From the Indie Side (19 page)

On the final
approach to the stadium I hit congestion. Pedestrians milled
everywhere, the density of the crowd increasing every few meters
until I was forced to a crawl. Hands banged on the window, faces
pressed against the glass trying to see who was inside. Unless they
were directly ahead of me, most people were just dim shapes, but I
remembered what Al had said. “Keep on going.” A baby would have
crawled faster than I moved, but I never took my foot completely
off the gas, and occasionally someone slapped the car in anger or
shouted out as I went by. I was beginning to think it would never
end, when I reached a proper roadblock, with at least a dozen
uniformed policemen in a line. Some of them held neon lights and
were trying to guide people into different queues. Behind them was
the stadium, a dark shadow looming over us all, only just visible
thanks to a sliver of moonlight in front of a few black clouds. I
stopped and rolled down the window.

“Where are you
heading, ma’am?”

“I think my
family might be in there, looking for me,” I blurted. I was tapping
nervously on the steering wheel, impatient, my eyes flickering
across faces as they passed, searching for those I knew.

“Okay then,” he
said. “You can leave the vehicle here. We might have to commandeer
it, I’m afraid. There are only a few older ones still working.”

“That’s fine.”
I jumped down from the cab. “Where do I go?”

“Start there.”
He pointed to an enormous crowd. “There’s someone taking names and
details. They’ll be able to tell you if your family has checked
in.”

I walked away,
and at first I didn’t register the shouts behind me. First one, and
then more and more.

I turned to see
they had the truck’s rear doors open. I watched as people began to
scatter.

My lungs were
on fire as I ran back, needing to know. I stood helplessly next to
a stadium full of survivors and stared in horror at the bulky
packages, and the numbers on a small digital clock face.

I
remembered his words.
I knew how to lay a bomb, too.

Most of my mind
closed off, except for one small, stubborn part, which stayed open
long enough to echo the countdown on the display.

Five.

Four.

Three.

Two.

No darkness
anymore. Only light.

And
then,
gone
.

Jeez, short
stories are tough! When I signed up to write this one, I had
forgotten what tricky little labyrinths they can be, until I had
spent a few weeks chasing after my original idea—a woman separated
from her family by a bomb—trying to pin down exactly what was going
on. It took a while for me to realize my first plan wouldn’t work:
I was trying to cram a novel’s worth of action into a few thousand
words. Finally, I focused in on the pivotal moment when Beatrice’s
life changes, and I was off.

At the moment
I’m in a personal reading crisis: I have a four-year-old and a
four-month-old and often the only books I get close to have
hippopotamuses going to school or green sheep getting up to
mischief. But during the first half of the year, while my eldest
was at kindergarten and my big round belly made the perfect book
rest, I crammed in as much reading as I could. Among my chosen
reads there were quite a few tagged with labels of dystopian,
suspense, or thriller. How I love these novels that are paced and
plotted like roller coasters, with characters who live in
completely disparate worlds yet feel like close friends (or
occasionally sworn enemies!).

I was
pregnant with my eldest daughter when I signed my first book
contract, so my professional writing career has developed in tandem
with the joys and challenges of parenthood. Somehow, amid the chaos
I have managed to publish three novels—
Come Back to Me
,
Beneath the Shadows
, and
Shallow Breath
—and I’m working on a fourth. It’s no surprise that I write
what I love, so all my books are pace-driven suspense stories of
personal dilemmas. However, while they have that in common, the
stories themselves are very different. It’s great to be challenged
and experiment with form and content to keep the writing fresh, and
being part of this wonderful anthology has provided a brilliant
platform for me to do just that. I’m very grateful to everyone
involved in
From the Indie Side
.

You can
find out more about me and my books at
www.sarafoster.com.au
 or
www.facebook.com/sarafosterwriter
.

The boat glides
through black water, the oar hitting aluminum with a hollow sound.
If anyone were to ask, I would say that I’m heading for a secret
place, to an island located in the middle of a shallow river with
no name. I would say that this is the kind of thing a curious girl
will do—take a boat through the dark night of a Louisiana swamp. As
I row, I recall a beautiful boy with pale skin and circles under
his eyes who came into the café where I work and slipped me his
business card. On the front was a picture of a swampy island, a
clearing, and a campfire. On the back of the card was a map. Now,
rumor has it that very few people are ever issued invites to the
secret island, and those who are invited visit and never return. So
why am I going?

This question I cannot answer, but here I am,
dressed in unfamiliar clothes: skinny black jeans, a black T-shirt,
black boots, and purple hair. A Goth Nancy Drew. I see lights and
hear music before I hit land. And then the boat is sliding up the
grassy bank to come to a jerking halt.

I step out and drag the craft from the
water.

“You came.”

It’s the pale boy, the one who gave me the
card, and he’s appeared out of nowhere, as if he’s been watching
for me, waiting for me. I think about the handgun I keep in my
boot, and the mace in my pocket. I’m not sure it will be enough to
protect me. Maybe I need a cross. And holy water. And garlic. Ha
ha.

He reaches out and takes my hand. “I’ll lead
the way. It’s hard to see.”

That’s the truth. I don’t know how he can
tell where we’re going, because I can’t see what’s underfoot, but I
let him lead me toward the music and the lights.

