“Where the hell am I?” she asked the empty sky. “What the hell?”
Then the irony of her situation kicked in and she began to giggle, frightened and edgy and afraid she wouldn’t be able to stop. She did a twirl, in place, trying to see whatever there was to see. Sylvan idyll at nightfall, still-life with deranged dot-com refugee and brown office furniture. A gust of wind rattled the branches overhead, dislodging a chilly shower of fat drops: A couple landed on Miriam’s arms and face, making her shudder.
The air was fresh-too fresh. And there was none of the subliminal background hum of a big city, the noise that never completely died. It didn’t get this quiet even out in the country-and indeed, when she paused to listen, it wasn’t quiet; she could hear distant birdsong in the deepening twilight.
She took a deep breath, then another. Forced herself to thrust the hand with the locket into her hip pocket and let go of the thing. She patted it obsessively for a minute, whimpering slightly at the pain in her head. No holes, she thought vaguely. She’d once worn pants like this where her spare change had worn a hole in the pocket lining and eventually spilled on the ground, causing no end of a mess.
For some reason, the idea of losing possession of the locket filled her with a black terror.
She looked up. The first stars of evening were coming out, and the sky was almost clear of cloud. It was going to be a cold night.
“Item,” she muttered. “You are not at home. Ouch. You have a splitting headache and you don’t think you fell asleep in the chair, even though you were in it when you arrived here.” She looked around in wild surmise. She’d never been one for the novels Ben occasionally read, but she’d seen enough trashy TV serials to pick up the idea. 1vilight Zone, Time Squad, programs like that. “Item: I don’t know where or when I am, but this ain’t home. Do I stay put and hope I automagically snap back into my own kitchen or… what? It was the locket, no two ways about it. Do I look at it again to go back?”
She fumbled into her pocket nervously. Her fingers wrapped around warm metal. She breathed more easily. “Right. Right.”
Just nerves, she thought. Alone in a forest at night-what lived here? Bears? Cougars? There could be anything here, anything at all. Be a fine joke if she went exploring and stepped on a rattler, wouldn’t it? Although in this weather… “I’d better go home,” she murmured to herself and was about to pull the locket out when she saw a flicker of light in the distance.
She was disoriented, tired, had just had a really bad day, and some cosmic trickster-god had dumped a magic amulet on her to see what she’d do with it. That was the only explanation, she reasoned afterward. A sane Miriam would have sat down and analysed her options, then assembled a plan of action. But it wasn’t a sane Miriam who saw those flickers of orange light and went crashing through the trees downhill toward them.
Lights. A jingle, as of chains. Thudding and hollow clonking noises-and low voices. She stumbled out into the sudden expanse of a trail-not a wide one, more of a hiking trail, the surface torn up and muddy. Lights! She stared at them, at the men on horseback coming down the trail toward her, the lantern held on a pole by the one in the lead. Dim light glinted off reflecting metal, helmet, and breastplate like something out of a museum. Someone called out something that sounded like: “Curl!” Look. He’s riding toward me, she thought dazedly. What’s that he’s-
Her guts liquid with absolute fright, she turned and ran. The flat crack of rifle fire sounded behind her, repeated short bursts firing into the night. Invisible fingers ripped at the branches overhead as Miriam heard voices raised in hue and cry behind her. Low branches scratched at her face as she ran, gasping and crying, uphill away from the path. More bangs, more gunshots-astonishingly few of them, but any at all was too many. She ran straight into a tree, fell back winded, brains rattling around inside her head like dried peas in a pod, then she pushed herself to her feet again faster than she’d have believed possible and stumbled on into the night, gasping for breath, praying for rescue.
Eventually she stopped. Somewhere along the way she’d lost her slippers. Her face and ribs felt bruised, her head was pounding, and she could barely breathe. But she couldn’t hear any sounds of pursuit. Her skin felt oddly tight, and everything was far too cold. As soon as she was no longer running, she doubled over and succumbed to a fit of racking coughs, prolonged by her desperate attempts to muffle them.
