Haunted Legends (38 page)

“Probably wedged down between the cushions,” she said. “Just dig in with your fingers.”

He tried, hoping she wouldn’t notice that he wasn’t exactly making a big effort. He’d never liked being strapped to anything, even a car seat, safety or not. “Sorry,” he said after a bit.

“Maybe we should pull over so I can try,” she said. “My hands are smaller.”

“Leave him be, worrywart,” said the blonde. “If he were in the front seat, it would be different but the backseat is safer. Tell you what—if it looks like we’re gonna crash, I’ll sing out ahead of time so you can curl up on the floor. Deal?” She winked at him in the rearview mirror.

“Works for me,” he said, making a small salute. Still more giggles, of course, although he didn’t find that quite so annoying anymore. Apparently you really could get used to anything, he thought, and anyway, at least they weren’t missionaries or opera fans. Not unattractive, either. He couldn’t say that if he’d met them at a party or a bar, he wouldn’t have been interested.

His gaze met the dark-haired woman’s and he realized she had said something to him.

“Pardon? Sorry, I guess I zoned out for a minute there. I must be tireder than I thought.”

She gave him a kindly smile. “I said, how long have you been on the road?”

“Quite a while, obviously.” He laughed; they giggled.

“No, really. How long? I’m just curious.”

“She means nosy,” the blonde put in wryly.

“That’s OK,” he said, sitting back and stretching out. The blonde sat close to the dash, which left him quite a lot of leg room. “When I was in Gdansk, the weather was really good—sunny, very warm. Until you got right to the beach. Then the temperature dropped about twenty degrees. There was this long pier you had to pay to walk out on. That must have been . . . late June, early July, I guess.”

“And I thought
I
lost track of time,” the blonde chuckled.

“I’ve given up wearing a watch. I can’t keep one longer than ten days, two weeks at most before I lose it or it breaks. I have bad watch karma.” The giggles were actually kind of musical, he thought absently; like wind chimes.

“And before Gdansk, where were you?” prodded the dark-haired one.

He had to think about it for a few moments. “Ekaterinburg, in the Urals. It was beautiful but they had this unexpected heat wave and there was no air-conditioning anywhere. I got a ride from a couple who invited me to supper at their lakeside dacha.”

“That must have been pretty far out in the country, away from Ekaterinburg.”

“Do you know the city?” he asked.

“We’ve been up and down every street. But only on the Web,” she added as he started to ask if she’d been inside any of the ornate Russian Orthodox cathedrals. “Amazing definition. At street level, you can see the texture of the stone buildings so clearly, you’d think you really were there.”

“Sounds like pretty heavy surveillance,” he said uneasily.

A few dark, curly tendrils fell loose as she shook her head. “Oh, hell, no. It’s that company, what’s-their-names. They’ve been sending vans with cameras all over the world to photograph all kinds of cities and then stitching the pictures together to make a virtual diorama.”

“Shouldn’t that be ‘panorama’?” asked the driver.

“Tomayto, tomahto.” The dark-haired woman waved a hand carelessly.

“So you went to Gdansk after Ekaterinburg. Didn’t stop in Moscow on the way?”

“No,” he said, thinking that it seemed kind of foolish now that he hadn’t. At the time, however, it had seemed more important to get moving. He waited for them to ask him why he’d passed up the opportunity to see Red Square and the Kremlin but they didn’t. In fact, they said very little except to prompt him when his recall turned spotty. They never commented on his memory, either, because they were too polite or they had actually traveled enough themselves to know how sometimes things could blur after a while.

Their interest surprised him as well. He’d have thought listening to him talk about where he’d been and what the weather had been like and what minor, uneventful things he’d done would have bored them to tears. Every so often, he would mention a city—Basel, Berlin, Calais—and they’d perk up as if he’d said a magic word. It was always because they had explored it the same way they had Ekaterinburg, via detailed, high-definition photos on the Web, uploaded by some corporation that was apparently determined to scan the entire world into a computer file.

“I know very little about computers and all that online stuff,” he told them after a while. “Sometimes I go to an Internet café to check the news from home or watch a funny film clip but I can’t sit still for very long. Fifteen, twenty minutes and I have to get moving.”

