Tales from the Gateway

by E. E. Holmes

  Mother always made sure that Father was out of the house on the occasions of lunar Crossings. Because it was one of the few things in the spirit world that happened on any kind of predictable schedule, it was one of the only things we could truly plan for. And because my father had never paid proper attention to anything so pagan as a lunar calendar in his life, he never caught on that the random outings, dinners, and events that always sprang up on Crossing days were part of a larger pattern. And so, when we arrived home that evening to an empty house, everything was as it should have been.

  Even though it was only the two of us, Mrs. Bryant fixed us a gorgeous dinner—coq au vin, one of her specialties, because she detested the idea of us living on “institutional food,” as she called it. After we had devoured it, with many compliments and hugs for the chef, we slipped upstairs to get ready for bed and prepare for the Crossing.

  We chose Mother’s dressing room to perform the Crossing—she had all of the necessary candles and Casting equipment in her vanity drawer amongst her perfumes and make-up, as well as a circle inlaid into the floorboards beneath her expensive Oriental rug, and it was a simple matter of rolling it back and lighting the candles to get started. Liam stood just inside the door, on alert, as always, for any issues with the ceremony.

  “Ready?” Lizzy asked. She looked pale, anticipating, as she always did, the onslaught of emotions we were about to endure as spirit after spirit used us as their conduit. She would be exhausted when we had finished and likely sleep all the next day.

  “Ready,” I replied.

  We joined hands and began.

  “Téigh Anonn. Téigh Anonn. Téigh Anonn.”

  I felt the connection open, the flood of energy, the gathering of souls at our gates.

  “Téigh Anonn. Téigh Anonn. Téigh Anonn.”

  Flash.

  The first spirit, a woman, aching for a reunion with her husband, her mind full of him in his military uniform, kissing her goodbye.

  Flash.

  A man, lamenting all of the things he’d never done, the places he had never traveled, because he had put it off too long.

  Flash.

  Another man, practically weightless with joy that he no longer felt the relentless pull of addiction, but wishing he’d seen his daughter one last time.

  “Téigh Anonn. Téigh Anonn. Téigh Anonn.”

  Lizzy’s hand jerked slightly in mine as we both felt Janine come rocketing into the connection, her mind a heady, swirling tornado of grief and anger and triumph and guilt and regret and pain and other emotions too tangled to understand, though the weight of it all took my breath away. I knew a single moment of relief that she would now be safely on the other side, and then…

  Chaos.

  Vague shouting and banging somewhere in the mental distance. A strange breeze and the familiar whiff of cologne. A rippling scream of energy—the Circle being broken—and then something knocking into me hard in the shoulder, startling me, a rough grasp on my wrist, and then…

  Agony. The connection was in turmoil. A second energy had inserted itself where Janine had been a moment before, thrusting itself in, but something was wrong with it. It didn’t whip through in a stream of colors and emotions and images. It was like a radio frequency full of feedback and static. All I could make out was confusion and fear and blinding pain and, cutting through the static, images of my own and Lizzy’s faces over and over again.

  And then it was over.

  I lay panting on the floor, my head pounding, my body aching, my fingertips still buzzing with the spark of the connection. Somewhere nearby, I could hear Lizzy moaning. And there was another sound, a kind of guttural, animal sound that I couldn’t quite place. I peeled my eyes open.

  The first thing I saw was one of the candles, tipped onto its side, the wick extinguished but still smoking, streaks of clear wax turning white as they hardened onto the floorboards. Beyond it, a huddled shape with many arms and many legs, from which the strange moaning sound seemed to be emanating. Even as I watched, trying to focus my eyes, a form detached itself from the shape and crawled toward me, patting my cheek, grasping at my wrist to feel my pulse.

  “Karen?! Are you all right? Can you hear me? Speak to me!”

  It was Liam. His voice was clipped and harsh, a sure sign that he was afraid.

