by Jason Gurley
The twisted, broken tail launches into the sky like a cannonball, accelerating into the clouds, punching a hole through them. For a moment, the keeper can see darkness beyond—no stars, no moon, just pure, obsidian black—and then the clouds swirl into the void, closing it off again.
She exhales in a rush, and sags to her knees in the clearing.
The crash site is, at last, bare before her. The grass is still scarred and black, and there is still an immense scoop of earth missing, but the plane itself—all its shattered parts and glass and metal—is gone.
Her shadow returns to her, cautiously, but she welcomes it, beckoning it to rejoin her. It glides to its place at her side, and attaches itself to her, and she takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. She feels almost whole again.
“My valley,” she breathes.
She has worked for months on the wreckage, moving only a few pieces per day. There is still so much to do, she knows. The holes must be filled, the grass must be healed. The trees will need to be regrown. She could have done it all in a day, she thinks, when she was younger, but she is not that young anymore. Her brain aches inside her skull.
“We’ve earned a break,” she says to her shadow. She scoots backward on the black soil until she encounters a tree, and rests her body against it. Her shadow curls around her like a puppy, warm and agreeable.
“Yes,” she says. “We take back what is ours.”
She tilts her head back and stares up through scorched branches at the clouds. The rain grows fat and plentiful as she watches, and her clothes, already soaked, become saturated as the drizzle becomes a downpour. She closes her eyes and listens to the dull roar of the storm.
The rain, she thinks, might heal the valley’s wounds on its own. She would not have to trouble herself with the repairs. The grave opened in the earth would fill with water, and the water would soften the exposed walls of earth, and the dirt would slide into the water and become mud, and the entire thing would churn dark and rich in the rain. And when the rain ceased, the mud would dry and become firm, and the hole would be almost erased. Grass would grow again without her direction. She could sleep for a few years, rest her weary bones, and allow her valley to take care of itself for a time.
Her thoughts grow foggy as the clouds roil above her, and as the earth grows soft beneath her feet. Spent, weary, the keeper’s eyes close, and she falls asleep.
The top of Huffnagle is almost perfectly flat. The rocks are beaten smooth, the dirt planed away, as if some god or another had taken a wide saw to the cap of a mountain, shearing it away.
The sun has come out, and warms the rocks, and warms Eleanor’s skin, and the rain stops. The mist far below boils away, just as Jack had said it would, and color seems to rush back into the world. The island is no longer gray and threatening, but a warm, chocolatey color. The sea is as blue as crushed pigment. The sun is golden, the clouds tinged with pink.
Jack takes off his sweatshirt and waders and jeans and stretches out on the ground, his legs dangling over the edge of the cliff. Eleanor sits down beside him on crossed legs.
“You took your pants off,” she says.
“It’s warm,” Jack says. “Too warm for jeans now.”
“It’s weird.”
“It’s not weird. You can hang your feet over,” he says. “It’s nice.”
“No, thank you,” Eleanor says.
Jack closes his eyes and is still.
“You look like a turtle,” she says.
He opens one eye. “A turtle?”
“Sunning itself,” she says.
“Ah. What sound does a turtle make?”
“No sound, I think,” Eleanor answers.
Jack opens his mouth and closes it again, and nothing comes out.
“It would have been funnier if turtles made sounds,” he says.
“It wouldn’t have been funny either way.”
She tugs her feet closer, rocking back and forth on her butt until they are wedged tightly beneath her.
“It’s nice,” she says.
“I knew you’d like it. Aren’t you glad you came?”
“I am,” she says. “I feel guilty.”
“She’s going to be okay,” Jack says. “My grandpa was in the hospital once. For, like, three weeks. We were there all the time, and then he told us to go home. Dad didn’t want to, but Grandpa made us. We went home to eat and sleep, and came back to see him every night. It was very—I don’t know. Balanced.”
“Was he okay?”
