Oliver has always felt this way.
He’s always felt like he didn’t matter, like he was a burden. That weight was always in his belly, because everyone was better than him. And he knows it’s not true, but it doesn’t stop it from being there. Doesn’t stop him from feeling that way.
And now he holds a true friend on his lap. Because of Oliver.
He tries to sob quietly. He covers his face, bawls into his hand. He’s not just crying for Flury. It’s his mom, his dad, his grandmother.
His grandfather.
It all weighs on him.
Molly wraps her arms around him. He drops the orb and buries his face in her hair, weeping openly.
“He chose you to help your family,” she whispers. “You know why? Because he saw your heart, Oliver. He saw it was good.”
They could hear him in the hall, but he didn’t care. He had to get this out, had to let go of the weight. When he finally pulls away, he covers his face to wipe his puffy eyes. The aftershocks rattle his lower lip.
The tears begin to dry.
“He left you a gift,” Molly says.
Oliver looks at the orb sunk in the bed. Molly shakes her head. She lays her hand over his chest.
Flury touched their lives. He changed his heart, his life. And that gift would last forever.
That night he sleeps deeply.
He dreams of snow in every direction. The wind swirls, but his heart warms. When he wakes, the orb is still dull and heavy.
But it is warm.
F L U R Y
thirty-six
Molly turns the radio off.
The roads are still wet. April showers have been consistent for two weeks, and May flowers are already filling the ditches.
She pulls off the main road and stops in front of the gate. Weeds crowd around the brick pillars. Oliver expects it to open automatically, but the black gate sits still.
They sit quietly.
Neither of them has been out to the property since Christmas. Oliver runs his hand through his hair. It’s almost as long as Molly’s. He gets out of the truck to open the gate.
Most of the trees are still standing. The ones that had fallen have been removed, their enormous trunks squarely cut. Mom had trouble finding an arborist to clear the road in February. The rumors of the haunted property were persistent.
This place was dark and mysterious when he had first arrived a year and a half ago. Now light filters through the trees, highlighting the undergrowth.
No more secrets.
The house looks like a survivor.
Most of the windows are boarded. The attic window is still intact, watching them park behind Mom’s car. Molly turns off the truck, and, once again, they sit quietly. She follows his lead, letting him go at his own pace. He tried to come out in March.
He just wasn’t ready.
Oliver waits for Molly at the bottom step, their fingers entwine as she reaches for him. They start up the steps, but he stops and listens.
“What is it?” she asks.
“Listen.”
They pause. “I don’t hear anything.”
“I know.”
“And I don’t smell the weird,” she says.
And then he gets it. It’s not the smell.
It’s the sound.
Birds are singing. Squirrels are crossing limbs. Nature is rampant.
The property is open to the world again.
Footprints are stamped in a thin layer of sawdust on the porch. The contractors say the house will be habitable by autumn. They don’t understand how the place worked. It’s wired for power but never had any delivered. The contractors that ask too many questions usually end up quitting.
The glass panes alongside the door are intact. Oliver pauses, half-expecting a gray-haired woman to appear in the decorative glass. But no one is waiting for them when he opens it.
The house smells like mold, sawdust and plaster. A few of the pictures are on the steps, leaning against the wall. Above them are bright squares where they’d previously hung. The place still looks haunted, it just doesn’t feel it.
Aunt Rhonnie wanted nothing to do with it, although the money she inherited apparently wasn’t haunted. Mom let her have the majority of the investments. She wanted the property.
So did Oliver.
The kitchen is empty. The refrigerator is open and bare, so is the pantry. The chalkboard is still hanging inside the door. One chore is listed.
Rule #1: Finish your work.
There was a time when Oliver thought he’d never come back. There would be too much sadness out here. Flury wasn’t just an invention. He contained a soul. Maybe it was a collection of memories, a soup of past elven that existed as one, whatever it was…he was real.
And now he’s gone.
The cabinet above the sink is open, and the tea set missing. He finds it in the dining room, the table set. An empty teacup sits in a saucer at the head of the table.
Gooseflesh rises up his back.
“Look at this.” Molly carries one of the framed photos from the steps. “I was putting it back on the wall and noticed this.”
It’s the photo of the ship at port with people gathered at the bottom of the ramp. The men wore bowlers. There are no women carrying umbrellas in what appeared to be a cloudless day, but there is the little girl.
Oliver rubs the dust away.
A very overweight child. Not a child. An elven.
Grandmother.
She looked exactly like he’d last seen her, inside the super sphere. They had arrived by ship as paying customers. Surely there were questions, but nothing they couldn’t answer. She was a dwarf, they probably said. And once they arrived on the property, no one probably saw her again.
At least not looking like that.
The journals said the elven could transform humans into elven, and the process could be reversed. How long did she live in the hobbit house before deciding to become human? And why did she become human?
Why? Because she loved him.
