by Jason Gurley
She would give anything at this exact moment to be five years old again, warm and alive inside the snugglebun with Esmerelda.
All of this surges through her mind in an instant, and then Eleanor goes through the doorway—is yanked through, almost—and she is no longer in her bedroom, or even in her house, anymore.
The first thing she notices is that this is not Iowa.
She isn’t in a lush green meadow. There are no cornfields, no wheat fields, no amber waves and violet skies and carefully crafted footbridges and distant red barns. There is no Jack. There is no childlike Eleanor. She is surrounded by gray trees with gray fronds of gray needles. She looks up, and the trees recede to very tall, very narrow points, as if they are a bed of nails for the sky to rest on. The gray, gray sky. Around her is a large depression, almost a crater of kicked-up mud and rocks, and at its edge, several trees are shattered, their bark torn, the hardwood inside bone white and glistening.
Eleanor does not know this place any more than she knew the picturesque, Venusian Iowa in which she spent her entire afternoon. She is again barefoot, but this time she is entirely naked. Her red hair is still long—she can feel it against her back—and she is dirty, as though she has been running through mud. Her legs are flecked with wet earth, and there are gray pine needles fastened to her skin, which is damp. She is sweating.
No.
Yes, she is sweating, but she’s wet because it is raining. It’s a very fine rain, a mist that seems to swim around her rather than fall from the sky, but it is rain and it beads on her skin and turns her hair into a dead weight that drags her head back. It would pull her to the ground if she allowed it to, but she grits her teeth and steadies herself, and fights against the hair’s strikingly powerful gravitational pull.
Whatever this place is, it’s miserable. Iowa was joyful, radiant with color and light, but this place has had the color sucked out of it until all that is left behind is the color of ash and soot. She looks up at the sky and sees clouds there, clouds whose underbellies are black like automobiles, stained as though they have been driven for years through cinders.
She is cold.
The rain is cold.
There is no wind here, but if there were, she thinks it would probably chill her to death in just a few steps. She looks around, searching for shelter of any kind. The ground slopes away beneath her feet, and she realizes that she is on the side of a hill. The trees are gnarled and battered, and some look as if they have been victimized by fire during their long lives, as if they have burned and yet live on, survivors all. Some leak stone-colored sap that has hardened and turned opaque.
Eleanor wraps her arms around her body and clenches her jaw against her teeth and wonders if she can possibly wish herself back to her bedroom. It is insufferable that she has to face this again, that she has been kidnapped from her very home and deposited here. Are there aliens? Has she been abducted? She doesn’t think so, but then, she didn’t believe in magic before this afternoon, and now she thinks that she has to allow for the possibility that there is some sort of something present in the world. It seems impossible that she would never have heard of such things, but she probably wouldn’t have believed them if she had.
She remembers the static—the strange, almost magnetic field that she encountered before she entered both doorways—and her mind stumbles to a stop on the word.
Doorway.
Both times that this has happened, she has been approaching a door. But they are ordinary doors—doors she walks through several times every day. There is nothing special about the cafeteria door or her bedroom door.
“Apparently there is,” she says aloud.
She coughs. The land here smells strange, and it leaves her with an odd taste in her mouth. The rain leaves behind little dots of grit on her skin. She touches the grit with her finger, pushes it around. It’s so soft and small that she can’t feel it, but gray streaks follow her fingertip.
Eleanor looks around again. There is no shelter, but there is a hollow beneath a broken old tree that looks just large enough for her. Under ordinary circumstances she would never scramble into such a hole—she imagines snakes or badgers or, worse, millions of squirming bugs occupying such a prize space—but she is cold and it is raining and she doesn’t know where she is, so she climbs into the hole backward, scooting her bare bottom into the shadows, and tucks herself into a ball against the moist soil. It isn’t warm, but she feels less cold. Her feet press into the damp earth, and she discovers that the soil can be a form of insulation, so she abandons any sense of decorum she might have been clinging to and unearths handfuls of mud and dirt, packing them around her body for warmth. There are no bugs in the earth that she can see, but the light is draining from the sky, and she would rather not think about whether there are or aren’t any bugs snuggling up to her in the dark.
