Infinity - ebook
By Elizabeth Donald
The boards felt firm under their feet, earth-dark and coated with a light film of dust. The beams overhead were old but unmarked, lacking the splintering or graffiti that comes with age. The shadows grew darker as they walked slowly away from the entrance, with only the barest hint of light on the other side. It didn’t seem to make sense that it would be that dark inside, or that it would seem so long when the creek bed it spanned was so narrow. But that was the least of his worries.
Ariane took each step carefully, testing the wood planks before entrusting them with her weight. Her hands clenched the camera, and he realized she was as nervous as he was.
Nervous. That didn’t quite cover it. Dale felt as though invisible ants crawled under his coat sleeves, as though his spine were suddenly a column of ice. The air felt too cold, the shadows too dark, and his stomach roiled as though he had eaten something rotten. The air tasted wrong, the smell of age and rot even though the boards seemed perfectly whole.
Too whole. There should be graffiti. The taggers found every piece of wood or metal that stood still on North Avenue in Baltimore, so how could the local kids have missed this giant fucking bridge, even if it was in the middle of nowhere?
“Here.” Ariane stood in the center of the bridge. It was so dark he could barely see her face, swallowed by shadows. “This is where she did it.”
Dale didn’t ask how she knew. He could feel it too, a pocket of coldness that gripped around his heart. He looked up at the beams, half-expecting to see Emily’s thin body twisting in a nonexistent breeze. There was nothing but the dim outline of wooden beams laid in place before the Titanic sank, and that overwhelming sense of being somewhere they shouldn’t.
Ariane raised her camera.
“Ariane,” he began, and she looked at him. The shadows fell over her face, and she was only an outline to him. He shook his head. “Nothing.”
Ariane focused the lens on the crossbeams above them and pressed the shutter.
The instant the flash exposed the upper beams, Dale felt an icy wind rush through him, a sudden rash of goosebumps on his arms. A chill ran down his spine under his jacket, clenching through his entire torso.
“Cold,” he said, and suddenly it intensified, December cold sinking through his jacket and into his body.
Ariane took another picture, nearly blinding him with its too-bright flash. In the moments after the flash faded, his eyes refused to contract and he saw only darkness, dancing kaleidoscope patterns of red and purple like a snarling face, only in his eyes.
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