  “I’m okay,” I managed to reply. “I’m… I think I am, but… what happened? Lizzy, where’s Lizzy?”

  But the moment he had satisfied himself that I was alive, Liam had crawled away from me, and I could hear him making the same assessment of my sister, heard her voice, cracked and feeble, reply that she, too, was all right.

  “But Dad…” she was saying. “What about Dad?”

  Dad? What was she talking about Dad for? He wasn’t even here… was he? My memory thrust forward the passing smell of familiar cologne and my heart seemed to freeze mid-beat. It had been his cologne I had smelled. But why?

  I rubbed at my eyes and squinted into the corner, where the many-limbed shape continued to moan and rock. And then I heard a single word that sliced through me, that sent my frozen heart into frantic, galloping beating once more.

  “John! John! John!”

  The shape resolved itself into my mother and father, huddled together on the floor. My mother’s voice was the low, constant, sobbing moan I had taken to be some kind of animal, and she had her arms wrapped around my father’s shoulders, rocking him like a child. My father’s face was a frozen mask of desperate longing, eyes bulging and moving rapidly back and forth, mouth moving silently, limbs shaking and twitching incessantly. As I watched with growing horror, she took his face in her hands and tried in vain to get him to look at her.

  “John! John, speak to me! Look at me, darling! Look at me!”

  But he wouldn’t. He couldn’t. Ever again.

  §

  I remember so little of the next few weeks. “Stroke,” I murmured over and over again to curious and concerned relatives and neighbors. “Debilitating stroke. Loss of function. Heavily sedated.” This was the official story put out by the Council who had arrived to clean up the mess that our lives had become. Finvarra, half the Council, and a slew of Caomhnóir descended on our house, assessing the damage, and arranging for the proper medical and financial arrangements to be made that would hide the truth of what had happened to our father—a truth which, when fully explained to us by Finvarra herself, would send us spiraling into grief and despair.

  “When he broke into your connection, his soul was pulled partially from his body,” she told us, sitting calmly on our pristine white sofa, hands folded in her lap. “It made contact with the Aether, and that has altered him indelibly. In a way, he has already left you. His soul, having seen what lay beyond, is not of this world anymore, and yet it is trapped here. I am so very sorry. I’m not sure there is anything we can do. What is done cannot be undone. It is a terrible tragedy.”

  Mum was inconsolable. For all their disagreements, she worshipped our father. She always prided herself in a strange way on insulating him so completely from the Durupinen legacy. But the world she had so carefully crafted around him, one built of lies and deception and manipulation, had crashed down around us, and we had lost him in the rubble. She kept vigil by his side day and night, not eating, barely sleeping, a living monument to her own grief. As for Lizzy and me, we took a month’s leave from school while arrangements were made for Dad’s care, and while we struggled to come to terms with what had happened.

  Over the first few days, we slowly learned the details of how it had all come to pass: how our parents’ dinner had been cut short by yet another argument over Mum’s matchmaking; the way he stormed out of the restaurant; the ensuing ride home, during which Mum desperately tried to contact us, to warn us they were coming home, but we were already immersed in our preparations, oblivious to her warnings. He’d entered their bedroom to find Liam standing there, then heard our voices coming from the dressing room. What he thought was going on, what terrible
conclusion he had leapt to, we would never know, but having found his good little Christian daughters engaged in some kind of ritual with candles and chanting and circles upon the floor, I’m sure he panicked into visions of Satanism and witchcraft. Mother and Liam had been unable to stop him from rushing forward… from breaking the Summoning Circle… from wrenching our hands apart…

  Worst of all, Lizzy retreated from me and into herself. Once the Council contingent had left, she spent days locked in her room, ignoring my pleas to let me in, to speak to her. I could only imagine that she felt as consumed with guilt as I did. The difference was that I wanted to console each other from it, to shore ourselves up against it, not let it consume us separately. We had always faced everything together, hadn’t we? Why should this be any different?

