Dreamseeker's Road (19 page)

“
I
didn't see 'em.”

“Which is
not
our problem.”

Another pause. “Still want me to come over?”

“I guess you better. But read me Alec's note first, okay?”

“Sure. He did it on the computer,” she added. The rattle of paper ensued, then:

11:17
AM

Dave,

Thanks for looking out for me last night. I hope you're not too pissed, 'cause you're probably gonna be a lot
more
pissed when you find out what I've done now. If I'm lucky, I'll have finished my little quest and be back before you can do anything about it, anyway—which I guess renders this note redundant, unless something's gone wrong. Oh well! I'm not gonna tell you more 'cause I know you well enough to know you'd find some way to come after me, and this is
my
battle. You've probably figured out by now that I've taken the ulunsuti and gone “tracking”—and that's as much as you need to know. If you're reading this, I've succeeded, at least as far as getting where I wanted. If I'm telling you this, I've succeeded all the way. And if
someone else
is telling you this, God knows what's happened, but you probably ought to plan a wake. But either way, I figured we were both better off if I wasn't sitting around beating my meat. I didn't tell you about this, 'cause I knew you'd either try to talk me out of it, or try to come along, and it's not your battle; it really isn't.

So take care, bro, and…pax.

(P.S. You must have my hangover, 'cause
my
head's clear as a bell.)

(P.P.S. Thanks for making coffee.)

Alec

“Well,” David groaned, pounding the clapboard wall beside him. “That's just
great
.”

“Yeah,” Liz sighed. “So what do we do?”

“I don't know,” David replied flatly. “I just don't know. I can't think straight right now.”

“Are you okay?”

“More or less. Why?”

“Just wondered. I don't need to lose you too.”

“Thanks.”

“Know what
I
think we should do?”

“I'm…open to suggestions.”

“Okay, then. We need to get both our friends back, right? And they've both done things that were really stupid. But Alec at least
sort
of knows what he's up against, and he's got magical whatsits to protect him, if he bothers to use 'em. Aikin doesn't, and he's been gone longer. He's on his own and probably in over his head, since he's not back yet. So we deal with Aikin first, and then look for Alec. Besides, Alec
might
be back any minute.”

“So might Aikin.”

“Yeah,” Liz said, “but we can't be certain, can we? So hang tight, I'm on my way.”

Chapter XI: Off Track

(Near a Straight Track—no time—dusk)

Okay, Daniels, get your act together,
Aikin told himself.
You wanted this; now
deal
with it! You're an
Eagle Scout! You did Outward Bound…

Only…Outward Bound didn't exactly prepare you for being dumped into another
World.
And there was no merit badge, last time he checked, for Straight Track Manipulation or Faery Realm Survival.

If he even
was
in Faerie. That was an interesting question, too: Was this murky, misty country part of Tir-Nan-Og at all—or one of the pocket universes that lay beside the Tracks—or some other place entirely? Another locale on good old terra firma, maybe? In which case he was still in deep shit, but one escapable by phones and credit cards—assuming, of course, this was also his own
time,
which, given the fact that it'd been a shade past midnight when he'd left Whitehall and it was now something resembling twilight, was definitely not a given.

No!
He wouldn't think about that—dared not! First things first—and first had to be figuring out what sort of land he'd blundered into. And with that, he wiped rain (he hoped it was
only
rain now; no way he wanted to meet the Lords of Faerie crying) off his cheek, cleaned his glasses, and took stock of his surroundings.

Well…the drizzly, twilight landscape
looked
a very great deal like Scotland, and he knew how Scotland looked, because he'd spent part of one summer there with his mom, who was a globe-trotting archaeologist. Actually, it looked like the
highlands
of Scotland; had the same desolate rolling hills with hints of higher ones beyond; the same scruffy, low-grown vegetation—gorse and heather and who knew what. There was also the same pervasive dampness, as if rain lay always in wait, even when it wasn't actually falling, or fog lurked just
beyond,
eager to assert itself and fill up the hollows with weirdness. The foliage around his ankles was wet even now, and from more than the fading drizzle; the moss below it felt squishy. To his right, a runnel of water tinkled between banks that were even parts rocks and heather.

