Within minutes, all signs of the homestead disappeared. My despair was indistinguishable from exhaustion and grief—grief for losing Quinn, and also Tindra. I’d had no plan as to how to find her, only crazed intent. Now even that was gone.
When I reached the fork in the road, I stopped. The snow was deeper here, drifted against tree trunks. It covered the dead grass and tangled undergrowth that choked a trail narrower and, I suspected, older than the one I’d just left. A disused footpath, not meant for vehicles.
I could lose myself here. Quinn wouldn’t bother looking for me. He’d assume I’d gone off on a bender. Which, I suppose, I had. I’d heard of people bottoming out, and knew plenty whose floor was the grave. I always imagined the process would be more dramatic: flames, screams, broken bones, blood; the orgasmic rush as the drug kicks in and the needle falls from your arm and you never feel your head hit the ground.
This was more like the endless magnification of a photographic print, the image losing definition as it disintegrates into grains of light and shadow, until any distinction between darkness and light is erased. All that remains is negative space.
Threads of light wriggled behind my eyes, through my skull. I opened my bag and dug around until I found one of the darts. I felt at the side of my neck until I detected the pulse of my carotid artery. With my other hand I pressed the dart against the skin, feeling the needle press against my skin without breaking it. I counted to a hundred, trying to summon the strength to take that final step, and fall without stopping. At last I lowered my hand and dropped the dart into my bag.
I trudged on, with no sense of time or where I was. The air sparked with ghostly symbols, eyes and arrows and wheels. I heard a constant low thunder in my ears. Eventually I had to pause to rest. I braced myself against a tree, scraped up a handful of snow, and pressed it against my injured kneecap as I stared at the trees on the other side of the path. Birches, not evergreens, and larger trees with smooth gray bark: a grove of ancient beeches that encircled an area thick with gorse, the remnant of a farm or other homestead.
I crossed the path, underbrush scraping my knees. The leafless canopy allowed the sky to show through, the color of charcoal ash. Wind parted the branches, the air no longer resin scented and evocative of Christmas but of something far more ancient: leaf mold and desiccated feathers, bones beneath the frozen earth. A shadow hulked in the center of the clearing, a pile of boards or an abandoned dinghy. I pushed through the thicket to see what it was.
Gravestones thrust up from the snow, each one the point of a spearhead the size of a boogie board, arranged in the shape of an arrow. When I reached the stone that formed the arrow’s tip, I saw it wasn’t a tombstone but a slab of rock hewn into a ragged point. I stood at the prow of a stone boat—the same one on the cover of Stone Ships, a vessel picked out with dragon’s teeth.
I stooped to touch a large rock encrusted with lichen like peeling gray paint. Slowly I walked around the perimeter of the ship, my hand resting for a moment on the tip of each stone until I returned to where I’d started. I counted sixty-seven. Shivering, I counted the stones again as I tried to distract myself from the freezing wind.
This time I came up with sixty. I tried a third time—fifty-three—then a fourth. Fifty-one.
My numb despair loosened into wonder. In the darkness, surrounded by snow and ferns and stalks of dead grass stirred by the wind, the stone boat really did look as though it moved upon the sea, the rustling of vegetation indistinguishable from the susurrus of waves.
It was an optical illusion that couldn’t be captured by any camera—there wasn’t enough natural light, and any artificial illumination would dispel it. Thousands of years ago, someone had designed this monument, a trompe l’oeil that had outlasted any folk memory as to its meaning or purpose. I tried one more time to count the stones—sixty-two—and walked away.