by Cege Smith
David’s blue eyes were filled with desire. There was a vulnerability inside there that unsettled her. He dipped his head to her shoulder and dragged his hands through her hair. “You are driving me crazy, woman.” His breath was ragged.
Who was she talking to? In that moment there was something lonely and sad about him and if that was the case, she was more confused than ever. Mikel was the bad guy. She wasn’t prepared for the idea that there was anything resembling a human being in him. But if he showed the capacity to care about someone other than himself, it was the most human thing she could think of.
They stood like that for several minutes. Ellie knew that if she gave him any cause to think that she was suspicious of him, he wouldn’t show her the way line. And when he was quiet, just holding her, she could easily think that it was David. She was angry at herself for letting herself be manipulated so easily by Mikel.
Finally he took a deep shuddering breath. “I’ll take you to the way line. I’ll show you whatever you want to see. But you have to promise me you’ll never try to leave me here, Ellie. Now that we are here, I don’t ever want you to go.” His face twisted in a grimace as he considered the possibility.
“I want to be wherever you are, David,” she said. Her mind, however, was doing backflips. She could get out of the waypoint. She just had to figure out how, after she figured out a way to separate Mikel from David.
Smiling shyly, he took her hand. “This way,” he said. He led her into the hallway and to the door of the basement. “Think of this like the back door,” he said. Then he led her down the spiral staircase that she remembered traveling down carrying Martin’s body just a short time before.
Then they were facing the stone pedestal again. But this time, David took her hands and led her around it and she saw a symbol on the floor. It wasn’t the same symbol that she remembered from her dream, and it hadn’t been there when she was in the room with Lucy. She carefully watched everything that he was doing as he scooped up some dirt from the floor and then dropped it inside the inner circle of the symbol.
“What is this?” she asked.
“It’s an ancient rune symbol,” he replied. “Think of it like a map to any time or any place that you could possibly think of. Then it’s just a matter of adjusting the map to tell it where you want to go.”
“Where are we going?” She was afraid she didn’t want to know.
“It’s a surprise,” he said as he knelt down next to the circle. His eyes twinkled. There was nothing menacing in his face at all. She wished she had a way to be able to tell for sure that David wasn’t involved in part of their conversation. David wouldn’t let anything happen to her, she was sure of it.
“So how did you figure out how to read the map?” She knelt down next to him. “I’m sure that Lillian didn’t want you gallivanting around the Afterlife or Other Side unsupervised.” She was teasing him, she realized as she watched his expression turn to one of amusement.
“Never heard of teenage rebellion?” he replied wryly. “I was busy studying these symbols before I could even walk. Call it preparation for worst case scenario.” As he spoke, he placed more dirt in the circle and then said a few words that Ellie didn’t recognize. The dirt started to swirl slowly close to the ground and then gathered into three different symbols on the ground. Knowing that so many things in the Afterlife keyed off the number three, Ellie wasn’t surprised.
David pointed at the symbols. “Person, place, and time. The more specific you can be the better.”
Ellie thought of all the infinite possibilities for every person in the world with just those three criteria to consider. She felt overwhelmed considering trying to learn enough on her own to be able to use the way lines, if she was even able to use them.
Then David took her hand, and since she was studying the symbols on the floor she missed the next part that resulted in a sharp stab of pain on her palm.
“Ouch!” she gasped and saw that the line where she had cut herself earlier had been reopened.
“Sorry about that,” David said, holding her hand firmly over the circle. Ellie watched several drops of her blood fall into the circle.
The sharp retort on her tongue fell away as she watched the ground beneath the circle begin to glow and pulse. Behind her the pedestal started to vibrate and then a fat white line about a foot wide shot straight out of it to the symbol, connecting the two.
“Just like that. It’s ready,” David said, standing up and helping her to her feet.
Ellie said nothing. Her mind raced as she tried to think where he was taking her.
“Trust me,” he whispered into her ear as if he had read her mind. Ellie didn’t trust anyone anymore. But she needed to know more. Finding that out meant putting herself in this man’s hands for the moment. She made a mental note to ask Lucy the next time she saw her for a spell to be able to see who it was she was actually in the company of because the man with her now seemed more and more like David all the time. Maybe Lucy was mistaken about Mikel’s ability to control him.
He took her hand again and stepped into the circle, pulling Ellie along with him. For a few moments the only thing that Ellie could see was blinding white and silver light. She couldn’t see David at all, but her hand in his remained a reassuring grip on reality. The edges of her vision started to clear, and as the light faded, a sight that she had not seen in twenty-five years came into view. Flickers of light danced around her eyes and then were finally gone, but Ellie didn’t even notice.
She was standing in front of the house she lived in with her parents until they died. She held her breath, expecting it to disappear, but it didn’t. It looked just the way it did when they lived there. Ellie had driven past the house a few times over the years, but the new owners repainted it, changed the landscaping, and fixed the front porch steps that her father always said he was going to do but never did. That last time she had seen it, it looked like a completely different place. But this house, this was the house from her memories. It was her home.
