Work Text:
Assorted knives gleamed a bright and lovely silver as the day’s first light began to flood the car. The knives lay in a shoddy, kiln-baked bowl, and the bowl lay in the dusty underneath of the car’s front seats. It lay there in the company of Barrington Whelk, who had watched the night turn to day with his hands bound behind his back and his cheek pressed against the unbearably musty carpet of his own car, as the engine thrummed beneath him all the while.
Through the night and into dawn Neeve had driven them; and now the knives were gleaming, and dust motes were skipping through the sunlight, and he had worked his bonds patiently loose, and still the engine thrummed.
Eventually, Whelk spoke up. “Where the hell are you taking me?”
“Although the spiritual energy in Henrietta is remarkable,” Neeve said, “certain signs indicated I should travel north, and seek greater power still.”
“How far north?” said Whelk. “What signs? Just tell me where we’re going, for God’s sake.”
The unearthly drone from the radio faded away; then with a whir Neeve’s CD went back to the start, and spiritual chimes tinkled gently as the first track began to play its fourth repeat. “All things come to those who wait,” Neeve said mildly. “Including information, and knowledge, and understanding. You will come to know in time, Mister Whelk.”
“When you’re killing me, you mean?” said Whelk. His tone was not polite, and Neeve told him as much. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” he said, not feeling sorry at all. He felt rather sulky, if he was honest; sulky and petulant, and as though he had an uncommonly good excuse for it.
The muscles in his arms were growing stiff. Behind him, his wrists chafed with the effort it had taken to work the knots loose. He wouldn’t tackle her in the car, no – not on the road. Wait for her to stop. Wait for the time to strike.
The coarseness of the rope had frayed his shirt cuffs. He could feel it, the loose threads tickling at his wrists, and Whelk held his untied hands clasped at his back and watched the dust dance before him, and thought of how low he had been brought: imprisoned in his own car, in a shirt of such cheap fabric that its cuffs had frayed, and still the engine thrummed on.
+++
“I’ll get us something to drink,” Neeve said, and Whelk stirred from a restless doze to feel the engine purring into a lower gear. “You wait here, I won’t be long.”
A gust of warm air as the driver’s door opened – the creak of the suspension as she left – the slam of the door, and Whelk was alive, awake, the world as real and vivid as it had ever been. He shook the rope from his hands and began to flex life back into his fingers. The carpet had left a pattern on his cheek; his pants were ruinously rumpled. As an afterthought, he took a pair of Neeve’s silver scissors from the bowl and gripped them tight, their blades splayed open.
“Iced tea?” said Neeve, as she opened the back door. “Everyone likes iced tea, don’t they?”
Whelk didn’t answer. From where he had been braced in a runner’s crouch, he sprang up and knocked her backwards. A tussle, brief and nearly noiseless: her elbow in his gut, the rope around her throat, yanked back, his knee in her kidneys the way he’d seen boys do after school, fighting where they thought the teachers wouldn’t see.
“Oof,” said Neeve, in a tone of some surprise, and she tumbled into the back seats of the car. One can of iced tea rolled in with her. The other hit the asphalt and bounced.
Whelk tied her hands tighter than she had tied his. His neck was hot with sweat and an adrenalin rush, and he stepped back to survey his work. He could roll her into the footwell, where she had kept him; but Whelk suspected Neeve was stronger than he was, and it would not be easy for him to haul her out again when the time came to march her to her death. No, Neeve could stay where she was for now, reclining placidly across the back seats.
He picked up the iced tea that had rolled beneath the car. An empty parking lot, an early morning shimmer of heat haze above the tarmac. Gas station pumps stood unattended some distance away, and behind the plate glass windows of the adjacent store an attendant was at the desk, leaning on her elbows, leafing through a magazine. Unobserved. Good. “Where are the keys?” Whelk said.
“In my pocket,” said Neeve. She didn’t seem at all troubled by her predicament. The voluminous draping of her broom skirt spilled across the back seats, a waterfall in earthy burgundy. Whelk patted her down as briefly as possible – “the left side,” Neeve said helpfully, “they’re in my left pocket,” – and he took the Taser from her pocket as well and slammed the door, and got into the driver’s seat.
Her CD wailed into life when the engine thrummed on. Whelk smacked the off button with the feeling of a man avenged.
“I was enjoying that,” said Neeve. She sounded rather doleful.
Whelk glanced suspiciously back, but she still lay where he had left her. “Too goddamn bad,” he said. “It sounds like whale music.”
