by Jason Gurley
Her father looks around. “This is home.”
“No. Home is you and me.”
“We don’t need them.”
Eleanor sighs. “I want to be with them. Don’t you want me to be happy?”
Her father looks pained. “Yes. But—”
She waits, but he doesn’t finish.
“Think about it,” she says. “That’s all.”
He rolls onto his back wordlessly, and Eleanor goes to sleep.
Her father’s bedroll is gone when she wakes up. The grass, matted flat beneath him during the night, is already beginning to stand up again. She sits up and looks around and calls his name, but he doesn’t answer.
She sits where she is for hours. There is nowhere for her to go. She thinks that she could walk to the horizon in any direction, and then the world might simply fall away into nothingness, or disintegrate, or slip into fog. What would have happened if she and her father had begun walking toward Anchor Bend? It’s his world. Would it have borders for him? Would his sleeping brain fill in the blanks? Would it even matter in which direction they walked?
He comes over the hill when the sun is high above.
“We go,” he says.
He has fashioned a tall pack from animal hide, and filled it with things they will need. Bladders of water hang from his hips. The metal cook pot dangles from a looped string, bouncing against the pack as he walks.
Eleanor sits up. “Anchor Bend?”
“What my Esmerelda asks, my Esmerelda shall have,” he answers.
He begins to walk, and Eleanor follows.
They walk for miles and miles, and the horizon only recedes. The world does not crumble into the void, as Eleanor had feared it might. She sees no steaming craters, no oceans of dark matter. There are only more green hills, more spreading forests, more branching rivers and clouds and lush mountains. There are animals, too. Though most of her father’s possessions seem to have been made from the husks of dead creatures, Eleanor had, before now, seen none herself. But now there are flocks of great-winged birds, with wingspans dozens of feet long, rising from the treetops as she and her father pass by. As they crest a field speckled with wildflowers, Eleanor can see a herd of something—elk? buffalo? she can’t tell—lazily milling about, the big dark shadows of idle clouds drifting over them.
She and her father do not talk much. He seems content with this, as if it hasn’t occurred to him to ask why she went away, or why she came back. As they walk, Eleanor glances at him surreptitiously, his face golden in the sun, his hair turned the color of pale yellow silk by the light. He stares confidently and happily ahead, often closing his eyes and turning his head toward the warmth above. He looks younger, and Eleanor realizes that he is younger—the nicks on his face have disappeared, his beard has faded, his skin has flushed with color. The crow’s-feet around his eyes have softened, and then a few hours later, they are gone.
Before long he looks the way she remembers him from her childhood.
Specifically, he looks the way he did in the months before Esmerelda died.
“Dad,” Eleanor says, wanting to call his attention to the change that has overtaken him. But when he looks down at her, so young and alive, not much more than a kid himself, her breath is caught, and she can’t say a thing.
He just smiles, and they continue walking.
“Look,” he says, as they emerge from a grove of tall oak trees. Before them is a new forest, one made of sunflowers that have grown impossibly tall, that have flushed with colors other than gold. There are rose-colored sunflowers, there are rich plum hues in others.
Eleanor has no words.
Her father’s dreamscape is a beautiful fantasyland.
They sleep for many nights beneath a perfect hooked moon, listening to the calls of nightbirds and the symphonies of crickets and frogs. They sleep at the bottom of a small mountain one night, and in the morning they climb it, her father’s hands looped in the straps of his animal-hide pack, Eleanor walking with a sturdy stick that she found on a leafy path. The mountain is soft beneath her feet, the ground spongy and inviting like spring tundra. They climb for hours and hours, and when they reach the top, a flat shelf of rock, they sit and eat bits of dried meat that her father has carried along.
Far below them a valley spreads wide like a bowl. It is carpeted with tall, waving grasses, and a stream winds through it like a shoelace.
Eleanor feels a tingle at the base of her neck.
