The In-Between

by Rebecca K. S. Ansari

  “Do that again!”

  Elena seemed amused by Cooper’s fascination. She did as she was asked, this time flickering into an image that caused Cooper to slap a hand to his open mouth. “How about this?” the new person asked. The voice, the grin, and the clothes—it was like Cooper was peering into a mirror, but with an image that moved independently of him.

  “Stop it!” Cooper said. “That’s not funny. Change back!”

  Her laughter continued through her transformation back to Elena. “I’ve never been able to show this off to anyone living before.”

  “Please don’t ever do that again,” Cooper finally managed to say.

  “You asked,” she said with a shrug.

  “It’s beyond freaky.”

  “I suppose it is. I haven’t thought about it in a long time. Sometimes even I forget who I was—who I am. I’m here, and yet not. Invisible. Like a forgotten dream.”

  Elena sipped her tea again and said, “Anyway, the living are so obsessed with bodies. All of this”—she gestured to herself—“it’s just a container, I know now. The true me—my core—is always the same.”

  Cooper stared at her, dumbfounded. He didn’t think body switching was as mundane as Elena was making it sound. He had no idea if the girl he saw now was Elena’s “real” self, but she was at least in the image he’d become accustomed to. That would have to do.

  “Does it hurt to die?” Cooper blurted out the question without thinking and was immediately embarrassed. It was such a strange and deeply personal question, but when she didn’t seem bothered by it, he added, “I mean, ’cause you’re not . . . normal, right? You’re not really a person, are you?”

  Elena flinched.

  “I mean, you were a person, but you aren’t . . . you . . .” Cooper decided to stop talking.

  “Yes. It hurts. I can change how I appear, but I’m still flesh and blood, like you.” Elena put her hand on top of Cooper’s. It was warm.

  As they spoke, the clouds had moved impossibly fast, now covering half of the sky. Lightning danced within them.

  “So what happens to you? I mean, when you die, you don’t really die, right? You can’t have, because you’re still here. But your body—bodies?—are always found in the ruins.”

  “I die the same way everyone else does—the body ends. It’s left behind as evidence of who was once there, but the soul, or whatever you choose to call it, goes on. I believe most people go on to the Beyond, but my sister and I, well . . . we end up here, every time. I wake up as my original self, until I’m called back out again. A new quest, a new body.”

  A truth of what Elena was describing dawned on Cooper. “Wait. You’ve done this more than three times, haven’t you?”

  “Three times?” Elena asked, her voice lifting.

  “Yeah. That’s how many accidents we found.”

  “Oh, there’ve been many, many more. Unfortunately, not every tragedy is deemed worthy of news coverage.”

  Cooper thought of the vast numbers of deaths they had already tallied. The idea that this was only a fraction was chilling. “So—what? That’s it? You’re going to do this for all of eternity?”

  “I used to think so, but not anymore. Every time I return, I’m a little more . . . broken. Weakened. Like less of me returns each time. It’s hard to explain.”

  The temperature around them was tumbling, and Cooper was made colder still by a few drops of rain that began to fall.

  Elena looked up, seeming to notice the storm cloud for the first time. She spoke quickly. “Cooper, there is only so much a body and soul can take. The injuries of each of my deaths echo in my bones, and the heartbreak scars my mind. They leave both my sister and me ruined, like the body we’ve left behind, and it takes longer and longer for us to become well again. Soon, I know, I will be too shattered to ever come back again. Neither my sister nor I can bear much more.” As she spoke, rain began falling in earnest, splatting into their cups, splashing up in little tea eruptions.

  “Surely then you’ll be allowed into the Beyond, right?” Cooper said.

  The sky lit up for a fraction of a second, and then thunder shook the table. Cooper startled, but Elena didn’t react at all. Instead she tipped her head and looked at Cooper through heavy lids. Fat raindrops plastered strands of Elena’s hair to her face. “I’ve come to accept that I’ll always be in the In-Between, dead or alive. I only wish I knew whether to fear or to hope that this is possibly my last quest.”

