I opened my eyes as I was tossed about inside the creature’s body, and was surprised to see a light floating in front of me. It was weak, bluish-purple in color, the color of lightning, coming from my necklace. From the light of this glow, I could see that Stephen was still there, floating beside me.
“I never meant for this to happen, Sarah. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for everything,” he said, though his mouth never moved.
“I know,” I spoke back in the same way. “None of this was supposed to happen the way it did. It wasn’t the life we were promised, the one we hoped would come true. But it’s the way things turned out. It happened.”
“Lea was everything to me. She was my light—she protected me from the ones who were against me—and from myself. She showed me how good the world could be. She gave me hope. I can’t—I can’t accept that I was the one that—”
“I know,” I repeated, feeling my heart ache because of him, and for him. “She was the same thing to me. She was to so many.”
“You must think I’m a monster. I took her from you. You must hate me.”
“I feel for you. Anyone who lives through the same pain that I do—I couldn’t possibly hate. There’s already enough pain, as it is,” I told him tenderly. “I forgive you.”
He groaned, his grief causing him to shrivel up. I reached through the darkness and murky water until I caught hold of his hand. Instantly the little light from my necklace faded and we were left there, drowning but undying in the dark. It seemed to last forever, but then I felt his hand squeeze mine.
“I think…I think I can still set this right. Or at least try to undo some of the damage,” he murmured. He was quiet for a moment, and I waited to see what he would do. “Elk, if you’re still there, if some part of you can still hear me, I need you to do something for me. Set me free. Let this all end. If I’m gone, the part that’s making you want to hurt others might be gone, too. Go on and set me free.”
“Stephen, no, there’s got to be another way.”
Just then the body that entrapped us both shuddered a great sigh. We were shaken about as the shiver grew more violent, and then everything was heating up around us, boiling us. The heat seemed to be erasing everything from below us, and it was rising, reverting everything back to the way it had once been. I called over and over for Stephen and clawed around in the pitch black water all around me, but he was gone. As the temperature reached an intensity that was sure to melt away my body, things again became still, and the heat dissipated. My sense of the spirit enclosing me vanished, as did any notion that Stephen was near me. This garden was empty.
I TRIED TO howl out my frustration and terror, but only a jet of water issued from my mouth. I was trapped here now. Stephen’s wish had been granted. The familiar had probably gone back to the other side of reality and taken the life of his master. The poison had been drawn from the wound—the toxic earth had been made clean again. The familiar was probably free too, roaming the Earth again in the shadowy places and looking for a new master. I could feel it because the substance I was floating in now wasn’t the filthy, acidic mixture of its stomach, but clear and clean water. But if this garden belonged to no one, now, what was to become of me?
Keeping my panic at bay, I waited. I waited for hours in silence, hoping against all hope that I would wake from this dream as I always did and drift back to my body. But I did not. I stayed suspended in my watery prison. I tried to find the perimeter, and could find neither top nor bottom nor sides. It went on forever. Gripped by despair, I pulled my knees to my chest and began to sob. This was it. I was in too deep to escape. There wasn’t any way out. Even if another master came to this garden and brought it back into life, how could they know where I was? How could they dig me out of here, even if they did? I thought of Felix, starving as my body would sleep endlessly. I wondered if he could even feel me down here.
Desperation spiked in my heart, and I tried calling to him. I screamed with whatever voice I could muster, but the longer I called, the deeper my despair grew. With a darkening heart, I realized that I couldn’t even take the easy way out as Stephen had. I would have to wait until some natural death came to my body on Earth before I was able to escape. I hugged my knees tighter to my chest, wracked with anguish. They would probably think I collapsed from alcohol poisoning when they found me. I would be put into the hospital just as Stephen had, kept alive by machines and intravenous fluid. Would Felix stay by my side, poised in wait to see if I ever awoke, or perhaps creep between the gardens of the Unreal City in search of my lost spirit? Would Joy weep for me? Would my parents have any strength left to go on after losing another daughter?