“It’s beautiful,” her father says, happily munching on a handful of nuts.
But Eleanor is not so sure. He’s right, of course, and the valley is quite stunning to look at, but Eleanor feels as if she’s looking backward in time. The view below chews at her. She knows this place, but she doesn’t know why.
“That’s quite nice,” her father says, pointing.
Far away—miles, perhaps—there is a structure in the middle of the valley. She recognizes it, too. It’s a cabin, one that her father built long ago in his workshop in the attic. If they walk far enough, Eleanor thinks, maybe they will stumble upon the other houses that her father created. Maybe one of them will have a broken mailbox.
But this cabin worries her. It is too perfect, too lovely.
A tuft of clouds passes overhead, throwing tiny, pale shadows onto the meadows below, and Eleanor jerks. Her mind fills with images of the ash forest—that poisonous, tumultuous place she visited before, that dark and otherworldly place. She stares down at the valley, and the sense of something looming in the paradise below only grows.
She turns to her father, and she knows what she has to do.
“Anchor Bend is not far away,” she tells him. She points at the far rim of the valley, where the grasses give way to dense forests and march up into the mountains again. “Over there, past those mountains.”
“We should go!” he chirps, gathering the remnants of his lunch.
But Eleanor puts her hand on his and shakes her head.
“They’re very shy,” she says, hoping he won’t press her. “I think I should go and tell them we’re coming, so that they have time to prepare for us. It would be the polite thing to do.”
He considers this, and then acquiesces. “I’ll sleep here,” he says, patting the rock, then sweeps his hand across the panorama below. “I’ll wake to this.”
She tells him she will return in a few days, and they’ll go to Anchor Bend then, together. He offers his pack, but she doesn’t want the weight. He gives her a folded package and tells her to eat, and to keep up her strength, and then Eleanor kisses his youthful cheek, and she sets off down the mountainside alone.
He does not tell her to take care, for what harm can come to her in this perfect world he has created?
Eleanor sidesteps down the mountain, her feeling of dread growing, and when she finally comes to the trees and steps into their thicket of shade and rich green smells, she falls through the world and disappears.
The darkness seems to swirl around Mea.
Look, it says.
Mea sees the tiny, sparking flame growing larger in the distance.
The child returns, the darkness says.
Mea says nothing.
Eleanor wakes up on the floor of the garage. Her arm is stained black from the old oil spot. She is naked. Sun shines through the dirty windows in the garage door. She gets up and pads across the concrete to the large door, and stands on her toes and peeks outside. Her father’s car is not in the driveway. It’s late morning, as best she can tell. She watches a mother walk by, holding a toddler with one hand, a collie’s leash with the other.
Her father must be at work.
She is as quiet as can be when she slips into the house. For a long time she stands in the hall, listening—for the sound of her mother moving about, for anything unexpected. But the house is silent.
A terrible thought occurs to her—what if her latest vacation from reality has lasted for years yet again? What if she has lost the opportunity to save her mother? What
if the house is this quiet because Agnes has already died of her cancer?
She goes to the downstairs bathroom and turns on the light. There are fancy soaps in a dish, a bit dusty from disuse. A towel hangs on a bar. She looks at herself in the mirror, and recognizes the shape of her face and body. If she has aged, it cannot be by more than a few days, maybe a few weeks.
Through the kitchen and dining room and into the living room, where her father had been asleep on the couch during her home invasion. The curtains are drawn, the room tidy. A pair of glasses rests on the side table, and she picks them up. They’re reading glasses, masculine in form. She feels an ache inside—her father has aged since her last disappearance. She wonders how he is coping now, a grieving father caring for a dying woman who despises him.
She turns to the staircase and is stopped by the sight of her mother’s chair.
Her father’s Glacier Pilots T-shirt is folded neatly on the chair.
Resting on top is a folded piece of paper.
She stares at it for a long time, the silence of the house rising around her, the creak of old wood and the tick of the water heater gone for now. She goes to the chair and stands over it, staring at the paper.
