by T. A. Pratt
When I got bored with those variations, I took some forays back to college, blowing off homework in favor of parties and epic road trips and hitting on girls I’d always considered way out of my league. I found out I could fall in love with women other than Meghan. It was great, but it was terrible, because everything was written on water, and nothing mattered at all. No matter what I did, good or bad or indifferent, was meaningless. The damage to my liver was undone each year, but so was every human connection and friend and lover I made.
Still. I got by on hedonism for a while. Until one year, when I got a girl pregnant in February and actually had a little time with the newborn before Elsie showed up, standing behind my sleeping wife and baby, asking, “When to this time, Dave?” Preparing to erase my family from the timeline.
That’s when I told her to take me back to my last real year. The year I met Elsie.
I lived through it okay. Pretty much the way I had the first time. I didn’t want to change things too much, because I wanted to be in the same place on December 31st.
When the time came I sat on the roof with a bottle of bad booze, and Elsie appeared, just like before, all in red. “Hey,” she said. “You planning on jumping?” If she remembered she’d met me before, she didn’t show it. Maybe this was the first time again, for her. Maybe I had the advantage.
My mouth was dry with hope, but I did it just like I had the first time. Said the same lines. You better believe I remembered them. But when she asked for a drink, I offered her the bottle instead of drinking it myself.
She wrinkled her nose. “Kidding. Like I’d drink that shit.” She scooted closer to me, though, and then just sat in companionable silence, not making me an offer, not musing on regret.
I’d done it. I’d avoided offending the bad fairy.
As the people on the roof next door began to count, she put her horrible arm around me. “I’ve got the weirdest feeling, Dave. I can’t explain it, but I just feel like... you and me don’t have a future. Or, at least, you don’t.”
“What—” I said, and then she shoved me off the edge of the roof.
I’d considered that as a possibility. That living up until the moment of my last terrible decision would mean my end—that I’d given up my future, and choosing to give up my past would leave me nowhere to go... except nowhere. Even as the sidewalk rushed up to meet me, I didn’t mind the prospect of nowhere. I was okay with that. I’d had enough of my life.
That would have been a good ending. I would have been okay with being dead.
After the crunch of impact came nothingness. Maybe it was death, but if so, it wasn’t the same death other people get, I don’t think. At least I hope so, for their sakes.
I was motionless, in the dark, paralyzed but never sleeping, aware of every passing moment. Everything was silent, but somewhere in my head I heard the ticking of a vast clock, counting every second and minute of my dead year.
After 525,200 minutes (or so), I started to hear something else: thumping and scraping.
After 525,230 minutes, the darkness above my face was wrenched away, and Elsie peered down at me, gripping a camping lantern in one hand and the handle of a shovel in the other. She wore a party hat and sparkly make-up on her face, though there was dirt smeared on her nose and chin. “Hello, Dave. Nice coffin you’ve got here.”
I tried to speak, for the millionth time in that silent year, and for the first time, I managed a groan.
“Hey,” Elsie said. “Hey Dave. Hey.” She put a noisemaker in her mouth and blew. The cheap paper toy blatted, unfurled, and hit me in the face, though I barely felt it. “Happy New Year. When are you going this time?”
My voice was a dry croak, my tongue heavy in my mouth, a dead thing, a foreign object. “I won’t choose. I quit. I give up.”
She clucked her tongue. “No fair. We had a deal.”
“Why are you doing this to me?”
Elsie shrugged. “I’m sure I had my reasons when I started, but who remembers after so long? At this point, well... Why do people kiss when the clock strikes twelve? Why sing Auld Lang Syne? Why make resolutions you’re never going to keep anyway? Why eat collard greens and black eyed peas on New Year’s Day? Tradition, Dave. You’re my tradition. You picking the next year is your tradition. But if you won’t choose... I’ll have to choose for you. Some things you do just because you’ve been doing them a long time, and habit is a powerful thing.”
Over her head—in the night sky above the graveyard—fireworks burst into colors and shapes.
“Ten,” Elsie said. “Nine. Eight. Seven.”
