Jay Lake - Last Plane to Heaven

“I’m not worried,” she told the empty sky, over which not even a hawk circled. The sky held no answers.

She slipped a half-eaten Clif Bar from her pocket, which slowly became a three-quarter-eaten Clif Bar before her gag reflex kicked in. Figs, who the hell ever thought figs were a good idea? Addison was eating less each day, which was odd, because she wasn’t really at any significant altitude.

Just the top of the world, from this view.

Her grandfather Locke’s words kept coming back to her.

He’d sung her to sleep with those words when she was a baby and a little girl, and later on made her memorize them. Addison had spent her winters with Grandfather Locke in the little house in Laramie, while her parents and brothers worked their high-country ranch. She’d been too weak for the deep snows, she’d been told all her childhood. Too delicate a constitution.

Addison had never had a cold a day in her life. Not a moment’s illness.

Not until now.

She crossed a ridge so low and subtle she almost missed the fact she wasn’t climbing anymore. The sun stood overhead, directly at its zenith. The scent was different here—the slight rank of bracken overwhelmed by the underlying acidity of the stony soil and a damp tang of metal.

The smell of magic, when you feel like you’ve been chewing wires.

Where the hell had that thought come from? In Grandfather’s voice.

There wasn’t any higher to climb. Not here, not now. No beck to put at her back, either. The watercourses had vanished to rivulets a day ago, and she was carrying her last two quarts on her hip. All she saw in front of her was a shallow bowl of a high valley, a place that by rights should have cupped a little tarn reflecting the blue sky with the indolence of water.

Close your eyes and follow your nose.

Grandfather Locke had died last winter with a smile on his face, looking no older than he ever had since she was born. Not even tired, just finished, as if his life work had been carving a young adult Addison from the stuff of childhood.

Now he was talking to her.

So she listened. That’s what she was doing here, right? Walking east from the Heartbeck.

Addison closed her eyes and breathed in the place she stood. Trace of bracken. Soil. Wind, bearing a bit of damp from some more fortunate locale. The droppings of something small and herbivorous. Metal.

Metal.

Copper.

Mouth open, she turned, facing first one way then the other, until she thought she knew where the metal tang was strongest. She advanced slowly, her hiking pole a cane now. No point in breaking an ankle in the one gopher hole for forty miles on this high, hollow hill.

Did they even have gophers on this side of the Atlantic?

Step, sniff. Step, sniff. Step, sniff.

When she bumped into the solid mass on the ground, Addison was not the least bit surprised.

She opened her eyes to see a pair of copper slabs stretched before her. No, not slabs, doors, for all that they were flat against the bottom of the little valley. They looked like nothing so much as the blast doors to a Wyoming missile silo, if the air force had been hiring Italian espresso-machine designers to build the Cold War infrastructure.

The margins of each door were worked in high-relief chasings of snakes and trefoils, which themselves seemed to form a script, though not one she recognized. Tiny eyes winked between the leaves. Tiny mouths screamed ecstasy and terror. Battles and seductions worked their way across the vast spaces between the margins. The doors seemed almost alive.

She looked about to find a girl who hadn’t been there a moment before sitting on one corner of the doors, twenty feet away. A young woman, much her build and age, wearing a rather smart denim miniskirt and a hunter green ragged wool vest far too large for her. And apparently nothing else, which made Addison’s heart skip a beat before she looked away from the curve of exposed breast, then found herself drawn back again.

The girl was the girl in the mirror.

“Hello,” the stranger said. Her voice was soft, familiar, though the accent was strange, like nothing Addison had ever heard.

“Uh, hello.” Addison’s own voice sounded odd in her ears now.

They stared at one another, ordinary brown eyes locked on ordinary brown eyes. She’d never been anything special, had always longed for the fiery red hair and green eyes of all the brave servant girls who were future queens in the books she’d devoured from the library, but Addison’s looks had remained resolutely plain.

On this girl in her ragged, open vest, here in the crown of the high hills, those looks were as exotic as any raving beauty on the page. Unthinking, Addison plucked at her own hair.

“Do you bear sorrow or joy?” asked the girl.

“You—” Addison blurted, then stopped. “You look like me.”

Laughter that could have rung the bells of morning. Why don’t I laugh like that? “Better to say you look like me, stranger.” A long, thoughtful pause, something deceptively close to compassion in those brown eyes. “No one finds these doors by accident. Well, almost no one. But surely not you.”

“No, no…” Addison paused, stared at her own slender, callused fingers a moment. She was still thirty feet from the other girl, but she could smell her. A far-too-familiar scent somewhere between sex and sleep. It was… disturbing. “Grandfather sent me.”

“Whose grandfather?” Now the voice was gentle.

Why was this question important? She’d fallen into some modern version of the riddle game, like talking to her therapist but with such different, unknowable stakes. Addison stalled by walking around the verge of the doors. There was certainly no way she was going to set foot on them.

The other girl was patient. Addison got the impression the stranger would have waited a decade for her to round the corner and walk face-to-face to answer the question.

“My grandfather. Grandfather Locke.”

“ Morfar or farfar ?”

“Excuse me?”

“Your mother’s father or your father’s father?”

“Oh. Mother’s. Daddy was a Keyes.”

Something stirred in the girl’s vest pocket. She glanced down in apparent surprise, looking into a dark place that seemed much deeper than the ragged woolen vest could contain. “Lock and key,” mused the girl.

“I’m Addison Keyes.”

The pocket shifted again. Was she carrying an animal in there?

The girl just stared back.

Eventually Addison filled the silence. “And you are…?”

The answer was prompt if unhelpful. “Waiting.”

“For what?”

She patted the copper doors. “Locks and keys.”

Something shifted in Addison’s head, half-forgotten words of Grandfather Locke’s. Another verse.

He really had been a bit strange…

“I can take the hint,” Addison said. “Nominate determinism is just silly, but if you want me to be, I am both a Locke and a Keyes.”

“If you think names do not count, then you have learned nothing.” This close, the girl touched Addison’s hair, then sniffed. A spark passed between them, like petting a cat during thunderstorm weather. Addison didn’t jump, but was surprised at the tingle inside her breasts and groin. “You were raised by a mabkin.”

“What?”

“Your morfar . Locke? He is a mabkin. I can smell him on you.”

“He passed away last summer.”