  Cooper had come here with the sole purpose of saving his own life, and those of his sister and his friend. But, as Jess had suspected, they weren’t the only ones in danger. “Elena, I know that you said you can’t, but you have to tell me more. There has to be some way to stop this awful cycle, for you, for me, for everyone involved. Why not just stop doing these quests entirely? Don’t leave this place, don’t die again. Then maybe you can stay here until you figure out how to get through that door.”

  “It doesn’t work that way,” she said. “We can’t stop.”

  “Can’t or won’t?” he asked.

  At that, a lightning strike splintered the oak tree beside their table with a terrifying and deafening crash. The rain began pouring down so heavily, he could barely see Elena through it.

  The In-Between was not happy.

  As Cooper shielded his head with his arms, he could barely hear himself say, “Tell me what’s coming! I don’t want you to have to suffer!”

  Elena opened her mouth, but whatever she said was overtaken by a rumbling that went from a murmur to a cacophony in a few short seconds, like an unseen train barreling straight toward them. Cooper slapped his hands over his ears and instinctively ducked down, his eyes closed. The roar shook his chest like the skin of a drum and lasted far too long to be thunder. When it came to an abrupt halt, Cooper dared to crack his lids, and found the yellow house standing only ten yards away. A path of freshly torn, muddy earth trailed out from it, and the door sat slightly ajar.

  He caught the scent of pumpkin pie and woodsmoke.

  “Cooper, you need to leave,” Elena bellowed against the driving storm. She pushed Cooper to his feet. “I’m glad that you came here. But I can’t risk telling you any more than I already have.”

  “You have to!” Cooper’s mind flashed back to his dictionary search on “vigilante.” A self-appointed doer of justice. What justice was being served by her dying in these horrific accidents? And what disaster was on the horizon? “Please tell me what’s going to happen—I’m afraid all our lives are in danger!”

  “You aren’t safe here!”

  A thousand more questions rushed to Cooper’s lips, but another blast of lightning struck the table, blowing Elena back with a cry. The door of the house beckoned.

  “Go!” Elena begged.

  The earth began trembling under Cooper’s feet, threatening to knock him to his knees. “But—”

  “Cooper, now!”

  His clothes were leaden with rain, and when he took what should have been the handful of steps to reach the threshold, he found it as effective as walking the wrong direction on a moving walkway. The front door, and only the front door, began retreating, as if it were the basket of a slingshot being pulled away by some giant unseen hand.

  Cooper ran, but the faster he sprinted, the farther it seemed to stretch away from him. Then, in a terrifying reversal, the door rushed toward him. Cooper slowed and let out a yelp before the doorway swallowed him up, passing over him like a strong wind. If he traversed the inside of Elena’s house, he didn’t see it, for the next thing he knew, he was on his hands and knees staring up at his own house, sitting calmly across the alley from where he was on Elena’s back porch.

  The quiet, cool evening air was disturbed only by Cooper’s heaving breath and the sound of a city bus stopping somewhere nearby. His clothes were completely dry.

  The familiar sight of Mr. Evans’s cat, Panther, prowling for mice anchored Cooper back in reality. The kitty seemed wholly undisturbed by Coope
r’s sudden appearance. It was only when Cooper bolted through the yard, across the alley, and into his house that Panther skittered away with a glance that said, How rude!

  23

  Cooper made it to his own home almost as quickly as he’d shot through Elena’s house. He flew through the back door and used the opposite wall to stop himself. He spun around and leaned his back against it, pressing his hands flat against the surface to convince himself of its permanence.

  His chest heaved both from the run and from the absolutely terrifying absurdity of all he had witnessed. How would he even begin to recount all of this to Gus and Jess?

  To his surprise, the two of them were standing in the kitchen, both smiling at him. Gus folded his arms smugly and said, “She threatened to call the cops on you, didn’t she?”

  “How long have I been gone?” Cooper panted.

