Eternity's Echo

by H. C. Southwark

  Because it wouldn’t make a difference if I went to where Obadiah Charon was, Ellie told herself. He’s one of those superhuman things, like Jude. I would just be a distraction, if he could see me at all. I need a mentor to take him out—I need to convince Niles to use a shard to stop him. And if Niles can see me change the past...

  It made sense. She repeated that to herself: It makes sense that I’m here. This is the way to save the world. If I change what happens here, then Niles will be forced to act.

  But deep down, she knew: she was here to save herself. Because nobody else would.

  Her mother’s voice said, “We left the list of numbers on the kitchen counter.”

  The words were so familiar that Ellie felt goosebumps spread over her skin like a disease, and she whirled to see herself—a carbon copy, minus the bruises, scarf, and battered red coat—walk out from the living room, through the hall, and into the kitchen.

  “There’s twenty dollars too, in case you want pizza,” said her mother. The unspoken subtext was that was a rare thing in the household, so Ellie ought to take advantage.

  Moving as if the carpet was velcro on the bottom of her boots, Ellie pushed her pocket-watch back into her breast pocket, kept her hands close to her body. She did not know what would happen if she touched her living self, but based on what happened to Shawn, she did not want to find out. Even close proximity was probably dangerous.

  Dying the once had been enough.

  In the kitchen, Living-Ellie was watching her parents pull on their snow boots.

  “Robbie should be fine at the Anderson’s,” said her mother, not looking at Ellie and certainly avoiding looking at Ellie’s father. “But if he calls, then call us.”

  “We’ll be back a little after midnight, so don’t stay up,” said her father, who had the single flip-phone that the family possessed in his hand, putting it into his jeans.

  Neither of them seemed to find it strange that Living-Ellie did not say anything.

  What should I do? Ellie thought, watching her younger self watch them, as they moved into the mudroom. I should do something. I should be using the shard for... something. If it changes the past, I need to figure out how, before...

  Before her younger self did the unspeakable.

  But she was mesmerized. She felt as though what she was seeing was both real and unreal at the same time, like she was in a play that she had read the script for, but never seen performed. Living-Ellie was almost invisible to her. When her parents glanced up at her living self, Ellie felt as though they were looking at—

  They were not, of course. And they had not seen Living-Ellie, either. Not really.

  “Mom,” Living-Ellie said, paused, as though startled to hear her own voice—and Ellie knew exactly what she was thinking, what she had thought, which was that she had not intended to speak but the word had slipped out anyway.

  “What?” said her mother, absently, buttoning her coat, just as Ellie’s father was doing. Both Ellies watched their parents jostle with layers, hats and scarves and gloves.

  Living-Ellie cast about for a word to say, and settled for, “Bye.”

  Her parents returned the word, automatically, and then the front door closed, and a moment later the scraping sound told both Ellies that they had used the key to lock it.

  Living-Ellie stood in the hall and stared at the door. Waiting for it to open again.

  Ellie stood there staring at her younger self. There was a look on her own face that she could not recall ever having seen before—a lost sort of expression, as if she was poking the corners of her own mind for an answer to some question even she did not know.

  A bitter taste crept over her tongue. She glared at herself, said, “You stupid bitch.”

  Living-Ellie moved. She hurried to the front of the kitchen, as if being chased, and stopped at the windows overlooking the porch. Ellie knew was she was seeing:

  Her parents getting into the car, parked in front of the house. On the way, her father said something Ellie would not hear, and then her mother would respond with a snarl on her face. When her mother opened the passenger side, her father would reach over her and slam the door shut before she could enter, forcing her to reopen it.

  Ellie did not need to see the gesture again—she remembered everything perfectly. There was such a petty, yet calculated, yet casual cruelty to it, just one of a thousand little ways her parents had hurt each other, until hurt became habit.

  The sound of the car door slam came, a muffled thump. Living-Ellie flinched.

  Then she said: “So much for your romantic night out.”

