The Reaches

[Near]

Keys.

Keys were … shit.

Jude’s weirdness -- or at least his paralysis -- were catching, it seemed. Near, having agreed to drive (only toasted, not drunk) through the dark, past freefall oceanside cliffs toward an unspecified “store,” found himself mired in the middle of the room where he stood, riffling through possible rental key locations like playing cards and inexplicably anxious about the sheer size of the deck. Fifteen rooms, wasn’t it? Or, no, sixteen: The Ritual Room.

Why should he be anxious just because the kid had overindulged a little? Self pat-down confirmed: he did not have the keys in his pocket. Because wouldn’t that have been perfect?

Retrace your steps, whispered common sense. Only how do you retrace when you weren’t tracing in the first place? He’d come in the front door, that much he knew, so now dragged himself back in that direction despite having soured lately on the view of the bar and the phantasmal furniture. Then, like a bell, like a snapping-into-place: first floor study, how he had peeled his jacket off and left it in a heap on the credenza.

He returned triumphant, new-jacketed and keys held aloft, jingling, to find Jude failing to commune with Lew. She was looking up with not overt hostility, just the blank look of failing to recognize Jude’s inherent personhood and therefore right to call her over or tell her what to do.

“She only likes one person,” he said, like that would help. That person wasn’t him. “Just put her on the leash and I guess we can go.”

[Jude]

Leash? Leash. Finding anything he himself had not placed was yet another challenge for Jude, but one that he doggedly took on. He slowly scanned the room until he located something leash-like, which he then went over to inspect. Mercifully he was successful on his second guess, and then it was a process of cornering the dog and leashing her. It was clear, by Jude's awkwardness and mannerisms, that he had little experience with animals, and no fondness for them. This was a necessary evil.

Jude dragged Lew by her leash, indifferent to whether or not he was choking her. The floors, mostly wood, offered little opportunity for claws to find purchase. Outside, the rain had stopped, but the air felt heavy with the promise of another storm. Jude had no problem walking straight out the door in the dark -- well, not straight, there was a bit of weaving, but the lack of light did not seem to perturb him. He had either remembered about where the car was, or he could see it, even in shadow.

He felt a little better outside. He felt the wind, tasted the forest. Houses were full of dead things -- stone scraped from the bowels of the earth, trees killed for furniture, refrigerators stocked full of meat. Death had its own appeal, its own feeling of familiarity and connection, but nature felt more... forgiving. Death was very final. Philosophers might call it a new beginning, but they hadn't ever died.

"I hope it's not too far," he wondered aloud. But was it true? No, he did hope it was far. The further away, the better -- the further they'd have to drive. He resolved to articulate the situation to Near once they had a bit more distance between them and the house. Once it felt... safer to do so.

(As if it would ever be safe.)

[Near]

The dog, caving more to the concrete pull of the leash than the supposed authority of its holder, dropped her tail low and tagged along amiably enough through the house, nails click-skittering along the floors. Once they were outside, she paused to squat in the grass. That being what she had been going on about in the first place, the whole scene probably felt to her like a battle she had won, and Near couldn’t staunch a pang of envy. Lew got what she wanted, and he just kept losing and losing and losing.

At least it wasn’t raining.

“You hope what’s not far?” he snapped a second before remembering “it” was his very own it, the gas station he was sure had passed before the long stretches of scenic Northwest nothing kicked in, steep drops and hidden drives.

Quick, graceless self-correction: “Oh, yeah … no, I don’t think so? I mean everything’s kind of far,” and how he wanted, bodily like thirst or hunger, to crack some obvious joke about his family name, but who would he have been amusing? Not the kid, not the dog, not himself. Maybe the gas station sold senses of humor in a rack next to the phone cards.

The car, a blue mid-size something with more bells and whistles than he would have picked only they hadn't had anything else on the lot, sat just down the driveway, half-lost within the layer of mist the rain left behind. It screeched into the throes of life as Near’s finger found and pushed the alarm button. Lew was mid-sympathetic wail by the time he fumbled it back into silence and popped the door unlocked.

“You going to sit up front, or do I get to chauffeur you?”

[Jude]

'Safety' was the felt answer to Near's question, but that was not a place. 'Reprieve' was probably a more realistic goal, but also not a geographical location. "The convenience store," he said, in slight awe of how completely full of shit he was. "Oh" was the empty response to the counter, the idea that the gas station / store / nearest shack was very far. The Reaches was not a place where one made spontaneous trips to... anywhere. It was a place someone lived to be alone. Had Courtland died alone? Jude felt suddenly guilty that he hadn't thought to ask.

