Laurel Falls-

In Episode Four of Laurel Falls, we find Simon Ryder on his way to a wedding. He’s going to be late.

LAUREL FALLS - EPISODE FOUR

HIGHWAYMAN - PART 3

Four miles left to Shelton Crossing. Tired and dull-headed after his long drive over the mountain, Simon Ryder thought he might stop there for coffee before tackling the last thirty twisting miles above the river up to Asheton. His beat-up van made poor substitute for the Flyer, but she’d flown away after her beloved boy. When he found the boy, now grown into a man, he would find the Flyer.

As the van labored up an incline, a red Corvette loomed suddenly close behind on a sharp curve, weaving in the mirror, impatient to pass. The stony flank of the mountain hugging the road just left of the pavement dropped away on the right several hundred feet to the river below. Given a place to pull over, Ryder would have, just to be rid of the fool in the red car. After shadowing his bumper for a mile, the Corvette swung around his van, too close on the blind curve, and roared up ahead and past the next bend. When he came round the mountain, Ryder saw the red roadster stopped on a pull-off, the driver standing with one hand on the hood, inspecting the crumpled grill. Fifty feet down the hill behind the car, a full-grown doe lay on her side, still kicking, just off the pavement. Ryder sighed, eased the van over onto the gravel and stopped. He commanded the clamoring dogs to stay, was surprised when they obeyed. He got out, slammed the door hard, walked back to see what might be done for the deer. He figured the reckless driver could take care of his car. As Ryder approached the animal, her belly heaved once, then she stilled. He knelt and laid a tentative hand on her neck. The big brown eyes, luminous with pain, slowly glazed and dulled. This life had changed.

Ryder heard the Corvette roar to life behind him, turned as tires threw a shower of gravel in his direction and the car lurched forward and away up the mountain. Ryder stood, brushed the dirt from his jeans, and cursed. Awake now, he could still use some coffee. He had places yet to go and be civil today. Caffeine might wash the stink of this savage and his little red car out of his thoughts before he got there.

Standing beside the broken deer, Ryder slowed his breathing as Owl, the old shaman taught him in that other place, closed his eyes, listened to his heart slow, stop, then sensed the blood reverse in his veins. The feeling still unnerved him. When he opened his eyes, the animal at his feet had gone, and he turned to see her bounding toward him down the steep across the highway. When Ryder stepped into the road, waved and shouted, the doe wheeled and began clambering back upward the way she’d come. He heard the Corvette growl around the bend behind him and the screech of tires burning against pavement. Ryder looked at the car, smiled, waved his arms over his head. He caught a glimpse of the frantic driver wrestling with the wheel, and then the car shot past him on the gravel verge and hurtled out into the air over the river and disappeared. Three seconds later, he heard a splash as the shiny red car impacted the water. He bowed his head and offered up a brief prayer for the soul of the Corvette’s driver.

The prayer was shorter than he intended. He looked up wide-eyed when his van’s front tire dropped off the asphalt onto the narrow shoulder. Carefully he steered back onto the road. When he drove around the bend a few minutes later, he saw no sign of the doe or the Corvette. This time Ryder was still sleepy, in need of his coffee.

Down one more steep and winding grade and across Shelton Creek, where the road straightened and leveled through the little village. Ryder stopped the van in front of the Twelve Mile Cafe. The coffee there was strong and black, and surprisingly good. The woman who made his coffee brought out a pitcher of real cream to pour in it. When Ryder reached for a cup of spoons on the counter, she pulled it away. “No, here’s a clean one,” and she brought a shiny spoon from underneath the counter and handed it to him.

She was large and young and friendly and gentle voiced, had big brown eyes like the doe Ryder had seen broken beside the highway four miles back up the mountain. He eavesdropped as the woman told another customer she’d lived all her life in Marshall County, drove eighteen miles across the mountain to work everyday. “Not as bad as it sounds,” she said, “I’ve always been here, so I’m used to having to drive some miles to get anywhere.”

