He sat down and began eating everything immediately. His appetite had no attention span of any kind: a little bit of stew, then a roll, then a slice of pie, then more stew, then a hunk of cheese and a sip of tea. Even if the food was all poisoned and the old lady was just waiting to skin his face off, it was all very real and very tasty. Within five minutes, he was full and bursting.
“How was it?”
“Excellent. Thank you, ma’am.” He stared at her for longer than was comfortable. “Do I know you?” he asked.
“Well, you do now!”
“No, but I mean from before. Have we ever met?”
“Oh, I doubt that. Now, I didn’t forget my promise to you.” She took a small leather pouch out of her apron pocket and slid it toward him. He peered inside and saw three hard brown seeds. “You’re a good, hardworking lad, and you’ve done well today,” she said. “Those seeds will get you to Courtshire.”
He pulsed with anger. “How is that?”
“The first one you throw down on the ground will become an iron tower. The second, a wolf. And the third, a wall of flame.”
“Are you kidding me? I just worked in your stupid yard for five hours.”
“Take the seeds. But please note: They’ll only grow at the exact moment you need them.”
Ben had to restrain himself from throttling her. He pressed down on his fury like a spring and wedged it into the corner of his psyche as best he could. He prayed that his unhinged mind was giving him a series of clues: a way out of his own lunacy.
He grabbed the seeds, silently fuming at the old crone.
“You won’t reach Courtshire until nightfall,” she said. “Take some of my food. I don’t have clothes for a boy your size, but I can feed you well enough.” She filled up a bunch of porcelain jars with stew and jam, then grabbed the backpack from off his shoulder and stuffed them in, along with some loaves of bread and pieces of cheese. She also snuck in the cheese knife, in case he needed something sharp. Again, everything fit. When she gave the backpack back to him, it felt as light as when it had been nearly empty.
“Are you really not coming with me?” he asked.
“I told you I would help get you to Courtshire, and I have. I’m certain of it.”
“Where am I? Just tell me, please. What’s happening to me?”
She said nothing and instead beckoned him over to the door and pushed it open. The path was waiting for him.
“Tell me your name, at least,” he begged her.
“It’s Mrs. Blackwell.”
“Where is Mr. Blackwell?”
“Gone,” she said, looking darkly out to the road. “He left the path.” That was all she would say.
“That’s pretty messed up.”
“Never leave the path,” she told him.
“I’ve been told that before.”
“You were told correctly.”
“Who are you, really? Do I know you?”
She said nothing. He stepped out the door and through the garden, back out onto the leafy path, and watched Mrs. Blackwell close the door behind her.
CHAPTER SIX
THE YELLOW LIGHT
Night fell and the cold was inside Ben again. It was making his fingertips buzz. He felt like he could transmit it to others now. He hugged himself and shivered as he trudged down the path, which never seemed to turn or bend. Just a straight shot into nothing. The path was a hole, and the farther he walked, the farther he was falling, making it impossible to ever climb out. He tried to warm up by thinking about Teresa and the children, but all of that was rendered bittersweet by his tryst with Annie, which he knew he would never be able to explain in a believable manner.
The dogfaces were gone, but he still felt the menace on him, like a lingering scent. Menace was underrated. When he was on a business trip once, another traveler accosted him in an airport. Accused Ben of cutting in front of him in line, which was a lie. They nearly came to blows before Ben backed down.
When he boarded the plane, the man was sitting directly across the aisle from him. Stared at Ben the whole flight. Leered at him, like he was an appetizer. He felt menaced for four hours. When the plane landed, the man followed right behind Ben up the Jetway, through the terminal, and all the way to the parking garage. It was 1 A.M. At 1 A.M. a parking garage feels like a crime scene in waiting. Ben walked briskly to his car and the man stayed behind him in his tight black shirt and angry glasses. They were alone now, and Ben couldn’t take it any longer.
“What the fuck do you want from me?”
The man popped Ben in the face with a sharp right jab. His scar split open.
“Remember that,” the man said, and he walked away. Just that one punch was all the man needed to put the menace inside Ben and leave it there. Anytime he parked his car after that, and anytime he went to an airport, he could feel it. Menace could do that to you. Menace could own you.
The sun set behind the trees and the cold took over his mind, holding it hostage, wiping out all thoughts of tent sex and the old lady’s horrid garden. God, it’s cold. Where is the town? Where is the fucking town?
To the right, off in the distance, he spotted a soft light in the air. It was yellow and artificial, like a parking lot light. It looked like modern civilization, not whatever Mennonite wizard land he had apparently stumbled upon. He picked up his pace, pumping his arms to keep warm, hoping the path would bring him to the light.
But the stupid path just kept going straight, and he could see the light pulling up alongside him and then falling behind, like the moon when you’re driving at night. Ahead, there was only darkness.
Never leave the path. That was what the note said. That was what Mrs. Blackwell also said. That was the warning. But here, in this yellow light, was a point he could aim for. It killed him to just let it go. Why would you listen to that old lady? She was talking to you about magic seeds, for shit’s sake. That town she was going on about probably doesn’t even exist. The light was all he had. He stepped off the path and began walking to it, taking out one of the loaves of bread and breaking it into big crumbs, leaving a trail of pieces behind him that he could follow back to the path if he needed to. And he made rock piles every ten yards or so.