Rain gathers in small puddles at the mouth of the hole. Eleanor watches it grow fat and trickle down the slope toward her, but there’s only a little of it. It’s good that the rain is so faint, but she worries that if it begins to rain harder, the hole will fill with water.
While she thinks about this, she feels herself growing sleepy. Her damp hair is heavy, and her head sags against the mud, and the exhaustion of dealing with her father and her mother and of her unexpected trip to Iowa overcomes her, and she falls into a deep slumber inside a hole in the side of a hill in a wasteland, far, far from home.
The woman trudges through the bleak meadow. She has grown accustomed to the perpetual chill in the air, but wraps herself in shawls and scarves and hats that she knits from scratchy, dense fiber, until she is sealed almost completely from the cold. A cowl beneath her coat is itchy against her neck, and she drags one long fingernail across her skin until the itch fades.
The meadow belongs to her, with its damp earth and tall grasses bent flat from the rain. A creek weaves through it like a strand of bulky yarn, twisting and turning. The creek winds past the woman’s home, a rough-hewn, single-room cabin that keeps her warm. She can see it from here, just a small speck on the horizon, a thread of smoke curling up from the chimney.
Each morning she walks the meadow. Sometimes her excursions are short, and take only part of the day, but often they take several days, as she decides to walk the perimeter of the land, where the meadow butts up against the hills. Beyond the hills, mountains rise like broken teeth into the sullen, ponderous sky.
She pauses and looks up at the peaks and ridges, then at the scrawl of forest below. The trees swarm like barnacles over the hills, stretching partway up the mountainsides themselves, before scattering, overtaken by rock and shale. The mountains themselves flank the meadow for miles, towering high above the flatland, cinching together at either end. To her knowledge there is no way into or out of the valley. This land is protected from the world beyond.
She considers the valley to be hers, though there is no deed. The mountains belong to her as well, and the creek, and the forests. The clouds, even. All that she sees is hers, and she is the keeper of this valley. Her sole purpose is to protect it, and in doing so, to protect herself.
This morning she awakened with a sense of unease in her belly. She tossed back the quilts on her small bed, made some coffee, stoked the fire, and then stood on the wooden porch under the eaves, smoking a black cigarette and surveying the gray land. She knows that it is sick, that it has in fact been sick since the day that she discovered it, and sometimes she thinks that its sickness has infected her as well.
But this morning she was sure of it for the first time.
She walks the meadow now, heading for the mountains to the south, the source of her unease. She can feel a change in the air, a sort of vibration that wasn’t there the day before. She’s felt such a thing only once before, when the beasts first appeared in the valley. But that was long, very long ago, and the keeper is not keen to share her valley with more interlopers.
She is certain that this is what she will find to the south.
&nbs
p; An intruder.
The keeper’s shadow trembles with curiosity.
It huddles in the natural shadows at the entrance to the great forest. It is shapeless without the keeper, which makes it perfectly suited for such tasks as this one, for reconnaissance. It isn’t often that the keeper frees her to swarm through the valley in such ways, and for a moment before it came to the forest’s edge, the shadow skimmed the long grasses along the creek, joyful in its temporary freedom.
But now it must get to work.
It slides into the forest, moving quickly through patches of pale light, confidently sliding through the deep shadows cast by the trees themselves. It does not know what it is hunting for, only that the keeper believes there is a thing here worthy of investigation.
Not a welcome thing. An evil thing.
The keeper has always been careful to keep evil out of the valley. The beasts who arrived long ago were not interfered with because they were not evil, and the keeper sensed that, and permitted them to roam.
Whatever the shadow is searching for must not be as benevolent or gentle.
