Traveling with Gabriel was so much easier than traveling alone.
But sometimes he wasn’t there. Sometimes I slipped down the swirling gray slopes of petrified mud all on my own. Sometimes I walked in circles, wondering why my hands were turning black. My eyelids would droop down and I would fight to keep them open, struggling against the descending black. It was as if I were seeing two images at once, and I couldn’t tell which was real.
Then Gabriel would return and everything was fine again. We had water from the stream and enough food for the both of us. Our legs never tired. He wasn’t as nervous or agitated as he used to be, and he smiled at me often.
Even so, I couldn’t shake a growing unease.
“How did that man get out here?” I asked.
“He probably left like we did. Maybe he was trying to find something better.”
I wondered if that man was the only one who lived out here, and how he managed to survive. “How did he know he wouldn’t die?”
“He didn’t know that, I’m sure.” Gabriel shrugged. “Some people thrive on hardship. I imagine he’s one of them.”
I hesitated, glancing at him sideways. “You didn’t kill him, did you?”
“No. I only knocked him out so we’d have time to get away.”
The thing that had been following me caught up when the mud turned to brown desert sand. Mountains surrounded us, farther in the distance than they seemed. Closer there were dunes, shifting in the wind.
I saw the white thing emerging from cracks in the hard-baked ground. As I walked, it would disappear behind sweet-smelling bushes. Then I would see it again somewhere ahead of me. Waiting for me to go to it.
So I did, finally.
“Do you see that?” I asked Gabriel, veering away from him. I kept my eyes trained on the thing. It was getting taller, as if it grew slowly out of the ground before my very eyes. Like it was alive.
Suddenly I was upon it. It looked like a cage, a birdcage maybe. The handle on top was attached to several slender, rusted white bars radiating down in a circular form. Within the bars, the dirt stirred. Something was inside the cage, buried.
I hesitated only a second before plunging my hands into the sun-warmed dirt around the cage bars. It came away more easily than I expected and I kept digging, determined to uncover the thing inside. I was good at digging by now.
Gabriel stood behind me, watching but not saying a word.
My fingers brushed something soft, something like hair, and the hard roundness of a head. I leapt back with a scream and stared at the little crater I’d dug. I could see the top of a head within the bars, bits of mustard-brown hair showing through the dusting of dirt.
“Something’s in here,” I said to Gabriel.
It didn’t move as I stared at it, but I knew it wasn’t something dead. It wasn’t a toy. I had touched it, and it was warm and organic.
A child. A living child. In the ground. In a cage.
Horrified and deeply disturbed, I wanted nothing more than to run from this thing. But I knew it would keep following me, so I leaned forward again, scrabbling away at the ground. I was careful not to touch the little body as I worked to loosen the cage. I couldn’t look at the tiny child. I didn’t want to know why or how it was coming up from under the ground, following me no matter where I went.
After another minute, I’d unearthed the bottom of the cage. I came to my feet, grasped the handle, and pulled. The cage came away with a shower of sand and I stumbled back a few steps. I’d expected a cage containing even a very small child would be heavy, but the thing was like air.
I set it down and studied the kneeling form behind the bars. A boy, I guessed, though it was hard to say for sure. Even bent up inside the small cage without enough room to stand, I could tell his body was freakishly ill proportioned. His hands and feet were too large for his thin, even skeletal, limbs. He couldn’t have been taller than two feet. His eyes, pale blue, were sunken in his wide, gaunt face. They seemed to see everything and nothing.
They seemed to see the things I saw when I closed my eyes for too long. Endless yellow fields burned black. The charred shell of the farmhouse.
But that was all behind me now.
The boy’s long, narrow hands, so pale they were almost blue, gripped the slender bars of the cage. He stared solemnly through me. The wind seemed not to touch him. And the cage had no door, so he could never get out.
I’d never seen him before, but he looked all too familiar. He was tiny and twisted like the thing rooted inside me—a knot of thoughts and fears so dark I could never share them with anyone else. Thoughts and fears that had festered and hardened, so now they would always be a part of me. Trapped within.
I would help this thing, this boy. Gabriel and I would. We would take him with us.
I lifted the cage off the ground. It was no effort at all to carry it. But I held it out to one side so it wouldn’t knock against my legs. I never wanted to accidentally touch that taut, bluish skin. Because then I would know for sure whether I was alive or dead.