“Is this real?” she asked out loud. “How can it be real?”
“As real as you or me,” David said. “I thought it would make you happy to come here again. I picked a random day from your past just about a year before your parents died.”
Ellie slowly walked up the path and heard the creak and groan of the old steps as she moved onto the porch. She listened to see if the noise would bring someone to the door. Her father joked that they didn’t ever have use for the doorbell since the porch steps announced every visitor. But she heard nothing from inside the house.
“I guess nobody’s home,” she said absently. The idea that she could see her parents again, alive and in person, made her heart beat faster. Never in her wildest dreams would she have ever considered the possibility that her foray into this dark journey could bring her here, literally to her parents’ doorstep.
“What do we do?” Ellie asked. She was uncertain of the rules here. “Are we really here? Can someone see us?”
“Only if you want them too, but I wouldn’t recommend it,” David replied. “Think of this like a three-D version of a photo album. You can revisit happy places and memories of your past but you shouldn’t interact with them. That’s why there are only a very select few in the Afterlife who are allowed to travel the way lines. It’s simply too dangerous to everyone to let people traipse around at will. Besides, when you enter the Afterlife, you are supposed to be letting go of the past and embracing what happens next. It isn’t healthy to be too hung up on what happened before.”
She wasn’t certain, but she thought there was an undertone of a lesson being reiterated with the last statement. Ellie knew that she had lived a great deal of her life depressed and angry about what happened to her in her childhood, and later with her marriage. But that seemed like a lifetime ago.
“If it’s so important to move on, why did you bring me here?” she asked.
“Because I thought it would make you happy,” he said. It
was a simple answer, but Ellie knew that there had to be another reason that Mikel, in David’s guise, would have allowed her to come here. At that moment, though, it didn’t matter. He was right. Just being there made her feel calm and relaxed. She would have given anything at all to be able to sit on the front porch swing and forget about everything else that was going on.
“I’d like to go inside,” she said, placing her hands on the doorknob. “Will you wait for me out here?”
She saw that he wanted to go with her, and for a moment she thought that he would disagree. But then he nodded. “Of course. Take your time. Oh, and Ellie, you don’t technically exist here, so no need to worry about using the door.” He winked.
She shrugged but turned the doorknob nonetheless. Just as she suspected, the door swung open. That memory proved true then; her parents had never locked their doors. She took a deep breath and stepped inside.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Even though she hadn’t stepped foot inside the house in twenty-five years, Ellie was immediately transported in her mind back to being eight years old and scampering inside after hearing her mother call her for dinner. Everything looked exactly the way that she remembered it. To her right, there was a narrow staircase that went up three steps to a small landing that then turned and continued on upstairs to the second level. Sunlight shone through the stained glass window on the landing and she could see bits of dust floating in the air. The air smelled musty, as if no one had been there in a long time.
She faced a long hallway that she knew led to the kitchen in the back. On her left was the family sitting room. There was a large brick fireplace across the room and she remembered lying there under a blanket while her father read to her from his recliner. Her parents never bought a TV because they said books were better entertainment, and it was a tradition Ellie followed when she moved out on her own. She paused just inside the door, trying to decide if she wanted to go upstairs and explore her old room, or continue on toward the back of the house. She decided on the former.
As she stepped up onto the landing, she passed a tall coat rack. Her father’s sweater jacket hung there and she paused to pick it up and smell it. Her father’s aftershave scent filled her nose, and it made her happy. Hanging the sweater back on the rack, she continued up the stairs.
Ellie’s room took up the entire upper floor of the small house. The house had a gabled roof with a steep pitch on either side, and she realized that if she stood on her tiptoes she could probably reach the apex in the middle. When she was little, the room had seemed huge, but now she saw that it was only slightly bigger than a normal-sized room. Toys were spread all over the floor and her bed was against the far wall under the small window that looked over into the front yard.
She moved deeper into the room, making note of the dolls that she remembered playing with every day, and saw a small tea table set up in the corner ready for imaginary play. Along the wall on her right, there were colorful pictures drawn in crayon lining the wall like art in an art gallery. The thought that she had been a normal kid once gave her comfort.
She was turning to go back downstairs when one of the pictures in the middle of the row caught her eye. She leaned over and pulled the paper from the wall. In it, she saw a simple drawing of a house and three people, a man, a woman, and a little girl. She had obviously drawn a picture of her family and her home. But up in the window of the house, there was another man standing there, looking down at the little family below. That man had red hair. Ellie started looking closer at the other pictures on the wall. In two more of them, she saw the same red-haired man, always hidden slightly out of sight but still there. Shivers ran down her spine. She patted the picture she had pulled off the wall back into place and tried to shake off the idea that this meant anything. She had been a little girl with an active imagination. It had to be nothing.
Ellie made her way back down the stairs and moved down the hallway past the family room. She stopped at the closed French doors on her left that she knew led into her parents’ room. She frowned. It had never occurred to her before how similar the doors were to the doors that led into the master suite in the mansion. She forcibly shook that thought from her mind. She didn’t ever want to find things in her childhood home that compared to any part of the waypoint.
