The Edge of Over There

by Shawn Smucker

  She remembered, as if out of nowhere, the woman she had seen in Sam’s room in the hospital that first night. She shivered again as memories of her came rushing back. Abra had forgotten the terror on Sam’s face as he pushed away from her. She had forgotten the way the woman had sniffed as if seeking out her prey. She had forgotten the ice-cold touch of the woman’s hand on her shoulder.

  And for the first time in a long time, she remembered the initials signed at the bottom of the note on her hospital tray.

  KN.

  For the next four months, from winter into spring, Abra felt a renewed sense of purpose, and she spent every spare minute studying the atlas and reading the notes written in Mr. Tennin’s handwriting. She took long, slow walks, looking for the lady who looked like Sam’s mother. Her parents worried about her, gave her more chores to keep her outside, but she did them quickly and retreated to her room. Even when spring arrived, Abra’s favorite season of the year, she came home from school and walked straight past the new blooms peeking up through the wet ground. Daffodils and tulips held nothing for her. Her sixteenth birthday came and went.

  She was distracted at school. Teachers taught and she continued to get decent grades, but her mind went round and round. She desperately wanted to know her role with the sword or how she would find the next Tree of Life. The responsibility of her mission became heavier, and she turned increasingly inward, became more and more obsessed with the atlas and the notes. She thought of all that was at stake.

  The Tree might be growing, and there was no one but her to stop it.

  One week after high school let out for the summer, Abra pushed her blonde hair behind her ears and stood by one of her bedroom windows, staring out across the yard and beyond Kincade Road. If anyone had pulled up to the house at that moment, they would have seen her standing there, perfectly framed by the window, looking like an apparition mourning a long-ago life.

  She didn’t remember how she had ended up with the atlas and the notes and the sword, but Sam hadn’t seemed interested in reclaiming them. She was frustrated and close to giving up. The forest was green and there was no sign of the fire. She marveled at how things can change, how the old empty spaces can be filled in.

  That’s when she saw the woman again, standing at the edge of the woods on the other side of the road.

  A chill moved up and down Abra’s back. She dropped everything and ran.

  12

  ABRA RACED DOWNSTAIRS. Should she call Sam? How could this woman be Sam’s mother? Had someone miraculously saved a piece of fruit from the Tree of Life and brought her back? Had Sam done it?

  She stopped in her tracks as that last thought sank in. Had Sam actually done it? Had he found another Tree of Life? In that moment, she realized why their friendship had crumbled so quickly after the incident of the Amarok. She couldn’t trust him.

  Her friendship with Sam had gone the way many friendships go after surviving something dramatic. For the first few months, there had been a surge of closeness. They spent every afternoon together scanning the book for new clues, things they may have missed. They took turns keeping the box with the atlas and Tennin’s notes. She followed Sam to the dead Tree almost every afternoon, and they sat there in the remaining heat of summer, into the autumn. The charred forest watched them, welcomed them.

  But as winter came and months passed, a year eased behind them, and then another, and a kind of coldness drifted in. It was the chill of shared doubt. Could it all have really happened? Could they actually have had a chance to bring Sam’s mom back? And if so, why hadn’t they seized the opportunity? The reasons they had done the things they had done became foggy. They stopped talking to each other in school, which is the easiest place for a friendship to fade because there are always plenty of other people around. You can convince yourself you’re not avoiding someone—you’re simply talking to other people. But she stopped riding her bike to his farm, and he stopped asking where she had been, and soon whatever they had between them drifted away, out of reach.

  She couldn’t go tell him now. He wouldn’t believe her. Besides, she had deep, lingering doubts as well, because even though the woman looked exactly like Sam’s mom, there was that other woman, the woman from the hospital. KN. Could this be her?

  Abra was certain that once she got out into the yard, the woman wouldn’t be there anymore, simply a product of her imagination or her intense recent focus on finding the next place where the Tree of Life would grow. But when she ran through the front door and onto the porch, the woman was still there, facing the house. The breeze pressed the dress against her body, something that made her seem even more real, more tangible. For a moment Abra hesitated, unsure of where this overwhelming sense of fear had come from, but she ran on, slowing to a walk as she approached the end of the lane.

