unraveling like balls of yarn, becoming long scarves of darkness that wound around him, climbing his legs, lashing him about the waist, and binding the dead man to the dead girl. As he was pulled down, into the brightness of the other side, Jude saw the back of Craddock’s head come off, and a shaft of white light, so intense it was blue at the edges, slammed through and struck the ceiling, where it burnt the plaster, causing it to bubble and seethe.
They dropped through the open door and were gone.
45
The papers that had been swirling above the kitchen table settled with a faint rustle, collecting into a pile, in almost the exact same spot from which they’d risen. In the hush that followed, Jude became aware of a gentle humming sound, a deep, melodic pulse, which was not heard so much as felt in his bones. It rose and fell and rose again, a sort of inhuman music—inhuman, but not unpleasant. Jude had never heard any instrument produce sounds like it. It was more like the accidental music of tires droning on blacktop. That low, powerful music could be felt on the skin as well. The air throbbed with it. It seemed almost to be a property of the light, flooding in through the crooked rectangle on the floor. Jude blinked into the light and wondered where Marybeth had gone. The dead claim their own, he thought, and shivered.
No. She hadn’t been dead a moment ago when she opened the door. He did not accept that she could just be gone, no trace of her left on the earth. He crawled. He was the only thing moving in the room now. The stillness of the place, after what had just happened, seemed more jarring and incredible than a hole between worlds. He hurt, his hands hurt, his face hurt, and his chest tingled, a deadly icy-hot prickling, although he was fairly certain, if he was meant to have a heart attack this afternoon, it would’ve happened by now. Aside from the continuous humming that was all around him, there was no sound at all, except his sobs for breath, his hands scratching at the floor. Once he heard himself say Marybeth’s name.
The closer he came to the light, the harder it was to stare into it. He shut his eyes—and found himself still able to see the room before him, as if through a pale curtain of silver silk, the light penetrating his closed lids. The nerves behind his eyeballs throbbed in steady time with that ceaseless pulsing sound.
He couldn’t bear all the light, turned his head aside, kept crawling forward, and in that way Jude did not realize he had reached the edge of the open door until he put his hands down and there was nothing there to support him. Marybeth—or had it been Anna?—had hung suspended over the open door, as if on a sheet of glass, but Jude dropped like a condemned man through the hangman’s trap, did not even have time to cry out before plummeting into the light.
46
The sensation of falling— a weightless-sick feeling in the pit of his stomach and the roots of his hair—has hardly passed before he realizes that the light is not so intense now. He lifts a hand to shade his eyes and blinks into it, dusty yellow sunshine. He makes it midafternoon and can tell somehow, from the angle of the sun, that he’s in the South. Jude is in the Mustang again, sitting in the passenger seat. Anna has the wheel, is humming to herself as she drives. The engine is a low, controlled roar— the Mustang has made itself well. It might’ve just rolled off the showroom floor in 1965.
They travel a mile or so, neither of them speaking, before he finally identifies the road they’re on as State Highway 22.
“Where we goin’?” he asks at last.
Anna arches her back, stretching her spine. She keeps both hands on the wheel. “I don’t know. I thought we were just drivin’. Where do you wanna go?”
“Doesn’t matter. How about Chinchuba Landing?”
“What’s down there?”
“Nothing. Just a place to set and listen to the radio and look at the view. How’s that sound?”
“Sounds like heaven. We must be in heaven.”
When she says this, his left temple begins to ache. He wishes she hadn’t said that. They aren’t in heaven. He doesn’t want to hear talk like that.
For a time they roll on cracked, faded, two-lane blacktop. Then he sees the turnoff coming up on the right and points it out, and Marybeth turns the Mustang onto it without a word. The road is dirt, and trees grow close on either side and bend over it, making a tunnel of rich green light. Shadows and fluttering sunlight shift across Marybeth’s scrubbed, delicate features. She looks serene, at ease behind the wheel of the big muscle car, happy to have the afternoon ahead of her, and nothing particular to do in it except park someplace with Jude and listen to music. When did she become Marybeth?
It is as if he has spoken the question aloud, because she turns and gives him an embarrassed grin. “I tried to warn you, didn’t I? Two girls for the price of one.”
“You warned me.”
“I know what road we’re on,” Marybeth says, without any trace of the southern accent that has muddled up her own voice in the last few days.
“I told you. One that goes to Chinchuba Landing.”
She turns a knowing, amused, slightly pitying glance upon him. Then, as if he hadn’t said anything, Marybeth continues: “Hell. After all the stuff I’ve heard about this road, I expected worse. This isn’t bad. Kinda nice, actually. With a name like the nightroad you at least expect it to be night. Maybe it’s only night here for some people.”
He winces—another stab of pain in the head. He wants to think she’s mixed up, wrong about where they are. She could be wrong. Not only isn’t it night, it’s hardly a road.
In another minute they’re bumping along through two ruts in the dirt, narrow troughs with a wide bed of grass and wildflowers growing between them, swatting the fender and dragging against the undercarriage. They pass the wreck of a pale truck, parked under a willow, the hood open and weeds growing right up through it. Jude doesn’t give it more than a sidelong look.
The palms and the brush open up just around the next bend, but Marybeth slows, so the Mustang is barely rolling along, and for the moment anyway they’re still back in the cool shade of the trees bending overhead. Gravel crunches pleasantly under the tires, a sound Jude has always loved, a sound everyone loves. Out beyond the grassy clearing is the muddy brown sea of Lake Pontchartrain, the water ruffled up in the wind and the edges of the waves glinting like polished, new-minted steel. Jude is a little taken aback by the sky, which is bleached a uniform and blinding white. It is a sky so awash in light it’s impossible to look directly into it, to even know where the sun is. Jude turns his head away from the view, squinting and raising a hand to shield his eyes. The ache in his left temple intensifies, beating with his pulse.
“Damn,” he says. “That sky.”
“Isn’t it somethin’?” Anna says from inside Marybeth’s body. “You can see a long way. You can see into forever.”
“I can’t see shit.”
“No,” Anna says, but it’s still Marybeth behind the wheel, Marybeth’s mouth moving. “You need to protect your eyes from the sight. You can’t really look out there. Not yet. We have trouble lookin’ back into your world, for whatever it’s worth. You maybe noticed the black lines over our eyes. Think of them as the sunglasses of the livin’ dead.” A statement that starts her laughing, Marybeth’s husky, rude laughter.
She stops the car at the very edge of the clearing, puts it into park. The windows are down. The air that soughs in over him smells sweetly of the sun-baked brush and the unruly grass. Beneath that he can detect the subtle perfume of Lake Pontchartrain, a cool, marshy odor.
Marybeth leans toward him, puts her head on his shoulder, puts an arm across his waist, and when she speaks again, it is in her own voice. “I wish I was driving back with you, Jude.”
He breaks out in a sudden chill. “What’s that mean?”
