Wildwood Road

by Christopher Golden

  “So,” he ventured. “I'm wigging out, right?”

  Jillian laughed, but there was an unsettledness to it, something shrouded beneath her gaze when she looked at him. Michael had told her everything he could remember from Saturday night, all of the thoughts he had been having, the way he had been obsessing about the lost girl and his responsibility to her. He had told her about the way he had subconsciously worked her into his sketches, and about the weird sensory events, the things he kept smelling. Most important, of course, he told her about seeing the girl.

  “And you haven't seen her since Monday?”

  He shook his head. “No. But I keep feeling like I'm going to, like I'll turn around and she'll just be there, as if she's here, but not here. I know how it sounds, trust me.”

  “Scooter?” Jillian looked at him. “You're sure that was what she said?”

  Michael nodded. “It must be a nickname or something.”

  She smiled. “I hope so.”

  He realized that Jillian was stalling for time, hedging as she tried to process everything he had said. But he couldn't blame her for needing a couple of minutes to take it all in. He tried to imagine how he would have reacted if their situations were reversed, and could not.

  Wasn't it strange, how most of the time the hum of the refrigerator and the ticking of the floral clock on the wall were inaudible, and yet at other times they seemed impossibly loud? Now, for instance.

  “Well?” he said, at last.

  It seemed to pain her to respond. She pursed her lips together and gave a barely perceptible shake of her head. “You never believed in ghosts,” she said softly.

  “No, I didn't. I'm still not sure I do.” The heat of embarrassment warmed his face. “I mean, what's more likely, really? That I'm being haunted . . . or that my head's shaken up from what happened Saturday night? All of it, I mean.”

  Jillian's usual confidence slipped back into her expression and she smiled as she reached across the table, shattering that line between daylight and shadow. She twined her fingers with his and tilted her head, drawing his gaze and holding it.

  “I think you know the answer to that.”

  With a nod, Michael sighed. “Yeah. I do. And to be honest with you, sweetie, I think I'd almost rather be haunted.”

  “Hey,” she said softly, squeezing his fingers. Her brows knitted in consternation. “Don't do that. You're talking to insomnia girl, remember?” And he did remember. Jillian had suffered from terrible insomnia the year Michael had graduated college. “I couldn't shut my mind off for months. I thought things at three in the morning that wouldn't make sense to anyone. Your mind can play tricks on you. And very few of them are funny.

  “Look, we've already established that you weren't drunk enough by half for what happened to you Saturday night. So someone slipped you something. How are we to know the effects of whatever it was? We don't even know what it was. So what have you got so far? A bit of obsession, which is understandable if you're feeling guilty for having left the girl at that house when you're not sure she was safe. You were messed up, Michael. You're not responsible. But I can't tell you not to feel that way, 'cause I'd probably be stressing about it, too.

  “What else do we have? Paranoia, for sure. Weird sensory experiences. That sounds like the effects of drugs. All right, you've had one massive hallucination—seeing this girl—but even that could be due to whatever was in your drink, or the mental stress, or a combination of the two. I think you should see a doctor—”

  Michael nodded, sighing. “A shrink.”

  “Well, yeah,” Jillian agreed, nodding in punctuation. “But that's not what I meant. I think you should see a doctor doctor to make sure that whatever you were doped with this weekend isn't going to have lasting side effects. Who knows what's in your blood right now? And then I think you should talk to a therapist, just to get rid of the stress you're under. You're so tense, you've latched on to this girl. Maybe you need to talk to someone whose job it is to combat that stuff.”

  The smell of coffee was strong in his nostrils. Michael noticed that the morning sun was rising further into the sky and the line of shadow had moved back some, so that now the place where he and Jillian held hands was washed in sunshine. The warmth of it felt better than he would have cared to admit.

  “You're okay. You're just a little out of focus at the moment,” she said.

  “Like when the TV starts fritzing out,” Michael agreed, smiling with some small effort. “Maybe if you just whack me in the side of the head?”

  “Don't tempt me.”

