One
Coming back from the city, through the countryside, where at night the world was a giant blank — and where anything could happen — the old Sarah would have loved it.
The new Sarah was just scared.
It was beautiful, all right, especially now, under the threat of a burgeoning storm. Lightning roiled in the distance, lighting up the branches of the oaks that spread across her path and sparkling on the river far ahead. The air smelled of fire and mist. But it was pitch black, and her back tire was nearly bald, and she had never gotten around to getting a cell phone. It was also the middle of the night. Damn it. I'll never go to a late movie ever again.
Still, something in her didn't mind being out here, in this electric wildness. All at once she didn't want to recall the dim, spartan one-bedroom apartment that awaited her. The humid scent of the trees filled her brain. A rare spark of rebellion flared — No matter how dangerous, I'd rather be out here than at home … She fiddled with the radio knobs, searching for something suitably moody that she could sing to, glancing up at the murky road as pulses of music filled the tiny car with human voices … And then lightning flashed with a sky-rending crack, and with it the nervousness returned, refreshed. With a shiver she snapped the radio off again and stared fixedly ahead into the storm, in silence.
The trees lining the road waved a warning as she passed out of their shelter and onto the slow ascent of the causeway. The road was slick with rain and oil, and Sarah held the wheel firmly in both hands as she navigated around fallen branches. Above the sky was dismally blank — no stars on this cloudy night; in fact, rain threatened again any second. Her high beams struggled against the gloom. The shallow, swampy banks of the river beneath her were lost in shadow. If not for the road ahead of her, she could be convinced she was driving steadily off into absolute nothingness, that the world around her didn't exist. She almost wished it were so.
And at that moment her gaze caught upon a sight she had seen a thousand times before — yet which now, in her present mood, seemed completely new to her.
To the west, across the deepest part of the river, away from the city, away from the lights, there was a place where the dark of the sky was even darker, a mysterious patch of black where the pastures and the river and the sky mingled and ran together and became indistinguishable from one another. It was always an intriguing sight, that blackness, a one that put her in mind of looking into a past life of the river, long before the lights of the city sprang up on either side to encroach on its quiet mystery. But tonight …
Tonight, in the absence of stars, the black was unbearable. It was as though a giant, unearthly hand had ripped a hole right through the night sky, revealing something else entirely, a lightless beyond vast and unfathomable. Instead of a past bound by earth and time, Sarah imagined the hole opening up into a whole other world altogether, with the river flowing right into it to fall in a great cataract through a starless space. Clutching the steering wheel and craning her neck under the windshield, she couldn't help but stare as long as she could, hypnotized by the sight and by the starkness of her pure, cold vision against the fierce, earthy darkness of the stormy night.
With a sigh, Sarah turned back — and the pair of glimmering eyes in the road locked with hers. In a great swerve she lost control on the wet pavement and the river came up to meet her —
She came to lying in a puddle of foul-smelling mud, just in time to see her car disappear into the muck beyond. A deep panic ripped through her, and in an instant she relived a night of horror three years buried … But she forced herself with extreme difficulty to breathe normally, and to feel carefully over her body, relieved to realize she was unhurt except for a coating of bruises and a faint, smelly film of rotted vegetation. A miserably warm rain began to fall.
She rolled over and tried to stand, but collapsed. The rain made the stench stronger, but blessedly served to washing it off at the same time. And remember, you've smelled worse bogs than this, she thought to herself with a humorless grin.
To her right, rising above the night fog, was the embankment she had tumbled over, tire tracks in the crushed earth still describing her wild path. She crawled stiffly to its base. At the top would be the road, and even in this weather, someone would come by eventually. It was hard going, but inch by inch she pulled herself up the weedy ridge and finally emerged over the summit.
There was no road.
There was a valley. Surrounded by mountains.
Where no mountains had ever existed before.
Astonished, Sarah lost her grip and slid nearly halfway back down the slope. Okay, she thought to herself, clinging to a jutting root, I'm just turned around. I'm just shook up. It must be something else. Let's see, river there — She twisted painfully and was rewarded by the sight of that slender object in the near distance, gleaming brightly in the moonlight like a jeweled necklace carelessly tossed across the landscape. Directly below her lay its floodplain, a froth of bubbles and broken grass marking the spot where her old car now lay entombed in the murky silt of the river's edge. Okay, that's the river, that's normal. But over th—
Wait — Moonlight?
She craned her neck upward, ignoring the pain that shot through her shoulders. Where she had last seen nothing but storm on a darkly clouded night, there was now a sky filled to bursting with glittering stars. She realized belatedly that the rain had stopped, as well, and that the fog was gone. Oh no … how long was I out?
