The Edge of Over There

by Shawn Smucker

  Those words had leveled her world, and now she was rebuilding it from scratch. She felt like someone searching the rubble of a bombed-out city, desperately seeking something that looked familiar, something recognizable. But she found nothing. Her father was new to her, a man who now seemed to have never told her a true thing in all her life. Ruby didn’t recognize the past she had created for herself because it wasn’t true. Her brother wasn’t dead. What about her mother?

  “I’m your brother. I’m Leo.”

  Ruby walked to the steps, holding her breath the entire way, walking carefully as if land mines had been placed randomly under the floorboards. She walked down to the second level, down to the first level, aware now of all the doors that were locked, all the doors that needed keys. She felt an overwhelming compulsion to run into her father’s office without taking any precautions, grab all the keys, and unlock all the doors. How wonderful that would feel, to run through the house with all the doors unlocked and open! How invigorating!

  The darkness was heavy as another car drove by, its headlights glowing behind the cracks in the curtains and the spaces in between the blinds and the window frames. It passed. She stood in front of her father’s office, the heavy sliding doors all that separated her from the keys, the keys, the keys. She waited, always expecting her father to wake, unlock his door, and come downstairs. But it was the middle of the night. He was sleeping. All was quiet.

  Ruby pushed against one of the sliding doors and it moved easily. Her father kept the rollers oiled so that the door moved without a sound, almost by magic. She moved faster now that she was inside, straight across the office. She struggled to read the small labels under each key, but soon she found the one she was looking for.

  Back door.

  She snatched it from the hook, reached into a pocket in her pajamas, and took out her bedroom key. They looked identical, at least from a distance. When she examined them closely she could tell that the teeth were different, only slightly, and the circle of iron at the top of her bedroom key was more oval shaped than the circular ring at the top of the back door key. She stared at her key. She hated to give it up, but her father was sure to notice if there was an extra empty space on the board. She hung her bedroom key in the place of the back-door key, then left the room.

  It was time to leave the house. It was time to see what was behind the red door in the tall building.

  33

  WALKING THE LONG DISTANCE to the back door in her house was a creaky affair. She took a step and waited. Took a step and waited. Another step. Another held breath. She found it hard to believe that her father slept through all of the noise she was making, but every time she stopped, she heard nothing.

  It was in this slow, deliberate way that she made her way to the back door. She held the key tightly in her hand, squeezing it so hard that it left an indent in her fingers. She wasn’t quite sure what her father would do if he caught her with the key to get out of the house. For years, she didn’t even consider opening that door, so great was the fear he had instilled in her. If she opened it, what would happen? What terrors, if any, would she let inside? What would her father do to her?

  She thought about her father as she walked slowly, step by step. He was a firm man. He kept to all the rules as if his life depended on keeping them. He never broke the law, at least not that Ruby was aware of, and when he spoke of those who did, he wrinkled his nose at their weakness. The crowds of young people who cruised the city were his special enemies. To Ruby’s father, the Frenzies represented everything that was wrong with the city. They were the sole cause of its downward spiral.

  As she came within an arm’s width of the back door, she heard a Frenzy coming down the street. She wondered how they kept getting in. She wondered why her father’s roadblocks were no longer keeping them out.

  This particular group was smashing glass windows as they went, and the sound of glass hitting the sidewalks made a rich, tinkling sound in the night. There was an underlying soundtrack of shouting punctuated by an occasional scream. Ruby couldn’t tell if the screaming came from within the crowd or from the people in the houses they were destroying. She held her breath and listened.

  What she heard next made her take one step back. It was the sound of something knocking against the outside of the back door. She took another step back. The doorknob turned, but the door did not open because it was locked. Ruby turned and ran back to the front of the house in time to see her father come flying down the stairs.

  “Dad!” Ruby shouted, not sure what to say, but she soon realized she wasn’t in trouble.

  Her father gasped when he saw her. He ran over and held her close.

  “Thank God you’re safe,” he whispered, and there was a frantic sound in his voice, a kind of desperation she had never seen in her father before. It scared her—it made her feel like an object to be possessed.

  He pulled his head back and stared into her face. “Are you okay?”

  She nodded, not sure what to say.

  “I heard the crowd outside,” he said. “I worried that if you had your key, you might have tried to go out . . . ” His voice trailed off. They both stayed there listening to the riot outside, the crashing of glass and the splintering of wood. The loud sound made by heavy things smashing against cars and signs. It felt strange to Ruby, leaning so close to her father, him on his knees. His face changed, as if he had decided something.

  “Where are those defenses?” he mumbled to himself. He seemed to be listening intently for something that never came.

  “Come,” he finally said, straightening up but not letting go of her hand. He led her to the front door. The sounds outside grew louder. Ruby could hear the individual voices. James Street suddenly felt like a place where evil lived. She realized the key to the back door was still in her hand, all hard edges and cold metal.

  Her father ran to the front door and looked through the peephole.

  “It’s a smaller group,” he said with relief in his voice. He muttered to himself, “They must have found another breach. I thought the war was starting. Thank God.”

