Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(69)
At the intersection, she didn’t brake for the stop sign, wheeled left around the corner, and scanned the street. More trees. Parked cars and SUVs and light trucks. There, on the right-hand sidewalk, man and dog moved away through the earthbound clouds, less real now than they’d been when she had first glimpsed them. If this was the night visitor at the hospital, he couldn’t be on the same side of the fence as Terezin. This man had wanted her to live, not die.
She raced forward, and from the right-hand curb, a pickup pulled into traffic. Bibi stamped on the brake pedal and blew the horn, and the Honda yelped and shuddered, and the other driver blew his horn longer than she had, a back-at-you statement. By the time that the pickup jockey reached the next intersection and turned downhill, she had lost track of the man with the dog.
Then she saw them half a block uphill, on the farther side of the street, passing through an opening in a low stone wall, into a park. By the time she drove up there and curbed the Honda in a no-parking zone, the duo had melted into the mist among the cascading branches of a grove of California pepper trees.
As parks went, this wasn’t a sprawling affair, not a destination for tourists, but a modest neighborhood amenity, maybe ten acres that encompassed a walk through the pepper woods, a children’s playground with spiral slide and a safety-first fun-free plastic-eyesore version of a jungle gym, as well as a big open grassy area where dogs could chase Frisbees and tennis balls. At the north end, the ground rolled gently into a canyon, and along that crest were positioned picnic tables and two small gazebos that offered a vista on sunnier days.
The man and dog were to be found in none of those places, and in fact she encountered no one else, either. Into the shifting curtains of mist, she called out, “Hello” and “You, sir, with the beautiful dog,” but no one replied.
The canyon was deep, and the fog appeared to condense in its depths, so that she could not see the bottom or even a significant distance down the slope. The abyss was rugged, and the way eventually grew steep, a kingdom of snakes and bobcats and coyotes into which no sensible person would venture blindly.
In that eeriness of fog-bearded trees and deserted gazebos and abandoned playground equipment, Bibi began to feel that she was being watched. Not only watched, but also manipulated, drawn forward. She was alone, far from the Honda. Although she had the pistol in her shoulder rig, she no longer felt safe.
As she headed back toward the street, a chill like the tip of an icy finger traced her spine from the small of her back to the nape of her neck. She broke into a run, certain that someone or something must be on her heels. When she cleared the opening in the low stone wall and saw Pogo’s aged Honda, she halted and pivoted, tensed for a confrontation. No one pursued her.
She’d always before been able to trust her intuition. Maybe that was another difference about this new reality, this world-gone-mad.
No sooner had this thought troubled her than she was given good reason to trust herself once more. Deep in the park, near the limits of visibility that the fog imposed, the man in the hoodie manifested out of the cold white blear, the leashed dog slightly ahead of him. They faded away and, after several seconds, returned to existence, strolling leisurely among the pepper trees.
The dog-walker had to have heard her seeking him. She almost called out again, but restrained the impulse. Even if this was the man at the hospital, she suddenly knew—without understanding from where this perception came—knew in mind and heart, in blood and bones, that by coming face-to-face with this man in the pepper woods, she would be destroyed. He might not be her enemy, but in some way he was nevertheless a threat to her. An existential dread overcame Bibi, so that she could not for a moment draw breath. Then she got into the car, shut the door, and drove away from there with no destination in mind, drove until she felt…not safe, but safer.
In rebellion against the claustrophobic fog, which had begun to cloud her thoughts almost as effectively as it shrouded the seaside communities, Bibi drove north to Newport Coast Drive and a couple of miles inland to a shopping center bathed in sunshine. She parked in a quiet corner of the lot, in the feathery shade of nonbearing olive trees, as far as possible from the busy Pavilions market.
If Chubb Coy and the dead professor had known what car Bibi was driving, they might have shared that information with others, and she might soon need new transportation. Lacking a GPS, the Honda could not be easily tracked wherever it went. Her enemies would have to be lucky to spot it in the hustle-bustle of Orange County’s millions, but they seemed to have a lot of luck.
According to Coy, arrayed against her were not merely Terezin and his large cult; there were other “factions.” She didn’t know what to make of that information. Only a day ago, had anyone babbled about a secret occult-powered fascist conspiracy, Bibi would have regarded them as citizens of Cuckoo City. Now she was being asked to fold into that idea the existence of other conspirators with different goals; Chubb Coy was adamantly not a fascist. Could it really be true that, per Shakespeare, our world in all its complexity was a stage and all its people merely players, and at the same time, per H. P. Lovecraft, that below the main stage were unknown others on which different dramas played out, secretly affecting the lives of everyone upstairs?
She didn’t want to believe that. Life was tenuous enough without having to worry about what trolls and molochs might be scheming in the basement. Yet it seemed that, to find Ashley Bell and to hope to survive the search, she needed to proceed as if this paranoid vision of the world was indisputable.