Elatsoe
Page 13
On page three, the illustration showed a tombstone with the name Joan chiseled into its face. No caption or paragraph accompanied the image.
The grayscale portrait of Nathaniel was glued to page four. Brett had drawn a clownish smile over his stern line of a mouth. “Nathaniel Grace learned a lesson from the fire. He made friends with other Pilgrims by hurting the people who frightened them more than he did.”
Page five continued, with a picture of a boxy building, “Nathaniel Grace made a hospital with the money he earned. He saved many lives.”
On page six, the single building had multiplied into ten identical buildings. They’d been drawn using a fine-tipped pen, with windows the size of pencil erasers. Brett only had room for one sentence: “He saves lives everywhere.”
The final page displayed an anatomically accurate drawing of a leech. It belonged in a biology textbook, not a historical biography. Brett concluded: “Nathaniel Grace is a great American because he saved the lives of many people like presidents and war heroes. Without him, the country would not be the same and there would be no Willowbee. He founded the town to be a good home.”
Ellie felt a hint of understanding and a prickle of confusion, as if all the threads of evidence were entwining, woven, her mind a loom—but she couldn’t see the pattern she was spinning. Nathaniel Grace could heal and hurt, much like Dr. Allerton. Were they linked? Did they sprout from the same family tree? They looked like twins, and she could think of no better reason why Brett would write about Nathaniel, a man too obscure for the footnotes in Ellie’s AP history book.
She felt a jolt of déjà vu. Ellie often resented the scholastic erasure of her six-great-grandmother and other Native people. Did Brett feel the same way about Nathaniel Grace?
It wasn’t the same. As a child, Six-Great saved hundreds of people from an invading army. She fought blood-sucking monsters and developed a method to raise the dead. Six-Great was an undisputed hero, while Nathaniel Grace seemingly founded hospitals with blood money. How else could Ellie interpret the statement, “He made friends with other Pilgrims by hurting the people who frightened them more than he did”? Particularly because she knew exactly who frightened colonists the most.
“Okay. I’m going to. Um.” Ellie tucked the pamphlet in her jacket pocket. “I’m going to sleep. Heel, Kirby.”
That night, Ellie dreamed about Abe Allerton; he wore sloppy clown makeup and a tall, wide-brimmed hat. “What’s your secret?” Ellie asked. “Did you hear me?”
Dr. Allerton opened his large mouth, and an avalanche of wriggling leeches tumbled out. They hit the ground with soggy plop-plip-plops and screamed like infants until Ellie woke up, her brow wet with sweat. For a dizzying moment, she feared that dreams and reality had fused, because the leeches’ screams reverberated through the house. But it was only Gregory crying.
“Me too, baby,” she muttered. “Me too.”
FIFTEEN
EAGER TO LEARN more about the mysteries of Willowbee, Ellie texted Jay at sunrise. Unsurprisingly, it took a couple hours for him to respond.
EL (6:50 A.M.) – Jay can u visit the Willowbee library with me?
JAY (9:36 A.M.) – Not today. :(Family troubles.
EL (9:37 A.M.) – What’s wrong??
JAY (9:38 A.M.) – Ronnie said yes.
EL (9:38 A.M.) – Uh-oh.
EL (9:39 A.M.) – I mean congrats!! Send her my good wishes.
EL (9:40 A.M.) – Do your parents know?
JAY (9:42 A.M.) – Yeah. D: They’re angry. I gotta be family peacemaker.
EL (9:42 A.M.) – It’s not fair of them to put u in the middle.
JAY (9:43 A.M.) – No worries, Ellie. Library tomorrow?
EL (9:43 A.M.) – See you then.
EL (9:45 A.M.) – In the meantime, I gotta tell you about my BRUSH WITH EVIL last night.
After describing the vampire attack (and reassuring Jay that she, her mother, and Gregory were alright), Ellie slipped into plastic flip-flops and stepped outside. She needed a break from bad dreams and dark thoughts. A walk might help.