It searches for hours and hours through the forest, sweeping over hundreds of acres, finding nothing. When it approaches the boundaries that the keeper has established, the shadow turns and repeats the search. It does this again and again—and many hours later, it finds what it has been looking for.
The shadow understands why it did not find the intruder sooner. It is only by accident that it stumbles across the intruder now. The shadow has taken shelter beneath a redwood to rest, tired from its dogged search. The woods around it are quiet except for the plip of water falling from the pine needles onto the forest floor. The rain has stopped, for now.
The girl comes out of a hole in the ground some forty yards away. The shadow almost doesn’t see her, but the girl coughs, and though the shadow does not possess ears, it detects the tiny fluttering vibration in the air, and turns and discovers her. The girl is caked with mud and needles and small stones and bits of tree bark. She coughs again and stands upright and stretches uncomfortably, then looks down at herself and begins to scrape the packed mud from her skin.
The keeper rocks in a handmade chair on her porch. Another black cigarette rests between her fingers, lit and burning toward her knuckles. She has been thinking of building a new cabin, not a replacement for this one but a second one, at the northernmost end of the valley, so that she has a place to rest her feet during her long walks. The valley stretches for miles, and she often is too worn out from the journey to make it back to this home.
A dash of cigarette ash falls onto her burlap pants and she brushes it away.
She can see her shadow approaching across the field, the low afternoon mist parting around it. It moves stealthily, as if it is playing a game with her, but the keeper is never fooled. The shadow moves closer and closer until it slips over the porch and reattaches itself to her feet.
“You’re back,” the keeper says. “What did you find?”
Her shadow does not speak, but she can feel its memories pass into her, icy cold. She takes them into herself, absorbing them into her own collection of thoughts. She reviews them quietly, eyes closed, and nods to herself. She sees the gash in the treeline from the shadow’s vantage point, as if a wrecking ball has dropped into the middle of her forest. She sees the lumbering clouds, the rich wet soil. She sees everything that her shadow saw, and—
The shadow found the intruder.
The keeper was right.
A naked, pale-skinned girl with soaking wet hair—dark brown, or maybe red—stands in the clearing, not far from the ruined trees. She is smeared with clay and mud. Her face and arms are scratched.
“There you are,” the keeper says. “You’re only a child. An amateur. What are you doing here?”
The keeper examines the shadow’s memory more closely, settling on the girl’s frightened green eyes.
“Where are you from, little girl?” the keeper muses.
There is of course no answer.
The keeper sighs. “We don’t like interlopers here,” she says. “Do we?”
Beneath the chair, the keeper’s shadow ripples its agreement.
“Begone, little thing,” the keeper says. She waves her hand in a slow sideways arc, as if sweeping a table of crumbs. Her hand passes through the air with a crackle, almost as though she has charged the air with electricity. To the south, she can see a dark flash in the forest, like a mirror has been aimed briefly at the cabin and then turned away.
The keeper relaxes, then takes a long drag on the black cigarette. The girl will be gone now, ushered out of the valley and back to wherever she has come from.
“Well,” she says, exhaling charcoal-colored smoke. “If she comes back, we’ll know. Won’t we?”
She gets to her feet, pulling her shawl tightly around her shoulders, then looks down at her shadow. It follows her every move, firmly reattached to her shoes. She can feel it agree with her silently, mute but not deaf.
“Come along,” she says, and she steps down off the porch and into the tall grass. She turns to the east and picks up her walking stick, and strolls quietly through her meadow.
Mea struggles against the darkness. For the first time that she can remember, she fights against the surge of the river and the memories that it carries. She expects resistance, but the darkness separates, abruptly revealing the membrane again. Beyond the clear boundary she can see the red-haired girl’s bedroom and the hallway outside, and the beginning of the stairs.
She doesn’t see the girl.
