“ALL RIGHT. WHO’S coming?” I ask. I sound calm, despite my heart pounding so hard I can hear it. No one else says anything. They all stare at the road—or at me. Like I have answers.
You expect in a moment like this to have trouble believing or a need to search for a rational explanation. Maybe it’s like that for the others—denial, trying to find evidence that they’re dreaming or hallucinating or that it’s some kind of trick. But for me, at least, it’s like a puzzle piece clicking into place. A feeling that everything has finally aligned the way it should be.
The road is here, and Becca is waiting.
“No way,” Jeremy says, shifting his weight back from the road. “Have you guys ever watched, like, a single movie? We get on that road and about thirty seconds from now some hook-handed motherfucker is wearing our guts like a scarf.”
Trina’s eyes are fixed on the road, her lips moving—praying. Finally she nods. Smiles. It’s an unsettling smile, off balance, and her eyes are bright and watery. “Okay,” she says.
Mel makes a disbelieving sound, half laugh and half cough. “What about this is okay?” She sounds more offended than afraid, like she’s pissed the world would dare throw something so bizarre at her. I know in that moment she’s with me—she won’t let the road win by scaring her off—and the first tremor of relief goes through me. If I have Mel, at least, I’ll be okay.
“It’s real,” Trina says. “It’s real, and that means that Becca—doesn’t it?” She looks at me. She’s crying now, her tear tracks silvery in the light. I step toward her, not quite off the road, not wanting to leave it in case I’m all that’s anchoring it here. She scrubs her cheeks with the heels of her hands. “I’m fine,” she says, in the same voice I’ve used a hundred times.
The five of us are standing together now, in a loose ring; Vanessa and Kyle and Jeremy and Miranda are farther back, and it’s just us, just the Wildcats.
“This is real,” Anthony says. “I’m just—we all agree, right? This is really happening?”
“It’s happening,” Mel says, rough-voiced. “Becca was right. The road is real.”
I don’t know who’s the first to do it—to reach out. One hand to the next, stepping closer, drawing tighter, but then there we are, linked. On one side I hold Mel’s hand, warm and dry, on the other side Anthony’s, skin cool.
“No one has to come who doesn’t want to,” I say.
“I’m not going back,” Trina says forcefully.
“We’re coming,” Anthony says. “All of us.” His hand squeezes mine. And then drops. We all shift back, our attention drifting to the others, a question in the air.
“Anyone who doesn’t want to come should head back,” I say, realizing as I do that I’m somehow in charge and that no one is objecting to this.
“I’m in,” Kyle says. “I’m already past my curfew. Which means Chris is already going to hit the upper limit of pissed off, so I might as well go for broke, right?” He gives Trina a lopsided grin. Her mouth opens, like she means to say something, but she only shakes her head and makes a sound like a swallowed laugh.
“I’m in, too,” Vanessa agrees, nodding vigorously.
“This is nuts,” Jeremy says. But he doesn’t leave.
No one asks Miranda. This doesn’t seem strange to me, not yet.
“I guess . . . I guess we go, then,” I say, knowing that no one is going to move until I do. I turn. Grip the strap of my duffel hard. And take the first step.
If I expect anything mystical in that first step, it doesn’t happen. I let out a held breath and take another step, and another. But now that the road has arrived, it seems content to exist in a state of absolute reality. The trees lining it stand upright, its stones meet neatly, its surface is firm. Silence lies steadily against the road, and I am glad I do not walk alone.
“‘Even larks and katydids,’” Anthony mutters, a few steps behind me, and I glance back.
“What?”
“Nothing. Just something from a book,” he says.
“You read a book?” I ask in mock surprise, nerves knocking me into our old, joking pattern. “Look at Anthony, shattering the jock stereotype.”
“Hey, watch it, or I’m going to make you repay me for all those Goosebumps books you ‘borrowed’ and never returned.”