“Now that’s what I call restless,” the driver said. No giggling, which seemed rather strange.

“I’m hopeless at remembering things like e-mail addresses and passwords anyway,” he went on. “I tried opening an e-mail account once but then I couldn’t even remember where I opened it. Forgetful-dot-com. Braindead-dot-com. Memory-like-a-sieve-dot-com—that’s what I’d need.”

“Well, let’s just check if those domains are available,” the dark-haired woman giggled. His polite laughter cut off when he saw she had a thin, shiny notebook on her lap.

“Oh, Christ, don’t do
that
!” he said, alarmed without knowing why.

“Too late!” she sang. “But it’s all moot anyway, those names are all taken.”

The blonde gave a surprised laugh. “Seriously? Even memory-like-a-sieve-dot-com?”

“Even that one.”

“How can you get on the Web from the car?” he asked, amazed.

“Wireless access,” she said, as if that explained everything. “Wow, you really don’t get online much do you?” she added, seeing his expression. “Ever thought about getting a BlackBerry—”

“Also known as a CrackBerry,” the blonde chuckled.

“—or a netbook,” the other woman went on, ignoring her. “Or even a PDA with sat nav.”

“I prefer to travel as light as possible,” he said.

“The new netbooks aren’t even as heavy as a large bottle of water. And a PDA weighs even less.”

“Must cost a fortune,” he said.

“You’d be surprised.”

“Well, it’s a fortune if you don’t have it to spare,” he said, starting to feel slightly defensive. “And it’d just be one more thing for someone to steal. I try not to carry too much that anyone would want to hit me over the head for.” He tried a good-natured grin on the dark-haired woman; she didn’t smile back.

“Ever thought about not traveling so much?” she asked.

He blinked at her. “Pardon?”

“Just getting off the road, taking up residence at a fixed address?”

“Waking up in the same place every morning,” added the blonde, her gray-green eyes twinkling at him in the rearview mirror. “Someplace with a door you keep the key to, so you can have nice things.”

He sat back without answering.

“You’ve really never thought about that?” the dark-haired woman said incredulously.

“No. And it’s not something I really want to discuss,” he said, trying to keep his tone firm but pleasant.

The dark-haired woman started to say something else but the blonde talked over her. “OK, forget we said anything. Really.”

“Thank you,” he said with pointed formality. The dark-haired woman looked frustrated as she turned around to face forward. The small computer on her lap was still open but he couldn’t see what was on the screen.

Abruptly, she turned back to him. “A PDA with sat nav would help you a lot, though. You’d always know where you are and how to get wherever you wanted to go. You could find the most direct route like that.” She snapped her fingers.

“I’m not always big on the most direct route,” he said, unconsciously digging his heels into the carpeting.

“Then you could find the least direct if you wanted.”

“I’d rather be surprised,” he said, politely obstinate. “You know, I’ve had people try to sell me on this stuff before. The virtues of high-tech hitchhiking, Goo-Goo maps or whatever it’s called. I’m just not into it. Sat nav—what’s that? Satellite navigation? You connect to
satellites
to find your way around one minute and the next you’re worrying about how your privacy’s being invaded? What’s
that
about?”

Nobody said anything for a long moment. Then the driver cleared her throat. “The man’s got a point.”

“Guess I’ll have that ID implant taken out of my arm,” said the dark-haired woman.

He was horrified. “You have an ID implant in your arm?”

Both women burst into hearty giggles. “Omigod,
no
!” said the dark-haired woman when she could speak. “It’s something that fancy exclusive clubs have been doing for super-VIP members.”

“I don’t believe you,” he said. “No one would do that, not even the craziest crazy-rich. That’s got to be some kind of urban legend.”

“I don’t think so,” said the dark-haired woman, still laughing.

“Of course, if it were, it wouldn’t be the first time you fell for one of those,” said the blonde. She gave him another wink in the rearview mirror.

Was he supposed to be in on some joke or did she just have a nervous tic? “Or the second or third. Or fourth—”

“All right, that’s enough. You don’t have to rub my nose in it.”

