The Edge of Over There

by Shawn Smucker

  “So,” Ruby said, breaking the silence during a walking spell. “Can you tell me anything about our mom?” She looked at him out of the corner of her eye.

  Leo cleared his throat to speak, stopped, tried to start again. “Mom isn’t doing well,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Ever since Dad ran off with you, she’s had . . . a rough time.”

  “But now that I’m back?” Ruby asked.

  “We’ll see,” Leo said, but there wasn’t much hope in his voice. “Ruby, she doesn’t speak. She hasn’t said a single word for seven or eight years now. She stares out the window. There’s nothing. Nothing there.”

  Leo felt an old familiar bitterness fighting to rise to the surface, always accompanied by the question of why he hadn’t been good enough for his mom. Why he hadn’t been enough. Sure, they’d lost so much when they lost Ruby, but they’d still had each other. But that hadn’t been enough. He hadn’t been enough.

  “I can’t wait to see her,” Ruby said hesitantly.

  Leo tried to be positive. “It’ll be good,” he said, looking at her and smiling. “It will be good for both of you.”

  “Look,” Ruby said, pointing at the walls. They were no longer smooth concrete—they were made up of cement blocks. For some reason this felt like a good thing, like they were making progress. Of course, they had no idea if this tunnel went anywhere, if it had ever been finished. They could be walking toward a dead end. Then what? But the change encouraged them both.

  “Want to jog again for a little?” Leo asked. Ruby nodded.

  The sounds of the warring city had died out a long time ago. It was easy to forget all that they had escaped, but Leo found himself thinking about Sandra and her small band of friends.

  “Our father isn’t all bad,” Ruby said quietly. Leo pursed his lips but didn’t say anything.

  They walked a little farther.

  “What was it like, where we grew up?” she asked.

  A small smile touched Leo’s mouth. “Before Mom and Dad split up, it was nice. We lived close to the water. Dad always wanted a boat. That’s all he ever talked about! But he was never able to afford one. Sometimes he’d take both of us out to the end of the dock, and the three of us would sit there and watch the boats go by. He knew all the names, the lengths, the kind of motors they had. Everything.”

  Leo’s voice trailed off in the tunnel.

  “Sometimes, if we stayed out there for a long time, Mom would bring food out, and then it would be all of us. But when Mom was there, Dad never talked about the boats. He just watched them, and he’d smile or shake his head in amazement when he saw a nice one. But the water! When the sun set, Ruby? It was amazing.”

  They came to a section of the tunnel where the walls were stone, individually placed by some master craftsman. Leo ran his fingers over the stones. Some of them were wet from underground springs. His flashlight flickered and went out. Ruby turned hers on and handed it to him. Not long after that, the walls became dirt walls, the tunnel nothing more than a hole bored through the earth. The ceiling was lower in this section, and Leo had to bend over in order to keep his head from hitting the ceiling.

  Hours and hours after they had entered the tunnel, it widened out, and the two of them came to a stairway and walked up into a small house. The same small house where Leo and Abra had peered into the windows so long ago. How long? Leo had no idea.

  “Where are we?” Ruby asked.

  “I don’t understand,” Leo said. “When Abra and I came into the city, it took us at least two or three days to walk from the house to the city. But you and I, we’re here after what, a day?” He paused, muttering to himself. “Something’s changing about this place. Something isn’t right.”

  They walked out and continued along the dirt road toward the darkness, where he hoped they’d find an open door in the crypt, the door that opened up in New Orleans.

  Ruby started asking something but stopped herself.

  “What?” Leo asked.

  “What’s it like out there? Where we’re from?”

  Leo chuckled. “Very different from this, that’s for sure.”

  “Like what?” She smiled.

  “Well, for one, the sky is blue, not red.”

  “What?” she asked, disbelief in her voice. “Blue? Like the blue in people’s eyes?”

  “Kind of,” he said, nodding.

  “Wow,” she said. “What else?”

  “Hmmm. Well, it smells different.”

  “It smells different?”

  “Yeah. I think everything here smells newer. Back where we live, it’s old. Really old.”

  He could tell she was having a hard time imagining what he meant.

  “The water tastes a lot better here,” he said, laughing. She laughed too, and he loved the sound of it, the sound of her happiness, the sound of being carefree.

  “So, why are we leaving?” she asked playfully. “The water is better here, it doesn’t smell as bad, and the sky is a beautiful red instead of a strange, icy blue.” He could tell she was kidding, but there was also a tiny, subtle trace of seriousness there. He realized for the first time that it would be hard for her to leave.

  “Good question,” he said, looking at her, feeling an overwhelming compassion and love for her like he hadn’t felt before. He realized she was leaving everything she had ever known. “Mother is there, for one. You might be able to bring her back. Two? This place is falling apart, the war is awful, and the Tree complicates things. Apparently. That’s what Abra says.”

  Ruby looked over at Leo. The sky was a dark red, nearly black. The flashlight died.

  “Who is Abra?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “Honestly? I don’t know. But I hope she’s okay.” He looked over his shoulder and stopped walking.

  “What?” Ruby asked.

  “Is that her?” Leo asked, staring harder into the darkness behind them. A figure approached slowly, limping up the road.

