Eleanor

by Jason Gurley

  No, Mea protests. No, you have to—

  There is no alternative, the darkness says. Remember, child, that you have given up your human form. Do not weep for an existence that you cannot return to.

  “She can return,” Eleanor says. “She can go with me.”

  Impossible, the darkness says. Perhaps you do not understand.

  “No. It’s not impossible,” Eleanor says.

  It has never been done. It cannot be done.

  “It may never have been done before,” Eleanor says, “but that doesn’t mean it can never be done. I know the way back in. The path lies in the beasts of the field. I saw their eyes, darkness. I saw myself, and I saw my sister. The beasts are not beasts at all. They are us. We may be dead, but in my mother’s nightmare, we live.”

  The darkness swells in size, dwarfing Eleanor and Mea.

  You have given up your impermanent form, it thunders. It is time for you to relinquish your human name, and take your death name.

  Mea shivers, but Eleanor holds firm.

  “If I fail again, you can have my name,” she says. “But we’re going back, and Mea—Esmerelda—is coming with us.”

  Us? We? The darkness pauses. You are not alone. Someone is there with you.

  Mea is perplexed. What are you talking about? What someone?

  Eleanor says, “You are not the only soul in the rift, Mea. The darkness is not the only wise ancient.”

  Give up your name, the darkness insists, and with a flurry of motion and sparks, it grows enormous in the rift, looming large and angry over Mea and Eleanor. You must give it to me.

  A new voice answers. How petulant you are, it says. Who taught you such manners?

  Who— Mea asks.

  I do not see you! the darkness shouts, ripping red against the void. Present yourself. Be known!

  A grand ocean, blue and alive, surges into the rift like a wall, angry and torrid. The darkness cries out in fear. The strange new ocean lifts them all high in the steep black emptiness, and the darkness itself is rendered small by the ocean’s great power.

  Your name! the darkness bellows in desperation. I will know your name!

  The ocean’s response is a roar, a cacophony of light and color.

  I AM ELEANOR, the ocean commands. AND I WILL SEE MY FAMILY RESTORED.

  The forests crawl over the mountains like a swarm of bees on a hive, and the keeper delights in her power. The trees claw up from the earth, stretching toward the summer sky, birthing birds in their branches, shaking themselves at the sun.

  “Yes,” the keeper says. Her shadow flits happily about her feet.

  The restoration of her valley has been a long affair, and now she hardly remembers the fire that chewed through the woods, the black ash that fell from the sky, fastening itself to her skin like leeches. The mountains have been reassembled, pebble by pebble, and they stand glorious against the cloudless sky, smooth fresh teeth in strong, earthy gums.

  She filled the gaping hole in the center of the valley with new rock that she formed in her palms, for the old rock had been melted away. As she worked, the glowing fissures in the rock cooled, and the acrid scent of death dissipated over a period of months. She is proud that she filled the hole at all. It seemed to have no bottom, but now the earth has pressed together to grow solid again, to present a new foundation for the sky to rest upon.

  The wound erased from her home, she climbs to the top of the highest mountain and stands on its flat roof. There she finds a still, shining puddle of bright water. She kneels beside it, and spies tiny minnows darting about within.

  “Hello,” she says. “Hello, there.”

  Her shadow passes over the water, and for the first time in what must be decades, she sees her reflection stare up at her from the still surface of the puddle. Her mouth opens, and she stares. Her cheeks are pink and smooth and alive, her hair long and rust-colored. Her eyes fairly sparkle. She smiles, and her teeth are clean and orderly and white. She sticks her tongue out. It is smooth and moist. There is no trace of the black sludge.

  She stands up and lifts the hem of the dress she created, pulling it over her head. When she is naked, she touches her small breasts, smooths her palms over her middle, and rests them on her belly. It is flat and pale.

  The spreading black stain is gone.

  “I am well,” she says aloud. She looks down at her shadow and says, “Let’s celebrate.”