  He pulled a few latches, lowered a few pins, and pulled a large, heavy, metal door across their normal front door. It rumbled into place and clicked loudly once it covered the entire front door. There were three bolts that went into the floor, three that went into the left side of the frame, and three into the ceiling. Her father sighed.

  Ruby stared at the metal door. She had never seen it before, never knew her house could do that. With every new thing she learned, with every lie exposed, she felt more and more confused about which way was up. Everything she depended on seemed to be untrue.

  They ran from the door and into her father’s office, where he went straight to his desk. He sat down and pulled out a few of the drawers, the banging of which was drowned out by the sound coming from the street. Now Ruby could hear individual voices shouting to one another, individual laughter the same shade as a hyena’s.

  “Watch this, Jimmy!” a voice clamored, followed by the sound of a brick slamming the iron bars on one of their windows, breaking the glass in the process. Ruby heard laughter as another rock shattered through a neighboring window. The glass tinkled to the floor like the sound of magic. Feet pounded onto the porch, her own porch, and faces leered through the bars.

  “Well looky, looky!” one of the young women shouted, squealing with delight when she saw Ruby’s father in the room. Soon three more young people joined her, staring through the bars. Soon ten more. They crowded around, trying to get a glimpse inside.

  A voice shouted with authority. Only one word.

  “Move!”

  The sea of faces parted, and a different young woman peered through the darkness. She made eye contact with Ruby, and her eyes widened slightly.

  “Who’s the fastest person here?” she whispered without looking away from Ruby.

  “Danny,” someone replied. The crowd shuffled in their silence, and a young man was pushed to the front.


  “Danny?” the young woman said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Go tell Jeremiah.”

  “We don’t have much time,” Ruby’s father said, grabbing her by the arm and racing to the board of keys and pulling off the one for the back door. Except Ruby knew that was actually the key to her bedroom. She held the key he wanted in her pocket, tightly in her hand. But her father didn’t know that, so he grabbed her and raced to the back door. They arrived to hear pounding on the door.

  “They’re already in the alley,” her father said, and Ruby felt a tremor in his voice, the tiniest fracture of a deep foundation. Her father was frightened.

  He led them back to his office yet again. Frenzy faces still peered in, watching them. Her father grabbed the key for the attic. “Hurry, hurry,” he said to Ruby, running up the stairs in front of her. She could barely keep up. They went up to the second floor, then the third floor. A crashing sound, and Ruby thought the back door must have been broken down.

  “Hurry, hurry,” he said again, and Ruby couldn’t tell if he was talking to her or to himself. He pushed the key against the keyhole, but his hands trembled and he dropped it. He bent over quickly and grabbed the key again, his shaking hands barely able to hold it. Ruby reached over and held his hand for a moment.

  “Don’t worry, Dad,” she said. “It’s okay.”

  She took the key from him, and he didn’t protest. With a steady hand, she slid the key into the lock and turned it. They made their way up into the attic.

  “Hurry, hurry,” her father kept mumbling to himself. “Hurry, hurry.”

  They had to get on their hands and knees as they climbed through the dust. The rumors had been correct, and Ruby looked behind her and ahead of her with amazement. All of the houses in their row were connected by a crawl space. They shuffled their way into the abandoned house, the very one where the young man had told her those words, the ones that still echoed in her mind.

  “I’m your brother. I’m Leo.”

  Her father crawled directly to the area where stairs led down, as if he had done this many times before. Ruby followed after him, picking up splinters in her hands and knees. The dust tried to make her cough but she fought the urge.

  Quietly, quietly.

  They crept down the steps. In their own house they had run without any thought for sound. Now they moved like ghosts, weightless, placing each foot carefully. Down, down, down they went. All the way to the basement. Ruby heard the Frenzy next door, in her very own house, smashing and searching and breaking. She wondered what they would have done to her if they had found her.

  In the basement, she followed her father all the way to the opposite end, which was right up by the street, though underground. There was a door there, and they walked through, and he closed it behind them. All was dark. She could not see a thing, and she froze there, on the other side of the door. Everything was far away: the Frenzy, her own house, the lights. There was nothing, and she stood in the middle of it.

  A flashlight beam popped on.

  “Come,” her father said. “We’re almost there.”

  She followed him into a narrow tunnel that he almost had to turn sideways to walk through. An intersection came out of nowhere, but her father did not hesitate. He made a quick right, another quick right, then straight on for a few hundred yards.

  “We made it,” he said.

  They walked out into an open area, huge, the size of fifty basements. There were posts supporting the ceiling, and in the middle something massive and irregularly round, like a frozen waterfall. There were no windows and no lights were on, but in the moving beam of her father’s flashlight she caught sight of a door over to her right, and she knew in that moment that she was looking at the red door she had wondered about for so many years.

  The red door that led into the tall building. Except now she was on the other side of it.

  She was inside.

  A group of men came running at them, shouting.

  “It’s me! It’s Amos!” her father said.

  The men came close. Some of them hugged her father, and some of them patted her on the head as if they had known her for years, but she did not recognize any of them.

