turn left

 “In 400 meters, turn right.”

“Thanks,”　Lindsay said absently. She considered turning her music up.　But she didn’t, because she was too tired to navigate without the friendly robot lady. She’d missed three exits already on her drive home from the concert. And ugh, she had work tomorrow. 

The worst thing was that she knew for a fact that she could take the day off with no consequences, but that she wouldn’t because she was saving up vacation days. Being an adult and sticking to her own plans was somehow so much harder than having to follow someone else’s rules.

“In 200 meters, turn right.”

She flicked on her turn signal.

Tic-tick, tic-tick.

Her eyes were bleary. There were no lights around this stretch of road, except the godawful pinwheels of red and blue on the left side of the road warning of a closed lane.

“Turn right.”

She braked slightly, turned the wheel, and saw that her headlights were lighting up a vast expanse of concrete lattice. The style that protected the road from landslide. Her vision was suddenly much brighter, because the light was reflecting back into her car where it bounced off the very close stone in front of her. 

She was turning directly into a mountainside.

She slammed down the foot that was already on the brake, but there was no stopping in time. Her brain processed in slow-motion horror as the front of her car met the mountain, but she kept moving forward. She expected to hear screeches and bangs, something that would underscore the catastrophe but all she heard was the music from her Bluetooth speaker rocking on, totally unaffected by what was happening.

Her body flew forward and stopped with a sudden jerk, painful pressure from the seatbelt. Her vision was flooded with light. She inhaled for the first time in – was it really only a second or two? It had stretched out for at least 5 seconds, she thought hysterically. That was far too long.

She was seeing green.

Lindsay stared uncomprehendingly through her miraculously intact windshield. 

Green. With a shaking hand, she took off her seatbelt. She opened the car door and got out. Force of habit had her snatching her purse up from the floor of the passenger seat, where it had fallen. She stood, bracing herself on the cold metal of her door with one hand. Her speaker was still playing music and it felt wildly inappropriate. She looked ahead. She looked behind. There was no highway behind her, no blue and red lights. It was the mountainside. How had the mountain gotten behind her? 

Lindsay took one, two steps toward it and stopped abruptly. She was afraid and she didn’t know why.

Because she had accepted that the mountain was behind her, she took one more stab at forcing her brain to comprehend the rest of what she was seeing. It was definitely daylight, even though that didn’t make sense. It was impossible for 11pm to be daylight. But it was. And the road was stretching out before her (even though it had started abruptly at the foot of the mountain.)

It was an interesting road paving choice. By that she meant that the road was green and springy. Like… She was fairly certain that it was a thick bed of moss, laid out in a perfect line that stretched toward the horizon. There was nothing else around for miles. Just grass, trees, and hills. 

That, at least, made sense. She’d passed the last town maybe ten minutes back, and she didn’t know how far it was until the next one. So the rolling hills made sense, even though they were dotted with the spidery red flowers that she was fairly certain were out of season.

Her car looked fine.

“In 4 kilometers, continue straight.”

…Seriously?

Disbelievingly, she got back into her car to look at what the GPS screen was telling her. This….This looked like the same route she’d seen show up when she had selected the first address that had popped up for her city. “Maybe I should have actually taken the time to type in my full address,” she said to herself. 

Lindsay was feeling a little shell-shocked. It hadn’t seemed like it mattered at the time. She’d be able to turn off the GPS and navigate home once the directions brought her close enough. Any address in her city should have been fine.

She reached out to change the address- and her finger stopped mid-air before touching the controls.

Maybe that wasn’t a good idea. She looked around again. Her vision was adjusting to the cheerful daylight, and she was a lot more alert than she had been before. She could not go back the way she had come. There was a mountain there, obviously. But the GPS had not, in fact, been wrong yet. She’d followed the directions and they had taken her to a road. Like, this was definitely a road to somewhere. It was just a …very alternate route. What if there wasn’t enough signal here for her GPS to load a new route? She’d just have no directions to follow.

Slowly, she sat down. She put her purse down on the passenger seat, she put on her seatbelt, and she changed the music to something instrumental. She turned the car back on and drove.

After what must have been 4 kilometers, a fork opened on the left side of the road. Lindsay looked down it and wondered, but she obediently kept going straight. The next command had her turning right at another fork 28 kilometers after that, and she realized that she wasn’t seeing any regular intersections. The road only made gentle curves. There were no 90 degree angles to be seen.

There were also no other cars. Not a one. It was eerie.

