Chapter One
Stuart McClintock got no warning. He was driving down a winding mountain road about to cross into Nower County, Kentucky, when the road in front of him exploded.
KaBoom!
Blew up!
The sound was defeating and the slap of concussion that struck his car just about put him in the ditch.
And it was the road that blew up. Not something on the road because there was nothing on the road. There were no cars ahead of him, had hardly been any traffic at all since he got off the interstate. And he had not met a single car, pickup truck, cattle truck or rickshaw coming his way in the past half hour.
It was the road itself that blew up, like there was a landmine under the pavement.
Stuart hadn’t been going fast, unaccustomed as he was to driving on mountain roads like these, so when he laid on the brake, the sudden stop didn’t send him plummeting over an embankment and off into nowhere.
The squalling protest of screeching tires filled his ears and the smell of burning rubber filled his nostrils.
When the car finally came to a complete stop, he settled back into the seat, might have bruises from where he’d slammed into the seatbelt harness that had kept him from flying through the windshield. He’d turned off the driver’s side airbag when he got into the car — was skittish about an accidental ignition in a car he wasn’t familiar with. Maybe that’d been a mistake.
He sat for a moment, his heart hammering a hole in his chest as he watched the plume of dirt, hunks of asphalt, and rocks begin to settle slowly back down to earth.
Was this some kind of missile? From a rocket-launcher of some kind? Artillery fire from … where? Fort Knox? He wasn’t completely sure where Fort Knox was, except that it was near Louisville — which was hundreds of miles away. He’d taken the ridiculously early flight out of Chicago into Lexington instead of Louisville this morning for that very reason, and though he wasn’t completely certain of the gold depository’s location in relation to where he was now sitting, he was reasonably certain that a misfire from one of their howitzers would not make it all the way into the Appalachian Mountains of Eastern Kentucky.
Mortar fire? He supposed it was possible. He had not served in the military, so had no point of reference except the movies — somebody yelling “incoming round” followed by an explosion. Was this the kind of hole a mortar shell made?
Who’d be firing a mortar at an empty road?
What if he’d been going faster? If he’d been even a few seconds farther down the road he would have been sitting on top of the asphalt as it was launched up into the stratosphere.
Was that it?
He began to look around apprehensively. Was somebody trying to blow up a car on the road, saw him coming and set off the charge too soon? Not him specifically. How could he possibly be a target? He’d never met a living soul from Nower County, Kentucky except Charlie. Unless she’d put out a hit on him — and he supposed, given the circumstances, that was indeed possible — nobody even knew he was coming.
So an attempt to blow up a random car was the only logical explanation. Who’d do a thing like that? There were multitudes of idiot lowlifes who got their jollies by throwing things off bridges at random cars below.
This could be that. Except it couldn’t.
Bridge dumpers likely put no more thought and foresight into their mayhem than, “Hey … wanna drop a rock on a car? Heh, heh, heh.” It required no greater sophistication than the ability to open their fingers and let go of a rock and no grander tools than the aforementioned rock.
Whoever did this planned it. This was a purposeful act by somebody who appeared to know his way around an explosive device.
Stuart yanked open his car door and got out, but just stood there by the door, ready to make a hasty retreat if one seemed warranted. There was no vehicle on the road beyond the gaping hole in the asphalt. And he could see nobody — wait, there was a guy standing there on the other side of the hole! How had he not noticed the guy before? He was just standing there all by himself, no vehicle, and he seemed to be as surprised to see Stuart as Stuart was to see him.
The guy was big, lumberjack big, square jaw, blunt features, rugged. Somebody you’d want to have on your side in a bar fight. He had black hair with a white streak like lightning had struck him in the head and left its mark. Dressed in bib overalls with a white tee underneath like maybe he’d just walked off the set of Deliverance.
How had Stuart only just now noticed that the guy was standing there a little way beyond the haze of settling dirt and dust? He must have been there all along, had to have been, so why didn’t Stuart notice him before?
The guy smiled, looked like he was just about to lift his hand and wave, and then he lowered it slowly, like his inclination to be friendly had suddenly and completely left him. His smile drained off his face, and what it left behind was not an expressionless face. He looked confused and then frightened. Frightened turned to scared, scared turned into terrified and the man suddenly whirled around and bolted down the middle of the road, just ran blindly away from the hole in what five minutes ago had been solid asphalt.
The man stumbled over his own feet and fell, immediately rolled over onto his back and rose up on his elbows. His features were blurred by the haze of dust still lingering in the air. Even so, it was impossible to mistake the look of horrified terror there.
He screamed. A sound that Stuart would forever remember as the sound of sheets ripping. It was too high-pitched for a man and yet it matched the look on the guy’s face. The scream went on and on, he appeared to be cowering away from something that was hanging above him. Except there wasn’t anything hanging over him.
Then the thing happened that couldn’t have happened but did. The man appeared to be in a circle of reality that was … shrinking. Like Stuart was looking at him through the closing aperture on a camera, which didn’t open and close like a door but regulated light by making a circular opening wider or closing the circle so small it was only a pin hole.
The circle of reality around the man shrank smaller and smaller.
The sheet-ripping screech the man had been wailing suddenly cut off, as abrupt as turning the handle on a water spigot.
That was because the circle around the man who’d been making the sound had closed up around him and he had … vanished.
