Eleanor (41 page)

The smaller beast lifts its tail into the red sky, and it hangs there, framed against the bleeding clouds, for a pregnant moment. And then its tail topples as if it has gone lifeless. It smashes to the ground, its sheer weight creating a riverbed for the black rain to collect in and flow through.
 

The keeper sinks to her knees at a safe distance. She bows her head, listening to the stinging hot rocks that slice through the air around her, feeling the valley flush with heat, seismic twitches stirring the ground beneath her knees.
 

She begins to cry.
 

“Please,” she moans. “Please stop. Please, you’ll leave me with nothing.”

Her shadow draws near to her for the first time in months.

The rain falls like a cancer upon her valley.

The Other’s first words come in time, after Eleanor has grown accustomed to the darkness again. She feels noncorporeal, separated from the fibers of her nerves and the pores of her skin and the damp weight of her hair.
Warm
, she thinks, as if the darkness has substance, as if it has wrapped her within itself, taken her inside it, turned her
into
it.

Long before the Other speaks, she discovers that her thoughts are like commands. She thinks of Jack as she hangs in the darkness, and wonders what it must have felt like when she disappeared from his grasp, when he struck the water alone. She wishes to see him, and just like that, the darkness thins before her, and she
can
see Jack. She sees him from a great height. It is like she has wings, and is flapping them in place, staring down upon him. He is a bead of white against the dark slate of the sea. A long moment passes before Eleanor realizes that Jack isn’t moving. He hangs, suspended like her, in the sky. As this dawns on her, the rest of the strangeness of her view becomes obvious. She watches the sea for a time, but sees no ripple in the water, no surge of the waves. The water is frozen against the base of Huffnagle’s cliff like gelatin.

She is staring at a painting of the world that she has left behind, a photograph of it.
 

I was waiting for you
, the Other says.
 

The words swell over Eleanor, suffused with heat and amber light. The sensation is calming, comforting, much like her grandmother’s old blanket, like the smell of her mother’s coffee when Eleanor was only a girl. The words are heavy with memory.

“You frightened me,” Eleanor confesses.

I know. It was not my intention.

“What happened to my friend?” Eleanor asks.

The Other says,
He is safe. Don’t fear for him.

“He’s not moving,” Eleanor says.

Do you remember your last visit to this place?
the Other asks.
 

“You called it the rift,” Eleanor answers. “I remember now. I was starting to forget.”

Good,
the Other says.
That you remember.

“You have to tell me why I’m here,” Eleanor says.
 

When you were a little girl, you were not good at many things
, the Other says.

Eleanor is quiet.
 

But with time, as you grew, you became good at those things. Is that true?

Eleanor would nod, but she cannot feel her muscles, cannot send signals from her brain. She thinks her response.

“Yes.”

For a very long time—for time is relative here—I have struggled to bring you to this place
, the Other says.
Do you remember those instances?

Eleanor thinks of the cornfield, of the scorched mountain, of the backyard swimming pool. She remembers the strangeness of her body after the last event, and it occurs to her now that it’s all because of time. She was in the rift, at least according to Jack’s papers, for two years—time enough for her body to shift from girlhood into womanhood, for her shape to change, her hair to grow unfettered.
 

“Yes,” she says again.

I, too, grow better at things with time,
the Other says.
I have been here for what you might consider a very long time, Eleanor, but for me, it is only a few days since my arrival. I learn something new every day.

“What are you trying to say?” Eleanor asks.

I have learned how to preserve your timeline when you enter the rift,
the Other says.
That is why your friend is not moving.
 

“I still don’t understand,” Eleanor says.

You would call it stopping time
.

“That isn’t possible,” Eleanor says, but she feels the truth of it even as she denies it.

You know that it is,
the Other observes.
I can feel it.

“He’s okay, then,” Eleanor says.

Yes.

“Will you tell me what this place is for? Why I am here?”

I will tell you what I can, but you must make of it what you will. The rift, as it is called, is a…

The Other is quiet for a long time, as if searching for the correct words.

You might call it a waiting room
.

“A waiting room,” Eleanor repeats, as if such a thing makes sense. “But for what? What are you waiting for?”

I wait for passage
, the Other says.
 

“Passage?”

For passage
, it repeats.
I wait here for passage into the light.
 

Eleanor is still. She can see no light, only darkness. The view of the sea, of Jack, dims into shadow.
 

The light of the after
, the Other says, answering the question Eleanor hasn’t asked.
I do not know what lies there, for I am here.

