Poe's children: the new horror : an anthology - By Peter Straub Page 0,210

Gordon turned right and they headed south.

Dewey stared out the window. She had never been anywhere in New Mexico except the Hill, not since she and Papa had arrived two years before, and then it had been night. She’d imagined that everything looked like the mesa, just more of it. But now outside the window the land was flat and endless, bounded by craggy brown mountain canyons on one side and distant dusky blue ridges on the far horizons.

Close up, everything that went by the window was brown. Brown dirt, brown fences, brown tumbleweeds, brown adobe houses. But all the distances were blue. Crystal blue, huge sky that covered everything for as far as she could see until the earth curved. Faraway slate blue, hazy blue mountains and mesas, ledges of blue land stretching away from the road, blurring into the sky at the edges. Blue land. She had never seen anything like that before.

Dr. Gordon had gas coupons from the Army, and he filled up the tank when they crossed Route 66. They stopped for a late lunch on the banks of a trickle of river a few miles farther south, eating their sandwiches and drinking Orange Nehi in the shade of a piñon pine. The summer sun was bright and the air smelled like dust and resin.

“How much farther are we going?” Suze asked, putting the bottle caps in her pocket.

“Another three, maybe four hours. We’ll spend the night in a little town called Carrizozo,” Dr. Gordon said.

Dewey watched as Suze bent over the map and her finger found Carrizozo. It was a very small dot, and other than being a place where two roads crossed, there didn’t seem to be anything interesting nearby.

Suze looked puzzled. “Why are we going there?”

“We’re not. It’s just the closest place to spend the night, unless you want to sleep in the car. I certainly don’t.” He lit his pipe, leaned back against the tree, and closed his eyes, smiling.

It was the most relaxed Dewey had ever seen him.

After lunch, the land stayed very flat and the mountains stayed far away. There was nothing much to see. Beyond the asphalt the land was parched brown by the heat, and there were no trees, just stubby greasewood bushes and low grass, with an occasional spiky yucca or flat cactus.

Dewey’s eyes closed and she slept, almost, just aware enough to hear the noise of the car wheels and the wind. When the car slowed and bumped over a set of railroad tracks, she opened her eyes again. They were in Carrizozo, and it was twilight. The distant blues had turned to purples and the sky was pale and looked as if it had been smeared with bright orange sherbet. Dr. Gordon pulled off onto the gravel of the Crossroads Motor Court.

They walked a few blocks into town for dinner. Carrizozo was not much more than the place where the north-south highway heading toward El Paso crossed the east-west road that led to Roswell. There was a bar called the White Sands, a Texaco station, and some scattered stores and houses between the railroad tracks and the one main street.

Through the blue-checked curtains of the café Dewey could see mountains to the east. “Are we going into the mountains in the morning?”

“Nope,” said Dr. Gordon, spearing a piece of meatloaf. “The other direction.”

Dewey frowned. She had spent most of the day looking over Suze’s shoulder at the map. There wasn’t anything in the other direction. It was an almost perfectly blank place on the map. White Sands was a little bit west, but almost a hundred miles to the south. If they’d been going there, Dewey thought, it would have made more sense to stay in Alamogordo.

“But…,” Dewey said, and Mrs. Gordon smiled. “You’re confused, my little geographer. That’s because where we’re going isn’t on the map. Not yet, anyway.”

That didn’t make a lot of sense either. But when Mrs. Gordon smiled at her with warm eyes, Dewey felt like everything would be okay, even if she didn’t understand.

It was barely light when Mrs. Gordon woke them the next morning. Dr. Gordon had gotten two cups of coffee in paper cups from the café, and Cokes for the girls, even though it was breakfast. The air was still and already warm, and everything was very quiet.

They drove south, and then west for about an hour, the rising sun making a long dark shadow in front of the car. There was nothing much to see out