Eleanor (38 page)

A dark stain spread across her belly.
 

A tiny cry escaped her mouth, and she swiped at her stomach in a fearsome panic. Her hand left behind a streak of soot and obscured the strange stain. She looked around frantically, and spied a deep divot in the ground, a remnant of the crash. It was full of gray water, and she plunged her hand into it and swirled her finger about until the black sludge came free.
 

She cupped water in her palm, then poured it onto her belly. The black dust washed away, most of it, and she poured another handful of water on herself to get the last of it. She closed her eyes, willing the stain to be something conjured by her imagination.

When she opened her eyes, the stain glared at her accusingly.

It lay just beneath her skin—or perhaps not
just
beneath, for she could see that the center of the stain was much darker than the rest. It spread in small tendrils across her stomach, bluish at the tips. She rubbed at it with her clean hand, but couldn’t erase it. She pressed her palm against her belly, pushed hard, and the stain moved with her skin. A terrible warmth, an
acidic
warmth, sizzled deep inside her, and she cried out.

“Come back,” she called to her shadow. “Help me.”

Her shadow remained at a distance.
 

“What are you doing?” she pleaded. “Something is wrong.”

Her shadow did not move.
 

She opened her mouth again, but before any words could escape, the sky above her changed. It turned black, as though an oil tanker had spilled its contents into the sea of clouds. The blackness grew so rapidly that she almost missed it. The entire valley fell into shadow, rendering the keeper blind. She could hear the rain falling, could see the faintest shimmer of dim light on the wet branches of the standing trees above her.

She could not see her shadow any longer.

“What is this?” she whispered, but she knew. She knew immediately.
 

She screamed into the sky. “
You go away! This valley doesn’t belong to you!”

 
The sky boomed in reply, and a flash of golden light rippled through the clouds. In the sudden glow, she could see the clouds pucker and then erupt into a funnel that surged to the earth like a tornado. The column twisted and swirled angrily, and as she watched, it grew exponentially wider until its size shamed anything she had ever seen before.
 

“
Go away!”
she cried, but her voice was lost to the winds.

She got to her feet, but the wind shoved her down again. Prone on the valley floor, she stared up at the dark hurricane and gasped. A tiny orb of glowing light appeared deep in the clouds and immediately began to fall through the center of the great funnel. It gathered speed, and she could
feel
it, hot like a fireball, its warmth ferocious even from so far away. The air around her rippled with heat, and the rain evaporated before it struck the ground.
 

No, no, no
, she thought to herself, and then the orb fell straight through the valley floor, and the world itself seemed to erupt. The ground below her bucked and heaved; she pressed her palms against her eyes, willing the invasion to stop—and a furnace blast of heat roared over her, a fiery wind that burned the hair off her head and turned her skin black and dead.
 

She awoke some time later, and climbed slowly to her feet. As she moved, her burned skin sloughed away, exposing raw, new skin to the toxic air. She stood naked on the hillside and surveyed her valley, and wept.
 

The forests were gone. Incinerated. The earth hissed and smoked, black and cracked and purged of life. Far away she saw an orange glow: a wall of fire that spread with blazing speed, and died off just as quickly, having burned every living thing in a moment.
 

The blackness slowly drained from the sky. The keeper’s valley glowed like a cooling ember beneath the gray clouds.
 

She stood in the wreckage, naked and bald and pink, the ugly dark stain throbbing in her belly.
 

“Mine,” she moaned. “Mine, mine, mine.”

But Eleanor had entered the rift, and the keeper’s world was forever changed.

The keeper wakes to the same poisoned rain.
 

Her shadow waits in the distance.
 

“Good morning to you,” she hisses.
 

She rises, and her bones crack like bullets. Her mouth is thick with ash. She feels weak, sick. She pushes a finger into her throat and vomits, and what comes out of her is as black as the stain that has overtaken her body. The stain has turned her entire belly black now, and the tendrils have begun to make their way across her breasts and into the hollows of her armpits. Each morning she forces herself to throw up as much of the black acid as she can, but the stain never diminishes. It only grows—slowly, inexorably.

Her shadow watches.
 

“Shall we?” she rasps, and begins walking.

