The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

OMPHALOS Livia Llewellyn

Vacation doesn’t begin when Father pulls the Volkswagen camper out of the driveway, and speeds through the sleepy Tacoma streets toward Narrows Bridge. It doesn’t begin on the long stretches of Route 16 through Gig Harbor, Port Orchard, and Bremerton, your twin brother Jaime fast asleep beside you on the warm back seat, his dark blond hair falling over his eyes. It doesn’t begin with the hasty lunch at the small restaurant outside Poulsbo, where your father converses with the worn folds of the triple-A map as your mother slips the receipt into a carefully labeled, accordioned envelope. 16 whittles down to 3, blossoms into 104 as the camper crosses Hood Canal onto the Olympic Peninsula, and still your vacation does not begin. Discovery Bay, Sequim, Dungeness: all the feral playgrounds of vacations and summers past: no. It is in Port Angeles, under a storm-whipped sky, against the backdrop of Canada-bound ferries gorging their wide, toothless mouths on rivers of slow-moving cars, when Father turns away from your mother, thin-lipped and tearful from the forced confession that another envelope holding four passports sits on the quiet kitchen counter back in Tacoma. You roll your eyes. Why do they go to such trouble of pretense? Oh, yes: for the neighbors. For the pastor, for colleagues and relatives, for all the strangers and passers-by who wouldn’t understand, who want to hear only the normal. Father sees the look on your face, and takes you aside as his large flat thumb rubs against your cotton-clad arm in that old familiar way, that way you’ve known all of your fifteen long and lonely years, the way that always sends your mind into the flat black void. Old Spice tickles your nose, and you rub the itch away as Jaime scowls, the color fading from his perfect face like the sun.

“Don’t worry, June-Bug. I know a place. Better than Victoria. No distractions, no tourists. Where there’s nothing at all. You know the place. You’ve been there, before. It’s where you always go.” He places his calloused finger at the center of your forehead, and you almost piss yourself in fear: does he know?

“Where we can — you know.”

Your mother takes Jamie aside, her fingers sliding around his slender waist as she spins her own version of the same tale. Father winks and parts his lips, coffee and cigarette breath drifting across your face as he whispers in your ear.

“Be alone.”

Vacation has begun.

Salt ocean air and the cries of gulls recede as Father guides the camper through Port Angeles. You wish you could stay, walk through the postcard-pretty gingerbread-housed streets with Jaime, shop for expensive knick-knacks you don’t need, daydream of a life you’ll never have. Father drives on. Office buildings and shopping districts give slow way to industrial parks and oversized construction sheds surrounded by rusting bulldozers and dump trucks. None of it looks permanent, not even the highway. 101 lengthens like overworked taffy into a worn, three-lane patchwork of blacktop and tar. Campers and flat-beds, station wagons and Airstreams all whoosh across its surface, with you and against you. Port into town, town into suburbs, suburbs into the beyond. The sun has returned in vengeance, and all the grey clouds have whipped away over the waters, following the ferry you were never meant to take.

“Once we’re off the highway, we can follow the logging roads,” Father shouts over the roaring wind as he steers the camper down the Olympic Highway. He sounds excited, almost giddy. “They’ll take us deep into the Park, past the usual campgrounds and tourist spots, past the Ranger Stations, right into the heart of the forest. And then, once the logging roads have ended — well, look at the map. Just see how far we can go.”

You stare at the silhouette of his head, dark against the dirty brilliance of the window shield. One calloused hand rests on the steering wheel, one hand on your mother’s shoulder. His fingers play with the gold hoop at her ear, visible under the short pixie cut of grey-brown hair. She turns to him, her cheek rising as she smiles. They remind you of how you and Jamie must look together: siblings, alike and in love, always together. Father and you used to look like that. Now you and he look different. You clench your jaw, look away, look down.

“It’s not even noon, we should be able to make it to Lake Mills by this afternoon—”

Your mother interrupts him. “That far? We’ll never make it to Windy Arm by then, it’s too far.” So that’s your destination. You’ve been there before, you know how much she loves the lake, the floating, abandoned logs, the placid humming of birds.

“Not this time, remember? We’re taking Hot Springs Road over to the logging roads. Tomorrow we’ll start out early, and we should be there by sundown.”

“But there’s nothing — wait, isn’t Hot Springs closed? Or parts of it? I thought we going down Hurricane Ridge.” Your mother looks confused. Evidently, they didn’t make all the vacation plans together. Interesting.

“It’s still drivable, and there won’t be any traffic — that’s the point. To get away from everyone. Don’t worry.”

“Aren’t we going back home?” Jaime asks. “Where are we going?”

“We’re not going all the way to the end of Hot Springs, anyway,” Father continues over Jamie. “I told you we’re taking the logging roads, they go deeper into the mountains. We already mapped this all out, last week.”

“We didn’t discuss this.” Your mother has put on her “we need to speak in private” voice.

“Take a look at the map. June has it,” Father says.

“I don’t need to look at the map, I know where we planned on going. I mean, this is ridiculous — where in heaven’s name do you think you’re taking us to?”

“I said we’re going all the way.” His hand slides away from her shoulder, back to the wheel.

“All the way to where?”

“All the way to the end.”

The map Father gave you to hold is an ordinary one, a rectangular sheaf of thick paper that unfolds into a table-sized version of your state. Jamie scoots closer to you as you struggle with the folds, his free hand resting light on your bare thigh, just below your shorts. His hands are large and gentle, like the paws of a young German Shepherd. You move your forehead close, until your bangs mingle with his, and together you stare down at the state you were born in, and all its familiar nooks and crevices. In the upper corner is your small city — you trace your route across the water and up the right hand side of the peninsula to Port Angeles, then down. The park and mountains are a blank green mass, and there are no roads to be seen.

You lift the edge of the map that rests on your legs, and dark markings well up from the other side. “Turn it over to the other side,” you say.