“Which ‘it’?” laughed the driver. “The tiny Mexican dog that turns out to be a rat or the cobras in the fur coat? Or—”

“I
said
, that’s
enough
!” The dark-haired woman tried to sound stern but giggled instead. “I guess that’s why I like the high-tech stuff so much. Hardware, hard data, hard facts.”

“Hard ass,” he added before he could think better of it. Immediately he tried to apologize but couldn’t make himself heard over their giggles.

“This guy’s definitely got
your
number, Doni,” the blonde said when she had caught her breath.

“No shit.” The dark-haired woman was still laughing. “And please, don’t apologize,” she added to him. “That was a good one.”

His smile was more like a grimace. It wasn’t
that
good, he thought. Maybe he had tapped into some subtext he was unaware of, some secret in-joke that colored everything for them. That would certainly account for all the giggling. Except in-jokes were never as funny to anyone on the outside. It might be time to get out of the car and go his own way, he thought uneasily.

As if catching the flavor of his thoughts, the blonde slowed down and pulled into the breakdown lane.

“Is something wrong?” he asked, bracing himself on the seat as she twisted around to look at him.

“Not at all,” she said cheerfully. “It’s just that there’s an interchange coming up where our routes diverge. If you want to take a more direct route to Aberdeen then we should leave you off there so you can pick up another ride.
Or . . .
” She made a small flourish with one hand to punctuate her dramatic pause. “You can come with us and see the Humber Bridge.”

Both women were looking at him with eager, expectant expressions. “Is there something special about the Humber Bridge?”

The women glanced at each other briefly. “You’ve never seen it,” the dark-haired woman said to him.

“Otherwise you wouldn’t have asked,” the blonde added.

“It’s
gorgeous,
” said the dark-haired woman.

“A gorgeous bridge?” he asked, skeptical.

“Absolutely,” replied the blonde. “I know, it’s hard to believe. I didn’t believe it myself when Doni first told me the first time I came here. But then I saw it. If there are bridges in heaven, my man, this is what they look like.”

He smiled, still doubtful. “How far is it from where we are now?”

She turned away to look at something on the dashboard. “Sat nav says only a few miles. It’s not that far out of
our
way—crossing the bridge will take us to Hull and Scarborough’s just north of that. But we can leave you off at a spot where you can pick up a ride going west, back toward Leeds.”

“Shouldn’t I just keep going north with you and try to get a ride out of Scarborough?”

“You’ll probably end up going to Whitby and having to pick up yet another ride from there,” the dark-haired woman advised him.

“Tomayto, tomahto,” he said, making them giggle. “Like I said, I’m not all that big on taking the most direct route anywhere.”

“Your choice,” said the blonde. “But if you end up having to spend the night in Whitby, eat some garlic for supper so Dracula won’t bite you.”

“Dracula?” he asked, baffled.

“Yeah. That’s where he came ashore after leaving Transylvania,” said the dark-haired woman matter-of-factly. “You didn’t know?”

“No, but that would have been about a hundred years ago, wouldn’t it?” He chuckled, sitting back as the blonde pulled the car onto the road again.

“Yeah, but that doesn’t matter with Dracula. He’s undead.”

“I thought he got staked and turned into ashes or smoke or something.”

The dark-haired woman shook her head emphatically. “Dracula
always
comes back.”

“Bela Lugosi’s dead,” he replied, unperturbed. “There’s even a song about it.”

“Bela, sure. But not Dracula.”

He couldn’t tell if she were really kidding around or not; she was keeping a straight face again but this time she showed no sign of breaking. He looked at the rearview mirror, waiting to see if the blonde would wink at him. When she finally did glance up, it was only for half a second and her eyes told him nothing.

What the hell, he thought; it was a strange world, made more so by the people in it. He’d ridden with atheists who believed in ghosts and people who thought astrology was another branch of astronomy. These probably weren’t the only two otherwise sane people who thought
Dracula
was a documentary. He shifted so he could look between the seats at the road ahead and what he saw scared him a hell of a lot more than ghosts or vampires.

The road was far too narrow to accommodate their car and the one coming toward them going the other way, even if the latter had not been towing a trailer the size of an elephant. He opened his mouth to say as much but his voice wouldn’t come. Before he could cower on the floor in the fetal position, the blonde slowed down and steered to the left.