She loved Malcolm Toye.
Out back, the garage doors are gone.
They were blown off their hinges when Flury escaped the dome’s collapse, when he whisked Oliver’s body into the front room before charging across the field to confront the rising snow titan that Grandfather had become.
Something clatters on the concrete floor.
“I’ll be right back,” Oliver says.
Oliver peers around the corner of the garage.
Mom is squatting to the right of the filing cabinets, piling items into a box.
“Hey.”
“Oh!” She lets a rag fly. “You scared me.”
“Expecting a snowman?”
“I didn’t hear you pull up.”
She pushes a strand of hair under her headband. There are no earrings to twist. She stopped wearing those shortly after Christmas.
Never said why.
“What are you doing?” Oliver asks.
“Cleaning up. I’ve been putting it off forever.” She spies Molly at the windmill. “Glad you came out.”
He helps her lift the box onto the workbench. There are stacks of folders, old tools and miscellaneous cans. There are also mouse droppings on the shelves. Nature’s back.
Oliver glances under the bench. The footlocker is missing.
He was never quite sure if Grandfather had been the one responsible for letting him have that. A part of him wonders if Grandmother put it there. Maybe she wanted him to find the wooden orb but Grandfather put the journals in it. She was genuinely shocked when she found them in his backpack.
The car is still there, but the shine is gone. Rust spots have already appeared on the bumper. The interior is water stained. When the dome collapsed, the car must’ve automatically found its way back. It hasn’t moved since. Without a key, it would remain an ornament.
Mom is staring out the window, the glass missing.
“You all right?” Oliver asks.
She n
ods. “I’ve been avoiding the garage because I thought it would be too hard to remember my father. It was the only time I really spent time with him, watching him tinker with his toys while I played on the floor. But I keep looking at the house, expecting Mother to come out the back door. It’s weird, but I miss her. And I never thought I’d ever say that.”
He never told her about Grandmother’s true elven nature.
Molly’s the only one that knows what happened after he left the house with Grandfather. When Mom asks about it, he says he doesn’t remember. It wouldn’t change anything if he told her, but it seems like the right thing.
She was her mother. That’s all that matters.
“The other day I stood on the bottom step of the staircase for half an hour. You believe that?” Mom’s eyes turn glassy. “I just, uh, did it for her, I guess. I don’t know.”
“She loved us. In her weird way.”
He cringes. He shouldn’t have said “weird.” She valued duty over feeling. She had to. He had a feeling there weren’t many good feelings after she left home. Her home.
The North Pole.
“You want these?” She slides a stack of leather-bound journals across the bench.
“Where’d you find them?”
“Mother’s room.”
He opens the one on top. They’re the ones she found in his backpack. He rubs the cover and slides them back.
He already knows the story.
***
The windmill is still standing, but the blades locked in place.
“Do you want to walk out?” Molly asks.
“Your dad will be mad.”
“I won’t tell him if you don’t.”
Molly’s dad wasn’t happy with all the mystery after the event. She wasn’t allowed to spend much time with Oliver, but Mom mended that fence when she went over to talk with him.
“They’re good for each other,” she insisted.
Many of the trees lay around the field.
They hike across the field and enter the forest where only a few trees have fallen. Oliver raises his phone and touches the screen. He only gets one bar of service. The compass, however, points north and doesn’t shift. And neither do the trees.
Not anymore.
Halfway to the river, they come across a patch of fallen trees. In the middle, a pair of kissing trees still stands. Limp and faded, the bracelets still hang from the limbs.
They reach the river swollen with spring melt. Several new bridges have been created by fallen trees. They stay away from the river’s edge, but when the path gets cluttered, Oliver suggests they stop.
“Maybe we shouldn’t go any farther,” he says.
“What?”
He’s thinking of all the holes the snowthings drilled down to the lab. He can’t remember where they are.
“I’ll be right back,” he says.
“Where are you going?”
“I just have to check on something.”
Oliver climbs through a tangle of limbs and navigates to a cluster of fallen tree trunks. The crossing over the water is safer than the original tree. Molly promises to wait, but he’s not even to the other side and she’s already following.
She forgot she promised.
They hike up the slope where the trees appear unaffected. The ground is slippery, and several times they slide on their butts. Their clothes are caked with mud when they approach the bend in the river. The felled trees diverted the water in a new direction. The water twists into the newly formed pool. Somewhere beneath the swirling water are the remnants of the lab. Treetops rise above the water surface as if they simply sank in place.
“Look!” Molly points at the exposed roots of a fallen tree. The slope has eroded around a window.
The hobbit house.
The ground above is still intact.
Even a few of the chimney stones are still in place. They have to climb higher to safely reach it. Oliver uses exposed roots to slide down to the window. The river is only a few feet beneath him. He rubs the filth off the glass. A soft glow emanates from inside. There’s no smoke from the chimney stones.