“Your mom told me not to give them back because they gave you nightmares. She called you a sensitive child,” I remind him, and he laughs, wincing at the memory. I guess all it takes is breaking the rules of reality to make things feel normal for a moment.
Behind him, the others trail in a ragged line. Jeremy is last, still on the dirt of the forest floor, not yet on the stone. He looks like he is ready to turn, to head back to the street and the cars they arrived in, to decide that this is a dream or a mistake and return to a life where things make sense and roads don’t stitch themselves together out of moonlight.
I wish more than anything that he had.
But his eyes meet mine, and a look like shame flits across his features, stark and clear despite the shadows. And he steps forward. Onto the road. No turning back, I think, knowing instinctively that it’s true. The only way now is forward.
I don’t know how long we walk. A few minutes or an hour. None of us say a word, not until we reach the first gate. Anthony and I have dropped back a bit, Mel charging out ahead, flashlight swiping furiously back and forth ahead of her, legs pumping like she’s trying to escape something. Or maybe she’s just trying to sober up. She gets far enough ahead of us that she goes around a bend and out of sight, a screen of scraggly-limbed trees blocking her from view.
When we come around the curve, she’s stopped dead. She holds the flashlight up like a pointer, aiming it straight ahead, toward a wrought-iron gate that blocks the way. It’s eight feet tall, spanning the whole road, but there’s nothing but a low, crumbled wall to either side. You could just step around it. None of us ever suggest it. Some rules you don’t need to be told.
“What’s up?” Anthony asks as we reach Mel. “Is it locked?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “But look.”
“What am I looking for?”
“Just look,” she says again, and hands him the flashlight. He lifts it, squinting. Swears. And then I see it too.
The light from the flashlight hits the iron bars and it should appear beyond them. Turn the night gray, illuminate some stray mote of dust. Instead, it stops, as if it has struck a black wall, but there’s nothing there. Only darkness, the utter absence of light.
“What do we do?” Anthony asks.
When it’s dark, don’t let go, I remember. “I think—” I pause. Everyone has reached us now. I look back at them and find myself taking a head count even though I don’t see how anyone could have gotten lost. “Becca left a notebook. It has—I think they’re rules,” I say.
“What rules?” Trina asks.
“Don’t leave the road,” I say. “When it’s dark, don’t let go. And there are other roads—don’t follow them.”
“Don’t let go?” Trina asks. “Don’t let go of what?”
“L-like the game,” Vanessa says. “That’s why you need a partner, right? H-hold on to each other’s hands.”
“That makes sense,” I say, halfway between a statement and a question.
Kyle’s up at the gate. He shakes it. “It is locked,” he says. “Do you think we can force it open?”
“You brought a key, didn’t you?” Miranda asks softly.
“Just my house key,” he says.
“Use it,” she insists.
He laughs a little. Like it’s any crazier than what we’ve already seen. “Okay,” he says. He digs in his pocket until he finds it, and we all stare at him. Watching. “You guys are giving me the creeps,” he informs us, but he turns and slides the key into the lock on the gate. It shouldn’t fit. It’s an old-fashioned lock, the kind shaped like a cartoon keyhole, a circle overlapping the top of a narrow triangle. But it clicks in and turns, and Kyle pulls the gate open with a groan that sounds like something dying.
Someone hums the theme from The Twilight Zone.
“Shut up,” Mel says, but without it the whole thing would have been too much. The black still looms, and nothing stands between it and us now. Empty air, and that’s no protection. It has a kind of pull to it. Like we can’t help but lean forward on the balls of our feet. Like one of us is going to plunge in soon, whether we mean to or not.
“We could still turn back,” I say.
“Can we?” Anthony asks.
“I don’t know,” I admit. But no one’s going to anyway. We’ve all made our decisions. Even Jeremy.
“So we pair up,” Mel says.
“There’s j-just one problem,” Vanessa says. “There are nine of us. We’ve g-got too many.”
“Or too few,” Trina says.
Vanessa nods. “Either way, it’s a problem.”