  Closer now. The woman still resembled Sam’s mother, but there was also something about the way she stood there that didn’t look like Sam’s mother in the least. There was something powerful and sinister about her, as if she was in complete control of everything. The sun. The wind. The grass. Everything. She held her hands behind her back and stood up straight, rigid, like a tower. She glanced at Abra as she approached, and her face shifted into an expression that at first looked like a smirk but slid seamlessly into something more sympathetic.

  It was the woman from the hospital. It was KN.

  They stood there across the street from each other, and anyone driving up Kincade Road could have easily mistaken them for mother and daughter. They had fair features, round, button noses, and large eyes. Both had pink lips and rosy cheeks.

  But if that same passerby would have waited and watched and looked closer, they also would have been struck by the opposite nature of the two, the same way something in a mirror can be the same image but reversed.

  If you could look at the essence of Good in a mirror, would you see Good reversed, or would you see the essence of Evil?

  The woman turned away from Abra and walked slowly north on Kincade Road, in the direction of Sam’s house. Abra skittered across the street and followed, maintaining a safe distance. She wished she would have brought the sword. The woman bent over and plucked a white wildflower. Abra stopped. The woman started walking again, walking north, and Abra followed.

  “So, you’re the famous Abra,” the woman said in a singsong voice. Her hair blew back behind her, though the wind didn’t seem strong enough to cause that. Her dress, too, lifted slightly around her, giving her the appearance of floating instead of walking. She was the center of an invisible storm. “It’s lovely to see you. Again.”

  Abra didn’t reply.

  “You don’t have to say anything,” the woman said. “It’s okay. I know . . . I know.”

  “Who are you?” Abra asked, fighting an incredibly strong urge to run back to her house, to run in any direction but the way this woman was walking, to run away.

  “My name,” the woman replied, then paused. “Yes, I do have a name. It’s Koli. Koli Naal.”

  She laughed an absentminded laugh and plucked a white petal from the flower. She dropped it over her shoulder as she continued walking away. Abra watched the petal as it fell, spinning, disappearing into the tall grass.

  “I have been away for so long,” the woman said. “I have been very busy.”

  “How do you know who I am?” Abra asked, gathering her courage. She had found her way to the other side of the curtain—of that she was sure. This was not normal life in Deen. This had something to do with the Tree.

  “You? The famous Abra? Abra the Amarok slayer? Abra, the one who brought Jinn low? Who doesn’t know about Abra!”

  Abra’s fear was instantly accompanied by something else: pride. She hadn’t disappeared off the radar! People knew what had happened—important people, people on the other side of the curtain—and she had a role to play. Not only that, but she was famous. Of course, she hadn’t actually slain the Amarok; Sam had done that. And while she had thrown the sword at Mr. Jinn,
some mysterious force had given it momentum. She never could have thrown it that far on her own.

  Yet there seemed no reason to mention these things.

  “Yes,” Koli said. “I know you.”

  Her voice had lost its singsong quality. There was nothing light about it—it was all weight and gravity. Ominous. Koli stopped walking and knelt down, still facing away from Abra. She picked the flower petals from the flower faster, letting them fall, shredded. She plucked at the longer strands of grass. What made Abra shudder was that Koli didn’t pick at things absentmindedly, the way a child will pull out grass by the roots in entire fistfuls. No, Koli pulled at the grass and decimated the flower in a way that said she knew what she was doing. She was snapping life in half, and she would gladly continue doing so until there wasn’t another piece of grass left on the planet. Not a single flower still holding its petals.

  “Why are you here?” Abra asked quietly.

  Koli smiled, and for a moment Abra wondered if she had misread this woman. Her smile went from mocking and demeaning to something that at first appeared genuinely kind, sincerely happy. Koli tilted her head to the side, took a deep breath, and sighed, all in a way that communicated a sort of resignation, as if Abra had bested her already, so easily. Her body looked soft and welcoming, like that of a long-lost aunt, someone who would explain everything to her.