“There’s nothing wrong with whale music,” Neeve said. The car nosed out of the parking lot and back onto the endless road, lush greenery rising up on both sides. “Used in a spiritual context, a psychic can use it to synchronize with the Earth’s natural harmonies before she begins a session. And personally, I also find it also very relaxing.”
“I’m going to kill you,” said Whelk. It infuriated him that Neeve didn’t seem to mind. “What good is relaxing when I’m going to kill you?”
“Well, what good is worrying about it?” Neeve asked, very reasonably.
Whelk’s grip tightened on the wheel. He could see his cuffs now, the frayed edges of the cheap material, and they infuriated him too. One of his cufflinks had chipped. It was plasticky imitation gold; it was a grim, humiliating wonder it had lasted this long at all.
+++
On one side, the road’s first fork reached up into the mountains. It twisted up to the right and narrowed out of sight, while the left-side road led down, down, down onto the highway. His car idling at the deserted junction, Whelk could just about see it from up here: sunshine winking from gleaming steel carapaces, zipping by far below them.
He gripped the wheel and deliberated, but in the end he wasn’t a psychic, and he had no map, and the last directions he had programmed into his glitchy dashboard GPS were for Krafty Kelly’s Hobbies & Crafts Store rather than anything useful, like Virginia’s optimum sacrifice spot. Whelk pressed the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger and scowled down at his crumpled pants, and then he slung his arm across the back of his seat and scowled at Neeve instead. “Where are we going?”
Neeve said nothing. She was sleeping, her expression calm and beatific in repose.
“You have to be kidding me,” said Whelk. Neeve’s chest rose and fell in peaceful rhythm. She didn’t seem to be kidding him, or indeed to be doing anything much except for sleeping. “Neeve,” he said. “Wake up. I need to talk to you. Neeve.” He reached back to shake her shoulder, repeating her name until she blinked awake. “Where the hell are we going?”
“North,” replied Neeve.
“North,” said Whelk. “North, great, that’s great. Where north?”
Neeve blinked again, squinting a little in the broad midday light. “What promising energy,” she remarked, and Whelk felt his impatience simmering hotly beneath his skin like something come to life inside him, burning to escape. “And such nice weather for it, too. I imagine it would be rather lovely to give one’s life in sacrifice on a day like this.”
“You won’t have to imagine it much longer,” said Whelk, “at least, not if you tell me where in the hell we’re going. Then you’ll get to live it. Won’t that be lovely?”
Neeve’s gaze was searching when she looked at him. “You don’t have a friendly manner about you, Barrington, do you?”
“For Christ’s sake,” said Whelk. “You’re a psychic. This isn’t a difficult question. Mountains or interstate?”
“Interstate,” Neeve said. She closed her eyes again, rolling her shoulders as much as her bound wrists would let her. “Do wake me if anything happens, won’t you? I should hate to miss out.”
“Oh, sure,” said Whelk. He turned back to the road, pulled out of the dirt edge and back onto asphalt, and stamped down on the accelerator. The highway grew larger in the front window. “Sure, of course,” he continued, the words loaded with bitter sarcasm. “Whatever you want, right? Sweet dreams.”
“Thank you,” Neeve murmured.
“You’re welcome,” Whelk said sourly. An obscure resentment had overtaken him: that she had kidnapped him, and now here he was her own personal chauffeur, ferrying her about as she slept. Whelk hadn’t slept a wink, when Neeve had been driving. Not a wink! – kept sleepless and tortured by that accursed music of hers, and it would hardly surprise him to learn that that was exactly why she had played it.
This thought, once it struck Whelk, would not leave him. Sleep deprivation: yes, that must be it. No other credible reason existed for the woman to subject herself to that caterwauling, after all.
He drove and drove, and the highway rolled out endlessly before him. Thoughts of his family’s chauffeur haunted him – Mister Jacks, that had been his name. Whelk thought of Mister Jacks in his crisp black uniform with the deep purple piping, the gold buttons, the neat peaked cap, and his resentment rose like sickness with the realization that even Mister Jacks – house staff! a servant! – had afforded a finer standard of dress than Whelk did now.
+++
A convenience store emerged from the hypnotic heat haze shimmer some time in the late afternoon. Whelk checked Neeve’s bonds before leaving her unattended – he was no fool – and went into the dry, processed cool of the air-conditioned store.
“Pepsi,” he said on his return, and tossed a can into the back seats. A bag of chips followed after it.