“My grandpa?” Jack asks. “He died.”
“Were you there?”
“My dad was,” Jack says. “I was at school.”
“Don’t you wish you were there?” Eleanor asks.
Jack is quiet for a moment. Then he says, “No. I wouldn’t want to remember that moment.”
“But what if he had things to tell you? What if he wanted to say goodbye?”
“Grandpa had told me everything already,” Jack says. “We said goodbye every night, just in case.”
Eleanor looks down at the sea. “My mom hasn’t told me anything. I haven’t said goodbye.”
Jack leans up on his elbows. “Yeah,” he says. “But your mom isn’t dying. It’s different.”
“She almost did,” Eleanor says. “She still could.”
“But she didn’t. And she isn’t going to. At least not today, and probably not for a long time.”
“She’s still in the woods,” Eleanor says. “That’s what the specialist told Dad. ‘She might come out of the woods, if we find the right donor. Or she might go deeper into them, if we don’t.’ That’s what she said.”
“Doctors have to say those things to cover their asses,” Jack says. “Just in case.”
“I don’t know. It sounded—true.”
They’re both quiet for a few minutes. Eleanor watches seagulls, little specks against the peach-colored sky. Jack stands up suddenly, startling her.
“Want to see something cool?” he asks.
She looks up at him, shielding her eyes from the sun. “What?”
“Keep looking out there,” he says, pointing at the horizon. “See those boats?”
“What boats?” She squints into the distance, scanning the water, but sees nothing. “Jack, I don’t see—”
She hears the slap of his feet and turns and Jack is right there, running toward the edge. He is a blur of legs and elbows and then he has passed her, and Eleanor whips her head around to watch him sail over the edge. He falls away from her horrifyingly fast, shouting something, and Eleanor screams. He tucks his knees to his chest and hits the water like a stone, with a wide and mighty splash.
“Jack!” she shouts.
He surfaces a moment later, slicks his hair back with his hand.
“You are an asshole!” she yells.
He just laughs. “That was awesome!” he shouts back.
“You could have killed yourself!” she shouts.
“What?”
“You could have killed yourself!”
“What?”
“You are an asshole!”
He laughs. “Come down!”
Eleanor turns away from the edge and folds her arms.
“It’s only a little cold!” he yells. “And look, no dangerous rocks back here!”
She looks back down at him, watches as he treads water. “I am not jumping off a cliff!” she yells.
His voice is small, but insistent. “Ellie, you’ll do great! It is awesome!”
She should be with her mother. Her mother, tiny under the beige hospital blanket. Eleanor should be in the hard plastic chair beside the bed, listening to carts wheeling by in the hallway, listening to the faint beeps from other rooms. She should be under fluorescent lights instead of the sun, reading hospital pamphlets for the hundredth time, waiting for her mother to wake up and ignore her, waiting for the nurse to shoo Eleanor from the room for her mother’s daily checks and tests and sponge bath. She should be there, amid the smell of Lyso
l and sweat; there, where it is hard to breathe, where there are no windows, where strangers sometimes pop into the room and say, “Oops, wrong room,” and then get to walk away, leaving Eleanor’s reality behind in favor of their own, which she always imagines is far, far better.
She should be there when her mother needs someone to blame, to accuse. She should be an ear for her father to bend about the medical bills, about the divorce, about hospital red tape and medical insurance and legal obligations. Lately, about his threat of litigation. We aren’t even married, he would insist, the words falling on his daughter’s ears like broken glass. She isn’t my responsibility.
Eleanor looks down at Jack, bobbing in the sea. His wide smile and wet hair and shining eyes. So small, so far below.
“Does it hurt?” she yells.
He shakes his head.
Eleanor takes a deep breath, and gets to her feet.
Night has fallen when the keeper wakes. Rain falls slowly, trickles down the trunk of the tree. She has sunk, a little, into the soft soil.
“Was I asleep long?” she asks her shadow.
