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A weather-beaten signboard is lighted in front of my car by my headlamps. It has an arrow pointing upwards, and it says ‘PINE’S LOOKOUT’.
I’ll be damned.
It’s kismet.
I know I should be trawling out of this tangle of roads to head for Rick’s mother’s home. Possibly to a comfortable bed and a warm shower and some good, old-fashioned Key Lime pie. But the words ‘PINE’S LOOKOUT’ is calling impossibly to me, like some sort of siren. I’m a sixteen-year-old fan again in LA for the first time – in an open top bus, peering at the homes of celebrities in Beverly Hills.
David Kinney used to live in LA when he was still working there, and we kind of camped outside his modest Hollywood Hills house, hoping for a glimpse. Which, of course, we never got.
I should wait till tomorrow morning, really. I should wait till it’s bright and dry and cheery and more conducive to snooping.
I step on my gas pedal.
The car starts its cranking way up Pine’s Lookout.
Somehow, I think, even then . . . I wanted to be burned.
3
Visibility is really, really poor. The road up Pine’s Lookout is narrow and steep, made comfortably for a single vehicle, although there are expansions here and there to allow double traverse. The trees on either side of the road are dense. They whip around like frenzied marionettes.
I think I made a mistake.
I think I should turn back. Only there isn’t anywhere to make a U-turn.
The engine grinds and squeals as I step on the gas, practically inching upward. What an awful place to live in. No wonder Ethan Greene doesn’t get out much. It’s too much of a bother getting up and down. With his money, he should build a wider road . . . or a cable car. I wonder how the mailman gets up there, or maybe Ethan Greene doesn’t have any mail.
The road gets windier and windier, until I’m almost convinced I’m riding on the back of a tossing dragon. Trees would appear suddenly in my path, and I realize the road has made another sharp bend. And then another. Yup. I have got to turn back now. Only there’s no place. Everything is too narrow, as though I’m in a funnel.
Funneled by spooky trees.
Another copse of trees bar my path. I curse. I swear those trees can walk, the way they seem to be materializing at every inopportune moment.
And then it happens.
The reason why I shouldn’t be here in the first place – why I should have listened to that nagging voice inside of me, the one that insists upon that hot shower and that warm slice of pie.
One moment, I’m safely tucked in my vehicle, with its four wheels clinging to the slippery slope. The next, I’m flying –
Oh shit.
I’m really flying in the air. It’s so dark and stormy and I can’t really see where I’m flying to, or how I got to be airborne in the first place. I must have missed a turning and crashed over some divider. Fuck it, there’s probably no divider. Just a gap in the smug, betraying, extremely sneaky and sentient trees.
I’m scared now. I’m really scared. Somewhere between the seconds of floating in deep space, I think I peed in my pants. I’m going to die and I should have stayed home and listened to my mother and never gone to be a reporter and never grown up, come to think of it.
Oh how stupid, stupid, stupid I am.
But that’s the way with accidents, right? You never want to be in one, but when you’re in one, you analyze the shreds out of it. I should have done this, I should have done that. OK, maybe that was a fucking stupid thing to do.
Provided you actually survive to analyze the hell out of it.
I’m not sure I’m going to survive.
The car lands with a resounding crash. Everything is pitch black, and I’m screaming so hard that I’m almost competing with the thunder out there.
That’s it.
I’m officially dead.
4
I wake up.
OK, maybe I’m not dead after all, but I can’t be sure. Though I am pretty sure the last time I was alive, I was in my rented Avis Chevy.
But not now.
I’m on a bed.
And what a bed. It’s gargantuan four poster one with a canopy on the top, and I feel like I’m in Kublai Khan’s pleasure dome. The sheets are pure silk, though I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between pure silk and unpure ones . . . meh.
My head is spinning and the posterior part of my skull hurts something wicked. Ow. I think I must have had a concussion. At least the pillows are geared to cushion that concussion. They are fluffy beyond fluffy, and soft as a baby’s bottom.
Despite my vertigo, I make myself peer around the bedroom. The ceiling is high and decorated with frescoes of lotus leaves. Where am I? India? The curtains are thick and double-layered, and the carpet smothers the floor like a blanket. The furniture is dark and rustic and polished to the hilt.