  They stayed like that for several long moments and then Michael nodded. “Thanks, Jilly. I'm sure you're right. I think I knew all that, but I needed to hear it from you, too.”

  What he didn't tell her was that the hallucination of the lost girl in his office had seemed so real that he had needed to talk about it to Jillian to soften it in his mind, to make it seem less real. Talking about it out loud helped him push it away, reassure himself that the rules of the world he knew still held fast. And it had worked. Now that they had spoken of it and Jillian had echoed his own internal attempts to make sense of it, Michael could embrace the idea that there was something wrong with him. Something that could be fixed with a couple of doctor's visits, maybe a prescription or two.

  Now she watched him again with those gentle eyes, her smile playful as she leaned over the table to kiss him. Her lips brushed against his.

  “You'll be all right, Michael. If you need to try to find that house, just do it. That might make you feel better. But first, call the doctor. And set up an appointment with a therapist. You'll be right as rain.”

  He had to grin at that. It was an antique expression, one her mother had always used, and Jillian put it into conversation almost without realizing it.

  “You know,” he said, “you really are something. Level head. Always got an answer for everything. Maybe you should run for office one of these days.”

  She laughed. “Maybe I will.”

  Michael had been teasing her about her interest in running for city council, but he was glad she seemed to be taking it seriously. It would be good for her, and good for the city.

  “Actually,” she said, “we're going to have dinner with Bob Ryan tomorrow night.”

  “Really?” He was pleased, and a bit surprised she hadn't brought it up sooner. Michael had the feeling Jillian wasn't sure if her husband was really in favor of her getting into politics. “Somewhere nice, I hope.”

  “Dorothy's.”

  Michael sat back in his chair. “Great. I could use a night out. Guess I have to be on my best behavior, huh?”

  “Yes,” Jillian said, wagging a finger at him. “No ghosts.”

  TRAFFIC WAS HEAVIER THAN USUAL on the way to the office. Halfway there, Michael wished he had gone all the way out to Route 495. It would be the long way around, but with the traffic on the back roads it might well have gotten him there sooner.

  Driving south on Route 125 he listened to the morning talk on Kiss 108, even though he couldn't stand the music they played the rest of the day. Their A.M. drive show was the best in the city. Even so, he was only half listening. There was a pleasant ache in his hips from his lovemaking with Jillian last night, and he could still feel her touch on his hand from their conversation at the kitchen table this morning.

  The rest of his life might still be out of sorts, but as long as things between him and Jillian were on solid footing, he was sure everything else would work out. Hell, as long as he had Jillian, not much else really mattered. He loved his work, but it wasn't nearly as important to him as his marriage.

  As he drove south, he barely paid attention. This was a route he had traveled hundreds of times. He could have driven it with his knees. Hell, he could have driven it with his eyes closed, nearly. The window was open several inches to let in the cold, crisp November air. The visor was down to protect his eyes from the sun, but he still had to squint as he rounded a corner just past Butcher Bo
y.

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw a lone figure standing on the sidewalk in front of the ice-cream stand on the left. A ripple of some trace memory went through him and for a moment he was sure it was her again, the lost girl. Scooter.

  But when he glanced over, careful to keep the car on his side of the center stripe, he saw that the figure was too tall. Instead, it was someone in a long, shapeless coat. Perhaps a homeless man, though this would be an unlikely place to see a vagrant walking. With the sun cutting down at a harsh angle, the man's face was bleached and pale. In that glimpse it seemed his face was misshapen, as though he wore a mask. Michael shifted his focus back to the road, adjusted the steering wheel slightly, and then glanced back to try to get a better look, but he had driven too far past the man now and all he could see was the strangely shambling shape on the sidewalk.

  The radio had been rambling through a series of inane advertisements for this week's television lineup. November was a network ratings sweeps month, after all, so there were all sorts of stunts on the various sitcoms and dramas. Jillian and Michael didn't watch a lot of television.

