by Amy Cross
“Has this got anything to do with Kirsten Winter?” she asked finally, turning to look at Annie again.
A flicker instantly ran up one side of Annie's face, causing her to wince slightly.
“Have you heard anything about her,” Elly continued, “or... from her?”
Annie paused, and now she seemed even more troubled than before.
“No,” she said finally, her voice sounding a little lower and less certain. “I thought I would, but there's been nothing. It's possible she hasn't tried to make contact with me. After all, she probably thinks I'm dead. I'd have thought maybe she could have figured out that I'm not by now, but it'd make most sense if she simply thinks I'm out of the picture. Because she'd definitely have tried to contact me otherwise. Of course she would.”
“So as far as we know,” Elly replied, “she's still... down in that hole under Lakehurst?”
“Almost certainly not,” Annie explained. “The first thing she'd have done, once she was able, is that she'd have tried to leave, most likely taking the entity with her. How she'd have done that, I have no idea, but I bet she managed to come up with some kind of plan. I imagine she disposed of Mary Langheim very quickly, if there was even anything left to dispose of, and then she headed off to... Well, that's the tricky part. I have no idea where she could have been for the past three years.”
“Do you think she's in this Farstone town?”
“That'd be too easy.”
“Then are you really sure we need to go there?”
“You think I'm mad,” Annie replied.
“No, I -”
“Of course you do,” Annie continued. “You saw my house. You can see what I look like. You've seen all my equipment. I know how it appears, Elly. I look like one of those nutters who've completely lost their minds. And I really hope that's the case, because the alternative is too awful to consider. I'd love nothing more than to find out that I'm just some lunatic who sees patterns that aren't really there. The problem is, the evidence is too compelling, and I can't afford to step back. I mean, what if I'm right about all of this?”
“Have you gone to the police? To the authorities?”
Annie shook her head. “They might be compromised,” she explained.
“By who?”
“By the cults. Or by the voice. By anyone.”
“And these cults are -”
“They worship the entity,” Annie said, interrupting her. “They each have their own different take on things, but they all agree on the need to help the entity gain power. We're lucky they fight amongst themselves so much. If they actually joined together and formed a united front, they'd probably be much further along. As it is, they're constantly squabbling, and it's their divisions that mean we have a shot at figuring this all out. There's something in Farstone, or near Farstone, or connected to Farstone, that's got all of them excited, and that's enough for me. I need to know why they're all so agitated. The entity should have surfaced by now.”
“Why would it have surfaced?”
“It needs help, or it'll dissipate again. It clumped together in the mine-shafts beneath Lakehurst, but if it's out now, it'll already be starting to fade. It needs help, and the cults are going to provide that. I don't understand how the cults got into this in the first place, though. It's possible that the entity communicated with them somehow, although that seems a little unlikely. I might not have the full picture just yet.”
“But if -”
“We need to get moving again,” Annie added, turning and heading back toward the car. “We'll find a motel along the way. I expect you need to sleep for a few hours. I also want to put the helmet on you again later, to make sure you're still you.”
“What about you?” Elly replied. “How do I know that you're still you?”
“I'm protected,” Annie called back, before reaching up and tapping the back of her scalp, “by all the metal in my head.”
“Of course you are,” Elly said, figuring that there was no point asking what she meant right now. After all, each question just seemed to result in more questions, and she was starting to wonder whether she should have just ignored Annie's letter in the first place.
Looking down at the stream, she stared for a moment at the wrecked radio, and she couldn't help feeling that she'd wandered into a situation that was completely out of control. In fact, deep down she was worried that maybe she should turn Annie over to a hospital or to some kind of psychiatric institution, so that she could receive the proper care that she so clearly needed. That was still a possibility, she supposed, but for now she told herself that she should at least complete the journey to Farstone. Then, when that turned out to be a dead-end, she'd have to start thinking about an alternative strategy.
“Hurry!” Annie shouted, her voice barely rising over the sound of passing cars. “We haven't got all day!”
Chapter Three
“Where is he?” Annie muttered, standing at the motel room window and staring out at the dark parking lot. “He should be here by now.”
“Who exactly are we waiting for?” Elly asked wearily, as she glanced again at her watch and saw that it was almost midnight. She was kneeling on the bed, and she desperately wanted to get some sleep. She'd tried reading for a while, but her eyes were too sore. “Or can you still not trust me enough to tell me?”
“Kieran's supposed to rendezvous with us here.”
“Kieran?” Elly paused. “I heard that name before, at one of the hearings. Do you mean Kieran Evans?”
“He's going to help us.”
“I thought...” Elly's voice trailed off for a moment as she tried to think back to the mountains of evidence she'd heard. There had been a lot to take in at the hearing, but some of it had stuck. “Annie, I thought I heard that Kieran Evans died a few years ago. He died in a car crash, didn't he?”
“Sure he did,” Annie replied, before turning to her. “Just like I died, right?”
“But...”
