Wonders of the Invisible World

by Christopher Barzak

  I pressed my finger against the star a second time, a third, and then the air around us began to shimmer. The Probable Stone glowed brighter, then grew larger, and finally it began to lower itself from the sky until it stood in front of me, changing its shape so that it looked like an open door filled with white light.

  I looked back at Carolyn, who was already raising her hand to wave goodbye. I nodded at her, and when I looked back at Jarrod, I said, “Are you ready?”

  “Always,” he said, “if it’s with you.”

  So we stepped on through.

  And came out on the other side, at the end of the long gravel drive of my house back in Temperance, where Jarrod had met me two days before, blocking me from going to Lily Dale without him.

  All of the windows were still dark as the last smudge of night began to disappear from the horizon, and a red glow from the rising sun hung over the back tree line. After Jarrod and I came closer to the house, we found light escaping around the edges of the blinds in the kitchen windows. Ordinarily no light would be turned on until my mom woke up and started fixing breakfast, but when I let us in the front door and we searched the first floor, she was nowhere in sight. And when I raced upstairs to her room, taking two steps at a time, I discovered that her bed had already been made. Or else it had never been slept in.

  Across the hall, Toby was still asleep. His chest rose and fell peacefully. If nothing had disturbed him the night before, I thought maybe my mom had figured out some other way to walk Eva out of the world. Or else Carolyn had been wrong and maybe Jarrod and I could have driven back home after all. Maybe I didn’t need to talk my mom out of doing anything.

  “Toby,” I said, trying to wake him. He’d know where she went, I figured. And if he didn’t know, he could help us look for her.

  But Toby didn’t wake when I called his name. Not the first time, not the second. And when I went farther into his room and stood directly over him, when I shook him by his shoulders and called his name over and over, he still didn’t wake up.

  That was when I knew that she’d done it after all.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Jarrod asked from the doorway.

  I looked over my shoulder at him. “He’s been put to sleep, I think.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My mom did something to him.”

  It was clear to me then too that she didn’t want anyone to get in the way of her plans.

  I went to Toby’s window to look out at our property, sweeping from orchard to stream to pasture to cornfield to the woods at the back of the place, hoping to see her moving through the landscape somewhere. But the view offered me no answers. Our farm remained silent, asleep and dreaming.

  There would be no answers forthcoming, I knew then. Clearly she’d foreseen my coming back here, foreseen that I’d try to stop her. I’ve always known what you were going to do before you did it, she’d told me before I left home. And it was true. She’d always seen our futures laid out like a map in front of her. There were gaps in her vision, of course, but she’d seen enough. More than I ever realized.

  None of that mattered now, though. I had to find her. Her trail would most likely be invisible, but I knew how to see invisible things, thanks to the eyes I’d been born with, the eyes my mother had given me. Now that her blindfold had been lifted, I could recall what it had felt like to interact with the invisible world when I was little, when it wasn’t unnatural for me to see a spirit cross the railroad tracks on its way to wherever it was going, or to see a white stag slip between the trees down in Marrow’s Ravine. And if my mother had tried to cover her trail so that I couldn’t find her, I’d just have to go back to the moment she left here. I’d have to look for her in the world’s shadow.

  I’d seen her do this—return to the past by counting backward to the hour she wished to revisit—and by now I knew how to do that trick without even thinking my way through the steps. So I sat down on my bed, preparing to dream, like my brother was doing in the next room, but with a purpose. Jarrod pulled the chair from my desk and put it beside my bed, straddling it, his arms folded on top of the back, his head resting on his folded arms. “If you see me struggling with something,” I told him, “don’t wake me.”

  “But what if you’re in danger?”

  “If I need you to wake me, I’ll squeeze your hand. Here,” I said, and slipped my palm into his. It was warm and only slightly rough-skinned from all of the training he’d been doing, but it felt solid because of that, and someone solid was what I needed.

  Then I lay down and began to count back through the minutes and back through the hours. Back and back and back I traveled. And as I counted, the events of the hours that had passed before my return whirred by like ghostly visitors: my mother putting the fire out in the downstairs fireplace, advising Toby to go to bed, reminding him that he had work in the morning; Toby going into his room to sleep later; my mother going in a while afterward, putting two fingertips on top of his eyelids to conjure some kind of deep sleep within him. And as the right moment arrived—when my mother walked down the staircase from her own room, pulling her arms into an old denim jacket she wore each springtime—I passed out of this world to join her in that last hour of that morning, right as she left the house and, under the remains of the moonlight, crossed over the railroad-tie bridge into the orchard.

  When I opened my eyes again, I was in the orchard with her. The wind blew through the trees, making the few scraggly leaves that had opened up for spring whisper against one another. In the distance, the chimes on our front porch were ringing. And in front of me, my mother stood beneath the Living Death Tree.

  With her back to me, she placed one hand on the trunk of the old tree and curled the other around the knotty rim of the hole at the top, where the tree began to branch outward. She was talking to the woman who lived in there. Eva. Eva Jablonski. Her grandmother. My great-grandmother. The woman who held her son’s curse in the folds of her dress and wouldn’t let go of it. I couldn’t make out what my mother was saying, though, so quietly I moved forward.

