Eleanor (34 page)

Mea turns to the darkness.
Are you sure it will work?

The darkness says,
It will work.

She thinks of her failures. She thinks of Eleanor’s disappearance into the dream world, into the place where Mea cannot see nor follow. She thinks of Eleanor’s injuries, of the missing hours and days.
 

You’re certain
.

The darkness says,
I hope you have prepared for her arrival. She will be frightened.

Mea says,
I have only thought of her arrival.

She turns her attention back to Eleanor’s world.
 

The boy is in the ocean, shouting up at the cliff, and Eleanor has taken several steps back. Mea can see Eleanor’s nervousness, but she also senses the determination that glows beneath her fear. Eleanor pulls off her raincoat, her scarf, her hat and mittens. She places her shoes carefully beside each other, but leaves her socks on.
 

Here on the cliff there are no doorways to which Mea can pin her portal. There is only blue sky. But a doorway isn’t strictly necessary, and Mea has a hypothesis. The missing element in her past attempts to steal Eleanor from her world—Mea’s theory about what will work now—is
momentum
.
 

Speed.

The darkness pushes up against Mea.

If you fail now
, it says,
the girl will die.

Eleanor begins to run.
 

I know
, Mea says.

The water below the cliff is blue and clear. There are no rocks on this, the back side of the island. Mea can see the boy survey the cove, making sure there aren’t any just below the surface that might threaten Eleanor. But if Mea is correct, even if there were spinning razors at the bottom, Eleanor would not fall onto any of them.
 

Eleanor’s red hair is a vibrant cape that unfurls behind her, whipped by the wind. She runs to the edge of the cliff and, with a frightened shout, launches herself into the air. Mea watches Jack’s expression change from anticipation to fear—there is something not quite right about the way Eleanor falls. For a moment, she was absolutely graceful—the arch of her body, the ribbon of her hair; she was a swan, framed by the sun. But Eleanor is not a swan. She is a fifteen-year-old girl, her body fresh and new and graceless, and Eleanor does not leap or dive, really.
 

Eleanor tumbles.

Tumbles from fifty feet up.
 

Eleanor realizes herself that something has gone wrong, Mea can see. The girl’s arms pinwheel. She turns over in the air, falling with her head pointed at the sea, then her back. Jack is shouting, not happily, but in fear, and already swimming to where he thinks Eleanor will strike the sea, because Eleanor will not cleanly cut into the water, will not make a joyful splash. The water is like a slab of concrete from that high. Eleanor will collide with it like a bullet, spearing into its depths before she slows, and Jack will have to dive deeply to find her, will have to combat the salt sting in his eyes to find her unconscious body before the deep-water currents do—

Now
, the darkness says.

Mea takes her, and Eleanor vanishes from the sky.

The sun goes out.

Jack disappears, along with the sea. His terrified cry is interrupted, silenced. The clouds are swallowed by a sudden darkness. The frightening sound of the wind ripping at her clothing ceases. It is as if Eleanor has fallen into a well, and the lid has been drawn over the top. Everything is black, and she wants to scream—but she was already screaming, and she can’t hear anything. Did she stop screaming?
 

She feels
different
. The space
around
her is different. It is neither warm nor cool. She can see no variations in the darkness. It is complete, and seems to wrap around her as finely as water, fitting into the crevices of her elbows, into the small pockets behind her ears. She gasps, and makes no sound—no sound at all. The darkness enters her nose and her mouth, swells inside her lungs.
 

What is she supposed to do?
 

She tries to think, but thinking is
hard
. Where is she? What happened to her? Is she falling?
 

Her mind races back to the last year. Is this a new place, like the cornfield, like the woods? Like the airplane? She has pushed those memories away for months now, and each time she walks through a doorway and hasn’t found herself in Siberia or New York or a swamp or an icy lake she challenges those memories just a little more, until they are remembered stories instead of memories, until they are fairy tales to pass on, not experiences that were lived.
 

Something happens. The darkness has a softness to it, or perhaps the definition of Eleanor’s own body has begun to blur. She cannot tell where her skin ends and the dark begins.
 

The darkness cups her gently, cradles her. It
becomes
her, and she becomes
it
.
 

If she moves, the darkness moves with her.
 

She has become enormous. She is a galaxy, a thousand galaxies.
 

She feels a calmness descend on her. This—whatever is happening—is
okay
. It is
good.

She can no longer tell which way is up, or if “up” even exists, and this does not concern her. The sky that she leapt into is gone. Was it behind her? Above? In the dark, she is all things and nothing. She is the before, and she is the after.
 

Eleanor feels pleasantly intoxicated.
 

I am floating
, she thinks.
 

She is, or may as well be, for in the darkness she has no sense of weight, of substance. Gravity itself has been dispensed with.
 

She wonders if she is still capable of moving. She cannot feel her legs, her hands. Are they even there? Does she still have a body? If she cannot feel it, does it exist? If she cannot see herself, what is she?
 

She tries to lift one hand so that she can see it.
 

The dark explodes into color around her.

She cannot see her hand, but she thinks that it is still there, perhaps, or that in the darkness, she is her own hand, or her hand is everything. But when she concentrates and moves the part of her that she thinks might be her hand, a fan of light blooms before her and trails away. It is brilliant, so bright that if she still had eyes she might squeeze them shut. Slim tracers of color move across her field of vision. She stops her hand—stops
moving
—and the little tracers slow, and at the tips they grow fat and bulbous, and then they burst like inky balloons. When they burst, they burst
slowly
, so slowly that Eleanor can see individual threads of color, all kinds of colors, fork into the blackness—and then they pop, saturating the dark with gold and rose and blue.
 

The colors are hypnotic. They dance, and Eleanor feels their warmth surge through her—through
her
. The colors are not separate from the darkness—they are a
state
of the darkness, which means that they are a state of
her
, and she has power over them.
 

She feels joy like a sunrise within her, and the darkness flares in a great wash of pink and orange and yellow, the colors so vibrant that they suffuse her being with happiness.

Then she remembers Jack, and the colors shrivel into ash and dissipate into the dark.

No
, she thinks.
Come back
.

And the colors return, playfully, arcing through her like comets and vapor trails. She feels oddly powerful. Is this a dream? If it isn’t a dream—if it is not a dream, then is she—has she died? She feels—she hesitates to put her feeling into words, but she thinks it, and the darkness surges with colors that overlap and collide and create entire new palettes she has never seen.
 

She thinks,
I feel like a god.

But she does not dwell on this, because the image of Jack, helpless in the ocean, rushes back in. She thinks of him there, alone, terrified, unable to find her. She knows Jack well, knows that he will not leave the island without her—but she is no longer there. She wishes that she could tell him, somehow, that she is okay. She knows that she is, even if she doesn’t know
where
she is. If he knew that she was okay, he could row home without her and not feel the way she knows that he will feel instead—heavy with guilt, frantic, frightened.
 

The colors wither into gray and black.

She does not know how long she has been in the darkness. Time seems not to matter here. There is no
here
, just Eleanor, just what she has become. She worries for Jack, worries about her mother, her father. She worries about her own body—is it still behind her, suspended in the air between the cliff and the sea? Has she plunged into the water already, an empty shell that sinks under its own weight?
 

But the importance of such feelings fades as she inhabits the darkness, and Eleanor begins to understand that the darkness has much to teach her. It is not that she has
become
something new, she realizes. She has
joined
with something, and that something is very, very old.
 

In the darkness, Eleanor feels peace, feels at home, things she has not felt for years.

It seems that the darkness, too, has waited for her for a very, very long time.