Her voice is grainy, as if she had screamed herself hoarse. She barely notices. Her entire body aches from the weeks of cleanup. She sincerely hopes that any future intruders in the valley arrive in considerably smaller vehicles.
She gets to her feet, the tree’s rough trunk pleasant against her back. She leans against it, shifting this way and that, scratching a deep itch. She decides in that moment to let the valley take care of itself, to let the rain and passage of time care for the rest of the damage. She is suddenly very, very tired, as if she hadn’t slept at all.
She coughs. Her tongue feels strange in her mouth—gritty. She pushes it against her teeth. If feels sludgy, as though she ate sand before she fell asleep. She coughs again, and even in the dark can see a fine mist of black dust appear in the air before her face.
The keeper blinks at it, not understanding.
She looks down at her shadow, then waves her hand in front of her face, and inspects her skin. There are dozens of tiny black dots on her hand. They disappear quickly in the rain, but the keeper is suddenly very worried.
She opens her mouth and touches her tongue with one cautious finger, then holds her finger up in the dim light.
Her heart almost stops.
Her finger is stained with damp black dust.
She swipes her finger across her tongue again, from back to front, and almost gags. She holds her finger up again, and her heart drops into her belly. Her finger is caked with the black stuff. She rubs her fingertip and thumb together. The black dust is wet, and burrows into the tiny valleys in her fingerprints.
“What is this?” she croaks.
Her shadow has no answer.
She cups her palm and spits into her hand. Her saliva is a murky sludge, viscous and oily.
“No, no,” she moans. “What is this? What is this?”
She slings the spit from her hand, and wipes her palm on her wet clothes. She thinks quickly, and wills the rain to fall with greater power, to storm down and purge her of this alien thing, whatever it is. But her head pounds horribly, and she cannot do it.
“We must go home,” she says. “Back to the cabin.”
But with her first step, a horrible fire erupts in her gut, and the keeper falls to her knees in the mud, gasping and spitting, burning from within.
Mea turns to the darkness. Are you sure it will work?
The darkness says, It will work.
She thinks of her failures. She thinks of Eleanor’s disappearance into the dream world, into the place where Mea cannot see nor follow. She thinks of Eleanor’s injuries, of the missing hours and days.
You’re certain.
The darkness says, I hope you have prepared for her arrival. She will be frightened.
Mea says, I have only thought of her arrival.
She turns her attention back to Eleanor’s world.
The boy is in the ocean, shouting up at the cliff, and Eleanor has taken several steps back. Mea can see Eleanor’s nervousness, but she also senses the determination that glows beneath her fear. Eleanor pulls off her raincoat, her scarf, her hat and mittens. She places her shoes carefully beside each other, but leaves her socks on.
Here on the cliff there are no doorways to which Mea can pin her portal. There is only blue sky. But a doorway isn’t strictly necessary, and Mea has a hypothesis. The missing element in her past attempts to steal Eleanor from her world—Mea’s theory about what will work now—is momentum.
Speed.
The darkness pushes up against Mea.
If you fail now, it says, the girl will die.
Eleanor begins to run.
I know, Mea says.
The water below the cliff is blue and clear. There are no rocks on this, the back side of the island. Mea can see the boy survey the cove, making sure there aren’t any just below the surface that might threaten Eleanor. But if Mea is correct, even if there were spinning razors at the bottom, Eleanor would not fall onto any of them.
Eleanor’s red hair is a vibrant cape that unfurls behind her, whipped by the wind. She runs to the edge of the cliff and, with a frightened shout, launches herself into the air. Mea watches Jack’s expression change from anticipation to fear—there is something not quite right about the way Eleanor falls. For a moment, she was absolutely graceful—the arch of her body, the ribbon of her hair; she was a swan, framed by the sun. But Eleanor is not a swan. She is a fifteen-year-old girl, her body fresh and new and graceless, and Eleanor does not leap or dive, really.
