Merrick lifted her up higher onto the wall. Ellis was finding it hard to breathe. Her eyes fixed on the bell jar on the table.
Moths. It was filled with moths.
One of their wings fluttered.
“And now I find this abomination in the Ruins?” Merrick seethed. “It wasn’t the house at all, was it, Ellis? It was for him! It was because of him!”
Ellis kicked sideways with her left foot. It did not connect with the table as firmly as she had hoped but the decayed condition of the wood yielded at once to the blow. The far leg snapped and the table shifted as it fell, sliding the bell jar across its surface.
The bell jar crashed against the parquet floor, shattering at once.
Moths—a thousand and more—erupted from the confines of the glass. They filled the rotunda of the house in a thick whirlwind of gray and color, their wings beating against the faces of everyone in the room as they passed in their frantic flight.
Merrick cried out, releasing his grip on Ellis’s face in favor of shielding his own. Ellis dropped down the wall and fell to the floor on her side. The moths flew above her, whirling about Merrick, their delicate wings rushing in to brush against his face before they again entered the cloud of moths whirling about the rotunda.
Merrick reeled back from them, crying out in angry frustration. For a moment he stood swatting in panic at the moths darting about his face, then he turned and ran toward the front of the hall.
The door flew open before Merrick as he approached, still revealing the elevator shaft that had so startled Ellis long moments before. Merrick lunged out the door, howling as he dove into the shaft, the door slamming shut behind him against the onslaught of moths.
Ellis slumped to the floor, leaning against the rough surface of the rotunda wall. She felt exhausted—spent—and barely able to lift her eyes to gaze expectantly down the foyer hall.
Memories drew up unbidden within her.
She knew what was coming.
The moths wheeled at the door, a cyclone of gray and color spinning around an axis. The whirling mass at once both contracted and became more complex, the dance of the moths in the air fragmenting into appendages to the core mass. The frantically beating figures were resolving into a tighter form with arms, legs and a head. One of the larger moths flitted at the face, its broad wings forming a mask where the patterns appeared as blank, turquoise eyes.
Margaret let out a short, piercing scream.
It was the figure of a man composed entirely of moths. Their wings still fluttered across the surface of its skin. A second large moth took its place on the face, its wings forming a paisley blotch on the right side of the moth-man’s face.
Ellis sat up slightly, bracing her back against the curve of the wall behind her. Merrick’s question still raged in her mind. It wasn’t this house at all, was it? It was for him, wasn’t it?
The figure took a step toward the women.
The paint on the door melted back into place, brightening to a shine as the weathered surface flattened back as though new. The dust vanished from the frosted glass and morning light beyond streamed through it, casting the moth-man in silhouette.
“Why this place?” Ellis murmured. “Why Summersend?”
Ellis thought for a moment. Both here and in Gamin, this home was important to her. Something had happened here, something she wanted desperately to remember.
The moths’ wings began to merge tighter still as the changes to the door began to spread to the hallway around it.
And continued to spread toward Margaret and Ellis.
17
SUMMER’S END
“Stop him!” Margaret insisted.
“I don’t think I can,” Ellis sighed.
The moth-man took another step toward them, swaying slightly in the hall. With each passing moment, the moths were grouping tighter together, their colors merging into a uniform smoothness of cloth, thread and skin. The coat was different now, a long military tunic emerging with two breast pockets beneath an open trench coat. The writhing moths at the figure’s head stiffened into a peaked hat, its visor suddenly shining in the hall light.
“But you stopped Merrick!” There was panic in Margaret’s voice. “No one has ever managed to do that … ever!”
“But I wanted to stop Merrick. I don’t think I want to stop this one.” Ellis pulled her feet painfully under her, pushing against the floor as she slid her back up the wall.
“After all he’s done to you?” Margaret’s voice broke as she spoke. “He stole you away from us … from your home.”
“I think I want him to come,” Ellis said. “That’s why he’s here at all. I think I need to face him.”
