Eleanor (49 page)

She turns to the staircase and is stopped by the sight of her mother’s chair.
 

Her father’s Glacier Pilots T-shirt is folded neatly on the chair.

Resting on top is a folded piece of paper.
 

She stares at it for a long time, the silence of the house rising around her, the creak of old wood and the tick of the water heater gone for now. She goes to the chair and stands over it, staring at the paper.

At last she opens it.

She reads its contents once, twice, then again.
 

A tiny rustle comes from upstairs, from her mother’s bedroom—an invitation, but a dark one. Eleanor turns to look at the staircase. The stairs seem to multiply and grow taller, farther apart, as she watches.

She unfolds the T-shirt and pulls it over her head, the soft scent of detergent filling her nose.

She returns the note to the chair, walks to the stairs, and begins to climb.

“
Don’t go
!” the keeper pleads.

Her throat burns with the effort of shouting. She feels the cords in her neck tighten. Her body is little more than bones dressed in skin, her skin little more than paper. The force of her own cry drops her to the ground, and she sobs bitterly, broken now at last. Her shadow has weakened now, too, just a dusky smudge on the raw ground. This is the worst part, the harbinger of her ending. When it goes, she will disappear as well.
 

The beasts move slowly away, every step crushing the blackened crust of earth. The small one leans against the other, hardly able to support its own weight. Now and then their heavy feet punch through the ground as it crumbles, unstable and brittle, and the two great animals stumble and stagger.
 

“Don’t go,” she whispers again, hoarsely.

The large beast cranes its neck to look at her, and the keeper holds its beautiful gaze for a moment.
 

Then the sky turns to flame, and the moment ends.

A bright orange flower bulges in the black clouds, and the keeper forgets her woes immediately. The air turns electric and begins to twist, the rain turning to bullets as the funnel forms. The keeper struggles to her feet, and stands on spindly bones, fixated on the growing maelstrom. It is the same as before, the sky pregnant with her enemy, and she summons every bit of strength she has, and she screams at the sky.
 

No words.
 

Rage like a thousand suns boils within her.
 

She is frail, a crushed and flightless bird. But she is not finished. Not yet.
 

She puts her hands up, curls her fingers, beckons the demon in the sky.
 

“
COME!
” she bellows, and her shadow turns pitch black against the scarred earth.

Bring her
, the darkness says to Mea.
We must know if she has succeeded.

Mea says,
I don’t think we’re in control anymore.

Far away, Eleanor treks up the stairs, each step tentative, deliberate. Mea watches, looking over Eleanor’s shoulder at the familiar staircase, the thready carpet on the second landing. Mea is not her former self—she knows this—but she remembers her past life, the one in which she was a six-almost-seven redheaded girl, a girl who liked to slip her bare toes into the shag loops of the upstairs rug, then lift the rug with her feet.
 

Mea and the darkness watch apprehensively. Eleanor leaves the stairs behind and goes to a door and knocks lightly. There is no answer, but there are sounds behind the door. Thin sounds. Frail sounds.
 

Eleanor pushes the door open, but doesn’t enter. There, small on the bed she once shared with Paul, is Eleanor’s mother. Agnes looks at first glance like a desiccated corpse. Her skin sags over a frame that has shriveled like rotted fruit. What muscles she once had are all but gone, and crawl beneath her slack skin like knotted string. Her auburn hair has grayed and fallen out in clumps. What remains is wispy and sparse.
 

Agnes’s eyes are closed, sunken deep into her face.
 

Her thread is weak
, the darkness says.
The cancer will claim her soon.

Mea stares at the woman on the bed.
Tell me the rules
, she says.
 

The rules—

You told Eleanor before that there are rules. What are the rules? The rules of the dreams.

The darkness understands.
I can only speculate, you understand
.

Yes, yes.

Dream worlds are refuges from what you see here
, the darkness says.
From death. From painful things.

Like memories.
 

Yes, like memories. In the dream worlds—if a person’s subconscious permits it—a person can pull a cloak around themselves. But it is not impenetrable. There is still a seam where it closes, and the child has found a way through.

Eleanor.

Yes.

Just now
, Mea says,
she wasn’t in her mother’s dream. Was she?

She has eased the pain of her father. Her mother will not be so easy.

What will happen?
Mea asks.
What will happen when Eleanor finds a way through the—the cloak?
 

The world that her mother has so carefully shut out will rush in.
 

The death. The memories,
Mea says.

The cancer. The pain. The regret. Eleanor will release all of it, like a flood. It will frighten her mother. It will overwhelm them both.
 

What will happen?

The darkness is quiet for a long time. Then it says,
I cannot say.
 

Mea can see Agnes stir ever so slightly on the bed.
 

Eleanor takes a step forward, into the doorway.

It will be a mistake, won’t it?
Mea asks.
 

Take her
, the darkness commands.
 

Mea does.

Her parents’ bedroom, once so bright and cheerful, has become a dour, odorous cave. The curtains are drawn, the room soaked in shadow. No lights are on. The air is heavy and still, as if it hasn’t moved in weeks. It is pungent, dense with the smell of unwashed skin, of sickness.
 

For a long time Eleanor stands in the doorway, her heart caught in her throat, staring at her mother.
 

At what used to be her mother.
 

The thing on the bed is hardly human anymore. It is spindly and compact, its branch-thin limbs pulled close to its body. It doesn’t resemble Agnes Witt any more than a crushed dog on a highway resembles a tree.
 

“Mom,” Eleanor whispers.
 

The only sound is the hiss of a breathing apparatus beside the bed. A thin, clear cord slinks across the sheets, connected to a plastic mask that is strapped over Agnes’s mouth and nose. A green-and-silver oxygen tank stands on a cart below the machine, pumping rich air through the cord.
 

Eleanor is afraid. She forgets about her mission, forgets the rift, forgets her sister. The only thing she can think of is her mother’s funeral. It looms over the scene before her like a thunderhead. Her mother cannot be more than an hour from death. How could she live like this?
 

She wonders what it will do to her father to have lost them all. First Esmerelda, in a violent car crash. Then, a decade later, Eleanor, who for all he knows has simply disappeared into thin air, never to return. And finally Agnes, who in her final years has turned into a pile of twigs beneath a blanket.
 

Agnes stirs, and Eleanor steps forward.

She becomes a missile.
 

Around her the air burns hot. Her hair is almost torn from her scalp. Her breath is stolen away, her eyes dry out. She can barely see—there is sky around her, but it flickers like a forest fire, turning her skin a hundred million shades of orange. Through the acrid haze that envelops her, she sees—what? Shapes, blurry shapes. She squints and stares and tries not to scream as she plummets.

There is ground down there, that much she can see. It is charred and smoking, some of it burning, some of it weeping magma.

Magma
.
 

Where is she?
 

And then the sky clears, and Eleanor punches through the atmosphere and the roiling black cloud cover, and she understands, suddenly, and is terrified. She knows exactly where she is. The upheaval far below her is the wreckage of some legendary battle. She sees mountains obliterated, transformed into vast fields of steaming rock. She can see cinders and ashen splinters scattered about, the only remaining evidence of entire forests, now wiped out.
 

Ash forests.

This is another dream world, she realizes. An altogether unpleasant one.

I’ve been here before.
 

This is her mother’s dream.