by Jason Gurley
The basin around the hole is jet black. All the trees that surrounded her cabin are gone. The lake that had filled the meadow is long gone, evaporated by the blast. The river that once curled around her cabin is little more than a charred groove in the earth. Beyond the valley, most of her mountains have crumbled. The few that stand, the farthest from the epicenter, are brown, their snowcaps melted away, their peaks black as well.
The fire consumed everything, climbing even to the tops of the mountains.
“We’ll rest here,” she says to her shadow.
But she turns her back to the devastation, and does not sleep.
She stumbles down the hill in the morning. It takes two days to reach the smoking hole in the earth. Her shadow remains on the hilltop and does not follow.
The earth around the chasm is unstable. Dozens of crevasses have opened in the crust, narrow and deep. More than once she steps on solid rock only to feel it crumble away beneath her feet, spilling down into the guts of the earth below. She walks more carefully after one of the crevasses almost swallows her up.
At the end of the second day, she stands at the hole’s edge. It is larger than anything she has ever seen—larger than the mountains, perhaps smaller only than the ocean or the sky itself. The far side of the chasm is so far away that it is pale and dim. The enormity of the wound renders her speechless. She wishes that she had a cane, something to support her so that she doesn’t fall over in fear.
In the end, she sits down upon the edge of the hole and weeps softly.
It is an atrocity.
The keeper has patched great wounds in the valley for as long as she can remember, stitching the land back together after an earthquake, or extinguishing a great fire with a storm. But this is well beyond her ability to heal. She peers down into the hole and can see liquid rock leaking like wet taffy into the dark. A wind carries up from far below, hot and pungent.
There is no sign of the falling thing. The keeper cannot see a bottom, nor any trace of the glowing orb. It is almost as if whatever fell from the sky passed right through the earth, and kept going.
She remains seated on the edge of the hole for hours, watching the steam rise and dissipate high above her. There are small fires all around the edges, and one or two are put out by the rain as she watches. The hole is cooling, slowly, and perhaps in a few more years it will simply be a tunnel into nothingness.
The keeper wishes that her cabin still stood. She wishes she could simply tuck herself into her bed, and fall asleep, and never wake.
She walks. There is nowhere to go, so she circles the valley for weeks and weeks more. She hopes to stumble across some pocket of untouched land, some lost world of green trees, perhaps even enough trees to build a new cabin—but there is nothing.
Her shadow follows her again, and she is grateful that she is not completely alone.
She searches for the beasts. She hopes that they found a way out of the valley before the end came. She has not seen them in a very long time. She has always considered them to be interlopers, but pleasant, passive ones, and over the years she has become accustomed to them, has even come to welcome their presence.
There are only two possibilities, she knows. They escaped, or they lie somewhere in the valley, great heaps of ash, felled by the blast and the fires.
As she walks, she looks for bones.
She does not expect to find them, but she does.
One gray morning she skids and staggers down a blackened hillside, the sky a tomb. She does not expect to last much longer. The stain has spread to her heart, and is threading its way up her neck. She enters a great depression below the hills, and works her way down into the middle of it, and passes around one of the great rock fields.
The beasts are bedded down on the other side of the rubble. Their enormous bodies are as black as the hills, and she realizes that they have probably been lying right in front of her all this time, indistinguishable from the land itself.
The large beast snores. The earth below her feet trembles with each breath. Its head is as large as five of her cabins. Its eyes are tightly shut, and its pebbled skin rises and falls slowly. Beside it, the smaller beast is also stained black. It is asleep as well, and breathing.
But barely.
Jack microwaves a cup of cocoa and puts it on the table in front of her.
“I don’t have any marshmallows,” he apologizes.
“It’s okay,” Eleanor says.
She cradles the mug in her palms and sighs. She is once again dressed in another person’s oversized clothing. Jack’s T-shirt is much too large for her. On the front is a Minnesota Twins logo. His sweatpants are cinched tightly around her waist, and still she had to hitch them up before she sat down. Her hair is tied up in a damp towel. She can feel the life slowly returning to her cold skin, a faint murmur of warmth rising in her cheeks. The shower helped.
Two showers in the middle of the night, she thinks.
“You’re sure I didn’t wake your dad?” she asks Jack as he sits. He’s carrying a blue plastic storage container.
“He just got back from a race weekend,” Jack says. “He’s probably still hung over.”
She sips her hot chocolate. It has almost no taste—it’s not much more than hot water with an ineffective sprinkle of cocoa powder for color—but it makes her tongue tingle and reminds her that she’s alive.
Which seems improbable. After all, she just fell out of the sky and into a plastic backyard pool.
Like a circus act.
Jack opens the container and, without saying a word, takes out a pile of newspapers. Eleanor watches him place them on the table, then looks at him quizzically.
“What are these?” she asks.
He turns the stack over, takes a folded City section from the bottom. He puts it on the table in front of her.
The story is about the annual festival of boats. There’s a photo of sailboats and fishing trawlers parading through the harbor, lit up with strings of golden bulbs.
