kids, you know. Do some archery, whatever kids do at those places. He was thirteen, it was an awkward age for him." She stopped and peered at Satterly in the darkness. "Why are you smiling?"
"I'm sorry," he said. "It's just that I haven't seen another human being or spoken English in so long, it actually seems more strange than my life does now. It's just bizarre, that's all."
"Anyway," she continued. "We got lost heading out to the camp. My husband was driving. We were following the signs out to Lake Rabun, just like the directions said, then we hit a fork that wasn't on the map. We went the wrong way, we doubled back, got lost. Next thing I knew we were on this little dirt road and I was afraid the Volvo was going to bottom out any second.
"I don't know what happened next. One second, we were on a tiny dirt road near Tallulah Falls, Georgia. The next second, there was no road. It just disappeared. Like that." She snapped her fingers. "The trees changed, the goddamn mountains changed. All around us. All at once. David lost control of the wheel and we pitched into that big ditch.
"In those days, the hole was huge. Big enough for Paul to drive a semi through, at least. He was the first one through, or at least the first one who stuck around. He'd been here almost a year when we showed up. He was on his way to a construction site, just minding his own business, then boom! He crashed his truck, landed in some godforsaken alternate dimension or whatever the hell this place is, and he was alone. For a year. I don't know how he survived, I honestly don't.