Road to Nowhere

by Christopher Pike

  “It never got better,” Free said. “How could it? But I’ll tell you about him later. Mother is next on the agenda.”

  “Where does she live exactly?” Teresa asked.

  Free pointed to the dark cliffs up ahead. They were now a long way past San Luis Obispo. The road had begun to rise, to twist and turn. Angry black waves pounded the rocks off to their left and below. A wall of stone stood on their right. The rain continued to fall. It was as if it was never going to stop.

  “Not far from here,” Free said. “We’ll be there soon.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  They didn’t reach the place until an hour later. During that time Free leaned back against the seat and took a nap, his snoring rocking softly in rhythm with the turns in the narrow road. In the back seat Poppy sat silent and still. Many times Teresa thought she, too, had drifted off to sleep. But then she’d flick her lighter, the orange flame flaring briefly in Teresa’s rear-view mirror, and exhale a cloud of fresh smoke. Teresa didn’t attempt to make conversation with her. She didn’t want to wake Free and she was still mad at Poppy for taking Bill’s side in what happened. Oh, Poppy would deny that, Teresa was sure, but it was the truth. Poppy was an ingrate, when you got right down to it. She took and never gave anything in return. One day she’d have to wake up and smell the coffee.

  Teresa did not feel well physically. Her fever had begun to subside, but now she was getting the shakes. She turned on the heat, but it didn’t work that well because she kept having to roll down the window to get rid of Poppy’s cigarette smoke. Her stomach was unsettled. She’d had a few handfuls of Poppy’s peanuts and wondered if they were to blame. Nausea pulsed through her in gurgling waves. Each time she thought it was about to end, the sickness would move through her again. She had the flu, she must.

  On top of everything else her left wrist started to hurt worse than ever. She had passed the dull ache stage – it was into throbbing now. She honestly wondered if she’d broken it without knowing it. Of course, that should have been impossible. She couldn’t even use the hand now to help steer. She was relying solely on her right, dangerous on tight turns. Yet she didn’t want to ask Free or Poppy to drive.

  She passed maybe three cars on the road, no more.

  Lightning flashed far out at sea as she navigated a particularly difficult turn. The trees had begun to thicken on both sides of the road. Thunder rumbled through the branches and shook the dark leaves. Beside her, Free stirred, sat up, and yawned.

  “Where are we?” he asked.

  “Closing on Big Sur,” Teresa said. “But we haven’t passed any houses. I think your mom’s place must be in front of us.”

  Free nodded. “It is, it’s just round this turn.”

  Teresa frowned; it was hard to imagine any place could be close. “It’s a good thing you woke up when you did or we’d have gone right by it.”

  “Poppy wouldn’t have let us go without paying a visit,” Free said. “Isn’t that right, Poppy?”

  Poppy snorted softly. “I’m not going inside.”

  Free feigned astonishment. “Don’t you want to have your future read?”

  “She can’t see the future,” Poppy said. “She can only read the past.”

  “But I thought you said we learn from the past?” Free asked innocently.

  “I don’t want to see the old woman,” Poppy repeated. “You don’t want to see her either, Teresa, if you have any sense.”

  “Why not?” Teresa asked, although she had a feeling she wasn’t really following the conversation. This woman didn’t sound like a normal mother. She fingered her left wrist briefly. Would the thing never stop hurting?

  “Because she believes everything she sees in a person,” Poppy said. “When a lot of it is just garbage better left ignored.”

  “My, haven’t we become the philosophical critic?” Free said. “You don’t want to see her because she’ll tell you what a loser you are.”

  “You can always tell a loser by the company she keeps,” Poppy quipped.

  Without warning Free held up his hand. “Slow, Teresa. The driveway’s coming up in a second.”

  Teresa squinted through the rain-soaked windshield. “Here? There’s nothing here.”

  Free clapped. “There it is! See? The driveway leads down beside the water. Make a left here.”