Kirby in tow, Ellie meandered through the neighborhood until she came upon the park. It was mostly empty, although two kids lounged on a yellow slide. As Ellie passed, they scampered across the playground and started climbing a rope ladder, as if afraid to be caught slacking off during playtime. The sun speckled Ellie’s brown forearms with pinprick-sized freckles. They always came out before she burned. She rubbed her arms, as if brushing the sunlight away, and relaxed on the farthest bench.
Ellie hadn’t brought the trilobite fossil, but she knew its shape and personality by heart. She called its hologram-dense body from the ether. As a child, when Ellie daydreamed about dinosaurs, they seemed mythological. In a distant way, Young Ellie understood that prehistoric animals came from the same planet as humans. Breathed the same air, saw the same sun and moon. Now, it still surprised her how familiar the trilobite ghost was. Its appearance and behavior reminded her of horseshoe crabs, lobsters, roaches, and many other beasties that shared her slice of time. Why not? After all, they were kin. The similarities among earthlings, dead or alive, outnumbered their differences.
Ellie wanted to meet every species on the tree of life. Witness the ghosts of its oldest branches. Velociraptors. Giant sloths. Megalodon sharks.
As Ellie watched the trilobite scuttle over a clump of yellow grass, she heard a whisper of sound. She concentrated, and the sound swelled, louder and multitudinous, as if an army of trilobites swarmed under her feet, crawling on the memory of a deep seafloor.
Ellie jumped off the bench and backed away from the park, concentrating on anything but ghosts, but she could still hear the trilobites swarming. Did she accidentally wake them up? How? That had never happened before! Luckily, nobody else seemed to notice the ruckus. Not the middle-aged jogger with a sweatband around his forehead. Not the woman checking her mail or the family having a barbecue on their front lawn.
In fact, nobody seemed to notice Ellie. The jogger, mail-checker, and barbecue eaters didn’t even glance in her direction. That might not be unusual elsewhere, but in Lenore’s friendly neighborhood, Ellie couldn’t walk down the street without hearing “Hello!” or “Hola, buenos días” once or twice.
The trilobites streamed from the gutters along the street like ants evacuating a flooded hive. They spread, invading the sidewalks and yards. Ellie eyed the neighbors, waiting for a reaction. A gasp. A scream. Anything.
Nothing.
Because she spent so much time around Kirby, Ellie was more sensitive to ghosts than the average person. The neighbors should sense something, though. The trilobites were visible, audible, swarming entities.
“Everyone stay calm!” she announced. “They’re harmless. Won’t hurt a fly! Ghosts fall asleep quickly! Well. Most do. These will!”
Again, the neighbors ignored her. As she walked forward, parting the trilobite sea with each step, she felt like a ghost herself. It was terrifying. “Can you hear me?” Ellie shouted. “Anybody?” Her voice had a weird, attenuated quality, like when she spoke underwater in a swimming pool. The air resisted her movements, thick as water. She struggled onward; she had to reach Lenore’s house! Her mother could help!
The trilobites flowed over Ellie’s feet and climbed her legs. They weren’t afraid of the human anymore. She could barely stand, much less attack. “Shoo!” Ellie tried to shake them off her pants, but her kicks were too slow. She plucked one from her knee, but two others took its place. There were probably more trilobites in the underworld than stars in the sky. They’d had millions of years to breed and die. With that thought, Ellie staggered.
Before her knees hit the ground, a sharp, anxious bark rang out. The trilobites tumbled away from Ellie, as if their little bodies had been thrown off by a hurricane-strength wind. Evidently, Kirby’s weaponized howl worked on ghosts, too. That might come in handy someday, especially if Ellie investigated violent hauntings.
“Kirby,” she said, “good boy!” H
e floated beside her, as if caught in a sluggish current. His tail wagged in slow motion, and he was visible, though she had not asked him to appear. Overhead, all the fire leeched from the sun, and it shone more timidly than the moon. The neighborhood was cast in a blue haze. Mesquite trees resembled branching coral, and the cacti were wrinkled brain coral heads. It seemed that Ellie had not only raised extinct arthropods; she had woken up the whole ancient ocean.
Before Ellie could panic, something drifted between her and the sun. Until the figure moved, she mistook it for a fish-shaped blimp. No. It was an immense ghost.
And there were others.