  “There has been a problem,” Koli said. When she spoke with that newly found kind voice, her beauty was almost overwhelming.

  “What problem?” Abra managed to stutter.

  “There is a door, a door that should never have been locked. But it has been locked. People are trapped on the other side, good people. A man by the name of Amos, for example, and his daughter Ruby. They have been there for many years. I need your help to unlock the door.”

  Abra sensed the lies in what Koli was saying—not the specifics of the lies, but the sense of lies twisted up in truth, like strands of hair baked into bread.

  “Where is it?” Abra asked.

  “New Orleans,” Koli whispered.

  “Why do you need my help?”

  “There was someone else who was helping us, someone else who had a key to this door. But she is gone now, took the key with her. We can no longer get in, and the people in there can no longer get out. We need your help because you have the only other key.”

  “But I don’t,” Abra began, but an image of the sword flashed into her mind. Somehow, she knew that’s what Koli was talking about. The sword was also a key?

  “Yes, you know, don’t you,” Koli said. “You do have the key, though you didn’t know it. That’s the way with all the most important kinds of keys—we have them without even realizing it.”

  The resemblance flickered again in front of Abra’s eyes, that strange similarity between Koli and Sam’s mother. She remembered the night Mrs. Chambers had died, the storms that had come through. The lightning. She remembered Mr. Tennin’s words.

  Death is a gift.

  A question floated up into Abra’s mind, a question about why Koli looked so much like Sam’s mom. She didn’t think it was by accident. Had she somehow tried to look like her to draw Abra in? Was that even possible—could these things, these beings, change the way they looked? There was something odd going on, and it made Abra’s insides twist and turn.

  Abra looked up at Koli and wanted to tell her she wouldn’t do it, she wouldn’t unlock whatever door it was that Koli wanted unlocked. She wanted to tell her, but she couldn’t speak. She couldn’t open her mouth. Abra stood there and shook her head back and forth, and even though the words wouldn’t come, she felt defiant and strong.

  Koli approached Abra, one slow step after another. She had a puffed-up look as if she had taken in a deep breath and held it, her mouth open but no breath moving. Abra took a step back. Koli walked up to her and examined her face. She smiled, and her teeth . . . Maybe Abra simply hadn’t noticed before, or maybe they changed in that moment, but suddenly her teeth were pointed, like miniature shark teeth, and her tongue had turned black.

  “Unlock the door!” Koli screamed.

  Abra jumped back and tripped over her own two feet. She raised her hands to protect herself—from what? A woman? A demon? She sat there in the grass, cringing, waiting, but the day had gone completely still. The breeze blew Abra’s hair back, and she heard birds singing in the woods that lined the river. She looked up.

  Koli was gone.

  Abra walked back to the house. The sun was warmer, nearly hot, and the almost-knee-high cornstalks rustled, whispered in a million voices. They reminded her of warnings, of that little feeling you get when something isn’t quite right. They also reminded her of the summer she had run with Sam through the field between his house and Mr. Jinn’s, chasing the vultures.

  The house was quiet when she returned. Her mom had gone out and her dad was working in the barn, and she felt both thankful for an empty house and scared that Koli would return. She couldn’t get that image of Koli’s teeth out of her mind, or the way she had screamed at her.

  “Unlock the door!”

  The words echoed in Abra’s mind. Koli had sounded angry, but she had also sounded frustrated, as if she realized she couldn’t force or trick Abra to do this one thing. Abra wondered why it was so important to her that she unlock the door and free the man and his daughter. It didn’t seem like Koli would be particularly concerned about anyone’s well-being unless it somehow served her own purpose, whatever that was.

  Koli hadn’t told her much. Abra didn’t know exactly where this entrance was, or how to use the sword to unlock it. And would they be waiting right inside the door, like a lost puppy finally home, or would she have to go inside and bring them out? Or was she simply supposed to unlock the door, or the gate, or whatever it was, and leave it open?