  Free was right. Wow. A narrow driveway that led into a stand of swaying trees appeared on the left. Quickly Teresa twisted the steering-wheel round and put mild pressure on the brakes. They crossed the yellow centre line and the front of the car dipped down sharply. She pressed the brake harder. The headlights swam round a tunnel of trees. They didn’t appear to be redwoods, which confused her. The branches arched over the roof of the car, cutting off the wet sky. Teresa rolled down her window as she moved forward gingerly. She could hear waves crashing, the wind howling. Free squirmed in the seat beside her. He was obviously excited to be seeing his mom again.

  “Wait till you see her place,” he said. “You won’t believe it.”

  Teresa agreed a moment later, when the tunnel of trees suddenly came to an end and the road emerged close to the ocean and foam-covered rocks with a huge stone castle in the foreground. It was almost medieval, a transplant from dark centuries of fanatical beliefs and cruel punishments. There was no moat, but there could have been. Twisted tree trunks hugged the hard walls, bare branches clawing at the stones. Lightning flashed again, and Teresa thought of wicked witches, haunted woods, and flying bat creatures. She wanted above all else, to go home. Yet that wasn’t what she really wanted, she told herself, because she knew she couldn’t go back. Free had been right when he said the past was dead. The future was all she had left She brought the car to a halt on the bumpy cobblestone driveway.

  “This is too much,” she gasped. “Walt Disney must have built this place on drugs.” Free laughed and opened his car door.

  “I told you I know all the great places to stop,” he said, climbing out. “Come along, Teresa. Mother’s waiting.”

  Teresa turned off the engine and glanced in the back seat at Poppy. “Is this place safe?” she asked.

  Poppy sighed. “Let’s just say you won’t die inside.”

  Curiosity and a desire not to offend Free had her. Teresa glanced once more at the building and cleared her throat. “I suppose that’ll have to do,” she said.

  Free had his garment bag with him as he and Teresa stepped up to the front door. It wasn’t an ordinary door, of course, but rather a rectangular gateway into mystery. Free pulled a skeleton key from his back pocket.

  “Don’t you want to knock?” Teresa asked.

  “Mother doesn’t like people to knock,” Free said confidentially, sliding the key into the lock. Metal scraped metal and the door slowly swung open with protesting creaks. Just before they stepped inside, Teresa glanced over her shoulder and saw Poppy leaning her head back on the seat as if, finally, the strange girl was going to take a short rest.

  Short?

  Teresa had no idea how long they’d be inside. She checked her watch. It was four in the morning. God, the night seemed as if it would never end.

  Inside was an entranceway of lit torches and shadows plucked from a horror movie set that had long been abandoned. The air was damp and the stone walls oozed moisture. They crept through a claustrophobic passageway into an immense hall filled with the sound of their own footsteps echoing over and over. The light from the torches was swallowed up by the rich darkness. Teresa put her hand, her sore left hand, on Free’s arm and whispered the words that had been on the tip of her tongue since they had turned off the main road.

  “What are we doing here?” she asked.

  “I told you, seeing Mother,” he replied.

  “Does your mother really live in this tomb?”

  “You don’t like the decor?”

  “It scares me.”

  Free nodded. “I think that’s the point of it. Anyway, I call her Mother. We’re very close, you understand. But my r
eal mother died a long time ago.”

  “How did you come to know this person?” she asked.

  “She read my fortune.” Free gripped her left arm, steering her the way he wanted her to go. He gestured to the right, but to the right of what she wasn’t sure. The place was a walk through the history of the earth. “She likes to sit in a small room over here when she gives readings.”

  “Does she know we’re coming?” Teresa asked.

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “She’s a fortune teller. She tells her own fortune every morning when she gets up and knows who’s coming to visit.” Free grinned. “It beats having to keep an appointment book.”

  They found the woman sitting in what appeared to be a library. The walls were lined with books, dark and dusty volumes of all sizes with barely legible fading titles. Between the sections of shelves hung maps of places Teresa did not recognize, continents that weren’t on the globe. Huge candles flickered in the four corners of the room. The woman looked up as they entered and smiled with thin red lips.