She glanced down at her fuel gauge. It was still indicating she had ¾ of a tank. She started seeing signs of habitation- a tree draped in ribbons, an old fence, and a house far off in the distance with an unlikely sky-blue paint job. But something told her it was better not to try to go to that house- it might have just been social anxiety. Probably just that. She didn’t want to bother anyone unless she absolutely had to.

A deer darted across the road ahead of her at one point. So she slowed the car down to a crawl because there were usually several deer together. But she reached the point where the deer had crossed and drove a fair bit afterward with no sign of another deer. Well. It was odd for a deer to be active during broad daylight, Lindsay reminded herself. Maybe that one had been startled awake and was running away from something. 

She still had ¾ of a tank. Doubtfully, Lindsay pulled over and restarted her car to see if the indicator readjusted. Nope. It climbed back up to ¾.She looked at her music player and scrolled past the list of songs she’d heard on the playlist since she’d started driving on the green road. It was at least two hours’ worth of music, which slightly surprised her. It hadn’t seemed quite that long. She didn’t feel nearly tired enough to have been driving for a total of nearly 3 hours since leaving the concert. But that was, in itself, a realization that should make her nervous. It had taken her only about 2 hours to drive to the concert venue. It was starting to seem like she was not going to the right place.

Unnerved, she turned off the music.

She needed a second to think. She stood up and shut the car door with a sharp thud that echoed around the deserted hillside. She paced a little bit, stretching her legs. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw something flash.

Lindsay turned to look. She thought that she’d seen something in the bushes- she had the impression of silver and of movement. But the movement could just as easily have been the way that light moved over a surface as a person turned. There was something there and she really wanted to know what it was. She was just about to step off the moss into the tall grass when she heard something.

She stood very still to listen.

It came again. She was hearing a woman’s voice in the distance.

Lindsay blinked. It took her a moment to react, since she hadn’t seen anyone around for hours. She peered in front of her car and saw nothing. But when she glanced back-There was a figure walking down the road, in the direction that Lindsay had come from. 

“That makes no sense,” she said aloud. She felt herself frown. “I didn’t see her, or anywhere she could have been. And if she’s catching up to me on foot, I had to have passed her like, a minute ago.”

The voice called out again. She couldn’t understand it at this distance, but she definitely got the impression that the woman wanted her to wait.

She had the sudden and powerful urge to start the car again and drive away, fast, before the other woman got close. Something was wrong.

But her sense of decency reared up. This was a weird and lonely stretch of rural road. If someone was walking along it, they probably needed help. And she might be able to help Lindsay get un-lost as well, so it was a good bet to wait.

It took less time than she expected for the woman to draw close. Lindsay felt her eyebrows shoot up- the stranger had long light-brown hair, bare feet, and a long-sleeved purple dress that reached to her ankles. Lindsay had managed to control her expression before the other woman got close enough to see it, because she didn’t want to be rude even if this lady was a little eccentric.

 “Hallo,” the other woman said. She had a pleasant voice, but it was raspy. “Thank you for waiting for me. My name is Hild.”

‘…I think I misheard that.’

Hild? Was it Hilda?

‘I’ll just never say her name.’

“Hey,” Lindsay said. She raised a hand self-consciously and plastered on a smile. “No big, no big. I’m Lindsay. Are you okay?”

Hild(a?) looked a little alarmed, taking a moment to respond. She had an oval-shaped face and tired circles under her large brown eyes. “Lindsay,” she said. She had an interesting accent. “Well-met.”

Weird way to say that, but yes.

“I’m glad to see someone else,” Lindsay said. She laughed, a little too loudly. “I’ve been driving and driving….” She waved her hand in a circle. “I think I’m a little lost.”

Hild looked at her up and down. She seemed to be considering it. “I can help,” she said slowly. “But could you take me home first?” She indicated the car. “Much faster than feet.”

Well, that was what she’d hoped for. “Sounds good to me. Where is your home?” Lindsay asked. She gestured for Hild to get in the passenger seat and sat back down in the driver’s seat.

Hild sat down gingerly. “Not so far,” she said evasively. Or maybe it just came off as evasive, because she knew Lindsay wouldn’t know the name of whatever town she lived in. Now that she was close, Lindsay had the weird realization that Hild smelled like she’d been at the sea. Maybe she’d been at the beach and that was why she was dressed boho-cute.

They drove. Hild sat stiffly, with her hands folded on her lap. When they came to a fork in the road, Hild leaned forward. “Left,” she said. Lindsay obeyed. She gave all the directions like that, simply and only when they were nearly to the fork in the road. She made no move to start any other conversation.