  Her shadow stretches long and thin, fleeing the brightness of the sun, and the keeper turns and looks down on her valley. She sits down on the edge of the flat cliff, and points her slim finger at the far horizon, and begins to draw the creek which once ran through the meadow.

  NOW, the ocean commands. SHE CARVES THE PATH.

  Eleanor gathers Mea to herself. “Hold on,” she says, and Mea becomes a vise around her.

  The darkness retreats, revealing the great membrane that borders all worlds, and the ocean explodes forward in a torrent, sucking the girls along with it, and surges through the portal.

  The darkness remains behind, and watches.

  The keeper is on the mountainside, just above the treeline, when it happens. She pauses to appreciate the glittering creek, then frowns when it stops glittering. High above the valley, the blackest clouds she has ever seen have appeared.

  “Where have you come from?” the keeper growls. “You are not welcome here!”

  She lifts her hands to the sky and waves the clouds aside.

  But they do not clear.

  It begins to rain instead, and a knot of dread forms in her throat.

  “No,” she says, steeling herself against the downpour. “No, this will not happen. No, this valley is mine!”

  But the sun does not rise when she commands it.

  She looks at her hands, then back up at the valley. A ferocious gust of wind screams through the distant mountains, and the new trees tilt and snap. She can hear their trunks splitting even from here, miles and miles away.

  “NO!” the keeper howls.

  And then an ocean sweeps large and gray and angry over the farthest, tallest peaks of her mountains, and the keeper falls to her knees.

  Her shadow loops around her feet and begins to climb the mountain again, dragging the keeper behind it, until both keeper and shadow rest atop the flat mountain shelf, staring in horror at the sea that swallows her masterpiece. The water rises steadily, frothy and dark, and finally abates only a few feet below the peak of the keeper’s mountain.

  She wakes.

  For days she has remained helplessly cornered atop the mountain. For days she has summoned all her strength to push the water away. For days she has failed. The sun ignores her call. Inhospitable clouds meet the sea, dousing the keeper in fog. She cries, she roars, she collapses. Her valley does not hear her cries. She can feel the mountain rumble beneath her feet, its integrity threatened by the hundreds of millions of tons of water pressing down on it.

  Soon, she thinks, it will crumble, and she will sink beneath this alien ocean, and she will drown, and that will be the end of everything.

  “Hopeless,” she moans. Her shadow does not respond, and when she looks down she does not see it at all.

  Finally, she has been abandoned.

  The keeper huddles naked in the rain, and waits for the end.

  It comes much sooner than she anticipated.

  The mountain pitches sideways, and she hears a horrendous crack from deep under the water, and then the entire peak slides into the deep gray water. The keeper climbs to her feet and runs in the opposite direction and leaps from the mountaintop as it smashes into the ocean. She closes her eyes and wheels her arms against the sky, imagining the great crushing end that she will meet in a few seconds—she will fall into the roiling sea, and sink like a stone, and the mountain will grind her bones beneath its weight.

  But she lands on something hard and strong, and the wind is knocked from her chest, and then she is climbing, high into the misty clouds.

  The beasts ha
ve returned.

  She is seasick.

  The beasts walk side by side, moving ponderously through the gray sea. Their long necks crane high above the water, scraping the clouds, and the keeper holds fast, afraid. Below her, massive waves break over the beast’s ridged back. The other beast’s back is below the ocean’s surface. She is riding the larger one, then.

  The creatures walk for weeks and weeks, it seems. The sun never sets and never rises. The world is dim and full of spray and salt.

  The keeper asks the beast a question, though she does not know if the beast has ears or understands her.

  “Am I in hell?” she asks.

  The beast does not answer.

  It only keeps trudging through the sea.

  She sleeps atop the beast’s head. It is wide and flat, as large as her mountaintop. Its skin is warm, pebbled, porous. She does not know what has become of her shadow. She imagines it pinned beneath the descending, shattered pieces of the mountain, crying for breath, traveling to the bottom of the sea, to the floor of her swallowed valley.

