The Cartographers(117)

“Save . . . ,” Swann repeated.

“I don’t care about saving the map,” she said again to him.

But Swann shook his head. He was smiling now, as impossible as it seemed.

“Go, save . . .”

And then he was gone.

“Swann,” Nell whispered. She cradled his face. “Swann. Swann. Swann.”

Through the haze of her grief, she saw that Felix had also fallen to his knees, where he was still hostage beside Wally, crying, too. Ramona, Francis, and Eve were clutching each other in horror, and Humphrey was hovering over Nell, larger than she’d ever seen him, looking determined to take Wally’s next bullet if he dared aim at her.

But Wally was not looking at any of them at all. He was still staring at the map in Swann’s absent grip, its open face becoming lightly misted with rain, its back in danger of becoming stained with the spreading red if it stayed there much longer.

“The map,” he finally said. It was not a statement, but a command.

“Wally,” Ramona started, stepping forward, but he stopped her with the aim of his gun.

“Not you,” he said to her. “Or any of you.” His gaze returned to Nell. “It’s just going to be the three of us.” Himself, Felix, and Nell.

“Don’t you dare hurt her,” Humphrey said, still hovering over Nell. “I don’t care if there’s a map or not, if you so much as touch a hair on her head, I’ll—”

“You weren’t her only beloved adopted uncle, Bear,” Wally said, sneering. “The library was an accident. You know I would never hurt Nell. Never on purpose.” He glanced sidelong at Felix. “That’s what Felix is for.”

Nell thought she might faint from the horror of those words.

“Just the two of us,” she said, her voice cracking. “Let Felix stay here.”

“I’m not leaving you,” Felix argued, even as he flinched as Wally brought the gun back toward him. “Never again.”

She glared desperately at Felix, willing him to take it back, or make a break for it, to try to escape somehow. She had already lost Swann—she wouldn’t be able to bear it if she also lost him.

But Felix just glared desperately back at her, equally determined.

“The map,” Wally said to Nell. “Do it now, or I will.”

There was nothing left to try. She looked at the others who had come with her, and then took the map from Swann’s lifeless grip with shaking hands.

Slowly, blinking through her tears, her eyes found their way back along the winding roads to the place where they all were, in the pale green fields off County Highway 206, and moved toward the little white dot of a town that didn’t exist. She read the tiny name above it. Five letters that were the answer to the greatest secret she had ever known.

AGLOE.

“Nell,” Felix said then, his voice tiny.

“It has to be,” Nell murmured, her eyes still locked on the map. “It has to be here . . .”

“Nell.”

She looked up, and her heart almost stopped.

There was a dirt road in front of them.





XXIV




The town was like something out of a storybook.

All down Main Street, wood-paneled two-story shops lined the sidewalk, offering their wares through curtained windows above little flower beds on the sills. At the corner, there was a diner, and across from it, a gas station. A fire hydrant waited stoically at the curb.

On the lamppost just in front of Nell, at the first intersection leading to the heart of the town, a sign in the same bright green of all state tourism signs proclaimed:

Welcome to Agloe

Home of the famous Beaverkill Fishing Lodge!



“It’s real,” Nell whispered. “It’s really real.”

She stared, awestruck. At the stop sign, the intersection, the buildings beyond it. At the trees, which looked to be at least a hundred years old, with thick gnarled trunks and heavy boughs that shaded their roots.

She had thought the liminal room in the NYPL, and the phantom staircase at Classic, had been the most fantastical things she would ever see—but this was even more impossible. Moments ago, she had been standing on the side of the road in the rain, staring at an open, empty field. Then she’d taken a few steps down the muddy dirt road, and suddenly, she was inside of an entire town.

A town that no one else in the world but they could see.

“Wait,” Felix said. “It’s not raining here.”

Nell looked up. Before they’d entered Agloe, they were being pelted by the downpour, so heavily the ground had turned to mud around Nell’s shoes and sucked at the soles with every step. But inside the town, it was a perfect spring morning. There wasn’t a single cloud in the sky.

“It was always this way,” Wally answered, his voice strangely quiet.

He wasn’t staring at the sky, Nell saw. He was staring at Agloe. At the place he’d been locked out of, a place almost no one else in the entire world knew existed, but he’d been convinced still did. A place he’d spent his life desperately trying to prove was real, to return to, no matter the cost. His eyes were glazed with shock.

As if he could hardly believe he had finally, finally made it back.

Nell wanted to run, to make a break for it and hide somewhere where he’d never find her, but she couldn’t will her feet to move. For one, Wally knew the town and she didn’t. As much as she was afraid of him, she was also a little afraid of Agloe. She didn’t know what would happen if she got lost inside of it.