by David Boop
Was it one silhouette, or many? Her eyes couldn’t focus on the shadows long enough to count. They dissolved and reformed, and through them, the branches of the bramble tree mural appeared to sway in a breeze.
“Saints alive,” Eloise muttered.
She lifted her hand from her gun and crossed herself. Bullets would no more harm this shadow than a drop of water would douse a raging forest fire.
“Name your desire,” the voice said.
“My husband,” Eloise said. “Peter.”
“You want him back.”
“Yes.”
“He is dead.”
“Is that a problem?”
Eloise waited, tense and anxious. If they said no, she was out of options. She would return home and do as her father ordered: marry one of her many suitors who were more interested in someday inheriting her father’s ranch and riches than in Eloise herself.
She didn’t want them. She wanted Peter, dear Peter, the sheriff’s son, with his blue eyes and kind smile, who loved her for her.
“What price will you pay?” the voice asked.
“I’ll do anything.”
A pouch appeared on the bar. That was how it seemed to Eloise. One moment, the pouch was not there, and then it was. It was made from an animal skin unknown to these parts, blue and pearly, as if from a mythical sea serpent or dragon.
“Take it,” the voice said.
“Where’d that come from?”
“We spun it. From another Earth. A different Earth.”
That made Eloise uneasy, but she meant what she said. She would do anything, pay any price. She tied the pouch to her belt.
“There’s a cave in the mountains,” the voice said. “Go due west through a steep pass, into the shadow of a mountain shaped like a buffalo. Fill this with what you find there and bring it to us.”
“If I do, you’ll give me Peter?” she asked, but outside, the clouds dispersed. Sunlight pierced the saloon and flooded the dark corners. Eloise squinted against the sudden light. When she looked again, the shadows were gone.
* * *
For five days, Eloise rode west through the mountains. The terrain was rocky and steep. Travel was slow. She hoped when this was over, she could find her way out again.
The stores in her saddlebags ran low, so she packed late spring snow into her water flask and set snares to catch rabbits and squirrels.
Each night, when she set the snares, she recalled hot summer days when she and Annie and Peter had done this together. They once caught a quail with beautiful speckled feathers. Annie had wanted to cook it. Of the two sisters, she was the rough one, more like their father than soft-hearted Eloise, who begged for the bird’s release. In the end, Peter resolved the argument by cutting the snare.
“She always gets her way!” Annie said.
If only that were true, Eloise thought as she sat by the campfire, wrapped in a horsehair blanket. If it were true, she wouldn’t be here with only her memories for company.
Three days more, and she found the cave, an open wound in the skin of the world. Wind moaned through the dark gap. She couldn’t see farther than a couple feet inside. What had the Spinners sent her to find? Gold and treasure? A mystical object? A special plant or fungus? Would she need to defend herself from a bear or cougar?
Brave Peter and reckless Annie—even her father—would have charged in, but Eloise remained cautious. The cave entrance faced west. In a few hours, the sun would drop and pierce the gap, and then she would see.
While she waited, she snared, skinned, gutted and cooked a squirrel, and forced the stringy meat down her throat. She didn’t miss the suitors or the pressure from her father to choose one, but she missed good food, hot baths and the comfort of her bed. If this worked, she would have all that again, with Peter. They would be happy.
The sun arced across the sky and sank into a dip between two peaks. Liquid gold light spilled into the cave.
It was now or never.
For courage, Eloise drew Annie’s knife in one hand, rested her other hand on her gun, and marched inside.
* * *
Eloise returned to the town of no-name and tossed the iridescent pouch onto the saloon bar.
“I did what you wanted,” she said.
The shadows formed. Eloise expected it this time but was no less unnerved. They opened the pouch and breathed in its contents, if a shadow could do such a thing.
“Ahhhh,” the voice said.
“The cave was empty,” Eloise said, “except for air. You could get air anywhere.”
“Not air. Perfect nothingness. Only one with nothing in their soul could enter the cave and collect it.”
She felt chill. The Spinners had gazed into her soul and found nothing. This is what had come of losing Peter.
“Why do you want nothing?” she asked.
“Something can only come from nothing.”
She didn’t understand. If she asked for an explanation, she wouldn’t understand that, either.
“Where is Peter?” she asked.
“He awaits you at home, but know this: We cannot spin the dead back to life. Some barriers are impossible to break. We spun him here from a world like this one but different. He will not be as he was.”
Eloise remembered the warning, right up until she saw Peter in the doorway of their small house, on their corner of the ranch with the creek and rolling hills, his blue eyes and tender smile as they had always been.
* * *
Good days followed. The suitors left and no new ones came. Eloise’s father welcomed back his son-in-law. No one asked questions. Perhaps that was part of the Spinners’ magic. Eloise seemed to be the only one to remember Peter lay buried under the willow tree by the creek, beside her mother and Annie.
“How did we meet?” Peter asked one evening on their porch, while he cleaned his rifle and Eloise polished a candlestick.
From her rocking chair, she watched a brilliant orange sunset. Gnats swarmed over the creek, and birds darted among the gnats. On such a perfect summer night, the days of Peter’s absence seemed distant.
