Down a Lost Road (2 page)

I forced a smile and tried to edge out of
his grasp, but he mirrored my movement, still staring me intently
in the eyes.

“
Mer?”

“
Just going to my
room.”

“
Awful edgy.”

My heart raced. Much as I wanted to stay and
talk to him, all I really felt was terror. I had to find that coin.
Now.

“
I just need to be alone a
minute, okay?”

He released me abruptly. I could feel his
gaze following me as I darted to my bedroom.

“
What, you got a chat date
with some guy I need to know about?”

I stuck out my tongue. “You’d know it
already if I did. They’re lining up, but they’ll have to wait.”

Damian knew how shy I was. It was pretty
pathetic, and I knew it. I’d never had a real boyfriend – not one
that would get past Damian’s approval anyway – but he still liked
to tease me about it.

I slipped into my room and shut the door on
Damian’s concerned gaze, snapping the lock. I hated doing it, but I
needed the solitude. From the door I scanned the floor of my room
for the coin, inch by inch. I’d nearly reconciled myself to failure
when I finally caught sight of it, glinting coldly between the
folds of the granny quilt heaped by my bed. My immediate relief
lapsed into a grumble of annoyance. All that time spent hunting for
the thing and it was right there beside my bed.

Damian knocked softly on my door. I still
felt guilty for locking him out, so I seized the thing without
looking at it and stuffed it into my back pocket. Now that I had it
safely in my possession, I could delay my investigation a couple
more minutes.

“
Sorry, D,” I said, opening
the door.

He wasn’t there. The hallway stretched out
dark and empty.

“
Damian?”

Behind me the branch scraped and whined
against my window again. My skin prickled, and I crept toward
Damian’s room. His door was ajar, but as I edged closer I couldn’t
see him inside. My heart galloped. I pushed the door the rest of
the way open and peered in.

Damian was there, sprawled in his chair with
his feet propped on his drafting table, fiddling with some kind of
mechanical thing he’d been obsessing over for the last month at
least.

“
You’re here!” I cried,
clutching the edge of his door.

He cocked his head at me, frowning behind
the wisps of his golden hair. Another creak emanated from the
hallway and I leapt into his room, slamming the door behind me and
diving into the pillow on his bed.

“
What the— Mer, you okay?
What’s going on?”

Breathe, Merelin. You’re being
ridiculous.

“
The house is possessed,” I
muttered into the pillow.

“
Possessed.”

I slanted a glance at him. “It’s going to
eat me.”

“
The house?”

I nodded. But joking about my terror wasn’t
making it go away. After a moment I sat up and found Damian still
studying me curiously.

“
Seriously, D, you weren’t
just knocking on my door?”

“
Um, no. You wanted to be
left alone, remember? Since when do I bug you when you don’t want
to be bugged?”

“
All the time,” I said,
cracking a smile.

“
Well, okay. But this time,
no.” He set the device on his desk. “So, you heard someone knocking
on your door and no one was there?”

“
I’m not crazy! Then
there’s that branch, and the door creaks, and…I’m warning you, if I
disappear, check the closets. They’re like big mouths.”

I pantomimed death-by-closet with my hands.
Damian laughed and pitched a wad of paper at me.

“
You’re crazy.”

“
Be that way.”

Finally I rolled off the bed, but then I
just stood there, rooted, both hands shoved in my back pockets. I
could have pulled the coin out right then. I wanted to. Damian
glanced at me once or twice, probably wondering why I was still
standing there like an idiot, nervous and speechless. I would have
to talk to him later. Somehow, at that moment, I just couldn’t seem
to find my voice.

I wandered out of his room and slipped into
my mom’s. With all the curtains drawn the room was dark and cool,
just the way I liked it. But I couldn’t see the coin with all the
lamps off, so I switched on the bedside light and sat down by the
pillow. For a few moments I just stared at the face gazing back at
me from the picture frame on Mom’s nightstand – the face I loved,
and missed, more than any other. My dad.

Pictures of him filled every wall in the
bedroom. Across from me hung a photo I’d taken myself at our last
family reunion, four years ago, on one of those cheap disposable
cameras the adults gave us to use. Dad leaned against our old
magnolia tree sipping a mint julep. The way the light filtered
through the leaves, I’d always thought it looked like some ethereal
figure stood behind him, barely outlined by the shimmer of light. I
used to make up stories about who or what the figure was. Angel,
elf, ghost, the spiritual presence of someone from another world,
any number of equally crazy ideas. I didn’t make up those stories
any more.

Three months after the reunion Dad had
disappeared.

He left the house late in the evening, when
he usually sat quietly in his overstuffed recliner, drinking twice
re-warmed coffee and reading last Sunday’s paper. I remember the
rattle of rain against the windows. It was pouring, a cold and
miserable late autumn storm. And there was my dad, throwing on his
overcoat and peering again and again out the window. He said he had
to go to his office at the university to get a student’s paper, but
that didn’t explain his panic. I followed him to the door asking
him why he was going, and before he disappeared from the porch
light he turned to say something to me. I never got to ask him
what. Only the rumble of his mellow voice cut through the
shattering rain, his dark eyes sad and regretful, and then he was
gone.

I’ve never stopped waiting for him to
return. It didn’t matter what the cops said, or how they called a
halt to everything, all at once, as if on cue. I remember the day
Officer Jankins took my mom aside. The apologies, the tears. The
reporters with bulky cameras trying to invade the sadness of our
house, the neighbors sending cookies, the university’s condolences.
No one whispered, no one spread rumors – none at least that I
heard. They just gave up. Everyone did, except Damian and me. We’d
made a pledge never to give up hope, and we never did, even though
the years had blunted the pain. Sometimes I think my mom didn’t
either, though she wore the mask of acceptance for the rest of the
world to see.

