A jolt coursed through him—equal parts elation and sorrow. “I can’t imagine doing any of this without you, Kel. I’m so sorry about…about all of this. You didn’t sign up for something like this when you agreed to that first date. You didn’t sign up for any of this. Hell, I just love you so much, girl.”
“Love you, too,” she replied, and then they were standing on a wooden platform, staring in disbelief at an equally stunned serial killer who had used his looks and charisma to carve a path of destruction across America, from Florida clear up to the Pacific Northwest. Bundy had a slip of paper in his hand, and he was just about to step through a field of greenish energy stretching between the open jaws of an enormous boar’s head.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Tasket drawled, his hand instantly finding the butt of his pistol, “if it ain’t Ted Fucking Bundy himself!”
“Now!” the Dowager shrieked, but Miriam was too quick for them. Even before the lady’s guards had an opportunity to charge them, she had encircled their position with the soil she’d pilfered from Adrienne. She barked a string of words and the air around them changed—somehow solidifying. It was like standing inside a cylinder of thick glass.
The rover with the sunglasses unfurled a huge bullwhip. He let go with a hellacious crack, but the blow glanced harmlessly off the air, six inches in front of Miriam’s face.
“We’ve come to free them!” Miriam shouted, and a confused murmur rose from the assembly. “You have no right to hold these people. They are missed by their loved ones, and it’s time they were given their release!”
“You have no power, here!” the Dowager shouted. Her appearance had changed again, this time for the worse. She was weakening, wasting away by the second. Liver spots blossomed on the sagging wattles of her neck and cheeks. Her grin was a misshapen fence of rotten yellow teeth. “Did you think they could all just…just up and leave?”
“Not without our help,” Miriam said. She turned and the five of them linked hands. She’d probably practiced the incantation a hundred times, and she’d have to get it right on the first try.
Everything depended on it.
Eyes shuttered against the darkness, she spoke a lilting chain of Latin words. There was a sudden change in the atmosphere. Dark clouds eclipsed the final remnants of sunset, transforming day into night. Rovers scrambled about, lighting fires on stage while the wind howled. Summers scrambled for cover.
The pitch of Miriam’s voice rose as she neared her conclusion. She was practically shouting the words as she cracked an eye toward the Dowager.
It was a mistake, that simple peek. A collection of demons circled them—scaly, monstrous creatures seething in their anger and hatred. Whatever human guise they had once worn had vanished, and she catalogued with perfect clarity the furnace glow of their orange eyes, the furtive flicker of their forked tales.
There were things to be afraid of in the world—oh, yes—and here they were. Here they all were…
A large, heavily muscled figure with a shaggy bull’s head grinned—actually grinned—at her from just beyond the reach of their protection. With talon-like fingers, he circled a place in the center of his chest and pushed deeply against the skin there, drawing blood; Miriam collapsed with a cry.
It—he—was inside her. She could feel his hands, his fingers, now encircling her heart. “How?” she shrieked. “What are you doing?”
“Did you really believe that you could come into Adrienne and end our work here?” the Dowager shouted. Thunderheads poured down from the summits, and Bo watched with mounting dread as some of the flimsier stalls and booths around them collapsed, their boards tearing loose and flying away on the gusts. “Take it, Moloch! Take it all, and restore my health!”
Miriam shrieked in agony. Bo and Kelli fell to her side, but the pain had incapacitated her. Eyes wide, she writhed on the ground.
The bull-thing’s fingers clutched at the flesh of its own chest, but it was Miriam who experienced the pressure. It was like a heart attack—a searing pain that shuddered through every inch of her.
She peered up at it from her prone position, the realization suddenly dawning on her. It was that damned creature—the dark lady’s servant—that she’d leapt into on her information-gathering mission just a few days before. It had left something of itself inside of her, latching on like a parasite in anticipation of their return.
They’d been doomed from the start.
