Fault Lines by Anne Rivers Siddons

Author:Anne Rivers Siddons [Anne Rivers Siddon]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: cookie429, Kat, Extratorrents
ISBN: 9780061742897
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2005-01-09T13:00:00+00:00

We got to Caleb Pringle’s mountain retreat long past dark, so I really did not see any of the surrounding country until the next day. But all the way through the tangle of suburban streets that stretched from San Jose to Saratoga I could feel the presence of the mountains to our west. Once we began to climb them, threading our way through the bewildering maze of small roads and trails that led up and over their crest and down into the Big Basin area, the unseen spires of the great redwoods seemed to lean so close over us in the little red car that we automatically spoke in near-whispers. Fog or low clouds augmented the darkness; it was like making our way through an endless tunnel whose walls were swirling gray. The silence was so dense and total that it seemed to have its own monolithic shape. Only the close-brushing branches of unfamiliar undergrowth broke the fog wall, and occasionally the red flash of wild watching eyes, or the ghostly shape of an animal whisking across the road in front of us. Twice we saw deer, and once a fox, and once something low and solid and scurrying that none of us could put a name to. By that time we were not speaking much. The darkness and the silence were oppressive, as was the growing sense that we were hopelessly lost in an alien moonscape where only inhuman things and towering, implacable giants tracked us.

We had met the dense June coastal fog just outside San Luis Obispo. It was scarcely past noon; we had left at nine and made remarkably good time up Highway 1, the old coast road. It had been Laura’s plan to drive up that way, taking our time and stopping wherever along the spectacular coast our fancy dictated. It would be, she said, a drive we would never forget: San Simeon, Big Sur, Carmel, Monterey. Perhaps we would break the trip for the night at Carmel, where a friend of hers had, she knew, an empty guest house, and then cut inland at Santa Cruz and follow Highways 9 and 236 up into the Big Basin area. Caleb Pringle’s private road snaked off there, up near the Santa Cruz County border.

I was as eager as a child to be on the road, sun and wind in my face and the cold blue sea always to our left. I thought of the magical flight through the desert and expected more of that, but somehow it did not happen. The sea, from Santa Monica on up, was wild and beautiful, and the low, empty hills to our right were sharp and clear and still green with the spring rains, and often blanketed so thickly with wildflowers that they looked like a pointillistic landscape, but somehow they failed to call out the wings in my heart as the desert had done. We made the first three hours in a jittering miasma born of something I could not put a name to.

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