The Fading Place

by Mary SanGiovanni

  And Charlie had a new, even greater love in her life. Haley was her whole world.

  Those two memories—falling out of a tree and leaving John—came to her as she was driving her baby and a psychotic woman farther and farther away from familiar territory. They were middle links in a chain of thought. She had to protect her daughter. She had to take control of the situation. But every time she had tried in the past, every time it had been important to her to grab the reins, she had grasped at nothing and fallen. She had reached out for something that simply wasn’t there for her, and she had fallen, hard.

  She couldn’t afford to fall this time, she thought as she glanced in the rearview at the woman with the gun. Not this time.

  “Take this right,” Simone said, nudging her shoulder with the gun. “Head toward the highway.”

  Charlie gave a tight little nod, making the turn. So they were heading toward the highway, then. Heading west from there, the highway, such as it was, grew more crowded with densely packed trees, the towns fewer and farther between. The area had once been home to miners who extracted iron from the myriad caves nestled between the trees and built small towns close by for themselves and their families. A nearby arsenal had used the iron ore to build weapons for the Revolutionary and Civil wars, and those who didn’t work in the mines were often given civilian positions there. That had been long ago, before the ore had run out and the mines shut down, before those towns had been abandoned, forgotten, left to nature to reclaim. The arsenal still stood out east, now large enough to house a small, well-guarded town of government employees and their families (Charlie understood they still did some kind of weapons testing out there), but its affiliations with the towns northwest of Wexton had been long forgotten.

  Out there, a body could lie rotting in a mossy ditch, beneath a cover of trees, for months, maybe years, before anyone found it.

  If anyone found it at all.

  She inhaled slowly, softly, and exhaled, trying to regain focus and force thoughts like those from her mind. She had Haley to think about. She would fight like a wildcat before she let this woman take her baby away.

  She would not fall.

  Charlie glanced down at the dashboard to check her speed, noting with vague surprise how calmly she was maintaining the speed limit. She also noticed the gas gauge, and suddenly a spring of hope spouted up from that cold lump in her gut.

  She was almost out of gas. She’d have to stop somewhere.

  “Uh—” she cleared her throat, breathed, started again. “Um, Simone? We’re almost out of gas. If you want me to, uh, take the highway, then we should probably stop somewhere first.”

  Simone bounced forward, clutching Charlie’s shoulder with her free hand and leaning, her cheek inches from Charlie’s, to verify the gas level. So close to Simone, Charlie could hear her breathing, smell her stale but somewhat sweet breath. She was seized with the nearly overpowering desire to take her hands from the wheel and wrap them in the other woman’s thin blonde hair, then slam that pale, smooth white face into the dashboard. Had she been alone with Simone, she might have. But one quick glance in the rearview to the sleeping little bundle in the backseat kept her hands on the wheel while she gritted her teeth.

  Simone leaned back with a loud huff. “Dammit. Fine. The first gas station you see.” Charlie felt the cold metal of the gun muzzle against her head. “But one word to anyone at the station about this…situation, and I’ll kill you and whoever you tell. I mean it.” She returned her arm to the top of the baby seat. Haley cooed in her sleep, wiggling a little, then settled back with a tiny sigh.

  Charlie ground her teeth—a habit she’d picked up in the hospital after the fall—and focused on the road. Signs indicated the exit for Route 80 West was just up ahead, beyond a Gas-Up on the left. She turned in and pulled up to the pump, killing the ignition.

  “Not a word,” Simone whispered as Charlie rolled down the window. The attendant, a dark-haired, middle-aged man whose eyes were heavy with the weight of some internal weariness, offered her a silent nod and a questioning eyebrow.

  “Fill it, please,” she said, keeping her voice even.

  “Cash or credit?”

  “Credit,” Charlie said, glancing in the backseat for the purse Simone had taken. A mile marker of sorts, indicating at least one place she stopped to anyone who might come looking for her, would be a good—

  “Cash,” Simone corrected, leaning forward to hand him two twenties from Charlie’s purse. She glanced at Charlie, a flicker of warning not to argue, and leaned back again.