31. el desierto
We walked across the desert. Dried-up lakes revealed rotten towns once hidden beneath water. Wind and sand had reclaimed others. Forgotten roads rose up from nowhere and led to nothing.
The sun had always been harsh here. This place had always been filled with dust. I took comfort in the thought that some things were constant. Some things were strong enough not to succumb to change.
As far as I could tell, the boy in the cage never slept. He never moved. He never blinked. I wasn’t even sure he breathed, and yet he was alive. He didn’t need food or water. He existed separately from the world, alongside it. Incapable of change, he would never age and never die. But he was also impermanent.
These were things I understood only when I could bring myself to stare into his pale, fishy eyes. And I felt this knowledge in my bones.
This boy in the cage would have followed me forever, no matter how much I tried to ignore him. He, it, was a manifestation of the withered root of my soul. Something I could never leave behind.
Carrying the cage was easy, since I’d always done it in some way or another. And now it was easier not to let the images behind my closing eyelids become my reality.
Gabriel and I found a sand-flooded house with missing walls to sleep in. The remaining walls would have fallen if not for the sand bolstering them up. We could touch the parts of the ceiling that hadn’t crumbled away to reveal the black starry sky. As I lay on the bed of sand, I wondered what it had buried. Tables, chairs, windows. Plates, sinks, clothes. Maybe even people.
My body was heavy as a stone. But I couldn’t sleep because Gabriel wasn’t beside me.
I sat up, casting a glance at the boy in the cage. His large eyes caught an eerie gleam of starlight.
Quickly I turned away, kicking up sand as I scrambled outside. I didn’t want to be alone with him. It.
Gabriel sat against one of the outer walls, arms resting on his bent knees. His solemn face was broken into planes of light and shadow.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Just looking at the sky,” he said. The moon hung above us, softening the night.
I stood there, gazing down at him. I remembered the time he’d said an empty shell was easily broken, but also easily filled. That was a nice thought. But there was nothing around us now. Nothing to go inside that shell.
He would have told me I had everything I needed inside me already. That couldn’t have been true, though, when I still felt so empty.
It was strange how sometimes moonlight could reveal the truth of things, or at least make something easier to believe. It shone right into his eyes, rendering them colorless but filled with love. For me.
And then he touched my wrist. I hadn’t realized how close I’d been standing. I held my breath and thought about what he would say to me. What he would do.
“Can I touch you, Marlo?” That was what he’d ask. “Will you let me make you feel
something good?”
Of course I would nod. My eyes would track his fingers trailing off my wrist and toward the hem of my dress. He would touch my knee then pause to meet my eyes. I would let him go on. I would let his fingers move lightly up my inner thighs until they reached my center. I would stand there as he touched me. As he watched me and listened to my quickened breath.
And then after he would draw me down beside him and hold me. He wouldn’t say a word as I shed tears for the girl who would never feel such pleasure again. For the girl I never had been and never would be. For those I had left behind. For those I hadn’t tried to save.
He wouldn’t need to. Because he would know it was my fear that had always kept me docile and weak.
Never doing a single thing that mattered—that was my biggest regret.
And he would simply understand without me having to tell him.
Only a second had passed before he drew back his hand. “It will be fine,” he said. “Everything is going to be fine.”
I sat down beside him. When I awoke with the morning light, his body had disintegrated to a gray heap of ash, small particles flitting away with the ceaseless desert wind.
32. las olas
I lay on the sand beside the dwindling ashes all day. The sunlight kept growing darker until it bathed the world in amber, and I had become mellified in its thick glow. And the light kept changing color until it was blue, neon blue. Everything else had turned to black. Faint, steady beeping noises sprang at me from the darkness.
Sand flew from my hair as I ripped my body from its stasis. I clawed at my eyelids until the images vanished.
Gray mist wrapped around my ankles. I was walking again, cage in hand. Psychopomp—I had seen that word once, in the abandoned library, and attributed it to Gabriel. Perhaps the boy in the cage was my psychopomp, arrived to guide me from one world to the next. The idea that something would be there to show me the way to death wasn’t frightening, but comforting. I’d waited so long.
Shadows moved alongside me as I walked, silent and intent. Sometimes I thought I caught glimpses of familiar faces before they vanished back into the mist.