  At the rumble of the car engine, Living-Ellie turned away, and Ellie dodged as her double walked through the hall and into the living room. Following outside arm’s length, Ellie watched as her younger self observed the room, which was sans parakeet, and then checked behind the couch, as though paranoid, before straightening.

  “Okay,” Living-Ellie whispered, afraid of being overheard, despite that this was a prayer. “Dear God, if you don’t want me to do this, you should probably give me a sign.”

  Stupid girl, thought Ellie, stupid, stupid—and Charon’s voice came, God designed us to die. She felt the insides of her throat swelling like she was ill, tissues inflamed. She wanted to scream: God isn’t going to save you! He doesn’t care!

  But, Living-Ellie was asking for a sign. That sounded like a cue.

  Pulling the shard out of her front pocket, Ellie paused one moment to wonder what she would experience if she stopped Living-Ellie right here and now. Would she vanish back into her body and retain or lose her memories of being a reaper? Which did she prefer?

  It doesn’t matter what I want, she thought. It’s a matter of what does or doesn’t happen.

  Holding up the shard, Ellie said, in a calm as voice as she could muster, “Stop.”

  For a moment Living-Ellie kept standing in the room, looking at the furniture, but with a confused expression, as though reality had become puzzling. Ellie did not dare to hope that this alone was going to be enough, until Living-Ellie called:

  “Hello? Is anyone home?”

  At that, Ellie started, jerking back. She stared at Living-Ellie, hardly able to believe what she had been heard, that she was getting a response. Then Living-Ellie called again:

  “Mom? Dad? Are you guys back?”

  And Ellie remembered: she had done this, before she got serious. Just in case. A moment of superstitiousness; she was worried she had been wrong about them leaving, that they were still in the house and would catch her in the act.

  Ellie had felt very strongly against being caught before everything was over.

  “You—” she erupted, waving the shard, but then had to scramble back as Living-Ellie moved, strode forward with purpose, to the mudroom closet. There, rifling through a few drawers. Ellie knew what she would find: the rope.

  Holding the shard higher like a charm, Ellie shouted, “Hey! You stupid bitch! You’re being watched, you hear me? You’re going to regret it, so don’t do it!”

  Even as she said these words, Living-Ellie had pulled out the rope, stood for a second contemplating the fibres. It was a smooth rope. The kind that would not upbraid the skin too much, would crush rather than sandpaper and tear. As she did this, Ellie felt a strange morbidity descend upon her, even as she kept shouting herself half-hoarse.

  Tragicomedy, Jude had said. As Living-Ellie sought out a screwdriver in another drawer, Ellie’s mind circled around the word. Here she was, half-begging herself to stop, unheard. And all she could think to do was rage—otherwise, she would laugh. Or cry.

  Carrying both implements, Living-Ellie turned and walked down the hall. Ellie was forced to line herself against the wall to avoid touch. She called, “Hey, hey! Stop right now!”

  But Living-Ellie ignored her. As Ellie watched, she reached the stairs and strode upwards like an resigned prisoner climbing the gallows—like this was no big deal. She h
ad been up and down those stairs a dozen times every day of her life; that this was her last time going up them did not seem to occur to her, or at least left her unconcerned.

  Ellie hurried in her wake, but paused at the foot of the stairs. No, she thought, mind trying to plan, that was not my last time going up here, because I’ve got to go up there now. I’ve got to stop myself, if I don’t, then... the whole world will end.

  My world will end.

  In all her visits, she had never gone back up. The stairs seemed steeper than she remembered; but forcing one foot to rise, she heaved her weight and took the first step. The next was easier, and the next even more. By the top of the stairs she was swinging her legs and hips without glancing down, each creak under her feet familiar.

  A memory, then: when Ellie was younger, she had not walked up stairs, but had half-climbed, using her hands to bound up. These were the stairs she had done that on, every day since she was four to perhaps a year or so before her death. Before now.