  She is truly alone now.

  The rain wakes her. It tastes of salt, as though the ocean below her somehow lives above as well, strained through the clouds. The keeper realizes her thirst and hunger, and tries to ignore both.

  “Where are we?” the keeper asks the beast, who does not answer. “Where are we going?”

  The smaller beast looks up at her, blinking its great dark eyes.

  Both beasts stop walking.

  The smaller one comes nearer, tilting its head curiously at the keeper, who seems but a parasite on the crown of her own beast.

  “Where are you taking me?” the keeper asks again.

  The small beast stares. Rain collects in a hollow on its head, and for the first time the keeper understands why the beast lumbers about, sickly and tired. One side of its head is caved in, the old skin scarred and thick where the wound has healed. Its two eyes shine bright despite its condition.

  “What happened to you?” the keeper asks. “Who did that to you?”

  Deep in its belly, the larger beast begins to sing, the sound like an oboe the size of the moon. The great slow sounds thrum in its throat. The keeper feels the song vibrate in her blood, and she remembers.

  She remembers rain.

  Remembers a highway, remembers a plane in the sky. Remembers red hair.

  Remembers every bit of glass that scissored through her own clothes and skin.

  She falls to her knees.

  “No,” she whispers. “No, you cannot be—you—”

  The large beast drops its head then, and the keeper nearly falls over. The wind rushes up about her as the beast’s long neck sinks into the ocean, waves churning over its plated skin, and the keeper shouts in fear. The ocean rises up to the beast’s massive head, and then the beast stops, its jaw resting upon the sea. The gray water splashes up around the keeper’s feet, and she retreats to the highest, boniest point of the beast’s skull.

  She huddles there, shaking, frightened. The cold wind is a saw blade, keening in her ears. The cold bites into her, its teeth scraping her bones.

  “You’ll kill me,” the keeper moans. “You’ll kill me, just kill me, please just kill me.”

  The beast hums deeply, urgently, and the keeper, trembling, looks up.

  A woman walks out of the sea.

  She rises from the water like a forgotten ship hauled to the surface, great gushes of salt water streaming off her, bits of debris and kelp stuck to her skin. She wears a simple black swimsuit, and removes a tight black swimmer’s cap to reveal hair that is dark and damp and cut short. She pulls off dark goggles, and her eyes beneath are intensely green, flecked with orange.

  The keeper retreats from the stranger, scuttling backward on the beast’s crown like a crab without a shell.

  “Go away,” she says. “Go away, get out of here, go away.”

  The woman stands at the water’s edge, her bare toes flexing against the beast’s knobby skin.

  “Go away,” the keeper says again. “Go away!” She pounds her fist against the beast’s skull. “Take me away! Take me away!”

  The woman says, “They hear you, but they will not listen.”

  The keeper falls silent. She pulls her knees tight against her chest, drawing herself into a ball. Without her shadow, without her powers, she feels like a child, exposed and cowed beneath the stranger’s strong gaze.

  The strange woman looks up at the sky, squinting in the rain. “It’s awful out here,” she says.

  The keeper feels a pang of familiarity. She stares at the stranger, then says, hopefully, “I used to be able to fix it.”

  The stranger looks back at her. “I know. Can you do it now?”

  The keeper shakes her head. “It has gone from me,” she says sadly.

  “Can I sit?” the stranger asks.

  The keeper looks around her. There are plenty of places for the woman to rest her feet. She hopes that the woman will not sit beside her. She looks up and shrugs, and looks away again.

  The woman sits where she stands, her slim legs folding almost elegantly beneath her, her back straight, head proud and tall.

  “Thank you,” she says.

  The keeper nods, and looks down at her feet. Her hair falls into her eyes, and she leaves it there. The curtain it creates calms her, if only a little.

