Free Dreamseeker's Road by Tom Deitz Page A

ride back here. Rain had caught them halfway down: just above Gainesville. It had not let up until that morning.
    Which meant he’d had no chance to scout out the place the ulunsuti had shown him.
    Nor did he really have time now; he was cutting botany as it was. But he did have to submit a plant collection in that class; and there were plants in the target zone. And if he just happened to find that place the ulunsuti had revealed, so much the better.
    And if he didn’t…well, empty woods were a hell of a place to read.
    And since he’d spent most of yesterday’s deluge haunting the library in quest of what Dave (and Mr. Poe) would have called “quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore,” he had God’s plenty of that to occupy him.
    So he stared at the banks a moment longer, and the river between them a touch longer than that, quieted Tori with a tap of a finger, raised his staff on high—and, in the style of Charlton Heston, yelled, “Behold!”
    No one heard—he hoped. The Oconee drank most of his voice and carried it away toward Lexington. And trees wrapped the rest in colored leaves and would not let go.
    And with that, Aikin strode across the dam and into the woods.
    *
    He found it sooner than expected and could’ve kicked himself for not exploring such a landmark more thoroughly. But there it was: an ancient white oak that had been zapped decades ago by lightning, reducing it to a twist of knobby trunk and gnarled and broken limbs, from which the bark was still sloughing like a bad case of leprosy. Beside it, Siamese-twin maples made a V that framed the westering sun—but they only served to confirm what he already knew. This was it: the place from his dream by which a Straight Track lay.
    He’d been here before, too. But he’d been so busy gawking at the tree itself, he’d not noticed the surrounding terrain.
    Had he deigned to look lower, however, he’d surely have seen the signs Dave had reluctantly described on the jaunt down from Enotah County. Like the way nothing actually grew on a yard-wide stretch of ground, and leaves seemed undisturbed there—and oddly un-moldered; how ants and beetles turned aside as they approached it, and spiders spun no webs across its path. Briars grew along it too: not so thick as to draw notice, but enough to dissuade the unwary.
    Aikin smiled as he crouched beside it. Tracks went everywhere, Dave had said; but in this World, at least, were unseen; nor did they follow its exact contours. He could not, for instance, pace this screwy trail for mile on mile unending. Rather, it would simply disappear at some point, as it passed through another World Wall. As far as he knew, which was as much as Dave had told him, the Track that ran through the Sullivans’ river bottom and thence up the mountain behind their house was the longest stretch in North America where Tir-Nan-Og and the Lands of Men precisely coincided. This was shorter—had to be—and to prove it, Aikin shucked his pack, fumbled out a map, and noted how the Track’s route, if extended, would carry it through a subdivision one way and into the concrete tangle of the bypass—with all its attendant steel—the other.
    But here it lingered. Here it waited, all unknown. The Promised Land indeed. The road to wonder.
    And then he could wait no longer.
    A briar snagged his elbow as he eased his arm through that almost-invisible barrier of blackberry thorns and over the Track itself. Slowly he lowered his palm, tensing as it neared the surface as if he feared a shock, though Dave had said nothing would happen unless the Track were activated, which no mortal could accomplish. Or unless, as had been the case with one of Dave’s grandsires, certain obscure natural conditions pertained, which Dave could not more specifically define.
    …closer, and he found himself straining his eyes in quest of what he could not see, had never seen—and might not get to see, if Dave had told him true. “A glimmer of gold on the