  “Abra?” Leo called into the darkness. But the person, ever closer, laughed, gasped in pain, laughed again.

  “No, no, no,” she said, and they both knew immediately that it was not Abra. It was Beatrice. She stopped about twenty feet away from them, bent over, coughing. She clutched her side just below her ribs. When she stood up, she wiped her mouth and coughed again.

  “I am most certainly not Abra,” she said, still managing a smile.

  “Leave us alone,” Leo said, trying to keep his voice steady. “We’re leaving. You can have whatever you want in this world. We don’t care. We just want out.”

  “This world?” Beatrice asked, her voice rising. “This world? You’re oh so generous, aren’t you? I can have whatever I want in this world?”

  She stared, and she stopped smiling. Her eyes were gaping black holes and her face transformed to something hideous, something like a human face but also something completely different. Something hollow.

  “There is nothing left in this world. As more and more people die in the war, this world will shrink back down to nothing. Once the gate is locked, those who ate from the Tree will be stuck here, perhaps for eternity. Koli Naal’s plan has failed, thanks to Abra. Thanks to you. There is no hope in this world, not for the dead, and certainly not for the living.”

  She gathered herself.

  “And there is no hope for you.”

  She shot into the air like a bullet. One moment she was standing in front of them, the next she was rising into the red darkness. When she fell back toward them, her path was white-hot.

  Her movement screamed through the Edge of Over There. She moved like a falling star. Leo saw what was coming. He shoved Ruby to the side at the same moment Beatrice slammed into him. It was like being hit by a freight train. The force of her impact knocked Ruby unconscious and bent all the trees outward.

  The road was silent again. Beatrice stood up and moaned. It had taken nearly every ounce of power left in her to do that. She limped away from where Leo and
Ruby lay, then she fell to her knees, breathing deeply. She tried to gather her strength.

  She crawled toward the door, back into the darkness.

  40

  ABRA STUMBLED AHEAD, trying to run, but it felt like she had been on the move for hours, and her legs refused to keep a fast pace. The tunnel went ahead, always in a straight line, and after the first ten or fifteen minutes, there were no more intersections with other tunnels. It was a lonely line. At some point the walls went from smooth cement to cement block to rock, and eventually they were nothing more than packed dirt. The floor went through the same transformation. The smell changed as she went—at first it smelled like the city, but the farther she traveled, the more it smelled like rich earth.

  Her flashlight flickered off. She turned on the second one. An hour later that one flickered, then turned off. She banged it against the wall and twisted the top and it came back on, barely shining. She tried to walk faster, tried not to think about the possibility of being stuck in a tunnel without any light. Behind her she heard a loud rumbling as if the earth had split in two. The silence that followed felt like a missing tooth.

  It is usually when we are going to give up that the difficulty changes, and such was the case with Abra. The tunnel felt never-ending, and she had nearly convinced herself to turn around and take her chances leaving the city above ground when things changed: she stumbled into a wide section of the tunnel. Dim light illuminated a stairway, and she went up into the red light.

  She didn’t realize where she was, and she crept through an empty room to a set of windows. The red light streamed through, and broken glass crunched under her feet. She ran outside.

  It was the house outside the city, the house she and Leo had stopped and looked into. She was shocked at how far she had traveled in such a short time. The tunnel had led her all the way out of the city. The sky was red, fading to night, and the air was full of smoke. She looked in the direction of the city and saw flames, smoke, and the black outline of buildings as they fell.

  She turned and jogged away from it toward the darkness, toward the doorway that would finally take her out of the grave of Marie Laveau. She hoped she’d find Leo and Ruby before she had to seal the Passageway closed. Now that she knew them, now that she had been with them, she didn’t know how she could leave them behind. When she thought about Leo something warmed inside of her, some small flame that was not one of destruction but one of friendship.

  Abra kept going, kept pushing, and the longer she went, the darker it became. The city glowed behind her, giving off a sense that night would never come, not until the fire died. Something about the woods pressed tighter against her, as if the entire Passageway was shrinking. It made her feel claustrophobic. Her breathing was tight and heavy.

  Soon it was dark. The souls would be making their way through the Passageway at any moment, screaming with speed. Abra saw a hunched form on the path ahead. She slowed, peered into the distance, but kept moving forward. When she saw who it was, she ran.

  “Ruby!” Abra said, gasping for breath.

  Leo was on the ground beside her, stretched out, his eyes closed. His breath came slow, with large spaces in between. His shirt was torn and covered in blood.

  “Ruby?” Abra asked, and there were many questions in that one word, but she already knew the answers, or at least the only answers that mattered.

  “It was Beatrice,” Ruby said through her tears. Her hands were covered in blood too, from where she had tried to stop up Leo’s injuries.

  Abra fell to her knees beside Leo and touched his face. “Leo,” she whispered. “Are you still here?”

  His eyelids parted, tiny slits of shining light, and he nodded. “You have to get out,” he said, and each word was a deep root pulled from the earth. “You have to leave me.”

  Abra shook her head, but she knew he was right—they did have to keep moving. It wouldn’t be long before people tried to flee the city.