Through the window of the cafe, Ryder could see across the street to the river and the mountains rising up green and steep in every direction. While he courted his coffee, several hikers passed, crossing the river at the road, to head up toward Silvermine and Lonesome Mountain. They had big packs. Ryder wondered which of them might keep on walking to Maine. He shielded his napkin with his hand, and sketched a quick loose portrait of the waitress. While he worked on the eyes, a certainty struck him that his subject was pregnant.

She came by as he pocketed his napkin, offered to refill his cup. “Youns need another sip, Darling?”

Ryder, as always, was irritated by waitress familiarity, but didn’t take it personally. He stood, laid some currency on the counter. “No thanks; I’m running late as it is. I have to go to a wedding in Asheton this afternoon.”

“You getting married, are ye?”

“I did that a long time ago. It’s a friend of a friend.”

The doe-eyed waitress busied with another customer as Ryder went out the door, got into his van. When she came over to clear his place and picked up his money, she stared at the two one-hundred dollar bills in her hand. Then she ran to the door, shouted, “Hey, Mister.” But the van was already at the end of the street. She saw the brakelights flare as Ryder turned onto the bridge across the river. When she got back to the counter, the customer asked why she was crying.

#

Getting into Ryder’s apartment after he left was no trouble at all. The door was locked so she simply walked through it. As she expected, the place was devoid of any sort of personal detail. No photos or mementos. Clothes hanging in the closets, work clothes and traveling garb, mostly. A pair of boots and some camping gear piled on the floor. A few books stacked on a far corner of his desk. A lean assortment, a couple of volumes about Appalachian history. An old book on campcraft by Horace Kellett, and one with text by Kellett and photographs by Ted Mura, titled Highland Faces. No fiction, except for two novels, Warwoman and Sorrow Cove, both by a woman named Paulette Coggins. None of the publications were recent. Tacked on the wall over the desk, a hand-drawn map. Her finger traced the convolutions of the Long Broad, falling down between scribbled mountains past Charon’s Crossing to the town of Beaverdam. She found the Circle, and the High Balsam, the Rising and the Alone. Several of the Gates were marked, including Standing Stone. He had remembered then, and now he was forgetting, as he must in Shadow, and he’d been trying to stay his recollections of lost home. She could see him sitting here nights, staring at his map, reciting aloud the names of the places populating it, trying to remember what he’d left out.

She found no mail, no bills. The telephone sat disconnected on a table. She took the directory from underneath the phone and opened it to see the pages carved out in their centers, and the void stuffed with cash. Several newspapers on a chair, among them a copy of the Asheton Citizen, folded behind the social page, Millicent Robbins and Benjamin Drum to Marry.

She felt a fierce glee rising up within her. She let it dissipate without manifesting mischief. So he was still after the boy, trailing him across times and worlds, from one Stream to another. And now, he was closing in on his quarry. It would not do for Ryder to find himself on his own, unprepared. He required her supervision, and if necessary, intervention.

#

Twelve miles past the spot where the Corvette launched into oblivion, the van approached another pull-off. The restless and rowdy dogs whined and yelped as they pawed at the rear door. Ryder pulled over, cut his engine and got out of the van, walked around and opened the rear door to let the dogs run. They immediately plunged down the slope and disappeared into the tall brush along the river below. Ryder stood watching the river until the dogs were beyond hearing. He waited long enough to be convinced his passengers didn’t mean to return, then walked back toward his van. A young woman beneath a luxurious tumult of fiery red hair sat in the passenger seat. The hair falling down around her face covered her shoulders but not much else. Except for her abundant mane, she was naked.

Ryder recognized her this time. The sight of her brought back memories that had escaped him and some he wished had stayed forgot. He stood with his hands on the door, appreciating the wanton display of her person as much as he was vexed by her intrusion into his day. She sat very still, hands in her lap, her head leaning slightly to one side, smiling at him like a delighted child would do. When there was no more to see, Ryder sighed, opened the door and slid behind the wheel.

