Best Laid Plans (Garnet Run 2)

“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!” He squeezed his eyes shut. “What did I do?”

He was a thousand miles from the only place he’d ever lived. No one knew where he was except the friends he’d been crashing with and some lawyer he’d never met. What little money he had wouldn’t last more than a week if he spent it on a hotel, and he didn’t even know where a grocery store was. The house would clearly make an excellent playground for Marmot, but Rye would rather sleep in a cozy open grave.

A hush came through the grass and Marmot jumped onto his shoulder and butted his head. Her orange tail flicked his back like a windshield wiper.

“Mrew?” Her tiny voice matched her small form but not her fierceness.

“It’ll be okay,” he assured her. “I’ll figure something out.”

Rye stood slowly so he wouldn’t displace Marmot and did what he’d learned to do over years of evictions, challenging roommates, getting fired, getting robbed, and getting dumped. He looked at the situation and chose to acknowledge all the dimensions of it.

Dimensions (as he thought of them) weren’t positive or negative. They were simply the truth of how he felt about things.

“It smells good here, hmm? Fresh air and trees and shit,” Rye said firmly, eyes searching the landscape.

Marmot purred against his neck.

“And we’ve got all this space to ourselves. I bet we could yell and no one would care.” The sinister implications of that hung in the air, and Rye acknowledged them too. “I could walk around naked whenever I want. Once it gets warmer, anyway. And, hey, we could barbecue outside. I’ll just, like, learn how to make a fire. And barbecue.”

Marmot perked up at that.

“Yeah, I’ll make you chicken. Or... I dunno...wild birds? Maybe you’ll catch a bird and...well, then you’d probably just eat it raw. Gross, dude. Still, we can make s’mores. And...and...”

Rye wracked his brain for more dimensions.

He couldn’t stay in a hotel. He wasn’t about to go back to Seattle, where nothing awaited him but no job and the search for another couch to crash on. This property and the crumbling ruin on it were all he had.

“Marmot,” Rye said. “We’re gonna figure out how to build a house.”

* * *

Rye unrolled his sleeping bag in the corner of the living room that looked in least imminent danger of collapse. Marmot curled inside the sleeping bag with him, her tiny weight a great comfort.

Then Rye did what anyone who’d spent their whole life figuring shit out for themselves would do: he went on YouTube and looked up how to build a house.

The results were overwhelming, and mainly featured teams of very strong-looking men hoisting walls in groups of seven or eight, so Rye refined his search.

How to fix a house that’s falling down alone.

Not good.

How to fix a house that’s been abandoned alone.

Very not good.

How to fix a hell site that’s clearly been blasted by an otherworldly curse. Alone.

Interesting ghost hunter videos that he bookmarked for later perusal, but not useful.

Rye sighed. He didn’t want to waste his phone battery but panic was starting to creep in again, so he put on Riven’s first album and let himself listen to his favorite three tracks to distract himself enough to go to sleep.

Theo Decker’s voice sank into him, honey warm and sharp as a razor. The album was years old, but it soothed him every time. Now, it helped drown out the terrifying sounds that Rye assumed were nature.

They definitely weren’t the creepy scarecrow becoming animate in the moonlight and hunting for prey. They certainly were not wolves or bears or whateverthefuck terrifying animals lived in Wyoming coming to eat him and Marmot. And they absolutely, one hundred percent, weren’t a mob of torch-wielding villagers coming to spit the clueless city boy and roast him over their ravenous flames. Nope.

“Everything’s fine. It’s just nature,” Rye told Marmot, whose sleeping purrs indicated that she wasn’t the one who required reassurance.

Theo Decker sang, and Rye fixed his whole attention on the music, squeezed his eyes closed tight against the darkness, pulled the sleeping bag over his ears, and tried to sleep in the crumbling house that was now his only home.

Chapter Two

Charlie

In the thin light of dawn, Charlie Matheson woke up gasping. The dream was an old, familiar haunt of meat and bones and loss, and he shook it loose like a spiderweb. It didn’t do any good to linger on dreams, good or bad.

Instead, he ran. Out his kitchen door and through woods springing to life after winter’s long spell. Up and up the rock-strewn path to the promontory, Lake Linea still half-frozen far below. Up here, the air was thin, and Charlie’s temples pounded with exertion. Up here, he was a dot, blasted to nothingness by immensity.

Not responsible for anything or anyone.