Mea is well versed in patience. She lingers at the membrane, spreading herself out against it, embracing the view as widely as she can. The house is bright and orange. Tiny dust specks float in a shaft of sunlight. Time has passed since the red-haired girl vanished. Mea can see the glint of things in the girl’s bedroom: the plastic shine of the clock radio’s face; the dull golden base of the bedside lamp; the sharper, crisper gleam of glass in a frame. Beneath the glass is a photograph of the red-haired girl, and standing next to the girl is another girl. An identical girl.
Mea leans into the membrane, trying to inspect the photograph more closely, but then she feels a tremor in the gap between her world and the one that belongs to the girl. She looks down and sees the small red orb from before, moving quickly, growing larger, and she realizes that it is the red-haired girl herself, returning from wherever she has been, but she is moving rocket-fast, and that seems like a bad thing. Mea reaches for the girl, and the orb takes the girl’s form again, and suddenly the girl is ejected from that strange other realm, and she is moving too fast for Mea to intervene, and Mea watches—and feels something quite like horror, another new sensation for her—as the red-haired girl explodes out of nowhere and flies across her bedroom as if thrown, and crashes into the wall with such force that Mea is afraid the girl will just burst through it, just sail right through the wall and into the air outside.
But the girl hits the wall like a bird hits a window, and falls to the bedroom floor, and is still.
Everything hurts.
Everything.
Eleanor opens her eyes reluctantly. The pain lifts her out of sleep, or wherever she has been, and for a long moment she is confused by what she sees. Her vision is weak, splintered with light. Everything is too bright, and she closes her eyes. Her eyelids are bright red from the inside. Even protected, the light makes her eyes ache and her head throb.
“Turn off the light,” an unfamiliar voice says, and then Eleanor’s eyelids turn almost black again, and she sighs with relief. She hears a shuffling sound, and then the bed shifts under some weight—bed?—and the voice says, “Eleanor. Do you hear me?”
The strange voice frightens her. Her ears are full of sound—a white blur of noise that she doesn’t understand—but that sound is not the trickle of water or the groan of a swaying tree or rain misting light and airy. Therefore she is not in the woods, which is the last thing she remembers—climbing out of a hole, slic
k with mud, naked, damp dirt in every crevice of her body, in her hair. So where is she?
“Ellie,” comes her father’s voice. “Sweetie, can you hear us?”
She opens her mouth to answer him, but her lips are chapped and her mouth is dry.
“It’s okay,” says the strange voice again. “Don’t try to talk just yet. Just breathe, okay? Listen to me. In… out. In… out.”
Eleanor focuses on the stranger’s voice and tries to manage her breathing. She takes in a deep breath, and almost coughs it right back out, but she suppresses the instinct and instead lets it out slowly.
“Good,” says the stranger. “Now, when you’re ready, try to open your eyes. Slowly, okay? We’re not going anywhere.”
Eleanor lets out another breath, then opens her eyes.
“Give them a moment to adjust,” says the stranger, and Eleanor can see her, sort of, a brownish blur in an otherwise blurry room. Her vision very slowly fine-tunes itself, and the stranger comes into muddled focus. She is a tall, slender woman in pastel blue scrubs. She has a paper mask tied over her mouth, but her eyes are dark and kind.
“Hi there,” the nurse says, and holds up a finger. “I want you to follow my finger with your eyes, okay? Nothing hard, just want to make sure you’re okay.”
Eleanor nods, and a spike of pain rips through her skull. She gasps and squeezes her eyes shut, and little red-and-gold fireworks dance over her eyelids.
“Careful,” the nurse says. “I want you to stay as still as you can. Try not to move your head right now. Okay? Now open your eyes.”
Eleanor winces, but opens her eyes.
The nurse holds up a finger and slowly moves it across Eleanor’s field of vision. Eleanor watches it carefully as it moves left, then right, then left again, but then she is distracted by movement beyond the finger, and she looks toward the foot of the bed again. Her father stands there, wide-eyed and worried, hands clasped to his chest as if in prayer.