Page 93 of The Bright Lands
Joel wiped sweat from his forehead, looked back at the dark house behind them. In a voice she’d never from him before—cowed, incredulous, scared—he asked, “What did she say about it?”
Clark keyed the ignition, hesitated. She struggled to bring back the stories that she’d spent so long ignoring. She suspected she should have been talking about them from day one.
“Mom said that Bosheth came to town when she was in high school but he was already old by then. Very old. He swam here from somewhere else, came through a trench underground. He sleeps under Bentley now. Or maybe under the Flats—she used to call them ‘Bosheth’s house.’” She felt absurd saying all this, embarrassed at how quickly she’d abandoned logic and deduction for a story told to her by a woman who’d once spent a week speaking in nothing but Kabbalah predictions, and yet Clark couldn’t help but notice that her fingers had gone numb. “And he drinks tears.”
She could see Joel struggling to process this, could see him weighing how seriously he wanted to take any sort of superstition. She couldn’t blame his confusion. Ten minutes ago, they’d both thought his brother was involved in the drug trade. And now?
“Does he also eat young men?” Joel said, sounding faintly astonished at himself for asking.
“I don’t know. But he spreads nightmares when he moves—she said that.”
“Here’s what confuses me. The week before I got here, were you having those crazy dreams?”
“Not like the ones we’ve been having. Why?”
“Because I think Dylan was. That Sunday he texted me, he said he couldn’t sleep, said something about hearing the town talking in his dreams. Why was Dylan having the nightmares when no one else was?”
Something occurred to Clark. “My mom once told Troy that if your dreams went woolly it meant Bosheth had taken a shine to you.”
“A shine? It’s a monster that has crushes on young boys?”
“I—”
Clark’s phone buzzed. She read the name on the screen, cursed. “I have to take this.”
She stepped outside of the truck, brought the phone to her ear. She had a feeling she wouldn’t like what she was about to hear. “Hello?” she said, and a moment later she was pinching the bridge of her nose and holding in an angry, tired sob.
She hung up the phone after saying only a few words. Climbed back into the cab. “It’s my father.” she said. “He’s in trouble.”
JOEL
Two hot hours later, Joel was thoroughly lost in the countryside. KT had only mentioned in passing that Garrett’s brother lived “out on 270 past the water towers,” and while Joel had had no issue finding the water towers west of town—they stood weeping rust onto a cow pasture long since abandoned—he soon discovered that County Road 270 in fact terminated a few miles past them. Road 270 split into two new roads, both of which unwound and eventually split again themselves. Joel passed small houses with black scabby windows, ancient trucks parked in their yards, and yet he hadn’t seen another soul for miles. Driving with the convertible’s ruined top folded down he soon felt the sun searing his hands to the wheel.
Google Maps was little help to him. Some of these roads didn’t even appear on the screen, and those that did refused all analysis. There was no Street View. The overlay of a satellite image simply revealed what he already knew: he was nowhere. He wandered a road until he reached a dead end, doubled back, tried again. No wonder people never went into the Flats east of Bentley. He could only imagine how maddening it would be to traverse this much emptiness without even a gravel road to make you feel tethered, however tenuously, to some more ordered world.
A text message arrived from Clark:Still driving.
He responded:Same.
Joel thought about Clark’s mom, about the time the woman had told him to kiss a piece of gold—“Real gold,”Margo had insisted.“Not that cheap shit your mother drags out on game nights”—to keep the devil away. What a strange world that lady must have lived in if the devil himself was only ever a few steps down the hall.
And what a world Joel lived in now. Her world. Because when he considered the eyes that had watched him at the park ten years ago, when he thought of whatever had stepped out of his car last night, when he took stock of all that he’d seen and heard this week, what answer was he left with?
That Margo might have been right all along.
Another message came from Kimbra Lott:
no word on that bright lands place—been keeping it low-key but so far nobody knows shit (which is maybe weird by itself??) will keep you posted.
When Joel had texted her late last night to ask Kimbra about the “White Lands boys” that she’d mentioned earlier in the evening, the girl had said yes, she’d probably misheard KT when he’d mentioned them over the summer. Last night, Kimbra had sounded eager to continue helping Joel, even though KT had already been found, safe and somewhat sound in Dallas, and for the life of him Joel still couldn’t guess why.
Not for the first time he felt apprehensive about asking Kimbra to play spy for him. If his suspicions were correct and this secret place—whatever it was—had something to do with Dylan’s death, then there was no reason someone might not kill again to keep it hidden.
Joel wrote:
Saw KT. He’s ok, not very talkative. I think you should stop asking around about this. Something bad is going on.
The unmarked road on which he’d been traveling petered out at a muddy pond. A thin band of gravel led to the southwest, off into more nowhere. To the north, however, far in the distance, Joel spotted something odd shimmering in the heat: a dense vivid block of red and green.