And there was the looming sky: wild and storm-tossed like something from a Romantic painting, showing but the faintest tinge of sunset fire along the backs of clouds that roiled and tore and shifted like a movie on fast-forward. It was a sky at once awesome and grim: dark and brooding, with flashes of silver among the layers that spoke of unseen lightning. And yet, so quickly did those cumuli roll and tumble that an instant later the drizzle vanished and stars winked through rents to his right, taunting him with a brightness borne of clean air far from the Lands of Men. It was frustrating, too, for those distant suns were revealed too patchily to resolve into any patterns that might possibly provide some sense of location.

But then a vast sheet of cloud straight overhead tore asunder, as though it had read his wish and acted on command, and he saw a great many stars indeed. His astronomy merit badge was no help at all, though, because every one was strange. Certainly, the sky
he
knew never held five sparklies in a straight line, each as bright as Sirius and equally spaced. No way they could be planets, either, because not a week gone by he'd pointed out Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars to Cammie—and they couldn't possibly have shifted to so precise an alignment in the interim—nor added two accomplices.

“I'm in another World,” he told the wind—which was picking up even as the moor—heath—desolation—whatever it was—grew darker yet. “I'm in a fucking other
universe
!”

Alone—so far as he knew, since the enfield had gone AWOL—and with no agenda in place to ensure survival. Oh, he had food in his backpack, a change of clothes, matches, and a couple of plastic garbage bags that would help when it came to shelter. But he'd never given much thought to what he'd do if he actually
got
to Faerie. His assumption had always been that he'd get the lay of the land, sightsee a bit, then make a beeline to Lugh's palace and rely on name-dropping—David, Alec, or Liz (or Fionchadd or Nuada, if he was brave)—to get him by. And of course the Faery folk would be so amazed at his arrival and so bound by the laws of hospitality, they'd show him a good time and send him on his way, and he'd be satisfied.

He had
not
counted on being alone on a cold, wet, windy moor with true night quickly drawing nigh.

Fortunately, he
felt
just fine—his earlier fatigue having vanished—so he supposed first priority ought to be getting a bearing on his location. And since he was presently standing at the foot of a long steep ridge which lay to what, in his own World, would have been the north (assuming directions hadn't twisted around along with time when he abandoned the Track), the reasonable solution was to climb it, so as to command a wider range of landscape.

That decided, he resettled his pack, took a deep breath (the air tasted wonderful here, though it smelled faintly of decay) and set off up the hill, wading through calf-high heather. The only sounds were the hiss of his breathing, the rasp of foliage against his cammos, the faint slop/suck/squish of the saturated moss, and the pervasive moan of the wind.

Abruptly he longed for music. David had often accused him of requiring a sound track for his life, wondering why someone who craved solitude as much as he did needed to have U2 or Enya or Tori Amos along for the ride. But now he really
did
need them—or somebody—and found himself wondering what would be most appropriate for this climb. Something dark, of course, but with drive; and definitely with a Celtic twinge, since this place had a strong air of the Isles. The theme to
Far and Away,
perhaps? Only that was a little too light to complement the wild sky. And then he had it: from
The Last of the Mohicans—
the
part that orchestrated the battle on the mountainside. That scene had been filmed near his old home turf—over in North Carolina (doubling for the too-commercialized Catskills)—and the rolling, relentless grind of what was either fiddle or hurdy-gurdy was perfect. He tried to imagine it, as he trudged along: the repetitive melody slowly swelling in volume and acquiring dark undertones of bass that seemed to evoke the infrasound of the very earth itself, both rising to merge in a burst of brass.

He tried to whistle it, but his thread of tune sounded frail and thin in the rising wind. Scowling, he contented himself with regarding the height above, and soldiered grimly on, noting that his legs were getting sore, and his fatigues were soaked to the knees. It was colder, too: as though summer and winter battled in the air. In fact, there were actual hot and cold spots, like ones found in bodies of water, only these were all around him.

