Shadow had told her to go to the farmhouse, that they would give her water to drink there. There were no lights burning in the farm building, and she could feel nobody at home. But he had told her that they would care for her. She pushed against the door of the farmhouse and it opened, rusty hinges protesting the whole while.
Something moved in her left lung, something that pushed and squirmed and made her cough.
She found herself in a narrow hallway, her way almost blocked by a tall and dusty piano. The inside of the building smelled of old damp. She squeezed past the piano, pushed open a door and found herself in a dilapidated drawing room, filled with ramshackle furniture. An oil lamp burned on the mantelpiece. There was a coal fire burning in the fireplace beneath it, although she had neither seen nor smelled smoke outside the house. The coal fire did nothing to lift the chill she felt in that room, although, Laura was willing to concede, that might not be the fault of the room.
Death hurt Laura, although the hurt consisted mostly of absences, of things that were not there: a parching thirst that drained every cell of her, a cold in her bones that no heat could lift. Sometimes she would catch herself wondering whether the crisp and crackling flames of a pyre would warm her, or the soft brown blanket of the earth; whether the cold sea would quench her thirst…
The room, she realized, was not empty.
Three women sat on an elderly couch, as if they had come as a matched set in some outlandish artistic exhibition. The couch was upholstered in threadbare velvet, a faded brown that might, once, a hundred years ago, have been a bright canary yellow. The women were dressed in identical fog-gray skirts and sweaters. Their eyes were too deeply set, their skin the white of fresh bone. The one on the left of the sofa was a giantess, or almost, the one on the right was little more than a dwarf, and, between them, was a woman Laura was certain would be her own height. They followed her with their eyes as she entered the room, and they said nothing.
Laura had not known they would be there.
Something wriggled and fell in her nasal cavity. Laura fumbled in her sleeve for a tissue, and she blew her nose into it. She crumpled the tissue and flung it and its contents onto the coals of the fire, watched it crumple and blacken and become orange lace. She watched the maggots shrivel and brown and burn.
This done, she turned back to the women on the couch. They had not moved since she had entered, not a muscle, not a hair. They stared at her.
“Hello. Is this your farm?” she asked.
The largest of the women nodded. Her hands were very red, and her expression was impassive.
“Shadow—that’s the guy hanging on the tree. He’s my husband. He said I should tell you that he wants you to give me water.” Something large shifted in her bowels. It squirmed, and then was still.
The smallest woman nodded. She clambered off the couch. Her feet had not previously touched the floor. She scurried from the room.
Laura could hear doors opening and closing, through the farmhouse. Then, from outside, she could hear a series of loud creaks. Each was followed by a splash of water.
Soon enough, the small woman returned. She was carrying a brown earthenware jug of water. She put it down, carefully, on the table, and retreated to the couch. She pulled herself up, with a wriggle and a shiver, and was seated beside her sisters once again.
“Thank you.” Laura walked over to the table, looked around for a cup or a glass, but there was nothing like that to be seen. She picked up the jug. It was heavier than it looked. The water in it was perfectly clear.
She raised the jug to her lips and began to drink.
The water was colder than she had ever imagined liquid water could be. It froze her tongue and her teeth and her gullet. Still, she drank, unable to stop drinking, feeling the water freezing its way into her stomach, her bowels, her heart, her veins.
The water flowed into her. It was like drinking liquid ice.
She realized that the jug was empty and, surprised, she put it down on the table.
The women were observing her, dispassionately. Since her death, Laura had not thought in metaphors: things were, or they were not. But now, as she looked at the women on the sofa, she found herself thinking of juries, of scientists observing a laboratory animal.
She shook, suddenly and convulsively. She reached out a hand to the table to steady herself, but the table was slipping and lurching, and it almost avoided her grasp. As she put her hand on the table she began to vomit. She brought up bile and formalin, centipedes, and maggots. And then she felt herself starting to void, and to piss: stuff was being pushed violently, wetly, from her body. She would have screamed if she could; but then the dusty floorboards came up to meet her so fast and so hard that, had she been breathing, they would have knocked the breath from her body.
Time rushed over her and into her, swirling like a dust-devil. A thousand memories began to play at once: she was wet and stinking on the floor of the farmhouse; and she was lost in a department store the week before Christmas and her father was nowhere to be seen; and now she was sitting in the bar at Chi-Chi’s, ordering a strawberry daiquiri and checking out her blind date, the big, grave man-child, and wondering how he kissed; and she was in the car as, sickeningly, it rolled and jolted, and Robbie was screaming at her until the metal post finally stopped the car, but not its contents, from moving…
The water of time, which comes from the spring of fate, Urd’s Well, is not the water of life. Not quite. It feeds the roots of the world tree, though. And there is no other water like it.
When Laura woke in the empty farmhouse room, she was shivering, and her breath actually steamed in the morning air. There was a scrape on the back of her hand, and a wet smear on the scrape, the red-orange of fresh blood.
And she knew where she had to go. She had drunk from the water of time, which comes from the spring of fate. She could see the mountain in her mind. She licked the blood from the back of her hand, marveling at the film of saliva, and she began to walk.
It was a wet March day, and it was unseasonably cold, and the storms of the previous few days had lashed their way across the southern states, which meant that there were very few real tourists at Rock City on Lookout Mountain. The Christmas lights had been taken down, the summer visitors were yet to start arriving.
Still, there were a number of people there. There was even a tour bus that drew up that morning, releasing a dozen men and women with perfect tans and gleaming, reassuring smiles. They looked like news anchors, and one could almost imagine there was a phosphor-dot quality to them: they seemed to blur gently as they moved. A black Humvee was parked in the front lot of Rock City, near to Rocky the animatronic gnome.
The TV people walked intently through Rock City, stationing themselves near the balancing rock, where they talked to each other in pleasant, reasonable voices.
They were not the only visitors. If you had walked the paths of Rock City that day, you might have noticed people who looked like movie stars, and people who looked like aliens and a number of people who looked most of all like the idea of a person and nothing like the reality. You might have seen them, but most likely you would never have noticed them at all.
They came to Rock City in long limousines and in small sports cars and in oversized SUVs. Many of them wore the sunglasses of those who habitually wear sunglasses indoors and out, and do not willingly or comfortably remove them. There were suntans and suits and shades and smiles and scowls. They came in all sizes and shapes, all ages and styles.