The Dowager closed her eyes, her open palms raised to the sky. She had become radiantly beautiful once again, and her chest swelled with the sudden infusion of sustenance. She was using the servant as a channel as she depleted Miriam’s vitality.
Moloch pushed his palm deeper into the flesh of his own chest, and Miriam fell still. Like a creeping frost, a stark shade of white crowded out any color that remained in her hair. She gasped for breath.
“Phil!” Wendy said, shouting over the wind. “Look—it’s Bo! Bo and Kelli are up there by the portal!”
Phil squinted. “Hang tight, Wendy! I’m going up there!” he yelled.
“No!” Jasper said. He showed Phil his palms. They were a clear, perfect shade of white. “I think it’s supposed to be me, Phil. I’m the one. You take care of your family. See to it that everyone makes it across safely. You got it?”
Phil shook his head. “Jasper, that’s my brother! I have to…”
But the big man merely squeezed Phil’s shoulder. “It’s my turn, Phil. Look, it was nice getting to know you. Even if it was just for a short time. You gave me hope when I needed it the most.”
“How?” Phil said. “What did I do?”
“You didn’t do, anything. It was just…just seeing you with Wendy and the girls. How you all are with each other. It reminded me of what I once had—what I’ll have again someday, gods willing.”
Phil offered a somber nod. “Thanks, Jasper.”
“Don’t mention it,” he said, grinning. “You all make the best of it back on the other side, okay? Be good to each other,” he said, and then he was off at a sprint. The dark ones were so confused by the sudden turn of events that nobody offered any resistance, and he bounded up the stairs and threw himself at Moloch. His momentum broke the connection the demon king had forged with Miriam, and the Dowager shrieked in frustration.
Miriam gasped, writhing, while Tasket knelt at her side.
“What now, Miriam?” Tasket shouted. “This shit’s falling apart fast! What do we do now?”
Her eyes scanned frantically back and forth among them. She was in shock—a mere whisper from death. “A sacrifice,” she rasped. Kelli had to lean in, her ear nearly touching Miriam’s lips. “A sacrifice by the one who doesn’t belong here. An act of true benevolence, so the way can be reversed.”
“But who is that?” Kelli shouted. “Who are we looking for?
Miriam summoned the strength to roll onto her side, the wind tearing at her clothing. “Him,” she said, pointing at Jasper, who was struggling to extricate himself from Moloch’s grasp. “I think it’s him.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
Moloch had the strength of ten men, and he brushed Jasper off as easily as a man swats away an insect.
Jasper tumbled across the stage, gathered himself, and staggered to his feet. “The old ways are finished!” he shouted. “All of this—it’s over! That door swings two ways, and everybody who doesn’t belong here is going home!”
The normals cheered his words. They surged toward the altar, the dark ones shrinking in fear and confusion.
“Not without payment!” the Dowager screamed. “Not without sacrifice!”
“There’s been enough of that already,” Jasper said. “There’s been centuries of it. Enough! How many years have we given? How much of our sweat and our flesh have you already taken, you worthless vampire? You rule this snake pit like you’re some kind of royalty, when all you really are is a parasite—a despicable fucking parasite.” He stared at Miriam, the light in his green eyes matching that of the portal.
“Bring us home, ma’am. Finish what you came here to do.”
“I can’t,” she said. “Our circle was broken. It can’t…it can’t be rebuilt. We only had the one chance.”
The Dowager’s laughter rode the wind like an electrical current in a thunderstorm. “Fools! You insolent little termites! You have no power here. No strength! I was old when the world was a cold, cold cinder, and I’ll be here long after it’s time to once again turn out the lights.
“Slaves do as they are commanded. They work and they toil and they scratch and they claw, and all the while we rest. We gather our strength, reformulate our plans. We grow stronger, that we might one day reclaim our human forms and write yet another chapter in the volumes of destruction.”
“It has to be him,” Miriam whispered to Kelli. “The book talks of an outcast—of a figure culled from the herd. I’m sure it’s him. He’s the one.”
