by Steven Welch
Morning rituals at The Girl’s Garden, as mechanical as the alarm clock and nearly as thrilling. Elise winced as her feet hit the cold stone floor. There was a Turkish area rug, but it didn’t extend to her bed.
Dressed. Teeth brushed. Hair combed. Face washed. Blanket tucked away. Books gathered and placed in a bag that dropped over her shoulder. Ten minutes, no more.
Elise walked down the narrow old wooden stairs to the second level, then to the floor. The room opened into the foyer of The Girl’s Garden.
Sister Viverette stood at her station like a vulture standing guard over the corpse of a dead hog. She was thin and tall, with skin the color of piano keys and just as cold. Her black dress covered her neck to toes except for those skeletal hands and that pinched face. A thin chain held a golden cross and a small medallion around her neck. Elise could catch a glimpse of the little medallion when being tucked in at night. It was an old fashioned diving helmet of tarnished brass, no bigger than a fingernail. Strange thing for a Sister, Elise thought.
“Bon jour, Elise St. Jacques,” said Sister Viverette, “your tripe and chutney is getting cold. Depeche toi.”
“Jen ne comprends pas?”
“Hurry, please.”
Elise dashed past her and moved toward the cafeteria. Her French was getting better, but she was still far from fluent.
Elise sat with the other girls, a hundred or so, at the long dining tables of The Cafeteria. The room was quiet for such a crowd and activity. A bit of light poured down from the glass doomed arcade style ceiling of the room. The air smelled of cumin and starched clothes.
And yes, the tripe and chutney were cold.
The chutney sat on her plate like a spatter of jellied insects next to a little puddle of pig innards that Sister Viverette called tripe. Elise hated tripe and chutney day. Who eats pig guts and chutney for breakfast? Honestly, until coming to this atrocious place, Elise had never even heard the word “chutney” before. Now, every Tuesday morning, she began her day with a not-so-steaming pile of spiced whatnots and a chunk of stale bread.
Dad had been a great cook, or at least Elise thought so. He would make wonderful meals for the two of them, sizzling plates of bacon and eggs, biscuits and sausage gravy, home-made pizza’s hot out of the oven with cheese caramelized and crunchy.
Now, tripe and chutney.
Yay.
*
A day at The Girl’s Garden was supposed to be a voyage of discovery into the world of impending womanhood. Here, so Elise was told, pathetic orphan girls would journey step by step along a path of intellectual and cultural enlightenment that would take them from hopeless poverty into the posh hallways of power and privilege. Learn to speak other languages, master the art of cleaning floors, develop your dishwashing techniques, and navigate a hundred different variations of bullying that ranged from the innocuous comment to the flat-out backyard beating.
What great fun!
Nights were hers though.
Once done with the day’s labors, Elise could settle into her room, into her bed, and she could try to remember who her Dad had taught her to be.
More than anything, though, lying in bed at night she could see the thing that gave her the most comfort in her world.
In her mind she could visit Jules Valiance in The Worlds Below and Between.
Her Dad’s tales had captivated Elise as long as she could remember. At night, tucking her in, he would weave another yarn of the heroes and monsters of this strange world. When she was old enough, they had begun a project together. Using sticks and twine and found objects, they created a tiny little world, a place of wonder and imagination.
To the outside eye, it might seem a meaningless chaos. To Elise, using her imagination to paint the picture, it was the endless, marvelous, mysterious world of her father’s stories.
Cat’s eye marbles became the legendary singing spheres of the frozen sea. Twine was the carnivorous Sargasso weed that devoured sea gerbil huts. Cotton, stretched and pulled, were the dome clouds of the Prawn God’s Kingdom. Broken watches, an egg carton, and some duck feathers were transformed into the magnificent and absurd steam spewing Abyssal Wagon. It was in this that Jules and his team would have their wildest adventures, sailing and soaring and diving through the Seven Seas, dodging ravenous Volcanic Mega-Squids, exploring the Slug Pits of Sumatra, wooing mermaids and doing those things that could only be done in the Worlds Below and Between.