“We had to go undercover,” Annie continued, her face twitching slightly. “We had no choice. We would have been killed by now, if we'd stayed out in the open, and Kieran realized that we needed to separate for a while. We took new names, and we faked our own deaths, but now we have no choice. We have to take risks and get together again, so he's coming here tonight. He has things we need.”
“So you signaled him that we were here?” Elly asked.
Annie nodded, before looking back out the window.
“So you have a cellphone?” Elly continued.
“Don't be stupid.”
“Then how did you -”
“I have my ways,” Annie added, cutting her off. “If I tell you every little detail, we'll be here forever. You just have to trust me, Kieran's supposed to meet us. I just hope nothing happened to him on the way. When he faked his death, he did it by staging a car crash. Ever since then, I've always hated it whenever he drives. I guess I'm just superstitious. It's dumb, but we all have our problems, right?”
“I guess so,” Elly said, as she spotted a thick red line running down from the hairline behind Annie's ear. Leaning across the bed, she squinted to take a closer look, and to her horror she saw what looked like a corner of metal plate poking out from beneath Annie's skin.
Suddenly Annie turned and looked at her.
“I'm sorry,” Elly stammered, “I -”
“I told you, I put metal in there,” Annie said matter-of-factly. “Small sheets, between the skin and the bone. Not all over, just in a few places. The sheets are lightly magnetized, so they form a protective shield that ensures nothing can reach into my mind. And before you ask, yes, it did hurt, but I had no other choice. Well, I suppose I could have worn the helmet all the time, but that didn't really seem practical.”
“You put metal sheets under your own scalp?”
“Of course. Who else could I have asked to do it?”
“You inserted pieces of metal into your own head? How did you even -”
“I'm n
ot an idiot!” Annie snapped. “I know how it looks, but it worked! And I did my research before I started. Like I said, they're only small pieces. The magnetic field does the rest.” She paused, before turning and looking back out the window. “I did what I had to. There was no other way.”
“But if -”
“He's here!” she added, suddenly turning and heading to the door.
Elly began to climb off the bed. “Who? Kieran?”
“Wait here,” Annie replied, opening the door and then glancing back at her. “He just flashed a light, that's the sign for me to go and meet him. He'll be skeptical of you, so I'll have to explain the situation first, and then I can bring him in to meet you. Maybe. If he's willing to, but he might not be.” She hesitated. “All this time hiding has made him a little paranoid,” she added. “He can seem a little strange, but don't let that put you off. But like I said, he might be willing to see you. He might not trust you.”
“Sure,” Elly said, as Annie headed outside and pulled the door shut. “I understand.”
Left alone in the room, Elly checked her watch again before clambering off the bed and heading over to the window. She looked out at the dark parking lot, and after a moment she spotted Annie hurrying around the side of the building. For a moment, she felt the urge to go and follow her, but she figured she might as well do as she'd been told. Besides, she needed a few minutes alone, so she hurried to the table in the far corner and – despite feeling bad about what she was about to do – she opened the little bag of papers that Annie had brought from the car, and she started looking through the notes.
“I'm sorry, Annie,” she said out loud, “but I need to know what's really going on here.”
She glanced over her shoulder, to make sure that she was alone, and then she looked back at the papers.
“Wow,” she whispered, as she saw that the pages were covered in hand-drawn notes and drawings, all of which seemed to make absolutely no sense. “Annie, you've really been busy.”
Some of the pages were filled with illegible scrawls of text, while others contained what seemed to be diagrams and plans for scientific equipment. There were numbers, too, and sections filled with mathematical computations that made Elly's head hurt. Many of the pages were stained with something dark brown, and Elly could only hope that this was coffee or wine rather than blood.
For the next few minutes, she looked through the pages, until finally she realized that she understood precisely nothing that Annie had written down. At first she'd thought Annie had used some kind of code, but now she realized it was just some really, really messy handwriting. Although she was tempted to keep looking, she instead sighed and slipped the papers back where she'd found them, before heading to her bag and taking out a bottle of soda. She managed to locate a glass in the bathroom – albeit one that was badly chipped – and then, figuring that she needed a cold drink before trying to sleep, she headed to the door and stepped out into the warm night air.
Having spotted an ice machine earlier, she wandered along the front of the motel and down the side, and then she stopped in the bright light of the machine and began to pour some ice into her glass.
And that was when she realized she could hear Annie's voice whispering earnestly in the darkness nearby.
“But what if it's not?” Annie was saying. “I feel like Farstone's the last chance. What if there's nothing there? What if I've been wrong this whole time?”
Although Elly knew it was wrong to eavesdrop, she couldn't help listening for an answer. As cars rushed past on the nearby highway, however, she realized she'd have to go closer, so she made her way to the corner and then stopped, just as Annie started talking again.
“I've missed you, Kieran,” she was admitting. “Sometimes I wonder what life could have been like if we'd just left it all behind. We didn't have to go looking for that signal after Lakehurst. We could have left it all alone, and maybe we could have been living normal lives by now. Is it bad that sometimes I think this should all be somebody else's problem?”
