All the Rules of Heaven (All That Heaven Will Allow #1) - Amy Lane Page 0,24
was significant.
“I don’t know. But then, if you haven’t noticed, your entire inheritance is sort of wonk-fuckit, right?”
Josh had a way with words.
Tucker slowed down, turned into the side road, and about caught his breath.
“Now that,” he said, remembering Angel’s discussion of the strange metals buried below the property of Daisy Place, “is just fucking creepy.”
Josh let out a low whistle. “Yeah, well, it’s gotten worse since I was a kid. You don’t really see it until someone points it out.”
On the left side was darkness; on the right side was light.
Sugar Pine Lake rested in a valley, and the forest from Highway 49 was almost a spacious one. The underbrush was sparse, the trees far enough apart for sunshine to get through. Off-road dirt bikers and mountain bikers liked the spot because it offered challenge and visibility. That was the forest on the right of the dirt track that connected the two main roads.
The forest on the left, Daisy Place, sat dark and dank. Friendly, independent trees like willow and oak had no business in this area, but they grew anyway, overgrown with mistletoe, ivy, and thick weeds. Tucker, who knew nothing about topography or botany, thought the grounds of Daisy Place would be more in keeping with a Southern mansion or the forests of the Northeast before the pilgrims landed.
A veil on that portion of the land quite simply darkened the sun, leaving the vegetation primeval and the shadows threatening.
“That is not good,” Tucker mumbled, remembering Angel’s duties. Apparently, the ghost hadn’t been talking out of his ass about the massing of souls over the property.
“Yeah, well, it’s always looked like that over the cemetery. Like I said, it just now got bad over the whole stretch of property.”
Tucker was busy negotiating the mostly washed-out dirt road. “I’m not breaking this thing, am I? Because I really fucking like it.”
“Nossir, it does this about every day. I really need to put gravel on our driveway. It’s not county property, and it stretches about a half mile.”
“Good. And ceme… ter… y…?”
Because that must have been it.
“Yessir,” Josh breathed, his voice hushed and respectful. “That’s the one.”
Tucker risked a glance at Josh, wondering if he saw what Tucker did. Because what Tucker was seeing was not an ordinary cemetery.
Most cemeteries are laid out very orderly—little rectangular earthen repositories for horizontal storage while the human bodies fought embalming fluid to decompose.
The graves Tucker was passing were randomly set out and randomly marked: angel headstones, giant sheets of granite, tiny sunken plaques—all of them vied for space in a haphazard arrangement over uneven, unkempt ground…
That stretched into infinity.
Real infinity, mile upon mile of erratically spaced graves stretching into the blackness of a dimensional horizon.
Tucker kept his foot steady on the gas and said, “That’s a little bigger than I expected.”
“Naw, bout an acre at the most. It’s full of the folks who passed away at the house. Daisy Place was founded around the Gold Rush. You knew that, right?”
“I assumed.” Which he had, even before Angel had told him, because much of California had been. Coming up the I-80 corridor, the giant statue of the prospector in Auburn was one of the most prominent reminders of the state’s history of exploration, entrepreneurship, and raw tragedy and greed. Daisy Place, with all of its Gothic sprawl, had probably been built to accommodate the newly rich and the young men out to find their fortunes, expecting it to take a week or two at the most. Much of the town was like that—including the place where Tucker had been eating his first night in Foresthill, the Ore Cart.
In fact, Tucker could see more than a few miners and pioneer women among the masses of spirits wandering the road to dimensional hell that apparently existed in his backyard even as he drove by. A bearded prospector with no teeth and maggots in his beard waved at Tucker from the side of the road, his appearance made no less grotesque by the fact that most of his body was poisonous green vapor.
Tucker thought that the poisonous green actually highlighted the maggots.
He swallowed back his nausea and kept his eye on the bend in the road, praying that the dimensional pathway to wherever the fuck it went disappeared when he turned left. It had to, right? Because that thing was big enough to suck up a semi, and this town was too damned small for semis to just disappear.