“Do you know why you are doomed to serve us?” the Dowager continued; she cast an accusatory finger at the normals, who cowered beneath her rage. She looked bigger, somehow. She was beautiful and young, and somehow…somehow larger.
“Because you are nothing in the grand scheme of things. Cockroaches and beetles. You live your pathetic existence in a white-hot flash of eight decades—maybe nine, if you’re lucky—and you waste your time and energy in doing all the right things. In living the right way. You repress every dark instinct that bubbles up from inside of you. You discount every exciting impulse that speaks to your true nature—to your basic instincts as animals, adrift in a sea of inequity and chaos.
“To put it plainly, life is wasted on you. And so you must die, but not here. Not today. And not until we’ve used every ounce of you toward sustaining our way of life. This lottery,” she spat, opening her arms to the normals, “is finished. There will be no joyous homecoming this year. Theodore,” she said, casting her gaze onto Bundy, “step through, young man! Fulfill your destiny!”
Wearing a slightly confused grin, he turned, waved to the crowd, and did just that…disappearing in the ether of the portal. The dark ones let loose with howls of celebration and one of the rovers—a thickly scaled creature with insectile eyes and a quick, darting tongue—scurried over to the drums.
Bum-bum-BUM-BUM-BUM! Bum-bum-BUM-BUM-BUM!
The percussion kicked things up a notch, and the normals scattered as dark ones charged in anger. Phil watched as a pack of them descended on a young man, pulling him to the ground. He put his arms around the girls and began hustling them back toward the front gates.
“Wait!” Jasper called. He stood tall at the edge of the altar, hands raised. “Don’t run! Stand your ground, and take what is rightfully yours!”
“Blasphemy!” the Dowager shouted. “You can’t do anything to stop this, you pathetic wretch. Let your precious cockroaches return to their holes, Jasper. Rest assured, you’ll have them back at your side in the morning.”
“I told you,” Jasper said, shaking with rage as he turned to address the Dowager, “that this was all a big…fucking…mistake. I told you I didn’t belong here!”
And with that, he showed her his palms. They were a stark white, and the Dowager gasped as he turned to the rovers, who cautiously advanced on him.
“Say the words!” he screamed to Miriam. “Do it now!”
Kelli and Bo helped her into a kneeling position. The grimoire lay open and her lips moved, though the spell was swallowed by the wind. As she spoke, the clouds parted, revealing a shaft of silver moonlight.
It fell on Jasper an instant before the rovers did.
Phil cried out in anguish as they took him down, their claws tearing into his friend.
But Jasper wasn’t the only one screaming. From her perch in the crow’s nest, the Dowager wildly waived her hands. “Stop it!” she shrieked. “Get off of him, you fools! It’s a trap! Get off of him!”
But it was too late. Miriam stood on uncertain legs, supported under each arm by Kelli and Bo. The wind fluttered the pages of the grimoire that she clutched in her shaking hand as she gave voice to the final words in the spell.
“…libertas a servitute, et nunc, et in saecula!”
The rovers suddenly shrank away from Jasper, shielding their faces from the light. He lay there—still—a ravaged mess that had once held a human form, in the center of the stage. That familiar green softly emanated, growing fainter with every passing second.
Jasper turned his head; he peered out over the subdued crowd, one eye fogged with terrible pain, the other pulped by the rovers’ attack. He wore a thin smile, and he found the strength to raise his right hand.
The smile widened, little pearls of blood glistening on his broken teeth, and he made a fist just as the last of his vitality left him. The green glow rose, lingered for an instant, and vanished on a gust.
He was gone.
The Dowager let loose with a howl of such deep and pervasive rage that Phil felt the hair on his neck stand up. Her cry was swallowed by an enormous thunderclap, and everything changed.
A stunned silence hung over the inky darkness of an alpine meadow.
Frightened, confused people stumbled about in the night. They bumped into each other, into the mechanical solidity of hundreds of cars and trucks, motorcycles and vans.
