Elatsoe

by Darcie Little Badger

  She did make note of some interesting details. For example, the color of the ground in Willowbee was uniformly dark green, with the exception of gray paved roads, and when she zoomed out, the town resembled an odd square on a yellowy-green quilt. She checked the clinic parking lot, searching for one of Allerton’s old cars, but the only vehicle behind the clinic was a scuffed blue Volkswagen, definitely not his style.

  During that period of time, had he been out for lunch? Driving home? When had the images been taken, anyway? Morning? Afternoon? A weekday or the weekend? Ellie wasted an hour zooming up and down Willowbee’s streets. She even visited Allerton’s digital mansion.

  Strangely, the entire property was blurry, as if intentionally blocked.

  The government sometimes blocked restricted areas from satellite-image maps, but were private citizens allowed to do the same? Probably. Allerton clearly found a way to hide.

  Out of curiosity, Ellie entered one final location into the search bar: the wooded road where Trevor died.

  As expected, it was empty, no sign of a staged accident. How could there be? The image had been compiled years ago. Somewhere, on that map of Texas, Trevor still lived.

  And yet—

  Ellie zoomed in to one of the trees along the road. There was a hint of color beside it. She zoomed in more.

  The smudge of an upturned face.

  She snapped the laptop closed.

  When Ellie peeked at the image again, her heart beating so fast it practically vibrated, the face was gone.

  TWENTY-ONE

  ELLIE KNEW THAT it was possible to graft a lemon branch onto an orange tree and grow two kinds of fruit on the same plant. Perhaps that’s why, in her dream that night, she woke up under a tree that had the body of a juniper and the crown of a mesquite. Black mesquite pods rattled in a dry wind and dropped, crumbling into ash as they struck the ground.

  She and the tree were the only living things in sight. The earth was hard and cracked. A furrow once carved by a river split the ground in front of her. Ellie was so thirsty, but there was nothing left to drink.

  “It’s not just a drought,” Trevor said—his voice was so close! “It’s the consequence of greed.”

  He sat in the former riverbed. No. Not sat. He was buried to the waist.

  “Are you real?” Ellie rasped, afraid to approach. In fact, she was tempted to avert her eyes and run away, but his kind smile disarmed her.

  “Of course. Jeez, your voice sounds rough.”

  “I’m thirsty,” she explained.

  He shook his head. “Willowbee. They’ve taken all the water. They’ll take everything, eventually. That’s what leeches do.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh, yeah.”

  “They don’t belong here.”

  “But they are here,” Ellie said.

  “For now.” Trevor drew a ring in the dirt with his finger. His nails were long, as if he hadn’t cut them in weeks. “Do you know how our plants and fungi are corrupted and transformed into doorways?”

  “You mean fairy rings?” Ellie asked.

  “Fairy rings. That’s such a cute term for wormholes that slice through reality.”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted.

  “The fairies and their humans dance in circles,” Trevor said. “They throw great balls and masquerades. The dances of magic users can be powerful. Their ‘midnight revels, by a forest side or fountain, some belated peasant sees, or dreams he sees.’ John Milton. I read his poetry in college. Not my thing anymore. I’d rather read the poetry in Gregory’s book of nursery rhymes. Ring around the rosie. Pocket full of posies. Ashes, ashes …” He trailed off. Looked at his hands, as if confused.

  “We all fall down,” Ellie offered.

  “Yes,” he said. “Where’s Little Greg?”

  “He’s somewhere safe.”

  “I was just holding him. Reading to him.”

  Ellie said nothing.

  “Where’s my son?”

  Trevor’s face began to darken with bruises. With a startled cry, Ellie turned around and pressed her face into the rough bark of the juniper-mesquite hybrid. A moment of silence. And then, with a voice that resembled the rattle of a mesquite pod, Trevor asked, “Can you help me? Ellie?”

  She didn’t want to look.

  “My back,” he said. “What did he do to me?”

  Ellie felt a biting pain in her lower back, and the shock of it woke her up. With a startled shout, she scrambled off her cot and turned on the guest room lights. There was a pencil tangled in her sheets; its sharp tip must have stabbed her as she slept.

  “Ooof,” she said, sinking to her knees and leaning against the wall. “Graphite tattoo.”