I closed my eyes and said “No, no, no,” over the sound of her voice as she finished counting down.
Then I was wrenched backward in time.
I gazed up at a ceiling, I think, though everything was blurry. I tried to move, but my arms and legs just bobbed, barely in my control. The room was dim, but not entirely dark, lit by some colored lamp outside my field of view. Above my upturned face, shapes dangled on strings: a fish, a smiling whale, a seahorse, a starfish. From some other room I heard a champagne cork pop and a man’s voice, simultaneously familiar and strange, cry out “Happy New Year!”
I opened my mouth and began to cry like the baby I was.
A Pathway Up and Down
I’ve toyed with writing an Elsie Jarrow novel, and if I ever do, this will be part of it. The Four Horsepersons weren’t the first helpers she tried to make.
Alisa
Her littlest was the first to be taken.
Alisa didn’t mind camping. She’d spent many contented weekends in her teens and twenties with family and friends stretched out under the stars... but that was desert camping. Marco had dragged them all up to Northern California, to foggy redwood groves and squishing mud and banana slugs, and she found the whole experience drippy and distasteful. Their children Sofia and Hector were first excited, then bored on the long drive, then excited again as they trekked in to a mostly undeveloped campsite, then bored as the trekking continued. Alisa had suggested that maybe a campsite with toilets, at least, would be smart, since they had a four-year-old and an eleven-year-old, but Marco was all about the illusion of wilderness. To his credit, when Hector got too tired to walk, Marco put the boy on his shoulders without complaint.
Alisa had wanted to go to Hawaii. She’d always wanted to go to Hawaii. The blue water. The warm breezes. The volcanoes. But they couldn’t afford it. They couldn’t even afford this, not really, but Marco said making memories was more important than money, sometimes. Maybe. But it was hard to guarantee they’d be good memories.
By late afternoon, the family had settled into their campsite, a little clearing surrounded by the sentinels of great redwoods, which were pretty, if not as impressive as the giant sequoias farther north. Soon they had the ground covers down and two tents pitched; in theory one was for the kids and one for the parents, but she had little doubt Hector would get scared and insist on crowding in with them. She knew she should cherish the time, since he wouldn’t be so snuggly forever, but she dreaded the prospect of his tiny feet kicking her all night and the likelihood of him wetting the sleeping bag. Sofia had outgrown such things years ago. She didn’t even climb into bed with them on Saturday mornings anymore, and spent most of her time gazing at her tablet and talking about the video games she played and wanted, someday, to design.
At dusk they gathered around the stone-circled fire pit, sitting on fallen logs Marco had arranged. They roasted hot dogs on the flames, and made s’mores, and Marco taught the kids campfire songs, but didn’t dip into his inventory of scary stories, since Hector was sensitive and easily frightened.
Alisa remembered that openness to fear, from her own childhood: the sense that the world was full of possibilities, dark and light together, with no dividing line between the real and the unreal, or the plausible and the unlikely. She had fears now, but they were about whether her husband’s auto shop would stay in business; whether she’d be stuck working as a part-tim
e physician’s assistant forever; whether Sophia spent too much time on the computer; whether Hector was ready for kindergarten in the fall; whether anyone would realize how poorly motherhood suited her, or if she could keep faking it successfully.
Watching the flames, she felt the familiar tendrils of melancholy reaching out for her. Her life was good, wasn’t it? She had children she loved—of course she loved them; a mother’s love was axiomatic—though sometimes she wondered: who were these tiny people in her house, with their demands and opinions and messy habits? And Marco... he was a good father, and not a bad husband so much as a distracted one. Probably everyone faced this, in their late thirties: the sense that choices were contracting, the window for extraordinary experiences closing. The realization that the life you’d haphazardly wandered into was the life you were going to be stuck with until you died or decided to make dangerous choices.
“Mommy?” Hector held out a messy handful of graham crackers and melted chocolate and marshmallow. His face was smeared with the same. “All done.”