Her chest was on fire. Oh god, any god. Whoever put me here. I just want you to know that I hate you!
She stood up. Somewhere high overhead the wind sighed. Her skin itched with the fear of pursuit. I’ve got to get home, she realized. Now her skin crawled with another fear-fear that she might be wrong, that it wasn’t the locket at all, that it was something else she didn’t understand that had brought her here, that there was no way back and she’d be stranded-
When she flicked it open, the right-hand half of the locket crawled with light. Tiny specks of brilliance, not the phosphorescence of a watch dial or the bioluminescence of those plastic disposable flashlights that had become popular for a year or two, but an intense, bleached blue-white glare like a miniature star. Miriam panted, trying to let her mind drift into it, but after a minute she realized all she was achieving was giving herself a headache. “What did I do to make it work?” she mumbled, puzzled and frustrated and increasingly afraid. “If she could make it-”
Ah. That was what she’d been doing. Just relaxing, meditating. Wondering what the hell her birth-mother had seen in it. Miriam gritted her teeth. How was she going to re-create that sense of detached curiosity? Here in a wild forest at night, with strangers shooting at her in the dark? How-she narrowed her eyes. The headache. If I can see my way past it, I could-
The dots of light blazed up for a moment in glorious conflagration. Miriam jack-knifed forward, saw the orange washout of streetlights shining down on a well-mowed lawn. Then her stomach rebelled and this time she couldn’t keep it down. It was all she could do to catch her breath between heaves. Somehow her guts had been replaced by a writhing snake, and the racking spasms kept pulsing through her until she began to worry about tearing her oesophagus.
Noise of a car slowing-then speeding up again as the driver saw her vomiting. A yell from the window, inarticulate, something like “Drunk fucking bums!” Something clattered into the road. Miriam didn’t care. Dampness and cold clenched their icy fingers around her, but she didn’t care: She was back in civilization, away from the threatening trees and her pursuer. She stumbled off the front lawn of somebody’s house and sensed harsh asphalt beneath her bare feet, stones digging into her soles. A road sign said it was somewhere she knew. One of the other side roads off Grafton Street, which her road also opened off. She was less than half a mile from home.
Drip. She looked up. Drip. The rain began to fall again, sluicing down her aching face. Her clothes were stained and filthy with mud and vomit. Her legs were scratched and felt braised. Home. It was a primal imperative. Put one foot in front of another, she told herself through the deafening hammering in her skull. Her head hurt, and the world was spinning around her.
An indefinite time-perhaps ten minutes, perhaps half an hour-later, she saw a familiar sight through the downpour. Soaked to the skin and shivering, she nevertheless felt like a furnace. Her house seemed to shimmer like a mirage in the desert when she looked at it. And now she discovered another problem-she’d come out without her keys! Silly me, what was I thinking? she wondered vaguely. Nothing but this locket, she thought, weaving its chain around her right index finger.
The shed, whispered a vestige of cool control in the back of her head.
Oh, yes, the shed, she answered herself.
She stumbled around the side of her house, past the cramped green rug that passed for a yard, to the shed in back. It was padlocked, but the small side window wasn’t actually fastened and if you pulled just so it would open outward. It took her three tries and half a fingernail-the rain had warped the wood somewhat-but once open she could thrust an arm inside and fumble around for the hook with the key dangling from it on a loop. She fetched the key, opened the padlock-dropping it casually on the lawn-and found, taped to the underside of the workbench, the spare key to the french doors.
She was home.
Somehow Miriam found her way upstairs. She worked this out when she awakened sprawled on her bed, feet freezing and hot shivers chasing across her skin while a platoon of miners with pickaxes worked her head over. It was her bladder that woke her up and led her still half-asleep to the bathroom, where she turned on all the lights, shot the deadbolt on the door, used the toilet, and rummaged around for an Advil to help with the hangover symptoms. “What you need is a good shower,” she told herself grimly, trying to ignore the pile of foul and stinking