“Just a minute.” He holds his side tight, so you lift your edge up as you lower your head, peering. The other side of the paper is the enlarged, fang-shaped expanse of the Olympic Mountain Range. Small lines, yellow and pink and dotted and straight, fan around and around an ocean devoid of the symbols of cartography, where even the logging roads have not thrust themselves into. You can see where your father has circled small points throughout various squares, connecting each circle with steady blue dashes that form a line. Underneath his lines, you see the lavender ink of your mother’s hand, a curving line that follows Whiskey Road to its end just before Windy Arm. Over all those lines, though, over all those imagined journeys, someone has drawn another road, another way to the interior of the park. It criss-crosses back and forth, overlapping the forests like a net until it ends at the edges of a perfect circle — several perfect circles, in fact, one inside another inside another, like a three-lane road. Like a cage. The circles encloses nothing — nothing you can see on the map, anyway, because nothing is in the center except mountains and snow, nothing the mapmakers thought worth drawing, nothing they could see. The circles enclose only a single word:

Someone has printed it in the naked center of the brown-inked circles, across the mountains you’ve only ever seen as if in a dream, as smoky grey ridges floating far above the neat rooftops of your little neighborhood, hundreds of miles away. Letters of brown, dark brown like dried-up scratches of blood — not Father’s handwriting, and not your mother’s.

“Do you see that?” you ask Jamie. “Did you write that?”

“Write what?” He’s still on the other side of the state. He doesn’t see anything. He doesn’t care.

You brush a fingertip onto the word. It feels warm, and a bit ridged. “Help me,” you whisper to it, even though you’re not sure to who or what you’re speaking, or why. The words come out of your mouth without thought. They are the same words you whisper at night, when Father presses against you, whispering his own indecipherable litany into your ears. Your finger presses down harder against the paper, until it feels you’ll punch a hole all the way through the mountains. “Save me. Take me away. Take it all away.”

The word squirms.

Goosebumps cascade across your skin, a brushfire of premonition. As you lower your edge of the map, Jamie’s fingers clench down onto your thigh. Perhaps he mistakes the prickling heat of your skin for something else. You don’t dissuade him. Under the thick protection of the paper, hidden from your parents’ eyes, your fingers weave through his, soaking up his heat and sweat; and your legs press together, sticking in the roaring heat of engine and sun-soaked wind. Your hand travels onto his thigh, resting at the edge of his shorts where the whorls of your fingertips glide across golden strands of hair, until you feel the start, the beginning of him, silky soft, and begin to rub back and forth, gently. His cock twitches, stiffens, and his breath warms your shoulder in deep bursts, quickening. You know what he loves.

“Do you see where we’re headed to?” Father asks.

Hidden and unseen, Jamie’s hand returns the favor, traveling up your leg. You feel the center of yourself unclench, just a little. Just enough. Raising the map again, you peek at the word. After all these years and so many silent pleas, has something finally heard? Face flush with shock, you bite your lower lip so as not to smile. You stare out the window, eyes hidden behind sticky sunglasses, watching the decayed ends of Port Townsend dribble away into the trees, watching the woods rise up to meet the road, the prickly skin of an ancient beast, slumbering and so very, very ready to awaken.

You want to believe, but you shouldn’t. Belief is an empty promise. Belief just leads back to the void. You shouldn’t want to believe, but you will. This time, just this once, you will.

“Yes,” you say. “Yes, I do.”

The beginning of a journey is always deception. The beginning always appears beautiful, as a mirage. Once you fold the map away, there’s laughter and music, jokes and gentle pinches, and the heady anticipation of traveling someplace new, all of you together, a family like any other family in the world. Sunlight drenches the windows and you laugh at the sight — so many prisms and prickles of color, glitter-balling the camper’s dull brown interior into a jewelry box. After half an hour, your mother unbuckles her seat belt and makes her way across the porta-potty, wedged in between the small refrigerator and the tiny bench with its fake leather cushions that hide the bulk of the food.

“Something to eat — a snack? We had lunch so early.” Your mother raises the folding table up, fixing the single leg to the camper’s linoleum floor, then pulls sandwiches and small boxes of juice from the fridge, passing them up to Father. She’s a good wife, attentive. Jamie drinks a Coke, wiping beads of sweat from its bright red sides onto his t-shirt. You pick at your bread, rolling it into hard balls before popping them into your mouth. The camper is traveling at a slight incline, and the right side of the highway peels away, revealing sloping hills that form the eastern edge of the Peninsula. You think of the ferry, of all that cool, wide ocean, waters without end, in which all things are hidden, in which all things can be contained.

“Can we stop?” You point to a small grocery stand and gas station coming up ahead to the right, overlooking a rest stop and lookout point.

Your mother points to the porta-potty. “You need to go?”

“No.” You feel yourself recoil. “No, I just — I just thought we could stop for a while. I’m getting a little queasy.” It’s true, you get carsick, sometimes. You think of the curved slope beyond the rest stop, and how easy it’d be to slip over the rail guard as you pretend to be sick. You think of the water, so close you can almost see it. “While we can.”

Your father doesn’t slow the camper. “Sorry, June-Bug. We need to keep going.”

You nod your head. “Sure. No problem.” You think about what you’ve just said, and decide that it’s not a lie. Running away would mean you didn’t really believe that the word moved, that something out there in the mountains is weaving its way to you, some beautiful, dangerous god coming to save the queen. You want to stay. Just this once, you want to see your miracle.

Outside, 101 splits off, part of it flying off and up the coast to Neah Bay as the newly-formed 112. Now the landscape morphs, too, sloughing off yet more buildings and houses. A certain raw, ugly quality descends all around. The highway curves away, and with it, the store, the land. You’re going in a different direction now. No use to think of ferries and guard rails anymore.

Jamie pulls out a deck of cards. They fan out and snap back into themselves as he shuffles them again and again. Your mother leans back against the small bench, watching him deal the cards. Go Fish — their favorite game. You’ve never liked games. You don’t believe in luck or chance. You believe in fate.

Reaching to the floor, you pull a fat book out of your backpack, and turn the pages in an absentminded haze, staring at nothing as words and illustrations flow past. Ignore her, you say, ignore the two small feet, bare and crowned with nails painted a pretty coral, that appear between you and Jaime, and nestle in cozy repose at his thigh. You press yourself against the edge of the seat, forehead flat against the window, legs clamped tight, ignoring the low hum of their voices calling out the cards. It’s not as if you hate your mother — you have long talks with her sometimes, she’s a good listener. And she’s never touched you, never like that. Sometimes, she even comes to your defense, when you can’t — just can’t do it anymore, when you’re tired or sick or just need a break, just need an evening to yourself, to sit in your pink-ruffled bedroom and pretend you’re a normal girl in a normal world. Still, though. She’s your mother, not your friend, and Jamie is her favorite, just as you are Father’s favorite. Sometimes you wonder if Jamie might love her more than you. That would kill you. It would be like, she’s rejecting one half of you for the other, without any real reason why.

