by Jason Gurley
This time, Jack walks behind Eleanor. She can feel his downcast eyes on her feet as she climbs the path, waiting for her to stumble. And she does, a little, sliding backward in the gritty mud a few inches with every short step. The brambles that hang over the dark path are sharp and invisible until she’s right upon them, and more than once she staggers through the branches and hears Jack’s grunt as their bristly arms smack him.
But they reach the pinnacle of Huffnagle without much trouble. For a time, Eleanor stands there, Jack at her side, staring at the far edge of the cliff. The sparse grasses on the rocky summit are matted down by mud and rain. The crown of the island is rocky and shimmery in the damp and dark.
She imagines what Jack is thinking as he stands beside her, sharing the view. He will worry about the leap, yes, but also about her approach. About the few running steps she must take, barefoot on the slick rock. One bad step and she might fall too close to the cliff wall, maybe even collide with some jagged outcropping on the way down.
She looks at him in the pale gray light. She can see these worries and more etched on his face.
He looks at her and finally speaks. “I’m actually terrified.”
Eleanor nods. “Me too.”
“This doesn’t feel real,” he says. “It feels like I’m dreaming. I have to be dreaming, right? There just aren’t places like that. Like your rift.”
“I barely believe it myself.”
“Maybe we ate something bad?” he ventures.
She shakes her head. “I’ve thought of a thousand possibilities,” she says. “But it’s real.”
“Were you really there for two years?” he asks.
She shrugs and looks out at the boats, dipping in the ocean swells. “It felt like a few minutes.”
He coughs, and shivers. “So—what do you want me to do? I don’t know if I can watch again.”
Eleanor puts her hand in Jack’s.
“Just hold my hand for now,” she says.
“There are seven boats,” Eleanor says.
“What?”
“Shh,” she says. “This will be okay.”
He stares at her. The rain picks up, lashing their faces.
“Promise,” he whispers.
She kisses him. “I can’t.”
Their clothes are soaked through, so they leave them on the cliff’s edge. They jump from Huffnagle together, their skin slate-blue in the faint light, their bodies pale, clad only in their underwear. Eleanor thinks of her grandmother, slicing through the waves, sinking to the bottom of the sea. She thinks of her father, of the terrible grief that he must carry like an iron ball around his neck. Of her mother, self-medicated nearly to death’s door.
She hears Jack shout her name, and it is the last thing she hears.
Only one of them crashes into the sea.
Eleanor is not there to witness Jack surface alone in the gray water, shouting her name against the ocean static.
Eleanor tumbles into the rift.
I am pleasantly surprised, the darkness says to Mea. You have my blessing.
Mea watches the girl, a distant glob of shadow, and sees a burning red wave sizzle into the blackness. A warning, sung out with confidence, with a hint of aggression.
“I’m not afraid of you,” comes Eleanor’s immediate outburst, its song a cacophonous roar.
Mea absorbs this, but does not reply right away.
Give her time, the darkness says. A moment to settle in. And demonstrate patience.
Mea says nothing, but hears the darkness very clearly.
Her singed lashes are crusted with ash when she wakes. She blinks. The air is dense, particulate, its matter collecting in her nostrils, in the corners of her eyes, in the creases around her fingernails, beneath her nails. The keeper feels as if a shell of black grime is slowly hardening over her skin. Her bones ache, ache powerfully, and she wishes she could simply lie here and fossilize, never to be found, not by anyone.
But she wonders what has wakened her, so she sits up.
The largest beast rests on its haunches, its great forelegs posed mantis-like before its massive torso. Its long, pebbled neck curves down toward the earth in supplication, its jaw nearly perched on the torn soil.
It is lowing. The sound rumbles deep inside the beast like a foghorn, and the keeper can feel her own lungs tremble in response. She climbs to her feet and walks to the beast’s side. She has slept in its shadow for—weeks?—and yet she has never touched it. But now she stands in that dark space below the great animal, and she places her hand against its belly. Its hide is tough but porous, and a strong warmth radiates from it. Despite the beast’s cool appearance, it burns like a furnace.
She jumps back as the beast shifts, and she looks up to see its graceful, snakelike neck rush up into the sky, so high that its head vanishes into the low clouds.
And then she sees what has set the beast on edge.
The clouds are ferociously red, the color of blood.
The beast sings a long, high note into the clouds, and the keeper sees the rupture as it begins, not so far away this time. The clouds twist and tear, and a fork of steam rushes to the earth like a meteor’s trail.
And there, deep inside that fuming artery of cloud-steam, she sees the golden beacon again. As before, it falls and falls, picking up tremendous speed, hurtling toward the earth—her earth—as if it intends to punch another great hole straight through to the blackness on the other side. Before the keeper can even suck in a fearful breath, the thing spears into the side of a mountain.
The peak shatters and crumbles in a spray of fine, melted rock. The sound echoes through the valley like a thousand bomb blasts. The keeper looks up, watching the glowing hot shrapnel that sails through the red sky and hisses to the earth all around her.
“My god,” she whispers.