“Hello again, Mathilda,” he said, as casually as if they were meeting in a bar after a day at the office.

“Hello,” she sang. “I see you’re still at your game.”

Ryder shook his head, turned his key and the engine caught and rumbled between them. “The game keeps changing. It’s hard to know.” He looked in his mirror, checked through his window, and steered the van out onto the road again.

“Did you get my note?” Mathilda asked.

A family in a station wagon met them and passed, the children all waving as they swept by. Ryder glanced at Mathilda. She had somehow put herself inside a long gray shimmer of a dress, which covered without concealing down to her bare toes. “I thought…” he began.

Her laugh confounded just as much as the last time they met, stunning and musical as a fairy spell. She pulled her feet up to the seat and wrapped her arms around her knees and lay down her head against them, as she smirked at him. “Oh, yes, you thought it was from the Flyer, I’m sure. She’s the boy’s now. That’s why you’re after him, isn’t it? Chasing your own tail like a bored puppy.”

It irritated Ryder as much as ever that no secrets were safe from this sprite of a being. She only asked questions when she already held the answers. He strove mightily to sound pleasant and conversational, “He isn’t a boy any more. Why aren’t you back in Laurel tending your Stone?”

Mathilda didn’t laugh when she spoke again. The tears trailing down her face astonished and uneased him. “Don’t you know?” Her voice faltered. “The Stone is broken and Laurel is falling.”

Mathilda told Ryder then what she knew about their former place. He heard it all, asked no questions as they rode more miles up the river in a silence that yielded neither consolation nor revelation. After some unreckoned time passed, Mathilda asked, “Why do you want to go to the wedding?”

Ryder couldn’t believe the fairy had asked him a question not wrapped around a riddle. “I hope to find out when I get there. He’s marrying some woman named Millicent.”

Mathilda’s laugh filled the van like a shower of bells. “There are a lot of Millicents in Shadow. Were you invited to this wedding?”

Ryder pretended to concentrate on the road ahead, tried to keep anger out of his voice, “Millicent is the Flyer’s name. He’s joining himself to a Millicent. Do you think that a coincidence? And no, I’m not invited. I’ve only seen him a couple of times in Shadow and that was years past. He thinks I am a ghost in his garden and a drunk in the road. He wouldn’t know me if I walked in there and shook his hand.”

The laugh again, Ryder cringed inwardly.

“Except,” Mathilda giggled, “you wear his face.”

“Except,” Ryder couldn’t banish the exasperation from his voice, “he wears my face, not to mention my old name from Laurel. What’s the significance of that? I’m sure you know.”

The fairy looked serious again, almost as serious as when she told him about the disasters in Laurel. “You share a lot more in common with Benjamin Drum than you ever guessed. It will take some time for explaining, but you need to know all of it before you meet him. The wedding isn’t important.”

They passed a sign warning travelers that they were only nine miles from Asheton. Ahead loomed a larger sign, painted wood with a cartoon silhouette of a man in overalls carrying a jug, and poorly-painted letters proclaiming ‘Grandpa’s Family Campground’.

“Stop here!” Mathilda shouted in his ear, her shrill voice ringing in his head.

Ryder stared his question at her.

“You must. Please.”

Ryder had never in his long acquaintance with this fairy ever heard her beg. He pulled the van into the yard before the campground office and rested his hands on the steering wheel, regarding the ridiculous sign. “Well, I’ve stopped, Mathilda. What do I do now?”

He hadn’t seen her pull her wand from the flaming cumulus around her face. She reached across, tapped him lightly with it on his left hand, the one short a finger. “Sleep,” she said.

To be continued-

Next week, the photographer has breakfast with his about-to-be wife and gets acquainted with his new assistant.

Walk in hope-

-henry