“Where did you get the map?” Why did you ask her that? You curse yourself silently. Always too curious, always wanting to know everything, and more. Like father, like daughter.

Your mother looks up from her cards, mouth pursed. Clearly she doesn’t like being reminded of the map, and doesn’t want to answer — or she’s going to answer, but she’s buying a bit of time. It’s her little not-so-secret trick, her way of rebelling. Jamie does the same. Like mother, like son.

“It’s just a regular map,” she finally says, adjusting her hand as she speaks. “I don’t know where your father got it. Maybe the car dealership? Or the 76 station on Bridgeport.” She lays down a card, as you wait for the shoe to drop. Your mother is often more predictable than she’d care to admit.

“Why do you want to know?” she asks.

“Never mind.”

Your mother sighs. “You know I hate it when you say that. Why did you ask?”

Jamie looks up from his cards. “She wants to know who drew the third map and the circle on it.”

“The third what?”

“Jamie.” Your voice is calm, but the biting pinch of your fingers at his thigh tells him what he needs to know. “Nothing, I meant nothing,” Jamie says, but it’s too late, he’s said too much.

“Did you draw on the map?” Your mother’s voice is hushed, conspiratorial. Together, your heads lean toward each other, voices dropping so that Father won’t hear.

“No, I swear. I thought someone had drawn on it. That’s all. That Father drew over it, where we were going to go, and someone else drew another map over those two.”

“Juney, there’s no third map — there’s no second map. What are you talking about?”

“I—”

Now you’re the one who’s said too much. She places her cards on the table, and holds out one hand. The diamond on her wedding ring catches the light, hurling tiny rainbow dots across your face. “Let me see it.” Her voice is low. You realize she’s not just angry but afraid, and it unsettles you. Your mother is often cautious, but never afraid.

“I didn’t write on it, I swear.”

“I hope to God you didn’t. He’ll kill you—”

“What’s going on back there?” Father, up in the driver’s seat.

“Nothing, honey. We’re playing Go Fish.” She motions for the map. You pull it out from underneath your jacket, and hand it over. Your mother opens it up, spreading it across the table. Cards flutter to the floor. She stares down, hands aloft as if physically shaping her question with the uplift of her palms. From where you sit, you can see what she sees, upside down. You look up at the front of the camper. Father’s sea green eyes stare back from the mirror, watching.

“Sonavubitch,” she whispers.

“What do you see?” I don’t want to know, but I have to know. What map does she see?

“June.” She throws up her hands, as if exasperated. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I see my map, which obviously your Father can’t see because he obviously is ignoring everything we’ve been planning for the last two months, but there is no second or third set of drawings here.”

“How can you not see that?” You know you see the lines, drawn over her directions and Father’s. You know you see the word in the circular void. It’s right there, on the paper, right in front of her. And, you know you don’t want her to see, you want it to be your destination, the secret place only you can travel to. But you place a trembling finger onto the middle of the circle, just below the word. You have to confirm it, that your map is unseen, safe. “All these new roads, leading to this circle in the middle, leading to this word—”

Your mother raises her hand, and your voice trails away. She stares down, her brow furrowing as if studying for a test. You want to believe that the small ticks and movements of her lips, her eyelids, are the tiny cracks of the truth, seeping up from the paper and through her skin. Her fingers move just above the lines, and then away, as if deflected from the void in the middle. She moves her fingers again, her eyes following as she touches the paper. Again, deflection, and confusion drawing lazy strokes across her face, as her fingers slide somewhere north. Relief flares inside you, prickly cold, followed by hot triumph. She does not see your map. She sees the route and destination only meant for her.

“June, honey.” She leans back, thrusting the map toward as if anxious to be rid of it. “It’s just coffee stains. It’s a stain from the bottom of a coffee cup. See how it’s shaped? Probably from your father’s thermos.”

“Yeah, you’re right. I didn’t see it until now.”

“All that fuss for nothing. What were you talking about, anyway — what, did you think it was some mysterious, magical treasure map?” She laughs in that light, infectious tone you loathe so much — although, the way she rubs at the small blue vein in her right temple reveals a hidden side to her mood. “Come on, now. You’re not five anymore, you’re too old for this.”

“Ah,” you say, cheeks burning with sudden, slow anger. She’s done this before, playing games with you. Long ago, like when she’d hide drawings you’d made and replace them with white paper, only to slide them out of nowhere at the last minute, when you’d worked yourself into an ecstatic frenzy of conspiracies about intervening angels or gods erasing what you’d drawn. You’d forgotten about that part of her. You’d forgotten about that part of yourself.

“It just looked like,” you grasp for an explanation, “it just looked like you’d drawn your own map of our vacation, and Father drew another, and the circles looked — I mean, look…” The explanation fades.

“Sweetie, calm down.” Your mother tousles your hair, cropped like hers. She appears bemused now, with only a touch of concern. She doesn’t believe in miracles or the divine, and sometimes she thinks you’re a bit slow. “Honestly. You read too much into everything, and you get so overexcited. That’s your father’s fault, not yours. All those damn books he gives you—”

“I’m sorry,” you stutter. “It was stupid, I know — it’s so bright in here. The sun.”

“Are you feeling alright?” She places a cool palm against your forehead. She does love you, as best she can, in her own way. “Maybe we should have stopped. Do you want some water? Let me get you some water.”

“Don’t tell Father,” you say, touching her arm with more than a little urgency. She pats your hand, then squeezes it.

“Of course.” A flicker of fear crosses her face again. “Absolutely not.”

As your mother busies herself in the fridge with the tiny ice cube tray, you fold the map back up, turning it around as you collapse it into itself. Your hand brushes the surface, casually, and you close your eyes. The paper is smooth to your touch. It’s just our secret, the circle, you tell yourself. It’s between us, between me and the void. That’s what you call it: the void, that black, all-enveloping place you go to whenever Father appears in your doorway, the place where you don’t have to think or remember or be. After all these years of traveling to it, perhaps now it is coming to you.