Gravel cascades on his head.
Molly is climbing toward the upturned roots of the great tree that served as the original bridge. Before he can say anything, she slides against it.
She’s too close to the river.
“Oliver,” she shouts. “I see it.”
He crawls back to a safe spot and slowly slides down to meet her. A small hole is evident. Molly holds her phone inside it and illuminates the cavern leading back to the door. He opens his mouth to make her promise that she’ll—
“I won’t lie this time,” she says. “You go first.”
Oliver drops in.
The earthen cave is humid and stuffy.
The back of the cavern had collapsed, destroying the secret entrance to the lab. The rest must have been reinforced to remain open.
They shine both of their phones on the L-shaped root. The door, however, is jammed. The ground had shifted, wedging it into place. He uses both hands to pry it open just enough. Molly slides in sideways.
“Oh, my god,” she exclaims.
Oliver sticks his head inside. The super sphere is in the center of the room. A soft glow pulses from the intricate etchings.
“Don’t touch it!” he says.
Molly has her hand out. The super sphere is smaller than he remembers. In his memories, it’s the size of the house. In reality, it’s about knee-high.
He told her a hundred times how he’d been sucked into its inner space. Even now, this close, his stomach begins to twist in knots. But the dim glow suggests something is missing. He can feel the magnetic tug when he reaches for it, but it’s weak and distant.
“This is it?” Molly asks. “That’s what pulled you in?”
“Yeah. That’s it.”
His knees weaken. That’s why he came out here. He had a feeling he’d find it.
Grandmother and Grandfather are still in there.
He tried to explain what it was like to exist without a body. He was pure awareness, just thoughts and emotions. There were no boundaries that defined him, no body to limit him.
But he still felt human.
And despite being interwoven with Grandfather, he still felt like an individual.
He could only assume Grandmother was right: Grandfather had resolved his past. If he hadn’t, the river is right next to them. It wouldn’t take much for the super sphere to become a watery titan.
“How’d it get in here?”
“I don’t know.”
The floor is water stained.
Maybe they did use the river, but only to move to higher ground, to hide inside the hobbit house until Oliver could find it. He should cover the super sphere so that no one does. They could hide the entrance and bury the window. It could exist here until he knew what to do with it.
Actually, Oliver knew what he wanted to do with it.
But at the moment, that seemed impossible.
It needs to be home.
“Oliver.” Molly had wandered around the super sphere. “Come here.”
She’s standing in front of the fireplace. The hearth is open and clean. She’s staring inside where something is propped against the wall.
The cover is leather.
The seventh journal.
F L U R Y
thirty-seven
January 15, 1885
Time, my love.
I have nothing but time.
I have not written in this journal for over a year because, quite honestly, I never expected to see you again. It became quite clear that the elven—despite my anguish, my tears and rage—were going to keep me forever. But if all goes well, my words will soon touch your ears, my lips will brush your lips, and I will feel your breath upon mine.
Home, my love. I am coming home.
I have lived almost two years beneath the ice, and today I stand on the deck of a ship crossing into the Pacific Ocean, th
e salt spray dashing over the bow and the sun warm on the boards. Water! So much water!
Now that we are safely en route, perhaps seven days from home, I am relaxing into the wonderful boredom. I care not to sleep because dreams have tempted my hopes for too long. I prefer to watch the stars at night, the sun rise in the morning and glisten on the green waves. I want to taste every second of this journey.
This impossible journey.
I have taken pen to paper, to finish this journal, because it was all that kept me alive in those early days, for when I did so it brought me closer to you. Even now, I can feel you at the end of my journey, a journey not possible if not for the only elven that believed in me.
Ginny.
She stands, right now, at the front of the ship. Her unusual size and shape has made her the target of the crew’s ridicule. I am quite a sight, as well, my love. I carry fat like a polar bear and a beard like a beast! But my feet, unlike Ginny’s, are normal. But she seems to care not. Never in her life has she seen so much water uncapped by ice.
She is my savior. My hope.
When my pleas fell on the elven’s deaf ears, she listened. Even when Claus, a human among the elven, agreed to keep me an unwilling citizen of the colony—a prisoner!—she listened.
She’s not like the others.
When they celebrated, she was morose. When they sang, she was quiet. Untouched by a smile, she worked hard to support the colony, but not because she loved them. It is a very strong sense of duty that drives her.
And that is what led her to us.
Little did I know, she had been watching me. She approached me last August. I was on the ice, pushing Flury’s limits as I did every day. It kept my mind occupied with dreams that, one day, he would get past their arbitrary border and fly me home.
Reality, though, was suffocating that dream.
It was that day she met me at the extent of Flury’s range. I waited for the stout little elven to approach, wondering if someone had caught on to my intentions. We stared at each other for quite some time.
Claus Trilogy (Boxed Set) Page 76