  Finally, on the eve of our return to school, I felt her crawl into my bed in the middle of the night. Her arms folded around me, and I sighed with relief.

  “There you are,” I said.

  “Sorry,” she whispered. “I’m sorry I shut you out. I was just…”

  “I know,” I said, although I really didn’t. “It’s okay.”

  “I’m sorry, Karen. I feel like this is all my fault.”

  I rolled over to look at her. “How? How could this possibly be your fault?”

  “I don’t know,” Lizzy replied, her face buried in my pillow. “It’s just what my brain keeps telling me.”

  “Well, if it’s your fault then it’s my fault, too,” I said. “And Liam’s fault. And Mum’s fault. And Janine Saunders’ fault. And the Council’s fault. And the whole damn universe’s fault. But it can’t be everyone’s fault. What happened to Dad was just a horrible accident.”

  “You sound like Carrick.”

  “Carrick?” I asked, surprised.

  “Yeah, he… he said something similar to me, when he was here with Finvarra.” Lizzy said.

  “I’m surprised he said anything at all,” I said, frowning. “He’s not really the consoling type, is he?”

  Lizzy didn’t reply—just gave an odd sort of shrug.

  “Look, my point is that we can’t just give up. I’m going to do what Dad would want me to do—make my mark at Harvard and get into a really good law school. And I’m going to keep faith—keep faith that somehow everything will be okay.”

  “Do you really think everything will be okay?” Lizzy whispered.

  “It’s up to us,” I said. “We have to make it okay.”

  “But how? How do we do that?” Her voice was so small. So sad. I’d never heard her like that before.

  “We do what we’ve always done. We do what’s right for each other. We protect each other.”

  “Protect each other,” Lizzy repeated.

  “That’s right.”

  She was silent for so long I wondered if she had fallen asleep. Then, just as I began to drift off…

  “I love you, Karen.”

  “I love you, too, Lizzy.”

  And I knew that she meant it. And I knew that she wanted to protect me. And I wish I could have known, in that moment, what she was thinking, so that I could have said or done something to change her mind.

  Because the next morning, when I woke up, she was gone.

  5

  Milo's Story

  HERE’S THE THING ABOUT HUMAN MEMORIES that most people will never find out for themselves; they fade. I don’t mean the kind of fading they naturally do while we’re alive—into the rosy colors and vague impressions of a past we don’t have room in our brains to remember in detail. I’m talking about the fading they do the instant we die. There’s a wall that goes up, between the life you had and the half-life you’ve chosen to cling to. The memories are there, but separate from you, on the other side of that wall, and no amount of thinking and feeling and dwelling can haul them over clearly to the other side. Dying is the equivalent of cutting the cords that link them to you, so that you seem to have no real connection to them anymore.

  This is true of every memory I have—my childhood, my family, my school days and summer vacations—each one an image that means less and less with every passing day out of my body. But not the memories I have with her. Every moment I spent with her is as sharp and clear as though it happened a moment ago. And I think that that must be what it means to be Bound; our story has become the only true part of my story.

  And this is how it started.

  §

  “Welcome to Prison, You Screwed Up Little Fairy.” That’s what the sign said outside the building. Okay, that’s not what the sign said outside of the building. It said, “Welcome to New Beginnings.” But I maintain that that’s what I saw when I looked at it.

  I glanced over at my mother, who was sitting in the driver’s seat. She was also staring at the sign as though it said terrible things. For a second, I thought about asking her what she was thinking, but then I remembered that I was pissed off at her and didn’t actually care.

  “Well, here we are,” she said after a few more seconds of listening to the engine run. It was exactly the same thing she’d said every time we pulled up to one of these places. It was the ultimate expression of the obvious except for one, glaring inaccuracy. She wasn’t really here. Neither was my sister, sitting in the back seat, sucking on her long, shiny braid, so that the end of it looked like the tip of a paintbrush. Neither of them were really here. They were going to turn around and drive home in a few minutes, free from whatever lay on the other side of that sign. No, I was the only one who was here, and we all knew it.