The brush had mostly disappeared from the forest floor. No gnarled roots. No surprise rocks to trip over. Everything remained flat and eminently passable. The light was farther away than it first appeared, like when you’re swimming far out in the ocean and it takes forever to reach a shore that appears to be close by. Still, he trudged on.
Teresa must be hysterical by now.
The light wasn’t getting any closer, and Ben was beginning to get the feeling that Mrs. Blackwell knew what she was talking about. There was a heavy stir off to the side. Here came the dread: full and horrible.
Another step and he saw their outlines in front of him: two men, with the silhouettes of their heads in the moonlight flanked by short, floppy dog ears. The yellow light was nothing more than bait. He turned and sprinted back along the path of bread hunks.
“GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME!”
He could hear them stampeding after him, their laughter growing. They sounded as if they had been born in a pit. In the shifting moonlight, Ben could barely make out the cubes of bread he had left for himself along the ground, but he kept his focus down on his feet and never looked back. He saw the rock piles and breathed a sigh of relief that, at last, some things in this world had managed to stay in place.
“We’re going to rip your face off and show it to you before we kill you.”
Ben began screaming nonsense again. By the time he was back on the path, his vocal cords were raw and stinging with cold, as if he had swallowed a box of tacks. The path kept straight, as always, and the men followed close behind. Ben almost wanted them to catch him. May as well get it over with. The path was coming to an end up ahead. The wide canal b
etween the trees was about to give way to a wall of pure forest. There was no town. There was no one to save him. Once he reached the end of the path, this would all be academic.
Except . . . Well now, he had that bag of seeds.
Ben slipped the backpack off one shoulder and dug into the front pocket for the little leather pouch. The first one you throw down on the ground will become an iron tower. The second, a wolf. And the third, a wall of flame. Which seed did what? They weren’t marked “WOLF” or anything. Did the order matter?
He grabbed one hard seed out of the pouch and threw it up ahead. Three steps later, he smacked hard into the wooden door of an iron spire that stretched a hundred feet up into the air, standing sentry over the woods.
“Holy . . .”
Ben could hear the dogfaces closing in, so he threw the tower door open and closed it behind him. There were lit torches encircling the atrium, and a series of locks lining the front door from top to bottom: hinges and bolts and chains and knobs. He locked every last one of them as the dogfaces reached the door and began pounding on it. The fevered percussions rung in his skull and sickened him. They sounded like they were going to eat their way through the door, so he backed away, until he tripped over a small stone stair. To the right, there was a second door that led . . . Well, he was through trying to figure out what led where. Behind him, the stairs wound up and up and up. He would have the high ground on the dogfaces, but also be trapped up at the top if they managed to knock the door down.
The pounding wouldn’t stop. The killers seemed to get stronger as the minutes passed on. Ben saw a knife go full through the heavy door, the blade twisting and bending, the dogfaces trying to weaken the oak. They would not stop. They would not simply go away. He was their quarry. They were created for killing him.
He climbed the stairs three at a time, pausing to rest at one point because he had already physically pushed himself well past any point in his lifetime in which he had previously pushed himself. He was running and climbing himself to death. After a few minutes, he finally made it to the top and felt like an out-of-shape tourist. The top of the stairwell gave way to an observation deck that surveyed the entirety of the forest surrounding him in every direction, nothing but trees and gently rolling hills. No yellow lights. No roads. No towns. He peeked over the stone guard wall and saw the two dogfaces standing still, looking up at him.
“What do you want?!” he asked them from above. They said nothing. “I didn’t do anything! I wanna go home to my family! That’s all!”
“We’re going to kill you.”
“Maybe we could talk about this.”
“We’re going to kill you.”
He ducked back behind the wall and reached into the pouch, his hands shaking. Then he dropped one of the seeds and watched it plummet, bounding off the side of the tower and landing hard on the cold ground.
Two red wolf eyes stared up at Ben instantly.
The wolf set upon the killers and began to tear them apart, taking its time to hunt both of them down and burrow through their guts. The dogfaces howled in agony as Ben sunk back down behind the guard wall and covered his ears. He couldn’t stand the sound. His body sagged and now he was lying on the floor of the observation deck, sobbing with grief as the wolf ripped and tore away at the monsters below.
When the screams finally subsided, he looked back over and the wolf was staring up at him. Still very hungry. It began pawing at the door, and then attacking it, aiming to finish what the dogfaces started. I wish the door had been made out of iron. Big design flaw. The wolf gnashed and wailed. Like the dogfaces, it had some mystical power that would prevent it from ever tiring.
“Wolf!”
The wolf stopped, looked at him, and then went back to clawing.
“Can you talk, wolf?” It was a reasonable question at this point. But no, the wolf couldn’t talk. It could only kick ass on that door with maximum aggression. Ben ran back down the spiral staircase and eyed the front door. And the third, a wall of flame. Ben took out the third seed and slammed it down in front of the door. But nothing happened. The seed stayed a seed.