At last she opens it.
She reads its contents once, twice, then again.
A tiny rustle comes from upstairs, from her mother’s bedroom—an invitation, but a dark one. Eleanor turns to look at the staircase. The stairs seem to multiply and grow taller, farther apart, as she watches.
She unfolds the T-shirt and pulls it over her head, the soft scent of detergent filling her nose.
She returns the note to the chair, walks to the stairs, and begins to climb.
“Don’t go!” the keeper pleads.
Her throat burns with the effort of shouting. She feels the cords in her neck tighten. Her body is little more than bones dressed in skin, her skin little more than paper. The force of her own cry drops her to the ground, and she sobs bitterly, broken now at last. Her shadow has weakened now, too, just a dusky smudge on the raw ground. This is the worst part, the harbinger of her ending. When it goes, she will disappear as well.
The beasts move slowly away, every step crushing the blackened crust of earth. The small one leans against the other, hardly able to support its own weight. Now and then their heavy feet punch through the ground as it crumbles, unstable and brittle, and the two great animals stumble and stagger.
“Don’t go,” she whispers again, hoarsely.
The large beast cranes its neck to look at her, and the keeper holds its beautiful gaze for a moment.
Then the sky turns to flame, and the moment ends.
A bright orange flower bulges in the black clouds, and the keeper forgets her woes immediately. The air turns electric and begins to twist, the rain turning to bullets as the funnel forms. The keeper struggles to her feet, and stands on spindly bones, fixated on the growing maelstrom. It is the same as before, the sky pregnant with her enemy, and she summons every bit of strength she has, and she screams at the sky.
No words.
Rage like a thousand suns boils within her.
She is frail, a crushed and flightless bird. But she is not finished. Not yet.
She puts her hands up, curls her fingers, beckons the demon in the sky.
“COME!” she bellows, and her shadow turns pitch black against the scarred earth.
Bring her, the darkness says to Mea. We must know if she has succeeded.
Mea says, I don’t think we’re in control anymore.
Far away, Eleanor treks up the stairs, each step tentative, deliberate. Mea watches, looking over Eleanor’s shoulder at the familiar staircase, the thready carpet on the second landing. Mea is not her former self—she knows this—but she remembers her past life, the one in which she was a six-almost-seven redheaded girl, a girl who liked to slip her bare toes into the shag loops of the upstairs rug, then lift the rug with her feet.
Mea and the darkness watch apprehensively. Eleanor leaves the stairs behind and goes to a door and knocks lightly. There is no answer, but there are sounds behind the door. Thin sounds. Frail sounds.
Eleanor pushes the door open, but doesn’t enter. There, small on the bed she once shared with Paul, is Eleanor’s mother. Agnes looks at first glance like a desiccated corpse. Her skin sags over a frame that has shriveled like rotted fruit. What muscles she once had are all but gone, and crawl beneath her slack skin like knotted string. Her auburn hair has grayed and fallen out in clumps. What remains is wispy and sparse.
Agnes’s eyes are closed, sunken deep into her face.
Her thread is weak, the darkness says. The cancer will claim her soon.
Mea stares at the woman on the bed. Tell me the rules, she says.
The rules—
You told Eleanor before that there are rules. What are the rules? The rules of the dreams.
The darkness understands. I can only speculate, you understand.
Yes, yes.
Dream worlds are refuges from what you see here, the darkness says. From death. From painful things.
Like memories.
Yes, like memories. In the dream worlds—if a person’s subconscious permits it—a person can pull a cloak around themselves. But it is not impenetrable. There is still a seam where it closes, and the child has found a way through.
Eleanor.
Yes.
Just now, Mea says, she wasn’t in her mother’s dream. Was she?
She has eased the pain of her father. Her mother will not be so easy.
What will happen? Mea asks. What will happen when Eleanor finds a way through the—the cloak?
