She was normal. She was a bridge back to the world he assumed he'd never see again. He imagined that if he were to lean in and smell her neck, he might begin to cry.
'I was elected to talk to you,' she said, walking with her hands in the pockets of a too-large brown cloak. The butt of the pistol protruded alongside her right wrist. 'I need you to understand a few things, and I want to know some things about you.'
'Okay,' Satterly said.
'Mainly, I want you to understand that we don't mean you any harm, not really. All we want is to get home. No one's going to get hurt if I have anything to say about it.'
'That's fine, depending on how much say you have.'
'I have almost enough.' She scowled. 'I need to know if you're willing to help us.'
'I might be under different circumstances,' Satterly said. 'I don't appreciate being held prisoner. And my friends aren't doing so well in that cage of yours.'
'We didn't… well, I didn't mean for that to happen. So, they are your friends then?'
'Why does everyone keep asking me that?'
'You're human, and you speak their language. We could use you to help us get back, and in return we'd be willing to take you with us. We just want to know what side you're on.'
Satterly stopped short. 'So you really have a way out of here?'
'Yes.'
'I… I don't know. Most of the time I'm not even sure what I'm doing with those guys. I mean, I've been through a lot already with them, but… I don't know. Sometimes I don't even think they want me around.'
'So you'll help us?'
Satterly thought. 'I have to think. I said I'd go with them; we're on a mission, sort of.'
'I can't tell you what to do,' said Linda. 'But we're leaving this place tomorrow, one way or the other. Like I said, I just don't want anyone to get hurt. If you help us, you can do whatever you want. Come with us, ride off with your Fae friends. I don't care. But I do know this: if you don't cooperate, Jim will force you. And I can't control him.'
'I have a question,' said Satterly. 'Why didn't you just ask? Maybe we would have helped anyway. I don't understand why I would even need to choose sides.'
'I guess Hereg hasn't explained the spell to you yet.'
'No, not to me.'
'The way I understand it, in order to create the way out, he needs the full premonition essence from a catalyst Fae. I have no idea what that means, but whatever it is, it's apparently quite painful.'
'I see.'
'Do you?' said Linda. She folded her arms across her chest. 'Understand, Mister Satterly. Your companion might very well die tomorrow. There's nothing you can do about it. I didn't want it to happen this way, but there it is.'
Satterly raised his voice. 'You keep saying that things aren't the way you want them, so why don't you do something about it instead of forcing it all on me?'
'Because I was outvoted, Mister Satterly. I have children, and the people who outvoted me have guns. And they don't really like me very much as it is. That's my reality.'
He followed her up a steep wooded trail. Halfway up the hillside, she stopped and walked away from the trail, beckoning him to follow. Something metal glinted in the filtered moonlight. A truck.
'What the hell?' said Satterly. It was a flatbed truck, mostly buried in drifting snow but recognizable. The bed of the truck held a number of open containers filled with metal rods in varying quantities.
'That explains the rebar everywhere,' Satterly said.
'This stuff has saved our lives a dozen times,' she said. 'It's strong, it's durable, and the Fae avoid it like the plague.'
'How did this thing get here?' said Satterly, baffled.
'I'm getting to that,' said Linda.
They continued up the hill. Farther along, a yellow tow truck was wrapped around the trunk of a stout pine, its exposed edges mottled with old rust.
'We never found out what that guy's name was,' said Linda, pointing at the truck. 'No wallet.' She shrugged. 'When we buried him, we called him Joe, because that's what it said on the side of the truck, but he didn't look like a Joe to me.'
Satterly said nothing, only goggled at the truck as he walked past it.
'This is my car,' she said, pointing. A Volvo station wagon rested on its end in a ravine, its taillights pointing skyward. From where Satterly stood, he could reach out and touch the rear bumper.
'You're from Georgia,' he said stupidly, pointing to the license plate. Then he noticed the registration tag on the plate. It had expired in June of 1994.
'How long have you been here?' he said, turning toward her.
'Fifteen years,' she muttered. 'We've been here fifteen years.'
As they neared the top of the hill, Satterly began to notice a light emanating from there, steady and blue. It cast long shadows through the tree trunks. Glancing to the left, Satterly noticed that the ravine that held Linda's Volvo continued up the hillside, carving an ever-narrower depression into the earth. Curiously, as the ravine neared the top of the hill, it grew more rounded, more regular, smaller, until Satterly would have sworn it was a drainage ditch, something man-made. The source of the light was at the top of the ravine.
It was a blue sphere of light embedded in the ground, the size of a softball. It glowed with its own radiance, its makeup uncertain. Satterly took a step back and tried to comprehend what he was seeing.
The ravine narrowed even further, becoming shallower as it ascended the slope, finally diminishing in size to a perfectly rounded trench the size and shape of the blue patch of light. The glowing circle was nestled at the top of the depression, as though someone had been rolling it through the mud, leaving the ravine in its wake.
'There it is,' said Linda simply. Satterly reached forward to touch the circle and she grabbed his hand. 'Careful of the boundary,' she said. 'It's sharp; it'll take off your finger if you're not careful.'
'What the hell is this thing?' said Satterly, kneeling and peering into the circle. He looked back at the ravine. 'Did this little thing dig out that huge hole?'
She nodded. 'It used to be much bigger,' she said.
'What is it?'
'That, Mr. Satterly, is the blue sky of the planet Earth,' said Linda. She knelt next to him, laying the pistol across her knees. 'Or at least what you can see of it from here.'
Chapter 28
'Why couldn't you just walk back through?' said Satterly, gazing into the blue orb. 'When it was bigger, I mean.'
'I'll show you,' she said. She picked up a stick from the ground, illuminated by the sphere's light. She poked the end of the stick into the light and they watched as it was torn to splinters by an unseen force.
'According to Hereg,' she said, 'the same force that's causing it to contract is distorting the membrane between the worlds. His spell is going to enlarge and smooth out the boundary.' She dropped the stick and wiped her hands on her pant legs. 'That's what he says, anyway. Who knows how much of it is true?'
'He's been in that cage a long time, I gather.'
'Yes, we caught him trying to steal food from us about eighteen months ago. We'd built the cage to hold some of our more precious belongings, but with the storms and the cold weather, we had to move them. Again, locking him up like that wasn't my choice, but without him, we'd probably be dead by now.'
'I gather that you and Jim Broward don't always see eye to eye,' said Satterly, turning away from the light.