  Too many questions. The light inside the house was quiet and still, although the windows were open and a breeze rustled the curtains. Abra walked up the stairs slowly, thinking about all that the woman had told her. She didn’t trust Koli. She believed the facts of what she had told her, and she was beautiful, but she was also terrifying and evil and definitely, definitely lying about something.

  Abra went into her room. The atlas was in the middle of the floor, open. Had her mother found it? Had someone been in her room? She walked closer and got down on her knees. She leaned forward and stared at the page. It was a map of the southern half of Louisiana. The city of New Orleans had an old, worn number written beside it. #27. So it must have been one of the earlier sites of a Tree of Life. But something new was written right beside the #27.

  It was another number, #69, circled and written in red. The Tree in Deen, the one she had killed four summers ago, was #68. Where had this new number come from? She glanced around, moved quickly to the door, and looked down the hall. Had someone been in there?

  Had Koli Naal been in her room?

  She was sure that number hadn’t been there before, which meant there was a new Tree of Life, and based on the map it was somewhere in or close to New Orleans.

  Was someone already trying to possess it, or, even worse, had someone already eaten from it? How would she find it?

  She saw an obvious connection between that strange woman wanting her to go to New Orleans and the Tree, but she had a lot of questions. There was only one place she knew to go for answers. The fair would be back in Deen, starting in four weeks. She had to find the three old women.

  13

  “DON’T STAY TOO LONG,” her mother said in a pleading voice, biting her lip. She looked as though she might change her mind. “Don’t wander around dark places on your own. Please?”

  Abra nodded and forced a smile. “I won’t be late, Mom. I promise.”

  “Okay,” her mom said. She looked in the side-view mirror of the car and pulled away, into the slow-moving fair traffic gliding up and down Kincade Road.

  Abra stared at a large puddle outside the fair entrance, and lights from the rides reflected in it like
multicolored stars. She looked farther into the water and touched the surface with the toe of her shoe, and ripples sprinkled the light. She could almost believe that if she jumped into that tiny, shimmering pool, she’d be jumping into nothingness, the void between galaxies. The puddle was a portal to somewhere different, somewhere important.

  She imagined floating through the curtain that separated normal, everyday life in Deen from what couldn’t be easily seen. It had been four weeks since Koli Naal had told her she had to unlock the door, four weeks since she had seen the number written beside New Orleans in the atlas, open and in the center of her bedroom floor. And nothing at all interesting had happened since. How badly she wanted to know what she was supposed to do! How badly she wanted to see something miraculous, something extraordinary.

  She couldn’t get New Orleans out of her head. She had an uncle there, her mom’s only brother, but he was much older than her mom and Abra had never met him. Every so often they received a handwritten letter from him, a New Orleans address scrawled in the return section of the envelope. Even his writing looked ancient, with its large, sloping loops and meticulous dottings and crossings. Abra would stare at the letter the whole way up the drive, wondering what this strange man had to say. It seemed odd that she could be connected to someone so intimately yet not even know what he looked like. But whenever she handed the letter to her mom, her mom would sigh, slit the envelope open quickly, skim the contents, and stuff the letter into her pocket.

  She remembered the name on the envelope: Mr. M. L. Henry.

  A few nights after the new number appeared in the atlas, Abra had nearly packed a bag and hitchhiked to New Orleans. She thought she might be able to stay with her uncle while she searched for the Tree. If she could find him. But reality settled in quickly—she knew she wouldn’t get far. Her parents would find out about it, and they would track her down.

  New Orleans! The distance between her and that city was mind-boggling, especially to someone who had never traveled more than fifty miles from her own small town. She knew the valley better than anyone—blindfold her, lead her into a field, spin her around, and uncover her eyes, and she’d know exactly where she was. But drive for an hour in any direction and it would all be new. New Orleans? The Tree might as well be growing on the moon.