The Gate: Part 1 of the Hinterlands Series

by Charlotte Grey

she shall be a true lover of mine.

  Alma stopped for a few moments before starting into a song that Shannon didn't recognize. For the first time, she really took the woman in. Ben was pale, and his skin had a gray tint like her own, certainly, but Alma had almost no color to her at all. She was young – perhaps twenty at most – but her blonde hair resembled bleached straw, and her lips looked more like clay than skin. Her plain, white dress was stained with dirt, and the bottom was coated in dried mud.

  “She's been here longer than I,” Ben frowned. “The strange thing about her, though – and I can't figure it out... Davy moves his boxes in the same way every day. Grace stands at her counter and stares relentlessly until evening. George takes one-hundred-and-eighty-three circles around the town, anticlockwise, every day. Alma has no pattern. I've had a lot of time figure it out, but I never know what she's going to sing next.”

  “Does she ever sing anything new?”

  Ben nodded. “Not often, but it happens. And each new song is as haunting and beautiful as the last. Sometimes I swear she can see me.”

  They left Alma to her ballads after a few minutes, and Ben continued to show her around the town, keeping well on his promise to take her the pond and the fence beyond it.

  The fence extended past the treeline, and Shannon was happy to find that they could walk all the way around the pond. It was much larger than she expected – a bit longer and wider than a football field, if she had to guess. Two fishermen stood on the other side of it, and a woman washed her laundry while a child dug in the dirt.

  The pond even had a rowboat that was tied to a decaying wooden peer. She ran up to it, ecstatic to see something that might provide some relief from what was sure to be a mundane afterlife.

  “Is it safe?” she asked, carefully stepping onto the pier.

  “You're dead,” Ben laughed.

  Shannon rolled her eyes, but chuckled nonetheless. “Yeah, well, believe it or not, it's taking some getting used to!”

  “It does at first,” he stepped past her hand walked to the end of the pier. “You will get used to it in a rather short amount of time. Come to think of it, I've been dead longer than I was alive!”

  “Most people have,” Shannon put her hands on her hips. She could snark right back. “How old were you when you died?”

  “Twenty-five.”

  “Me too!”

  She held out her hand, looking for a high-five, but Ben just stared at her.

  “It's a...” she let her hand fall. “Never mind.”

  The communication barrier was annoying, but Shannon was just glad they both spoke modern English. How well would she and Ben have been able to communicate if he had been born in the Middle Ages? What if he didn't speak English at all? Of all the places and times he could have come from, nineteenth-century England was a much easier adjustment than it could have been.

  “Would you like to go for a row?” he asked. “I promise it doesn't leak.”

  Ben held his hand out, and she stepped gingerly across the splintered slats. Although Shannon wasn't really into chivalry, she decided to humor Ben's gentlemanly customs and allowed him to help her into the boat. Sitting across from her, he untied the boat, took the paddles, and began rowing.

  The water was the same dark charcoal as Lake Erie on a cloudy day in November. When Shannon dipped her fingers in, she barely felt it. It was almost the same temperature as her body. But she didn't have a heart anymore, so there was no way for her to have a temperature, really.

  “I tried to catch fish in vain back in my early days,” said Ben. “Humans are the only creatures here. Fishing would provide us with a past-time and food, so of course we don't have any. Dear lord, do I miss eating. Ah, well, at least we have a pond so we can heat up water to drink. I put pine needles in it, and it makes a decent tea. It's amazing; you can actually taste it.”

  Shannon tried not to let her pity show in her face. One day she would get excited over pine needle tea, too.

  He rowed around the pond a couple of times, careful to avoid the fishermen's poles. The sky had begun to darken, though no light source was present through the thick layer of misty clouds.

  “We need to be getting inside,” Ben hopped out of the boat and tied it back to the pier. “They'll be packing up and heading back to their homes soon.”

  Ben glanced back and forth between the village and the fishermen, tapping his foot repeatedly on the ground.

  “Is there a reason we need to head inside?”

  “There isn't a good way to tell you this,” he began heading back toward town, and Shannon followed. “But it's crucial. When people go outside at night, or when they're locked outdoors before they can get back, they disappear. Someone gets trapped outside once in awhile, and by the time morning comes, they're gone. Whether they're dragged off to heaven, hell, or worse... I don't know. I don't intend to go outside at night to find out.”