  Jess and Gus glanced at each other slowly, then back at Cooper.

  “What do you mean, gone?” Jess said.

  “I was—” Cooper cut himself short. The kitchen clock, the one he had last seen what seemed like a century ago, showed 5:22.

  “What day is it?”

  Both Gus and Jess said in concerned unison, “Monday.”

  Only ten minutes had passed since he had left this same kitchen.

  “You guys,” Cooper murmured, shaking his head. “I was . . . I’ve been gone for . . .” He walked to his sister, put a hand on each of her shoulders, and held on tightly. “You have to believe me. Elena’s house is . . . it’s like a portal or something. I went through it, and on the other side was this field and then her house was swept away, and I was stuck there for days, years—”

  “Cooper,” Jess said over him “we were just over there with you.”

  “—and Elena and I talked for a long time. She’s, like, two hundred years old, but she’s never died, not really. She said she was between life and death, and—” Cooper only stopped talking because Gus entered his field of vision, creeping up slowly behind Jess, fear and shock etched on his face.

  “What did Elena tell you?” Gus asked.

  Cooper was immensely relieved that Gus, at least, seemed to believe him.

  “She said that the place where we were is between life and death,” Cooper repeated. “I told her all we knew about the crest, and she told me that . . . wait, hold on, I gotta sit down.”

  They all sat at the kitchen table, foreheads nearly touching as Cooper told them everything he could remember about the In-Between: the landscape, Elena’s past, the time warping, Elena morphing and her dying in all of the past tragedies. He told them what he now believed: that she wasn’t the cause of these disasters but instead played some role he didn’t understand.

  When he was done, Jess’s eyes were wide, and Gus appeared to be overheating, his face flushed.

  “Well, if Elena isn’t the one behind all of this,” Jess said, “what is she? Why does all this terrible stuff follow her wherever she goes?”

  “I don’t know. But someone, or something, keeps making her do this. She said she couldn’t risk stopping or telling me any more. It felt like she was trapped. A victim.”

  “I know the feeling,” Jess said with a grimace.

  “And,” Cooper continued, “she said that she’s been involved in tons more accidents than just the three we’ve found. And every one of her deaths is chipping away at her—that her body and soul can’t take much more. Soon she and her sister will be so completely damaged they’ll never be okay again. She also insisted that even though we’re right about her and the Vigilantes shield reappearing, that we’re looking at it wrong.”

  Gus leaned back and slowly folded his arms, staring up at the ceiling, deep in thought.

  “We have to figure out why she’s here,” Cooper said. “It felt like . . . I don’t know, like she was trying to protect me from something, staying silent. The big question now is how do we look at it right?”

  Jess appeared eager to offer an answer, but nothing came. She ended up shaking her head and shrugging. Cooper made a T with his hands like a football coach and ran up to his room. He returned with the iPad, sat back down, and started typing.

  “Everything we know is from these articles, right? The answer must be in here somewhere.” He pulled up their most recent search, the New York Chronicle article about the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. He read it aloud. Jess and Gus both listened intently. After the last word, they all sat, thinking, reconsidering the information. Cooper strained his brain, hoping for a lightning strike of understanding.

  “Read another one,” Gus finally said.

  Cooper went to their search history and clicked on the Sampoong Mall article, reading that one aloud too. Then the Charfield train accident. He had read them all so many times he probably could have recited them from memory, but he wanted to make sure he didn’t miss a single word.

  After the final sentence, Cooper closed his eyes. Images from the articles as well as Elena’s earnest plea to believe her flickered through his mind, but no answers revealed themselves. He opened his eyes again and turned to Gus. “You got anything?”

  “Nada,” Gus said.

  “Maybe we need to find more articles,” Jess said. “More accidents.”

  “We’ve already been searching nonstop. I don’t know how to find them.”

  “But she told you there were more. If they happened, there would be records somewhere. We just have to figure out the right way to search.”

  “Wait,” Cooper said, an idea blooming in his mind. He started nodding vigorously at Jess and Gus. “If they happened!”