What had happened to their wonderful, ridiculous project? Thrown away, probably, with everything else.
“L’here de dormir, Elise.”
It was the voice of Sister Viverette. Time for sleep. She was a tall thin shadow, and she weaved to the bed on unsteady legs. Elise could smell the wine on her breath and heard the woman’s old knees creak as she bent down to straighten the bed sheets.
“Oui, Sister.”
Cold fingers tightened the blanket around Elise and brushed the hair back from her face.
“Pleasant dreams.”
“Thank you, Sister.”
The woman closed the door as she left and the room became dark.
Elise returned in her mind to those fantastic stories and dreams.
Voyaging in her imagination to these worlds Elise could feel her father, hear his voice, see his face. For a moment, she felt warm. Then, in the still darkness of that cold room, in a foreign place of strangers and indifference, the awful memories of that day on the shore came back as they always did.
The rushing tide, the screams.
He was there and then he was gone.
Sometimes she hated him for going away.
She hated him for filling her head with fantasies and lies, then leaving her alone.
But this night, Elise didn’t think of those things. She didn’t think about the cruel girls, the strange foreign city, the cold room, lost dreams, or the day Dad died.
Elise St. Jacques lay in the gloom and thought of The Worlds Below and Between, diving into its mysteries, swimming through its complexities, soaking in those old stories of Les Scaphandriers.
So she allowed herself for just that night to think about the good days.
After a time though, it became harder to drift through those fantasies. An hour passed, then two. The magical worlds faded away. The room grew cold. Elise felt numb. She wrapped her blanket tight around until she was a mummy swaddled in its soft, beautiful fabric.
“I’ll do this now, but not tomorrow, or ever again. I swear it.”
And for the first time in a long time, Elise St. Jacques cried.
Then she fell asleep and her blanket’s beautiful embroidery began to glow.
CHAPTER THREE
TEN YEARS GONE
WHO WAS THROWING sand against the window?
Elise had been having the most unusual dream. There had been darkness and bears riding scooters and something with skeleton fingers tugging at her skirt. She hated skirts.
It was cold. She curled up tight against the chill. Her arms and legs moved slowly, despite her best efforts, as if they weren’t interested in listening to her.
She tried to open her eyes and found it to be a struggle.
Stop throwing sand. She wanted to go back to her dream and make it better, maybe push the bear off of the scooter.
All right, it’s too cold.
Elise pulled at her blanket and it came apart in her hand.
She raised up, eyes wide. What had they done to her blanket?
The room was dim. The sound of sand continued to slam against her old windows. Elise tried to gather her blanket and saw it was falling apart, like cotton candy, or spider webs in the wind.
Her heart felt like it was being knifed. They had destroyed her blanket. How did they do this awful thing? She sobbed and took a deep breath.
She coughed. There was dust in the air.
Now awake, she heard outside the roar of high winds. A storm?
She peered out of the window next to her bed, dizzy, almost toppling back to her pillow, but couldn’t
see much.
There was a dim red haze, and the window was caked in dirt. The wind was blasting sand against it like a horrible snow. Her heart was pounding, eyes and throat itching because of dust, shrouded in the remains of her blanket.
“Wake up.” She told herself it was a dream gone bad, and she needed to wake up or be suffocated.
Something smelled disgusting. Rotten. Elise was scared.
“I need to wake up. Wake up now. Wake up. Wake up.”
What was happening?
She reached for her light on the nightstand next to her bed and pulled the string.
Nothing.
The power must be out, she thought.
So hard to see in the room. So dark.
She pushed away the remnants of her blanket and scrambled out of bed, feeling her way. The other beds were empty and the room a shambles of dust and cobwebs. The rotten smell was getting stronger as she moved about, disturbing the still air in the room.
Where are they? Where is everybody?