The world that her mother has so carefully shut out will rush in.
The death. The memories, Mea says.
The cancer. The pain. The regret. Eleanor will release all of it, like a flood. It will frighten her mother. It will overwhelm them both.
What will happen?
The darkness is quiet for a long time. Then it says, I cannot say.
Mea can see Agnes stir ever so slightly on the bed.
Eleanor takes a step forward, into the doorway.
It will be a mistake, won’t it? Mea asks.
Take her, the darkness commands.
Mea does.
Her parents’ bedroom, once so bright and cheerful, has become a dour, odorous cave. The curtains are drawn, the room soaked in shadow. No lights are on. The air is heavy and still, as if it hasn’t moved in weeks. It is pungent, dense with the smell of unwashed skin, of sickness.
For a long time Eleanor stands in the doorway, her heart caught in her throat, staring at her mother.
At what used to be her mother.
The thing on the bed is hardly human anymore. It is spindly and compact, its branch-thin limbs pulled close to its body. It doesn’t resemble Agnes Witt any more than a crushed dog on a highway resembles a tree.
“Mom,” Eleanor whispers.
The only sound is the hiss of a breathing apparatus beside the bed. A thin, clear cord slinks across the sheets, connected to a plastic mask that is strapped over Agnes’s mouth and nose. A green-and-silver oxygen tank stands on a cart below the machine, pumping rich air through the cord.
Eleanor is afraid. She forgets about her mission, forgets the rift, forgets her sister. The only thing she can think of is her mother’s funeral. It looms over the scene before her like a thunderhead. Her mother cannot be more than an hour from death. How could she live like this?
She wonders what it will do to her father to have lost them all. First Esmerelda, in a violent car crash. Then, a decade later, Eleanor, who for all he knows has simply disappeared into thin air, never to return. And finally Agnes, who in her final years has turned into a pile of twigs beneath a blanket.
Agnes stirs, and Eleanor steps forward.
She becomes a missile.
Around her the air burns hot. Her hair is almost torn from her scalp. Her breath is stolen away, her eyes dry out. She can barely see—there is
sky around her, but it flickers like a forest fire, turning her skin a hundred million shades of orange. Through the acrid haze that envelops her, she sees—what? Shapes, blurry shapes. She squints and stares and tries not to scream as she plummets.
There is ground down there, that much she can see. It is charred and smoking, some of it burning, some of it weeping magma.
Magma.
Where is she?
And then the sky clears, and Eleanor punches through the atmosphere and the roiling black cloud cover, and she understands, suddenly, and is terrified. She knows exactly where she is. The upheaval far below her is the wreckage of some legendary battle. She sees mountains obliterated, transformed into vast fields of steaming rock. She can see cinders and ashen splinters scattered about, the only remaining evidence of entire forests, now wiped out.
Ash forests.
This is another dream world, she realizes. An altogether unpleasant one.
I’ve been here before.
This is her mother’s dream.
But that’s not right.
It isn’t a dream. It’s a nightmare.
The black clouds smell like gasoline. They are thick, sludgy, and seem to slow her fall, tugging at her like oatmeal. The air is dense and oppressive and utterly hot. Eleanor breaks free of the clouds altogether, and the ruined world spreads out before her, and she knows instantly that the lush valley in her father’s dream and this perverse vision are one and the same.
She has been here before, long ago. There were forests then, trees that were blackened by fire and stripped of their leaves and needles, and a poisonous downpour. She hid naked in the mud, sheltering herself from the rains. But through the raw and broken trees she could see the valley, faint beneath a gelatinous fog.
She’s all but certain that she’s falling toward the very same valley, not a similar one. But the mountains have been sledgehammered into rubble. The flat peak where she left her father—gone. The glittering river winding through the green meadow—gone. The valley floor is a wasteland. There is no river, only a cracked groove that loops unevenly over the land. Heavy black smoke gushes from rifts in the earth.
