The Night Country (The Hazel Wood #2)(31)

“Hasty?” A man pushed to the front of the crowd, blond eyebrows scaling his bald head. Finch had known his type back in New York: he was the guy who composted and canvassed and spent his weekends gathering signatures for a petition to save an endangered beetle, then called the cops on kids being too loud on the sidewalk. “We’re dying out here, and you’re talking about don’t be hasty?”

Janet sized him up. “Thank you, Leon. We can always count on you for the dissenting opinion. If you’re volunteering to go first, please, be my guest.”

Leon’s eyebrows climbed even higher. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you.”

“I’d like it tremendously. I think most of us would.”

Even Janet was getting ruffled these days.

But it was Alain who got to his knees and opened the door. Half the room gasped, and Leon ducked and covered.

All you could see through it was gray fog, like it opened straight into a cloud. Then a wind came through, a bracing, whistling thing that lapped the room and left them in silence.

“Perfume,” Alain breathed. “Isobel’s perfume.”

Leon’s face was red; he looked like he was hardly breathing. “Baby powder,” he choked out. “And grilled cheese. Did you smell that?”

Everyone was murmuring now, their faces lit up or shut down, naming the promises that had blown through the door. Finch looked to Janet; she said nothing, but her face was stricken.

They were all wrong anyway. The wind had smelled like his mother’s coconut oil, and the gingery spice mix she’d kept on the kitchen counter. It smelled like the lace of overdone waffles, the very last meal he’d eaten on Earth.



* * *



Within a few hours, people started leaving through the door. Whatever was on the other side of it, they’d decided it was better than what lay through the sinkholes. Finch figured they were probably right.

But he remembered something he’d read once, about the door to the kingdom of Heaven being so low you had to enter it kneeling. This didn’t feel like that. It felt like the Spinner being petty, making them crawl their asses out through a doggy door. The sheer cuteness of it felt sinister as fuck.

He was still waiting for her to show up and show him what she thought of idiot Earthlings who messed with the works. But if she blamed him for her falling-apart world, she hadn’t said so. Some days he thought that was deliberate, that she knew it was worse for him this way: forever bracing for the hammer to come down. And some days he thought the worst thing she could do was to just let him leave. Maybe the door in the tavern wall would drop him in New York. He’d move back in with his dad and stepmom. Get his GED, let his dad pay his way into a good college. Ring a buzzer somewhere, wait for Alice to open the door.

Part of him wanted to go home, but none of him wanted it to be like this: raw, scarred, pared down. If he went back, he wanted to be like a king in exile returned. Someone who had seen things, and wasn’t shit at processing them.

But as the days passed and the population dropped, he started to think it wouldn’t happen that way. On a humid morning, with nowhere at all to be, Finch sat at a table in the tavern. It had lost its heart when Alain left the morning after the door first appeared, and had practically become a bus station since then. People walked through with their packs tied tight, alone or in pairs, said tearful goodbyes by the bar or slipped through without a word.

And always the place smelled like memories. Every time the door was opened, that antic wind sprang free, teeming with lost things. The sugar cloud of baked ice cream cone at the sundae shop a few blocks from his apartment on the Upper East Side. The rubber-and-sweat scent of indoor basketball practice. His dad’s clovey cologne. He marinated in the scents of home, watching people disappear forever into the back of the bar. While he did it, he toyed with the little metal fox he’d taken from Hansa’s cottage.

There was a trick to it. He was sure there was. It had big eyes and three twitching tails, like those creepy vintage cat clocks, and it made a chittering sound in its throat. The points of its ears and tails were tipped in gold, but the rest of it was red metal. If you put your ear up to its belly, you could hear the faintest hum.

It took time for him to notice the girl watching him from another table. Early twenties, hair bleached out and tied back into Heidi braids, wearing three different shades of faded black. She had an unflappable vibe that reminded him of Janet. When Finch finally looked at her, she smiled brightly and stood, like being noticed was as good as an invitation.

“Hey,” she said, sitting down across from him. “Come here often?”

Finch nodded at the weak joke and said nothing.

The girl pulled out a red glass bottle and set it between them. “I think we missed last call, so I brought my own. You want?”

He put down the fox. “Look, do I know you?”

“I doubt it. I just got into town.”

Reluctantly, he was interested. “From where?”

“I’ve been on walkabout. Well, sailabout, I guess. I wanted to check out the islands, see what came after the edge of the sea.”

Finch’s heart twanged. He’d always planned to do that. “How far did you get? What did you find?”

Her voice fell into the easy cadence of a storyteller’s. “I found a tale that played out on an island the size of this bar. I saw mermaids singing down storms and stirring them into the water. There’s a square of sea that’s always stormy, with a ship tossing inside it. There’s a place where you can take a staircase down to the bottom of the sea and walk in a garden there, with the water just over your head.” Her voice stalled out. “It was beautiful. But it wasn’t home.”