Except sometimes at night, she still dreamed of falling into darkness, and then sometimes, Peter asked about this world and their life together—a reminder that while he was Peter, he wasn’t her Peter. She suspected those things were linked, like a horse and its cart, and that if she could make Peter happy, the dreams would end.
“We were children together, you and me and Annie,” she said. “You would ride in from town, and we went on adventures. We learned every inch of this land. Then Annie died, and you stopped coming.”
“How did she die?”
“She fell from her horse and broke her neck.”
Even now, the memory hurt of the impossible stillness of a girl who was always on the move, her eyes sightless and glazed, lips parted in frozen surprise, blood in her long strawberry blond hair. As for Peter, she couldn’t judge what he was thinking.
“When did we meet again?” he asked.
“Five years later, at the town harvest festival. It was like we’d never been apart.” She took his hand. “You proposed a year later. You built this house for us.”
“I’ve never been much of a builder. My father said I have too many thumbs and not enough sense.”
That was the most he had said about his past in a while. Eloise wanted more, but he fell silent, and she didn’t push.
The last sliver of sun vanished behind the hills, and a cricket chirped near the creek. More joined it, and more. As a child, Eloise had opened the bedroom window to listen to their songs until Annie grew annoyed at the “racket” and slammed the windows shut.
“What makes that noise?” Peter asked.
“Crickets.”
“What’s a cricket?”
“It’s an insect. It rubs its legs together to make the chirping noise. You didn’t have crickets before?”
“No. I don’t like them.”
“Neither did Annie,” she said. “This place mus
t be different for you.”
“In some ways, yes.”
Peter didn’t cry. Her Peter hadn’t been a crier, either. But in that moment, he was unguarded, and Eloise saw his grief.
“Are you happy here?”
She hadn’t meant to ask that, but the words were past her lips before she could stop them. She was happy with him, but what if he did not feel the same? What if the Spinners gave him no choice in coming here? What if she had selfishly obtained her happiness at the expense of his?
He looked at her.
He told her.
His answer sent her back to the ghost town.
* * *
The mural of the bramble tree was gone, and a real tree grew in its place. The trunk burst upward through the wood-paneled floor. Black branches, bristling with spikes, thrust toward windows and into the eaves.
From the branches dangled shapes—cloth dolls, no bigger than Eloise’s hand, with yarn hair and black stitching for their eyes and mouth. Hundreds of dolls covered the tree like strange fruit. Instead of apples or peaches, the tree was growing tiny girls and boys.
Where had the dolls come from? The tree, too, for that matter. Eloise had last stood here mere months ago, but judging by the trunk’s thickness, this tree was decades old.
Impossible.
She laughed.
Peter was dead, yet he lived. That alone proved that impossible was, in itself, an impossibility.
“Why have you returned?” asked the voice.
Eloise saw no shadow figures, but there was a presence whose weight pressed down on her, and she was frightened. She wished Peter was with her, but her father had needed his heir at the ranch. Besides, this was her mistake to fix, not his. She had slipped away in the night and only told Peter afterward, in apologetic letters delivered by Pony Express.
“You know why I’m here,” she said.
“Do you think so?”
“You chose a specific version of Peter to—what do you call it?—spin to this world. You know what he left behind.”
“His son.”
Eloise spat her distaste for the shadows. “You separated a parent from a child. That was cruel. What did the boy think when his father disappeared?”
She hoped her righteous anger would sway the shadows, yet she also felt guilt for her own part in this tragedy. She had orchestrated her husband’s return without a thought to his own desires.
Because of that, she owed him. Peter wanted his son. Their son, though she had not met the boy. She and her Peter had wanted children, but the sickness took him away too soon.
The dolls twisted subtly so they faced Eloise with their frozen smiles. She would not allow them to frighten her.
“Give him back his son,” Eloise said.
“You want the boy?”
“I demand him.”
“You must pay a price.”
“I won’t return to your cave of nothingness.”
“That is no longer the price.”
“Name it,” she said, while she thought, What do you want, you devil? You trickster?
“Bring us the innocence of a child,” the voice said.
“What?”
Her anger faltered.
The voice repeated.
“I don’t understand,” Eloise said. “How do I do that?”
Why would she do that? To steal a child’s innocence was to erase a bit of goodness and purity from the world, to snuff out a small light against the darkness.
The voice didn’t answer. The presence that had weighed on her lifted. Suddenly the dolls were just dolls, and the tree just a tree. This time, the Spinners had left nothing on the dusty bar for her to collect and carry what they had tasked her to find.
* * *
Eloise searched aimlessly, with no plan except to keep moving until a plan presented itself.
On clear nights, she lay with her saddle for a pillow, stared at the stars and thought about worlds where Peter and Annie were alive, where she and Peter had started a family together, where they shared the memories of their son’s birth and his first steps and his first words. She yearned for such a world with a desire so strong it hurt.