It was as though a wave of the past were washing down the hall from around the shadowed figure before them. The paint along the chair rail curled back into place, brightening to a shine. The broken railing of the curving staircase groaned back into place as the broken balusters mended one by one. The plaster gathered from the floor and the winds, choking the hallway with dust for a moment before filling in the holes in the walls and covering the lathe beneath with perfect smoothness.
“Ellis?” Margaret’s voice quivered.
Tears filled Ellis’s eyes. She could not move. Dared not breathe.
She remembered.
Jonas stood before her, gazing at her with a thousand hopes, apologies and questions.
He was as she remembered him on that day. His face was marred from the horrible burn that ran as a paisley-shaped mark over his right eye. His infantryman uniform was a bit rumpled from the journey but his tie was straight and he had done what he could to look presentable despite the hurried journey down from Halifax. His eyes were bright and liquid as he removed his peaked hat.
They stood facing each other in the hall of Summersend as they had once before—so very far away and so long ago.
Ellis lifted her chin and drew in a deep breath. “You were the one who waited for me by the Gate.”
“Yes.” Jonas nodded with a shy smile. “Yes, I waited.”
“I never gave you any cause for hope … never encouraged your attentions,” Ellis said, her mouth feeling dry. “Yet you waited for me all the same.”
Jonas nodded.
“Why, Jonas?” she asked. “Why?”
Jonas looked up, his loving gaze moving about the hallway. He did not answer her at once. He drew in a deep, satisfied breath before his eyes fell on her again.
“You baked bread,” he said.
Ellis’s eyes narrowed. What he had said was some complete non sequitur and yet somehow his words resonated in her mind. “I don’t … what do you mean?”
“Remember, Ellis,” Jonas said. “I came in the front door. It was in the afternoon with the sunlight streaming in through the glass of the front door, just as it is now. I think I must have stood on that porch for almost half an hour trying to decide whether to ring the doorbell or just come in. I finally realized how ridiculous it looked for a soldier to be standing on the porch without the courage to enter your uncle’s summer home. So, at last, I turned the doorknob and stepped into the hall. That’s when I saw you, coming from the kitchen into the rotunda.”
Ellis smelled the warm, inviting aroma of baking loaves filling the air from the back of the house. She pushed herself away from the wall and stood, uncertainly, to face him.
“We looked at each other for what seemed forever,” Jonas continued, a tincture of desperation coloring his words. “I was so afraid that you would find me hideous from my wound despite what you had written. Neither of us speaking. Finally, I said…”
“You said that I had baked bread,” Ellis murmured. “Then I said … I said…”
“Go on, Ellis.” Jonas nodded. “Then you said…”
Ellis looked up. The hall around her was restored, clean and bright as it had been in that place and time so far away.
“For you,” Ellis echoed her own words from the past.
“I am so sorry, El,” he sta
mmered.
“Yes, that is what you said next.” Ellis stood very still, as though moving might break the fragile moment. “And do you remember my answer?”
Jonas swallowed, glancing down at the floor before he continued.
Ellis smiled slightly to herself. “I believe my line was, ‘Yes, you are a sorry sight indeed.’”
Jonas’s face brightened, his spirit rising like the dawn after a long night.
“It was my uncle’s house,” Ellis said softly, her eyes taking in the hall and staircase as though she were seeing them with new eyes. “We had very little money of our own after the wedding but my uncle owned this summer home…”
“In Maine,” Jonas prompted.
“Yes, in Maine.” Ellis nodded. “We came all the way up on the train so that we could spend our wedding night here.”
“It was the happiest day of my life, Ellis.” Jonas smiled.
“Perhaps it was,” Ellis sighed. “But this isn’t that day, is it, Jonas?”
Jonas paused, taking a step back.
“No, Ellis.” Jonas’s smile fell slightly. “It’s a more important day. A stronger day. A more difficult day. A better day.”