Fine, I will not wander around a nightmare in my pajamas, she thought, fear becoming anger.
She looked at the remains of her blanket for a long moment. It was a dusty gray shroud, thin as hair, the vibrant embroidery just a memory. What had they done? Her teeth bit into her lip in anger and sadness.
“I’ll make them pay for this.”
My beautiful blanket. Dad’s blanket.
She pulled on jeans, boots, and a sweater.
Elise ran out of her room into a tornado of dust and nearly plummeted out of her hallway into the street three floors below.
The wood at her feet was rotten and gave way under her boots. She backpedaled, sending chunks of the floor flying, grabbing the door jamb for support.
The rest of the building was gone.
Her doorway opened out onto a pit where the Girl’s Garden had once towered. The air was red chaos with wind blowing sand sideways. She struggled to see through the storm.
Elise teetered on the edge of her door jamb, fifteen meters above the street, her room and the floors beneath just a tall, jagged column of wood and stone.
Freezing wind slapped her face, and something more, the sand, as if thrown by a giant. It hurt.
Why am I dreaming this?
She became tangled in rusted support metal beneath the rotten wooden floor and fell backwards into her room. A splinter of wood sliced her hand, but the pain was nothing. What Elise was seeing overwhelmed everything else.
Paris was engulfed in a storm of wind and sand.
And something more. Fireflies? No. Sparks of light filled the air, shutting on and off. Sparks. Electricity. The air, the sky, was charged with lightning.
The old building across the street from where The Girl’s Garden had stood was burned out and skeletal, what she could see of it through the red fog of the sand storm. Dunes of sand were piled high, like crimson snow. The blood red haze made it impossible to see beyond, but huge flashes of light, like the heat lightning she remembered from her time in Florida, erupted in the distance.
Thunder, sharp and brittle, barked and shook her to the core. She felt the rumble in her heart.
Elise held her bleeding hand up to her face. It hurt.
“Oh, crap.”
She scrambled back into the darkness of her room, dizzy from fear and confusion. Wait. Dizzy yes, because the floor felt like it moved. Impossible. Floors don’t move.
First, I need to wrap up this cut.
She opened the chest in the corner of the room and pulled out a black scarf. There was a thick layer of dust everywhere, and it made breathing difficult. Elise ripped the scarf in half, wrapped a piece around her lower face as a bandana so she could breathe without sucking in dust. The other half became a tight bandage for her wound. The cut wasn’t too bad, but she didn’t want it to get full of that awful dust.
She looked around, taking stock of her surroundings.
Dust. Lots of it. Wait. The candles. She searched her bedside table for matches and found a box. A strike, and a lit candle revealed more in the gloom.
There was something big and moldy on one of the other beds. Agnes’s bed. She walked closer, inspecting it.
Elise weaved again, like Sister Viverette after too much wine. Why am I so dizzy, she thought.
The mold was the size of a person, and spread out like spilled old molasses, dripping down the sides of the quilt. It smelled horrible. Tiny white mushrooms were growing here and there. Elise looked closely and her stomach lurched.
At the top of the bed, stuck in this puddle of mold, there was a pair of pink rimmed glasses. And buck teeth.
Elise wanted to scream but couldn’t find her breath.
This was Agnes.
Ok. Screaming and acting the fool wasn’t an option.
This nightmare was different, true, but if she was to be an active participant in her own nightmare she was going to take charge. Lucid dreaming, that’s what they called it, right?
Elise ran back to her bed and grabbed her backpack. It was a tough old thing, dusty but still intact. Inside of it were a couple of her books, a water bottle green with mold, her flashlight, some odds and ends.
Oh. Snack bars. Sweet. Guess it was true, junk food could survive the apocalypse, at least in dreams.
Elise jammed socks and underwear into the bag along with a shirt and jeans. Oh, and her toothbrush. Dad had always badgered her about brushing her teeth.
