by Jason Gurley
She lies awake for a long time, the silence around her so complete that she can almost hear the snowflakes crushing each other on the lawn below. Sleep finally overtakes her as the sun begins to rise, turning the room to rose and taffeta. Before long, Paul will wake her to tell her that it’s time to feed the twins, and Agnes will sleepwalk through her day, as she has begun to sleepwalk through every one of them.
In the ghostly stillness of the house, she sinks into herself and into sleep, and descends through wispy clouds into the tall, waving grasses of a beautiful valley that she has never seen before. She stands barefoot, naked, beside a creek, and marvels at the warm breeze on her skin, in her hair, at the quietude that envelops her.
She kneels beside the water and drags her fingers over its surface. The water beads on her skin. She looks for fish and sees a few, and plunges her hand into the water to startle them, her heart suddenly alive like a child’s. Her hand disappears into the inches-deep creek up to her wrist, then her forearm, then her elbow, and Agnes wiggles her fingers, feeling the faintest stir of electricity in a gaping void that she cannot see, but only feel.
She knows that she is dreaming. The world feels so real, but whatever exists below the creek—the darkness, she knows instinctively—must surround this world on all sides, unseen but present. She looks up at the clouds that she fell through, seeing them thicken and gather and darken, and wonders if the same black void exists above them, out of sight. And around her, past the mountains that seem to cup the valley in their palm. Is the darkness beyond that craggy range?
Birds flutter overhead, sailing low over the meadow and skidding into the water. They flap and paddle about, dipping their beaks into the stream, and Agnes smiles. She feels a bit like Eve, permitted reentry into the garden.
A tiny mewling sound comes from the tall grass on the opposite side of the creek. Agnes cocks her head and stares. The grass moves, but whatever is inside doesn’t emerge. So Agnes steps over the water, the soft valley floor spongy beneath her bare toes, and cautiously kneels before the grass. She leans forward and parts it, and looks down in surprise at a pair of lizard-like creatures, tiny and tangled together in the undergrowth. Broken bits of red shell are scattered around their damp bodies.
They look like dinosaurs, almost, like the pictures in the books Agnes read as a little girl.
One is a little larger than the other. It looks up at Agnes, its dark eyes glittering.
Then it recoils, as if it senses something wrong, and before Agnes can react, the little thing urges the smaller creature to its feet, and leans into it, and the two strange little beasts flee unsteadily into the grass. Agnes stands up, the wind whipping urgently through her auburn hair, and watches the grass ripple as the small creatures run like hell, putting as much ground between her and them as they can.
She turns and surveys the valley that unfolds behind her, around her, and is not surprised one bit to see that the sun has been chewed up by the lumbering clouds, to see the distant trees bending under the sudden winds. A single drop of water spatters on her shoulder, and she holds out her hand, and the rains begin to fall, filling her cupped palm in minutes.
There is nowhere to shelter herself—the treeline is easily a mile or more away, gathering at the base of the mountains like a tuft of hair. The waving grasses slant under the rain and wind, and the air takes on a chill that prickles Agnes’s skin.
She looks down at her body as rain sluices down it, dripping between her breasts, sliding down her belly. That her body is changed is only a mild curiosity—the marks on her abdomen are gone; her breasts are smaller, her hips narrower. Her skin is pink and alive and—
She stops. There, against her thigh, is the strangest thing.
She reaches down, suddenly nervous, and takes the thing in her fingertips, holds it up to the dim sky to inspect it.
A damp sliver of reddish shell, brittle and cracked.
Agnes drops it, and reaches between her legs and gasps.
Her hand comes away red with blood, speckled with shell fragments.
She wakes up.
Paul is shaking her. Her head pounds, her breasts throb.
“They’re hungry,” Paul says.
The girls are bawling in their cribs. Paul comes into the room with Agnes, and gently lifts Esmerelda into his arms and begins to sway. Almost immediately the little girl calms, and drifts into a momentary sleep against his chest.
Agnes scoops Eleanor into her hands and settles into the rocker beside the window, loosening the flap on her nightgown. Eleanor fastens to Agnes’s nipple and begins to suck, and Agnes weeps.
There is no trace of Eleanor anywhere. Mea cannot find her on Earth—she scours Paul and Agnes’s house, Jack’s house, searches for her along the coast, in the sea, in the forests. But Eleanor has disappeared from the world like a spark from a sputtering match. And the little glowing ember that Mea recognizes as Eleanor—as a sort of beacon, suggesting where Eleanor really is when she’s traveling through someone’s dreams—is nowhere to be found.
She’s gone, Mea says. I feel—panic.
The darkness envelops Mea and threads through her shape, weaving in and out of her until she feels as if she has become a part of something greater.
She is gone, it agrees.
But where? What happened?
The darkness says, I’m afraid I don’t know.
Something happened to her. In her mother’s dream.
I think so.
Mea seems to shiver. She’s gone, she repeats. Eleanor is gone. Why don’t you know where she is? Why don’t you know what happened?