“This day was years later. You had been gone a long time, Jonas,” Ellis said, more accusation in her voice than she intended.
Pain registered at the corner of the young soldier’s eyes. “Your constable friends were pretty clear about staying away after they threw me out of our apartments.”
“You were impossible to live with.” Ellis shook her head, setting her jaw at the memory. “You had such a temper and were so jealous all the time.”
“I couldn’t believe that you really wanted me, even then,” Jonas said through a bitter smile. “You were so beautiful, so bright … you seemed so far above me. When it looked as though we were going to have a child, I thought this would make it all right; this would be the one thing that would bind you to me … the one thing that would insure that you would stay with me and never leave.”
Ellis took a step toward him, folding her arms across her chest, her words filled with anger and pain.
“But I lost that child, Jonas!”
The shock of the realization suddenly overwhelmed her. Her words were suddenly choked off in a sob. She reached up, furiously brushing at the tears that welled out of her eyes before folding her arms before her again.
“Yes, Ellis.” Jonas nodded. “We lost that child.”
“Our child died within me,” Ellis said, her lips quivering with anger and regret.
“It wasn’t just our child that died that day.”
“No,” Ellis spoke between stifling sobs. “So much more than our child.”
“It’s all right,” Jonas said, reaching his arms out for her. He folded her in his own arms, cradling her there as best he could despite her arms remaining crossed against him.
“You blamed me,” Ellis sniffed.
“I blamed myself,” Jonas said quietly against her cheek.
“What difference did it make in the end,” Ellis said. She lifted her hands up against his chest, pushing away slightly from his embrace. “It felt as though I were to blame. Every time you looked at me … every time you touched me, you took it out on me.”
“I took it out on us both,” Jonas said. “I was in such pain, Ellis. I just didn’t know how to tell you. By the time I determined to make it right, I’d been drafted. The army needed skilled craftsmen for the engineer corps and I was still a Canadian citizen. By then it was too late to turn back and I was overseas. I wrote to you every day, hoping that you might one day be moved by my letters to write me back. Then after I got my medical discharge and you did write me at last…”
“I asked you to meet me here,” Ellis said.
“Yes, here.” Jonas nodded. “The one place where we could come where we could set aside what had happened and try to start over despite our wounds. And we did start over, Ellis. Here, in those glorious few days we spent together, we were able to forget…”
“Forget?” Ellis said sharply. She pushed away from him with her arms as she stepped back. “All I’ve done is forget. Long before I met you in that clock shop, I’d forgotten an entire existence here before I was born. Forgotten that it was you who lured me through the Gate out of this place. It was the sight of you on the other side that drew me on, curious as to how you could possibly be there. Then what did you do, Jonas? Kidnap me into mortality?”
“No, Ellis, I couldn’t possibly…”
“I just fell into the world by accident, I suppose!”
“No, Ellis! Of course not!” Jonas protested. “I had won the confidence of one of the Guardians…”
“But as I understand it, it was you who arranged to lure me out of the Tween and send me into the world,” Ellis said, her anger rising by the moment. “Whether you did it yourself or convinced someone else to help you, you dragged me away from this place and pushed me into a mortal life!”
“That’s right, my lady,” Margaret said as she stepped up behind her. “And being mortal, you would have forgotten everything that happened before. Your home here, Merrick, Alicia, Silenus, Ely, me … everyone that you knew and everything that you ever made here was swept from your memory. All you knew was mortal, and Jonas counted on that!”
“Was that it?” Ellis looked Jonas in the eye, fixing her gaze on him. “You thought that if you somehow managed to drag me into mortality that you would have a better chance at somehow winning my heart?”
“Well, yes … no … It’s not that simple!”
“No, it’s not simple at all and it seems to me to be even a great deal more complicated than you think!” Ellis’s voice grew firm and accusing. “If I understand what is supposed to have happened here, you somehow arranged for both of us to be born about the same time. But it doesn’t seem like a particularly elegant plan since I was born in Boston and you were born somewhere in the eastern provinces of Canada! Just how did you expect our paths to cross when we couldn’t remember anything about each other?”
