The door told him to touch it. It described the satisfaction of the handle turning beneath his hand. It promised an understanding of the blackness inside him if he pushed it open. It pulsed in him, the hunger, the ascending desire.
He had never wanted anything so badly.
He was in front of it. He didn’t remember crossing the distance, but somehow he had. The door was dark red and carved with roots and knots and crowns. The handle was oily black.
He had come so far from his body that he couldn’t imagine how to even begin going back.
The door needs three to open
Go
Adam crouched motionless, fingers braced against the stone, afraid and desirous.
Somewhere far away, he felt his body getting older.
Adam, go
I can’t, he thought. I’m lost.
“Adam! Adam. Adam Parrish.”
He came to in a fury of pain. His face felt wet; his hand felt wet; his veins felt too full of blood.
Noah’s voice rose. “Why did you cut him so deep!”
“I didn’t measure!” Blue said. “Adam, you jerk, say something.”
Pain made every possible response meaner than it would have been otherwise. Instead, he hissed and rocked himself upright, gripping one hand with the other. His surroundings were slowly representing themselves to him; he’d forgotten that they’d crawled in between these boulders. Noah crouched an inch away, eyes on Adam’s. Blue stood a little bit behind him.
Things were starting to come together. He was very aware of his fingers and mouth and skin and eyes and himself. He couldn’t remember ever being so glad to be Adam Parrish.
His eyes focused on the pink switchblade knife in Blue’s hand.
“You cut me?” he said.
Noah’s shoulders slumped in relief at his voice.
Adam studied his hand. A clean slice marred the back of it. It was bleeding like nobody’s business, but it didn’t hurt badly unless he moved it. The knife must’ve been very sharp.
Noah touched the edge of the wound with his freezing fingers, and Adam slapped him away. He struggled to remember everything the voice had just said, but already it was sliding out of his head like a dream.
Had there even been words? Why did he think there had been words?
“I didn’t know what else to try to get you back,” Blue admitted. “Noah said to cut you.”
He was confused by the switchblade. It seemed to represent a different side of her; a side that he had not thought existed. His brain wearied when he tried to fit it in with the rest of her. “Why did you stop me? What was I doing?”
She said “nothing” at the same time that Noah said “dying.”
“Your face went sort of empty,” she went on. “And then your eyes just … stopped. Blinking? Moving? I tried to get you back.”
“And then you stopped breathing,” Noah said. He slunk to his feet. “I told you. I told you it was a bad idea, and nobody ever listens to me. ‘Oh, we’ll be fine, Noah, you’re such a worrywart’ and next thing you know you’re in some kind of death thrall. Nobody ever says, ‘Noah, you know what you were right thanks for saving my life because being dead would suck.’ They just always —”
“Stop,” Adam interrupted. “I’m trying to remember everything that happened.”
There had been someone important — three — a door — a woman he recognized —
It was fading. Everything except for the terror.
“Next time I’ll let you die,” Blue said. “You forget, Adam, when you’re pulling your special snowflake act, where I grew up. Do you know what the phrase is for when someone helps you during a ritual or a reading? It’s thank you. You shouldn’t have brought us if you wanted to do it alone.”
He remembered this: He had been lost.
Which meant that if he had come alone, he would have been dead now.
“Sorry,” he said. “I was being sort of a dick.”
Noah replied, “We weren’t going to say it.”
“I was,” Blue said.
Then they climbed to the top of the mountain and, as the sun blasted them from above, found the stones Adam had seen in the scrying pool. It took all of their combined strength to shove the rocks just a few bare inches. Adam didn’t know how he would have managed this part without help, either. Possibly he was doing it wrong, and there was a better, more proper magician way.
He left bloody fingerprints on the rock, but there was something satisfying about that.
I was here. I exist. I’m alive, because I bleed.
He hadn’t stopped being thankful for his body. Hello, Adam Parrish’s formerly chapped hands, I’m happy to have you.
They knew the precise moment they’d solved the alignment, because Noah said, “Ah!” and stretched his fingers up to the air. For a few minutes, anyway, he was silhouetted against the livid sky, and there was no difference between him and Blue and Adam. There was nothing to say that he was anything less than fully living.
As the winds buffeted them, Noah slung a comradely arm around Blue’s shoulders and another around Adam’s and pulled them to him. They staggered back toward the trail. Blue’s arm was linked around the back of Noah, and her fingers grabbed Adam’s T-shirt so that they were one creature, a drunken six-legged animal. Adam’s hand was throbbing with the beat of his heart. Probably he was going to bleed to death on the way back down the mountain, but he was okay with that.
Suddenly, with Noah to his side and Blue next to him, three strong, Adam remembered the woman he had seen in the pool.
He knew all at once who she was.
“Blue,” he said. “I saw your mother.”
40
This is one of my favorite places,” Persephone said, tipping her rocking chair to and fro with her bare feet. Her hair cascaded over the arms. “It’s so homey.”
Adam perched on the edge of the rocking chair beside her. He did not much like the place, but he did not say it. She had asked him to meet her here, and she nearly never made the decision of where to meet; she left it up to him, which always felt like a test.
It was a strange old general store of the sort that had died everywhere else but was not uncommon around Henrietta. The outside usually looked like this one: a sweeping, low porch lined with rocking chairs facing the road, a rutted gravel parking lot, signs for bait and cigarettes in the windows. The inside usually held convenience store foods in brands one had never heard of, T-shirts Adam would not wear, fishing supplies, toys from another decade, and the occasional taxidermied deer head. It was a place that Adam, a hick, found to be populated by people he considered even more hickish.