“It’s purgatory,” Eleanor says. “The rift, it’s purgatory.”

Her own words spread into the dark, ribbons of phosphorescence that ripple outward. She watches them recede until they are small, but in the distant dark, they break over the shape of the Other. She cannot tell what the Other is, only that it is there, and that it, like the darkness, has substance.

Purgatory
, the Other muses.
I know of this concept. Yes, it’s like that.

“So there’s really an afterlife,” Eleanor says. “You’re dead. You’re waiting for it.”

Perhaps
, the Other says.

“But you don’t know for sure?”

It may be so
.

Eleanor considers this, surprised that the Other does not seem to know. “Does that mean that I’m dead, too?”

The rift does belong to those who have passed from life
, the Other says.
All sorts of lives, in all sorts of places.
 

“So I’m dead,” Eleanor says, not surprised by this at all.

No,
the Other replies.
You are rare.

“What do you mean?”

Few can enter the rift from life without passing first into death.

“But I’m not dead?”

You are not dead.

“I don’t understand, then,” Eleanor says. “Why—what am I doing here? Why is this happening to me?”

You are here because I brought you here
, the Other says.
For you, the rift is a different thing. It is not a waiting room, but—a conduit, you might say. Into other places. I do not know how many sorts of places, only that there are other doors available to you. Doors that you may only enter from here.

“From this darkness,” Eleanor says. “But why? I don’t understand.”

Do not be distracted by such questions,
the Other says.
Do not ask why you are here. That is not the correct question.

Eleanor is quiet for a long time. Finally, she says, “What is the right question?”

You know what it is,
the Other says.
Ask.

Eleanor turns away from the Other and considers the thousand questions she wishes to ask. Which of them is the right one? How is she supposed to know which it is? What happens if she asks the wrong one? For a time, she panics. She doesn’t want to disappoint the Other, whomever it may be out there in the darkness.
 

Behind her, the Other is patient and still.

Eleanor turns over in the black. The movement of her body sends a kaleidoscope of color into the darkness, the dancing light and pigments radiating from somewhere within her new, invisible self. She loses herself in the beauty of it. In the colors she sees a star and its entire life, passed in but a moment. She witnesses its formation in the void, as if she is observing its death in reverse. She sees it snap to life, witnesses its body turn incandescent in the void. It burns brighter and brighter, and grows larger and larger, and then it collapses. She watches the star go nova before her eyes, sees its soul rupture like a soap bubble in the darkness.
 

She gently rolls over in the blackness, and in the slipstream of color around her sees the formation of planets, strange and wonderful ones, some that look like fibrous bacteria, some that are cold and slick and blue. She sees the passage of comets, their centuries-long journeys over as quickly as a glimpse of a falling star. Beyond all of it she sees the great flaming edge of the universe itself as it pushes forward into the absence, and in the chaos of that boiling expansion she watches galaxies born like tiny sparks that become fireworks displays.
 

The question comes to her at last, and she turns slowly to face the Other.

“Why are you here?” Eleanor asks.

“Wait,” Eleanor says. “Before you answer.”

The Other is silent.
 

“My name is Eleanor,” she says. “You called me that earlier. You know who I am. What is your name?”

She can feel the Other’s hesitation, and then it answers.

I am called Mea
.

“Mea,” Eleanor says.

It is the name I chose for myself when I entered the rift.

Eleanor thinks about this. “Should I choose a new name?”

You are but a flicker in the rift,
Mea says.
No.

“Is Mea a girl’s name?”

The rift recognizes no gender
, Mea answers.
You may have noticed that you do not possess a body.

Eleanor nods, and a tendril of color flutters into the darkness.

“Okay,” she says. “You can answer my question now.”

She can feel Mea approach her. Waves as dark as wine lap over Eleanor’s new shape, and Mea comes to rest nearby. Her shape remains indistinct, but now Eleanor can see the violet waves that emanate from her when she speaks.
 

I once existed in time’s great stream
, Mea explains.
The rift is that stream. It has no beginning, and no end. I am here now, and so I have been from the beginning of all things. Yet I have also only just arrived, and I have already left. Do you understand?

Eleanor doesn’t understand.

You come from a place where time moves forward
, Mea says.
The rift moves in all directions. This is why I can leave your friend in the air. I can visit the very moment that you ceased to exist in your world, the moment when you entered the rift. I can also return to the instant when your world was formed in the darkness. I can visit your world at the moment of its death, when it is consumed by your sun. Do you understand?