  The man went back to fill the tank and Simone sniffed. “I know what you were doing there.”

  Christine frowned, turning to look at her. “What?”

  “You were trying to send him a message.” Something in Simone’s expression pulled in on itself, like the sun passing behind clouds.

  For a moment, Charlie honestly didn’t understand. “What are you talking about?”

  “Leaving aside for the moment that a credit card is traceable—I’m sure you thought of that, Charlie—you can use it to send and receive messages. Don’t even try to tell me you weren’t thinking that, too.”

  Dumbfounded, Charlie shook her head. “Messages? What—what messages? I don’t understand what you’re—”

  Simone shot forward so suddenly that Charlie flinched, instinctively shrinking away from her. The pale emptiness of her face was offset by sudden fever in her eyes, the muscles around her mouth tense with an unshakeable belief in her words. “Messages. Credit card companies embed the technology inside. A credit card is full of, of magnetic ideas, of programmable information about you—where you go, what you do, who you’re with. Information that is readable by electronic devices. GPS coordinates, shopping preferences, even tracking and bugging devices. That guy would be able to run it through the reader, hand it back, and then hear everything we’re saying. And then they can fade us. They can start draining everything away.”

  “What? What kind of—”

  The gas station attendant appeared at the window and Charlie jumped, crying out a little. In the backseat, the baby fussed, then thankfully settled back to sleep.

  “Okay. You okay,” the attendant said, more a statement than a question, thumping the roof of the car lightly.

  “Right—okay, thanks.” Charlie faced forward again and turned the key, then pulled away from the pump, her mind still trying to wrap around Simone’s paranoia. Messages embedded in credit cards? Tracking and bugging devices? A sliver of fear rooted itself in her chest. Simone’s ideas suggested an imbalance that the slightest hair trigger could set off, and there was no way to foresee what those triggers might be, either. Simone was not just detached from the wrongness of their situation, but from the better part of reality itself.

  “Take the highway—80 West.”

  Charlie merged onto the highway, trying to focus on the road and not on the possibility that she had lost her last chance to contact help. Now there would be no way for anyone to trace her whereabouts (unless Simone’s paranoia is right, ha ha, she thought dryly). If the police happened to find the right attendant at the right gas station, and that attendant happened to remember two women with a baby, arguing over the method of payment, then maybe she stood a chance, but the likelihood of that was slim. It was too much to hope the attendant was suspicious, too much to even consider that he might remember the license plate of her car.

  Her heart sank as she considered it all. Stopping for gas had done no good for her situation, but really, would it have made a difference anyway? After all, who was there to even report her missing? She had no family who cared about her whereabouts and only a few work acquaintances that didn’t quite reach far enough across the gaps between people to count as true friendships. Her boss might miss her, but it would still be a long time—too long before he realized something was wrong rather than her just being a negligent slacker.

  And of course, there had been no one since John. She’d wanted to date, in a w
ay; she’d been lonely, had missed sleeping next to someone every night, missed having someone come up behind her in the kitchen while she was cooking and put his arms around her, kissing her neck. She missed sex, its sensation and its intimacy. But she couldn’t quite bring herself to move on. She supposed that even after all that time, even after what John’s silence inevitably meant to her about him and about them, she still held out a faint flicker of hope that maybe he’d change his mind. Maybe he’d realize how much he loved her, that he’d been a fool to let her go, to let his beautiful new baby daughter go.

  A bigger part of her mind knew she was on her own, though. She had Haley and she had herself and that was it. If no one was going to come looking for them, she’d just have to find a way to save her baby girl on her own.

  * * *

  “Where are we going?” Charlie asked, her voice dry and sticking in her throat.