“Christ!” a man shouted as he barked his shins against the fender of an ’88 Plymouth Reliant. “What the hell?”
Tasket sniffed the air. This was different.
This was familiar.
He pulled a flashlight from his jacket and switched it on, the beam illuminating what had become a surreal setting. He took stock of the situation.
Behind him stood a singlewide trailer.
DEER CREEK FOREST PRODUCTS
BLACK HANDS MEADOW SALVAGE
Before him, hundreds of men, women, and children milled about the meadow in a daze, their vehicles and any possessions that they had brought with them to Adrienne collected there on the mountain.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said, shrugging out of his jacket and draping it across Miriam’s sagging shoulders, “it worked, Miriam. It worked! We brought ‘em home.”
THIRTY-NINE
Tasket saw to it that they got Miriam squared away first. She was shaken and exhausted, but her vitals were good and her color was slowly returning.
The reality of their freedom dawned upon the returned gradually; it spread like a germ, and pockets of raw, jubilant celebration erupted in the darkness. The moon ducked out from behind the clouds, bathing the scene in a bright light that added another level of clarity.
“Phil!” Bo called, pushing his way through the crowd. Men and women were crying, embracing, shouting. Bo climbed onto the hood of a Dodge station wagon with wood paneling. He cupped his hands to his mouth. “Phil Benson! Wendy! It’s Uncle Bo!”
He heard someone call his name and he jumped down and jogged toward it. It took some time, but he found them. They were huddled around the minivan, the girls weeping huge, grateful tears.
“Uncle Bo!” Cammie called, her arms outstretched. “You came for us! How did you know?”
He scooped her up, and then stooped and pulled Carrie into his other arm. He kissed their cheeks, tasting the salt of their tears.
“I had some help, honey. I had lots and lots of help.”
FORTY
Homecoming: A Case History of
The Peculiar Incidents on Last-Chance Mountain
Chase Johnson, Special Correspondent to Time
While most American meadows bloom a menagerie of resplendent wildflowers in the final weeks of spring, things are much different near the summit of Last Chance Mountain. April brought its usual mixture of rain and snow flurries to this remote region of the Sierra Nevada, but the consistent presence of vehicles and the steady stream of visitors—the government research envoys, international media, and the families of the returned themselves—has prevented the vegetation from establishing much of a foothold.
“It’s been a real trick to do this th
e right way,” Sheriff Woodrow Tasket says as he surveys the scene. This is classic Tasket—a master of understatement. The clear-eyed lawman with the starched shirts and folksy speech lends perhaps the greatest credibility to what took place here. “Nothing like this has ever happened before, so we’re figuring it out as we go.”
The this in question is the story of the returned. It is the startling story of the sudden appearance of 863 men, women, and children—people who had been reported missing…people whose relatives had long thought them to be deceased.
“It’s been quite an adjustment,” Dennis Wren, the former San Francisco 49ers lineman says. He looks unchanged from the images in the press clippings that reported his retirement—more than two decades prior. “Time was different over there, so it’s been…hard for my family to accept that I’m just the same as I was when I got lost there on the mountain. And they’re right. I’m not the same. I’ll never be the same. You endure the things that we did in Adrienne, and you can’t go back to the way you were. It’s just not possible.”
But in the weeks since their homecoming, many of the returned are attempting to pick up the pieces. Anna Wells, part of the quintet whose actions are thought to be at least partially responsible for the phenomenon on Last Chance Mountain, is now Anna Ryman. Her fiancé, Frank, is looking forward to their life together.
“We just got a little sidetracked is all,” he says. “Anna stuck by me. She believed in me and, ultimately, she came to find me. That’s what love is. That’s the definition of it,” he says, grinning.
They plan to live in Bishop.
So many questions. So much to uncover in what feels like a fantasy.
But where to begin?
As I sit with Tasket, staring out on a bizarre landscape of abandoned vehicles—little clusters of scientists running tests on the vehicles before the sun sets behind the mountains—I pose this very question.
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