There was a dirt road in front of them.
XXIV
The town was like something out of a storybook.
All down Main Street, wood-paneled two-story shops lined the sidewalk, offering their wares through curtained windows above little flower beds on the sills. At the corner, there was a diner, and across from it, a gas station. A fire hydrant waited stoically at the curb.
On the lamppost just in front of Nell, at the first intersection leading to the heart of the town, a sign in the same bright green of all state tourism signs proclaimed:
Welcome to Agloe
Home of the famous Beaverkill Fishing Lodge!
“It’s real,” Nell whispered. “It’s really real.”
She stared, awestruck. At the stop sign, the intersection, the buildings beyond it. At the trees, which looked to be at least a hundred years old, with thick gnarled trunks and heavy boughs that shaded their roots.
She had thought the liminal room in the NYPL, and the phantom staircase at Classic, had been the most fantastical things she would ever see—but this was even more impossible. Moments ago, she had been standing on the side of the road in the rain, staring at an open, empty field. Then she’d taken a few steps down the muddy dirt road, and suddenly, she was inside of an entire town.
A town that no one else in the world but they could see.
“Wait,” Felix said. “It’s not raining here.”
Nell looked up. Before they’d entered Agloe, they were being pelted by the downpour, so heavily the ground had turned to mud around Nell’s shoes and sucked at the soles with every step. But inside the town, it was a perfect spring morning. There wasn’t a single cloud in the sky.
“It was always this way,” Wally answered, his voice strangely quiet.
He wasn’t staring at the sky, Nell saw. He was staring at Agloe. At the place he’d been locked out of, a place almost no one else in the entire world knew existed, but he’d been convinced still did. A place he’d spent his life desperately trying to prove was real, to return to, no matter the cost. His eyes were glazed with shock.
As if he could hardly believe he had finally, finally made it back.
Nell wanted to run, to make a break for it and hide somewhere where he’d never find her, but she couldn’t will her feet to move. For one, Wally knew the town and she didn’t. As much as she was afraid of him, she was also a little afraid of Agloe. She didn’t know what would happen if she got lost inside of it.
And she also couldn’t leave Felix.
Despite the incredible impossibility of what was around him, Felix was still looking at Nell, rather than at the town. As if by letting her out of his sight for a single moment, he would lose her forever.
“This way,” Wally finally murmured, startling her and Felix both.
“Where are we going?” Felix asked.
“To where the fire happened,” Nell answered him. What else could Wally want to see but the ruins? But to her surprise, Wally shook his head.
“It’s not far,” he said instead. He turned and stared down one of the wide, empty streets, hypnotized. “The town isn’t as big as it looks.”
They went slowly, Wally lost in reverie, Felix wary, and Nell, despite the danger, utterly entranced.
She couldn’t help but stare at everything as they passed. At the first intersection, there was a little café on the corner, the lights on and door open. The sign in its front window proclaimed, Coffee! in blue cursive over a little painted cup, a curlicue of steam rising from it. It looked so inviting that Nell half expected a barista to call out to them.
But there was no one inside.