Bard pulled out his map and studied the surrounding landscape.
Nothing matched.
There was no crossroads like this anywhere on the map. There should only have been one Route 4, not two of them crossing each other.
He looked around again, trying to find anything resembling where he had been the night before.
Nothing.
After a while, Bard decided the best thing he could do was explore. He would head down one of the roads for a few miles, see if he recognized anything, then come back and try another direction until he had some sense of where he was.
Then he remembered the compass.
Bard rifled through the glove box.
Sure enough, there it was. The compass his dad had given him almost twenty years ago. Nothing fancy. Walmart. Made in China, probably.
He opened it.
The needle was spinning.
Bard stared at it.
Probably not because it's broken.
He returned the compass to the glove box and started driving.
It wasn't long before the landscape began opening around him.
Bard slowed.
Valle Grande.
“No.”
There was no way.
He knew these roads. He knew roughly where he'd been the night before, and there was no conceivable way he could have driven from that crossroads to Valle Grande this quickly.
Bard looked back down the road.
He turned around.
Ten minutes passed.
No crossroads.
He should have reached it already.
Bard kept driving.
Nothing.
He drove farther, turned around again, and searched the same stretch of road a second time.
Still nothing.
The crossroads was gone.
“Come on.”
Bard drove back and forth until he was certain he hadn't simply missed it. There was no intersection. No sign. Nothing resembling the place he'd just come from.
Eventually, he gave up.
Exhaustion psychosis.
That was the best explanation he had at the moment.
Not a particularly good one.
Bard started making his way back toward camp, thinking through everything that had happened.
The underground structure. The cavern. The pendant. The strange garage with the blue light. The impossible road. His car somehow moved, cleaned, and filled with gas.
And the timing.
The timing didn't add up either.
He needed to backtrack. Figure out what the fuck had happened and where. Now he had several different points he needed to return to, except somehow he'd managed to lose the place where the breadcrumbs ended.
Fine.
Go back to where they began.
He passed the dead coyote again on his way toward camp.
Bard pulled out his laptop and began dictating.
“Research underground structures of archaeological significance. Underground complex. Bone bat pendant. Garage with blue light. Road maps around Route 4. Crossroads.”
He paused.
“Figure out what the fuck happened to the car.”
That seemed worth its own entry.
About an hour later, Bard was back at his camper.
It was getting close to midday.
He unloaded his supplies, changed his clothes, drank a bottle of water, and ate something quickly while looking over the bulletin board.
Then he gathered his laptop, notes, clippings, and the pendant.
“Last leg.”
When he got back from the library, he was going to sleep.
For a moment, Bard considered getting a hotel room in Santa Fe.
He shook his head.
“That’s like all my money.”
The drive into Santa Fe was surprisingly pleasant.
The sky had become overcast, but it wasn't terribly hot. Bard found himself enjoying the road despite the exhaustion.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
The full tank helped.
Every few minutes he glanced at the gauge.
Somebody, or something, had apparently cleaned his car, moved it, and filled it with gas.
Or teleported it through some kind of temporal paradox.
Either way, free gas.
Bard stopped for coffee and a cheap breakfast sandwich before heading to the library.
He sat quietly in the parking lot for a few minutes, sipping the coffee.
Strangely, he felt more energized than he had in months.
There had been a time several years ago when he'd intentionally held a vigil once or twice a year, staying awake through the night. He remembered how strangely energized he sometimes felt afterward.
Maybe there was something to that.
Or maybe he was about to crash spectacularly.
Bard finished his coffee, threw the cup away, and went inside.
He looked somewhat presentable.
Clean enough, anyway.
Black jeans. Red T-shirt.
The scratches covering his face and arms from the previous night made him look like he'd recently escaped a battlefield, but there wasn't much he could do about that.
Bard settled at a computer and unpacked his laptop, clippings, and notes.
Then he removed the pendant.
First subject.
The bat.
As far as Bard could determine from the internet and the references available to him, the pendant was indeed bone. He found several remarkably similar artifacts among pre-Columbian archaeological remains from South America, particularly around Peru.
“That’s kind of weird.”
He thought about the year he'd spent traveling down there.
He didn't remember seeing shamans wearing anything quite like it, nor did he remember bat symbolism being especially prominent in the things he'd encountered.
That didn't mean much.
Bard kept digging.
He searched for possible ritual uses, magical associations, religious symbolism, anything that might explain why someone had been buried with something like this around their neck.
One idea kept appearing in different forms.
Seeing what couldn't normally be seen.
Bats navigated through darkness. Echolocation gave them awareness of things hidden from ordinary sight.
Bard circled one phrase in his notes.
Seeing the unseen.
He printed several pages.
Then he picked up the pendant and held it toward the light.
He stared into the tiny sockets of the bat's skeletal face.
“What is that?”
Bard turned.
A pale woman with black hair sat at a desk behind him. She wore an elegant black lace dress.
“I'm not really sure yet,” Bard said. “Something I found recently. I was actually trying to figure that out.”
She leaned slightly closer.
“Do you mind if I look at it?”
Bard hesitated.
“Yeah. Sure.”
He held it out.
The woman took the pendant and studied it.
Almost immediately, a shiver passed through her.
Her eyes closed.
For a moment, she held the little bone bat between both hands.