  The hall was unlit, but Ellie blinked her eyes back to adjustment. The master room at the back. Robbie’s room to the right. And to the left, her own room’s door was ajar.

  As she approached, her ears popped. Some differential of air pressure.

  Halting, Ellie reached her free hand up to the side of her face, realized she was trembling. How strange. She should have felt herself tremble from the inside, but instead she felt it only on the outside. She no longer inhabited her own skin.

  Pushing the door, she was confronted by the sight:

  Her bedroom had an attic access. The only one in the house. The hatch was down and the wooden collapsible ladder reached the floor. Draped through the hole was the rope, noose already tied in the hangman’s knot Ellie had looked up at the library days ago. Ellie did not need to peer up through the hole to know that her younger self had tied the other end to the exposed beams holding up the attic roof.

  All told, this was a twelve-foot drop to the floor.

  At the floor was the sewing tape measurer that Ellie had used to determine a length of five feet for the rope, a little over that, just in case. Because she had also read: to die instantly, a person’s weight had to be matched to the length of the rope.

  “It’s not going to work,” Ellie said, and shocked herself at the sound of panic in her voice. Above her, Living-Ellie took a few steps down the ladder, and put her boot into the noose. She began to shift her weight, testing the strength of the beam and rope.

  “You stupid bitch!” Ellie yelled, as Living-Ellie determined the setup would bear her. “It’s not going to work! You read the chart wrong, it’s not long enough!”

  Because she had. For someone of Ellie’s size, she would have needed a rope over nine feet. That would have let her land on the floor—nowhere in the house was tall enough. A five-foot rope would only have been effective for someone about twice her build.

  Satisfied with the rope, Living-Ellie grabbed the screwdriver, climbed halfway down the ladder, and began working on the hinges that kept the wooden attic ladder in place. She would need to dismantle it into two parts to clear room for her to fall.

  We’re minutes away, Ellie thought. Stared down at the shard in her hand, tried to think what to do. Nothing helped. The shard did nothing, just glowed faintly, as always, even fainter than the red coming through her bedroom window with the fading sunset.

  “Shouting’s not enough,” Ellie said to herself, and she turned to her dresser, where the assorted bits and bobs of childhood were still present. Picking up a snowglobe encasing a giraffe, she hurled it against the wall. The glass was tougher than she predicted; it bounced.

  The thump had no effect on Living-Ellie, who finished one side of the lower half of the ladder and began to work on the other. Even in the midst of all this, a reaper was still a reaper: invisible. Snarling, Ellie felt something feral rise up inside her—a storm that had been brewing for all of this misadventure, for all of three years reaping, for six years since her brother had been born and her parents turned ugly.

  Seizing the jewelry box she had inherited from an aunt, she flung that against the window and it exploded like a firecracker—a shower of jewelry real and fake, beads, little rings that no longer fit her—and then a small pile of makeup she hardly used, lipstick rolling as she swept the whole collection to the floor, then a CD player with a crash, a disk popping and scrolling across carpet—finishing with the final snowglobe at the end—and this one shattered perfectly like a miniature version of the Big Bang.

  “Listen to me!” she screamed. “Listen, you have to stop! Stop! Stop!”

  But there was no difference. She was raging without an audience. Living-Ellie had finished the lower half of the ladder and was pulling herself up to the top half, legs still dangling. Ellie flung the shard from the Spindle of Necessity at her.

  It bounced off her shin, much as it had only a few minutes ago when she had yelled at Niles. Still no effect. But Ellie hardly noticed, for she found herself shouting:

  “It’s not going to work! They’re going to hate each other even more when you’re gone, they’re going to blame each other, but then you know what? They get back together, no problem! They’ll stop talking about you. And then everything will be fine. They’ll turn this room into an office, I know they have! You’ll be nothing but a shrine in the kitchen!”

  Living Ellie made quick work of the top half of the ladder, and heaved it up into the attic with her. Then she sat, dangling her feet down the hole, lost in thought.