It was a little awkward. Lindsay shifted in her seat and wished she had something to drink. She cleared her throat. “So, what were you doing today?”

Hild gave her a sharp look. “Today…” Her voice trailed off. “I went on a short sail. I met my father. And my father got into a fight with my companion.”

Her tone implied that she did not want to elaborate.

Well. That was even more awkward. Lindsay grimaced. “That sounds like a long day,” she said.

Hild gave a surprised laugh. “Very long,” she said. And then she laughed again, as if the comment had been genuinely funny. “Years and years long.”

‘This is so creepy. Why is she so creepy?’

“I have also been feeling that time is not quite working right lately,” Lindsay said, trying to keep the tone of their conversation relatively normal. But it was also true. The second when she thought she had been about to crash had felt forever long, and the time she had been driving on the green road simultaneously felt like ten minutes and ten hours. 

“It does that here,” Hild said in a mock-serious tone. “I’ll make sure that you get home before the sun goes down.”

Lindsay opened her mouth to point out that the sun was high overhead, but she shut her lips on the words. Saying it aloud made how impossible it was seem even more obvious. She had the weird premonition that it would be a bad idea to acknowledge that something was very wrong.

Hild watched her knowingly.

She focused on driving. The path that Hild directed her on led them along the coastline, which was a good sign for Lindsay. She needed to find the bridge back to her island, so coastline meant she was at least on the edge of this island. The grass became longer and lighter in color, and she started to see large grey stones dotting the countryside.

It was silent in a way that was deeply unnatural. All she heard was the sounds of a running car. No wind, no birds. She couldn’t even hear Hild breathing, actually.

Lindsay frowned and wondered why she’d thought that. It wasn’t like she normally made a habit of observing how loudly other people breathed. The thought would never occur to her. But it had. And now that she’d made the subconscious realization, Lindsay found herself deliberately trying to make out the soft sounds of another human being breathing in the car right next to her. 

Nothing.

She shuddered. She had the extremely unpleasant sensation where chills went up her neck and the “wow I’m creeped out” tingling washed all over her body, even down her thighs.

Through her peripheral vision, she could see that Hild was looking straight at her. Not the road. Just staring at Lindsay, still, and silent. She looked immeasurably sad.

Yikes, ya’ll.

Lindsay reached for her music player and fiddled with it, turning back on the same instrumental playlist as earlier. That somehow made her feel a little better.“Are you going to be okay after I drop you off?” Lindsay asked. She was trying really hard to make this be normal. “You’re…” She glanced at Hild and those big, sad eyes, feeling discomfited. “You ended up a long way from home, for someone walking.” 

“No.”

It was such an unexpected answer that Lindsay couldn’t quite process it. Who ever answered that question with blunt honesty?

“I’ve been gone for a long time,” Hild said. Her tone was distant. “There’s probably not much left for me there.”

‘Oh. So, you aren’t close to your family? Was that why your dad got in a fight?’ Lindsay thought, but had the tact not to ask. That seemed like a pretty personal topic.

”But it’s still worth the try,” Lindsay said. It was half encouragement and half question.

“Yes,”　Hild agreed.　She looked out the passenger window. “It is. I’d like to see the area again.”…That didn’t sound terribly final or anything.

‘What it sounds like,’ Lindsay told herself firmly, ‘is none of my business.’ She followed the directions that she was given, because it was the best bet that she had. But Lindsay felt her heart begin to sink after Hild straightened in her seat and pointed to a structure on a faraway hill. 

“That’s it,” Hild said. “The house of my father.” Her tone was reverent.

‘…Maybe the house of her great-grandfather’, Lindsay thought dubiously.

Getting closer did not fill her with more confidence. If anything, it looked worse up close. Lindsay put the car in park and squinted up the hill.

It was just impossible to believe that anyone was living in that building. There was an identifiable courtyard, and stoneless bits that were clearly serving the purpose of windows. But no one had lived there for hundreds of years. 500 years, minimum. There was no sign of life. Half of the walls were falling down, and everything was covered in vines. It was clearly being reclaimed by the wilds: that wasn’t a place where humans lived, it was part of the hills.

“This is it.” Lindsay stared at the crumbling stone walls again. “You live here.” She couldn’t keep the doubt from her tone.

Hild  gave her a sharp look. “Yes,” she snapped.

The venom in her tone took Lindsay aback. She raised her hands defensively. “It wasn’t what I expected,” she said. “That’s all. It’s bigger than most houses.”

That was true. This was obviously the ruins of something like a castle or a monastery. It was not a house.

