“You sure we didn’t miss a turn?” Adam asked.
“I’m sure,” Harlan said. “I’ve only been here once, but it was pretty unforgettable.”
He stopped the truck when they reached a stone cairn. The stack of gray, lichen-covered rocks stood the height of a man, with a two-foot-high weathered, wooden cross protruding from the top. The cross was made of raw poles rather than flat, milled lumber, and Adam couldn’t tell how the crossbar had been secured. There was a matching cairn on the other side, as if they marked an entrance. Beyond the cairns, the road was bound by rows of evergreen trees on each side and disappeared from sight as it curved ahead. Additional stacks of stones appeared periodically between the trees, but none of those incorporated crosses.
Adam shivered involuntarily. He’d thought he was over the food poisoning, but his nausea and feverishness had grown worse throughout the day. Harlan asked if he was okay, and Adam nodded. “What is this place?”
Harlan muttered at the clutch under his breath before he got the truck moving again. “Well, I don’t know what it is now, and I can’t rightly say I know the word for what it used to be.”
“I find that hard to believe,” Adam said. “You’re not a man who suffers from a shortage of words.”
Harlan laughed. “Smartass. I really don’t know what to call it, though. Not a mission exactly… What do you call a cult’s summer home?”
“A cult? Seriously?”
“I probably won’t use that word in front of Teddy, although I doubt he’d really mind, and it’s as good a word as any. See, back in the day, your grandfather Lawrence had a little religious group,” Harlan said, raising the truck’s sun visor to accommodate the day’s fading light.
“Iris said—”
“Whatever Iris said, I can guarantee it wasn’t much, and it was selective,” Harlan said, with energy.
Piney branches had grown together, like threaded green fingers, shielding the property from view on either side. It was disconcerting, and Adam kept expecting someone or something to slide the limbs away and peek through. “Was Iris in his group?”
“Oh yeah,” Harlan said. “She was part of it by virtue of being Lawrence’s wife, but I wouldn’t call her a true believer.”
“What about you?” Adam asked.
Harlan grinned. “I wasn’t exactly what you’d call a true believer, either. But I was part of it for a while, until I either came to my senses or your grandfather kicked me out. It depends on which story you hear.”
“And which story do you tell?”
“I try not to tell any of them.” Harlan glanced over at Adam. “I’m sorry, I’m not being cagey. I don’t talk about this, and Iris doesn’t talk about this, and no one else knows. Well, no one we ever see, anyway.”
Harlan slowed the truck as they approached a fork in the road. On the right side, a faded sign mounted on a tree depicted a small ball of flame, much like the symbol you’d see on a fire extinguisher. On the left side, a slightly less faded sign showed a pyramid. Harlan took the path to the left.
“Are you sure this is the right way?” Adam asked.
“Quite sure. I don’t know what’s down the right path now, but if it’s anything like it used to be, I’d just as soon never travel that road again.”
“What happened to not being cryptic?” Adam asked, just before a stomach-churning sense of disorientation struck. He shuddered as an image flashed in his mind, of white robes and blood and flames and the bleating scream of a literal sacrificial lamb.
Adam flung open his door, and only his still-fastened seat belt prevented him from falling from the moving pickup.
Harlan slammed on the brakes, stalling the truck. He stomped the emergency brake, slid over and reached across Adam to close the swinging door. “Adam! Look at me.”
The world streaked by Adam’s eyes as if he were spinning in a centrifuge. He could hear Harlan’s voice, but wasn’t sure where it was coming from.
“Adam!” Harlan grabbed Adam’s face with his bare hands, and an electric jolt knocked Adam’s head back and turned the world red. Harlan jerked his hands away.
“Shit!” he said, grabbing a dark-stained hand towel from the edge of the seat. He used the dirty towel to cover his hands before placing his palms flat against Adam’s cheeks. “Adam, come back to me. Focus on me.”
And Adam did, corralling the images that flew by until he fastened onto Harlan’s dark brows and his deep-set brown eyes. Harlan’s silver hair blurred like a halo around his head, but the eyes—the eyes stayed solid. And then the pressure around Adam’s skull fell away, so suddenly his chin hit his chest. The smell of dirty, old oil overwhelmed him, and he started to heave. He threw his arm across his face—striking Harlan’s jaw—and held his breath, trying to keep everything inside. It worked, until his next inhale, when he began shivering uncontrollably.
“Can you hold it together for a few more minutes?” Harlan asked.
Adam nodded, unsure if the gesture was distinguishable from the rest of his shaking. Harlan started the truck and roared through the gears, flinging Adam’s head against the seat. Adam thought of the scarred trees in Harlan’s driveway and wanted to say something funny about them, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t make the words come.
He had a sense of trees transitioning from rows to natural forest, conifer to deciduous, but somehow couldn’t capture individual trunks with his eyes. There was a bit of fence, a tumbled gray structure, then another structure that was mostly standing, before the house came into sight ahead of them.
“Almost there, buddy,” Harlan said, short of breath.
The house didn’t look in much better shape than the structures they’d passed earlier, and Adam was surprised when a figure came running out the front door and down the porch steps.
“How did he know?” Adam said. Or at least, he thought he said. He wasn’t certain he’d spoken the words out loud, because that’s when his eyes rolled back in his head. Adam fell forward, felt a band of pressure across his chest from the seat belt, and then nothing.