The Veil (8 page)

Unbelievable. Apparently there really were
no
exceptions to my curfew whatsoever.

Lucas still had my keys, and after he opened the passenger-side door for me, he slipped behind the wheel of Gran’s Oldsmobile for the second time that day.

We drove in silence. I began to think about Nate. What must he have been thinking when I suddenly disappeared from his side and reappeared, yards away, with Lucas? Did he think I’d ditched him on purpose? Had he found someone to give him a ride home?

I was so deep in thought I didn’t even notice when Lucas got on 101, and we were passing by Tiburon before I looked up at the unexpected sound of his voice.

“Happy birthday.”

“What?”

“I heard yesterday was your birthday,” he explained, with a small frown. “Did I hear wrong?”

“No. You’re right.”

“Well, I’m sorry I’m a day late wishing you a happy one.”

That plunged me deep into thought again. The idea that Lucas Stratton would feel in any way inclined to acknowledge my birthday, much less feel badly about failing to do so in a timely manner, made my head spin. Somehow, his concern about missing my birthday was even weirder to me than the fact that he was, at this very moment, driving my car. And that he had some strange connection to Gran he was now about to explain to me.

“Where are we going?” I asked him finally as we passed by Sausalito and entered the tunnel I had always referred to as the “rainbow tunnel” because of the design painted on the opposite side.

“Not too much farther,” he said.

Lucas exited 101 just before the Golden Gate Bridge, turned sharply to the right, and then headed up before I could protest. Suddenly, I knew where we were going; I had been there just once before, on a field trip in sixth grade that had since lived on in my mind as the absolute
worst
field trip of all time. The road we were on led up to the Headlands, the hills on the very edge of Marin. From the top, you get a beautiful view of the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco Bay, and the city itself. It’s a very popular tourist spot, but one I preferred to avoid.

Just like the last time I’d been driven to the top, my stomach began to clench as soon as I felt the car start to angle upward. I closed my eyes, knowing it was the view straight down the mountainside and into the churning waters of the bay that was making me react
like this. With my eyes closed, maybe I could pretend we were at sea level, that there was not a giant drop underneath our feet, and that a careless step or a failed set of brakes couldn’t send us careening over the edge because there
was
no edge. We were on the ground. The solid, solid ground.

Except I knew we weren’t. The car was still climbing, and I could feel myself sliding backward, pressing up against the back of my seat. And even though my eyes were closed, I’d passed by this road enough times to have a perfectly clear picture in my head of the way it twisted its way up the face of the mountains and ended abruptly at the very top. The top, where tourists took pictures and the wind gusted fiercely, and you could look straight down, way down—

The car had stopped. I opened one eye.

We’d reached the top, and Lucas was staring at me again.

“Are you okay?” he asked. He was frowning slightly, perhaps with concern. Or maybe he just thought I was odd.

I took a deep breath. I had to be rational about this. I was on a mountain, yes, a very
high
mountain, but there was absolutely no reason to think I was going to fall off. The wind was not strong enough to pick me up and blow me off, and I wasn’t going to go near enough to the edge to do anything stupid, like trip and fall off. I was
fine
. I’d survived the trip here in sixth grade, and there was no reason to think I wouldn’t survive it now.

I slowly let my breath out. “Yes,” I answered. “I’m fine.”

He didn’t look convinced but said nothing further as he undid his seatbelt and exited the car.

I followed him, bracing myself for the icy wind. I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered that although it
was
pretty cold up here, the breeze was light and nowhere near strong enough to pick me up and toss me over the edge.

It was also pretty dark by now, which made it much easier to pretend there wasn’t a perilous drop off of the side of the cliff less than thirty feet to my left.
Much
better than in sixth grade, when I
had had to endure it in the middle of the day. Maybe I could handle this after all.

My confidence increased even more when Lucas began to walk away from the edge, in the opposite direction from the dozen or so tourists who were taking turns snapping photos of each other, using the Golden Gate Bridge as a backdrop. I followed just behind him as he walked several hundred yards away from the car and toward a refreshingly solid-looking concrete circle, one of the old army bunkers left over from when this whole area had been a military fortification.