Elly waited, but she heard no answer.
“Elly's good,” Annie said after a few seconds, “but I need you. Please tell me you're not going to leave again tonight, tell me you'll come with us. Honestly, Elly's fine once you get to know her. I'll introduce you and everything'll be fine. She's really quite tolerable.”
“Thanks,” Elly muttered under her breath.
“Three heads are better than two,” Annie continued. “You know this stuff as well as I do. Better, maybe. Kieran, I'm begging you, stick around this time and help me. You don't have to stay quite so hidden. We're probably in the end-game now, anyway. Whatever happens, one way or the other things can't go on like this.”
As she waited to hear Kieran's reply, Elly became more and more curious, until finally she dared to take a step forward and peer around the corner. Immediately, she saw Annie all alone near the back of the motel, pacing back and forth near an old chain-link fence and silhouetted against the distant lights of a nearby town.
“It's really hard doing this alone,” Annie said, before stopping and turning to look back the way she'd just come, toward the fence. “Why are you looking at me like that, Kieran? You know I need you. Don't make me go back to Elly and carry on with this alone. I already screwed up one of the radios today and I had to destroy it. With you around, I'd get so much more done. Please, I need you so much right now.”
Elly watched, with a growing sense of sorrow, as Annie stared into empty space.
“I knew you'd say that,” Annie continued finally, talking to somebody who wasn't there. “I just need to stay strong. Tell me you'll be waiting at the end of all this, Kieran. Tell me we can be together once we've stopped all the bad things.”
As her eyes filled with tears, Elly stepped back. She'd never seen anything so desperately sad, and she wanted to rush over and tell Annie that everything would be alright. At the same time, she didn't dare admit that she'd been listening to the conversation, even if this particular conversation had been completely one-sided. Instead, therefore, she turned to walk away, only to bump against an old three-legged chair that had been left out in the darkness.
The chair's legs scraped against the floor for a moment and Elly froze, worried her cover might have been blown.
“It's okay,” Annie said after a moment, “it was just the wind. Elly's in the room. I'll have to go back to her in a moment, but can I just spend a few minutes with you first? Please? I've been alone for so long, and it's just so good to see you again. Everyone thinks you're dead, but I know you're not.”
Elly took a deep breath, as more tears filled her eyes. She knew from personal experience what it was like to miss someone so much that you carried out imaginary conversations. She'd done the same with her mother, who'd been dead for almost six years now; for a while, she'd talked to her dead mother, even sometimes on the phone. She knew how it felt to be so lonely, you could only talk to memories.
“Yeah,” Annie added, “I miss you too.”
Unable to listen to any more, Elly turned and started walking away. She hurried, while taking care to not make any more loud noises, and she quickly got back to the motel room's door. Just as she was about to go inside, however, she spotted blue lights flashing in the distance, and she turned to see that a police cruiser was parked a little way along the road, outside what looked like some kind of seedy bar. Two officers were standing near the cruiser, and Elly felt a flicker of hope as she realized that she might have found a way out of this crazy situation.
She hesitated, before setting the glass of ice down and making her way out across the parking lot, toward the distant flashing lights. Stopping as she reached her car, she looked down and saw all of Annie's equipment piled on the back seat. Up until that moment, she'd just about managed to convince herself that Annie might be onto something, but now she felt certain that she was on a road-trip with a woman who'd lost her mind.
Annie desperately needed help.
After pausi
ng for a moment longer, Elly finally made a decision. She took a deep breath, wiped her eyes, and set off again toward the lights. All she had to do, she figured, was tell the officers that she was with someone who was having some kind of breakdown, and then Annie would get all the help in the world.
“Hey.”
Startled, Elly turned to find Annie right behind her.
“Hey,” she stammered, “I was just -”
“Yeah, I guessed,” Annie said, staring at her intently. “There are cops over there.”
“There are?” Elly asked, feigning innocence as she turned and pretended to see the cruiser for the first time. “Oh yeah, you're right. We should probably steer clear of them, huh? We should make sure we don't attract any attention.” She paused, before turning back to Annie. “And -”
Before she could get another word out, Annie smashed a broken chair leg against the side of Elly's head, sending her crumpling down onto the cold parking lot asphalt.
Chapter Four
It was the sudden change of speed that woke her, combined maybe with the sensation of the car bouncing along a gravel road. Startled, Elly stirred from unconsciousness and let out a faint groan, and then she opened her eyes and began to sit up.
Instantly, her head bumped against something hard, and she realized that she couldn't see a damn thing.
She blinked, convinced that somehow she'd not opened her eyes properly, but a moment later she realized there was a foul smell of petrol in the air, and then she felt the car slow to a stop with a brief jolt that send her bumping against a close, felt-covered wall. She tried to reach out to stop herself, only to find that her arms were tied behind her back, and then she heard a car door opening somewhere nearby, which was when she realized the truth about her predicament.
She was tied-up, and she was in the trunk of a car.