  She tried to remember her dream, but its details were already fuzzy.

  Trevor had been there. Reciting nursery rhymes. Asking for help.

  Warning her about the danger of strange dances.

  TWENTY-TWO

  THE LAST TIME Ellie had an emergency one-on-one meeting with Dan, she’d just been suspended for giving her homeroom class nosebleeds.

  Well, technically, it was Kirby who’d given them nosebleeds.

  The howl incident began with a public-speaking exercise. Ellie, twelve years old, stood before her twenty-eight-student class; only half of the kids were paying attention.

  “I can describe my summer vacation with one word,” Ellie said. “Enlightening. Centuries ago, Six-Great-Grandmother Elatsoe, my namesake, developed a method to wake the dead.” She paused for effect, peeking at her audience. All eyes faced forward. “Glad I have your attention now,” Ellie continued. “Her secret has persisted through eight generations of Apache women. Nine, including me. My best friend, Kirby, died last year. He was eighteen, which is old for an English springer spaniel. I brought him back in June. Dogs are ideal poltergeist companions, since they’re easy to train. That said, anything inhuman is fair game. Grandma taught a woolly mammoth several tricks, but …”

  Ellie stopped reading because Samuel Tanner, a kid in the first row, was waving his arm like he wanted to flag down an airplane. All his passionate hand-raising wrecked her concentration. “What?” Ellie asked.

  “Actually,” Samuel said, “ghosts don’t work that way. They’re chaotic balls of negative emotional energy.”

  “Actually,” she corrected, “you’re thinking about human ghosts, which manifest when people aren’t buried right.”

  “Actually, Ellie, animals can’t make ghosts.”

  “Actually, Samuel, they can. Did you not hear my report?”

  “Actually, I’m calling you a liar.”

  “Actually, Kirby is in the classroom right now, so please shut your freaking mouth, Sam.”

  Mrs. Leman half-rose from her cushy teacher’s chair, but before she could restore order, somebody shouted, “Make Kirby do a trick!”

  “Gladly,” Ellie said. She could vindicate herself and amaze the class with just one innocent command. But what? Tell him to appear? No. He still flickered sometimes, and that wasn’t very impressive. Fetch? Ellie left his tennis ball at home. Ah, she had a plan! “Howl, boy!”

  There are military-grade “sound cannons” that can incapacitate human targets with sonic waves. The notorious Sargasso Sirens concert rocked so loud, eardrums burst in the mosh pit. Neither could hold a candle to the unbridled voice of a dead hound.

  Kirby did not howl, not merely. His cry seized the classroom and shook it; every molecule screamed with him. The windows warped, bubbled, and cracked. Overhead, every long fluorescent bulb sparked and went dark.

  “Stop!” Ellie shouted. “Stop, stop!” Buffeted by the foghorn howl, she could not hear herself scream. Could not hear a peep from her terrified classmates, though their mouths yawned with horror. The windows exploded outward, dusting the empty schoolyard with powdered glass. Students ran for the door, hands over ears, noses bleeding. The blood speckled and smeared across the tiled floor, and tennis shoes tracked it to the hallway. Ellie doubled over because her hea
d was a nucleus of pain; blearily, she saw Mrs. Leman escape the classroom. The door closed.

  Alone with his master, Kirby stopped howling.

  Ellie dabbed blood off her upper lip; it stained her essay with Rorschach spatters. What the hell happened? Kirby had never howled like that before. Clearly, public speaking made him nervous.

  Ellie looked through the window embedded in the classroom door. Somehow, its thick glass survived the howl intact. Across the hall, her homeroom class huddled against a row of lockers. Mrs. Leman had flagged down the assistant principal. Ellie ducked out of sight before either adult noticed her.

  This was bad. Very bad. Suspension or expulsion bad. Ellie hadn’t served detention before. She’d never survive behind bars. Would they penalize Kirby, too? The good boy was just following orders!

  “Heel, Kirby,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  Ellie climbed out a broken window and ran home.

  After she explained the situation to Dan, he bowed his head, as if disappointed. “Your heroic ancestor treated her dead hounds with respect,” he said. “Kirby isn’t your toy. He isn’t your pet. Not anymore. He’s a conscious grenade, Ellie. Never pull the pin unless you have a very good reason.”