“Are you ok?” Jamie touches your arm. You shrug.

“I’m fine. Help me pick up the cards. I want to play Old Maid.”

“June, it’s getting dark. How can you read that — scoot your chair over here before you hurt your eyes.”

“It’s ok. I can read it just fine,” you lie.

If there’s a sun left in the sky, you can’t see it from the makeshift campsite, a small flat spot Father found just off the one of the dead-ended offshoots of Hot Springs Road. He says that according to the map — his version of it — there’s a lake nearby, but it’s hidden from view — wherever it is Father has parked the camper, you get no sense of water or sloping hills, of the space a lake carves for itself out of hilly land. The earth is hard and flat, and piles of stripped logs lie in jumbled heaps at the edges, as thought matchsticks tossed by a giant. The woods here seems weak and tired, as if it never quite recovered from whatever culling happened decades ago. You sit on a collapsible camp stool, watching Father set up a small table for the Coleman stove and lanterns. No fire tonight, this time. Father says there isn’t time, they have to be to bed early and up early. “It’s ready,” he says to your mother, as he lights the small stove. “I’ll be back in a bit.” He turns and walks off with the lighter, disappearing between tree trunks and the sickly tangle of ferns. His job is finished, and he’s off to smoke a cigarette or two, an ill-kept secret no one in the family is supposed to notice. There are so many other secrets to keep track of, he can afford to let slip one. Besides, it calms him down. You note that the map is in his back pocket, sticking out like a small paper flag.

Your mother has become thin-lipped and subdued over the past hour — you know what she’s thinking, even if she doesn’t. No matter where the family goes, a vacation for all of you is never a vacation for her, only the usual cooking and serving and cleaning without any of the comforts of home. Jamie knows how she feels, and as usual, he helps her. Beef stew and canned green beans tonight, and store-bought rolls with margarine. Chocolate pudding cups for dessert. If she was in the mood, she’d make drop biscuits from the box, or cornbread. She’s not in the mood tonight. It’s more than just cooking, this time. Father and your mother are divided over the vacation, over the destination. This is a first for them, and a first for you. Usually they are united in all things, as you and Jamie are, because so much is always at stake for all of you, because everything must be done in secret, away from the eyes of those who wouldn’t understand, which is everyone in the world. But things are off-balance, tonight. You stare up at the trees, trying to see past them to the heart of the mountains. Your mother couldn’t see the brown ink lines, the map within the map. Does he? You think you know the answer. Otherwise, why would he ignore his own vacation plans, his own map and dotted blue lines, why would he take you all here?

“June.” Your mother, her voice clipped and tired. “Go get your father. Dinner’s ready.”

You stand up, looking around. Nothing but trees. It’s peaceful here without him, brooding over everyone. You don’t see the need to change that.

“I don’t know where he went…”

“June, please. It’s been a long day. Just go get him.”

“I don’t even know where he went to!”

“Just follow the smoke,” Jamie says.

“Hush!” Your mother slaps at his arm, a playful smile on her face. For a moment, her dour mood has lifted. You use it, slipping into the woods unnoticed. You’ll follow the smoke only as far as you need to, before going in the opposite direction. He can come back on his own.

Five feet in, and the darkness seals up the space behind you, as though the cozy camper and the soft lights never existed at all. Up above, the sky is still blue, but starless and without light. There are no paths or trails here, only ground thick with fallen pine needles and cones, and large ferns that brush at your face as you push through them. No trace of smoke is in the air, you smell only wet earth and pitch and leaves. You should have grabbed a flashlight, but you’ve never been afraid of the dark before, so you push forward. After several thick strands of webbing lash your face, you raise your arm, holding the book up high before you like a shield. It’s a crumbling cloth-bound volume Father gave you years ago, for your seventh birthday. Mythology of Yore. Mythology of your what? you’d joked when you unwrapped the book. Father stopped smiling: later, when you started reading, you stopped smiling as well. The stories are old, very old, and deliciously cruel, and when you touch the illustrations, red and silver bleeds off onto your skin. “This will explain everything,” Father had said when he gave it to you. “This will explain why we do what we do, and why it is not wrong. Why it is as old as mankind itself, beautiful, divine.”

He must not have read all the stories in the book.

“You know where we’re going, don’t you?” Father appears from behind the trees, and you let out a small gasp as you lower the book. He’s barely visible in the gloom, the red tip of the cigarette the only real part of him you can fix your sight on. Yet, you can tell, even in the dark, even from a distance, that some strange mood has seized him, morphing his face into a mask. He wants something, he’s seeking something. You remember what he told you on the piers at Port Angeles. Now is not the time for a smart-ass reply.

“We’re going to the mountains. Into the center of the Olympics, like you said.”

“We’re going into the center.” Smoke billows from his mouth as he speaks, and he crushes the remains of the cigarette with his finger and thumb, carefully so as not to create stray sparks. You watch him slip the butt into his front pocket — Father never approved of littering — and his hand is upon your throat, lifting you up and back into the solid wall of a tree. The book tumbles from your grasp, away into the dense brush. It’s gone, you’ll never find it in the dark. Once again, he places a finger at the center of your forehead. Small coughs erupt from your lips, wet with spittle, as you struggle to breathe, as your feet slide up and down the rough bark, trying to find some place to come to rest.

“And where are you going, where do you go?” Father asks. His voice is a whispered snarl, hard and tight. What little air your lungs clutch at is tinged with warm smoke and rank sweat. “Where do you go when I’m with you? Where are you when the light leaves your eyes and all that darkness pools out of them as you beg me to take you away? What do you see?”

“I — don’t — know.” The words are little more than croaks.

“You don’t know? You don’t know? I treat you like goddess, like a queen, and you slip away like some backstabbing little whore?”

“No — never.”

The finger at your forehead disappears, and you hear the rustle of paper. The map. “Is it here? Oh yes, I see it. I don’t know how you did it, when you drew it, but there it is. I drew my road to where I wanted to go, and she drew hers, and then your little web appeared, shitting itself all over our destinations. Except, I couldn’t figure out how to get my road to the center of your map, to that nice big space inside you, no matter how many roads there were, no matter how many times the lines crossed. I always lost the way to the center of your little Tootsie Pop. And it’s just a fucking piece of paper!”