There was a metal railing circling the edge, which Lucas grabbed onto and used to swing himself up and onto the top of the concrete cylinder.

I hesitated. I had no desire to go even higher up. But the concrete looked like a much more stable surface than the crumbly ground currently beneath my feet. I puzzled over my dilemma for almost a full minute before surprising myself by jumping up and grabbing the metal bar. I swung my legs up and over the edge of the bunker; I was just a tad less skillful about it than Lucas had been.

He was waiting for me at the top, sitting with his legs over the edge and facing what most people would probably consider to be a fabulous view of San Francisco Bay, lit up for the night and without a single shred of its customary fog.

I, however, was doing my very best to ignore the amazing sight before me. Frantically trying to visualize an imaginary brick wall surrounding the entire concrete structure, I crept toward the edge and sat down a few feet to Lucas’s right. I sat cross-legged. No way was I going to dangle my feet over the edge like he was.

“Heights bother you,” he said after a moment.

I looked over at him, annoyed to see that he looked amused, like there was something about my phobia he found funny.

“Was that a question?” I asked him irritably.

“Nope, just an observation.” He sat there, grinning, looking off
into the distance. “We can go somewhere else, if you want to.”

“No,” I said firmly. I was already dreading the drive back down. “This is fine. Really.”

He nodded. His eyes were still focused on the bright lights of the city on the other side of the bridge.

I had to keep him talking. It was the only thing preventing me from remembering how high up we were.

“So,” I said conversationally. “Is this where you tell me you’ve been slipping mushrooms into my coffee?”

His grin faded, replaced by confusion, and I suddenly felt embarrassed about my less than extensive knowledge concerning hallucinogenic substances.

“You know,” I tried again. “Mushrooms. Or maybe acid? Some sort of drug that makes you see things?”

“Oh, I get it,” he said, and that grin worked its way across his face again. “Don’t worry Addy. I’m pretty sure nobody, least of all me, has been slipping you drugs.”

“How would you know?” I grumbled. Why was he finding this all so amusing?

“I know because drugs can only make you see things that aren’t there.”

“Yeah . . .”

“And I don’t think that’s what has been happening to you.”

“You think the things I’ve been seeing are
real
?” I asked, incredulous. Maybe Lucas Stratton was going to turn out to be just as crazy as I was.

“Maybe. Before I decide, I need you to tell me about the kinds of things you’ve been seeing.”

“You want me to
describe
my hallucinations to you?”

“Please.”

I gritted my teeth. This was the moment I’d been dreading since the second I first saw the silver blob bouncing up and down on Sully’s shoulder. You see, the prospect of losing my mind, as troublesome a
thought as that was, had not actually been what had concerned me the most over the past two days. What had really been bothering me was the knowledge that one day, if the hallucinations continued, I would almost certainly have to sit down with someone and describe, in detail, exactly what it was I’d been seeing. The potential humiliation of such a conversation troubled me quite a bit more than the thought that I was becoming a crazy person.

And that was before it had ever crossed my mind I might be having that conversation with Lucas.

I sneaked a glance over at him. I’d always thought he looked a bit older than seventeen, but he was still not nearly old enough to be a licensed psychiatrist. What could he possibly do to help me? Why did Gran think he would be able to answer all of my questions?

Then again, when had Gran ever been wrong about anything?

I took a deep breath and told him about everything weird that had happened to me over the past two days, holding nothing back. I started with the silver frog at Sully’s, and he listened patiently as I worked my way through the cougar incident in precalc and the strange fortress with the flying things in Ghirardelli Square. I’d just begun to describe the bonfire to him when he held up his hand.

“Enough,” he said. “You’ve convinced me.”

“Of what?” I asked. “My lack of sanity?”

He chuckled. “You’re quite sane, I assure you. I just needed to know you were seeing the things I
thought
you were seeing—that no one actually
was
slipping you magic mushrooms.”