  “There’s no reason for it,” my mother was saying. “My sons have nothing to do with it. It’s time to end this, Eva. Let it go. Please. Release it.”

  When no answer came from the tree, my mother changed her tone. “I’ve tried talking sense and I’ve tried being patient. I’ve tried for years now. But these are my children. I’ve already lost one, and you’ve taken my husband from me too. I won’t let the others come to harm. If you force me to, I’ll burn this tree down to its hateful roots.”

  With the threat in the air, Eva stepped from around back of the tree, as if she’d only been hiding on the other side of it. She wore the same clothes I’d seen her wearing in the vision she’d shown me: a ragged dress with a babushka wrapped around her ruddy face. I knew she had probably been no more than in her early thirties when she died, but she looked more like an old woman. Her bare feet were covered with mud and bloody scratches from climbing through the Living Death Tree’s branches. But even in that wretched condition, she smiled briefly before she said, “You cannot make me leave here, child.” And then she turned to pat the trunk of the tree like a sturdy horse. “If you burn this tree, I will simply move into your house with you.”

  “You can’t,” my mother said, and there was no tone of family feeling in her voice. “You can’t go beyond the creek without my permission. That land is mine by marriage, as this tree belongs to you by blood.”

  Eva narrowed her eyes and wrung her hands in the folds of her dress a little, fingering what must have been the curse she clasped within it. “Do you really think you can drive me away with fire?” she asked my mother. “I cannot burn, girl. And if this tree burns, it does not matter. I will find another. Will you burn them all down?”

  My mother nodded, just once, firmly. “Yes,” she answered. “You’ve twisted these trees beyond their lives anyway. Their fruits spoil even as they grow. Eva, we must end this. Now.”

  “I ca
n stay without them,” Eva said, frowning, pouting as though she thought my mother hadn’t made her plans very carefully. She seemed to almost feel bad for her. “I do not need the things of this world to stay within it, my sweet one. One thing and one thing only keeps me here, and it will not let me go until it is finished.” She clutched the folds of her dress tighter then, clutched the place where she’d put her son’s words and shook it like a purse full of coins. “These trees?” she continued, looking around at them, shaking her head, closing her eyes sadly. “They do not matter.”

  “Old Black Suit is coming,” my mother said fiercely, and Eva’s eyes snapped open. “I saw him the other day, in fact. It’s time again, you know, for you to deal with him. Or have you forgotten?”

  “Why are you doing this?” Eva said, wincing. A note of fear had crept into her voice. My mother was threatening her with something, and she seemed to actually feel threatened by it, but I didn’t understand what my mom was using against her.

  “I’m doing this to free you,” my mother said. “I’m doing this to free all of us.”

  They looked at each other for a while after that, silent and serious. Finally Eva said, “It is not so easy, leaving after having stayed for so long. Do you know how it is?” She shook the folds of her dress again, rattling the words inside, and this time she looked down at her skirt as though it were a chain locked around her body. When she looked up again, she said, “I’m not sure I know the way to leave any longer.”

  My mom held her hand out to Eva then. “I will take you where you need to go,” she told her. “I know the way. It’s not as far as you might think.”

  Eva stared at my mother’s outstretched hand, hesitating, but in the end she said, “If you are willing to take me, then I must go with you. I know that rule, even though I forget so many others.” Then she reached across the space between them and took hold of my mother’s hand.

  For a while they stared into each other’s eyes, searching each other’s face for the shared spirit between them—an old woman wearing a babushka who had saved her son’s life only for him to unwittingly curse the lives of her great-grandchildren, and a middle-aged woman in a pair of jeans and a jean jacket that had belonged to her dead husband—and when they found what they were looking for, a glint of recognition behind both of their green eyes, they turned together and began to walk into the field behind the orchard, taking the lane beside Sugar Creek back to the woods.

  “She’s in the ravine,” I said, gasping for breath back in my bedroom as I swam up and out of the world’s shadow. I said the words before I even had a chance to open my eyes.

  “The ravine?” Jarrod said. He was still sitting there beside me, holding my hand.

  “She’s going to walk Eva out of this world,” I told him, “and she paid their way across with her life, to take Eva and the curse with her.”

  I sat on my bed and shook my head, recalling what my mom had told me. You’ll be the one to find me, she’d said, after I’ve passed out of this world.

  She knew this would happen. She’d been preparing me for this moment more than for any other in my life, even when I hadn’t realized it, but she was leaving the choice to do something about it up to me. High school graduation would be just another day on a calendar, but this day? In her estimation, this day would be my first as an adult.

  I got up from my bed and left Jarrod behind me. “What are you doing?” he said as he stood to follow.

  At the door I turned and said, “Please stay here and look after my brother until I come back.”

  “But what are you going to do? Where are you going?”

  “I’m going back there,” I said. “To Marrow’s Ravine. I’m going to find her.”

