Little Girls(81)
The air smelled fishy. She rolled up the windows and turned on the A/C. Up ahead, orange road cones rose up on the shoulder of the single-lane road. As she approached a slight incline, she could see construction signs dotting the horizon. Yet as she crossed up and over the crest of the road, there were no road crews at work. The construction equipment that stood in the grassy median looked like it had been expediently evacuated in the moments before a nuclear holocaust.
Directly ahead was the wasteland industrial park of Sparrows Point. Along the shore were cargo ports crowded with dark ships that belched smoke into the air and, at the horizon, Laurie could make out the schizophrenic jumble of ductwork and pipes. On the other side of the road stood a complex of redbrick apartments with bars on the windows and a fire escape zigzagging from window to window all the way to the ground. Blinking red lights told Laurie which side roads were off limits. She continued driving until the factories rose up to greet her. They stood like medieval fortresses along the ramparts of the bay, their smokestacks like prison towers, their massive parking lots the color of moat water in the fading daylight. Beacons winked intermittently from the tops of the smokestacks, a warning to careless low-flying aircraft.
Laurie pulled along the shoulder and put the car in park. Her purse was beside her on the passenger seat. She opened it, took out the old photograph, and unfolded it. She wasn’t sure exactly where this particular lot was located, and she had no addresses to go by. Instead, she held the photo up and peered past it through the windshield at the crenellated silhouettes of factories along the cusp of the water. She wasn’t sure if the water itself was the Chesapeake Bay or one of its tributaries, though with dusk creeping up over the east, it looked expansive enough to be the goddamned Atlantic Ocean. Cargo ships were black specks dotted with Christmas-colored lights far off in the distance.
She thought she recognized the same arrangement of smokestacks in the photo down one of the closed-off access roads. There was an arm-bar blocking the gravel road and a construction barrel equipped with a blinking orange hazard light on the shoulder, but she thought she could hop the grassy hillock beyond the barrel and make her way around it. She switched the Volvo back into drive, spun the wheel, and eased the vehicle up the slight grassy incline of the shoulder. It was a tight squeeze maneuvering the boxy Volvo between the construction barrel and a chain-link fence woven with leafy veins of ivy, but she managed. When she cleared the barrel and the arm-bar, she negotiated back onto the roadway to find the surface bumpy and irregular. The Volvo’s steering wheel vibrated in her hands. She tightened her grip on it.
To her right, the factories’ smokestacks seemed to have repositioned themselves. She continued along the roadway, slowing down each time a dirt road branched off from it, cutting through the shallow scrim of trees toward the factories and ports. Any one of those dirt service roads could lead her to where she wanted to go. For all she knew, the road she was currently on might dead-end at the cusp of the bay.
She cranked the wheel to the right and took the service road. It proved even bumpier than the previous road. Tree limbs reached down and scraped the Volvo’s hood. Through the tangle of branches she could see a thumbnail moon surrounded by many stars.
Just when she thought she had made the wrong choice—that the service road was actually a conveyor belt in the middle of the cosmos on which she could drive and drive and never reach a destination—the trees parted and the Volvo’s headlights fell upon a NO TRESPASSING sign the size of an interstate billboard. Beyond the sign stood a high fence dressed in more concertina wire. Beyond the fence, and at the end of a paved parking lot that looked like the reflection of the night sky, were the rambling concrete structures of the factories themselves. The ones in the distance still trailed white gossamer from their smokestacks, but the ones here along the point—with the exception of the red and green blinking lights at the top of the stacks—looked desolate. They could have been factories on the moon, for all Laurie could tell.
Again, Laurie compared the photograph to the factories on the other side of the fence. A series of smokestacks midway through the rank of stacks matched up to the ones in the photo.
Bingo.
The fence was locked, the gates wrapped up in a tight ball of industrial chain and several padlocks. But age or vandals—or a combination of the two—had seen fit to smash a ragged hole in the meshwork a few yards from the entry point. The opening didn’t look large enough to accommodate the Volvo—not without submitting the vehicle to potential damage, anyway—but she could certainly pass through it on foot. Yet the thought of doing so frightened her. The parking lot itself looked at least a quarter of a mile long, and while there were industrial-sized vapor lamps at intervals throughout the parking lot, none of the lamps were working. It was as dark as infinite space. And once she reached the factories themselves . . . what hideousness might be lying in wait for her there? After all, it had been Sadie—Abigail—who had led her out here. Was she willing to trust the child?
The Vengeance, she thought. The Hateful Beast.
Still, she believed she had found that key at the bottom of the well for a reason. The fact that the number carved onto it matched the garage number in her father’s photograph—a photograph her father had deliberately hidden in the sleeve of a record album—couldn’t just be coincidence.
Laurie got out of the car. The air was acrid with pollutants from the steamships and the factories. Beneath her feet the ground seemed to rumble with the pulse of invisible machinery. Her ears picked up a motorized whine emanating from someplace nearby; her mind flashed images of great earth-moving cogs and wheels, of a system of pulleys and ropes just below the surface of the earth, keeping nature in harmony with itself. One careless move on her part could upset the whole balance of the universe. As it was, she felt as though she had inadvertently stepped through a tear in the fabric of space and time—that she was both simultaneously in the past and the future, watching herself from various different angles all at once.