The mountain collapses like glass, and veins of steaming red magma wind through the ruins. The keeper looks up to the heavens, afraid, but there are no more blinding missiles circling in the clouds, and the one that destroyed her beloved mountain has vanished, shot straight through the rock as before.
The largest beast continues to sing above the clouds, but the smaller almost kills the keeper outright. It is suddenly racked with violent spasms, its legs—as big as grain silos—kicking out into the dark, shoveling up geysers of dirt and sand and rock. The keeper darts out into the open, away from the beasts, and her shadow, which has long observed her from a distance now, follows, as if it feels the way the keeper herself does.
The smaller beast lifts its tail into the red sky, and it hangs there, framed against the bleeding clouds, for a pregnant moment. And then its tail topples as if it has gone lifeless. It smashes to the ground, its sheer weight creating a riverbed for the black rain to collect in and flow through.
The keeper sinks to her knees at a safe distance. She bows her head, listening to the stinging hot rocks that slice through the air around her, feeling the valley flush with heat, seismic twitches stirring the ground beneath her knees.
She begins to cry.
“Please,” she moans. “Please stop. Please, you’ll leave me with nothing.”
Her shadow draws near to her for the first time in months.
The rain falls like a cancer upon her valley.
The Other’s first words come in time, after Eleanor has grown accustomed to the darkness again. She feels noncorporeal, separated from the fibers of her nerves and the pores of her skin and the damp weight of her hair. Warm, she thinks, as if the darkness has substance, as if it has wrapped her within itself, taken her inside it, turned her into it.
Long before the Other speaks, she discovers that her thoughts are like commands. She thinks of Jack as she hangs in the darkness, and wonders what it must have felt like when she disappeared from his grasp, when he struck the water alone. She wishes to see him, and just like that, the darkness thins before her, and she can see Jack. She sees him from a great height. It is like she has wings, and is flapping them in
place, staring down upon him. He is a bead of white against the dark slate of the sea. A long moment passes before Eleanor realizes that Jack isn’t moving. He hangs, suspended like her, in the sky. As this dawns on her, the rest of the strangeness of her view becomes obvious. She watches the sea for a time, but sees no ripple in the water, no surge of the waves. The water is frozen against the base of Huffnagle’s cliff like gelatin.
She is staring at a painting of the world that she has left behind, a photograph of it.
I was waiting for you, the Other says.
The words swell over Eleanor, suffused with heat and amber light. The sensation is calming, comforting, much like her grandmother’s old blanket, like the smell of her mother’s coffee when Eleanor was only a girl. The words are heavy with memory.
“You frightened me,” Eleanor confesses.
I know. It was not my intention.
“What happened to my friend?” Eleanor asks.
The Other says, He is safe. Don’t fear for him.
“He’s not moving,” Eleanor says.
Do you remember your last visit to this place? the Other asks.
“You called it the rift,” Eleanor answers. “I remember now. I was starting to forget.”
Good, the Other says. That you remember.
“You have to tell me why I’m here,” Eleanor says.
When you were a little girl, you were not good at many things, the Other says.
Eleanor is quiet.
But with time, as you grew, you became good at those things. Is that true?
Eleanor would nod, but she cannot feel her muscles, cannot send signals from her brain. She thinks her response.
“Yes.”
For a very long time—for time is relative here—I have struggled to bring you to this place, the Other says. Do you remember those instances?
Eleanor thinks of the cornfield, of the scorched mountain, of the backyard swimming pool. She remembers the strangeness of her body after the last event, and it occurs to her now that it’s all because of time. She was in the rift, at least according to Jack’s papers, for two years—time enough for her body to shift from girlhood into womanhood, for her shape to change, her hair to grow unfettered.
“Yes,” she says again.
I, too, grow better at things with time, the Other says. I have been here for what you might consider a very long time, Eleanor, but for me, it is only a few days since my arrival. I learn something new every day.
“What are you trying to say?” Eleanor asks.
I have learned how to preserve your timeline when you enter the rift, the Other says. That is why your friend is not moving.
“I still don’t understand,” Eleanor says.
You would call it stopping time.
“That isn’t possible,” Eleanor says, but she feels the truth of it even as she denies it.
You know that it is, the Other observes. I can feel it.
“He’s okay, then,” Eleanor says.
Yes.
“Will you tell me what this place is for? Why I am here?”
I will tell you what I can, but you must make of it what you will. The rift, as it is called, is a…
The Other is quiet for a long time, as if searching for the correct words.
You might call it a waiting room.
“A waiting room,” Eleanor repeats, as if such a thing makes sense. “But for what? What are you waiting for?”
I wait for passage, the Other says.
“Passage?”
For passage, it repeats. I wait here for passage into the light.
Eleanor is still. She can see no light, only darkness. The view of the sea, of Jack, dims into shadow.
The light of the after, the Other says, answering the question Eleanor hasn’t asked. I do not know what lies there, for I am here.
“It’s purgatory,” Eleanor says. “The rift, it’s purgatory.”
