If clocks in this house could not display time properly, that didn’t mean the seconds weren’t passing. This was apparently some kind of eddy in the river of time; the river rushed forward; but here, the currents circled in a side pool. This wasn’t a pocket of stasis; events still proceeded here in a familiar linear fashion. Therefore, the timer in the bag should count down to detonation. The fact that Nanette and Anna seemed to respect the threat indicated that the device would work. Nevertheless, he broke into a sweat as he considered that he might leave the bomb behind to no effect.
Ten seconds. Twenty. Thirty. Forty. Forty-five.
David put down the tote, stepped out of the house, pulled shut the door, and ran to the nearby Explorer, splashing across the sodden lawn. Emily had left the driver’s door open, the headlights blazing. He swung in behind the steering wheel, slammed the door. She hadn’t engaged the emergency brake. He needed only to shift the vehicle into drive and tramp on the accelerator.
As they rocketed away from the house, a thousand knuckles of rain rapped the windshield, the safety system loudly warned him that he had not engaged his harness, and he expected bullets. When he glanced at the rearview mirror, it filled with a roiling mass of reflected fire. An instant later, a concussion wave rocked the Explorer on its tires, and the steering wheel stuttered in his hands.
Before they reached Highway 101, another blast wave rattled the tall Monterey pines that flanked the long driveway, shaking loose a whirling mass of dead needles. Sleeping birds, waking from sheltered branches, swooped in front of the racing Explorer and seemed to blow away into the storm, as if they were swatches of celestial fabric torn from the starless night sky.
Third and fourth concussions, each greater than the one before, were not the work of the bomb, but perhaps signified the collapse of whatever elemental power sustained the bridge that linked this troubled century to one more troubled in the future.
| 96 |
The night, the rain, the southbound blacktop glistening in the headlights like some magical highway leading to an enchanted land. Emily beside him, untouched by time and by those tormented creatures who had conquered it. She was an impossibility, but real.
She said, “A man . . . he stabbed me.”
“Yes.”
“I . . . I died.”
“Almost. Thank God, not quite.”
In his face, she seemed to see the years that she had lost but he had lived. “How long ago?”
“The man, the knife? Ten years.”
Shock silenced Emily for a mile, and then she said, “I dreamed. I didn’t realize how very long I was dreaming, Davey. I dreamed of anniversaries, celebrations, journeys, children. I dreamed . . . a life. Davey, what was that place? What happened there?”
For the moment, he had lost the talent to weave a story. He was unable to think where to begin.
Instead, he wondered how they would explain her reappearance, what tale of amnesia they would concoct and how they would anchor it with enough hard facts to satisfy both those who had known her and the authorities—and Isaac Eisenstein. There would be a way. He had no doubt they could do it. Life was a tapestry of stories. People spun stories ceaselessly, every day of their lives, whether they were writers or not.
She respected his silence, as if she understood that he wasn’t buying time to deceive, but was struggling to decide how best to lead her through the extraordinary maze of truth that they could never dare to share with anyone.
The rain relented. Santa Barbara glittered in the darkness, necklaces of light across the hills.
He would not return the Explorer to Estella Rosewater just yet. Call her later. Come north again in a few days to collect his things at the motel and retrieve the rented Terrain Denali. Tonight, they would drive all the way to Corona del Mar. To the yellow bungalow with the white shutters, where the yellow porch swing waited to be swung and yellow hibiscus bloomed in abundance.
At last he said, “You know the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice.”
Her eyes were blue gems in the instrument-panel light. “Eurydice treads on a serpent and dies of its bite. Orpheus is a great poet and musician. He descends into the land of the dead, using music to charm his way past Charon and various demons, to rescue his beloved Eurydice.”
David said, “Hades allows him to take her, though Orpheus must vow that he won’t look back at her until he’s led her into the land of the living.”
She said, “At the last moment, he breaks the vow, looks back at her, and loses her forever.”
“Let’s start with that,” David said, as clouds began to tatter and beams of moonlight found the sea. “This time, I did not look back.”