“Guess — it’s not — you stupid — fuck.”

The map slams against your face, and there’s a crunch. Blood streams from your nose, and pain explodes like lightning through your skull. And then Father wrenches your shorts and panties down and off your legs in a single motion and his zipper is down and your legs up as he parts them wide and he’s against you and inside you in a single painful thrust, his cock spearing you against the tree like a butterfly.

For a moment he doesn’t move, only breathes hard against your face as the branches rustle overhead, catching the evening wind. It’s true night now, and there is no moon and there are no stars. What is he waiting for? You realize the map is still stuck against your face, stuck in the sweat and tears and blood. You move, listening to the rustling of paper so close you’re your open eyes, your open eyes that see only liquid primordial night, and he begins to thrust. Long, hard strokes slamming your back and head against the rough bark, in and out, again, again, and you can feel it but you can’t help it but you can feel it the old familiar vortex of pleasure forming somewhere deep down inside your traitorous thrusting body and you would give anything to not go there to not feel that and the words form silent in your blood-filled mouth take me away take it away take it all away, and even though you can’t see, you feel it, you feel the blood-brown word expanding, burning through the layers of map, burning through bone and skin. Somewhere, a chain is being pulled, a hole unplugged, and your muscles slacken as the dark of night whorls around, thickens and deepens, as the flat black void opens wide to take you back in, even as something begins to spill out—

The map disappears, and the hand comes down hard against your cheek. You’re back.

“I go everywhere with you. Everywhere! Do you hear me?” Your father’s grip tightens, and you spasm against the tree, struggling as he pins your arms back against the trunk with his hands. Tears and snot drip down your face, plop onto your breasts.

“I go everywhere,” he says. “You don’t get to leave me behind. And the next time, the next time? — I go with you. The next time, I see everything you see.” He leans in, kissing you hard as he thrusts deeper, harder, his tongue pushing into your mouth, filling it up until all you taste is him, all you breath is the air from his lungs, all you feel is what he feels, what he wants.

He lets go.

You fall, choking on your spit and pain, into the roots of the tree, your shorts and panties bunched at your feet. Father walks away, thin branches snapping under his feet as he zips up his pants. Then the metal rasp of his lighter, followed by the solitary blue-orange flame singing the tobacco into red. “Tomorrow night, when we get there, I’ll be with you. All the way to the end.” A moment of silence as he takes a deep drag, and exhales. You stay huddled in the knotted arms of the tree, hand at your throat, afraid to breath.

“Dinner’s waiting, June-Bug. Hurry up.” He walks away, crashing and cursing as he tries to find his way. It would be funny, if — When you no longer hear the sound of his footsteps, you crawl to your feet, clinging to the bark of the tree for support, then pull your shorts back on with trembling hands. The map is stuck to the bottom of your right sandal. You wipe the blood and dirt off with great care, then fold it small enough to tuck into your panties, small enough to not be noticed by anyone. He’s done for the night, and you’re not touching Jamie again tonight, not with your mother’s smell all over him.

Off to your left, that’s where the campsite was supposed to be, except, you don’t know what left is anymore, or where it used to be. You walk forward, toes curled and back hunched as if worried that a single noise will bring him flying out of the darkness at you again. Your sandals slide over blacktop, flat and smooth. Overhead, the stars, and a sudden feeling of space and distance: the road. It’s the same road Father drove down two hours ago, before he turned off onto the dirt road into the woods. You turn, looking back into the woods. All of the trees look the same, you can’t tell which one Father pressed you against. All you know is that when he first did, you and he were not at the side of the road, there was no road at all. You closed your eyes and you traveled. You escaped, but you took him with you, and only this far.

Is this what he was waiting for?

How much farther can you go?

Dinner is a dream. Your mother pinches your nose and wipes the blood away without a word, then gives you cold water with miniature ice cubes from the tiny freezer, saying nothing as she hands you the glass. She must know what father did. Maybe she made him do it. Father has two beers, and your mother doesn’t hesitate in bringing them to him. He’s mad at her, which is when he drinks. She’s subservient when she’s mad, which makes him angrier, because he knows she’s just pretending. Jamie’s eyes look a bit puffy, not enough for anyone except you to notice. Your mother did or said something to him, that he didn’t like. He touches his bangs constantly, keeps his head down. You eat your beef stew in small bites, careful to grind it down to a paste your tender throat can swallow. It all tastes the same. And as you force down your meal, you realize that all the things you know about your world, the normal things, aren’t the right things. They aren’t the things that are going to save you. You think of the book, lonely and cold, heroes and gods already festering in the damp of the undergrowth.

But the map… The map is folded into a tiny square, shoved deep into your underwear. It’s your map now, it’s not his or hers, he threw it away, and besides, it was never his map anyway. It was never his journey, his destination. He had his own, and besides — isn’t what he gets from you enough? Does he have to go everywhere, see everything? Is there no place left for you and you alone? You bite down on the lip of the plastic tumbler. There’s nothing you can do, really. It’s not your fight, what they fight about. You, like any good map, can only point any number of ways. But if he wants to see everything, he’s going to be surprised. Everything is not where you’re headed. Everything is never where you go.

After dinner, it’s quick to washing up and then to bed. You and Jamie each get five minutes alone in the camper to change before clambering up into the camper’s upper bed. Father and your mother argue quietly in the front of the camper, behind a small plaid curtain your mother sewed. I can’t believe you lost the map, she says. We don’t need a map, I know where we are, and I’ll know when we get there, he says. That doesn’t even make sense, she says. We agreed to go to Windy Arm, we agreed to go where I wanted to go for once, she says. Wherever we go, we go together, he says. We do it for the family. That’s how Mom and Dad taught us, it’s how we survive. We do it as one.