Above her head swam the biggest pod of whales she’d ever seen, and she’d watched a lot of nature documentaries. Blue whales, humpbacks, sperm whales, and species she could not identify floated together, sharing a pod. Some were so high, they seemed to skirt the edge of the atmosphere.
At the scale of evolutionary time, cetaceans were new. This wasn’t an ancient ocean; it was every ocean since the beginning of time.
Ellie was submerged in the sea of the dead.
SIXTEEN
THE WHALES BEGAN to sing. Their ancient voices harmonized, swelling in volume and number until Ellie’s teeth ached. As if she could escape the whalesong by hiding, Ellie dove for cover. For an uncomfortably long moment, she floated two feet above the ground (and twenty feet under a humpback’s belly). She kicked her feet so hard, one flip-flop launched off. The motion propelled her behind a clump of branching coral. Ellie held up her hand; her red-painted nails looked black. Red light waves were quickly absorbed by water; that’s why the ocean looked blue. The neighborhood was rapidly transforming into a strange version of Atlantis.
She took a deep breath, grateful for the life-sustaining oxygen that filled her lungs. Ellie’s chest felt corset-bound-tight, as if pounds of water squeezed her body. It was an alienating and uncomfortable sensation. Ellie enjoyed snorkeling, but she’d always refused to try scuba diving. Yes, it would be fun to see shipwrecks and swim with basking sharks, but humans weren’t made to survive in the ocean’s cold depths. She didn’t trust a wetsuit, a mask, and a pair of gas tanks to keep her alive.
Kirby happily paddled circles around her head. With a soft exhalation of worry, she grabbed him by the scruff and tugged him behind the coral. Ellie didn’t know whether ghosts could eat each other, but she didn’t want to tempt the carnivorous whales with her vaguely seal-shaped best friend. “Good boy,” she whispered. Gradually, the pod passed them and swam into the distant gloom.
Out of the whales’ shadows, Ellie had a chance to focus on sensations beyond fear. For example, Kirby’s neck felt soft. It felt like fur. Ellie threw her arms around him and gave him a firmly affectionate hug. “How’d you get a body?” she asked. “You’re solid again!”
Sometimes, Ellie dreamed that Kirby never died. That he could still coat the furniture with fur and warm her toes when he slept at the foot of her bed. This wasn’t a dream, though. She could tell the difference. Consciousness was a sensory banquet compared to the worlds that her mind invented.
Now, Ellie didn’t just wonder whether ghosts could eat each other. Could they hug each other too? Was she dead? Horror welled in her chest, but she pushed it down and tried to think logically. If she had died, she would be with family, not trilobites and sharks. Trevor, Six-Great-Grandmother, and everyone in between would guide her to their homeland in the country of ghosts.
Ellie cautiously peeked around the coral. The street had dissolved into a field of brown silt. She was afraid to swim up toward the light, just in case that action dropped her in midair when—if?!—the world returned to normal. She clung to Kirby like he was a life raft.
“If I brought us here,” she said, “I can … find a way home.” The ocean felt so heavy. So cold. She remembered plunging into the Herotonic River. Struggling to breathe and stay afloat. Ellie shut her eyes and tried to divert her thoughts to something pleasant, because fear made it difficult to focus. Instead, she remembered the day her father taught her how to swim in the rec center pool. She bobbed in the shallow end, a pair of yellow floaties on her arms, her father beside her, watchful and encouraging. “It’s only water, Ellie,” he said. “We’re seventy percent water. Did you know that?”
Maybe that’s why the ancient sea had such a powerful hold on Ellie’s soul? Was it part of her now? Had it always been? Panic diluted her memories of the pool. She could feel an ancient current flowing through her. Drowning her.
Drowning.
She remembered camping beside a lake. Tents along the shore, sandwiches and burgers on metal grills. Her older cousins were jumping from a long wooden dock, and Ellie wanted to join them. She could! She knew how to swim now.
The lake had been so cold.
She felt cold now.
How did her cousins swim so quickly? She was unable to keep up. Her leg cramped. She shouted for help. Her cousins didn’t hear her.
Nobody heard her anymore.
