Page 46 of Spelunking Through Hell

“Oh, because leaving notes for the people who love us always works so well at getting them not to do stupid things.” I shrugged. “Then again, Thomas didn’t leave a note. So maybe it would have changed my mind. Maybe I’d be home and old and happy, and all my kids and grandkids would adore me, instead of being vaguely afraid of me and confused about how I keep not getting any older.”

Saying that caused a brief bubble of panic to work its way up from the depths of my psyche, and I suppressed a shudder. This wasn’t the time to fall apart again. Maybe that time was never going to arrive. Wouldn’t that be nice? We could go home, and I just wouldn’t let Naga hurt me anymore, and Thomas would ignore him, and I wouldn’t have to deal with what he’d been doing to me all this time. It wouldn’t be forgiven. It would just be... forgotten, swept aside in the face of so many better things to worry about.

“I wasn’t afforded the opportunity to write anything down,” he said, with the stiffness I had long since come to recognize as apology in his tone.

“I don’t know if he’s still looking for you,” I said, eyes on Sally. If I looked at Thomas with the panic over Naga bubbling at the bottom of my mind, I would lose my cool, and everything would fall apart. Sally, though... Sally was essentially a stranger. Sally was safe. I could look at Sally.

“I don’t know, because I wasn’t really listening after the point where Annie said Thomas was really alive out there for me to find. I was losing faith. I hate to admit it, but I was, and I needed that moment to get me moving again, to get me looking properly, not just circling in dimensions I already knew, going through the motions and occasionally finding some new corner to explore. I was stuck. So Annie told me I didn’t have to be, and I got going again, and now I’m here. But he’s there, Sally. He got out of the town where you grew up, and he’s with my granddaughter, which is about the best place he could possibly be, even if her boyfriend may not agree with that.”

Sally snickered, eyes still overly bright. “Oh, James isn’t going to be any threat to the boyfriend,” she said. “Kids like us travel in packs for our own protection, especially when your school’s too small to have a GSA.”

“I don’t know what any of that means, but good to know Annie won’t be setting him on fire.”

Thomas cleared his throat. The dart had vanished, back into wherever he’d been hiding it before, and I couldn’t wait to get my hands on him and find out.

Later. “Does me knowing about your best friend who I couldn’t possibly know about help you believe that I am who I say I am, or does it make it less believable? I just want to know how many asses I’m going to have to kick before you stop randomly assaulting me. A ballpark number would be great.”

“If we’re pausing for questions, I want to know what you meant when you said, ‘Destroy them,’” said Thomas, tone measured. “Are you telling me the crossroads have been... how is that even possible?” I glanced at him. He was watching me, gaze sharply focused and understandably anxious.

“I don’t have all the details because I was a little distracted and trying to get out of there; this was at the Red Angel, and Cynthia wouldn’t have appreciated it if we’d stayed around forever. If I had my mice, they could tell you exactly what Annie said. I can just give you the gist.”

“Please,” said Thomas.

“She said that because the crossroads broke the rules they weresupposed to operate by, she was able to ask Mary to take her for an arbitration?”

It turned into a question at the end, largely because I didn’t know what an arbitration was in this context. Thomas, however, nodded, a look of satisfaction on his face. “Mary always did her best to be on our side,” he said. “Even when she couldn’t, she was sorry not to be. I’m not surprised our granddaughter asked her for an arbitration.” He paused. “I am a little surprised Mary’s still with the family. I would have thought you would ask her to leave after everything that happened.”

“Mary is one of the first people I remember,” I said. “I got in trouble in school because I was drawing pictures of a dead girl when they asked me to draw pictures of my family.”

Sally blinked. “Dead girl?”

“Mary is our family babysitter,” I explained. “She died about a year after I was born, and no one noticed, so she just kept on going about her life. My mama hired her to take care of me. And she liked our family well enough that she stuck around after we found out she was dead. We’re the house she haunts.”

“What my lovely wife,” and Thomas stressed the last word just a little, as if reminding Sally of my place in all this, “isn’t mentioning is that in addition to serving as the Healy family babysitter, Mary is a crossroads ghost.”

Sally tensed immediately. “A crossroads ghost is bound to her family, and you still married the woman?”

I decided to let her anger slide, since she’d at least acknowledged me as his wife, instead of calling me an imposter again. I shrugged, spreading my hands. “Most of the time, Mary was just trying to keep me from licking the frickens. Unless we invoked the crossroads, she didn’t bring them into things.”

“My bargain was made under extreme pressure—but not because Mary convinced me it was the right thing to do,” said Thomas. “She fought against me until it became clear that we were out of time. If we continued to fight, Alice would die, and the only thing that ghost cared about more than keeping her people away from her employers was the girl who had grown up in her care—and even then, she made a stab at convincing me that Alice would be better off a ghost like her than she would be with further ties to the crossroads, even by association.” He turned his attention back to me. “I was worried you would have called for an exorcist after the crossroads called in my debts.”

“Like I said, one of the first people I remember,” I said. “It took mea long, long time to forgive her, even knowing the constraints she was under. But she helped as much as she could, and having her and the mice meant the kids grew up knowing about their family and where they came from, and that was important.” I hadn’t been able to raise my own children, but I’d been able to make sure they could take care of the mice and stay connected to their history, at least a little.

“I want to ask about these mice you keep mentioning, but I feel like we’re already getting pretty far off the point,” said Sally. “The crossroads were destroyed?”

“Annie said she went to the pocket dimension where the crossroads existed, and that it was somehow outside of time. She saw them come to Earth and displace the pneuma we were supposed to have. They were never meant to exist in our reality.”

“A traveler,” said Thomas thoughtfully. “That would explain how they knew about this place. If they had come from far away, they would have encountered dead realities that petrified instead of putrefying, turning into fossil reminders of what was lost rather than tainting and destroying everything around them.”

“Or they created those places,” I said. “We don’t know that our world was the first the crossroads affected. They attacked our pneuma and took its place, until Annie bent time and fought them before that could happen. I don’t really understand how that works—how could she have fought them before they displaced our pneuma when we’ve been suffering the consequences of that displacement for centuries? But they were all very firm on the idea that it had happened, and Annie’s boyfriend talked about her killing the crossroads like it was something that definitely occurred.”

“How long ago did this happen?” asked Thomas.

“They were driving home to Oregon, and James seemed like a comfortable but fairly new addition to a pre-existing group, so I’m going to say it all went down somewhere on the East Coast,” I said.

“Maine,” said Sally. “We’re from Maine.”

“All right. Maine to Michigan doesn’t take more than a couple of days, and I ran into them at the Angel about four months ago as I experienced it, but I apparently hit some time mismatch between dimensions, so according to Cynthia, that was about three years ago,” I said.

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