Even though Ellie knew there was no one home, she was still hesitant to open the doors. Her parents never tried to keep her out of their room, but she had been raised to have the proper respect for the fact that the room behind those doors was their personal space. She had been allowed in when she wanted, but she couldn’t touch or move anything without permission.
She grasped the doors and pushed them open. It was almost anticlimactic. It was the room she remembered, and she felt foolish hoping for just a second that she would find her parents moving about. The bed was large and covered in a pale blue blanket that she knew her mother had sewn by hand. Throw pillows covered the top half of the neatly made bed. At the foot of the bed, there was a large chest that Ellie’s mother told her was her hope chest. She said that one day it would pass to Ellie. Ellie remembered how she howled and screamed the day that she found out that she wouldn’t be allowed to bring the chest with her when she went into foster care. The memory brought tears to her eyes.
Cautiously, she moved into the room. On the bureau to her right, she saw her father’s favorite cufflinks and her mother’s jewelry box. There was also a bottle of her mother’s favorite perfume, Quelques Fleurs. A large mirror was hung above the bureau, and Ellie realized with a start that she couldn’t see herself in it. Apparently, David had not been lying about that.
Ellie sat down on the chest and just absorbed the atmosphere of the room. It was the closest she had been to her parents in twenty-five years, and she intended to enjoy every minute of it. Her hands rubbed the top of the chest and her mind was filled with a multitude of memories of running downstairs and jumping into her parents’ bed and snuggling with them on weekend mornings.
After long discussions about nonsense, which they never seemed to mind, they would all get up and make their way to the kitchen. Her father would read the paper while her mother made coffee and Ellie remembered that she would frequently be told to pipe down because she talked incessantly. She knew the comments were always in good fun, which is probably why she didn’t stop talking, at least until they were gone. When her life changed forever, she went a long time trying not to talk at all.
Her thoughts distracted, she didn’t really notice the change in the surface of the chest at first. But after running her fingertips across it several times, she became aware that there were the smallest grooves in the wood that formed the outline of a rectangle. Ellie flipped around and knelt on the floor, tracing the grooves again. The rectangle was completely flush with the top of the chest, so there was no way to even know it was there unless you were looking for it. Ellie frowned.
She opened the top of the chest. Just as she remembered, there were sheets and blankets inside that she knew covered up boxes and photo albums that chronicled her parents’ courtship and Ellie’s arrival into their lives. A box filled the far end, and a lump formed in Ellie’s throat. In it was her mother’s wedding dress. Focusing on the task at hand, Ellie peered underneath the chest's cover but didn’t see anything that looked like the rectangle on the other side. But as she compared the top of the chest to the bottom, it looked like it was probably several inches thick, just deep enough for a compartment to fit inside if someone wanted to add one there.
Closing the top again, Ellie started poking at the rectangle trying to figure out how to open it. There didn’t appear to be any way to grasp a corner to pull the rectangle out, so she determined that it either had to pop up or slide out of the way. After a few minutes of prodding she was about to give up and go find a flathead screwdriver when suddenly she was rewarded by a tiny click and then the rectangle creaked on small metal hinges and slid up. Ellie pushed it the rest of the way up and looked inside.
H
er hands started to shake. Her mind raced with the thought that it couldn’t be possible. Her heart started to thud against her chest and her mind was spinning to try to understand what it could mean. Fingers trembling, she reached into the tiny compartment and pulled out the two items hidden inside. She set them on the chest and fell backwards, staring at them. She had seen pins like them before: on the lapels of the escorts who had taken Katie and Will. One pin matched the black snake eating its tail that had been on Dane’s jacket. The other was a match for the golden halo and white cloud that had been on Peter’s.
“Oh my God,” she uttered to the empty air. She didn’t know how it was possible that these pins had found their way out of the Afterlife and into her parents’ house, but there they were nonetheless. Somehow, someway, her parents were tied to the factions of the Afterlife. What that meant Ellie couldn’t even begin to guess.
“You okay in there, Ellie?” she heard David call. “It’s about time that we got back, before anyone misses us.”
Ellie quickly put the pins back into the hidden compartment and pushed the lid back down until it clicked. She called out, “I’ll be right there!” She didn’t want David to discover her there digging in her mother’s chest.
She stood up and took another look around the room. On one hand she didn’t want to leave, but on the other she knew that she had too. But a shadow had been cast on what her past actually held now. She needed to get some answers.
She closed the doors behind her and made her way back to the porch where David waited for her. She closed the front door behind her and saw that he was looking at her expectantly.
“How’d it go?” he asked, putting his arm around her.
“Fine.” She nodded, pasting a smile onto her face. “It was really nice to see this place again.” She knew that he was looking for something else though. “This was a sweet idea, David. I’m glad that you brought me here. Maybe we can come back again some other time? I’d really like to see my parents again.”