This is a dream. I suddenly realize that this
is a dream. Of course. It makes no sense that I’ve come here by
myself. It makes no sense that I’ve come at all. And a gun. Where
did I get a gun? So it has to be a dream. And since it’s a dream, I
can let it unfold without question.

Yes. Now I remember. At the café. He handed
me the business card. I held it, and I regarded the image. The
island. And as I looked, the fire began to move. And when I turned
the card to examine the map, I was suddenly in the boat, on the
river with no name, heading toward the secret island.

Yes, a dream.

And now the pale boy is holding my hand, and
I am following. Two girls have come to the island before me, and
two girls have vanished. I think this is true. I think this really
happened. Maybe this is a vision quest, a dream that will lead me
to an answer. Maybe later I will tell the police what happened to
the girls.

The pale boy hands me a drink.

“Is this blood?” I ask, lifting the glass and
trying to examine the contents in the light falling from a house
with tall windows.

He laughs. “It’s wine. Don’t tell me you
believe all that vampire stuff.”

“Well…”

“If that’s what you think, why’d you
come?”

I could hardy say I’d had no choice. I could
hardly tell him this was a dream, because I would then be pointing
out that he wasn’t real. “The business card,” I begin as way of
explanation.

“Did you like that? It wasn’t easy for the
clan to create a doorway card. It’s still in the beta stage, so I
was surprised when I saw you coming across the river. I didn’t know
if it would work. But you’re here. I’m glad.”

I sip the wine and watch him over the edge of
my glass. “Did I have any choice?” I wonder aloud.

“It’s like hypnosis,” he says. “You can’t be
made to do anything you don’t want to do. Which is why I’m extra
surprised to see you. It means you wanted to come. You wanted to
see me.” He smiles, and it doesn’t bother me that the mouth behind
his teeth looks black. Maybe it’s just the light. And it doesn’t
bother me that his skin is cold and as smooth as marble. And it
doesn’t bother me that he smells of moss and mildew and damp earth.
I rather like it. And I like the softness of his voice, and I like
the shimmer of his blond hair, the long length of his legs, the
fragile strength of his arms.

I drink the wine. Even though I know it’s
more than wine, I drink it. Because I know it will open another
door, and that door will take me to a deeper understanding of the
pale boy. I fall through a dark hole, and in that hole our lives
intertwine. We marry, we have sex, we have children born under a
black moon. The pale boy knows me and I know him, and twenty years
unfold in one glass, a road that unrolls in front of me and rolls
up behind me as I walk, every experience ephemeral and
fleeting.

An intrusive sound seeps in. A ring that
indicates an order is up. And suddenly I’m standing in the coffee
shop behind the cash register, and the pale boy is on the other
side of the counter, and I’m holding the business card as if he’s
just given it to me seconds ago. I look at the card. Just a photo
of a campfire. I turn it over. Just a crude map.

“For the jar,” he says.

I look at him blankly.

He nods toward the fishbowl of business
cards.

“Oh.” I drop it inside.

“How often do you have a drawing?” he asks.
And I recall the way his skin felt under my fingertips, and the way
his hair smelled as it fell against my face.

“Every Monday,” I say.

He smiles, and his smile is intimate. As if
he knows me. “Good. I’ll have a new card next week.”

I will never get old. I will never die. These
are the things I know. Before the clan created the secret island,
we had to worry about being killed by our own kind and by the true
humans, but now that we have our secret world, we are finally
safe.

But love.

What about love?

I will always be a sixteen-year-old boy. And
yes, most people, when asked what part of their life they would
like to relive, or what age they would like to be if only they
could go back—they say sixteen. Most people say sixteen.

At sixteen, there is so much promise. At
sixteen, we are on the precipice of our lives. We don’t know what
those lives will hold, but excitement thrums in our veins. For the
unknown. For the magic of the future. And like the true humans, we
want to meet someone special.

We on the secret island don’t consider
ourselves vampires. The V word isn’t allowed here. Vampires are
simply immortals who went rogue. Psychopaths. Sociopaths.

Immortals eat food, for God’s sake. (Although
I have to confess, food on the island is about as tasty as
sawdust.) This is the tragedy of our existence. We fall in love,
but we never age. We don’t have children. We don’t watch those
children grow. We don’t grow old with someone. These are life
experiences that we cannot have.

And so the clan set out to change this.
Sinclair, the genius behind our secret island, came up with a
formula. It involves matter and antimatter and black holes and time
shifts and gates and maybe a bit of magic. I don’t know. Sometimes
I wonder if he just hypnotizes me and makes me think he’s created
the place where I can live a normal life. Where I can grow old and
have children.

But I don’t care.

Because in that place—whether it’s real or
whether it’s something Sinclair has planted in my head—it
seems
real. It seems real times a hundred. And in that place
of magic created by Sinclair… in that place, my love lives and
breathes…and works in a coffee shop.

And like a man with an illness, like a man
with an addiction, I count the moments and breaths until I can go
back there again. Until I can see her again.

Of course there’s always the worry, the
terrible fear that it won’t work this time. That the gate won’t
open. That I won’t be able to cross into her world. Or worse, that
I will go through the gate and I will walk down a street that seems
too perfect, and she won’t be there. She won’t be where she was
when I last visited.