She wiped him off, and then scooped him up and got him ready for bed; he found peeing on a tree outside the campsite so hilarious she thought he’d fall in the puddle from laughing so hard. He wanted to sleep alone in the kid’s tent—“Big boy,” he said solemnly—but he clutched his stuffed snow owl so hard his fingers disappeared into its plush white fur. Sofia stayed up later, watching the flames with them in companionable silence, then went off to use the bathroom in privacy, muttering about the barbarity of it all.
Marco sat down beside Alisa. “Mon petit chou,” he said.
It was the opening of an old and ritual exchange between them, but she didn’t feel like playing tonight, so she said nothing.
He took her hand, turned it over, and kissed the underside of her wrist, a gesture that had filled her with an almost unbearable ache of longing when she was twenty-two. Now it was just one of the little things he did. Gestures toward something she wasn’t sure even existed anymore.
He was trying, though, so she roused herself to try too. “Are you ever going to learn how to say anything else in French?”
“I know how to say ‘potato.’ Would you like to hear me say potato in French?”
“That’s okay.”
“Then I’m afraid the only other French I know is this....” He leaned in to kiss her, and though lately she found his touch no more arousing than being brushed by a tree branch in passing, he’d been very good and patient tonight, so she leaned in to him and put some heat into her response.
He made a long low mmmmm sound. “Maybe if Hector actually sleeps in the other tent for a while we can—”
A great light suddenly flooded the clearing: so harsh it seemed to strike them like a physical force, a shocking wave of brightness. Marco shouted and fell off the log, and Alisa screamed, instinctively turning toward the tent where Hector slept, though she couldn’t see anything. The light vanished as abruptly as it had come—but not entirely. Through dazzled eyes narrowed to slits, Alisa saw a beam of brilliant white shine down on the children’s tent. The top of the tent ripped open, as if torn by unseen hands, and her littlest child—bundled up in a sleeping bag, clutching his owl—rose up in the light through the gap. Then the beam vanished, and Hector with it.
“Baby!” she screamed.
Marco stood, staring up at the sky, and she looked, too, but there was nothing up there, not even stars: just clouds and darkness. “Sophia,” Marco said, and then shouted it, “Sophia!” and ran into the trees to look for their other child.
Alisa started to follow him, then sank down on the ground, shaking all over, gasping out sobs, her heart a wild animal in her chest, panicked and racing. Real—unreal—plausible—implausible—
She was flooded with an intense rage at Marco for dragging them to this stupid wet forest with, with aliens, an anger so overwhelming her vision went black for a moment.
“That was a little over-the-top, huh?”
Alisa froze, then slowly turned her head. A white woman with hair that glinted red in the firelight sat on the log where Marco had sung earlier. She wore a white dress with some eye-twisting pattern of black all over it. “The whole UFO abduction thing,” the woman said. “I considered something old school, you know, like stolen away by fairies, leaving a wooden doll in your kid’s sleeping bag for you to find in the morning, but who would even get the reference anymore? Nobody cares about the classics.” She smiled. “Hi. I’m Elsie. I’ve got plans for you. For your whole family. Want to hear about it?”
Alisa howled and launched herself at the woman, her hands twisted into claws.
Hector
Hector woke in a dark and unfamiliar place. The ground was rough like sleeping on rocks, and there was only a little light shining from patches of slimy stuff on the walls, but he still had his sleeping bag, and Owly. Sometimes Hector fell asleep in one place and Daddy carried him to bed, but why would Daddy have carried him here?
“Hey, kid.” A tall lady knelt down in front of him, and he shrank back, because he was nervous around new people. “Don’t worry, you’ll be back with your family soon.”
“Are you a stranger?”
“Probably the strangest you’ll ever meet. My name’s Elsie. I’m like... your auntie. I’m a very important person, and I’m looking for helpers. Are you a good helper?”
His mommy always said he was, so Hector nodded.