“I prefer to eat organically, if I can,” Neeve said.
“Well, you can’t,” said Whelk. “I’m driving, and I want caffeine.” He peeled the cellophane wrapping from his other purchase and fed the new CD into the slot. The mournful, herky-jerk harmonica squall of Into the American Heartland: Country Classics began pounding through the car, turned up so loud that a rhythmic tremor shuddered the suspension.
After some miles, Neeve raised her voice over the din. “Do you enjoy this music?”
“Love it!” Whelk yelled back, and keyed the volume up another few notches with desperate, manic glee. “Can’t get enough of it!”
The engine thrummed, the country beats pounded. Whelk drained his can and flung it aside. North, north, north; if he couldn’t sleep, then nor would she. All was fair in love and war and ritual sacrifice.
“I see the appeal,” Neeve said, some time later. “Yes, I – it’s a very steady rhythm, isn’t it? Grounding. Centers your focus. Draws you into yourself. Yes,” she said, and though her voice was still raised it was also thoughtful, now, and when Whelk glanced in the rearview mirror he saw her nodding her head in time, her eyes serenely closed.
+++
They left the interstate after dark began moving in across the mountains. Neeve said they wouldn’t reach their destination before morning, even if they drove all through the night, and Whelk was inclined to believe her largely because he had no one else to believe. He pulled the car over in the rutted entrance of a field along a narrow dirt track, switched off the headlights and the engine, and in the sudden black void of the silent night he felt very much like a city boy. The night was an emptiness out here, no neon storefront scrawls, no liquidly pooled streetlight. Neeve’s quiet, steady breathing behind him was disembodied in the darkness. Uncanny, like something from a ghost story.
Abruptly Whelk left the car. He opened the back door – felt in the dark to check her binding, still secure – he returned to his seat.
Neeve’s mild voice drifted from the void that was the back seats. “Good night, Barrington. May your dreams be restful.”
“Just go to sleep,” Whelk snapped, and Neeve made a sound that might have been assent.
Sleep didn’t come easily to Barrington Whelk that night, but it came eventually, and it slumped him down in the driver’s seat with his shoulders hunched and his scowl as securely in place as though it had become a permanent fixture.
+++
Whelk was woken up by the fact of Neeve Tasering him. The light blinded him and the electricity incapacitated him, and the pain left him whimpering when she heaved him out onto the ground and set about methodically tying his hands back behind his back.
“How?” he managed, as she bundled him into the back seats. “How?”
“Is that comfortable?” asked Neeve. She was propping him upright, his hands and forearms twisted back behind him. “You’ve had some rest, so I thought you might like to sit up – to see where we’re going. How’s that?”
For a single wild moment, Whelk imagined spitting at her. Her face loomed before him in the darkness like a round shadowed moon, and he didn’t spit at her. He said, “It’s fine,” and heard in his voice the shame of a man defeated, a man brought low. But Whelk was accustomed to hearing that in his voice; he had been accustomed for seven years now.
“Good,” Neeve said, and reached across him to draw the seatbelt down across his body. It clicked home with a crisp sound that was loud in the still of the night.
It wouldn’t do for the sacrifice to die before Neeve could kill him herself, Whelk thought. He would have said it aloud, too, scathingly bitter, but the aftershocks of the Taser were still frying through his nervous system. He doubted it would even bother Neeve, anyway; he suspected she would simply agree, as gentle and as merciless as a goddess.
She was in the front seat, keys jangling. The engine thrummed on and the headlamps blared out into the night, and the gate of the field was lit starkly; beyond it, the churned earth held no shadows. “Off we go,” Neeve said brightly, and Whelk hung his head in hateful, unbearable shame.
+++
Night-time on the interstate wasn’t dark. Cat’s-eye lights pricked upward as floodlights glared downward, and the car was washed in the dazzle of headlights whenever the heavy grumble of overnight haulage approached, passed, receded. Whelk misted the window with his breath and wrote HELP, mirror-reversed, with the tip of his nose. If Neeve noticed, she said nothing. The condensation faded, and he rested his head against the glass and watched the night pass by.
The first pale traces of dawn had spread across the sky before they left the interstate again. Neeve pulled off down a deserted feeder road and parked in a turn-around, and Whelk watched sourly as she rummaged in the glove compartment. A thin blue stick, which she set upright in a narrow tray; a wickedly sharp silver knife, slid out from within her sleeve, with which she nicked the top of the stick; a lighter, retrieved from and then replaced within the voluptuous depths of her cleavage. Neeve set up the incense, leaned her head back against the headrest, and sighed. It was a long, contented sigh.