  Ellie had hardly noticed. She kept raging: “And you won’t like what comes next! You’ll spend eternity watching people die. They’ll all beg you, ever single one of them, Please, please, give me another chance! But there’s no way for you to stop them from dying because it’s fate—but now, now it can’t be fate, it can’t be, it can’t...”

  Her lungs felt tired, overworked. Her mouth was swollen, slippery—or perhaps that was her whole face. She stared up into the hole at her younger, living self, and said, “They will be better off without you, understand? You only think they will learn a lesson, but you don’t really want them to learn it. But you know what? It’s fine. Because they were finally happy. And that’s when the world ends!”

  She broke into something like laughter, hysteria woven through the peals. Felt almost like a block of ice, teeth chattering as she finished, “That’s why you have to stop. It’s just you, okay? There is nobody else. God isn’t going to save the universe—or you. He doesn’t give a shit. My family is happy and the universe ends—what a laugh!”

  Living-Ellie kicked, but absently, almost a spasm of muscle that was soon forgotten.

  “Hey,” Ellie yelled. “Are you listening to me?”

  And then she jumped, just a hop, and lashed out at the sole of Living-Ellie’s boot.

  The jump did not end; instead, she was falling. She shrieked as the universe tilted, up becoming down, and she fell through the air onto herself through herself into herself...

  Then she was sitting in the attic, watching the sunlight on the toes of her boots.

  Everything was so calm here. When she had looked for the rope she had felt an odd tremor in her fingers, but she could not tell if that was fear or excitement. She did not know what she had to be excited about. But she did not feel particularly afraid either.

  Leaning back, she stared up into the gloom of the attic. There was only a single window around the corner which cast red sunset onto the walls. The air was dark and heavy, overly warm even in winter. Insulation and dust everywhere. A deadened world.

  Lean forward again. She looked down at her bedroom. Everything felt odd and out of place—like a tornado had rearranged her things. Or maybe a tornado through her life.

  You’re being overdramatic, she told herself. It’s just death. Everybody dies, right? And either way, you’ll be okay. God’ll forgive you because that’s what He’s for. And if there’s nothing waiting for you at the end, then you don’t
have anything to worry about. You won’t even know you’ve vanished. Either way, there’s probably better than here.

  Best get on with it before I lose my nerve.

  She stood, stooped a little in the slope of the attic ceiling, pulled the rope up and tugged it over her head. The knot went behind the ear, right? The book she read on state executions said that the prisoner’s neck snapped and their blood pressures plummeted to near zero, losing consciousness immediately. Death took a couple minutes but they felt nothing. That sounded like falling asleep. Pleasant, even.

  Leaning a little over the edge, she wondered: Maybe she should take another minute. Read her Bible or something. Get more in the mood. But that would mean screwing the ladder back, and that was just too much effort. Living itself was too much effort. She was exhausted. Life had been one long labor since before she could remember and she was tired of working. To rest—that was good. Everything else was a delaying tactic.

  Do it already, she told herself, and lifted a foot to step off the edge. Pausing, she considered: How exactly did one do this? Jump? Hop? How does one fall to die?

  It’s just a simple thing, she decided, and so took one step forward.

  The drop was nauseating. For an eyeblink she thought that she might fall forever.

  Then the rope. Impact. The air was a surface she slammed into. Her neck wrenched and the pain was indescribable—but it did not stop. She was on fire. She should not have felt anything but yet everything was here and it was not stopping.

  And the lone thought came: I’ve made a mistake.

  Ellie had never been more sure of anything in her life. Now, at the end, she could be nothing but completely honest—this was the worst thing she had ever done.

  She wanted to scream for help. But there was nobody in the house, nobody on the street to hear, nobody. She clawed at the rope until her fingers were bloody but that was nothing, nothing compared to the fire on her throat, pouring into her lungs. Her legs kicked and thrashed, swimming through air, a grim dance. By now, even if she had been physically able to scream, she still could not—nothing compared to this agony.