  When I didn’t reply, she plowed on through the sea of awkward silence now filling the car, handing me a large manila envelope as she talked. “We did all of your paperwork ahead of time, and faxed all of your records over. It should make everything nice and easy when you get in there.”

  Translation: I did everything in my power to avoid walking into this place with you, because my crippling maternal guilt can’t handle the reality of where we’re sending you. Again.

  “Nice and easy,” I repeated, looking at the envelope. “Yeah, right.”

  “Now, Milo, don’t start. You know what I mean,” she said, wearily, like I was the one making this difficult.

  “So, what’s the cover story this time?” I asked, tucking the envelope into my bag.

  She looked me in the face for the first time all day.

  “Cover story?”

  “I mean, what’s Dad telling everyone? It’s not as though he’s actually admitting that he’s locking me up to medicate the gay away.”

  “Don’t talk like that in front of your sister,” she hissed through clenched teeth, the way that parents do, as though pressing your teeth together will render your children miraculously deaf. Seriously, you would have thought I’d dropped an f-bomb. But no, I’d dropped the g-bomb, and that was clearly much more damaging to a seven-year-old psyche.

  I looked into the rearview mirror at my sister, who was watching us intently. I winked at her and she smiled. I turned back to my mother, who was not getting off the hook that easily.

  “You still haven’t answered my question. What’s the lie this time? Math camp? Future Doctors of America Conference? You’re going to have to let me know so that I stick to the official line when I finally get paroled from the joint.”

  “I’m not having this conversation with you right now,” she said, pinching the top of her nose as though my attitude was bringing on a spontaneous nosebleed.

  “Now or never,” I muttered.

  “Do you want us to come in with you?” she asked, because she had to.

  “Of course not,” I said. “I don’t want Phoebe to see that place, and neither do you. That’s why you brought her, isn’t it? A sweet little ready-made excuse not to get out of the car.”

  Without waiting for her lame protests, I opened my door and slid out of the car. I leaned into the back seat to pull out my bag, and kissed Phoebe on the nose. Her mouth was quivering at the corners.

  “Stay cool, dancin’ fool,” I t
old her.

  “Stay hot, tater-tot,” she said tremulously.

  I shut the car door and turned my back on her quickly, before she could see that I was teetering on my own verge of tears.

  §

  I don’t recall much about the whole “Welcome to New Beginnings” bullshit, except for a few random details. The woman at the front desk had a mole on her lip that was like a whole other face sprouting under her nose, and I couldn’t concentrate on a single word she said because I was staring at it. The nurse gave me a welcome packet with, I shit you not, a smiling sunshine peeking over the top of a hillside on the cover. Then she swiped an ID card to open the door from the lobby and pointed me in the direction of my room. She told me that she’d come and get me in an hour for my first group therapy session, but to “make myself at home” in the meantime. I may or may not have laughed in her face.

  It was obviously a guys’ hall; it smelled like body odor poorly masked with cheap body spray. I put a hand on the door handle to my assigned room and pushed. It turned easily, but wouldn’t open. I leaned my shoulder against it and shoved, throwing my body into it. Still nothing. These places were always full of locked doors. The nurses had probably forgotten to get it ready for the new head case. I looked again at my ironic, sunshiny welcome packet and checked the room number. I was in the right place, according to the paperwork. I was about to turn and head back to the front desk to tell mole-lady when I heard something that made me stop in my tracks.

  A voice was just audible on the other side of the threshold. It was speaking in low, urgent tones, but I couldn’t make out what it was saying. There was a small window near the top of the door, and I stood on tip-toe to peer through it. The bed had been pushed up against the inside of the door, which explained why it refused to open. But more interesting than that was the fact that a girl was sitting on the end of said bed, carrying on one hell of a conversation with absolutely no one.