  Simone took so long to answer that at first, Charlie thought the woman hadn’t heard her. She was about to repeat the question when Simone finally said, “I have a car parked along the edge of Serling woods, up north of here. I walked down to Wexton, off the road but near it. Took hours. I didn’t want anyone to see me. I couldn’t afford to hitch a ride, because then I’d have someone who might remember giving me that ride. And I’d have his car to get rid of as well, once I took care of him. It’s a lot of extra work. Easier to walk. We’ll drive your car into the woods, and then I’ll take my car back. That’s how I planned it.”

  Simone delivered this to Charlie in a kind of monotone, as if she were ticking off steps in the best way to get grass stains out of a pair of pants. The deadpan tone reinforced that disconnect from reality that Charlie suspected, and it made her shiver. Somewhere prior to all this, Simone had come undone, and in that undoing, she had unplugged herself from…well, the world. Society, law, her own life—hell, even her own thoughts and experiences. Charlie wondered if Simone had family or friends or anyone, really, who might be looking for her if she didn’t show up after a time. Anyone who might have suspected, as Charlie did, that Simone was unhinged and unwell. She doubted that person would readily believe Simone was dangerous. Charlie thought the families of these types of psychopaths always seemed to know something was wrong, but not the extent of it—not the breadth or depth of it. But maybe someone in Simone’s life might understand that her absence meant a potential problem. Charlie could hope for that.

  And hope she did, because what Simone had said about hitching a ride scared Charlie. It suggested Simone’s plan was detailed and included the tying up of loose ends. The plan did not allow for witnesses, and after Simone got what she wanted, what was Charlie, really, but a witness? And the pronoun change had not gone unnoticed, either. “We” driving Charlie’s car into the woods indicated the three of them. “I” driving Simone’s car back suggested Charlie had been written out of the plan by that point. So that meant she had until they reached the car to come up with something.

  “Is the car…near where you live?” She glanced in the rearview to find Simone frowning.

  “Why?”

  Charlie shrugged. “Just curious. I didn’t think there were many houses out that way, let alone people living in them.”

  “What are you saying, that I live in a dump? Some old wreck of a place out in the middle of nowhere?”

  Charlie felt a flare of panic. This conversation had taken a sudden and decidedly unexpected turn. “No, no—nothing like that. I’m sure your home is beautiful. I just—I don’t know that area so well, that’s all. I don’t know the area northwest of Wexton, really.”

  “Where we’re going to live is just fine,” Simone responded, sounding only marginally less indignant. “It’s clean. It couldn’t be any cleaner. I’ll clean every day, maybe even a few times a day. Especially the baby’s room. They won’t be able to tell me one single thing is being overlooked, not one single thing has been neglected. The house will be baby-proofed, it’ll be clean. My backseat is full of baby cereal and baby food. I have a whole trunk full of diapers—all sizes. And baby clothes. Lots and lots of baby clothes. And baby bath stuff. When we get where we’re going, she won’t need a single thing. They can’t say she’s neglected. I thought of everything.”

  “Who? Who can’t say—”

  “Nobody!” Simone shouted, and Charlie cringed, waiting for the baby to wake up and cry. She didn’t. Haley had had a little head cold the last few days, and Charlie noticed she’d been sleeping heavier. It had worried her in the same uneasy way that everything distressing but usually nothing serious worried mothers—that thin, brittle set of nerves that made head colds a precursor for S.I.D.S, for example—but right then, she was grateful Haley was sleeping through this.

  “Okay, okay, Simone, I believe you,” she said softly, hoping to soothe the crazy woman in the backseat. “I’m sure you’re well prepared.”

  “Really.” In the rearview, Simone’s face went slack, but the blaze in her eyes dulled to that emotionless smolder. Something in her tone made Charlie more afraid than when she had been ranting. There was an underlying wrath, barely checked. She thought a wrong move or word when Simone’s eyes looked like that and her voice was wrapped in that tone meant a reaction rather than a response—something sudden and violent, maybe not sadistic but driven by her own inexplicable sense of logic.