I don’t know how long I stayed down there; time seemed to evaporate. What I wanted more than anything was to fall asleep as Stephen had done, but this also seemed impossible. Instead, I fell into a hypnotic state that seemed to pacify my turmoil somewhat. It was calming, floating through nothingness and listening to my own heartbeat. It seemed to get louder and louder, and pulse through the water after so many hours—days? weeks?—in that suspended state.
I put my hand to my chest, noticing a peculiar rhythm in the pulsing sound. There was another little bump in the middle of the beats, almost imperceptible at first. It was like another heart was beating near me. Experimentally, I reached out and felt warmth.
Someone was here with me. My hand searched around and connected with another set of fingers. It sent a wave of comfort through me, and my fingers closed around the hand of whoever was with me in the dark. The hand grasped me back. My heart started to flutter—I already knew who it was. After all, we’d been here together before….
“Lea,” I stammered. “It’s you, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
My eyes ached with the threat of oncoming tears. My other hand searched for hers, and I found it. We held to each other. She was the only thing that I had in this world.
“God, Lea, why did you have to go?” I moaned, yet happier than I’d ever been. I didn’t know how long I’d have with her, or if she was even real, but I felt peaceful. “You’re half of me. We’ve been together since the beginning. I can’t do this without you. I’m not strong enough.”
“That’s not true at all,” her voice said. “We were each other’s strength, but that doesn’t mean we couldn’t stand by ourselves.”
“But everything’s broken now. I’m not the same. Nothing’s the same. I’m scared of everyone and everything. I’m scared to love anything. You have no idea what you did to me, what I’ve been through. I’m ruined.”
“Sarah,” she said and pulled me closer, holding tight.
“Lea, I need you. We’re two parts of a whole, and you were always the better part of that. You were born first. I followed. Somehow in those few extra minutes, you gained all the wisdom I could never understand. You always had it and now I’m lost. I have no one to follow,” I murmured, and felt her forehead press against mine.
“We were born together for a reason,” she told me. “Our lives were beautiful, weren’t they? But we were never half of a whole. No one is completed by another person. No one becomes happy that way. Happiness is something you have to chase after, and you have to have the courage to hold onto it, and the strength to weather the storm when it goes away for a while. But it’ll always come back. It will always come. That part of your life is over, and my life is over for good. You can’t hold on to an instant for the rest of your life. You can’t stop halfway through. You’ve got to keep going.”
For the third and final time in my life, I felt that ringing in my chest. Something deep inside of me broke loose and I held Lea tightly, hoping to hold her forever but aware that I couldn’t.
The memories came to me. My first memory of life, being so small with her in our crib. I saw us at the seaside in silly big hats with plastic yellow buckets. We’d made sandcastles that day. I saw our backyard, and heard our shrill, innocent laughs. I saw birthday candles, and scraped knees, and Christmases, and first days of s
chool with our hands clasped, holding onto one another for strength. The same strength that had come during thunderstorms, bad days, at the end of fights, and on the nights after break-ups. I felt her running beside me and our dog in the last light of the day, and felt her breathing beside me on the couch during the credits of so many movies. And I remembered, finally, the last day I’d seen her alive. She had come back from somewhere—spending time with friends, maybe, or perhaps Unreal City. I’d been short with her and when she’d gotten the text from Stephen to come and meet him, I’d said, “Well, don’t disappear on me, again.”
We clutched one another for as long as we could, saying the silent goodbye we’d never had the privilege of last time. I wanted to freeze this moment like I’d done before with Felix in my garden, but it wouldn’t work. She really had told the truth.
A current rose up and pried us gently apart. I felt her break away from me, and the last thing I remember of her is her fingers still trying to grip mine as she was swept away forever. For a while longer I hovered there, mourning the loss of the most important person I’d ever known.
I hardly noticed when a shaft of light cut through the darkness.
