“Well, shit.” The spear point dropped abruptly earthward. The man leaned comfortably against it, picking at his snaggled teeth with one fingernail and squinting amiably at us. “Sorry to scare you, hon, that’s my mistake. But the whole point of guard duty is to guard, ain’t it, and you can’t be too careful. Why don’t y’all follow me and we’ll get you some hot food and a place to set down. Unless”—and here he gestured toward the gnarled, age-wracked tree just behind us, at the narrow Door nestled in its roots—“there’s anybody likely to come running through after you?”
Samuel and I stared at him in slightly stunned silence, but Jane made a considering sound. “Not immediately, I shouldn’t think.” The revolver had vanished again into her tight-knotted bundle and Bad’s growls had turned to intermittent grumbles. His tail gave the smallest of wags, not indicating friendliness so much as a cessation of open hostilities.
“Well, c’mon, then. Might make it back for dinner if we hustle.” The man turned toward the setting sun, bent to pluck a rusted red bicycle from the tall grass, and began wheeling it down a narrow track. He whistled tunelessly as he walked.
We exchanged a series of looks, ranging from what the hell to at least he’s not trying to kill us anymore, and followed him. We waded across the plain with the last red sunbeams warming our cheeks, driving the frigid Atlantic from our bones. The old man alternated between whistling and chatting, entirely undeterred by our weary, edgy silence.
His name, we learned, was John Solomon Ayers, called Sol by his friends, and he’d been born in Polk County, Tennessee, in the year 1847. He’d joined the 3rd Regiment of the Tennessee Infantry when he was sixteen, deserted at seventeen when he realized he was likely to die miserable and hungry on behalf of some rich cotton grower who wouldn’t give a bent penny for him, and was promptly taken prisoner by the Yanks. He’d spent a few years in a Massachusetts prison before busting out and running for the coast. He’d stumbled into this world and been here ever since.
“And have you been, uh, all alone? Until my father came through?” It would, I felt, explain a few of Solomon’s more eccentric qualities. I pictured him squatting alone in a dirt hovel, whistling to himself, perhaps shunned by the natives… And where were the natives of this world? Were they likely to swoop down on us in a thundering horde? I glanced up at the bare horizon but saw nothing more alarming than a low line of hills and a jumble of sand-colored stones ahead.
Solomon cackled. “Lord, no. Arcadia—that’s what we call it, who knows what it used to be called—is about halfway toward being a proper city these days. Not that I’ve seen many of those. We’re nearly there, now.” No one answered him, but Jane’s face expressed deepest skepticism.
The tumbled stones loomed larger as we walked, growing into massive boulders that leaned against one another at precarious angles. A few birds—eagles, maybe, or hawks, the same shimmering golden color as the feather in Sol’s hair—watched us mistrustfully from their craggy perches. They took flight as we approached, seeming by some trick of the fading light to vanish into the sky.
Solomon led us to a gap between the two largest stones, which formed a shadowed tunnel with a strange, shining curtain strung across it. It was only when we stood before it that I realized it wasn’t fabric at all, but dozens of golden feathers tied and dangling like soft wind chimes. I could see through them to the other side of the standing stones: a few empty hills, endless swaying grasses, the last rose glimmer of the sun as it set. No secret cities.
Solomon leaned his bicycle against the stone and crossed his arms, staring at the feathers as if waiting for something to happen. Bad gave an impatient whine.
“Excuse me, Mr. Ayers,” I began.
“Sol’s fine,” he said absently.
“Right. Um, excuse me, Sol, what are you—” But before I could find a polite way to ask if he was an honest-to-God madman who spent his spare time knitting feathers into curtains, or if he had an actual destination in mind, I heard padding footsteps. They came from the darkness behind the curtain, but there was nothing there except stone and dusty earth—
Until a wide hand swept the feathers aside and a squat woman in a black stovepipe hat stepped out of the empty air and stood before us, arms crossed and eyes narrowed. Jane said a series of words I didn’t recognize, but which I was sure were impolite.
The woman was roundish and brownish, with silver-streaked hair. She wore a collection of clothes just as motley as Solomon’s—including a silver-buttoned tailcoat, pants sewn from burlap, and some sort of bright beaded collar—but somehow contrived to look imposing rather than comical. She glared at each of us in turn with heavy-lidded eyes.
“Guests, Sol?” She said the word guests the way you might say fleas or influenza.
Solomon gave an exaggerated bow. “May I introduce our most esteemed chieftainess—don’t growl at me, darlin’, you know you are—Miss Molly Neptune. Molly, you remember that black fella with the tattoos, name of Julian Scholar? Came through a few years back and mentioned a daughter?” He turned both palms toward me like a fisherman displaying a particularly large catch. “She’s finally come to call.”
Molly Neptune looked only slightly appeased. “I see. And these others?”
Jane lifted her chin. “Are her companions. Charged with keeping her alive and safe.” Companions. See the curve of that C like a pair of outstretched arms? It implied the sort of friends who might slay dragons or go on hopeless quests or swear blood oaths at midnight. I swallowed the urge to fling myself at Jane in gratitude.
Molly ran her tongue over her teeth. “Doesn’t look like you’ve done too good a job, so far,” she observed. “She’s three quarters drowned, half-naked, and banged up all over.” Jane’s jaw tightened, and I tried to pull Samuel’s shirt cuffs lower over the grayish bandaging around my wrist.
The woman sighed. “Well, never let them say Molly Neptune doesn’t keep her word.” And, with a slightly mocking flourish, she drew back the feathered curtain.
The view between the stones—that dull triangular patch of sky and grass—disappeared and was replaced by a confused jumble of shapes. I ducked under Molly’s arm and into the short tunnel, trying to squint the images into focus. Steep stairs rising up hillsides; thatched roofs and clay bricks; a rising murmur of voices.
A city.
I stepped out into a sandstone plaza with my mouth hanging slightly open. The empty hills had been suddenly populated by a messy sprawl of buildings and streets, as if some enormous child had tossed his blocks into the valley and wandered away. Everything—the narrow roads, the walls, the low houses and domed temples—was built of yellow clay and dried grass. It glowed gold in the cooling dusk: a secret El Dorado hidden on the coast of Maine.
Except there was something weirdly dead-looking about it, as if I were standing in the leftover bones of a city rather than the thing itself. Tumbled-down bricks and slumping buildings dotted the hillsides, surrounded by broken statues of winged men and eagle-headed women. In some places gnarled trees had rooted themselves in rotted-thatch roofs, and tufts of grass sprouted in the cracked streets. The fountains were all dry.
A ruin. But not an empty one: children laughed and screeched as they rolled a rubber tire down an alley; laundry zigzagged from window to window on what looked like telegraph wires; greasy cook smoke hung low over the square.
“Welcome to Arcadia, Miss Scholar.” Molly was watching me with a slightly smug expression.
“I—what is this place? Did you build all this?” I gestured a little wildly at the eagle-headed statues, the rows of clay houses. Samuel and Jane had emerged behind us with similar expressions of startled awe.
Molly gave a small shake of her head. “Found it.” A bell clanged twice from somewhere in the city, and she added, “Dinner’s ready. C’mon.”
I trailed after her, feeling like a cross between Alice and Gulliver and a stray cat. Questions buzzed in my skull—if these people didn’t build the city, then who did? And where were they now? And why was everyone dressed like some weird cross between a circus performer and a tramp?—but a heavy, mute exhaustion had fallen over me. It was the weight of a new world pressing against my senses, perhaps, or maybe the half mile of freezing ocean I’d swum across.