Whelk said, “You usually keep a knife up your sleeve, do you?”
“A knife serves many uses,” Neeve said.
A feeling of terrible certainty overcame Whelk. “Like cutting through rope,” he said.
“That is one use, yes,” Neeve agreed. “Could you keep quiet for a minute or two, Barrington? I like to start the day with meditation.”
Whelk promptly began to kick her seat. But Neeve offered no reaction, humming quietly and monotonously to herself, and before long he lost patience and gave up, feeling useless with frustration. Thin smoke curled from the incense, and a cloud of stinking hippie crap wafted all through his car. It would never get out of the upholstery, and it wasn’t as though Whelk could afford to get the thing dry-cleaned.
No matter: when he awoke the ley line, he would have all the cars he wanted.
At last Neeve breathed out, long and loud. She pinched the incense out between thumb and forefinger, swept the ash into her palm, and dusted it off outside her opened door. “Breakfast?” she asked.
“Yes, of course,” said Whelk, “just strap a nose bag on me, I’ll plunge my face right in. We don’t even have food.”
“Nonsense,” Neeve said firmly, and left the front of the car to sit in the back seats beside Whelk. She brought with her the Pepsi and chips he had thrown her way last night. “I did say I prefer clean eating,” she said, in answer to Whelk’s lifted eyebrows, “and anyway, I was lying down with my hands tied. I couldn’t have polluted my body’s organic harmony even if I’d wanted to.”
“Are you going to untie me, then?” said Whelk. He was watching her open the packet, his heart a staccato frenzy in his ears, but he kept his voice even. If she untied him to let him eat – if she was fool enough to untie him, even for a moment – softened by her care for him, her kindness, pathetic—
“That won’t be necessary,” Neeve said. Her voice was practical. She took a single chip from the packet, and as Whelk followed the movement he felt his stomach drop entirely away. A nauseous horror unlike anything he had ever known began to overtake him; his spine was a single line of ice.
“No,” he said. “No – no, no, no—”
“Open wide,” said Neeve.
Like the Titanic, Whelk’s ego had once been vast and proud and stately; like the Titanic, Whelk’s ego was no longer anything but flotsam and jetsam brought to wreckage by the colossal, unyielding iceberg that Neeve kept in place of a heart. “No,” Whelk insisted, but he felt already that it was futile. As calm, as beautiful, as utterly, devastatingly immovable as an iceberg; and she had won, and he had lost.
“Barrington,” Neeve said sternly, “this is your last chance. And you know you’ll regret it later if you don’t eat now.”
Whelk wet his lips. The chip was there before him, held in her soft small fingers. Better to face his fate blind to it; he shut his eyes, and he opened his mouth, and he let her feed him.
At that moment, Whelk hardly cared which of them would die, so long as one of them did. The memory of this humiliation must be taken to the grave; the matter of whose grave was inessential, a secondary concern.
+++
Neeve put on the country music again somewhere around midday, and Whelk suffered it with the mad good humor of a man driven half-insensible by his own bad fortune. By the time the car nosed into the parking lot of a state forest park, both of them had learned the lyrics of the album’s pounding centerpiece, and Neeve’s quavering contralto and Whelk’s maniacal tenor were uplifted in time together through the open windows: wear your hat and chaps to the railroad tracks cos you know this is goodbye, GOODBYE, there ain’t no HUH UH-HUH ain’t no COMIN BACK ain’t no HUH UH-HUH OH NO-O-O—
Neeve left him in the locked car while she went for a walk – “just to stretch my legs,” she explained, “because driving does take it out of you, doesn’t it?” – and returned before long with two cups of green tea, purchased from a little log-walled café at the edge of the parking lot. She set them to cool in the cup-holders behind the stick shift, and settled into meditative study of what seemed to Whelk, peering forward between the seats, to be a bundle of tiny bones knotted together with twine.
The doors were open while Neeve worked, and a warm breeze blew through the car. The lingering reek of incense was suppressed by the heaviness of damp earth, greenery, heat rising from asphalt. A gnat zipped back and forth around Whelk’s ear; he jerked his head to ward it off, but instead it settled just below his hairline and began the unbearable, tickling crawl down inside his sweat-damp collar.