  They stared back blankly. “I don’t get it,” Jess said.

  “Elena’s exact words to me were that our assumptions were backward and upside down,” Cooper said. “We’ve been focusing on all those people who died, right? Well, what’s the upside down and backward of that? What about people who didn’t die?”

  Cooper looked at Jess and Gus expectantly, but all he got were squints.

  “You’re not making any sense.” Jess was starting to sound annoyed.

  “Okay. I said she was in more accidents than the three we’ve found, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But that’s not actually what she told me. She said she’s been on countless more quests than we’ve found. Maybe they aren’t the same thing. Maybe there aren’t more articles to find because her whole job is to stop these catastrophes! To keep them from happening at all.”

  Gus started nodding, mirroring Cooper and his enthusiasm. “That could make sense.”

  “What if the incidents we’ve found were only when she’s failed?” Cooper went on. “We aren’t finding articles about her other missions because she succeeded in keeping those accidents from happening!”

  “That would explain why Elena was so upset when you accused her of killing people,” Gus said.

  “That would make me mad too,” Jess agreed. She then added, “Hold on a sec,” and went upstairs. A moment later, she returned to the kitchen with the letter Cooper had found during his first visit to the yellow house.

  “The lone person standing in the room,” she read aloud, “was a man who marched up and down the rows, one hand on his hip, the other moving a cigar to and from his pinched mouth. The air in the room began to crackle, though no one could hear it but me. I squared my shoulders and tried to stay calm”—Jess slowly lowered the letter and stared pointedly at her brother as she spoke the final words—“but failed.”

  “That’s gotta be it, right?” Cooper’s grin was wide and infectious. “She’s here to stop something terrible from happening.”

  “So maybe we aren’t all going to die?” Jess offered with a laugh and a nervous smile. Gus and Cooper joined in the giggles, their anxieties bursting from them like water through a breeched dam.

  But the relief didn’t last long.

  “But she still might fail, right?” Jess continued. “She has failed. Sometimes a lot of people still die. The people . . . who can see her.”<
br />
  “I wasn’t going to mention that,” Gus said, rubbing the back of his neck.

  “Even more of a reason to make sure she succeeds,” Cooper said.

  “But how?” Jess said.

  “I don’t know yet,” Cooper said, “but we have to. And not just for us, but for Elena too. Who knows how many more times she can do this? Maybe we can save ourselves and her at the same time.”

  “Yeah, her, us, and a couple hundred other people,” Gus added.

  “Gus!” Cooper said, so loudly that both Gus and Jess jumped. “Maybe that’s it!”

  “What’s it?” Jess said.

  “Every one of these accidents happened to a large gathering of people, right? A bunch of people on a train, a group of women at work, hundreds of people shopping in one mall. They were all together in one place. Maybe we can help fend off whatever’s going to happen if we just make sure we’re not all in one place at the same time. We can’t all be involved in something if we’re not there, right?”

  “Not where?” Gus asked.

  “Anywhere. At least not anywhere together. If this thing is fated to happen to all of us, how can it happen if we stay apart?”

  “I guess that makes sense,” Gus said.

  “But what if it’s a really big disaster?” Jess said. “Maybe it involves all of Chicago.”

  “But we know that’s not it, right? Otherwise Mom and Zack and Tyler and all of his friends would be able to see her.”

  Suddenly it felt like there was a ticking bomb someplace near them. Cooper looked around, seeing potential catastrophe everywhere. Was the stove leaking gas? Was carbon monoxide seeping from the heater? Could a refrigerator kill you?

  “But we live together, Cooper,” Jess said. “And all three of us go to school together. It’ll be impossible to stay apart all the time.”

  “I could pretend to come down with something terrible that keeps me home for the next month or so,” Cooper suggested.

  “You aren’t that good an actor,” Jess said.

  “Well, you’re sick all the time, maybe you can do it.”

  “I can’t fake high blood sugar. It’s kind of out of my control.”