Forest of Rope

Chapter 16

Leaving home had never been so difficult.

The first time had been swift and easy. Riley and Alexis had first packed their bags and taken off in the late Summer, not Winter. It had been a simple matter of dollars and cents getting themselves out-of-state.

Riley’s arduous journey back to California could perhaps best be described as a deliberate act of some prying deity to punish him for his consistent impiety and foolishness. Snow storms had left several train lines inoperable for days and the main highways toward the West Coast were closed until further notice.

With the unbearable guilt of abandoning Tracey on Christmas Eve mixing grotesquely with his travel sickness, Riley had pondered out of the coach window with the naive hope that there was still a chance of negotiation or compromise waiting for him at his final destination.

He caught himself coming up with prepared speeches professing the sincerest of apologies and the most desperate pleas for forgiveness while still trying to find a way to pin the root of the problem back to her. It was quite a conundrum and the infernal practicalities and complexities of travelling in apocalyptic weather did little to help.

The winds howled tonelessly and relentlessly down the little county roads, blowing down fences as well as some trees while manifesting great vortexes of snow which spiralled throughout the battered landscape. Meanwhile Riley sat more or less unfazed by the calamity outside due to being conscious of a far greater danger: the unquenchable wrath of Alexis.

In his delirious mind-state he imagined her as a dark queen, a terrible ruler feared by all, her hands stained with the blood of lesser mortals, much like the girls in her paintings. She was clad in a torn yet handsome Victorian dress, her delicate face painted white, her staring, judging eyes marked with coal-black paint. He approached her humbly with cap in hand, bowing low, impossibly low, until his head hit the floor.

‘Off with his head!’

Riley obliged as a cloaked Vincent approached him sombrely with a large axe and placed his neck on the chopping block...  

The moment the blade swung down on his neck he snapped awake to discover that the coach had long since been immobile. The driver, having received more storm warnings had pulled off the treacherous road hours ago and parked them in a humble town for the night.

Afterwards Riley lay in a cheap motel room, his hair wet from a cold shower, trying for sleep, doing his best to ignore the moans and groans that wailed through the paper thin walls. All he could think about was the sheer incredulity of his situation. No matter how persistently he adapted to the crazy weather, he only seemed to be heading for the smallest and obscurest parts of northwestern America.

He spent days travelling miles inch by inch in near-constant gridlock, wasted hundreds of dollars alternating between different modes of transport before they themselves became delayed or were abandoned altogether. Whether he liked it or not he was stuck and there was nothing he could do about it.

So he waited the storm out.

On the twenty-seventh of December, three days after he’d set off from Oakmaple Drive, Riley finally arrived back in San Francisco. He shuddered from a particular chill as he crossed over the Golden Gate Bridge in a stuffy taxi cab, remembering the telescope in the apartment. He’d contacted his landlord before arriving back at the building and he readily unlocked the newly replaced door for him, even though it was close to midnight.

The authorities, he was informed, had searched the place for “uncanny objects” and had left the place in a hideous state. Although, Riley thought, the place was probably in a hideous state to begin with. Riley was told all about how Vincent broke down the door and recovered Alexis from the bedroom, how he waited in the lobby for an ambulance and yelled at all the tenants for not acting any sooner.