“Excellent. I love little kids. They just roll with stuff, no going on about how this can’t be real, it must be a dream, blah blah blah. Take a look at this.” She did something with her hands, and suddenly a light bloom between her palms: a sparkling thing the size of an orange, but it spun around and shone. “You like shiny? This is a little piece of me. A little bit of my divinity. Do you know what that means? Ha, yeah, thought not. But you know what magic is, right? This is magic. Want to touch it? If you touch it, you’ll be magic. But it’s up to you. You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”
Hector knew magic: Santa Claus, Tooth Fairy, Daddy pulling coins from behind his ear and giving them to Hector to put in his Thomas the Tank Engine bank that locked with a real key. The pretty glowing thing was magic, but mostly it was pretty. He was scared of the dark, but Mommy and Daddy said he couldn’t sleep with the overhead light on in his room anymore, so they’d gotten him a night light, shaped like a star. The sparkly reminded him of the night light. Looking at it made him feel safe, and holding it might make him feel even safer. He reached out.
“That’s one,” the lady said. And then, after Hector changed: “Wow. I bet you won’t be scared of the dark anymore. The dark will be scared of you.”
Marco
Hector was—he was—Marco didn’t know what he was, but he was gone, and Marco was terrified Sophia was gone too, that she’d been taken up as well, carried off by whatever took Hector. Marco had an uncle who believed in all that Area 51, alien autopsy shit, but Marco had always thought it was silly. He was practical. He dealt with what was in front of him. Now, aliens were in front of him, or at least overhead. He screamed his daughter’s name and she didn’t answer.
Then he took a step, and instead of solid ground beneath his feet, there was emptiness, and he plunged straight down. He twisted as he fell, and struck soft soil drifted with leaves, landing on his side. The darkness above him had a patch that was merely dim: the hole he’d fallen into it. The roof of this hole was at least ten feet up. Marco struggled to his feet, then thought, Maybe Sophia fell in here too, and shouted her name.
“No, no, I’m Elsie,” a voice said from the darkness. “Sophia is someone else. In a few minutes, she’ll really be someone else. Or maybe herself, but more so. The experience affects different people differently. At least, I suspect it does. I’ve never actually done this before. This is the first time I’ve made... acolytes? No, that’s not right. Avatars? Champions? Dogsbodies? Catspaws?”
“Who are you?” Marco rushed toward the voice, kicking up old leaves as he went. This wo
man knew his children’s names, she must be involved somehow.
She spoke again, but from the other side of this cave, or pit, or whatever it was. “I told you, I’m Elsie. I’m a god. I used to be just an ordinary witch. Un petit sorcière, if you want to get French about it. But I was so good at magic, I went into the underworld and got my hands on some of that divine fire, and here I am: a brand new god.”
“There is only one God,” Marco said, spinning toward his voice. “You aren’t Him.”
“Right! Wait. Are we talking Yahweh, or Aten, or Allah? I get all those one true gods mixed up. It’s true, I didn’t lay the pillars of the Earth, and you can think of me as a demigod, if that helps you sleep at night and get up in the morning. I didn’t make the world, but I can change it. Within my area of expertise, which is basically kicking over anthills and overturning expectations, there’s nobody better. Loki, Coyote, Kokopelli? Don’t get me wrong, they’re Hall of Famers, but I’m the future of the trickster god game. And you’re going to help.”
“You’re insane.” He moved slowly toward her voice, without much expectation of finding her. Maybe she was a ventriloquist, throwing her voice.
But then a bright light shone through the hole in the ceiling of this cave, and illuminated a red-haired white woman of early middle age, wearing a white-and-black dress. Her feet were bare and dirty, and there were leaves in her hair. Her smile was just a little too wide to seem anatomically possible. “By conventional standards, I absolutely am insane,” she said. “I realized recently that I can’t be everywhere at once—at least, not without being awfully thin everywhere—so I decided I needed some help. I won’t lie to you: I have a lot of power, but I’m also constrained, and I can’t act against my nature. Which means, in this case, that I sensed it was necessary to choose my new acolyte avatar whatevers at random. I closed my eyes and transported myself to any old spot of inhabited Earth, and there you were. Four of you is good, though. Four seasons, four cardinal directions, four horspersons of the apocalypse, there’s some symbolic mojo there.”