As Ellie thrashed, gagging on dirty lake scum, she felt fingers wrap around her arm. Her father had been watching, and now he pulled her from the lake. She could remember that moment so vividly. The relief she’d felt. The warmth of his hug. The sweetness of fresh air and sunlight and …
Kirby slipped through Ellie’s fingers; she opened her eyes, startled. The coral reef was gone, and she sat on the park bench. The world seemed normal again. But was she really home?
The sweatband-wearing jogger passed her.
“Hola!” Ellie called.
“Buenos días,” he said. “¿Cómo estás?”
Ellie looked down. Although one of her sandals was gone, Kirby’s shimmer sat beside her, and that was all she wanted to see. “Excelente,” Ellie said. “Heel, Kirby.”
As she returned to Lenore’s house, Ellie searched for her missing flip-flop. She couldn’t find it anywhere. It must have stayed in the realm of Devonian ghosts. Maybe she had to be touching something to move it across the barrier that separated the living from the dead.
If she had actually visited the underworld, though, Ellie needed help. She wouldn’t be the first living person to make the journey. However, based on ancestral stories, Ellie was one of the lucky few to survive unscathed.
“Mom!” Ellie shouted, bursting into the living room. “Mom, where are you?”
“Over here, Ellie!” Vivian was in Gregory’s playroom, supervising a game of “throw the toy frog against the wall and laugh.”
“Mom!” Ellie said. “I had the weirdest experience. Oh, hi, cutie pie.” She waved at Gregory. He waved back by rambunctiously swatting the air.
“What was it?” Vivian asked. “Your nose is bleeding, Ellie. Did you fall?”
Sure enough, when Ellie licked her upper lip, she tasted blood. “Ew. I’m glad a megalodon didn’t smell this,” she said. “You think they can sense blood like other sharks?”
“Megalodon?” Vivian looked concerned, her eyebrows scrunching closer together, as if an invisible cord between them had shrunk. “Did you wake up a megalodon ghost?”
“Not exactly. Let me start from the beginning.” Ellie hesitated. “Actually, I have a question first. Is it possible for us to visit the land of the dead?”
“No!”
“It isn’t?”
“Theoretically, it is. But you didn’t.”
“I don’t know, Mom.” She crossed the room and spun the airplane mobile that dangled over Gregory’s crib. “I was playing with my trilobite in the park. Something I’ve done a hundred times.”
“I know. It’s always crawling around. You’re going to scare somebody, Ellie. That thing resembles a humongous mutant pill bug.”
“Everyone loves pill bugs. They’re the insect version of hedgehogs.”
“We can debate that later. What happened?”
“It started slowly. I heard a thousand other trilobites. Their feet kinda sounded like wind blowing through a field of wheat.”
“Maybe you woke them all?”
“Changed. What did it become?”
“An ocean. Coral everywhere. Trilobites. Dozens of whales swam over my head. I could breathe, but I could also swim. You know the best part?”
“Best?”
“I hugged Kirby. Really hugged him. It wasn’t like petting a force field. I even felt his wet nose.”
“How did you come home?”
“It just happened. One moment, I was hugging Kirby and thinking of swimming in a pool. The next, I opened my eyes and saw the park.”
“Maybe you were dreaming?” Vivian asked. The cord between her eyebrows drew as tight as it could go.
“Doubtful. I left my flip-flop in the … uh … ocean world.”
“Ellie, there are stories. Old ones.”
“Yeah. I remember.”
“Stories about people—living people—who can walk between our world and the land Below, where ghosts and monsters dwell.”
“Do any of these stories have happy endings?”
“Rarely,” she said. “It’s easy to get lost in the underworld, and ghosts will try to trick you. Stay too long, and you’ll die, Ellie.”
“Nobody wants that!”
“How did you open the door? What did you do? What did you do?”
“I don’t know! Honestly, Mom.” Ellie crossed her arms and tried to remember every thought and feeling she experienced on the park bench. “Hm. I guess …”
“Yes? What, honey?”
“It seemed innocent at the time. As I played with my trilobite, I thought about prehistoric Earth and how it’s familiar. Things change, but they also stay the same, you know?”
“For safety’s sake,” Vivian said, “avoid philosophizing about the dead until we consult with an elder.”