For the first time, these ghostly visions didn’t bother me. Instead, they were my distant companions. I could no longer feel the burdens of loss or guilt or obligation.
After a few minutes, the mist parted and I emerged on a beach. The air was cold and windy, the sea gray and white. I heard waves crashing gently. There were clouds overhead, covering the sky.
If I looked to either side, I could see the indistinct forms of thousands of others that had walked through the mist with me and emerged on the silky sand. And just ahead, at the edge of the surf, I saw enough little wooden boats to hold every one of us. Some people were already climbing into the boats, ready to go wherever the sea would take them.
So I walked down to the water too. The cage swung lightly in my hand. I found an empty boat, but I didn’t get in just yet. Instead, I looked out across the ocean’s undulating surface and saw other boats cresting the waves. One wave, two, the boats angling over. Three and four, defying nature by buoying the boats away from shore rather than toward it. Five, six, seven waves, each of them larger than the last. The eighth, breaking with a massive roar.
And the ninth wave, biggest of all. It looked like a behemoth rising from the deep. I thought my heart would stop as I watched the boats lift with its swell. It appeared they would tumble beneath the curl and splinter under the crushing weight of the water. But when the wave crashed down, rocking the boats waiting at shore, I saw the others had made it out to the flat part of the sea. By the dozen, they drifted toward the misty horizon.
In a few moments, I would be out there too. I imagined myself floating atop the waves, drifting farther and farther from the shore. Into oblivion. Maybe I wouldn’t even care that there would be fathoms and fathoms of unknowable depths beneath me. I wouldn’t be afraid. Because what else had I ever wanted than to leave?
Above me, the clouds dissolved to reveal a clear sky. I lay on my back. No, someone carried me. My throat burned. My lips had cracked. My skin stung down to the muscle.
No, I stood on the beach. Calm and ready to continue my journey. The clouds were still there, thick enough to block the heat of the sun.
Suddenly Gabriel was standing beside me. He smiled somewhat sadly, his black hair whipping in the salty wind.
“Are you ready?” he asked.
I took his hand, and we climbed in the boat together. We sat down facing each other, the boy in the cage between us. I couldn’t have cared less about the others on the beach. They were phantom-like to me, as I must have been to them.
“I made it so far,” I said, feeling strangely proud but also sad. Gabriel nodded in agreement.
My hands shook, clasped together in my lap. The ocean tumbled beneath us as the waves carried us out—to the next world, I imagined. To a place where only good dreams lasted forever. Each time the boat rose, my stomach dropped, and I was painfully aware of how deep the water must have been.
“Gabriel,” I said, turning my panicked gaze to him. I’d made it so far, and I wanted to keep going, but I didn’t know if I had the strength.
His expression was gentler than I’d ever seen it. “Don’t be scared, Marlo. All of us come to the end.”
As we rose to the crest of a large wave, the cage toppled out of the boat, breaking as it hit the water. I watched as the pieces rested atop the surface for a second before sinking beneath it, as if the ocean had absorbed them. And the little twisted boy was swallowed down with them, his limbs too weak to keep him afloat. But it was all right, because death was better than a caged existence.
Tears were streaming from my eyes, I realized. I touched the tips of my fingers to the wetness on my cheeks. They came away black with a substance that crumbled from my fingertips. It wasn’t tears or the splash of the ocean, then. Dirt… It was dirt falling on my skin from the lip of a shovel.
Raising my eyes, I saw the clouds dissolving again to reveal the raw blue sky. Looking at the sky was like looking down a tunnel, somehow. I could see through to the very end. Back past the shifting desert and the green mountains and the castle, the abandoned farmhouse loomed.
Dark spots encroached gradually upon the blue of the sky. I blinked furiously, but the darkness didn’t go away. Bit by bit, it eclipsed my vision. My body grew colder, yet I didn’t shiver. I lay there unmoving as clumps of dirt covered me.
Now the darkness was like water rushing over me. It became everything, growing until I could see nothing. Feel nothing.
My lips parted in a final exhale.
I dreamed my final dream.
El fin
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Heather Crews is the author of four previous novels. You can find her on Goodreads and Twitter. Learn more about her books on her blog.
Psychopomp: A Novella Page 13