Jamie and you lay on your sides in a shallow imitation of spooning, his arm draped across your waist. At first you didn’t want him touching you, afraid they’d stick their heads up into the pop-top for a last good-night — you’ve long suspected that they know what you and Jamie do, what you are to each other. Still. You don’t need them to have it confirmed. Finally, the lights click out: the night is so dark in contrast, for a second it seems bright as noon. You slide your hand across Jamie’s, bring it up to between your breasts, as if to shield your heart. Your breath is shallow. Father and your mother zip themselves into their sleeping bags, and the camper settles into the ground, little creaks and ticks sounding out like metal insects. You wait. And, after what seems like half the night, gentle snores and deep breathing fill the small space. They’re asleep. Nothing more will be needed of you and your brother tonight.

Your lips part, and you close your eyes, letting anxiety sieve out through the netting into the cool night air. Still, though, you don’t move a muscle, and neither does Jamie. Let them fall sleep peacefully below, undisturbed. Let them lay together, like they should. Sometimes, after the school day was over, Jamie would whisk you into one of the crumbling old portable classrooms, unused for years since the new additions were build. There in the soft of the chalky air, he’d press you against the plaster walls, his body fitting neatly against and into yours. It was so different than with Father, it felt so good, so right. There was no need for the void with Jamie, no need to escape, because you wanted to be there, you wanted to remember every sigh, every moan. It’s like Jamie was made for you, made to fit you, made to taste and smell exactly how you like. He was made for you, though, he was a part of you once, inside your mother’s womb. Making love to him was the only way you could love yourself.

Jamie’s hand opens, slides down around your right breast, cupping it gently. You feel protected, safe. And yet. And yet.

Another hour passes, and another. Jamie drifts off, you can hear it in the rhythm of his breath, feel it in the dead weight of his limbs. Below, Father and your mother are lost in sleep. Do you dare? Even as your mind asks the question, your body is answering, your hands slipping up to zip, inch by careful inch, the hard mesh that surrounds the pop-top of the camper. Jamie stirs, turns over and away. You stop, listening. Somewhere in the woods, a branch cracks, sharp like a gunshot, and silky rustling follows. Here, in this part of the world, the moon is of little use to you, and the stars are nothing. Here nothing can penetrate the blanket of wood and branch and needles. You move forward, sticking your face outside. You see nothing. You are blind as a worm.

The zipper moves again, and now your entire upper body is exposed to the night. If you try to climb down the camper’s slick sides, you’ll only fall, and that will mean noise, unnatural human noise, the kind that wakens other humans. This is the most you can do, the most you can be free. Hidden at the bottom of your sleeping bag is the map. Your toes grasp the folds of paper, and you bend your knees up, reaching down at the same time. Slowly the map travels into your hands. You hold it out into the open air, outside in the world, your finger brushing across the bumpy ridges of the circles and into the center, where it once again rests on that strange, lone word. Is this truly the place you travel toward, when Father visits you in the night? Do you really hold the map to that invisible place, and if so, how and when did you draw it? Or was it you? Perhaps there is more in the flat black void than sublime nothingness. You move your finger back and forth, coaxing the letters to respond.

The brownish ink, invisible in the night, leaps against the whorls of your fingertip, as if tracing a route, an escape from the center and into the world. The paper crackles, and you stiffen, holding your breath in. Again, you listen. Silence. For a wild second, you imagine Father and your mother, awake and perched at the edge of the bunk, pupils wide and oily-black as owls as they stare down at you and your sleeping twin, younger versions of themselves, when they were brother and sister, before they were husband and wife. You ignoring the cold fear as you send your plea, your command, out into the mountains, wherever in the night they are. Save me. Take me away.

But nothing happens, and your arms become stiff and cold. Soft hooting punctuates the silence, followed by another passage of the wind through the ferns and trees. Resisting the temptation to sigh, you curl your arms back into the camper, and fumble for the zipper. As you close the mesh screen, the wind picks up, and small cracks sound throughout the clearing. It’s a familiar sound, but you can’t place it. Something flaps against the screen then whooshes away: startled, you shiver and slide back from the netting, images of insects and bats filling your mind. Jamie stirs, turns away. Another object hits the mesh and slides away — this time you recognize the sound for what it is. Stretching one hand out, you press against the mesh as hard as possible, fingers outstretched, wiggling as if coaxing. When the page hits the flat of your hand, you grab and reel it back in. The wind dies down, and the flapping of loose paper fades. What’s left of the book is gone for good, scattered into the sky. You take the page and insert it into the folds of the map. You fall into restless sleep, paper clutched against your chest like a rag doll. In the early morning before everyone else awakens, when the sky is the color of ash, you’ll wake up and study the pen and ink drawing of an ancient maelstrom, its nebulous center leading somewhere you cannot see.

The road Father drives down while you fall asleep is smooth as silk compared to the road you wake up to. It had been beautiful before — unbroken lanes of blacktop, with perfect rows of evergreens lining each side, wildflowers of crimson red and white crowding at their roots. The magazine slipping from your hands, you’d grabbed a pillow from the storage area behind the bench and snuggled against the window, bare feet resting flat against Jamie’s legs. You slept hard, so hard you didn’t feel the vibration in your bones as the road shifted to gravel and dirt, pitted with potholes and large rocks. You didn’t see the forest fall away, dissolve into ragged sweeps of ravaged land, green only in the brush and grasses sprouting around stumps of long-felled trees. You didn’t see the land itself fall away, until all that remained of the road was a miserly ledge, barely wide enough for any car, clinging to the steep sides of barren hills. You only woke up when you heard your mother screaming.

“Don’t ask,” Jamie says, before you can. He’s sitting on the porta-potty, ashen-faced and shoulders hunched over, methodically placing one green grape after another in his mouth. You rub your eyes, trying to make sense of the ugly, unexpected landscape. To your right, the hill rises in a steep incline, tree stumps clinging for their lives to the dirt like severed hands. To your left: nothing. There is more desolation in the distance, but right beside the camper, there is nothing but jagged space.

The camper lurches down and shoots up, sending books and backpacks sliding across the floor. Your mother screams again. “Turn around, goddammit!” Tears stain her face in shining streaks.

“I can’t turn around,” Father shouts. “There’s nowhere to turn!”

“Where are we?”

Jamie shrugs. “A logging road, somewhere. It’s not on the map. Dad says it is, but—” he shrugs again, and shoves several more grapes in his mouth, barely chewing before they’re gone. He always eats mindlessly when he’s stressed out.

