The Sketch Rift: The Seal of Demons

Return

They did not "arrive" so much as they spontaneously appeared, breathing rapid and eyes shot open as if shaken from a shared nightmare. A horizontal Riverift had mollified their senses as much as it previously heightened them, a gentle current as much as it was once a sheer drop. They fumbled with their limbs to corroborate their consciousness, ultimately corroborating their attachment – for the time machine had not separated them. Their embrace did not just withstand the commute: it stiffened, so that it now could break. The four laughed and cheered.

They had alighted on a beach in the dead of night, unpeopled and noiseless, save for the rhythmic ebbing and flowing of the tide. Darkness under starlight blanketed this undeveloped pasture of sand, on which only four grazed for meals of immeasurable glee, twirling upon it in celebration, dipping, giggling, into the water, and emerging bedraggled and sodden, albeit behind a childish smile nothing could tarnish. Bella especially cherished the pristine air, the unspoiled ocean, the hallmarks of before. All was rejuvenating, and all welcomed.

All of nature, that is, because when frolicking at the seashore became humdrum, the truth dawned on the four. Here, they were not legendary heroes and affiliates, but a woman and three kids, disheveled, drenched, and wide awake at midnight, carrying no belongings and little pretense of the date or location – although Alice suspected the Bay. No one of sound mind would take them for trustworthy.

Thankfully, Alice had done her fair share of hitchhiking in young adulthood.

Less thankfully, her winning formula consisted of plodding parallel to the nearest vacant road until reaching a shoulder near an intersection. She ordered Sam, Irene and Bella to obscure themselves behind a tree trunk as she remained in view, sticking her thumb out, sending passersby a coy, vaguely coquettish guise.

This strategy historically carted her nationwide, but now it was risky at best and treacherous at worst. She lacked both that weaponizable early-twenties allure and the handy taser that dealt with anyone for whom that was too much a deciding factor. More presciently, it was the middle of night in the middle of nowhere. Three cars passed in ten minutes, and every driver distracted themselves whilst doing so to mask their apathy toward a lost stranger.

Half an hour elapsed, and their only progress was a filthy ten-dollar bill Sam recovered from the dirt. The four meditated on walking, but headlights suddenly approached, prompting Alice to leap out from the woods onto the roadside, flailing her arms to grab the driver's attention – and, more miraculously than she knew, it worked. The car screeched to a halt, and its owner lifted their alarmingly fogged glasses.

It was a gaudy cerulean convertible of some sort, roof open, hugging the asphalt with a hair's breadth dividing, evoking the offspring of a borderline millionaire's midlife crisis. The pale driver's curls suggested a relation a peeking Sam could now name, but deemed irrelevant compared to their visible inebriation, although by what he could not name, which most likely contributed to their outing at this hour. Another second of analysis indicated they had no destination in mind either.

"What are you doing out here?" the driver asked, far too casually, as Irene snuck over to read their license plate. New Hampshire: perhaps the number mattered more.

"Look," Alice shrugged, "I won't even try to explain how this happened, but if you're able, could we hitch a ride to Boston?"

"Sure, sure –" the driver nodded with an offputting amount of verve, "—'we'?"

"That's right," Alice summoned Sam, Bella, and shortly Irene to her side. "We'll pay you back. Anything."

Sam considered brandishing his newfound ten-dollar bounty, but it would be redundant – for before they knew it, he, Irene, and Bella were uncomfortably wedged in the now-roof-down convertible's leathery backseat, Alice adopting the passenger's, all at the mercy of a highway hazard not exactly at their most lucid. Moments in, and regret ensconced itself. Minutes in, and it boiled over.