Jude was used to sitting in the backs of cars, and it felt strange when he carried the squirming dog with him into the front seat. Well, one of them should enjoy chauffeuring. He twisted backwards and put Lew on the back seat. Dogs didn't need seat belts, right?

It wasn't until they got going -- car started, radio station set, wheels crackling on the wet asphalt -- that Jude finally seemed to settle. He rolled the window down a little, so the fresh air could offset his fear of car sickness. Away from the light of the house, the darkness around them yawned. "Do you have any siblings?" Another thing he'd picked up about Near: he didn't seem to like silence. Jude had enough practice at small talk to offer this concession. It helped that Jude was thinking of his own sibling. However strange Jude was, there was at least one other person like him in the world. Drunk and still afraid, this was another comfort, along with the cold air hitting his face.

[Near]

The car started up with the push of a button. No key-in-ignition-turning required: granted the proximity of thing A, thing B purred to life without a hiccup. Near figured there was a profound truth to be discovered in this setup if you were willing to dedicate enough energy into examining it closely, only he wasn’t willing and surely someone already had put it under a loupe and written their thesis on it. Does the car love the key fob?

He flicked the wipers a couple of times to clear the rain from the windshield, made a sluggish circuit of the driveway, and hung a right, glancing once into the side mirror at the looming skeleton of the house still wide-eyed with lights no one had bothered to turn off, and it struck him that he was probably responsible for the electricity bill. Really, was now the time to be making idle chit-chat about siblings? Oldies on the radio, the only station he could get to come in sharp when he drove here, and it had become muddily sibilant in the interim, bad bad Leroy hisssss.

“Not that I know of.” One of those canned answers, blithely recited, a nod to the fact that he didn’t have the foggiest idea what Courtland had been up to reproduction-wise after Escape from The Reaches Part I. Or before, really. For all he knew, he had a hundred bastard half-siblings wandering the Pacific Northwest and beyond.

“What, the glaring only child syndrome isn’t a dead giveaway?” Ahead, empty road. Haunted forest on either side. He turned the brights on, but it only made the wisps of fog luminous and distracting.

[Jude]

Jude had also learned that, while Near doesn't seem to enjoy providing answers, he nonetheless depended on a certain measure of banal, casual conversation to lube up the social interaction. Near Farr had very delicate gears; without alcohol and some pointless smalltalk, he ground to a halt. Unlike his father (and many other people with too much money and time), he was not tempted to know the secrets of the world or its inner workings. His mind was elsewhere, on the quotidian matters of his own life, and Jude was an interruption to the quotidian.

"It wasn't. A dead giveaway." He was home-schooled until high school, then he and his sister were went to a boarding school where several members of the Family gained employment. By then he knew the basic rules for lying to people, to putting on a front. It was telling the truth that is so much harder. There were a million reasons for people to act the way they did. How was he supposed to guess why?

"I have a sister. A twin sister." Jude closed his eyes, trying to avert the potential of carsickness, but the darkness made him more sensitive to other sensations. He opened his eyes again. "I think she's--"

For a moment, the fog receded away from the car, drawing itself back like an animal. Patches of it faded in the imprints of eyes; below it, a mouth. Then the blob-fog-animal leapt forward and splattered itself on the windshield. It happened in two seconds, so quickly as to be imagined, half of it missed in a blink.

Jude paused, swallowed, resumed. The radio splutters about the meanest man in the whole damn town. "--looking for me."

[Near]

City-dwellers did their driving in cities. Young, they practiced lurching in caveat cars under the squint of city-dweller instructors who smelled like mildew and scorched coffee. After, they crept through congested side streets at fifteen miles an hour. They refused the zipper merge and cut people off on freeways and steeled themselves against the infernal orchestra of blared horns and epithets. They commiserated with one another about parking. Some, exempli gratia Courtland Farr III, gave up on the whole production and sold the two-door Toyota that was their high school graduation present in favor of the simplicity of walking across town or calling an Uber.

So driving to The Reaches in the daytime had been a novel experience but not a bad one. There was something untethered and auspicious about the driver’s seat, something quintessentially American Road Trip in the space between here and there relative to the stop-start-start bottlenecks he associated with the verb “to drive.” He had rolled the windows down, cranked Croce (playing then, too) loud.

Leaving was different. The kid sitting so close churned a thick unease -- should have let him/made him sit in the back, after all. The dog whined unseen. Darkness and low visibility and awareness of his own not-quite-sober state made him tense up, made him grip the wheel harder than he had to. Still, he screwed his attention on the road, drove too slow, and figured what was the worst that could happen?