—one last slice of momma’s sweet potato pie cos you know this is goodbye, GOODBYE, there ain’t no HUH UH-HUH ain’t no COMIN BACK—
Hell couldn’t be as bad as this. The thought came to him distantly, and then Whelk pinned it down for more thorough inspection. First his death – and as he thought it, so too did Whelk imagine it: his body, prostrate on the kind of stone altar he had a vague memory of seeing in some long-ago documentary about pagans – or Wiccans – or whatever the hell Neeve was, some New Age bullshit, no doubt... And his body would be pale and tragic, and so picturesque in death that no one would care about the scuffed toes of his shoes, nor that the soles of those shoes were rubber rather than Italian leather, nor that those soles had been hotglued on by the manufacturers rather than painstakingly handstitched by some hunched old Italian woman with shaking hands, trying to earn a few pennies for her impoverished brood of hollow-eyed children.
Yes – yes, Whelk would be tragic in death, and whatever Hell awaited him could not be worse than this: the sweat, the heat, the gnat tickling across his collarbones, another gnat now whirring in his ear, the numbness everywhere in his arms except his wrists, which chafed and burned, the untouchable calm of Neeve and her warm presence so close inside the car – his car, his shitty garlic-and-incense-reeking second-hand car – and the prospect of green tea, the prospect of being gently fed green tea, and the chorus, still hammering at his skull: ain’t no COMIN BACK, ain’t no HUH UH-HUH...
“I need to use the bathroom,” Whelk said abruptly.
Neeve lowered the tangle of bones to her lap. “You do?”
Whelk nodded. Then, “Yes,” he said, in case that wasn’t enough. She would have to release him now; it would be inhuman to force him to hold it in, and Neeve had fed him, had kept him well: inhuman she was not. In preparation he tried to flex his fingers, but there was no response from his nerveless hands.
“Well, then,” said Neeve, “I suppose we’d better see to it.”
She unclipped his seat belt, and helped him to his unsteady feet; she pulled his discarded jacket from the front seats and draped it across his shoulders, concealing his bound hands. On Whelk’s first step he nearly overbalanced, but Neeve caught his elbow before he could fall, and tucked her soft neat hand inside the crook of it to steady him. Together, they proceeded on towards the dappled shade of the forest.
+++
Whelk had been correct to assume that Neeve was kind, and not inhuman. He had been incorrect to assume that she intended to untie him while he relieved himself.
The aching frenzy of the banjos was welcome by the time they were on the road again, so loud it cleared his head, drowned everything else inside it. Amidst the crammed ranks of memories Whelk would have preferred to forget, several new entries had appeared.
+++
“Are you ever going to tell me where we’re headed? And don’t say north. I know we’re going north. I want a name.”
“One name is quite enough for any man, Barrington Whelk,” Neeve replied, and Whelk replied in turn with a curse that Neeve seemed not to hear. She sat outside the car, cross-legged in the dusky, rusty light of sunset. The water in the bowl before her reflected the sky as orange as fire. Incense burned again.
Whelk watched her a while longer, his bad mood a resentful simmer deep at the heart of him. Her eyes were closed, her breathing steady; her hands rested loosely on her knees, and her broom skirt poured across her lap and puddled on the ground. Did she not care that her clothes would become dirty? Did she not care that her clothes were atrocious?
At last Neeve’s stillness broke, and she touched the even surface of the water to set a ripple in it. The reflected orange sky fractured into shards.
“What’s the point of that?” Whelk asked.
“Of what?” said Neeve.
“Any of it.” He jerked his head towards her. “The bowl. The bones, and everything. All the goddamn incense. Are you doing it for the ley line?”
“No,” Neeve said. She began to collect up her things, and as Whelk watched her pour the water from the bowl onto the ground he wasn’t sure at all that she would answer any more than that. But at last it was all packed away inside his car, and Neeve said, “It’s more personal than that. These rituals... I perform them for my own benefit. For my own security. They are not performed for the corpse road.”
Whelk grimaced. “Do you have to call it that?”
“That is its name,” Neeve said, implacable as ever. “Would you rather I called it a ley line? It is the corpse road because it is where the spirits of the dead make their home. It’ll be your home too, soon enough.”
As distant as a dream, the grumble of interstate traffic could still be heard. A sparse cluster of trees hid the car from the road, but it was hardly necessary: no other vehicle had passed this way since Neeve pulled over.
Whelk’s head fell back against his seat. “Are all psychics as creepy as you, or did you have to practice?” he asked.
