Available Darkness Season 2

she asked, thinking she should have simply said yes.
    The old man mopped his brow, just beneath the single tuft of hair, and looked at Hannah with undiluted surprise, as if it was impossible to believe that anyone could be filling their tank at his station and not headed out toward Ashford Canyon.
    Since the old man couldn’t go anywhere without Lucinda, he decided to give Hannah a history lesson while waiting. He jabbed his finger at a thick swath of trees, without any general direction. “You probably know all about the gold rush, right?”
    Hannah shrugged and lightly nodded. She knew a little.
    “The gold rush is what changed this state. You see,” he said waving his hands in a wild circle, “gold is everywhere. In every rock, believe it or not, and even ocean water. The world is always changing, and California wasn’t nothing like it is now millions of years ago when it was sitting at the bottom of the sea.”
    The old man took Hannah’s mild surprise as an invitation to continue. Despite her urgency to flee, there was something comforting in the old man’s lilting voice that kept her sitting in her seat and smiling through the open window, willing to hear the rest of his story.
    He thrust his thumb behind his shoulder and said, “The Pacific shoreline lay to the east, where Utah and Arizona are now. Hot springs along the ocean floor built up huge deposits of sulfide minerals. That makes gold, and once all that gold was sitting on solid ground instead of being stuck under water, people all around the country, if not the entire world, started seeing California as the end of their rainbow. Ashford Canyon was one of the state’s more profitable mines, until she called it quits back in 1968.”
    The old man whistled, and only then did Hannah smell the whiskey on his breath, which tightened her nerves and made her want to key the ignition and take off.
    “Now it’s just a ghost town people like to visit,” the old man shrugged. “But the hotel is nice if you’re looking for a place to stay, or at least I’ve heard it said. Never stayed there myself.”
    “How do I get there?” Hannah asked, thinking an out-of-the-way ghost town hotel might be the perfect place to rest her head on a pillow and gather some thoughts.
    “You can’t miss it,” he said, again pointing nowhere in particular. “Just keep driving on the road, you’ll see the first sign in about five minutes, then fairly regular after that. You’ll hit the canyon in about 25 miles or so. Just follow the signs.”
    “Thank you,” Hannah said.
    “Sure thing,” the old man nodded and slapped the side of Greg’s car as if giving Hannah permission to leave. “Just be careful and don’t drive too fast. The roads twist something fierce up toward the canyon, and there’s no light until morning, outside what you make yourself.”
    Hannah said thank you and turned the engine, then gave him a little salute just as what she assumed was Lucinda pulled into the station. Hannah turned to the heavyset blonde around 60, smiling from behind the steering wheel of an ancient F150, and sent her a similar salute. The heavyset blonde returned her wave, looking uncertain.
    With a full tank of gas, Hannah tore into the night, only slowing through the treacherous turns the old man had promised. She followed the signs leading toward Ashford and was now only an exit away. As the highway turned flat, Hannah floored the pedal, racing through the walls of trees and hallways of darkness around her, keeping her eyes fixed ahead as she fled either paranoia or nightmare.
    Though Hannah didn’t doubt her instincts enough to stop, or even slow, she doubted them enough to fill her trip with plenty of mental self-flagellation.
    What are you doing?
    You stole Greg’s car and left him stranded hundreds of miles from home.
    Why?
    She waited for her other inner voice, the one which prompted her haste to flee like a bat out of hell. She needed that voice to weigh in and assuage her guilt. Unfortunately for Hannah, that voice stayed oddly silent, thickening her doubt and decaying her resolve.
    I should turn around, drive back, and say it was all just a joke, ha-ha.
    Maybe I can say I forgot about him, blame it on the accident and my bump on the head. Yeah, that might work.
    Despite the thought that Greg would probably forgive her, Hannah’s body was in no hurry to turn the car around. She accelerated, racing toward Ashford, eager to put more, not less, distance between