  Now the ads segued into a hip-hop beat, a woman sang the same sweet words over and over in the background, and a deep-voiced man launched into a rap in dangerous tones. Michael rolled his eyes. It was all the station played these days, and it all sounded the same. He reached out and punched buttons on the radio, gaze ticking upward to make sure the traffic light ahead was still green.

  Two of his preset stations were oldies, and he smiled now as the blistering guitar riff from Eric Clapton's “White Room” squealed from his speakers.

  Content, he sat back.

  The light was yellow and he was just about to coast under it. The intersection was a large one, and half a dozen vehicles were waiting to come in from the right, where the China Blossom restaurant sat on a small rise overlooking the road. A breeze whispered through the window. Clapton's guitar wailed. It was too late to stop for the light, which would turn red any second, and so he accelerated. A pickup truck loaded with paint supplies, ladders hanging off the sides, had already edged partway out into the intersection in anticipation of the light change.

  The paint truck's driver laid on the horn as Michael sailed through the intersection. Michael ignored him, though the urge to make an obscene gesture was pretty strong.

  Then he was passing by China Blossom, a big orange-and-white barn of a place, with very little overt Asian influence, despite the offerings on its menu. His stomach growled. He had eaten breakfast, but still felt hungry.

  “Is it lunchtime yet?” he muttered to himself, chuckling.

  And then he frowned and sniffed the air. Perhaps it was hunger, or just the thought of food, that had summoned up the scent, but if so it was an odd one. He inhaled it, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. He glanced at the control panel for the heat and a/c, wondering if somehow it was coming from the engine or drifting in from outside, but the fan wasn't even on.

  Michael smelled chocolate. No, not chocolate. Hot cocoa.

  He breathed it in again, but this time there was only a trace of the smell. And then it was gone entirely and he was left wondering if it had been his hungry stomach and his vivid imagination after all.

  He put down his window and the chilly air rushed in. The traffic stopped abruptly ahead of him and he hit the brakes. The car shuddered to a stop. Another frown creased lines in his forehead as a disturbing thought struck him. This wasn't the first time he had noticed a smell that seemed out of place to him, and he wondered if it could really be some aftereffect of whatever he might have been drugged with.

  Jillian was right. The sooner he saw a doctor and found out what was happening to him, the better. If he was going to sit in traffic—up ahead there was some construction going on, a new high school, he thought—then he could make use of the time. Keeping his foot on the brake, he popped open the glove compartment and pulled out his cellular phone.

  As he sat up again and began to dial, he glanced to his right.

  The sun had disappeared behind gray prewinter clouds and the daylight was dreary now.

  On the side of the road were two figures, nearly identical to one another. Nearly identical, also, to the homeless man he had seen a short way back on the other side of the road. Long, shapeless coats. A sort of stoop to their shoulders.

  They stood as though waiting for a bus, but they were looking directly at Michael. At his car. Through his car. Watching him.

  And now that the sun was hidden in gray sky, he saw that it was not the glare of the morning light that had made the face of the first one look bleached. These two were equally pale and had the strangest features, as though their faces had been stretched and distorted. Yet Michael could see their eyes—wide eyes with irises so dark they seemed black as tar—and they stared at him.

  Not masks, he thought.

  Sympathy touched him, pity for them, and curiosity about what sort of affliction caused something like that. But sympathy had not been his first reaction. In the moment when he had realized that they shared their deformity with the other man he had seen—the moment when he'd realized they were looking at him—the first emotion to reach his heart had been fear. It passed and was quickly forgotten, but a trace of it lingered beneath other feelings.

  He tried to make sense of their features, of what he was seeing, and somehow he could not. It seemed difficult to focus on their faces. His attention seemed to want to shift, to pull back and take in their entire forms, those shapeless coats and hunched shoulders.

  His vision blurred and he reached up to rub at his eyes, the engine purring and the radio moving on to something with a thumping backbeat. He smelled exhaust fumes. Traffic was frozen.

  When he looked again, they were gone. Just like Scooter. Just like that lost girl.