“What am I looking at?” she asks, finally.
Jack taps a smaller headline, partially obscured by the fold of the paper. He opens the section wide and points again.
LOCAL GIRL DISAPPEARS FROM HUFFNAGLE
Eleanor feels her jaw slip open. She puts her mug down and stares at the words.
Disappears.
“What is this?” she asks.
“Look at the date,” Jack says.
August 24.
Eleanor’s mouth dries up. “That’s—that’s—”
“Two days after I took you to the island,” Jack says. “More than a month after you disappeared the first time.”
“The first time,” Eleanor repeats.
“Yes,” Jack says. “Now look at the year.”
“Nineteen ninety-four,” she reads slowly. She looks up at Jack. “I don’t understand.”
Jack turns over the next clipping.
COAST GUARD CONTINUES SEARCH FOR MISSING GIRL
“Four days later,” he says. “Nineteen ninety-four. They sent divers down, Ellie. They didn’t find anything.”
He flips through several more folded newspaper sheets, then pauses. He taps the date. “See?”
She leans forward, almost knocking her cup over. A chill grips her.
“February,” she says hoarsely. “Nineteen—”
“Ninety-five,” Jack finishes.
FAMILY STILL HOLDS OUT HOPE FOR VANISHED DAUGHTER
He spreads the clippings out on the table.
MISSING GIRL STILL UNACCOUNTED FOR
NO NEW DEVELOPMENTS IN WITT CASE
The stories have gotten shorter, smaller.
“August,” she whispers.
Jack turns over the last of the clippings.
MISSING STUDENT DECLARED DEAD
Eleanor looks at the date.
March 3, 1996.
Her chest tightens, and her eyes fill up with tears. “Nineteen ninety-six?” she rasps. “Jack—it’s—”
; “It’s not a joke,” he says. “I’m not messing with you. There was a service at the high school. The whole town came, practically. Stacy’s father gave the eulogy, Eleanor.”
She grips Jack’s hand and squeezes it hard. “My parents,” she says urgently.
Jack takes a sheet of pink copy paper out of the storage container. Printed in black ink is Eleanor’s eighth-grade yearbook photo. Beneath it, a bold headline reads REWARD FOR INFORMATION.
“Your dad put them all over town,” Jack says. “They were everywhere. You couldn’t turn a corner without seeing twenty more.”
“My mother,” Eleanor whispers, a hand on her lips. “She—Jack, two years? Is she—”
“Shh,” Jack says. “Your mother went home. The doctors wanted to send a nurse home with her. A home care worker? But I think your dad decided to do it. I haven’t seen his office lights on in at least a year. I think he just—quit. I don’t think he could handle it, going to work, selling houses every day while you were—while you were wherever you were.”
“I can’t breathe,” she says. “Two years.”
“You’re almost eighteen now,” Jack says. “I—your birthdays were… hard for me.”
His voice cracks, then tightens.
“You scared the shit out of me,” he says. “Two whole years, Ellie! No more bullshit. Okay? What the hell is happening? Where did you go? I thought I’d gone crazy. I thought I’d blacked out or something, because you—I couldn’t find you anywhere. Do you know how that felt? What that was like? I dove under looking for you. I couldn’t find you. And eventually it got too dark to see, and I had to row the boat back to shore alone. The whole way was torture. I kept thinking, what if she’s still back there and she can’t find me? What if I’m abandoning her?”
“Jack—”
“I had to tell the police that you—that you just fucking disappeared in midair,” he says. “They thought I was high!”
Eleanor swallows the hard knot in her throat. “I’m sorry,” she chokes out. “I didn’t—I—”
Jack is crying now. He angrily swipes the tears away from his cheeks, but more just spill over. He’s embarrassed, but he doesn’t turn away, and Eleanor wishes—as powerfully as she has ever wished anything—that this wasn’t her life, that her sister had never died, that her parents were happy and well-adjusted, that she was boy-crazy and begging her dad for a car, sneaking out at night, all the things that a teenaged girl ought to be doing. She wished it not for her sake, but for Jack’s.
If only she were normal.
She sees it in him. Every time he looks at her. Every time he swallows down the things he wants to say, and makes a joke instead. Every time he mock-punches her arm when what he really wants—what she knows he really wants—is to lean her back and kiss her, to find out what her skin smells like, what her cheek might feel like in his palm.
She sees every bit of it, and feels it, too.
But the rest of the world is too big. The rest of her world is too much. Too much.
She puts her hand on the back of his head and leans in close.
“Jack,” she says, swallowing her own wishes. “I need to see my parents.”
He looks up and blinks rapidly, trying to clear his eyes. Then he exhales slowly, calming himself.
“Okay,” he says. “I’ll call your dad.”
Jack goes to the telephone mounted on the wall. His shoulders are slumped. He looks older—not just two years older, but ten. Maybe more.
“Wait,” she says.
Jack stops, holding the telephone handset.
“Hang up,” she says. “I want to tell you everything.”