“When did we leave the real road?”

“I don’t know — an hour ago? It didn’t get really bad until about twenty minutes ago. I can’t believe you slept through all that. I thought you were dead.” The camper lurches again, swaying wildly. Jamie stares out the window, a grape at his lip. “Yeah, I don’t want to talk anymore. I just want to be quiet for a while, ok? I need to not — I need to be quiet.”

“Yeah. Sure.” Reaching for the grapes, you start to rise, and Jamie shoots out his hand to block you. “Stop, ok? Just — don’t. Fucking. Move. Sit down.” The camper lurches again, and for a wild second, you get the impression that there is nothing under the wheels, that you’re all about to topple over and fall. The shriek is out of your mouth before you can stop it.

“Goddammit.” Father, at the wheel. “Sit down, June, both of you sit down and shut up!” Your mother covers her face with her hands. You’ve never seen her cry. You’ve never seen her lose control of her emotions, or of Father. They’ve always done things as one. Now she’s sobbing like a child. Father turns back to you, motioning.

“Come up here.”

“I—” You’re paralyzed.

“Look at the road—” your mother shrieks. Father’s hand lashes out like a snake. You can’t hear the slap of his hand over the roar of gravel and rock under spinning wheels.

“June, get up here now. Jamie, get off the goddamn toilet and help your mother to the back. Everybody, now!”

Jamie stands up, legs shaking, and grabs your mother’s hand as she sidles out of the passenger seat. Mascara coats her face in wet streaks, except for where Father slapped it away, and her lipstick has bled around the edges, making her mouth voracious and wide. Jamie helps her across the porta-potty, while you stand to the side, fingernails biting into your palms. There’ll be raw red crescents in the skin when you finally unclench your hands.

“Come on,” Father snaps, and you crawl across the toilet, hitting your head against the edge of the refrigerator as the camper slams over a log. Father curses under his breath, but doesn’t slow down. Sweat the color of dust dribbles down his face, collects at the throat of his t-shirt and under his arms. If his jaw was clenched any tighter, his teeth would break. “Sit down. Open up the map.”

Up here, in your mother’s seat, you see now how bad it is. The road before you is barely there, crumbling on the right side back into the mountain, gouged with giant potholes — more like depressions where the road simply dropped away. No guard rails or tree line, just a straight drop hundreds of yards down, the kind of fall the camper would never survive. And the road curves, so steep and sharp that you can’t see more than ten or twenty yards ahead, assuming there’s even a road ten or twenty yards beyond that. No wonder your mother was hysterical. Father’s going to kill you all.

“June, the map.”

“You threw it away in the woods, I don’t have it—”

“Never mind the fucking seatbelt. Take out the fucking map!”

Reaching into your blouse, you pull out the warm square of paper.

“Open it up.”

You do as he says, refolding it so that only the folds showing the Olympic Peninsula show. It fits perfectly in your lap, the land and the void.

“Tell me where we are.”

“Ok, I—” Your finger traces over the hand-drawn roads, so many of the brown-red roads that start and end with each other as abrupt as squares of netting. Below them, somewhere, is Father’s dotted blue ink line, along with your mother’s wishful scrawl of lavender road. Frantic, you move your fingernail along Father’s road, following, following — You lost it. No: it’s simply gone.

“Where are we, June-Bug?” Father manages a tight smile. “How much further do we have to go? I’m counting on you to help us.”

“I’m looking — it’s hard to see, it’s like a furnace up here.” Panic sharpens your voice. Again, you find the start of Father’s road, and you follow, follow — it disappears. And it’s not like it simply stops, and you can see the end. The road is there and then it’s not, and your gaze is somewhere else on the map, on another map altogether, on the one that was meant for you.

“I’m sorry.” The words barely leave your dry mouth. “I just can’t find it. It’s not on here. I’m looking and I see all these lines but there aren’t any logging roads, and I can’t find the road you drew—”

Father puts his foot on the brake, and the camper grinds to a hard halt. When he cuts the engine, the silence almost makes you groan with pleasure. Only the ticking of the engine now, and the whisper of wind and rolling gravel outside. Father places a hand on your shoulder. It sits there like some cancerous growth, hot and heavy, pressing down until the bones grind together. “You can do better than that,” he says. “You know what map I’m talking about.” He leans toward you, his eyes still on the ever-thinning road ahead. “Look at your map, June-Bug. I want you to tell me where we are on your map, not mine. Because, every very time I try to read it, I can’t quite make out the roads. You know what I mean. Read your map, and tell me where we are. How far we are from the center.”

You look back at your mother. She holds Jamie in her arms. His face rests at her throat, lips on her skin, pressing gently, whispering words you cannot hear because they aren’t meant for you. Those beautiful large hands, around her waist and thighs. He didn’t love you most, after all.

“June-Bug.” Father stares at you, and you return his glance. There can’t be any lying now. He already knows, and, you’re so tired. You just want this all to be done.

“It’s not my map. I didn’t draw it, you know. I don’t know how it got there.”

“I know. We didn’t draw those other maps, either, your mother and me.”

“What?” You lean back in the seat, astonished and angry as you stare at the limp paper. You wanted divine intervention for yourself, not for him, because you were the one who needed it, not him. Did the void betray you? “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Do you know how it got there?”

“I don’t know. I got it at a gas station, I didn’t open it till I got home, and there it was.” He stares at the dusty windshield, beads of sweat matting his brown-grey hair. “I think — I think they appeared because that’s where we wanted to go more than anywhere else in the world; and I think something in the world heard us and showed us the way. To a place where we can be ourselves without anyone else’s eyes on us, to where we can be free to do and act as we please.”

As animals, you think. As monsters. But you remember Jamie in the same breath, curving over you in the quiet corners of the school. Like father, like daughter. Animal, monster, too.

“Why can you see my map? Why can’t we both see yours?”

“Because your map, that’s where we both most want to go now. Because I love you, and I want to be with you. We need to go there together.”

“All of us, together?”

Father’s hand moves from your shoulder, gliding over your breast as he lowers it onto your thigh, the fingers rubbing hard against your sore crotch. “Us, together. Just the two of us. That’s how it’s supposed to be.”