“This is precisely what I mean,” Neeve said. “You find it creepy, but all it is is truth. A true name, a true future. Why should you let the truth unsettle you?”
She was in the open doorway, one hand braced on the car’s roof, looking in at him. She was a plump silhouette in a skirt that moved freely with the breeze, and at her words an image of Czerny rose into Whelk’s thoughts as unpleasantly as bile. He forced it away, but like bile it left a nauseous aftertaste behind it.
“I’ll re-tie the ropes,” Neeve said. “To let you lie down more comfortably.”
Hope launched up Whelk’s throat so violently it left him feeling sicker still.
“I’ll just get the Taser,” Neeve added, and went off to rummage in the glove compartment.
“What? No – no,” said Whelk, “you don’t need the Taser. Neeve. Neeve, come on. I’ll promise to hold still for you. I’ll promise—”
“I’m sorry,” said Neeve, and sounded as though she genuinely meant it.
“Neeve,” pleaded Whelk. “Neeve. Neeve, please – trust me, I promise you can trust me, I promise—”
+++
Consciousness smeared back slowly, and Whelk found he had been carefully arranged across the back seats. Neeve was sleeping in the driver’s seat, which she had reclined almost all the way to horizontal. She had tied the ropes around his wrists more loosely than before. Loose enough...?
Whelk worked at them while the last of the sunset leeched from the sky. Desperation gave him a well of endless, surreal patience, and it was full dark when at last his hands fell apart from each other, and his pulse began to move blood that felt like fire back into his cold, stiff fingers. The first solid object he found was one of Neeve’s kiln-baked pottery bowls, stashed away beneath the front seats. Whelk seized it and brought it down on Neeve’s head, hard enough to startle a cry from her, and then again, hard enough to silence the cry. His heart was frenzied, a wild thing.
Her left pocket – fumbling, blind and clumsy in the endless dark, muttering curses for his ears alone – and then Whelk had the car keys in his hand, and in his haste he half-fell from the side door when he flung it open.
The dashboard lights illuminated the interior with a lifeless blue glow when he started the engine. It was enough.
The bowl went back beneath the seats. Neeve went in the front passenger’s seat, propped up and – as an afterthought – buckled in. The driver’s seat was restored to an upright position. The headlamps flooded a few underdeveloped trees and a stretch of gravelly roadside with their stark light, and Whelk put the car into reverse, and pulled out onto the road with victory bursting wildly in his heart.
+++
“What an awful headache,” Neeve remarked, somewhere towards late morning.
Whelk spared her a glance. “Serves you right,” he said. “Tasering me like that all the time. You had it coming.”
“I certainly did,” Neeve said. She said it so agreeably that Whelk glanced round again, suspicious. She was gazing out her window at the blue haze of the mountains on the horizon. Her hair was the same disheveled mess of curls it had been beforehand – no blood to be seen. A small, serene smile tipped the corner of her mouth.
There was no sign at all that the events of the night had troubled her. If it weren’t for her tightly bound wrists and the reassurance of the steering wheel in Whelk’s sweaty grip, there would hardly have been any sign that the events of the night had happened.
The iron bands of a stress headache began to tighten around Whelk’s own skull. “You’re up to something,” he said. “You are, I can tell. What is it? What did you do?”
Neeve laughed, and Whelk’s surge of irritation was instantaneous. “Nothing like that,” she said. “No, nothing like that.”
“What is it like, then?” Whelk demanded.
“I was just getting a little tired of driving,” Neeve said. “I travel all across the country for my job – book-signing tours, you know, live shows, that sort of thing – but generally I prefer to fly. Driving gets so boring, doesn’t it?”
The faux-leather skin of the wheel had grown damp beneath Whelk’s vice grip. “It does,” he agreed. “It gets extremely boring.”
“And we won’t be there for a day or two yet, I imagine,” Neeve went on. “So I thought it might be nice for you to take a turn, and then we can swap back when we’re nearer to the site, once I’ve had a rest.”
Several questions jostled to be spoken first. Whelk was rather gratified by the steadiness of his voice when he said, “Would it have been so hard just to tell me you wanted to swap?”
“Well, no,” Neeve said, “but you would have knocked me out and tied me up anyway, wouldn’t you?”
Whelk would have. He ground his teeth.
“I would have done the same to you,” Neeve reassured him. “In fact – well, I suppose I have done the same to you, haven’t I? More than once, if you think about it.”