  The traffic started to move again.

  Car horns blared.

  Michael forced himself to drive, breathing slowly, wondering about what had been done to him Saturday night, when the effects would wear off.

  If they would wear off.

  TEDDY POLITO COULD NEVER GET comfortable in the chair in front of his desk. Maybe it was ergonomics and maybe it was just that he had a hard time focusing on his work. He fidgeted a lot, sitting up straight, then slumping back down. It was one of those typical office chairs, metal arms painted black, black fabric covering the seat and back. Most everything else in the office was a comfort to him, from the photograph of his wife in the silver frame on his desk to the spider plant in the corner to the old-fashioned green glass banker’s lamp he had had with him since college. But that fucking chair did him in every goddamned day.

  You're fat, Teddy, he thought. You can't get comfortable because you're fat. And there was that, true enough. But he did not think it was just his weight that made him so uncomfortable, put him in constant motion. It certainly didn't help, though, especially with the pain in his back.

  The new Liz Phair played quietly in his computer's CD drive. He didn't dare have it any louder. His door was closed, but if anyone came in he did not want to have to listen to complaints about some of the more ribald lyrics Liz came up with.

  He sat back in the chair, stretching, popping the muscles in his neck with a twist, and then just stared at the computer screen. As his mind worked, he tapped a pen against the edge of the desk in a rapid one-two rhythm.

  Most days, he didn't have a clue why he couldn't get comfortable in his chair, why he had such a hard time focusing on his work. Today, though, he knew exactly what was unsettling him. Michael had come in late for work, and more than a little. He had muttered an apology to anyone who asked him about it, but hadn't even offered an excuse for why he was late. The guy had looked pale, even a bit shaky.

  At his desk, now, Teddy closed his eyes and massaged the bridge of his nose. He had grown up with a father who drank far too much; when he had looked at Dansky this morning, images had flashed through Teddy's mind. Ugly images. Shattered bottles and emp
ty cans and bruises on his mother's face. The truth was, Michael Dansky looked a hell of a lot like a man who either had a vicious hangover, or someone who badly needed a drink. Either option spelled trouble.

  With a sigh, he stood up and stretched his back. One of these days he was really going to get serious about losing weight. Getting into shape. What he needed was a nice little heart attack to motivate him. Nothing serious, just something troubling. Something to scare the hell out of him.

  These morbid thoughts were his way of distracting him from what was really bothering him at the moment. He glanced out through the clear glass that bordered the door to his office. The beehive was at work. Garth was making the rounds with the mail cart. Paul Krakow, the big boss, was standing in the midst of the bullpen of cubicles that made up the lion's share of the production, sales, and accounting departments. There were some junior copywriters and designers out there as well. At the moment, the distinguished older gentleman who had started the agency was engaged in an animated conversation with Heather Vostroff, a recent hire. Heather was a talented girl, a designer with her eye on Dansky's office, and his job.

  No wonder she was sucking up to the boss.

  Not that Paul Krakow minded. She was feeding him charm and sex appeal like candy, and he was gobbling it up.

  “Michael, you idiot,” he whispered to his otherwise empty office. “Don't fuck this up.”

  He wasn't just talking about Dansky's career, but the Newburyport Premium account. Heather Vostroff wanted Dansky's job, but there were half a dozen young writers at Krakow & Bester who would love to pick up the assignments that Teddy Polito got, and if Michael screwed up the ice-cream campaign, it might have a serious effect on Teddy's position at the agency as well.

  “All right. All right,” he muttered to himself. He shook his head and opened the door.

  Without pausing to speak to anyone, he moved swiftly across the main floor toward Michael's office. Krakow noticed him on the move and raised a hand to acknowledge him. Teddy smiled and waved back, nodding politely. The last thing he wanted to do was to get into a conversation with the old man today about Newburyport Premium. Bester the younger, the talentless sycophantic hack who'd gotten the job because his father was the junior partner at the place, was already breathing down the back of his neck for the first round of test ads so that the management team could discuss them.