felt now as she stared ahead in disbelief.
Everything familiar was gone. Road, trees, hills—all gone. She wasn’t in the same country anymore—wasn’t in the country at all. A city like something out of an Escher painting lay spread out in front of her. Odd buildings, angles all awry, leaned against and pushed away from each other, all at the same time. Halfway up their lengths, there seemed to be a kind of vortal shift so that the top halves appeared to be reflections of the lower.
And then there were the bridges.
Everywhere she looked there were bridges. Bridges connecting the buildings, bridges connecting bridges, bridges that went nowhere, bridges that folded back on themselves so that you couldn’t tell where they started or ended. Too many bridges to count.
She started to back up the way she’d come but got no further than two steps when a hand reached out of the shadows and pulled her forward. She flailed against her attacker who swung her about and then held her with her arms pinned against her body.
“Easy, easy,” a male voice said in her ear.
It had a dry, dusty sound to it, like the kind you could imagine old books in a library’s stacks have when they talk to each other late at night.
“Let me go, let me GO!” she cried.
Still holding her, her assailant walked her to the mouth of the covered bridge.
“Look,” he said.
For a moment she was still too panicked to know what he was talking about. But then it registered.
The bridge she’d walked across to get to this nightmare city no longer had a roadway. There was just empty space between its wooden walls now. If her captor hadn’t grabbed her when he did, she would have fallen god knew how far.
She stopped struggling and he let her go. She moved gingerly away from the mouth of the covered bridge, then stopped again, not knowing where to go, what to do. Everywhere she looked there were weird tilting buildings and bridges.
It was impossible. None of this was happening, she decided. She’d fallen asleep on the other side of the bridge and was just dreaming all of this.
“Will you be all right?” her benefactor asked.
“I ... I
She turned to look at him. The moonlight made him out to be a harmlesslooking guy. He was dressed in faded jeans and an offwhite flannel shirt, cowboy boots and a jean jacket. His hair was dark and short. It was hard to make out his features, except for his eyes. They seemed to take in the moonlight and then send it back out again, twice as bright.
Something about him calmed her—until she tried to speak.
“Whoareyou?” she asked. “Whatisthisplacehowdidlgethere?”
As soon as the first question came out, a hundred others came clamoring into her mind, each demanding to be voiced, to be answered. She shut her mouth after the first few burst out in a breathless spurt, realizing that they would just feed the panic that she was only barely keeping in check.
She took a deep breath, then tried again.
“Thank you,” she said. “For saving me.”
“You’re welcome.”
Again that dry, dusty voice. But the air itself was dry, she realized. She could almost feel the moisture leaving her skin.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“You can call me Jack.”
“My name’s Moira—Moira Jones.”
Jack inclined his head in a slight nod. “Are you all right now, Moira Jones?” he asked.
“I think so.”
“Good, well—”
“Wait!” she cried, realizing that he was about to leave her. “What is this place? Why did you bring me here?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t,” he said. “No one comes to the City of Bridges unless it’s their fate to do so. In that sense, you brought yourself.”
“But ... ?”
“I know. It’s all strange and different. You don’t know where to turn, who to trust.”
There was the faintest hint of mockery under the dry tones of his voice.
“Something like that,” Moira said.
He seemed to consider her for the longest time.
“I don’t know you,” he said finally. “I don’t know why you brought yourself here or where you come from. I don’t know how, or even if, you’ll ever find your way home again.”
Bizarre though her situation was, oddly enough, Moira found herself adjusting to it far more quickly than she would have thought possible. It was almost like being in a dream where you just accept things as they come along, except she knew this wasn’t a dream—just as she knew that she was getting the brush off.
“Listen,” she said. “I appreciate your help a moment ago, but don’t worry about me. I’ll get by.”
“What I do know, however,” Jack went on as though she hadn’t spoken, “is that this is a place for those who have no other place to go.
“What’re you saying? That’s it’s some kind of a dead end place?” The way her life was going, it sounded like it had been made for her.
“It’s a forgotten place.”
“Forgotten by who?”
“By the world in which it exists,” Jack said.
“How can a place this weird be forgotten?” she asked.
Moira looked around at the bridges as she spoke. They were everywhere, of every size and shape and persuasion. One that looked like it belonged in a Japanese tea garden stood side by side with part of what had to be an interstate overpass, but somehow the latter didn’t overshadow the former, although both their proportions were precise. She saw rope bridges, wooden bridges and old stone bridges like the Kelly Street Bridge that crossed the Kickaha River in that part of Newford called the Rosses.
She wondered if she’d ever see Newford again.
“The same way people forget their dreams,” Jack replied. He touched her elbow, withdrawing his hand before she could take offense. “Come walk with me if you like. I’ve a previous appointment, but I can show you around a bit on the way.”
Moira hesitated for a long moment, then fell into step beside him. They crossed a metal bridge, the heels of their boots ringing. Of course, she thought, they couldn’t go anywhere without crossing a bridge.
Bridges were the only kind of roads that existed in this place.
“Do you live here?” she asked.
Jack shook his head. “But I’m here a lot. I deal in possibilities and that’s what bridges are in a way—not so much the ones that already exist to take you from one side of something to another, but the kind we build for ourselves.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Say you want to be an artist—a painter, perhaps. The bridge you build between when you don’t know which end of the brush to hold to when you’re doing respected work can include studying under another artist, experimenting on your own, whatever. You build the bridge and it either takes you where you want it to, or it doesn’t.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
His teeth flashed in the moonlight. “Then you build another one and maybe another one until one of them does.”
Moira nodded as though she understood, all the while asking herself, what am I
“But this,” he added, “is a place of failed dreams. Where bridges that go nowhere find their end.”