And as he continued on, more land came into view, and he noted that many of the surrounding summits were studded with standing stones: singly, or in pairs, groups, or circles. They looked familiar, too—conceptually—and he recalled how, on a trip to Ireland, he'd scrambled atop the lone menhir that crowned a hill in Connemara National Park and quartered the compass with his gaze without seeing one obvious token of modern man.

And then he reached the ridgeline—and felt at once exalted and dismayed.

It was a hell of a view, that was for sure: a country as wild and full of latent magic as any he could imagine, for all that every element it contained was sufficiently mundane to exist in his own World.

But it went on
forever
! Saving the megaliths, there was no sign of man at all! No lights—not so much as a campfire.
Nothing!

So what did he do now? Good sense said go back down the ridge, locate the Straight Track, and see if he could contrive some way to activate it. Shoot, if he was lucky, the enfield would return; and if he was very lucky, the beast might even sense his need and trigger the Track itself.

But before he did any of that, he'd check out the view one last time, to imprint it indelibly on the romantic part of his soul. So it was, then, that he began a slow circuit of the ridgetop, surveying every quadrant in turn. And so it was, too, that a flash lightning to the possible-east revealed something he'd missed before, that now stuck out in stark relief as sheeted brightness lit the clouds there.

It was a tower—or the ruins of one. Nothing big, and certainly not as imposing or other-looking as Lugh's place in Tir-Nan-Og. But it
did
offer two tokens of hope: human-type life
had
lived here once, and shelter was available—which he would need if the storm that had exposed the tower moved closer. Already he'd felt new darts of rain against his cheeks—and he had no desire to be caught outside by a downpour on these moors.

And since the tower was a surety, whereas cooperation from the Track was not, he directed his steps to the former.

—And had barely gone five paces when a new realization brought him up short. The tower lay in what he'd assumed was the east, and was mostly visible when cut out against the lightning. Yet so quickly were those dark clouds moving, that the sky there had cleared already and a steadier light shone forth: that of a heavy, yellow moon, newly risen. “Hey, man!” he called to it, for he had been observing good old Luna since he was kid, and knew its movements and phases. Only…
this
moon was full! No big deal, in the abstract; it happened every twenty-eight days. But the moon was supposed to be full in his World
tomorrow
night; and his practiced gaze was discerning enough to note even one day's change, and this was
definitely
a full moon. Which, if there was any analogy between his World and this (which was a pretty big if, given that the stars were all wrong) meant he had somehow gained over eighteen hours and was out on the moors on Halloween night! And while Halloween was his favorite holiday back in Georgia, he was not at all certain he wanted to confront it here, without the veneer of plastic and neon to enforce disbelief.

Halloween felt
real
here. This was a place where the dead
could
rise, where witches could ply the air on broomsticks, where all the dark things of earth could walk the land and have their way. Aikin suddenly wished, very hard, that he was a fundamentalist business major with an IQ of about 5 and the imagination of a turnip.

No, forget turnips: folks had used big ones hollowed out to hold candles back in the old country. They'd been precursors of jack-o'-lanterns.

Which was only making him more wired, and getting him no closer to the ragged black spike of tower.

But he was far less than halfway down the ridge on that side when a gust of wind swept off the heights and caught him, plastering his shirt to his arms and whipping his hat right off. The wind howled ominously, and a glance behind showed the storm moving in that way.

But then the wind dropped abruptly, to reveal
other
sounds that had hidden in it: the distant, clear shriek of a hunting horn—and, slightly closer, the belling of countless hounds.

Aikin had been hunting all his life and had sampled almost every variation, from rising in the wee hours to stalk the woods alone, through wading through briars listening to dogs cry as they flushed a rabbit, to riding red-clad on horseback as hounds coursed across Virginia meadows. Yet something about
this
horn chilled him to the very depths of his soul. It had sounded as though whoever winded it was crazed with anger, and the belling of the hounds spoke of both hunger and insanity.