I LOOKED UP to see something very like the opening of a well, only I was at the bottom of it. Swimming upward, I broke through the surface of the water and gasped in the cool, fresh air. Each lungful was like new life. Air had never tasted so sweet.
Seemingly hundreds of feet above my head at the top of the shaft was a circle of light with little black specks moving around it. I called up, my voice echoing off the stone. An indistinct noise answered me and my heart leapt. It could’ve been a voice.
After about a minute of treading water and trying to keep afloat, something was tossed down onto my head. It was a rope. My heart skipping with nearly painful delight, I grabbed hold of it with trembling hands and tugged. It seemed safe, so I began my difficult ascent. By the time I was halfway up, my shoulders and hands were screaming with pain, but I didn’t care. There was a way out. I was going home.
Nearing the top I couldn’t see the specks any longer, and I called up for help as I tried to hoist myself over the edge. I almost let go when Joy leaned down and caught my hand. I stared at her in shock as Angus grasped my other hand and I was pulled over the side onto solid ground. There stood Felix, purring, and next to him was a familiar I’d never seen before. It was shaped like a rabbit carved from ice. Aodh’s face was in the trees behind us.
“Joy—how in the—what are you all doing here?”
Joy and Angus shared a relieved look. “I got worried about you when you didn’t come back inside after a long time, so I went searching for you on the sea cliff. You were lying in the grass and Felix was there beside you. He told me everything. He told me what you did, and where you went—”
“—and how I couldn’t follow you,” Felix finished for her. “I figured you’d get yourself stuck down there, so I waited beside your body for her to show up. After she heard what you’d gotten yourself into, we just had to pray that you worked things out. I felt a shift happen. Felt my friend had finally been set free. So I called him to our side so that Joy could make the pact with him. There she sits, reborn,” Felix added, gesturing with a flick of his tail to the rabbit at his side. She was beautiful and pure, and the surface of her glimmering skin was etched with beautiful symbols. Her eyes were like two pearls, shining with that miraculous opalescence of the familiar’s life energy. I was speechless.
“It was easier the second time,” Joy remarked when she saw the tears welling up in my eyes. “You know I couldn’t have left you stuck down there.”
“Joy, you—”
“I know. You don’t have to say anything. I chose this life over the other. I chose the one with you alive and very much a part of it,” Joy said, her brilliant smile lighting her face. I couldn’t stop my tears from falling. I took her in my arms and as we embraced, I smiled at Angus.
“You brought her here, didn’t you?”
“Taught her how to find you and everything. Don’t worry. You can thank me later. You’ve got a true friend there, Sarah, and not too bad looking, either,” he grinned, and she broke away from me to give him a shy grin.
Joy waved her hand and the well closed up, leaving only earth sprouting with shoots of new spring grass. “She’s a natural,” said the rabbit at her side. “I predict there will be a few peaceful decades for us, old friend.” She looked over at Felix, who flashed his wicked grin.
“Some well-fed decades are all I hope for,” he said, licking his lips and studying me like I was a Thanksgiving turkey.
As we sat in Joy’s garden, I told them all that had happened down in the ground, and Joy was relieved to hear that Stephen’s passing came by his own choice. With the oppressive danger dispersed, Joy decided to make a celebration of our remaining time in her garden. She commanded the flowers and grass to grow all around us until we wandered through forests of tulips, roses, hyacinths, narcissus, and bluebells. Angus, Aodh, Felix, Joy’s new familiar and I followed her through endless antique stores crammed with all manner of nostalgic wonders, through recreations of the 1920s and the regency period. We feasted and flew and played among the clouds, and all too soon I found that my time in the garden was ending.
I floated back to Earth in a peaceful manner, feeling as if I’d been hollowed out—the good was gone along with the bad. When I awoke, I was shivering in the tall grass overlooking the sea. Joy was sleeping beside me, still exploring her section of Unreal City. I watched her for a long while in the gray light of those quiet moments before dawn, and when the sun rose in a blaze of orange and peach, I got to my feet. Felix was perched atop a stone cross at the edge of the cliff, and I waded through the grass to join him. I clung to the cross, smiling uncertainly. He smiled back.