At this point, she just wanted the get this crazy lady out of her car and move on with her life. Everything about it was spooky as all hell. This felt like some kind of fairy story. Lindsay was savvy enough not to eat or drink anything here, but the determination felt kind of pointless since she’d felt no hungry or thirst. 

The other thing that she knew was not to piss anyone off, and not to break the rules if she was told something like “don’t turn around to look back.” 

Hild regarded her, long and cold. And then she inclined her head. “Thank you for taking me home,” she said. “I had been wandering a long time. You gave me clarity.” She blinked, looking tired. She seemed on the verge of sleep. “You should turn around. Three circles. Take every left path, except when you come to running water. Never cross it. Turn back, and then turn left at the next cross as you approach it from the new direction. If you see a cemetery, hold your breath. If you hear hammers...”

Her voice trailed off.

‘This,’ Lindsay thought, ‘is the weirdest set of directions that anyone has ever given me. Is this a dream?’

“Do not follow them,” Hild said finally. Her voice was strange. “Do not speak to anyone until you are home. Do you understand?”

‘Maybe I really did run into the mountainside. Maybe I’m in a coma, fantasizing.’

Lindsay nodded. “Only turn left, don’t cross water, don’t talk to strangers, and don’t follow mysterious hammers.”

Hild barely seemed to be listening. Her mood was finally picking up. She opened the car door, paused for a moment, and then swung her feet out to touch the ground.

Then she tumbled forward, out of the car. There was an odd clatter.

Lindsay jerked in her seat. “What- you okay?” She wrestled off her seatbelt and jumped out of the car. There was no answer. She saw why when she came around the hood of the car.

Hild was... Hild was gone. There was a pile of bones on the ground. 

She stared.

“What,” Lindsay said, “the absolute hell?”

Something glinted. Her knees cracked as she slowly knelt to get a better look without touching anything.

There was a necklace on the skeletal neck, despite the fact that Hild had definitely not been wearing it before. It was nothing like anything she’d ever seen. She was now pretty certain that Hild was some creepy long-dead ghost, but the necklace was much more delicate than she’d seen from historical jewelry that was old enough to match the ruin that Hild had apparently been dying to return to. It was also way too showy and intricate to be something modern and commercial- it reminded her of the kind of thing you’d see on a crown princess’ neck in a black and white photo. High quality with delicate metal work, but crowned with enormous showy and valuable jewels.

It was silver, with blue and green stones. And she really, really wanted it. Lindsay found her hand reaching out to take it, as if in a trance. She stopped herself at the last second. Fear filled her body. 

Something was wrong. Something was not right. 

She all but ran around and flung her body back into the car, fear prickling the back of her neck. With shaking hands, she started the car, carefully backed away without cracking Hild’s bones, and turned the car in three wide loops. She turned to the left, just in case. And then she got the absolute fucking hell out of there. Her heartrate was beginning to slow down, just a bit, when her GPS crackled back on without her input. 

“In 200 meters, turn left,” it said.

Lindsay slammed on the brakes. Her whole body was shaking. 

That was not the voice of her GPS. 

“I said, turn left in 200 meters,” came the GPS again. It was annoyed this time, crisp female tones that didn’t allow for disagreement. 

She had to. Lindsay eased off of the brakes. She started driving again. She glanced around, as if she was going to see whoever was speaking. 

She didn’t. She didn’t see anyone. But she did see the silver necklace sitting on the passenger seat of her car.

Lindsay swallowed, hard. 

In 200 meters, she turned left. She knew for a fact that this road had not been there when she’d come in with Hild. Lindsay didn’t have it in her to be surprised. It would just be naive at this point.

“Very good,” the woman speaking through her car said. Her tone was cool and unruffled again. “In 12 kilometers, turn left.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Lindsay said, because she had the feeling that good manners wouldn’t hurt at this point, and she suspected that whoever this was could hear her.

“Call me Frigga,” her car answered, amused. 

Frigga. Like, Norse mythology Frigga?

Her hands were shaking on the wheel. She traveled in obedient silence, answering only with confirmations and “thank-yous” for the directions that she was given. She didn’t really think that the directions she was being given were taking her home. She didn’t think she had any choice here.

There was a percussive sound in the distance. Lindsay flinched. It came again, louder and faster as she drove on. She glanced out her windows- there was nothing to the left, but there were mountains to the right.

“Great craftsmen,” Frigga purred. “They made my token.”

Token- the necklace. 

“Do you wish to see them?” Frigga asked. There was something cruelly amused in her voice. “I think that you might be able to acquire something similar, though of lesser value.”

“I don’t have any money,” Lindsay said quietly. She didn’t know what the joke was, but it was making her very wary.