My heart ached and the room blurred, but I
blinked away the tears and pulled the coin out of my pocket. I kept
staring at my father’s picture. Part of me didn’t really want to
look at the coin. I just had this feeling that it wouldn’t be
anything special. Maybe Mr. Dansy had given me an old arcade token
or something equally chintzy as a joke, even though Mr. Dansy had
never done anything like that before. And my whole morning of
mindless terror would turn out to be just that – mindless. All
worked up over nothing.

I desperately wanted it to be something more
exciting. If I’d been a bit younger, it wouldn’t have mattered if
the thing
were
just a bit of junk. I still would have
pretended it had strange magical properties – something that
hypnotized viewers, probably, and evoked strange whispers from dark
corners in the room. I’d always had too active an imagination. But
here I was, sixteen, too old for make-believe and too young to be
bored with the tedious sameness of life, day after day.

I dreaded disappointment.

Finally I sighed and uncurled my fingers,
holding the palm of my hand under the pool of warm golden light.
For a solid minute I sat and stared. The object was a small circle,
about the size of a silver dollar, cast from some heavy,
dull-sheened metal that looked like bronze. In the center the metal
twisted in a complicated knot, kind of like the Celtic necklace
Maggie always wore. All along the knot were the tiniest, strangest
letters I had ever seen, but the endless knot made it impossible to
tell where the words began and where they ended. Or maybe they
weren’t normal words meant to be read in the normal way at all.
Maybe you could just grasp the meaning, the way you sometimes
suddenly just know something.

I pressed my fingers over it and thought I
felt the metal pulsing between my fingers, like the ground does
under my bare feet before a thunderstorm. I half expected to see it
glowing when I opened my hand. It only went on glinting coldly, the
soft lamplight shining a bit on the bumps, but swallowed in flat
shadow in the crevices. It seemed so unspectacular, but it was the
most curious, wonderful, terrifying thing I had ever held.

And suddenly I remembered that I had seen it
before.

Chapter 2 – Discovery

I stared at the coin, racking my brain for
some hint of a memory. I had this strange certainty that I’d seen
it in my mom’s room. First I checked her jewelry boxes, then the
bookshelf and the tidy drawers of her nightstand. No luck. Maybe I
was just imagining things. Maybe I
was
going crazy. I sighed
and turned to the wall photos, making my usual pilgrimage around
the room before leaving. I could never go into Mom’s bedroom
without visiting all the different pictures. It always hurt, and
sometimes I avoided her room for just that reason.

My first stop was the photo of Dad bending
over me just after my birth. I always loved the look on his face,
so caring. The same picture was in my baby album, but there Dad had
captioned the photo in his small, careful hand:
Iell
egledhruir
. He’d never told me what it meant. I think he
expected me to figure out, or maybe he just disappeared before he
got a chance to explain. I’d always guessed it was something from
one of Tolkien’s languages, which my dad supposedly knew better
than almost anyone. But that was all I had. Just one more mystery
in my life. I was so tired of mysteries with no clues and no
answers.

I moved on to a photo of the whole family
the day we’d gotten our dog Jas, we kids laying in the grass with
the puppy, Dad standing by the old magnolia. And there again, the
shimmer behind his left shoulder.

I gazed at the shimmer for a few moments,
then went back to my baby picture. Suddenly I bent forward,
studying the picture more closely. That cold shock tore through me
again. I held up the coin so it covered its image in the picture,
where it hung on a chain around my dad’s neck, slipping out from
under his shirt as he bent over my crib. Every stark detail was
there, and I had never even noticed.

* * *

“
Back already?”

I stopped breathless in the doorway of Mr.
Dansy’s shop. I wasn’t even sure why I had run all the way back to
the store, or what I wanted to say to Mr. Dansy when I got there. I
just stood there, mute and paralyzed, until another customer
shouldered out of the store past me, giving me a nasty glare.

“
Forgot batteries,” I
mumbled, waving at the first thing that caught my eye.

I edged around Mr. Dansy and stared blankly
at the battery display. My thoughts careened from one plan to
another. Maybe I could threaten him, or try to trick information
out of him, or beg and plead. All the while I could feel his
wide-eyed terror, like he was expecting some kind of monster to
jump out behind me. It got me nervously glancing over my shoulder
too.

Mr. Dansy drew up close beside me, dabbing
at his forehead with his cuff. “Well, darlin’, you didn’t lose
it…did you?”

I jumped in spite of myself.

“
It was my father’s, Mr.
Dansy!” I turned to face him. “My father’s! Where did you get it?
Did he give it to you? Or did you steal it from him? It doesn’t
look like the sort of thing there are a lot of, you
know.”

“
Shh!” Mr. Dansy waved
frantically. “‘Course not! That’s why you gots to hush. You do
still have it, though? Where’s it at?”

“
It was my father’s. Of
course I still have it,” I said crossly.

If he was relieved it didn’t show. His face
was so pale it looked almost grey, and beads of sweat dribbled down
his temples. He kept blotting them away, but they kept reappearing.
I stared at him, baffled. What had gotten into him? What had gotten
into all of us, for that matter?

“
Please, Merelin, keep your
voice down!”

“
What’s wrong? It’s
just—”