It sounded as though the thought entertained her. The road rolled out and out before them, sunlight dazzling from windshields and wing mirrors as cars flashed past. “What if I don’t want to swap back?” asked Whelk. “I don’t want you to kill me. I want to kill you. What happens if I just refuse to untie you?”
“Then I’ll cut myself free,” Neeve said mildly. “I do still have a knife in my sleeve, you know.”
Whelk’s next question would have been what if I won’t let you drive?, but I still have a knife in my sleeve rather answered that one, too. She had a knife in her sleeve. Of course she had a knife in her sleeve, Whelk had known she had a knife in her sleeve – they had even discussed it, for God’s sake! But in the frenzy of his attack, Whelk had forgotten it, and now here he was: driving Neeve as far as Neeve wished to be driven, then to either surrender or face down a knife fight.
A bristly, rhythmic sawing sound. Whelk resisted the urge to look.
The bristly sound continued, and then stopped.
Whelk succumbed to the urge to look. Neeve had already freed herself. She coiled the rope up neatly and folded her small soft hands in her lap, and gazed appreciatively out the window.
The road rolled on, and on, and on. Whelk needed Neeve alive, and Neeve needed Whelk alive, and both of them were travelling to the same place: there was no reason that they shouldn’t share driving duties. Neither of them could harm the other until they got there, after all. It made sense. Terrible, infuriating sense. He was trapped, and Neeve didn’t even need rope to keep him there.
Neeve reached for the CD player, then hesitated. “Oh, I’m sorry, I should ask the driver. Do you mind if I put some music on?”
“Go ahead,” said Whelk. His voice was hollow. Chimes began to tinkle gently, and then a reed instrument squealed in and a squall of fiddles erupted into wailing, eerie chaos, and Whelk let it happen. The engine thrummed beneath him, and the road rolled on.
+++
They stopped at a roadside diner. Why the hell not, Whelk had thought, with a kind of feverish mania, when he saw the pink glow of its sign loom up through the dusk; why the hell not? A booth seat for two, and a pitcher of water shared between them, and Neeve’s look of dismay as she scanned the menu and found only processed, grease-soaked junk food – why the hell not? It was a disgusting meal, for an insulting price, in terrible company, under the worst circumstances of his life so far. Why the hell not!
As they waited in silence for their order to arrive, Neeve retrieved a deck of cards from somewhere about her person. She was a theatrical shuffler: cards flickered where there shouldn’t be cards, their movements giddy and rapid as they somersaulted through her quick fingers, gravity all but ignored. When she let the pack cascade across the sticky Formica tabletop, they splayed out into a perfectly even fan.
“Pick a card, any card,” Whelk said dully. “Right?”
“Right,” said Neeve. She folded her hands beneath her chin and watched him as he deliberated over his choice.
It wasn’t a standard deck. Whelk had known that much from the obscure black sigils scrawled across their backs, and the fact there were far more than fifty-two cards in the pack. The card he flipped had no sign he recognized: just an ink drawing of a vague, sexless figure doing something impossible to parse, detailed with splashes of red. Ivy coiled in patterns around the edge.
Neeve studied the card, tapping one neatly-painted fingernail against her cheek. With an air of some finality, she nodded – and then she slipped Whelk’s card back into the deck, which she began to gather up.
“Well?” said Whelk.
“That wasn’t for your benefit,” said Neeve. The pack went back into her pocket just as two portions of fries arrived, in baskets made of red plastic wicker lined with grease-stained paper.
“You can’t tell my fortune and not tell me my fortune,” Whelk said. He was outraged, but they were in public, and his voice had to stay at a pressurized hush. “You can’t do that! That’s – I wouldn’t have taken a card,” he said, “if I’d known you’d do that.”
“I thought as much,” said Neeve, utterly unruffled. “Do you think ketchup will improve the taste, or just hide it?”
A trip to the restroom, and then they were back on the road. Neeve wanted to stop for the night before the light faded, and since neither of them stood to gain anything from attacking the other in the night, Whelk said, “Why the hell not?” and parked them up in the shadow of a high slab of mossy cliff-face that reached up into the foothills of some mountain Whelk didn’t give a damn about. Neeve began to unpack her bowls and bottled water, but Whelk didn’t give a damn about that either, by this point. He reclined the driver’s seat, and to the low, somnolent sound of Neeve’s murmured incantations he fell asleep and into unpleasant dreams.
+++
Whelk was woken by a birdcall so shrill that it pierced through his nightmares, and he startled awake with the conviction he had heard sirens.