Frigga laughed, high and a little wild. “Nor did I,” she admitted. “And that is why my husband was so displeased. Would you believe the trouble he caused, over such a little thing?”

She ran a very quick calculation over whether it seemed more dangerous to ignore Frigga or to participate in the conversation. “Trouble?” Lindsay settled for.

“Ah,” Frigga said casually. “The incident with the kings served by kings. He took my token and said that I might only have it back after certain conditions were met. He did not, of course, mention where he had put it. It was out of my sight for some time.” Her tone turned a little sour at the end.

…It had been with Hild, who had been wandering in some kind of purgatory for hundreds of years after she should have died, Lindsay presumed. It made a horrifying kind of fairy-tale sense. Frigga hadn’t been able to get it back until Hild died, but Hild couldn’t die until she returned home.

‘…That kinda sounds like Frigga’s husband didn’t want her to have it back,’ Lindsay realized. She felt really sick. ‘And like he might not be happy about someone who facilitated that.’

…and it also told her that he had been perfectly willing to trap the presumably innocent Hild in an endless walk as a side effect spiting his wife. 

“Yes,” Frigga agreed carelessly. “He will be most displeased when he sees it on my neck. But this time, there will be no sending a fly through the lock of my bower to steal it.” She paused. “I won’t let him harm you,” she assured. Frigga sounded amused. “You have done me a favor, little one. I have the manners to repay it.”

“Thank you,” Lindsay said mechanically, because she did not want to die. She was pulling into a great courtyard now. There were enormous horses on either side, paying her absolutely no attention. She turned the car off.

“Take my necklace,” Frigga said. “Come around the west and up the stairs. Do not look at anyone you see.”

She took off her seatbelt, and was certain that she was about to die. She picked up the necklace and winced- it was uncomfortably hot.

“From the forge,” Frigga said. “It’s only a few thousand years old. It still breathes with the heat of the diamond forge.” She sounded wistful. “It is beautiful. Perhaps I shall take you to see it, one day.” Then she laughed, and it was great and terrible. “If my husband does not lose his temper and kill the craftsmen,” she added. 

Right. Only a few thousand years old. She chose not to think about how hot it must have been before, if it was still holding heat. But Hild’s exhaustion and pained way of moving was making more sense now. 

She transferred the necklace between her hands as she walked, moving it around her palms and fingertips to distribute the painful burden and avoid burns. She was walking before she realized that she had automatically known which side of the castle was the western wall. She found the stairs and began to climb up, up, and up. It was steep and endless. Her legs trembled and hurt. The staircase had begun as a line that looped back to change directions every floor, but after about ten floors or so it transformed into an endless spiral. It seemed impossible that she could take one more step, but she always managed it.

There was a great golden door in front of her, with no handle. There was something that might have been a keyhole, but it had been filled in with something red that she suspected she did not want to touch. Lindsay stared at it blankly. It was… It was very tall.

She turned around and looked at the stairs again. She noticed that the ceilings would allow for someone easily twice her height to walk. 

At 5 feet and 10 inches, Lindsay wasn’t exactly short herself. She tried not to think about it. 

“I don’t know how to open the door,” she said quietly. She was sure that she could be heard.

No answer came, but the door swung inward soundlessly. 

When she stepped inside, the door closed behind her. The room was bright and large, with sunshine streaming down onto lush green plants and velvet-covered furniture. An enormous fluffy cat sat up to watch her- like, it was the size of a Labrador dog. A woman was kneeling over it with a brush, carefully combing out fur that was longer than Lindsay’s hair.

She was very careful not to make any eye contact.

“In here,” came Frigga’s terrible voice. It was harder and higher in person, aching at her bones but filling her heart to burst. Lindsay followed the sound. She had forgotten about the painful heat of the necklace and was not gingerly moving it around her hands anymore. All she wanted was to see Frigga.

And see she did. Frigga filled the room with light- it wasn’t sunlight, it was the goddess. She had wavy hair that trailed down the floor and enormous catlike eyes. The goddess was lounging on a divan, holding a wine cup in her long fingers. She was probably about 7 feet tall.

Silently, Lindsay crossed the room and held out the necklace in offering. Instead of taking it, Frigga bent her head and pulled her long hair to the side to expose her neck. Lindsay slipped the necklace on. It latched shut without her having to touch it.

“Thank you,” Frigga said. She lifted her head and regarded Lindsay, taking in her painted nails, tight jeans, and the braids in her hair. She smiled. “I think,” Frigga said carefully, “that I will keep you.”