  Her hair was snow white, long like her heavy purple dress. The fine wisps of aged thread almost disappeared into the darkness that hugged her sides. Her eyes were striking, blue and hard, like bits of coral that had been removed from an ocean depth where the sun never shone. She was old, extremely, Teresa thought, her skin lined with time that had not passed easily. But she was not feeble. She crooked a beckoning finger to them as she smiled and gestured for them to sit in front of her on two small wooden stools. They did so.

  “Welcome,” she said in a dry voice that sounded as if it had little, if any, breath supporting it. The old woman sat on an overstuffed chair beside a low round wooden table littered with a star atlas, scraps of wrinkled paper, two inkwell pens, and a silver pyramid the size of a grapefruit. Teresa forced a smile, although she felt like getting up and running out the door as fast as possible. This person, she was sure, this hag, was not going to tell her anything she wanted to hear.

  “Hello,” Teresa said.

  “Hi, Mother,” Free said casually, setting his garment bag on the stone floor and crossing his legs.

  “Your name, child?” the woman asked.

  Teresa hesitated. “Teresa.”

  “Your full name,” the woman insisted.

  “Teresa Marie Chafey.”

  “What time were you born? What day?”

  “I was born at exactly ten in the morning on a Saturday,” Teresa said. “My birthday’s November twelfth. I’m now eighteen years old so I was born in—”

  “I do not need the year,” the woman interrupted. She turned to her star atlas. “The year is always the same. It doesn’t change with the sun or the moon.”

  “Huh?” Teresa said.

  “Mother doesn’t do the usual astrological chart,” Free whispered in her ear.

  They waited silently while the woman performed her calculations. Soon she had a sheet of orange paper in her hand sprinkled with numbers, astrological signs, and a few strange symbols Teresa had never seen before. An amusing thought – it was amusing given the circumstances – floated through her head.

  I wonder how much this woman charges.

  “You’ve had a difficult life,” the old woman began after consulting her paper one last time. “Your parents don’t care for you and you don’t care for them. You have been alone most of your life, even when surrounded by other people. You think you are different from everyone else and you’re right. You do not belong in crowds because the crowd does not appreciate your uniqueness. Your talent is vast. You can write poetry and prose, play instruments, and sing like a goddess. All three of these abilities appear to you to be separate, but they are one and the same. You can touch people, that’s your gift. Yet you do not like to be touched yourself. You have built walls to keep the world out and the world, in turn, has built walls to keep you inside. That is how you suffer. Any time you step outside your usual place, and demonstrate what you have to offer, people reward you by throwing stones. Am I not correct, Teresa Chafey?”

  “Yes,” Teresa whispered. She was shivering before she entered the castle, now she froze. The old woman’s voice was cold, and it penetrated deep. The truth could do that.

  How does she know all this about me? I've never met her until tonight.

  A mystery. The building was a mystery. The woman was an enigma. Her hard blue eyes burned with the flame from a candle. She was waiting for Teresa to ask a question. Another mystery, that the old hag would have no trouble unravelling. That’s what scared Teresa most, that she was sitting before a crystal ball that glittered as no mirror could. The woman was just that – a mirror reflecting the person who was sitting in front of her.

  Teresa didn’t want to go forward, not yet. She wanted to understand better why her past had died the death it had.

  “Why did my boyfriend want Rene instead of me?” she asked.

  “Because you scared him,” the woman said. “He didn’t know what you’d do next.”

  Teresa chuckled uneasily. “Bill wasn’t afraid of me.”

  “Not of you, but of what you would do. They are not the same thing, child. Often, they have nothing in common.”

  “Was there another reason?” Teresa asked.

  “The reason I have given you is enough. But if you must have another one, I’d say Rene and Bill wanted to be close to each other in a way neither wanted to be close to you. Because” – the woman paused to scratch her chin with a long golden nail – “they couldn’t understand you. People always fear what they cannot understand.”