Her own words spread into the dark, ribbons of phosphorescence that ripple outward. She watches them recede until they are small, but in the distant dark, they break over the shape of the Other. She cannot tell what the Other is, only that it is there, and that it, like the darkness, has substance.
Purgatory, the Other muses. I know of this concept. Yes, it’s like that.
“So there’s really an afterlife,” Eleanor says. “You’re dead. You’re waiting for it.”
Perhaps, the Other says.
“But you don’t know for sure?”
It may be so.
Eleanor considers this, surprised that the Other does not seem to know. “Does that mean that I’m dead, too?”
The rift does belong to those who have passed from life, the Other says. All sorts of lives, in all sorts of places.
“So I’m dead,” Eleanor says, not surprised by this at all.
No, the Other replies. You are rare.
“What do you mean?”
Few can enter the rift from life without passing first into death.
“But I’m not dead?”
You are not dead.
“I don’t understand, then,” Eleanor says. “Why—what am I doing here? Why is this happening to me?”
You are here because I brought you here, the Other says. For you, the rift is a different thing. It is not a waiting room, but—a conduit, you might say. Into other places. I do not know how many sorts of places, only that there are other doors available to you. Doors that you may only enter from here.
“From this darkness,” Eleanor says. “But why? I don’t understand.”
Do not be distracted by such questions, the Other says. Do not ask why you are here. That is not the correct question.
Eleanor is quiet for a long time. Finally, she says, “What is the right question?”
You know what it is, the Other says. Ask.
Eleanor turns away from the Other and considers the thousand questions she wishes to ask. Which of them is the right one? How is she supposed to know which it is? What happens if she asks the wrong one? For a time, she panics. She doesn’t want to disappoint the Other, whomever it may be out there in the darkness.
Behind her, the Other is patient and still.
Eleanor turns over in the black. The movement of her body sends a kaleidoscope of color into the darkness, the dancing light and pigments radiating from somewhere within her new, invisible self. She loses herself in the beauty of it. In the colors she sees a star and its entire life, passed in but a moment. She witnesses its formation in the void, as if she is observing its death in reverse. She sees it snap to life, witnesses its body turn incandescent in the void. It burns brighter and brighter, and grows larger and larger, and then it collapses. She watches the star go nova before her eyes, sees its soul rupture like a soap bubble in the darkness.
She gently rolls over in the blackness, and in the slipstream of color around her sees the formation of planets, strange and wonderful ones, some that look like fibrous bacteria, some that are cold and slick and blue. She sees the passage of comets, their centuries-long journeys over as quickly as a glimpse of a falling star. Beyond all of it she sees the great flaming edge of the universe itself as it pushes forward into the absence, and in the chaos of that boiling expansion she watches galaxies born like tiny sparks that become fireworks displays.
The question comes to her at last, and she turns slowly to face the Other.
“Why are you here?” Eleanor asks.
“Wait,” Eleanor says. “Before you answer.”
The Other is silent.
“My name is Eleanor,” she says. “You called me that earlier. You know who I am. What is your name?”
She can feel the Other’s hesitation, and then it answers.
I am called Mea.
“Mea,” Eleanor says.
It is the name I chose for myself when I entered the rift.
Eleanor thinks about this. “Should I choose a new name?”
You are but a flicker in the rift, Mea says. No.
“Is Mea a gi
rl’s name?”
The rift recognizes no gender, Mea answers. You may have noticed that you do not possess a body.
Eleanor nods, and a tendril of color flutters into the darkness.
“Okay,” she says. “You can answer my question now.”
She can feel Mea approach her. Waves as dark as wine lap over Eleanor’s new shape, and Mea comes to rest nearby. Her shape remains indistinct, but now Eleanor can see the violet waves that emanate from her when she speaks.
I once existed in time’s great stream, Mea explains. The rift is that stream. It has no beginning, and no end. I am here now, and so I have been from the beginning of all things. Yet I have also only just arrived, and I have already left. Do you understand?
Eleanor doesn’t understand.
You come from a place where time moves forward, Mea says. The rift moves in all directions. This is why I can leave your friend in the air. I can visit the very moment that you ceased to exist in your world, the moment when you entered the rift. I can also return to the instant when your world was formed in the darkness. I can visit your world at the moment of its death, when it is consumed by your sun. Do you understand?
“Sort of,” Eleanor says.
I am not dead, Mea says. Death is a thing which visits bodies, not the beings which inhabit them. You will understand this when your body dies, but for now you may think of me as a spirit, or a soul, or a consciousness. It is not urgent that you understand all of this. It is enough that you have been told.
Eleanor says, “But why are you here?”
Mea seems to laugh. A pink rush of color explodes outward, and Eleanor almost laughs herself.
It is not an original story, Mea says. Your storytellers have long had this correct. I must remain in the rift until a wrong is put right again.
“You’re a ghost,” Eleanor says. “You’re a ghost that has to put its affairs in order before you can rest.”
Perhaps your oldest storytellers were like you, Eleanor, Mea says. Travelers between your world and the rift. Perhaps that is how they have always known.
“What wrong do you have to correct?” Eleanor asks.
I must put right the same wrong which you wish to settle, Mea says.