  “We can’t leave you, Leo!” Ruby insisted. “You’ll be okay! You have to come with us.”

  Abra reached over and held Ruby’s hand.

  “I remember now,” Ruby whispered. “I remember the third-floor bedroom and the light streaming in. I remember the sound of the birds under the eaves. I remember how you took me out back, even when I wasn’t feeling well, and pulled me around in the little red wagon, showing me the flowers. I remember how you’d point up at the tallest tree and we’d dream of climbing it, seeing the entire city.”

  She paused for a moment, tears dripping from her nose.

  “I remember it all, Leo. I remember how much I loved you. Please don’t go.”

  Everything grew dim. Even the fire that was the city died down, like an old-fashioned oil lamp when the wick is drawn down into the oil. The same thing happened to Leo—he withdrew into himself, and the light inside him went out.

  The Wailers started streaming past Abra and Ruby where they knelt beside Leo. Their sound was loud, but it didn’t seem as harsh as it had before—it felt more like the whistling the wind makes when it races along a rocky shore. The two girls sat there and let the bodies of light stream around them. Ruby’s forehead was close to Leo’s chest when Abra saw it begin to happen.

  “Ruby,” she whispered, and Ruby sat up straight.

  It looked as though someone had spread white talcum powder all over the top of Leo—his face, his chest, his legs—so that even the red of the blood was covered over by this almost glowing white. It reminded Abra of the veins of silver she had seen in the cliff on her way to the rocky plain. That dust, that very dust, began to float around him the way dust sometimes floats through beams of light as it falls between tree branches or down through barns full of fresh hay. The white dust hovered there for a moment, and the only thing that stirred it was the passing of the souls as they whistled by.

  “It’s him, Ruby,” Abra said. “It’s the real Leo.”

  And she was right. More right than she had ever been. Because that was Leo—the very essence of him. It wasn’t only that he was leaving his body behind, because there was even an element of his body there in that white dust, and it was his perfect body, a body full of cells that could never mutate or be affected by diseases, cells that could never break down. His mind was there too in its perfect form, swirling full of thoughts and memories and feelings. But all of these things were so intermingled that you never could have separated them, never could have labeled them, never could have dissected them. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could take apart and later, piece by piece, put back together. No, it was a beautiful intermingling of everything that was essentially Leo.

  Then he was gone. That white cloud of Leo shot off like a comet, racing along with the other souls, whistling with joy. If Abra and Ruby could have kept up with him, they would have raced through the smoke and the fire of the city. They would have seen him shoot out over the water like a star, rising, crossing an uncrossable distance, to the white cliffs and the soft green hills that waited on the other side.

  Abra and Ruby walked in complete and utter darkness for hours. Have you ever had a conversation with someone in the dark when it is only the words and nothing else? The words become sounds that take on their own being—they float around looking for anything to latch on to. The voices are everything. You notice every fluctuation, every point of emphasis, every sigh. Every swallow.

  “Did you know they were building a telescope to see over the water? To see beyond death?” Ruby asked, and Abra knew that she was combing her mind for something to talk about that would help her forget about the death of Leo, her only brother, the one she had barely known.

  “Yes,” Abra whispered.

  They pulled themselves through the darkness. Abra’s arm was around Ruby’s shoulders, and she held her close. Ruby pressed in close to her and trembled like a baby bird.

  “I looked into the telescope,” Abra said, regret heavy in her voice. They were words she had to say, because it was not something she could carry on her ow
n.

  “You did?” Ruby asked, and by the way her shoulders turned, Abra could tell she was looking up at her in the darkness, searching for her face.

  “Before I killed the Tree. Before I came back down. It was only a second, only a glance,” Abra said, and it sounded like she was trying to convince herself that it was okay, that she had not looked into the eyepiece long enough to be changed.

  “What did you see?” Ruby whispered.

  Abra waited. In the darkness, she could remember it perfectly.

  “There was a cliff that rose up out of the water. White waves crashed against it. The cliff was high, very high, and at the top of the cliff was the greenest grass you’ve ever seen, stretching on in rolling hills. Beyond that, there was a city, and all the buildings were shining white.”

  Abra’s voice caught as a sob tried to escape.

  “What else?” Ruby whispered in a small voice.

  “Far off beyond everything was a terrible darkness, but it was a darkness that had no power. It was an emptiness I could not bear to look at. But that was far, far beyond the city, and it seemed almost invisible compared to the beauty of the cliff and the green and the white.”

  “What was the white city like?” Ruby asked. “Could you see anyone there?”

  Abra shook her head. “I can’t . . . I can’t talk about it.”

  “Are you glad you looked?” Ruby asked.

  Abra shook her head again. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  Abra looked down at her and gave a sad smile. “Because I’m sure that for the rest of my life it’s the only place I will ever want to be.”

  For a moment, Abra imagined the years stretching out ahead of her, the distance of a life she would have to live before she could go to that city. She remembered the vision she had seen in the clear water of the old woman sitting quietly in her bed, passing away. She wondered again if that had really been her in her old age, and if that was a vision that would come to pass or one that would change. She pulled Ruby close in the darkness, and Ruby reached up and kissed her on the cheek.