  “Simone? I didn’t mean—”

  “Oh shut up, you uppity bitch. You think I don’t get it, huh? You think I’m too stupid to hear your condescension? Think I don’t hear the words under your words? I don’t need to explain myself to you.”

  “No, I wasn’t asking you to—”

  A sharp and dazzling pain grazed the side of her head, shooting brightly across her eyes. It took a moment to realize Simone had hurt her, another to realize she’d been hit with the gun and not shot with it, and yet another moment to regain control of the car. She shook her head, tears blurring her vision until she blinked them away, and tugged the steering wheel to compensate for the car’s drift.

  “I told you to shut up. Watch where you’re going instead.”

  Charlie didn’t speak. She couldn’t. Fear and the throbbing in her head made her lips and tongue feel heavy. Crackles of splintered pain made her eyes water. She focused on sweeping them up with some kind of mental broom. She had to keep her head clear, had to think, to think. A rivulet of warmth, a liquid pain, throbbed out from the painful spot and traced a cooling, sticky path down the side of her face.

  Think.

  A wave of hot nausea threatened to send her swerving again, and she buzzed her window down a little, letting in a torrent of cool air and dull noise.

  “What are you doing?” In the rearview, Simone leaned forward.

  “I need air,” Charlie replied more curtly than she’d intended. Her head still felt a little swimmy beyond the radius of pain near her right eye.

  Simone didn’t seem to notice. She settled back with a wary sniff, looking out her own window. The gun sank to her lap, the fingers of her other hand absently stroking the barrel like a small pet. “Okay.”

  The woods blurred along their right side, thick clumps of trees so dark a green, even in the day, as to appear almost black. Charlie liked to hike, though she hadn’t had the time since Haley was born, nor was she familiar enough with the local terrain to know where to go. She’d heard enough, though, from coworkers about those particular woods to put her off the idea of hiking there. Mostly they were stories of people going missing—hikers, even experienced ones, who planned day trips through the area that they never returned from, and campers who suddenly vanished, leaving behind tents and water bottles, cooking utensils and full beer bottles. There were stories of teenagers who had gone to woods parties to drink and hook up and were somehow lost track of. They never showed up where they were supposed to the next day, though sometimes their cars were found running idly or run dry of gas. Charlie’s coworkers, evidently founts of information all, offered stories where more sinister traces of the missing pe
ople were found—splatters of blood on the rough bark of the surrounding ancient trees, gnawed-on pieces of human leg and finger bones found in shallow parts of the stream leading up to Serling Lake. Occasionally torn clothing was located, still encasing a bloody chunk of flesh. These ghoulish aspects of the stories had been related to her with morbid detail and reverent fascination, though when she asked what was believed to have happened to all those missing people, she’d gotten little by way of answer. Evidently, urban legends of the area superseded the less supernatural and more likely possibility that drifters committed murder and made clean escapes right up the highway.

  Like what was supposed to happen to her. If Simone had her way, Charlie would be one of those people who police would think had parked in the woods and simply disappeared. Poor girl, new to town, single mom just trying to get a little exercise maybe, and some fresh air for her baby. She’d be just another story for coworkers to tell tales about when the five o’clock hour approached and everyone was more or less ready to knock off for the day.

  Charlie had been to (well, near) those woods once. She hadn’t believed those stories, not really, but they’d piqued her curiosity enough to detour down one of the lightly wooded side roads where occupied houses still stood, and park just before one of the myriad entrances into the forest itself. Nothing about the outermost trees struck her as unnatural or unwholesome. Okay, maybe there was a gnarled tree here and there that sprouted leaves with darker-than-usual veins, like a sepsis had been drawn up from the roots to the tips. Maybe a limb on this tree or that reached out toward the road with excessively long and vaguely fingerlike branches. Possibly the occasional old tree trunk seemed to bend a little beneath a fuzzy blanket of faintly phosphorescent moss, as if that moss was eating away the bark and meaty wood beneath… But all those notions could be chalked up to imagination. If you looked hard enough for something, you could begin see it.