The darkness is calming despite its answer.
I can see into many worlds and many times, it says slowly. But dreams belong to their owners. I cannot intrude.
She could be hurt or trapped.
This is true.
She might be—dead, Mea says.
I can do nothing for her until she leaves the dream.
Mea looks around for any sign of Eleanor in the rift, but the orange spark is long gone.
I feel helpless, Mea says.
The darkness is quiet.
For Mea, it feels as if her own thread has snapped. The darkness of the rift has never frightened her, never seemed anything more than a comfort to her, but now it feels foreign and strange. She lingers quietly for eons, aware in some foggy way that she is experiencing something that she hasn’t experienced in the rift, ever: regret.
The darkness leaves her be, and she presses herself against the skin that separates the darkness from the world she once grew up in. She feels Eleanor’s absence from the world keenly, like a growing hollow within her belly. She threads her shape through the river of time, winding it back to a past that she remembers, but in an academic sense. Her past life as a child, as a sibling, as a daughter, is like a story written in a history text. She watches the past, watches the man who was her father as he twists this way and that on a rotating chair in the attic of their house, contentedly humming and painting tiny windowsills and doors. She can see her mother, and from Mea’s vantage point in the rift, Agnes’s unease with her position in the world is strikingly clear. She wonders how Paul and Eleanor and her former self failed to see it.
She watches Eleanor, small and pale and alive, red hair like a campfire, green eyes like new spring leaves.
Regret.
The river of time churns on, less one precious soul, and not at all concerned with such things.
Mea winds time forward like a watch, the river coursing through the events of her own history, then stops to watch Esmerelda and Eleanor dig a hole in the back yard under their father’s watchful eye. The twins clap delightedly when he lets them turn the garden hose on their excavation, transforming it into sludge that decorates their bare legs as they stomp happily in it.
From the darkness of the rift she sees Eleanor’s thread, fat and bright like smoke from a tall stack, and she sees her own thread, darkening and issuing into the invisible void in a cough of f
inal days. If Agnes and Paul and Eleanor had known that Mea’s—that Esmerelda’s—end was so imminent, would life have been different? Would her father have stayed home from the real estate seminar that took him to Florida? Would her mother have tried harder to love her?
Mea skips the moment of her death. She has seen it enough times, and doesn’t want to watch it again.
There is nothing to be done about it.
Eleanor is dead.
All is lost.
She is dead.
She knows it. She felt it, the certainty of it, as sure as a vise that tightens and tightens. The moment she saw her mother, a frail witch in the gutted wasteland of her dream valley, Eleanor knew that she was going to die. Even from such great heights, she saw her mother’s eyes burning. There was no question why. Her mother was furious with her.
In the darkness of her death, she has plenty of time to consider this. She has known for years and years that her mother’s grief was toxic. Each morning Eleanor would wake from sleep and stand in front of the mirror with her eyes closed, hoping that when she opened them, she would look like someone else. If she could only do that—if she could only strip Esmerelda’s face from her own reflection—then maybe her mother would… love her again.
Of course, that never happened. And each day that Eleanor grew older was another day that Esmerelda didn’t. Eleanor at ten was a haunting reminder of a future that Esmerelda would never see.
Eleanor understood—had always understood—why her mother hated her so.
But she had never realized just how powerful that hate really was.
Eleanor is dead, and her mother has killed her.
She knows—just knows—that something unusual has happened to her. Each time she has passed into the dream world, she has left the fabric of her own world behind. Mea described it to her as like slipping into bed and hiding beneath a blanket—she exists, in a way, beneath the world. Between worlds.
Dreams do not occupy any particular reality, the darkness had explained to Eleanor. They are a fabricated world, wholly owned by their makers.
The rules do not apply.
Eleanor is dead, and she has left no body in her own world. There are no remains for someone to stumble upon, rotting in the brush beside the highway. No bloodstains on the carpet to be investigated. Eleanor walked into her mother’s bedroom, and disappeared.
She fell out of the world, never to return.
The expression on her mother’s face haunts her. She has never seen anger like Agnes’s anger. She has never seen someone so infuriated that they would crush their child into pulp. But her mother did just that, then threw her into a hole and went about her business.
Eleanor has failed in her task.
She wonders if Mea even knows that she has failed. Neither Mea nor the darkness can see into the dream worlds—they said as much when Eleanor was in the rift with them. How will they know she has failed, that she has been extinguished?
Eleanor considers this, then stops.
Where is she?
It has to be the rift.
She is surrounded by warm dark. She is formless, as she once was in the rift. She tests her theory, and waves her hand—her hand which is not a hand at all, which is as shapeless as the dark itself—and gasps when a tendril of pink echoes into the dark.
It must be the rift.
But if it is the rift, where is Mea? Where is the darkness?
Eleanor concentrates and speaks into the great black.
“Hello?”
She waits for a reply, feeling that same dislocating sensation of thousands and thousands of years passing by while she lingers here, sightless, like a blind shrimp in a sea beneath the earth’s surface.