  “Is it ready?” her father asked.

  “Yes, sir,” one man said, his voice trembling, but Ruby couldn’t figure out why.

  “So, it’s time,” her father said quietly, perhaps to himself. “The meeting is still on for tomorrow night?”

  “Thousands are coming, sir,” the man said. “Everyone is ready.”

  “Okay,” her father said, taking a deep breath. “We don’t have much time.”

  He glanced back and forth between Ruby and the man in front of him. The other guards stared at him as if awaiting orders. Ruby couldn’t believe it. This was her father? This man who other men listened to? Obeyed without thinking? Her world continued crumbling in on itself, and she felt lost in the midst of the rubble.

  “I’m going to take Ruby to the top,” he said, still looking at her. “I need all forces to go to James Street. There’s been a breach—a small Frenzy is in my house. Get them out of here. Or smash them. Whatever. After we’re finished, I’ll come find you.”

  Walking up the stairway through the tower was one of the strangest experiences of Ruby’s young life. The stairs were made of bricks, all rough and jagged edges. There was something only vaguely professional about the way things were built. The rest of the buildings in the city felt new but looked dilapidated. The tower, on the other hand, felt dilapidated but looked new. She understood that it had been built in her lifetime, but everything about it, from the uneven steps to the bare cement-block walls to the unfinished ceilings exposing beams and wires, screamed of shoddy work, or at least work done in great haste.

  And there, twisting and turning among the bricks like some kind of strange tumor, were tree branches. They had been pruned and cut and, in some cases, tied so that they had become part of the walls. The branches looked like a splinter in flesh, and something in Ruby wished she could pluck the tree out. But that would have been impossible. It was everywhere.

  She struggled to keep up with her father, who after ten or fifteen floors began taking steps two at a time. It seemed he had forgotten about her, quite forgotten that a young girl was following him, trying to keep up. Soon he was far ahead, and she was left to walk the stairway on her own.

  This is when the true strangeness of the situation settled in: it seemed eternal. Floor after floor—eight steps up, a landing, eight more steps, the next floor with a door leading into it. Each time, they bypassed the door and continued walking up, up, up. Eight more steps up, a landing, eight more steps, and the next floor with another door. It started to feel like a dream from which she would never wake. Her legs were tired and she walked slower and slower, sometimes stopping altogether to sit down and stare.

  “Ruby!” a voice called, and it was like a voice from a mountaintop. It echoed through the stairwell with a tinny, artificial sound.

  “Ruby!” the voice called again, and she realized it was her father, though it sounded like someone else entirely.

  “Yes?”

  “Almost there now. Hurry!”

  She took a deep breath and walked up, up, up to the voice, following the father she no longer knew.

  Five minutes passed. Ten. Fifteen? She didn’t know.

  The last door opened easily, and she walked out onto the roof of the tower, the topmost level. It took her breath away, and she forgot to look for her father. She forgot to wonder about all of the things in her life that were not what she had always believed them to be. The view drew her to the edge.

  34

  RUBY LOOKED DOWN AT THE CITY, now tiny and far away. She didn’t know how many floors up she was (sixty? eighty? a hundred?), but the height made her knees feel weak, and she took quick, small breaths. There were no handrails, no walls, nothing separating her from a long, drifting fall that would end in . . . what? A sharp impact? Followed b
y what, exactly? Yet she couldn’t step back. Curiosity glued her feet to the edge, and she stared out over the distance.

  She faced the road that led away from the city, and she had a brief memory of that tiny thread through the dark green forest, small as a strand of DNA. Was it a memory or a dream? The trees waved in a breeze she could not feel, rustling as if they were being stirred from all directions. She knew that was where the nighttime screamers came from. Those woods. Or perhaps somewhere beyond. Above the woods, the sky. It was a deep, deep red, speckled with lighter patches. It made you want to drift away, that sky. It made you want to go to sleep.

  Ruby turned and walked to the other side of the building, thirty or forty paces away. She was entranced. She felt suddenly indestructible, as if all that she could see was her domain. She looked over the city, this time in the opposite direction, and again she was overcome to the point of tears. The buildings, small and powerless, were plotted out, city block after city block. The streets were a maze, and they rebounded back on each other, endless squares of concrete and macadam and metal. But she wasn’t looking at the small boxes of buildings; she was looking beyond them.

  Water.

  A body of water larger than anything she ever could have imagined stretched out in cold, navy blue. The water looked metallic, like mercury. Red light reflected off its breakers, and even though it was the size of an ocean, spreading out to the horizon, it moved like a river, sweeping along the edge of the city. It looked powerful to her with its constant motion and its whitecaps and the way it seemed to push back even the sky at the edge of the world. It stretched as far as she could see to the left and to the right, and Ruby realized the great forest surrounded the city on three sides. The fourth side of the city was lined by water.

  Something else caught her attention. The light, the red light of the sky, seemed to emanate from across the water. It almost looked like there was another city Over There, somewhere very far away, and that the light of their own sky was only the residual light from a greater city, a more wondrous sky. She peered Over There, but she could not see far enough.