Sarah decided not to think for a few minutes. She felt oddly peaceful as she lay gripping the hillside, resting her mind and body, finding herself mesmerized by the stars. She had never seen so many stars before in her life. Once, on a camping trip into the country when she was still quite little, she had sat up half the night on a rock outcropping in the close circle of her father's arms, gazing at the beauty of the night. They had not spoken for hours, the two of them, simply sat there equally awed by the majesty that stretched infinite and vast over their heads. But this, she realized, this seems somehow even fuller, clearer, than even that magical night. I must be hallucinating, seeing double, she thought. Surely the universe could never be that big.
And then there were the mountains. Yes, I'm definitely hallucinating. She began to panic and had let go of the root to climb back down to the level ground when she saw that behind all the alien stars, the impossible mountains, the hole in the sky was still there.
It had been mysterious enough seen from the bridge, a dim smudge in a cloudy ceiling — but in this night impossibly full of light, the contrast was even more incredible. Though all around her from horizon to horizon shone what seemed to be the combined cosmos of several universes, to the west it all ended abruptly in a modest but definite region of absolute nothingness. But now she realized with a shock that the blackness extended past the horizon — where there should have been trees around it, or a bend of the river, there was just … darkness. It looked like a black hole; a black hole that had fallen to rest on the earth, devoured all that ventured near, and waited now silently and eternally for another victim to wander too close.
But yet … that couldn't be right. Its dark depths did not appear sinister or oppressive; instead, it seemed calm and soothing in its uniform darkness, an oasis of tranquility amidst the riot of light. Sarah could not pull her eyes away. The stars around her suddenly seemed harshly, unnaturally bright. She focused her gaze on the cool dark of the hole with an inexplicable but palpable sense of relief.
It was as though without the balance of this darkness, the light would be too much to bear.
She didn't realize she was walking toward it until she had already covered a good hundred feet. It was a shock. She was still stiff, but the pain and dizziness had faded. Shaking her head, she turned and plodded back to the ridge behind her, straining and hoping to see a gleam of headlights to appear over its top. Ignoring the mountaintops she saw looming beyond it.
Come on … there's got to be a car coming soon …
Which made it even stranger when she realized that her feet were wet; she was standing in the shallows of the river, even farther from the ridge, facing the hole again.
She set out for the road, and succeeded only in soaking her jeans further, up to the knees this time. Frustration took over. I give up. I 'm hurt. I'm tired. Forget the road. Just let me go …
Reason rallied. But there's no road over there. Look, see the trees? There's just fields and woods and darkness. You'll get lost.
Well, there's no road back there, either. Just those horrible mountains. I'll never get home that way. I'll still be lost. It's impossible.
But this way is insane. No help, no way home. Not even any stars to light your path. Just that thing …
But I don't care … I don't care.
Sarah silenced the thoughts with effort, with a voice a whisper in the silence. She took great care that it not shake. "I can't stay here, in the mud, and it's no use going back; there's nothing there. So it's ahead, then. I'm sure I'll run into a farmhouse or a ranch or something pretty soon." But she didn't say the rest. Not even to herself.
She didn't want to go back, because she wanted to go … there. Wherever it was. Into the dark. Somehow she felt she could feel safe there. This part of the world, like the part she had come from, had ceased to make sense. And she was suddenly very tired of dealing with it all.
Barely aware that she was moving, Sarah set off for the black edge of the horizon, dim in the distance.
She didn't find any farmhouses or ranches. She had never really expected to. But she had ceased to care, or to fear. She let go and let herself toward the darkness. It held steady before her, drawing her in. The trees closed about her for a little bit until she broke out into a starlit clearing, an endless smooth, colorless meadow that stretched on and on. She walked for what seemed hours, but the sun never rose; no dawn lightened the penetrating profusion of the stars. And at some point, one by one, fireflies began to appear from the shadows. They glided around her in waves, mirroring the waltz of the stars overhead. Disoriented, half-awake, Sarah felt as if she were whirling among them, moving forward but at the same time swirling backward, side to side, up, down, dancing among the stars — but always before her stretched that impenetrable corridor of dark, soothing in its stillness as the world fell down all around...
Till one of the fireflies bit her.
She snapped out of the dance, involuntarily swatting at the offender — which had a surprising weight. That's a monster bug, she thought automatically, and looked down. The tiny creature sprawled at her feet had long red hair and wings as fine as gossamer. Sarah froze.
"Oh, no," she groaned.
The trance had been broken. Nothing was as she remembered it; even the mountains seemed to have shifted, spacing themselves out on either side of her path. Even as she realized how hopelessly lost she had become, she planted herself firmly on the plain, with the tallest mountains looming at her back, and defiantly faced the imperturbable black sky.
"Where are you?!"
The shouted words echoed in the stillness. The stars had stopped spinning.
"Come out and show yourself!"
The stars waited, breathless.
"Damn you, Jareth!"
She stood for a long time on that soundless, worldless plain, hearing nothing but her own rigidly controlled breathing. Then she surprised herself:
"Oh well," she conceded to the observant heavens, "what else is there to do?" And she trudged on into the starless west.