He picked the seed back up and turned to the second door. This one was iron. The wolf wouldn’t get past that. Of course, who knew what would be on the other side of that door: another wolf, another dogface, the Land of Oz.
Ben turned the mighty knob of the iron door, peeked into the thick darkness, took one step in, and promptly fell down a very deep hole.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE BEACH
He fell asleep while falling. Passed out from terror, really. He screamed and cried out in midair for Teresa and the kids, and then he blacked out. No dreams.
When Ben woke up, he was on a beach. One side of his face was buried in the cool sand, little grains of it stuck to the corner of his mouth. He had left a small pearl of drool down on the sand that looked like a tiny jellyfish. The waves were crashing in twenty yards away and the sky had a very thin cover of sheet clouds, the kind that would anger you if you wanted a full day of hot sunbathing. Behind him, the sun shone opaque through the sheer cloud cover. A series of rolling, grassy dunes provided cover for a single row of houses.
Houses.
He got up and beheld them. In front of him, two long lines in the sand ran parallel along the beach, as far as he could see, never turning into any of the houses. The path? The path. Screw the path. Those are real houses.
The dune grass was sharp and lashed against his ankles as he sprinted toward the house closest to his landing spot. It was a blue house with white shutters, and it stood up on stilts for protection from high tides. Ben waved his arms and stared into the windows.
“Hello! Hello! Can anyone help?”
As he drew closer to the house, he saw a worn-out dirt road behind it that stretched along the row of neighboring units. On the other side of that road was the sea. There was no land to be found past the expanse. He was on a massive sandbar. There were no telephone poles outside the house. No visible power lines. No cars. No bikes. No wagons. No vehicles of any kind. And no people. He was getting used to disappointment. He went up the loose plank stairs to the front door of the blue house (which faced away from the first expanse of ocean he had encountered) and began rapping furiously on the door.
No one answered. He dared to turn the knob and the door came open with ease. Inside was a spartan summer home designed to be lived in for only ten weeks a year. There was a little kitchen with ancient appliances, but no cookware of any kind. The kitchen opened to a living room with a pair of cute old lounge chairs and a cracked pleather sofa. Ben scoured the walls for outlets and phone jacks but saw nothing. Upstairs, he found three bedrooms with empty drawers and bare mattresses. He ran into a bathroom and turned on the faucet but no water came out.
“Hello?”
The closets were empty. Pacing from window to window, he could see that the neighboring houses didn’t seem to be harboring any traces of life either. He booted up his phone on the off chance that it would power up for just a moment and give him a signal. If you left the phone off for a while, sometimes the battery was resurrected just long enough for you to get angry at it again. But this time, it couldn’t even make it past the greeting logo. He pocketed it once more. His whole life was just taking his phone out and putting it back in again.
Up and down the sand spit, each house offered him the same kind of nothing: no people, no communications equipment, no food in the fridge, no water. It was a ghost resort. A trap, like the yellow light in the forest. Every sign of life was just a piece of bait to draw him away from the path.
And now the sea began to swell up. The whitecaps rippled and churned and, from the front porch of a three-story red Victorian, he saw a massive wall of water forming on the horizon: a wave higher than any building he had ever set foot inside of. Seagulls flew away from the wave with supreme urgency, but the water enveloped them as it
drew closer to the coastline, their caws snuffed out by the coming catastrophe.
He ran down the porch steps through the bristling dune grass until he came to the parallel lines in the sand that had probably been drawn for him by some cruel God. The tsunami was arriving, ready to claim the sandbar. Ben reached into the seed pouch and took out the final hard nut. He threw it at the wet sand just as the wave was gathering up the front of the ocean and preparing to throw it all back on top of him.
The fire immediately blazed up and down the coastline, reaching past the cloud sheet and into the stratosphere: a wall of fire with no limit to its height or width. Ben got down and the hot sand began baking him like a buried clam. He could hear the fire snuffing out the wave, steam loudly hissing all above him.
And then the wall died down and the ocean returned to its resting state, gently lapping at the edge of the beach. Wisps of steam rose up and broke apart in the air—ghosts of the tsunami—as thin and frail as the little clouds above him. That was his final warning. No more seeds to save him. No more leaving the path. He sat up in the sand and wrapped his arms around his knees and started to cry again. The hysteria had ebbed and flowed, and now it was walloping him again. He began saying I miss you over and over, in his hushed and croaky voice, hoping all the I miss yous would be carried like a signal through the atmosphere back home.
“I miss you all so much. Someone . . . someone please help me.”
But there was no response. Then Ben rose to his feet and shouted up at the sky.
“WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?! WHAT IS THIS SHIT?”
That was all he could muster up the energy to say. He was reduced to a random jumble of profanity and loud questions. There was nothing on this beach, nothing in these houses, no one to talk to. The stillness all around him made it obvious.
Up ahead, he saw a slight deviation in the parallel lines, so he walked toward it. Again, everything looked much closer than it actually was. All this grand visibility was making his feet ache. The padding between his skin and bones had worn down to nothing. He was a pillow someone had ripped open and emptied of feathers.