  Years later, as Ellie told Dan about her adventure in the dead ocean, she felt uncharacteristically nervous. Would he be disappointed again? She didn’t mean to visit Below. It wasn’t like sixth grade. When she finished, Ellie wiped her clammy hands on her jeans and waited for Dan to speak. He was a plump man with rays of laugh lines radiating from the corners of his eyes. In fact, they were so deep, he always seemed to be smiling. Dan wore a bolo tie, yellow shirt, and blue jeans—always dressed like somebody who worked at a rodeo, even though he’d retired from that profession in his forties after one too many riding-related injuries.

  “You’ve never been closer to death,” Dan said, “than the moment you sank.”

  “So she did visit the land of the dead? God! Just like …” Vivian hesitated and seemed to change her mind. “What can we do?” she asked. They’d moved to the living room after supper; Lenore sat with Baby Gregory on the floor, half-listening to the conversation, and Dan, Ellie, and Vivian shared the sofa.

  “These things don’t happen randomly,” Dan said. “Okay. Step by step, describe your thoughts, your actions, before the world changed.”

  Ellie crossed her arms and stared at the ceiling, sinking into her memories. “I was on a bench. It felt hot beneath me. Not painful, just warmed by the sun. Right. I woke up my trilobite.”

  “Trilobite,” Dan said. “I’ve seen their fossils. Little segmented roly-poly-looking things. Is that right?”

  “Yes,” Ellie said. “The ghosts might as well be moving versions of their fossils. Actually, that’s what I thought about as I sat on the bench. The trilobite crawled around my feet, and I thought it looked like a roach. The observation really amused me. The world changes, but it doesn’t. I felt … this fond familiarity. Like, despite the eons that separate humans and prehistoric critters, we are all earthlings, you know?”

  “I do,” Dan agreed.

  “Then things got weird. Other trilobite ghosts flooded the park, and the reef appeared.”

  “Ellie,” Dan said, “besides your cousin, have you ever lost a loved one before?”

  “Kirby,” she said. “My dog. But he’s not really lost. My paternal grandfather passed away, too. Couple years ago.”

  “How old was he?” Dan asked.

  “Seventy-nine,” she said.

  “Your cousin died during the prime of his life,” Dan said. Lenore looked up sharply, her jaw tense, her eyes hard.

  “That’s right,” Ellie said. “He did.”

  “And have you dwelt on his death?” Dan asked.

  “Every day,” Ellie said. “I can’t stop thinking about the … the murder … until Abe Allerton is in prison, where he can’t hurt us anymore.”

  “When you coexist with ghosts,” Dan said, “speak to them, and love them, you lean over the wall that separates the living from the dead. It becomes easier, then, to push you into that dangerous place, that land—or ocean, huh—that should not be experienced by anything with breath.”

  “What pushed her?” asked Ellie’s mother. “Her cousin’s death? Is that it?”

  “To dwell on death, especially a premature and violent end, burdens the soul. The tragedy grew heavier every time Ellie fed it with attention. Enough weight might cause somebody to topple. Yes, it might.” Dan shrugged. “But I think, in the park, Ellie pushed herself.”

  “I did?” Ellie asked.

  “Yep.”

  “How?” Vivian cut in. “Is it now dangerous for her to wake ghosts?”

  “Mom, I can’t abandon Kirby.”

  “If I’m right,” Dan said, “you won’t need to stop waking ghosts, as long as you’re mindful of the difference between the dead and the living.” He wagged a finger at Ellie, as if lecturing a class of rowdy toddlers. “There is a difference. The dead should not seem like kin. When they do? They might devour you.”

  “You mean that I opened the door to the trilobite’s underworld because I felt like we belonged together?”

  “Uh-huh,” Dan said. “That feeling of familiarity sent your soul to a dangerous place.”

  “Never think about dinosaurs again,” Vivian said. Perhaps she realized that the statement was extremely strange, because she added, “Will that keep her safe, Dan?”

  “I can’t guarantee anything, Vivian. Your family line has always played with fire.”