Where’d he go? The guy, the one in the road …? Where’d he go?
Stuart literally rubbed his eyes, blinked to clear them, but he couldn’t manage to do anything to make the man … be there.
He’d been lying in the middle of the road and then …
That was cra—!
How could that—?
What was going on here?
Stuart found himself running though he didn’t register anywhere in the higher centers of his brain either the decision to do it or the will to carry it out. He was just running, sprinting to the edge of the … the crater in the road and climbing down into it. The rift stretched in a jagged line from one shoulder of the road to the other, a hole four feet deep, though it had been filled back in to some extent by the cascade of rocks, dirt and chunks of asphalt raining out of the sky.
He clambered over the rocks, heedless of his expensive Italian shoes that had definitely not been designed for such usage. He stumbled, scrambling up out of the hole, went down on one knee and snagged a small rip in his suit pants.
Staggering out over the debris of asphalt chunks and rocks on the pavement beyond the hole, he raced to the spot where the guy …
There was no guy.
Stuart looked around, turned 360 degrees, shading his eyes and looking off into the distance.
Where did he go?
There was not so much as a stand of tall grass anywhere around, and even if the dude could do a hundred meters in under the world record thirteen seconds, he could only have made it to the bushes growing alongside the woods and they weren’t thick enough to hide in.
This was nuts!
Where. Did. He. Go?
Stuart got down low on the spot where the guy’d been lying, looking for … he didn’t know what. Some trace that less than sixty seconds ago a man had been lying in this exact spot … and then he wasn’t.
Magic happened all the time in Charlie’s children’s books, but this was real life, not fantasy. In real life, people didn’t just … vanish.
But this guy had.
Which could not possibly be true. And that could mean only one thing—
Ever rational, logical Stuart McClintock: If he’s not here now, and there’s nowhere he could have gone, then he was never really here at all. Stuart had imagined him.
That was the only logical conclusion to come to, the only reasonable explanation. Only it was a pile of the warm sticky substance you find on the south side of a horse going north.
Stuart was not imagining things. There had been a man standing there. Stuart had seen him, could describe him, all the way down to the white streak in his black hair.
Okay, he was here. Then where’d he go?
Stuart looked around one final time, like maybe the guy was hiding under a rock and Stuart just hadn’t noticed—
The guy hadn’t been there at first.
Now Stuart’s heart kicked into a full gallop.
That’s right. When Stuart first looked up after he stopped the car, looked through the falling debris, there had been nobody on the other side of the road. No car, no truck, no person. The road had been empty.
And then the guy appeared and Stuart just assumed the guy’d been there all along and he just hadn’t noticed him, but when he replayed the surveillance cameras in his brain, there was no sign of anybody on the other side of the road in the beginning.
Now he was getting somewhere. Not only did the man vanish in a puff of smoke — almost literally — but he’d appeared out of one, too.
Appeared. Then vanished.
For one brief, hysterical moment Stuart wondered if they still put crazy people in straitjackets.
Don’t cinch the belts too tight on him, boys, wouldn’t want to wrinkle his suit.
He shook it off, reoriented himself.
Reality check. Somebody had blown a hole in a state road, made it impassable. Needed to get a state road crew out here to put up sawhorses, barriers, or somebody either entering or leaving Nower County was likely to run off into …
The hole in the road was on the county line.
Maybe right smack in the middle of it.
So what did that have to do with anything?
“Done!” He said the word out loud. A verbal acknowledgement that he was not going to chase these lunatic notions around and around in his head. He had better — more important things to do.
And now, on top of the other things he had to do, was the added task of going around this hole in the road. He’d have to find another way to get to 2811 Barber’s Mill Road. He’d picked up a new Kentucky map at that gas station off the interstate. When he’d asked for a map of Nower County and the guy had looked at him like he’d grown a third eye.
“I never had anybody ask me for a map of Nower County. The folks who live there don’t need one, and don’t nobody else ever go there.”
Stuart turned back toward his car on the other side of the hole and noticed the sign set back from the side of the road. What with one thing and another — explosions and magical vanishing people, stuff like that — he hadn’t thought to look for what Charlie’d told him about it.
It was just like she’d described it. On an old, dilapidated sign were the words “WELCOME TO NOWER COUNTY.” But somebody had added letters to the sign with red paint, crudely drawn but definitely readable. There was an “H” between the “W” and the “E” and an additional “E” added to the end of the word. Making Nower County Nowhere County.
After he’d studied the sign for a moment he looked around, and was mildly creeped out by how quiet and empty it felt here, all by himself with no other cars on the road.
He was suddenly in something of a hurry to climb back across the crack in the road and back into his rented red Lexus so he could pull the map out of the glove box and chart a route to Charlie’s mother’s house, different from her simplistic description of how to get there. It’s at the foot of Little Bear Mountain, on Barber’s Mill Road. Just ask anybody.
When he was finally behind the wheel again, he pulled out the map, acknowledging as he did so that he and the map would soon be engaged in mortal combat — Stuart trying to fold it back the way it had been, and the map resisting every such attempt.
He traced with his finger the interstate south and east from Lexington, but after that he got confused by the smaller roads …
Then he noticed it.
County lines and names were in gray superimposed on the topography, and the space occupied by Nower County was visible — between Drayton and Beaufort and Crawford counties. But the name wasn’t there. “Nower County” wasn’t on the map.
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