“You thought that was a real possibility?”

“You brought it up,” he pointed out.

“Hmmmm.” I couldn’t think of anything to say to that, but when I played back the last few things he had said, something else occurred to me. “What do you mean, ‘the things I thought you were seeing’? Did you see those things too?” I heard a note of hope enter my voice just then. Maybe I wasn’t the only crazy one. I could probably handle being nuts, as long as I was nuts in the same way he was.

“Some of them, yes,” he answered. “I saw the cougar jump through the cheerleader’s Hula-Hoop, and I saw the flames rise out of the bonfire. You’re not crazy, Addy. The things you’ve been seeing are real; you’re just not seeing all of it yet.”

“‘All of it’?” I quoted. “What ‘it’ are you talking about?”

“I can show you.” He pulled his legs back from the edge and folded them cross-legged, just like mine, as he turned toward me. “At least, I think I can.”

I turned until we were facing one another, sitting about two feet apart.

The slightly wavering lights up here, combined with the glow of the city below, lit up the flecks of yellow in his eyes and made them look greener than ever. It was odd that even at a moment like this, I could be distracted by his extraordinary looks, but for a good minute or so I could think of nothing except how strong the line of his jaw looked, how his hair looked just messy enough to be uncaring but at the same time so perfect, how his hands—

“Let’s try something,” he said suddenly, startling me out of my infatuation-induced stupor. I was going to have to see about getting some professional help.

“Try what?” I blinked.

“It’s called Lifting the Veil,” he said. “Close your eyes.”

“I thought the point was for me to see things,” I argued.

“Humor me.”

I closed my eyes. I heard him start to speak again, then hesitate.

“Um,” he said finally. “Will it make you nervous if I ask you to think about the view from up here?”

“I’m not sure,” I answered slowly. “Do I have to think about the view looking down?” I shivered involuntarily.

“No, I want you to think about the view looking out. Will that be okay?”

“I think so.”

“Fine. Do it then. In as much detail as you can.”

I sat silently for a minute, trying to build the picture in my head. To the far right was the city, with the triangle-shaped building dead center and all the windows in the surrounding skyscrapers lit up. Moving left, I came to the bridge, with two enormous red pillars and the cables stretched between them, dipping down to almost touch the deck in the center. Underneath the bridge was the dark water of the bay with maybe a few boats. Alcatraz would be just barely visible on the far side of the bridge, its searchlight making slow circles and flashing a light in our direction every couple of minutes. The very far left of the picture, where the bridge met land again, was Marin County. Could you see Sausalito from here, and all of its colorful houses on the hills overlooking the water? No, probably not; I’d gone too far to the left now. I brought my mental camera back slightly to the right.

“I’ve got it,” I told Lucas.

“Okay, now I want you to imagine that the image in your head is actually a painting. It’s two-dimensional, flat and on a giant piece of canvas. Can you see it?”

“Yes.” That wasn’t too hard. I’d seen enough paintings of this very view.

“Now picture the canvas becoming thinner and thinner. Not see-through, still totally opaque, but thinner. Picture a slight breeze. The breeze starts to flutter the edges of the canvas, which is still getting thinner. Are you picturing that?”

“Yeah.” Without his face to distract me, I could concentrate entirely on his voice, which was indescribably alluring. He was very relaxing to listen to—so relaxing I realized I was actually fighting to stay awake as he continued to talk.

“The breeze is getting a little bit stronger, and the canvas is getting thinner. A lot thinner, until it’s as thin as a piece of cloth. The breeze is starting to move the cloth a little bit. Do you see that?”

“Yes.”

He paused for a moment.

“Let the cloth blow away entirely, and then open your eyes.”

I did as he said, and blinked in wonderment at the world spread out before me.

——

The first thing I noticed was that it was not nearly as dark as it had been a few minutes ago. Moonlight filled the scene in front of me, casting dark shadows over the water but, at the same time, lighting up the city in the same way the sun would have in the very early hours of the morning.