“If you are at the gate, you have been on this road long enough. Do not go back. The road behind you will not take you out. It will take you back here. Every time. The gate is the only exit. The lock is combination: 1-9-4-7. Do not ask how we knew the combination. We found it the same way you will. Go through. Walk, don’t drive. Leave the car. The car is why you keep coming back.”
Silence.
Wassim took the letter and read it himself, as though Zofia might have mistranslated it somehow.
“That’s insane,” he said.
“Yes,” she agreed.
“Someone put that there. Someone who knows this road, who’s messing with people who get lost here. It’s a prank. A local thing.”
“Then let’s get back in the car and drive out,” Nikos said.
Wassim looked at him. Looked at the road behind them. Looked at the gate.
He tried the combination anyway. 1-9-4-7. The padlock opened.
They stood at the threshold for a long moment, all four of them, the gate swinging slowly inward on its own weight. Beyond it, the road was dirt now, not asphalt, though none of them could say where the transition had happened.
“We are not leaving the car,” Wassim said.
Federica walked through the gate on foot.
Not dramatically. Not running. She just walked through, as if she’d made a quiet decision and was done discussing it. Her footsteps on the dirt were very loud in the strange thick air.
“Federica.”
She didn’t stop. Nikos went after her. Then Zofia. Wassim stood at the car for another moment, jaw tight, and then he followed.
The road through the gate was not long. Maybe half a kilometer. The trees on either side were older here, their roots pushing up through the dirt in long dark ridges, the canopy so dense that what little light remained came through in pale, scattered shafts. Nobody spoke. Federica walked at a pace that wasn’t quite hurrying but wasn’t comfortable either, and the others matched her without discussion.
The road came out into a clearing.
A paved two-lane highway ran through it, east to west. A green interstate sign stood at the junction: I-76 West, 4 miles. I-76 East, 4 miles.
A gas station sat at the corner, fluorescent lights on, a pickup truck at one of the pumps.
Zofia made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh.
Federica sat down on the ground at the edge of the pavement. She sat with her knees up and her forearms on them and looked at the highway for a while.
Nikos looked back down the dirt road they’d come through. He could see the gate from here. It was still open. Beyond it, where the trees should have been dark with the coming of whatever early dusk had settled over the other road, the light looked ordinary. Late afternoon. Unremarkable.
“The car,” Wassim said. The word came out hollow. They had left the car on the other side of the gate. On the road that went in circles. Where, according to a letter from a stranger who had apparently been through the same thing, the car was the reason you couldn’t leave.
Nikos walked back through the gate. The others watched him go. He returned four minutes later.
“The road is straight,” he said. “It goes about a hundred meters and then it ends. There’s a ditch. And the car is…” He stopped. “The car is fine. It’s just parked.”
“Did you drive it?” Federica asked.
“No.”
“Then we can go back for it,” Wassim said.
“I think,” Zofia said slowly, “we should call for a tow from this side. And I think we should not get back in that car.”
Wassim opened his mouth to argue and then closed it. His hands were shaking slightly. He put them in his pockets.
They walked to the gas station. The man at the pump looked at them the way people look at tourists who’ve clearly had a bad day, with mild sympathy and zero curiosity. Federica bought four coffees from a machine inside. They sat at a picnic table near the air pump and drank them without talking much.
It was Zofia who finally said what the rest of them had been turning over. “The letter. Someone wrote it knowing the combination.”
“Local kids,” Wassim said, but weakly.
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