When she opened her eyes, the beings had formed a circle around Pink. Pink was contorted into an impossible shape, screaming, as if his body were hot steel being forged into a peculiar torus. Michelle got up and stumbled past the faceless beings, falling next to Pink. In the throes of a seizure, Pink convulsed, his face like oil, queer iridescent colors swirling through his skin. Michelle pressed the pendant against his leg, his flesh queerly rough, furrowed as tree bark.
After several moments, Pink’s writhing eased, but even through the material of his trousers, his skin felt cold. She wondered if he was dead. “Pink? Pink?”
The beings dispersed slowly, moving away in rays of yellow light, dissolving the circle, until they finally disappeared. Michelle held Pink’s wrist, trying to find a pulse. Nothing. “Pink?”
Chapter 39
The sky beyond the rim of mountains turned deep blue, bleeding though the tangle of black branches. Morning approached, but nothing looked familiar. The dusk-to-dawn light had vanished.
Michelle felt as if she were waking, but could not remember falling asleep. Pink lay next to her on the ground. He looked dead. She tried to stir him. She didn’t want to leave Pink, but there was no way to move him.
She surveyed the area, deciding to go in the direction she’d last seen the light. After picking down the slope for almost twenty minutes, she saw her and Cliff’s cabin. She looked back in the direction of Pink, but could see nothing, the underbrush so thick visibility was less than twenty feet. Michelle was sorry she hadn’t marked the trees in some way when she’d left Pink, traced some kind of path with rocks or broken branches. Now she had no way of finding him again.
With the cabin in sight, she jogged toward the front porch, checking the driveway for Pink’s Suburban, Darcy’s Explorer. Nothing. When she found the glass sliding doors locked, she went around to the front. That door was locked too. She grabbed a walkway stone and smashed the glass, then reached inside and undid the latch. For the first time in twenty-four hours, fatigue slogged through her veins.
The cabin was different, the way it had been before Cliff disappeared, the way it was when Cassie was still alive. The sudden relief weakened her knees, caused her to fall to the floor. Rays of sunlight cut bright shafts across the carpet. Her mind went to Pink, the faceless beings, the woman in the lavender gown. She wondered if the apparitions had come back for Pink after she’d left him. Maybe that’s why they were there, to claim his dead body.
Michelle shifted between consciousness and vague, restless dreams. Something crossed the back deck, interrupting the sunlight. She tried to push up, exhaustion keeping her down. A moment later, a silhouette pressed against the glass door. When she focused the figure, she saw it was Pink, his hands cupped against the glass.
“Michelle?” he said. “You in there?”
For a moment she was relieved that Pink was all right, then her heart sank. If Pink knew who she was, then nothing had changed. But the cabin? It was different. Even so, Pink’s mother had said he wouldn’t remember her, wouldn’t remember anything from the previous evening or his previous life. He would only remember the life where he had never met Michelle, the life where he had killed Isabelle.
He rapped on the glass with his wedding ring then tried the slider, the door rattling against the lock. “Michelle?”
Michelle pushed up and went to the door, flipping the latch, jerking it open.
“Whew,” Pink said, walking past her. “That was the strangest damn dream I ever had in my life. No more pork chops before bedtime.”
He remembered everything from the previous evening. Nothing was different. Had she dreamed the woman in the lavender nightgown, the faceless spirits, the burning in her bones?
“I was happy I woke up when I did,” he said. “There was a mangy damn coyote sniffing around me.”
“You feel okay?” Michelle asked.
“Yeah, except I don’t recollect how I came to be out in them woods in the first place. Plenty of times I been drunk and woke up in possum shit, but I didn’t drink that much last night.”
Pink found the couch and plopped down in the cushions, the foam rubber exhaling a whoosh. Michelle sat in the chair opposite him, wondering where Darcy had gone. Nothing felt right. She looked over at Pink. His expression was gloomy, his eyes receding into dark slits. He seemed to be ruminating on difficult subjects, as if his head were filled with sharp, pointy objects.
“What happened to the damn snowstorm?” he finally said. “And my Suburban?” He looked over at Michelle, then down at his own clothes, studying the rips and stains, poking his finger through the hole in the knee of his trousers. “What happened to me? And what the hell happened to you?” His eyes went to her hair, and Michelle’s hand instinctively followed his gaze, her fingers finding a tangle of leaves and sticks at the side of her scalp. She combed them out with her fingertips, inspecting the detritus momentarily before dropping it on the coffee table.
“What happened to all the snow?” he asked again.
“It disappeared,” she said, too weary to concoct a meaningful lie.
“Like one of them chinooks?” Pink said.
Michelle didn’t get his meaning. “What?”
“Clarence told me about ’em,” Pink said. “A rogue wind that blows warm air that melts all the snow. Indians called them ‘Snow Eaters.’ Clarence knows the damnedest things.”
How resourceful the mind was, Michelle thought, grabbing information from one phenomenon to patch over another much-less-palatable one. There had been no wind, no mysterious snow-eating zephyr from the gods, only faceless creatures and a woman in a lavender gown.
“It’s my Suburban I can’t figure out,” Pink said. “Where that is. Any chance your sister had it towed?”
“No,” Michelle answered.
“Got a phone?” Pink asked. Michelle pointed toward the desk.
Michelle watched Pink dial, feeling frazzled, jittery. She tried to think when she’d eaten last. She got up and stood at the sliding glass door, letting her eyes drift over the gentle repeat of valleys and mountains. Everything looked beautiful, yet nothing felt right. She stepped out on the deck. The air was thin, and for one brief moment she felt free.
She heard the slider open. Pink stood beside her, his hands on the railing. “Every damn phone number I called’s been disconnected. Even my own damn office. Recording said the number’s no longer in service. I couldn’t raise Isabelle, Claire, or my mama. All the damn numbers are out of service. Can you beat that? Even Clarence’s number is changed, but they wouldn’t give it out. Hell, the only person in Ardenwood’s got the same number is Lyman. He’s coming to fetch me.” Pink looked troubled and confused. Michelle remembered Lyman from the Hilltop Club.