In the quiet, Mea does not reply.
The darkness does not reply.
A black ocean rises around Eleanor in the rift, warm and dense and alive. It stirs around her, lifting her, bearing her up until she feels like a tiny ship bobbing atop a vast, fathomless sea.
“Hello?” Eleanor turns slowly on the invisible waters and says it again. “Who’s there? Mea?”
The ocean answers.
Mea is haunted by memories.
She cannot explain why, so she asks the darkness to explain her pain.
You feel because she is gone, the darkness says.
This is not a sufficient answer.
I am not her sister, Mea protests. I was, but now I am new.
The darkness leaves her alone to think about this, and in its quiet, Mea settles on an answer—she feels pain because she is one half of two. She feels the way that Eleanor must have felt when Mea—when Esmerelda—died. This makes sense, but she wants to be sure, so she presses herself against the membrane between the rift and the world, and commands time to reverse.
And she watches Eleanor, a little girl, for a while.
Eleanor does not sleep for weeks after Esmerelda’s death. Mea feels the hollow inside her grow teeth and begin to consume her as she watches her young sister. Eleanor crawls beneath her bed, passes the night in the shadows there, awake except when she drifts into the sleep of an exhausted child. These small measures of rest never last. She starts from sleep with a cry, and realizes again that Esmerelda is gone, and weeps. Each time she wakes, it is as if Esmerelda dies all over again.
Mea has never wanted anything as badly as she wants to push through the wall, to swim down into Eleanor’s room, to enfold her sister.
She leans with all her might and substance against the gauzy membrane.
The darkness cups Mea in its vastness.
You feel because she is gone, the darkness says again.
I am not whole, Mea laments.
Then the rift seems to shimmer and dance, a million points of light glittering over the darkness, as if dawn has come to the void.
Mea says, What is it?
The darkness is silent.
You don’t know, Mea says in wonder. Something is happening. You don’t know what it is.
The brightness grows and grows, and the rift is consumed.
“Hello?” Eleanor asks.
The silence would be deafening, she thinks, if she had ears.
She is certain that this is the rift, or perhaps a part of the rift. The whiteness of it is strange and blinding, but as she watches, it dwindles, calming into eternal night once again. She feels as if she has just witnessed the Big Bang, the birth of a universe.
Eleanor feels the hesitant ripple of Mea’s voice cross the dark void.
Hello?
Eleanor says, “I’m back,” and then she is swallowed by Mea’s embrace.
Where were you? Mea demands.
“I died,” Eleanor says.
Impossible, the darkness interrupts.
“I did.”
Not impossible that you died, the darkness says, confusion in its words. Impossible that you are here.
“I’m here,” Eleanor says.
What do you mean? Mea asks.
Eleanor can feel Mea’s presence tighten around her, as if Mea is offended by the darkness and its disbelief.
The darkness says, Dream worlds do not permit the passage of the dead. This has never happened.
Eleanor would shrug if she had shoulders. “I’m here,” she says again.
Your mother, the darkness says.
“I saw her,” Eleanor says. “She was a skeleton, a witch. Her world was the same as our father’s world. When I arrived in his dream, it changed everything—his world was barren and covered in ice, and I watched it… It was reborn. We walked and walked—”
Where? Why? the darkness demands.
“We were walking home,” Eleanor says. “He wanted to go.”
Mea says, You healed his wounds.
The darkness reluctantly agrees. He volunteered? He accompanied you willingly?
“Yes,” Eleanor says.
Then what happened? Mea asks.
“We came upon a valley,” Eleanor continues. “It was familiar, and it took some time to fig
ure out why, but I knew that place. I had been there before. But it looked different. My father’s version of the valley was green and rich. It was beautiful. But the valley I had been to before was burning.”
It cannot be, the darkness says.
“When you took me into my mother’s dream, it was that same valley,” Eleanor says. “Except it had been—slaughtered. It was like a bomb had fallen right in the middle of it, and destroyed everything, and she somehow survived it.”
It is impossible, the darkness says again. Dream worlds cannot be shared.
Eleanor shares their dream worlds, Mea argues. You are wrong.
No. Eleanor does not share their dreams. Eleanor pierces their dreams. She is a guest.
“Not always a welcome one,” Eleanor says.
Your father? the darkness asks.
“My father was transformed by my arrival,” Eleanor says. To Mea she says, “He thought I was you.”
Mea trembles unexpectedly. Me?
His grief was eased, the darkness says. And your mother?
Mea tightens her grip on Eleanor, nervously.
Eleanor says, “My mother murdered me.”
Her wounds fester, the darkness says. She is not healed. I fear you have failed.
What can she do now? Mea asks. What can be done?
The darkness is resolute. It is over. Time will not permit further intervention. Her pain would return to the past with her. It would destroy all of you.
“No,” Eleanor says, firmly.
The darkness is taken aback. It is not for you to debate.
“I have to go back. I’m going back to see her.”