  “I’m worried that it’ll happen again,” Ellie’s mother said. “We cannot be too cautious. Ellie, I know Six-Great’s secret, but I rarely use it. Maybe that’s best.”

  “Don’t worry, Mom. I can escape the underworld. I just have to think about home. Real home. It worked the first time, and it’ll work again.”

  As if emphasizing her decision, Ellie called Kirby; he eagerly burst from the ether between the sofa and play mat. Baby Gregory uttered a shrill “Aaa?” and looked, with owlish intensity, at the ghostly shimmer. If Gregory was already sensitive to paranormal entities, he’d make a good student when he came of age. Assuming Ellie still wanted to pass Six-Great’s secret down his line. She had twelve years to make up her mind.

  “Is that the dog?” Dan asked, his expression so guarded, Ellie could not decide whether he was concerned or curious. After the howl incident, he refused to be near Kirby, but things had changed. Kirby wasn’t dangerous anymore.

  “You want to see?” she asked. “Appear, boy!”

  Kirby’s visibility made everyone but Ellie and Lenore jolt back with surprise. “Sorry about the jump scare,” Ellie said. “I wish he could do that trick less suddenly.”

  “Ah,” said Dan. He pointedly looked away from Kirby. “Thank you for the meal, Vivian. It’s a long drive home. I should start. Once I am gone, you need to tell her the last story of your heroic ancestor. It’s time.”

  “You’re right,” Ellie’s mother said, standing with him. “Thank you, Dan. I’ll see you out.”

  They left, and Ellie suspected that her mother just wanted a chance to confer with Dan alone. As if Ellie were still a child, too vulnerable and naïve to make grown-up decisions about her life.

  “Are you scared?” Lenore asked, from the floor. The question caught Ellie off guard. Lenore had been sullen and quiet that evening, barely speaking at supper. Brooding, perhaps. Who could blame her?

  “Scared of what?”

  “Yourself, I guess,” Lenore said. “What if you fall asleep in my guest room and wake up in the afterlife?”

  “That won’t happen.”

  “Is it easy to wake the dead?”

  “No,” Ellie said. “It’s never easy. I’m just good at it.”

  Lenore raised an eyebrow. “How long did it take to get good?”

  “A few years. I’m a natural, though.” Ellie shrugged. “It’s like any skill. Practice always helps, and some people excel more than others.”


  “What’s it like? Mental math?”

  “Look, I wish I could explain, but … the knowledge is secret. You know that.”

  “Worth a shot,” Lenore said, smiling in a way that didn’t reach her eyes. It reminded Ellie of a clown’s smile, deceptive and unsettling.

  “Mom may be a while,” Ellie said. “Guess I’ll sleep. Do you need anything? Tea? Cookies?”

  “No. Thank you. I’m fine.” She didn’t sound fine. Didn’t look fine. Wouldn’t be fine until Dr. Allerton, some way or another, was punished for Trevor’s death. And that made Ellie anxious. How long would Lenore wait before she did something terribly dangerous? Maybe her patience had already expired.

  “We’re getting close to answers,” Ellie said. “Jay is looking for something right now. Something that’ll confirm the freaky magic Dr. Allerton used on … on …”

  “On Trevor,” Lenore said. Ellie flinched at the use of his name. “Ah. So you think he killed Trevor with magic? What kind?”

  “Well, I …”

  Ellie’s phone beeped in rapid succession as a flood of instant messages rolled in. Jay was typing so quickly, his communications lacked their usual punctuation.

  JAY (8:34 P.M.) – Got article bout bear attack

  JAY (8:34 P.M.) – A farmer outside Willowbee found corpse in field

  JAY (8:34 P.M.) – Corpse had mangled leg

  JAY (8:34 P.M.) – Body never ID’d

  JAY (8:34 P.M.) – Could be drifter

  JAY (8:34 P.M.) – Howd u kno???

  JAY (8:35 P.M.) – Forwarding article now

  JAY (8:35 P.M.) – Lots of weird deaths near Willowbee

  “Who was that?” Lenore asked. “Sounds like an emergency.”

  “Jay. Perfect timing.”

  “Don’t leave me hanging. What did he report?”

  Ellie glanced at the front door. Her mother was still outside with Dan. “Maybe I should wait until—”