Borderline (The Arcadia Project, #1)(79)

She turned the key in the door and then slowly pushed it open.

“Holy shit,” I whispered.

“I know,” she whispered back.

I was looking into a rain forest, on the second floor of a house in the Hollywood Hills.

Linda hung back, but I stepped inside. The air was thick and shadowy and warm, fragrant with nectar and rot. Frogs moaned a constant song, and somewhere a bird let out a shrill whoop that echoed through what sounded like miles of sky. I could hear the spatter of raindrops falling through the -canopy of leaves over my head, even feel them strike my skin, but when I looked at my arms, they were still dry.

A pale flower, struck by a fat drop of water, trembled on a vine near my elbow. Without thinking, I brushed the petals with my fingertips. Quickly I pulled back, but the flower was undamaged. “I don’t understand,” I said. “Are parts of this real?” I bent down, scooped up a handful of soggy loam, watched it fall through my fingers. I could feel its gritty richness in my hand, but no grains clung to my fingertips or lodged beneath my nails.

“Your mind is telling you what you should feel,” she said, still lingering in the doorway behind me as though she couldn’t bear to enter. “All of this is just painted on the walls; Johnny glamoured it so you think you’re standing in it. If he were here, he’d hear Arcadian birds; it would smell different to him. You’re hearing and smelling and feeling what you expect from a place that looks like the painting.”

“Walt Disney would be peeing right now,” I said. Of course, now that I thought of it, old Walt had almost certainly been to Arcadia himself.

“I know you can’t see the wall,” she said, “but the glamour is on the actual painting, so you have to touch that. Just put your hand here next to mine.”

I looked around and felt a little pang. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t have the heart to spoil this. Let Johnny do it, if you think it’s the right thing to do.” I turned to look at her and saw something change in her face. Damn it, I’d taken David’s side again.

“Well then,” she said. “Is there anything else you’d like to see while you’re here?” Meaning, before I kick you out on your ass and tell the woman at the gate never to let you back in?

She stepped back from the doorway, turning away to look down the hall. She seemed to be disappearing into a corridor of light surrounded by endless miles of tangled twilit wilderness. If she shut the door, I might be lost in there forever. I hurried toward her, feet squelching and crunching in the illusory undergrowth, and impulsively I slapped my hand against the tree that stood closest to the door frame.

Just as with the fey in the Seelie bar I felt nothing at all, no surge of power, no tingle on my skin. But the sounds stopped, and suddenly I was standing in an empty room. I looked around with an entirely different sort of amazement. Although the paintings were flat compared to the dream my mind had conjured from them, their colors were rich and bright, their detail spectacular. Even the ceiling had been painted to -resemble a forest canopy with fading daylight streaming erratically through.

Linda turned to me with a surprised smile.

“Even without the magic,” I told her, “this is an amazing room. Johnny could make a living doing this kind of thing.”

Her forehead creased for a moment, and then she shook her head. “No, Johnny just did the spell on it; the painting is David’s. He did another one in the garage. Here, come look.” She broke out in a sudden bright smile: still girlishly in love after twenty-five years.

I followed her back down the stairs to the sitting room just off the foyer; at the side of the room was a door that led to a roomy two-car garage. The Valiant was parked on the far side, but my eye lingered on it only for a moment before sweeping over the murals. Berenbaum had painted the whole place to look like a drive-in burger joint, complete with busty waitress on roller skates waiting expectantly by the Valiant’s driver’s--side door.

Carefully I made my way around Linda’s silver BMW and the long, angular nose of the Valiant to get a closer look at the waitress. She had red hair and a very short skirt. I glanced back at Linda, noting the resemblance, and she gave an embarrassed laugh. “Yeah,” was all she said.

“This stuff is great!”

“He does it when he’s high, usually. You know, off of fairy dust or whatever. He’s impossible to live with when he’s under the influence, so we started these projects to keep him busy when he didn’t have a film to obsess over.” Leaving the door to the house open, she moved absently to the shelving on the wall nearest the door. Various props from David’s films were intermingled modestly there with ordinary garden gloves, bicycle pumps, and other garage trivia.

“This is amazing,” I said. “Thank you for showing me.” I leaned against the wall by waitress-Linda, studying real Linda as she absently tidied things up and looked inside boxes. “I’d really like to see Johnny,” I said.

Her shoulders stiffened. “Can we wait to talk about that until David gets here?”

“I’m not here to send him back to Arcadia. I promise. I just need to talk to him. I need to know he’s okay. I’m kind of—fond of him, to be honest.”

Linda frowned as she continued to open boxes as though looking for something. “I wasn’t aware that the two of you had met.”