Eleanor tumbles.
Tumbles from fifty feet up.
Eleanor realizes herself that something has gone wrong, Mea can see. The girl’s arms pinwheel. She turns over in the air, falling with her head pointed at the sea, then her back. Jack is shouting, not happily, but in fear, and already swimming to where he thinks Eleanor will strike the sea, because Eleanor will not cleanly cut into the water, will not make a joyful splash. The water is like a slab of concrete from that high. Eleanor will collide with it like a bullet, spearing into its depths before she slows, and Jack will have to dive deeply to find her, will have to combat the salt sting in his eyes to find her unconscious body before the deep-water currents do—
Now, the darkness says.
Mea takes her, and Eleanor vanishes from the sky.
The sun goes out.
Jack disappears, along with the sea. His terrified cry is interrupted, silenced. The clouds are swallowed by a sudden darkness. The frightening sound of the wind ripping at her clothing ceases. It is as if Eleanor has fallen into a well, and the lid has been drawn over the top. Everything is black, and she wants to scream—but she was already screaming, and she can’t hear anything. Did she stop screaming?
She feels different. The space around her is different. It is neither warm nor cool. She can see no variations in the darkness. It is complete, and seems to wrap around her as finely as water, fitting into the crevices of her elbows, into the small pockets behind her ears. She gasps, and makes no sound—no sound at all. The darkness enters her nose and her mouth, swells inside her lungs.
What is she supposed to do?
She tries to think, but thinking is hard. Where is she? What happened to her? Is she falling?
Her mind races back to the last year. Is this a new place, like the cornfield, like the woods? Like the airplane? She has pushed those memories away for months now, and each time she walks through a doorway and hasn’t found herself in Siberia or New York or a swamp or an icy lake she challenges those memories just a little more, until they are remembered stories instead of memories, until they are fairy tales to pass on, not experiences that were lived.
Something happens. The darkness has a softness to it, or perhaps the definition of Eleanor’s own body has begun to blur. She cannot tell where her skin ends and the dark begins.
The darkness cups her gently, cradles her. It becomes her, and she becomes it.
&nbs
p; If she moves, the darkness moves with her.
She has become enormous. She is a galaxy, a thousand galaxies.
She feels a calmness descend on her. This—whatever is happening—is okay. It is good.
She can no longer tell which way is up, or if “up” even exists, and this does not concern her. The sky that she leapt into is gone. Was it behind her? Above? In the dark, she is all things and nothing. She is the before, and she is the after.
Eleanor feels pleasantly intoxicated.
I am floating, she thinks.
She is, or may as well be, for in the darkness she has no sense of weight, of substance. Gravity itself has been dispensed with.
She wonders if she is still capable of moving. She cannot feel her legs, her hands. Are they even there? Does she still have a body? If she cannot feel it, does it exist? If she cannot see herself, what is she?
She tries to lift one hand so that she can see it.
The dark explodes into color around her.
She cannot see her hand, but she thinks that it is still there, perhaps, or that in the darkness, she is her own hand, or her hand is everything. But when she concentrates and moves the part of her that she thinks might be her hand, a fan of light blooms before her and trails away. It is brilliant, so bright that if she still had eyes she might squeeze them shut. Slim tracers of color move across her field of vision. She stops her hand—stops moving—and the little tracers slow, and at the tips they grow fat and bulbous, and then they burst like inky balloons. When they burst, they burst slowly, so slowly that Eleanor can see individual threads of color, all kinds of colors, fork into the blackness—and then they pop, saturating the dark with gold and rose and blue.
The colors are hypnotic. They dance, and Eleanor feels their warmth surge through her—through her. The colors are not separate from the darkness—they are a state of the darkness, which means that they are a state of her, and she has power over them.
She feels joy like a sunrise within her, and the darkness flares in a great wash of pink and orange and yellow, the colors so vibrant that they suffuse her being with happiness.