“Yeah, well, people take privacy seriously out here. Not like they do on the coasts, where there’s enough weirdness in the background radiation of daily life to cover up for a certain amount of slipping.” I reached back and twitched my shirt out of her fingers. She laughed and slung her arm around my shoulders.
“Anyway, the Red Angel has been here for more than a hundred years, and apart from one tiny little incident where my great-grandmother used a shotgun to knock when she was looking for her daughter, the owners have always been on good terms with my family.”
We had reached the edge of the field, which gave way to the gravelly, dubiously level surface of Old Orchard Road. I still made a small sound of relief as I stepped onto it, causing Fern to shoot me a surprised look.
“Do they not believe in asphalt in Buckley?” she asked.
“Oh, they do, on the roads that are actually inside the town limits, but out here, the rural roads, those are mostly left alone unless they develop bad enough potholes to be legitimately dangerous. And I’d say we have a few more bad rainy seasons before anyone’s willing to call the graveler out this way. It keeps municipal taxes low, and it keeps strangers out.”
“Not friendly people, your locals?” asked Sam.
“They’re friendly enough, to the other locals. They’re even reasonably friendly to my siblings and me. Wary, but friendly. Once you come from here, you’re from here forever, and that applies to your descendants. Only Dad and Aunt Jane left when they were little, little kids, and Grandpa was from England, which means some people still think of us as outsiders, while others insist that since Grandma was born here, we’re locals.” I snorted. “She wasn’t even born here. Great-Grandma Fran went into labor while she and Great-Grandpa Jonathan were visiting a town of finfolk out in Maine. Gentling isn’t that far from New Gravesend. We could have gone there to hide if things had turned out poorly.”
“Finfolk?” asked Sam.
“Like mermaids, but less cannibalistic, and more capable of breeding with humans,” I replied, and kept walking.
We made a weird little line, working our way along the side of the road, and we didn’t see any cars. I pulled out the cellphone I’d signed up for as soon as we were sure that Leonard Cunningham was on his way out of the country, taking the threat of the Covenant of St. George with him. I had a surprisingly good signal, considering our surroundings. I shot a quick text to James, asking whether he’d been able to reach anyone with a tow truck. His reply came just as quickly: the truck was on its way, and he’d been able to confirm with the mechanic that he could tow our trailer wherever we needed it to be.
I responded with the address of the old Parrish place. Maybe spending the night at my family’s least haunted house would be more tolerable if we did it in the trailer, and the tailypo probably wouldn’t be able to figure out how to get inside. Probably. They have creepy little serial killer hands, like racoons but with longer fingers. For all I knew, they could work locks.
Gradually, the road curved away from the orchards for which it was named, moving toward the lake. The township of Buckley became visible off to the right, a low, ramshackle collection of buildings with no skyline to speak of. Those were for big cities where things happened, not for good, honest places filled with good, honest people doing good, honest work.
I could have told the people of Buckley some stories about the things that could happen even in the absence of a skyline. But they wouldn’t have listened, or they would already have known those stories from their own family histories, where they were kept buried, quietly sanitized, or locked away.
The world is stranger than most people admit, and because no one ever wants to talk about it, no one ever seems to realize that they’re not unique. Everybody already knows.
The Red Angel was a low-slung building right on the edge of the lake, somehow managing to be two stories and squat at the same time, like it was crouching down and getting ready to pounce. The paint, what little there was, was an unassuming shade of brown that had probably looked sun-bleached even before it had started to peel. There were only a few cars parked in