  It was a long walk. Longer than the walk I’d taken down to Marrow’s Ravine to find my father’s body that winter, it seemed. Each step was an effort. Each breath I took was a rusty blade cutting me open. The earth was soft beneath my feet, and I left a trail behind me, like the trail of my father’s blood in the snow, the trail that had led me to the Living Death Tree in the winter. Eva had somehow been behind his fall. Probably because my mother’s story had begun to unravel after Jarrod came home, picked up a loose thread of it, and started pulling. Pulling on me, pulling on my memories. I kept thinking that there was a chance to change things, that she’d be down there when I arrived, still alive, climbing up the side of the ravine, having found a way to return Eva without giving herself up in exchange. But when I made it to the edge of the ravine and looked down the slope to its bottom, all of those thoughts were ruined in an instant.

  My mother’s body was down there, resting in a bed of early buttercups and daisies, in the same place my father’s body had fallen.

  And I saw something—or someone—standing near her, casting a large shadow across her outstretched body. The wide brim of his black hat rose before I saw anything else. And when I did see his face, it was the red strings of his scraggly beard I noticed first, and then his eyes, dark as coal, lined with veins of fire.

  He smiled when his eyes locked on mine, then put one hand on top of his hat and nodded, like he’d done when I was in the seventh grade, when he’d noticed I could see him.

  My heart started to beat faster, and a cold sweat broke out in beads across my skin, making me shiver in the chill morning air. I wanted to run back the way I’d come, back through the woods, beating branches aside, back through the lane and through the pasture, until I was home and could slip inside, where I’d be safe. Or felt I could be safe, though there was nowhere truly safe anymore, and I knew it.

  There was no wish I could make that was strong enough to break the reality in front of me. There was no way I could get out of this without regretting it later. This was my only chance.

  You can’t outrun Death. But sometimes you can make him take off his hat to stay a while and listen.

  So I took a big breath and started to pick my way down the slope, to go to him, to meet him where he waited for me.

  I went slowly, hesitant to actually see my mom this way, up close, not breathing, her heartbeat flown away from her, and hesitant to be so near to the creature that had come into my classroom on the day he would take my teacher’s life. Eventually, though, after stepping into the notches that the Lockwood men’s feet had made in the side of Marrow’s Ravine over the decades, I reached bottom. And there, in that place that held so much death in its embrace, I finally paused to return Old Black Suit’s nod.

  I didn’t smile, though. I didn’t think I needed to be nice to him, just civil.

  We didn’t say anything at first, and I decided to go to my mother’s body, to attend to it however I could. Kneeling next to her, I saw that she was holding the silver pocket watch she’d had when she went into the world’s shadow to end a blizzard. The watch her father had given her. The watch Lockwood had given Dobry after his mother had died for him. That watch was in my mother’s hand, held against her chest, right where her heart should have been beating. Dawn light filtered through the canopy of trees above me, and when it fell onto the filigree around the watch, the silver gleamed.

  Tears sprang to my eyes as I uncurled my mom’s fingers to take it from her. I wanted to hold it for just a moment, to feel the last heat of her touch on its surface. And when I slipped it away from her clenched fingers and opened the lid, the first thing I saw was the photo she’d put inside it, a picture of her and my dad on their wedding day—both of them standing beneath an arbor grown over with roses—and under the glass of the watch itself, there was time, still being kept, still ticking and ticking.

  But there was something else in there too. Something I hadn’t expected. We had time left, I remembered her saying when we found my dad down here a few months earlier. I was saving it up. I had heaps and heaps of time saved for us. I saw something more in there, not just the gears of a watch moving. A golden flicker of light moved under the watch hands, like a goldfish swimming counterclockwise in a bowl of water. To others it might have seemed an
illusion, but I knew it was True time, a way of saving up the seconds to stretch out a person’s life by hours or days or years. It was no more than an extra hour, from the looks of it, but I knew my mother had kept this one hour back for me, had hidden it in there like a stash of money.

  There wasn’t much left. Most likely, she’d been using whatever time she’d saved sitting in front of the fireplace or her candle, trying to find my dad, using it to go back to the moment he died, trying to understand the true nature of his death, trying to see what had been invisible to her: the trail of my father’s blood that had led me to the Living Death Tree in Sorrow Acre. This was what was left of the time she’d been using to bring him back to her: one solitary hour.

  It might be just enough, I thought, to turn back the clock and let her heartbeat return for a moment. If I wasn’t too late.

  I wiped away a tear and looked up at the man in the black suit. He was looking down at me where I knelt beside my mother’s body with a face full of infinite patience. He had time, after all. He had all the time in the world.

  “Well,” he said, and his voice was low. He didn’t sound particularly thrilled or excited by his task, as I’d imagined he would be when I was a kid. “The child who saw me.”

  “I knew you saw me that day,” I whispered. “I knew it.”

  “I see those who see me,” he said, spreading his hands. “Most often, it’s the dying. But sometimes it’s a little boy who can’t help it. You have your mother’s eyes, you know.”

  “She gave them to me,” I said proudly.

  “A great burden,” Death’s agent said, shaking his head as though he sympathized with me.

  “Or a blessing,” I said. “It can also be a blessing, depending on your view of things.”

  “Your brother once told me the same thing.”