“Well, that part is a bit complicated,” Jonas stammered.
“Indeed?” Ellis seethed. “And the explanation is … what?”
“We have no memories of our lives here but who we were here resonates as a thread of who we are in the next life,” Jonas said, gnawing at his lip as he tried to explain. “I knew that our lives here would converge there and that I at last could take care of you as I always hoped I could. It’s not destiny, exactly, so much as a convergence like a river of our choices, which—”
“I don’t want to hear it!” Ellis yelled. She turned from him, pacing back and forth in the hall before him. “I’m tired of being ‘cared for’ or ‘manipulated’ or ‘saved’ … I don’t need to be saved, Jonas! I never did. I didn’t need someone to take care of me, guide me or protect me. I needed someone I could stand beside, who wasn’t afraid of the woman I could become and who would encourage me to be stronger, not weaker.”
“Then why come back here?” Jonas shot back, his own anger rising. “If you have been so determined to be strong, why return to this prison of the twice damned!”
“I came back for Jenny!” Ellis shouted. She stopped in her tracks, facing Jonas squarely. “I didn’t know it then, but I know it now. I have to find her and then we have to leave the Gate together. And you’re going to show us the way.”
“But I don’t know where Jenny is,” Jonas protested.
“Well, what do you know?” Ellis demanded.
“Those who come from the outside—from beyond the Tween—have a sense of where others like us can be found,” Jonas admitted. “It’s how we find the Gates and each other here in the Tween. I think I may be able to find the Gate but not even the Soldiers know where she is hiding. I’ve already asked them.”
“My lady?”
Ellis turned in surprise toward the quiet voice that called down to her from the stairs. “Alicia! How did you get here?”
“I was with Jonas,” she said, cal
ling down from the landing above. She started down the stairs as she spoke, still wearing her now somewhat tattered Egyptian-themed costume from the masquerade. “I was checking the upstairs for Jenny when I overheard your conversation.”
“What of it, Alicia?” Margaret asked, deep suspicion obvious in her tone.
Alicia stepped from the stairs onto the rotunda floor, facing Ellis.
“Well, it occurs to me, your ladyship,” Alicia said with a coy lift of her eyebrows, “that if a Soldier doesn’t know where Jenny is, then perhaps their opposite number might?”
“You mean, if one of my angels won’t do…”
“Then what we need is a devil.” Alicia nodded.
* * *
Merrick plunged down the endless elevator shaft head-first, the tails of his morning coat flapping at his back. He snarled at the air as it rushed past. His held out his hands and arms, bringing him to face the bottomless abyss.
He bent his mind to the problem … and bent the shaft in turn.
Slowly, his surroundings shifted. The doors to the rapidly passing floors remained oriented to the vertical but the shaft rotated slightly from vertical and became an acutely angled passage. His feet connected gently against the slope that had been the back wall of the elevator shaft. Though his speed was still great, it was enough to begin slowing his momentum.
The chute continued to turn while the doors rotated in place. Soon the chute became a ramp and then fully horizontal to become a hall down which Merrick was sliding across the wooden floor that formed beneath him.
His foot caught on a tattered rug.
Merrick tumbled down the hall, rolling for nearly twenty feet before at last coming to a stop. He picked himself up slowly, brushing the dust from the old ruin of a hall from his morning coat.
He knew from the condition of the hall he had just transformed that he was still in the Ruins of Echo House. He also knew that things were not going according to his will in a place where his will was everything.
He considered the hallway. There was no reason why he should be constrained by the inconvenience of logic, space or time. The hall appeared to go forever in either direction and, he supposed, he could go back the way he had fallen and come to where he had been surprised by Jonas. He might more confidently find Ellis there but he abhorred the idea of succumbing to such mundane constraints as walking.
Unhonored Page 13