Then her eyes opened and she gave it back.
“That feels weird.”
Bard took it from her.
“Yeah?”
“Where did you say you found it?”
Bard looked at her.
That was a considerably more complicated question than she probably realized.
After the last few days, he also wasn't entirely sure who he was willing to trust.
“It's kind of a long story,” he said. “I'm not really sure where to begin.”
She looked at the clipboard beside him. Then the printouts. Then the collection of books and notes spread across the desk.
“If you want to tell me about it when you're done, I'd like to hear it. I'm curious what you've got going on here.”
Bard studied her for another moment.
“My name's Calypso, by the way.”
“Calypso?”
“Cal.”
“Nice to meet you.”
She offered her hand.
Bard shook it.
“Mucho gusto. Bard Hill.”
He gestured toward the mess covering the desk.
“I've still got a bunch of stuff I need to get through. Might take me a couple hours.”
“Oh, no worries. I get it. I used to be in college and stuff too.”
Her eyes moved over the books.
“You have a really interesting major.”
“Yeah. I'm majorly interested in the majority of this stuff.”
Calypso looked at him.
Bard wasn't entirely sure whether that had been a joke.
“Do you want to meet outside in a couple hours?” he asked.
“Actually, we could meet for lunch. Do you like sushi?”
“Yeah. That sounds fine. You have somewhere in mind?”
“Have you ever been to Izanami?”
“A long time ago. Not to eat. I built tables there several years ago.”
“Oh. Weird. I don't know if that makes it awkward for you, then. I was actually thinking about going up there for lunch anyway.”
“No, that's fine. I've been meaning to eat there sometime.”
“Two-thirty-ish?”
“Sounds good.”
“Looking forward to it.”
Calypso didn't quite smile as she left.
But she made a strange little expression that looked like she was trying not to.
Bard realized his own face had been doing something increasingly stupid throughout most of the conversation. At some point he'd started pursing his lips, and by the end he'd practically been talking through an O-shaped mouth.
He probably looked like a buffoon.
Whatever.
Next subject.
The underground complex of dungeons and caverns…
Bard searched geological records, archaeological listings, maps, cave systems, and anything else he could find relating to the area around Route 4.
Nothing.
No underground structure.
No enormous cavern.
No massive openings in the mountains.
Nothing that remotely resembled what he'd just climbed out of.
Eventually, he moved on.
The missing boy.
That search took considerably longer.
For a while, Bard found almost nothing. Then finally a newspaper article named him.
Alex Fernandez.
“Okay.”
He kept digging.
Several weeks before Alex disappeared, the boy and his family had apparently visited a hospital after Alex suffered a series of unusual injuries. Bruises. Contusions. The family had denied domestic violence or that anyone in the household had caused them.
Bard leaned closer to the screen.
That was interesting.
From an outsider's perspective, somebody had gotten to the kid before he disappeared.
He tried to remember exactly when the story about the horse flying into the sky had begun circulating.
Close.
Very close.
Another detail bothered him.
For some reason, the family had gone to a hospital in Española.
That seemed like a strange choice considering where they lived.
Bard scratched his head.
For approximately thirty seconds, he contemplated impersonating an FBI agent and calling the hospital.
Creative solution.
Bad solution.
He abandoned that idea.
Instead, he spent another half hour researching the hospital and found names for several staff members who might have been working around the time Alex was treated.
Not much else.
Even if he called, HIPAA meant nobody was likely to tell him anything useful.
Unless he could get the parents to talk.
That might be the only option left.
Bard leaned back.
Then he remembered Ernie's phone.
He pulled out his notes and found the message again.
Get to the temple before they bring the boy there.
Bard stared at the words.
He had been at the temple.
“Oh, fuck.”
He'd actually found it.
And then he'd lost it.
Finding that place again had just become considerably more important.
But first, apparently, he was meeting this woman.
Then he was going home and sleeping before he tried doing anything else remotely stupid.
Bard packed his things and headed outside.
It took him a minute to remember exactly where he was supposed to be going.
Then he got into the Civic and headed toward the road leading up toward the Santa Fe Ski Basin.
He turned onto Artist Road.
The beginning of the drive wasn't especially pleasant. Construction trucks filled the air with exhaust, and Bard spent several minutes trapped behind them.
Eventually, they peeled away.
The road opened.
Trees thickened around him as he climbed higher into the mountains.
Finally, Bard reached the Japanese spa and restaurant where he was supposed to meet Calypso.
He drove up the steep hill past Japanese-style buildings and railings, then found a place to park near a series of trails disappearing into the woods.
A small group of crows hopped around inside a nearby bush.
Bard watched them for a moment.
Then he got out.
He climbed the last steep stretch toward the restaurant.
Before he reached it, he could hear water.
The entrance sat among flowers and carefully maintained gardens. Beside the building, an artificial waterfall poured over stone. Elaborately engineered wind chimes produced soft, peaceful notes in the mountain air.
Bard reached for the door.
It opened before he touched it.
“Arigato.” Bard said.
A small-framed Japanese man with gray hair held the door for him.
“Please, come this way.”
He led Bard inside to the host desk.
“Will you be dining alone today, sir?”
“No,” Bard said.
He glanced toward the entrance.
“I’m meeting a woman.”