Jude talking about a sister, and it was funny, he had assumed without thinking about it that they shared only-child status. Something about the cloud of entitlement he floated around on. But it must have just been the magical powers. Sister out looking for him. Wasn’t that nice, two of them.

A little thing, splat on the windshield. Near’s focus splintered, he swerved a bit to avoid what had already collided. Corrected himself. Overcorrected himself. Failed to correct the correction. Braked, hard. It was how shit like that always happened, wasn’t it? Pebble, snowball, avalanche, a car spinning off the road into found footage woods. He was pretty sure he was silent while it happened, that he didn’t voice the “told you so” that came to him, unbidden and hideously smug, considering, right before part of the car crunched against something harder -- tree trunk, telephone pole -- and his vision flashbulbed white.

[Jude]

There was not much time to react at all. Had he been straight sober, Jude might have had more control over that reaction, instinctual as it was, but drunk and panicked and already nervous, everything was automatic. The car crunched; the crumpling aluminum absorbed some of the speed, then sent the rest rippling through the vehicle. Jude's body was in line to absorb some of it, but that magic, those instincts, divert the force. The passenger side windows shatter; the inside of the door warps, the handle bending, the curves of the interior compressing and distorting. Naturally, when the stillness settled, it was impossible to open.

Jude had no fear for his own life. He did not think to check for any broken bones. He wasn't even particularly concerned for Near's life -- Near who didn't seem to relish living very much anyways, so what did it matter? He did, however, fear capture. The fear he had been concealing beneath his drunken sidewaysness exploded outwards now, as he shoved at Near with both hands, trying to push him out of the car.

"What the fuck did you just do?! We are so fucking fucked!" Jude sounded the most normal he ever had. For once he was freaking out about something that was visible, and apparently proportional. It was a pity his next line immediately contradicted such an appearance. "Oh, they're definitely going to find us now. Fucking fuck." Fucking Near. Fucking moron. Jesus Christ, didn't believe in magic but spooked over a big of fog.

[Near]

The crash itself, the whole second-and-a-half of it -- or however long it took from first-domino miscalculation to conclusion -- was instantly blurred, like someone had dragged a hand across the wet paint of the experience as it was slapped down. So: driving headfirst into a malevolent night; Leroy Brown. REDACTED. Present. The same song was ending on the radio, so either the accident had just happened or it had been long enough for the station to cycle through again.

Screwed-shut eyes flickered open to an airbag vista.

Sore. His teeth were sore, that was what he noticed, though they exhibited (running his tongue across the back, probing) no evidence of having met with any real damage. Maybe not his teeth, maybe more of a displaced all-over sore. He found his hands. His feet. Wiggled fingers and toes to prove all or at least most of his pieces were still attached.

Any nascent concern for the well-being of his passenger was obliterated by said passenger’s shouting. It took him some mental recalibration and a dying-down of the ringing in his ears to pick out individual words. Did he expect “are you okay?” Idiot. Wishful idiot.

“The fuck did I do?” He asked back, foggily unable to match the kid’s volume, his level of outrage. He drew a hand to his face, traced a line down his chin to intersect a thin stream of blood trickling from a hole he seemed to have bitten into the corner of his lip. Out of the black tarpit sheen of the last few moments bubbled and surfaced the memory of a death-defyingly petty I told you so, which he had, in the moment, felt like nothing but an asshole for thinking. Less so now.

“Christ, they can have you …”

[Jude]

"You fucked us you fucking moron!" A line of blood ran down Jude's forehead, nicked by some stray piece of glass. He attacked the passenger door handle with both hands and shook it, but without supernatural force, it would not give. His only option was to tantrum in his seat, thrashing his arms and kicking in frustration. He remained very drunk. A drunk fit of hysteria had arrived.

"What do you think they're gonna do with you, huh?!" Now the threats came out. Now it was all coming out, as whatever filter Jude had ruptured in multiple places. "She's always wanted to kill a person!" He buried his face in his hands and screamed into them, as if there is any reason to muffle himself in the middle of spooky forest nowhere. He screamed once, then twice, a short sound and then a longer one. The frustration of the entire evening crystallized in the passenger seat.

He dropped his hands. "I would say you're the dumbest fucking person alive. Except I don't know how much longer you'll be alive, once they get here." Jude actually wasn't totally sure whether the Family would turn Near into mincemeat. He was the heir to a very wealthy estate; money talked and bullshit walked. However, Near was definitely in the position of knowing too much, and he certainly would not be allowed to go on living exactly as he had been. "Fucking -- open the door." He struggled with his seatbelt, fumbling with the release and then throwing it over his shoulder. Fuck. Fuck!