She tells him everything she can remember. About the alien Iowa cornfield, about the mysterious ash forest, about the lost minutes and hours. She tells him about her unaccountably strange experiences in those places—about the baseball field, about meeting a young version of Jack himself, about Gerry’s dead sons. About the shark statue, and the Danish woman, about the smashed bathroom wall in her father’s apartment.
And then she tells him about the rift.
“It’s crazy,” she says. “I know it sounds crazy.”
“It’s a lot more than crazy,” he says at last.
There’s a thumping sound from somewhere in the house, and Eleanor looks at Jack, startled.
“Dad probably just fell out of bed,” Jack says.
Eleanor looks in the direction of the sound, toward the farthest room in the house.
“Does he do that often?” she asks.
“When he’s drunk,” Jack says. “Didn’t your mother ever—” He stops. “Shit. I’m sorry.”
“Mom’s a very controlled drunk,” Eleanor says. “A quiet one. She drinks until she doesn’t have to live in this world anymore. She just huddles in her chair and—I don’t know where she goes, but it’s anyplace but the house where she once had two daughters, not just one.”
“Do you think—”
“That she’s drinking herself to death?” Eleanor finishes. “Yes. Yes, I think my mother wants to be dead.”
They fall into silence for a moment, and the house is quiet with them.
She tells him about the last part. About the Other, deep in the rift. When she finishes, Jack just studies her without speaking.
“Something is happening to me,” she says. “And I don’t have any control over it.”
Jack is pale. “What happens if you—disappear again? What if you never come back?”
Eleanor closes her eyes. Jack’s question triggers something within her.
“I have to say something terrible,” she says softly. “It’s okay if you think I’m horrible.”
“I won’t,” Jack says.
“My father thinks I’m dead,” Eleanor says. “My mom, too.”
“Everybody thinks you’re dead,” Jack says.
Eleanor nods, then opens her eyes. “I think that there’s something I have to do now,” she says. “And I think that if I go home first—”
“And your parents see that you’re alive—”
“—then they’ll be devastated when I go away again,” she says. “They’ve been through too much.”
“Wait,” Jack says. “What do you mean, when you go away again?”
She just looks at him, waiting.
Her meaning dawns on Jack slowly, and he pushes back from the table. “You can’t,” he says. “Jesus, Ellie.”
But Eleanor nods. “Something strange is happening,” she says again. “Don’t you think it means something? Don’t you think there’s a reason for it?”
“This isn’t a movie,” Jack says. “You aren’t the chosen one. You can’t fuck around with life and death because you experienced something you can’t explain.”
“I think I was supposed to learn something,” she says, ignoring him. “In the rift. From the Other. And I didn’t.”
“Ellie,” Jack says. He paces in a circle and shoves his hands into his hair, pulling at it like a crazy person.
“I don’t expect you to believe any of this, you know,” Eleanor says. “I know it sounds crazy.”
Jack stops, slides back into the chair, leans close to her. “I do believe you,” he says. “I saw you. I watched it happen.”
“Then you know—”
“But you can’t do it again,” he says. “You just can’t. It’s too much, it’s too dangerous. This isn’t natural.”
She puts her hands on his. “You have to take me back.”
“I won’t,” he says, snatching his hands away. He presses his palms against his eyes. “I won’t do it.”
“I’ll go by myself,” Eleanor says.
“Ellie, please,” Jack says. “Please don’t do this.”
“Then take me,” she says again. “I want you there. I need you to be there.”
He shakes his head. “I can’t. It’s not right, Ellie. You don’t know what it was like. I’ve been fucking terrified for two whole years.”
“Then don’t watch,” she sa
ys. Gently, she places a small, soft kiss on his cheek. “Just be my ride. Okay?”
There is no moon. The sky is a frayed gray blanket. The rain has weakened to a mere drizzle.
Jack rows in silence. Eleanor reads his fear in every pull of the oars, finds his worry in the hard slope of his tucked shoulders. She cannot see the furrow in his brow, but knows that it is there, so deep it must be almost painful.
“There’s water in the boat,” Eleanor says.
Jack doesn’t answer. For the duration of the bicycle ride that brought them back to the beach and the moored rowboat, he has been quiet. Eleanor imagines that he is torn between his fear for her and his fear of the unknown.
“Only a little,” she adds, and then she falls silent, too.
She would be lying if she said that she didn’t share Jack’s worries. The memory of the rift has begun to slip away from her already, and more of it fades by the minute. She can feel a pang of urgency, the understanding that if she waits much longer she will forget her journey into the rift entirely. It is too strange and fearsome and wonderful a memory for her to permit such a thing.
The sky rumbles, and on the far horizon Eleanor can see a whisper of lightning in the torn clouds, little sparks rattling about in the darkness. In the cold flickering glow she can see that there are other boats bobbing on the rolling waves, and once she spies their silhouettes she can also make out their tiny stuttering lanterns, like little campfires on the sea. The sun hasn’t yet begun to rise, and Eleanor perversely thinks that maybe it won’t rise today at all.
It feels like the end of the world, a little.
It feels like anything might happen.