But there were no sirens. The roadside was deserted, though the bird was still crying out and the trees rustled in the breeze, and Neeve was the only other person to be seen. Four of her large pottery bowls were arrayed before her, and a bag of emptied water bottles lay carelessly in the back seats. A deck of standard cards was scattered about her in the grass. Incense burned. A ribbon wrapped around Neeve’s wrist had a willowy twig of some sort threaded through it. Her movements were so slow, her eyelids so heavy, her appearance so immensely tired, that Whelk rather suspected she hadn’t slept at all.
Whelk got out from the car and stretched until his spine popped all the way down. No sirens, no witnesses, no skeletons left inside his blasted-open closet. The grass was dewy. The sun was warm. Not a bad day to kill a psychic, he concluded, and promptly tried to un-conclude it in case that was the sort of thing psychics could tell from scattering playing cards about them in the grass and wearing absurdly large pink crystals strung about their necks.
Belatedly, it occurred to Whelk that Neeve already knew full well that he intended to kill her. The beginnings of a smile grew broader as he picked his way over to her.
“Good news and bad news,” Neeve said. She held a milkily translucent sphere cupped in her hands, and she didn’t look up from it.
“Bad news,” said Whelk, on the basis that bad news for Neeve was likely to be good news for him.
“My initial readings were correct,” said Neeve, “and the optimal site for a sacrifice to the corpse road is, in fact, in Henrietta.”
“It’s in,” said Whelk, but then words failed him. He stood in the dewy grass in his scuffed shoes and his shiny, rumpled pants, his days-old shirt with its stains and its tide-lines of his sweat, and he looked down at Neeve in the middle of her paraphernalia – scattered without order, Whelk saw now, the frantic mess of a woman fallen into panic – and he thought of all that had happened, and he felt – nothing.
Nothing. Nothing at all. It was as freeing as anything could be, as freeing as he imagined waking the ley line would be, as freeing as the cops realizing whatever went down with Czerny was old news and none of their goddamn business would be, as freeing as the glorious security of a trust fund waiting just the other side of his eighteenth birthday had once been. Murder wasn’t rock bottom; this was rock bottom, and Whelk couldn’t summon up the energy to give a damn.
“Great,” he said. He clapped his hands together, and then for good measure he rubbed them in anticipation. “Great, that’s great. Great! Back to Henrietta, then. Back the way we came. Who’s driving?”
“There’s good news,” Neeve reminded him.
“You’ve rented us a private jet for the return journey,” Whelk speculated. “You’re going to cut your own throat and save me the trouble.”
“While I was sorting through all my equipment last night,” Neeve said, “trying to corroborate my readings any way I could – it was quite a shock, you know, to receive such very different—”
“The good news?” Whelk said.
“I found this,” Neeve said, and held up a CD case. Whelk took it from her, and studied it. Holistic Awakening: Volume Two, said the cover, in pseudo-Celtic script printed above a pink-washed image of Stonehenge. A few harps were superimposed dreamily onto the background, floating above a radiant sunrise. “It’s the companion disc, though goodness only knows how it ended up at the bottom of the carry case for my crystal ball.”
The wild mania of the last few days was creeping in again, and Whelk saw no reason why he shouldn’t surrender to it. Contains such hits as ‘Eternal Bliss’ and ‘Waking Mindfulness’, said the blurb text on the album. And why not! Eternal Bliss – why not, indeed! “Terrific!” Whelk cried. “Fantastic! Let’s get going, and I’ll put it on right away!”
“You see,” Neeve said, “you can be agreeable when you try, Barrington, can’t you?”
Whelk’s smile was wide and terrible. “Oh, I’m a great guy once you get to know me,” he agreed. Czerny was in his thoughts, and would not be dislodged: pale and forlorn and silently, unbearably accusing.
+++
The sun climbed slowly and splendidly into a sky as clear as water. From the CD player came the endless, lulling tinkling of chimes, the squawking of accordions, the chaotic squeal of fiddles, layer upon layer of digitally-manipulated birdsong. Neeve held her crystal ball in her soft neat hands, and she watched the distant, bluish swell of the mountains as the day grew hotter, and hotter, and hotter still.
And all the while the road rolled on, and beneath them the engine thrummed, and Whelk began to realize that within the soft rustling of the forests all around them there had been patterns developing with the structure and rhythm of a language; and Whelk understood none of it, though he heard all of it, and the trees whispered and whispered as he drove like death depended on it.