She forced herself not to look back at the bed, where the body lay molding.
But what if it was moving?
What if Agnes was up and about, reaching out with drippy, gross fingers of mold and mushroom?
“What if I stop freaking myself out? How about that?”
Her backpack was heavy, but not impossible.
Time to get out of here. Anywhere but here.
“Let’s see the rest of my nightmare.”
And that’s when something wet and heavy moved in the darkness of the corner of her room.
The feeling you should look over your shoulder, that something awful was behind you?
Elise had that feeling. Her heart raced. She forced herself to look back into the darkness.
The stinky lump of Agnes still moldered on the bed, but there was a shadow behind it. A tall, thin, shadow.
“Hello?”
Nothing.
She couldn’t breathe and her skin was alive with fear.
“Hello?”
The thin shadow moved and when it did there was something unnatural in the movement.
Terrified, Elise scrambled to the door that opened out into the storm. She looked down, beneath the crumbling, rotten door jamb, and the whole world felt once more like it was spinning.
The street so far below was draped in sand and spark.
The roar of the wind was strong, and she couldn’t hear if the shadow was moving. That made it worse because it could be on her before she knew it.
Time to move.
She strapped her backpack tight and dropped to her knees, looking down into the room below. Dark, but maybe safer than this.
Elise looked back. The shadow was no longer dark against the far wall. It was low and slow, moving along the floor. Towards her.
Her fingers gripped the metal bars that had supported the stone of her floor. The cut on her hand stung. She slung her left leg down, into space, holding tight. Then the other leg and she was hanging by ten fingers out over the pit below.
Now what?
If she dropped straight, she might make the floor below. Or she might miss by an inch and plummet.
Elise saw a beam of wood close to her left hanging from the debris of her floor. She held herself now with her right hand and reach out with her left, clutching a deep gouge in the wood.
Deep breath.
Like a monkey she released her right and swung to the beam.
Not bad.
Then the beam shifted under her weight and dropped a few inches.
Bad.
I
f the beam fell out of the stone building she would die. The floor wasn’t directly below her. It was a foot to her right. She would need to swing over and drop and hope nothing gave way.
A warm, disgusting breath tickled her neck through the cold of the storm’s air. She glanced back into the face of the shadow, and in the blackness of that face there were teeth like knitting needles and dozens of tiny red eyes.
Elise didn’t hesitate. She pushed off against the wooden beam and dropped as far to the right as she could, landing with a hard bounce against the floor below.
Run.
Elise moved to survey the room. It was a shambles of dust, just like hers had been. No corpses, no weird walking shadows.
And a hole in the back wall.
She ran to the hole. It was big enough to fit a skinny girl with a fat backpack and there was a street lamp just beyond, within reach.
“I can climb out onto the lamp post and make it to the street. No problem. But then what?”
A thump. Elise turned to the sound.
The shadow man had dropped into the room and stood smiling a horrible hungry smile, a thin silhouette against the storm.
It slinked towards her.
Elise was through the hole in the wall and out onto the light post before she had time to blink.
She slid down the pole like she’d seen firefighters do in old movies and landed in the street, ankle deep in soft sand.
She raised her middle finger up to the teetering tower of rubble that was all that remained of the Girl’s Garden, turned, and ran as fast as she could into the dark, storm swept streets of her Paris nightmare.
The last gossamer shreds of her blanket drifted away behind her.
The shadow watched her go, and its many eyes did not blink.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE CITY OF LIGHT
WHERE WAS EVERYONE?
Her instinct was to call for help. It’s what you do when you’re a kid and you’re lost or scared. You call for help, but it was so loud on the street she didn’t imagine it was possible for her voice to be heard.
She tried anyway. Her call came out like a mouse fart.
This felt like one of those nightmares where you try to scream but can’t find your voice. It was hard to take a deep breath for fear of sucking in sand, even through her makeshift bandana. There was no way her voice could carry over the roar of the wind.