  “You come back to fear,” Teresa said.

  “You come back to it. I merely speak what I see. What do you fear, child?”

  Teresa suddenly felt defiant It was not pleasant having her brain picked, even when she’d asked for it. But was that true? She hadn’t exactly asked to have her fortune read. Free had just dragged her into this place.

  “You tell me,” Teresa said.

  “You are afraid to be alone.” She consulted her paper again. “But you can have love in your life if you don’t care how much it costs. You can have it tonight, now, in this place. But you do not want love. You want adoration, and that’s cheap. How much do you want to spend tonight, Teresa?”

  Teresa stammered. “I don’t understand what you’re asking.”

  The woman leaned closer. Her dark blue eyes, though, did not move in sync with the rest of her. They seemed, for a moment stuck in the space they had occupied since they had entered the room. The eyes could have slipped back into the old woman’s forehead; they appeared to peer at Teresa from beneath the weathered flesh, from a perspective that had nothing to do with modern-day humanity. Teresa had mentally compared the woman to a witch when she first saw her. Now she believed the comparison valid. The woman terrified her.

  The hag twisted her thin red lips once more into that grotesque thin line that was supposed to pass as a smile.

  “How come you haven’t asked me why Bill didn’t want to sleep with you?” the old woman asked.

  Teresa swallowed and lied. “I did sleep with him.” She glanced over at Free and added, “A few times.”

  The old woman moved in close. “You drove Bill away.”

  Teresa barely shook her head. She could smell the woman’s breath; the taste of copper in it. The hag could have had a mouth full of blood. “Bill didn’t leave me because he was afraid of having sex with me,” Teresa said.

  The old woman raised a balding eyebrow. “Then how did you know I was suggesting that?”

  “I just knew.”

  “When you have sex with someone you become wedded to that person, and Bill was afraid to be wedded to you, Teresa. He was afraid of where you were going.”

  “You just said he was afraid of what I might do.”

  The woman nodded and sat back. “What you have done has determined where you’re going.” She paused. “Do you want me to speak of your future?”

  “No,” Teresa said.

/>   “You are soon to have the things you craved from Bill. The things he didn’t want to give you.”

  “I told you not to tell me.”

  The old woman cackled. The sound was like the screech of nails on a blackboard. “Why shouldn’t I tell you? It doesn’t cost you or me a cent. My advice is as cheap as the things you are about to receive.”

  Teresa stood. “Thank you for your time. I’m leaving.” She turned and strode out of the room, into the vast cavern where both light and direction were confused. Free caught up with her before she could run into a wall.

  “Hold on,” he said, grabbing her by the arm. “Don’t be angry.”

  She turned on him. “Why did you take me to this awful place?”

  “I thought you’d have fun.”

  “I’m not having fun.”

  “Well, then, I was wrong,” Free said. “But that’s still no reason to leave in such a hurry. Let me show you the rest of the place first. There are rooms in here that’ll take your breath away.”

  “No. I hate this place. I just want to get out of here.”

  “You have to see one room, at least. It’s where I sleep when I stay here.”

  Teresa shivered in the oppressive gloom. “I can’t believe you actually stay here with that old witch. She doesn’t even look like a human being.”

  Free was amused. “She isn’t human. She’s just an apparition. You can close your eyes and blow hard and she’ll vanish.” He touched the tip of her nose with his finger. “Close your eyes, Teresa. Let me lead you to a special place.”

  He was speaking to her in his story-telling voice. The voice he used to make the pictures shine with words that told her of John and Candy. Their whole lives had been laid out in the space of a few hours together in the car. He had magic words, just like his magic fingers. She remembered then that she had forgotten to check to see if there was a joker in her back pocket, after all.

  Free slowly pulled her forward while she kept her eyes squeezed shut. She trusted him, it was true, but it was equally true that she was afraid to open her eyes and see where she was going. Or to open them and reach in her pocket to discover that Freedom Jack had been wrong about the joker. That it might not be a joke at all, the whole thing, what they were doing tonight.