  His long legs carried him quickly along the path back into town, and Shannon almost had to jog to keep up. As the sky grew darker, the drab world faded to sepia.

  “Is it normal for everything to be this color?” she asked apprehensively.

  “It just means we need to get back. We're fine; just keep up.”

  He led her back to his home before the people in the square had finished their routines, slamming and bolting the door behind them.

  Ben's living space was comprised of two rooms: a kitchen in the front and a bedroom in the back. The ceilings, high and steep, were half-timbered just like the exterior of the building. The walls were bare and yellow, but the furniture, though worn, was made of rich mahogany and upholstered with fine green velvet. Seeing the embers that smoldered in the fireplace, Ben added a couple of logs and stoked it.

  “I know it's not much,” he lit an oil lamp and a few candles. “But I did what I could with what I knew. Décor isn't exactly my forte.”

  “Well, hey, if you ever want to fix anything up, let me know,” Shannon said. “My dad used to flip houses... and you have no idea what that means. What I mean is, he'd buy an old house, fix it up, and sell if for a profit. He made sure my sister and I knew the ins and outs of remodeling. This whole town needs some upkeep, if you ask me.”

  “I'd love to make this place less drab,” Ben picked at the crumbling plaster on the wall. “Thankfully nothing falls apart or decays unless I do something stupid, but let's face it. This whole town is just depressing.”

  “Exactly! That's what I'm saying. We should make it less depressing.”

  Ben smiled. “You're remarkably optimistic.”

  “Yeah, well, a hundred visits to the shrink and ten different SSRI prescriptions can do a lot for a girl,” she plopped down on his sofa, and the corset dug uncomfortably into her ribs.

  “I haven't a clue what you just said.”

  “I know. It's fun; isn't it?”

  “Having you here will certainly keep me on my toes,” Ben poured water from a bucket into an open copper kettle and hung it over the fire.

  “Is that a good thing, or a bad thing?”

  “I suppose you'll just have to find out,” he winked.

  It took a while for the water to boil, and Ben kept apologizing, though Shannon insisted she didn't mind. Pine needle tea seemed to be a huge deal to him. Then again, being English, she guessed it was more the tea part and less the pine needle. Finally it boiled, and he poured her some in a fine china cup.

  “How is it?”

  “It's... uh... It's piney.”

  “Ah.”

  “No, no – it's good! Don't get me wrong! Just not like anything I've ever had. Somehow, I see this turning into my morning coffee. Not that I'll be waking up or anything.”

  “We can sleep, you know. We don't need to, but we can, and I strongly advise that you do, at least once in awhile.”

  Shannon looked around. The room had grown darker, and the light from the fire flickered and dan
ced on the walls. For a moment she considered how the flame kept itself going without any oxygen, but then she remembered the afterlife probably didn't abide by the same rules as the world to which she was accustomed.

  “You can use my bed, if it's not too improper,” Ben offered.

  “I'm from twenty-first century America,” Shannon said. “We don't really have standards for what's proper and what isn't.”

  “What a strange time the present must be.”

  “I'll have plenty of time to tell you about it, I'm sure,” Shannon said. “I can even draw you pictures! It's going to blow your mind. Then maybe in another hundred and twenty-some years, someone else will come along and tell us what the year 2136 is like. God... That doesn't even sound like a year.”

  “Neither does 2015. It's almost absurd to me.”

  “Hey, at least we've pretty much eradicated that pesky consumption thing you guys were so keen on getting.”

  “Oh, it was that Keats fellow; I know it,” Ben scoffed. “I'm so glad I didn't start writing until I was dead. People of my age were so insufferable when it came to, well, suffering poets. As though suffering brought brilliance and a deeper understanding of human nature.”

  “Well...” Shannon hesitated. “People still think that. We just don't get TB all that often.”

  “I feel no more enlightened today than the day I died,” Ben took a seat at the kitchen table and scribbled on a blank sheet of paper. “Cynical? Depressed? Certainly. But – I shouldn't be talking like this. Not when you've just... It's a lot to process. I