My eyes turned to the sunrise over the waves, a view like liquid mercury in the light of the newborn day. I was still stunned by everything, overwhelmed and unable to start planning everything that was to come. My heart still fluttered to think that I’d spoken with my sister just hours ago. I’d gotten to say goodbye, to let her know how much I loved her and I missed her.
My hand went to my neck where the pendant that housed her ashes still hung. With numbed fingers, I clumsily undid the clasp from behind my neck and looked down at it. All that was left of her fit inside my palm. I closed my fingers around it, and with eyes squeezed shut, I tried to remember the warmth and light of the succession of memories that had blazed in my heart in the deepest part of Unreal City. To my surprise I felt a smile on my lips. My eyes opened again to the light of the sun. It was almost above the waves now.
In an almost involuntary action, my arm lifted high into the air, my hand tilted back and I took a deep breath. Then I hurled the pendant forward with all my might. I saw the light catch it in midair as it flew, and my chest clenched with a longing that wasn’t quite regret. Seconds later, the necklace disappeared into the ocean.
I watched the place where it had sunk for a while. I stood there until the sun was over the sea, and jumped when cold fingers touched my shoulder. Joy was there, smiling cautiously at me. I returned the grin. She gave me a searching look, and I knew she wanted to ask what I was doing.
“Just…just saying goodbye,” I said, putting my fingers to the space around my neck.
“Oh,” she murmured, seeing the pendant was gone. She tilted her head. “Well, I could leave you here for a while, if you want a little more time to—”
“No,” I said, taking a step away from the cliff. Felix leapt off the top of the cross to follow me. “I’ve had my moment. And no moment needs to last forever.”
THROUGH THE HAZE of sleep, Penny knew that this particular dream was dangerous, though it began as any other dream might.
Penny wandered through a forest, searching for an eerie voice that called her name. She found herself at a lone apple tree that didn’t belong in the sea of pines.
Dig…I’ve got to dig, her dream-logic ordered. The e
ntrance is buried here. Someone once showed me how to get there, it was…
Penny dropped to her knees in front of the fruit tree.
The atmosphere changed. Her awareness became too clear—so much so that it seemed to sting her eyes. She was awake inside of her dream, but lacked any form of control. The vividness intensified to the point of agony and Penny tried to scream. Nothing came out. A violent gust of wind knocked her off her knees and onto the ground.
All at once an immovable pressure crushed her. Talons gripped her body as a great white heron swooped in front of her eyes. The bird’s beak appeared crooked and malformed.
The heron drove its beak deep into her body with a mercilessness that paralyzed her, its knife-like bill drilling into her abdomen. Horror electrified Penny and she tried in vain to wriggle free. A burst of revulsion assaulted Penny when she realized that the massive bird was searching for something within her body. She was still unable scream but somehow felt no pain.
The bird grew still and with a swift yank withdrew from the wound, revealing an enormous black spider clamped in its beak. Eight spindly legs twitched and twisted in the air, probing for something to hang onto.
A deep, resonating voice split through Penny’s panic. “I have removed it. Now you will be hidden no more.”
This time Penny screamed and the clear, sharp sound drew her back into reality. She tumbled onto the hardwood floor amidst a shower of various fluffy pillows. Her eyes snapped open and Penny found herself face-to-face with the grin of a teddy-bear.
Penny sighed as she untangled herself from her homemade quilt and sat up. Grumbling, she ran her fingers through her tousled black hair and started to rearrange her bed, listening to the footsteps pounding up the hallway.
Penny’s door flung open as her inquisitive mother popped in. “What’s all the noise about?” Paulina asked, failing to sound nonchalant. Her long black hair was pulled back, hidden under the usual bandana. Her gray eyes flitted over Penny with concern.
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