Peter knew their son, but she did not. Did he have her eyes or Peter’s? What color was his hair? Was he smart or athletic, a daredevil or a bookworm? Would he recognize her as his mother? Would she love him as her own?
Such questions consumed her. Weeks passed. She wrote more letters to Peter, telling him how much she loved and missed him and how she dreamed of the day she would be in his arms again. Summer did battle with autumn, lost and retreated to gather its strength for next year. Prairie grasses browned. Dry leaves crunched under her horse’s hooves.
Eloise wandered from town to farm to ranch and wondered how to take a child’s innocence, and whether she even should. She had lost her own innocence on the day Annie died. Who had taken it, she wondered, or had it evaporated into nothing, like dew drops on a hot day?
The next town was like every other one: a main street, buildings, horses and wagons, goods and services, a way station amid the ocean of grass. In this one, townsfolk crowded in the street around wooden gallows, hastily constructed, meant to be torn down when its purpose was fulfilled.
Eloise hitched her horse and walked over. She had witnessed a hanging when she was fourteen years old, and the man whose neck had cracked was a thief who stole cattle from her father.
This man who marched to the gallows had his hands tied behind his back. He was pale but stoic, determined to face death with bravery.
“What did he do?” Eloise asked a woman in the crowd. She wore a homespun dress and apron, and looked at Eloise, in her dirty men’s garb, with suspicion. “I’m traveling. Passing through. I just rode into town.”
“He killed his wife’s lover,” the woman said.
“That’s a hanging offense?”
“It’s murder, ain’t it?”
A man with a deputy’s star on his chest fitted the noose around the neck of the murderer, who searched the crowd until he found a person he was looking for. His lips formed the words I love you.
“Papa!” cried out a young voice. “Papa, papa!”
“Saints alive,” Eloise said. “He has a child?” Without thought to the consequence, she cried, “Stop! You must stop!”
Murmurs from the crowd followed her as she pushed her way to the gallows. The child’s cries rose above all. Eloise climbed onto the wooden platform. Her eyes found the child, a girl clutching a doll.
The deputy on the platform unholstered his gun. “Whoever you are, you get outta here. This ain’t none of your business.”
“You would deprive a child of her father. That makes it my business, and the business of all decent folk.”
He pointed his gun. “You wanna get shot?”
Eloise knew she should stand down, that this wasn’t her mission, but she couldn’t stop. “Do you want to kill two people today? Exile this man from your town, if you must, but don’t ruin this child’s life. I beg you.”
The girl sniffled.
The deputy cocked his gun. “Last chance.”
Eloise looked not at him but the girl at the base of the platform. Her tear-streaked face radiated fear and hope, and something else. Innocence.
The innocence of a child.
Though it tore her heart, she knew what she must do. To reunite Peter with his son, she must tear this father and child apart.
“I’m sorry,” she said and stepped aside.
The deputy holstered his weapon. He kicked at a latch, a trapdoor opened and the condemned man fell through.
The girl screamed as her father spasmed and twitched at the end of the rope. Eloise stared through the opening of the trapdoor, and she imagined herself falling into the darkness beneath, like in her dream. Vertigo seized her. Her balance failed, her foot slipped off the gallows platform and she tumbled over the edge, several feet down into the dirt. No one moved to help her.
This is my fault, she thought
as she lay there with her guilt and grief, while another internal voice said, There was nothing you could do.
Then it was over. The crowd loosened like a frayed knot and came apart. The girl was led away by an older woman. Eloise watched the body be cut down and tossed onto a cart.
An object lay beside her. She picked it up. It was the girl’s doll, hair made of corn silk and eyes and mouth of black thread. It was a childhood treasure, but the girl had walked away without it, changed forever; no longer in need of such a thing.
Eloise cradled the doll as she walked back to her horse. She tucked it into her saddlebags with the tenderness that its former owner might not know again in this lifetime.
She rode from the town as fast as she could and took the doll to the Spinners.
* * *
Their son’s name was Simon. He was four years old, with blue eyes and strawberry blond hair. For the first time since the deaths of her mother and sister, Eloise was part of a family. Laughter lived in their home by the creek. She had thought when Peter returned she could not be happier. She had been wrong.
The day was chill and the ground soft from a recent snow. Peter had gone to town. Eloise and Simon tended to the chickens, and they made a game of blowing out clouds into the winter air.
In the afternoon, Eloise had Simon practice riding on old brown mare named Milly. To test his knowledge, she had the boy tell her how to saddle and bridle the horse, and corrected him when he didn’t get it quite right. He hugged his arms around her neck as she hoisted him into the saddle, and she adjusted the stirrups for his short legs.
“Hold the reins like this,” she said and positioned his hands on the soft leather strip.
“I know that.”
“What else do you know?”
“I know how to ride.”
“Oh, do you?”
He nodded solemnly. He was a serious boy. “I’ve known how to ride forever. Since I was three. But not on horses like this. Horses here ain’t proper.”
Did the horses he knew have wings? Or six legs? Or red eyes? She didn’t ask because she didn’t want him to think too much about before. Simon was young and would forget he had lived in any world but this one.