The sun boils the fabric of the seat, searing your skin. You stare out your window at all the desolation, feeling his hand, working, working. You barely see a thing in the glare, but you don’t need to. You don’t need to see anything at all. The cool, black edges of the void nip at the edges of your conscious, small nudges that leave smears of black in your vision, as though ink is trickling into your tears.

“I know the way to the center,” you say.

“Good girl.” Father leans in, kissing you on the cheek, almost chaste in his touch. “Good girl.”

The engines roar, and the wheels whine as Father shifts into first, sending the camper rattling back up the small ledge. It’s not that much further, you tell him, just a few more corners to round, and we’ll be at the top, and the road will even out. You stare at the map as you speak, fingers moving back and forth as they trace the roads to the nothingness in the middle. Another corner comes and goes, and another, and you can see the anger in his face start to rise again, anger and impatience because he thinks no he knows that you lie, and you move your hand to his shoulder and squeeze it, then place it on his thigh. He smiles, takes your wrist and moves it in and down, wrenching the small bones in his haste. Repulsion fills your throat as you slide your hand past the folds of fabric, but you grab tight, grab as you slide to the edge of your seat, place your other hand on the wheel and your foot on the gas, down hard. And the road becomes a blur, the cliff is a blur and the screams and Father’s fist against your face are mere blurs, and only the momentary silence under the wheels before the sharp weightless flip of the entire world strikes you as having any substance or weight, just the right weight and terror to send you into the flat black void, into the nothingness of the center, as you whisper to Father and Jamie and your mother and to anything else that can hear:

Can you see everything now?

You open your eyes.

You stand in an open field on a hill. Beyond this hill, more hills — small mountains bristling with dark green trees. Beyond those, the Olympics rise up from one end of the horizon to the other — endless, imperious, cold and white, their jagged peaks tearing through passing clouds like tissue. Until now, you never thought they were quite real. You never knew anything so colossal, so beautiful, could actually exist. Behind them, the sun is lowering, and long shadows are creeping toward you and the hill. The light is wrong: thin and pale. The air is cool, almost cold. It doesn’t feel like summer anymore. It doesn’t feel like June.

Both your hands are covered in clotted scars and blood — your right hand clutches a long, pitted bone. Many of your nails are gone, the rest have grown out hideous and sharp. It takes a moment to recognize the filthy strips hanging from your body as the remains of your pajamas. Your skin is deep blue: hands, arms, torso, legs, feet. Dye from the small septic tank in the porta-potty. You smell like shit and death.

An animal-like grunt sounds out. Startled, you turn. To your right, a small herd of elk graze on the short grass. They are large and thick-furred, the males with antlers high as tree branches. They pay no attention to you. To your left sits the camper, monstrously dented and mangled, windows shattered, sliding side door long gone. Inside, it’s dark. There’s no movement in or around it, save for several birds perched on the pop-top. Scattered all around you are bits of clothes, empty cans and boxes, plastic bags, with a larger pile by the front tire of the camper, like a large nest. The hill. The road. The fall. The camper should not be here. You should not be here, alive. This is not the remains of the logging road. This is the interior. This is the center. But of what, you do not know.

Turning to the camper again, you wait.

You wait for Jamie. You wait for anyone. You wait until the sun begins to lower behind the range. Waves of nausea roll through you, sending drool and bile spilling out from between your lips, and your muscles spasm and twitch. But you are not ill, and you are not hungry, and you hold a long clean bone in your hand. You raise the bone to your face. It’s been scratched and scoured clean.

You know they will not appear. You know where they’ve gone.

As you lower your hand, you notice how rounded your belly is, like a little pillow, and how your naval sticks out like a round fat tongue. You’re thin but not starved. Bending over slightly, you study your inner thighs: they, of all places on you that should be caked with blood, are clean. “Oh.” It’s the only word you can form. You know what this means, and you now know you’ve been on this mountainside longer than just three months. The tight, blue skin of your stomach is dotted with a lattice-work of markings as intricate as lace. You touch the blood, a roadmap of brown ink — it’s the map, you realize, it’s your map made flesh. You run your finger in a spiral around to your naval, circled three times in dried blood. Press at the soft nub of flesh, the place that still connects you to your mother’s womb, and to all the women before her, to the beginning of time, the first woman, the first womb. It was always going to be like this. It has to end like this. It cannot begin again.

Behind the mountains, the clouds and skies deepen into vivid pinks and purples, rich and wonderful. A wind barrels down, sharp and stiff: the herd raise their heads from the grass in a single movement, then shoot off down the slope. You smell the change in the air, see the shimmering dark gather around the high peaks as the first thread of lightning splits down and away. Shivering, you sit down in the grass, balancing the bone at the crest of your mounded stomach, and carefully, firmly, run your wrists across the sharpened edges. And the sunset begins its slow dissolve, while lightning dances around the mountaintops, as all light fades from the world, and you start to cry. It’s not a mirage, you see it: a separate, circular mass of black flowing up from the heart of the mountains, up and over the peaks like a tidal wave. Clouds and lighting curve toward the darkness, sliding into the mouth of the maelstrom and away. Near the edges of the whorl, uprooted trees begin to swarm into the air like locusts, disappearing with the earth itself. The ground beneath you shifts, and the entire hill jerks forward: the camper topples over and rolls out of sight. This is it. This is it. Raising your arms high, you inhale as much as your cracked ribs allow, and shout as hard as you can.

Take me. Save me.

It’s not very loud, or hard, and your broken voice can barely be heard. But it doesn’t matter. It’s widening, consuming everything, and it doesn’t even care or know that you exist because this is chaos, this is nothing and not nothing, and this is where you want to go more than anyplace else at all, because inside that, there is no sorrow, there is no pain. Only everything you ever were, waiting to be reborn.

And while you can still feel, you feel joy.

Within your belly, movement — a deep watery ping of a push, like someone beating down against a drum, over and over. You cover the mound of flesh with your weeping arms, and crouch before the rising winds. Everything’s going, this time. Nothing will return. Cherry red ribbons cover the blue stains and black scars, erase the circles, the roads. No new map this time. Only a river rushing into itself, only a girl striking out on her own, with no directions left behind that anyone can follow.

Which is as it should be. Where a girl goes, the world is not meant to know.