  They sit quietly for a long time, the beasts still in the sea. Then the stranger says, “I miss the sun.”

  The keeper parts her hair with her fingers. “I miss it, too. I made it.”

  “You made the sun?” the woman asks.

  The keeper nods.

  “Well done,” the woman says. “It was beautiful. I wish it would come back.”

  The keeper bows her head, letting her hair fall over her face again.

  Another moment of silence, and then the woman says, “What can I call you? Do you have a name?”

  The keeper opens her mouth, then looks away.

  “Do you know your name?” the woman asks.

  The keeper cannot answer. She is ashamed, and she does not understand why. Only a short time ago she was a goddess, with the powers of life and death crackling in her veins. She feels as if she has been turned to stone, as if she has been abandoned.

  “I am good at names,” the stranger says. “Perhaps I could give you one. You could use it, if you wanted to.”

  The keeper says, “I don’t need a name.”

  “Everyone needs a name. What will I call you if you don’t have a name?”

  “You could go away,” the keeper says. “You could leave me be.”

  The woman looks out at the sea. “Where would I go?”

  The keeper stands up, suddenly, and looks around desperately for any hint of land.

  She sees a beach that was not there before.

  “There,” she says.

  The keeper and the stranger sit still as the beast lifts its great neck into the sky. The clouds fall over its head, draping the two women in gauzy shadow. The keeper can barely make the woman out in the haze. She fixes her gaze on the woman’s indistinct shape, ready to leap to her death if the woman should so much as scoot an inch in her direction.

  The beasts walk through the sea, the waters crashing against their bodies far below. The keeper can see their wake, deep and wide. The walls of the sea crash together there, and a feather-white trail of foam unravels behind them.

  The beach is a half-moon of fine, black pebbles, yellow sawgrass at its edges. The fog is deep and heavy, obscuring the land behind it. The keeper can see the hint of trees in the fog, trapped as if in great, dense spiderwebs. As the beasts approach, she notices a rickety pier stretching out from the land into the water, and something tiny bobbing beside it.

  The beasts stop in the deep water off the shoreline, and the large one dips its head, submerging itself in the water.

  The pier is only a few feet away, just below the top of the beast’s head.

  “We’ll have
to jump,” the stranger says.

  She does not know what she expected, but her new body is a comfortable fit. Her legs are skyscrapers, her body a small moon, her neck a graceful ribbon. The clouds are a fine mist against her broad face and hardened skin. When she dips her head into the sea, she blinks underwater, unperturbed by the salt that stings her eyes lightly. She sees the sea floor, disturbed by her mass, clouds of dirt and mulch clotting her view.

  When the two women leap to the pier, Eleanor raises her head high into the sky and turns to her sister.

  Let’s leave them, she says.

  Where should we go?

  Eleanor looks around. The beach—Splinter Beach, she realizes, recognizing it easily—appears to be the only part of Anchor Bend that exists here. A smoky haze of fog, like a fist of clouds, holds the beach like a knife blade. Beyond the mass of clouds, though, the sea stretches forever in every direction.

  To sea, she says. Come.

  Eleanor and Esmerelda turn their giant bodies, and head for the horizon. Each step reminds Eleanor of the inflatable swimming pool her father bought, the one that she and Esmerelda splashed in, pretending they were giants. The sea is a child’s pool at their feet, and together they march like monsters away from the beach.

  What if they need us? Esmerelda asks.

  Eleanor says, I think we’re done. I don’t think this is up to us anymore.

  The planks of the pier are squishy and wet with age beneath the keeper’s feet. She stares at the thick beams, at the tiny pebbles that have fallen into the gaps between them. The wood is soft and porous and almost black.

  The larger of the beasts lifts its head into the clouds, great splashes of water lapping over the pier, and the keeper squints up at the animal, watching. It sings out, its voice strong and low and musical, and the keeper is startled when the wounded beast sings back, its voice wavering. She watches as they appear to come to a decision, then depart from the beach.