She has taken her time approaching the impact point. She is afraid of what she might find there, not only because some piece of it might remain, but because she does not want to see how mortally her valley has been wounded. But it is time to survey the damage, she thinks. If there is a way to preserve her beloved valley, now is the time to do what must be done.
 

Now, before she dies.

As she walks, she thinks of the world that was, the world she knew long ago. She recalls stories of enormous bombs, of the shadows imprinted on walls by the brilliance of their explosions. Her valley is no different. The trees are all destroyed, turned to ash in a moment, but their shadows are etched onto the earth in obsidian, little flakes of dark glass that spell the story of her beautiful home.
 

She wonders if her own shadow will remain here when she dies.
 

She walks and walks for days and weeks, climbing the hills, carefully navigating the boulder fields that are all that remain of her mountains. Her shadow follows, farther away than before, unwilling to leave her, yet unable to reattach itself to her. She understands. She wishes that she could detach from herself as well.
 

The point of impact is miles and miles away, but she pauses at the top of the hill and stares into the center of the valley. The funnel had opened directly over her cabin, and now, for the first time, she observes the damage.
 

“This is very bad,” she says. Her voice is brittle, and her throat aches from the effort of speaking. She coughs up another black lump and spits it out. It patters to the ground at her feet.
 

The impact point is much worse than she anticipated. She had expected—what? A crater? But this is far more than a simple crater. A cylindrical hole the size of a city has been punched into the valley floor. She can see into the chasm from here, can see exposed strata, soil and granite and bedrock. Smoke threads up from the edges of the fissure. The walls of the hole glow fresh and hot, as if the damage was inflicted mere hours ago and not—

“Years,” the keeper says.

She does not know how long it has been. Her mind is weakened by the blackness that overtakes her from within. But it is more than days, more than months. It has been a very long time since the airplane crash. Since the doomsday event.
 

The basin around the hole is jet black. All the trees that surrounded her cabin are gone. The lake that had filled the meadow is long gone, evaporated by the blast. The river that once curled around her cabin is little more than a charred groove in the earth. Beyond the valley, most of her mountains have crumbled. The few that stand, the farthest from the epicenter, are brown, their snowcaps melted away, their peaks black as well.
 

The fire consumed everything, climbing even to the tops of the mountains.

“We’ll rest here,” she says to her shadow.

But she turns her back to the devastation, and does not sleep.

She stumbles down the hill in the morning. It takes two days to reach the smoking hole in the earth. Her shadow remains on the hilltop and does not follow.
 

The earth around the chasm is unstable. Dozens of crevasses have opened in the crust, narrow and deep. More than once she steps on solid rock only to feel it crumble away beneath her feet, spilling down into the guts of the earth below. She walks more carefully after one of the crevasses almost swallows her up.
 

At the end of the second day, she stands at the hole’s edge. It is larger than anything she has ever seen—larger than the mountains, perhaps smaller only than the ocean or the sky itself. The far side of the chasm is so far away that it is pale and dim. The enormity of the wound renders her speechless. She wishes that she had a cane, something to support her so that she doesn’t fall over in fear.
 

In the end, she sits down upon the edge of the hole and weeps softly.

It is an atrocity.
 

The keeper has patched great wounds in the valley for as long as she can remember, stitching the land back together after an earthquake, or extinguishing a great fire with a storm. But this is well beyond her ability to heal. She peers down into the hole and can see liquid rock leaking like wet taffy into the dark. A wind carries up from far below, hot and pungent.
 

There is no sign of the falling thing. The keeper cannot see a bottom, nor any trace of the glowing orb. It is almost as if whatever fell from the sky passed right through the earth, and kept going.

She remains seated on the edge of the hole for hours, watching the steam rise and dissipate high above her. There are small fires all around the edges, and one or two are put out by the rain as she watches. The hole is cooling, slowly, and perhaps in a few more years it will simply be a tunnel into nothingness.
 

The keeper wishes that her cabin still stood. She wishes she could simply tuck herself into her bed, and fall asleep, and never wake.

She walks. There is nowhere to go, so she circles the valley for weeks and weeks more. She hopes to stumble across some pocket of untouched land, some lost world of green trees, perhaps even enough trees to build a new cabin—but there is nothing.
 

Her shadow follows her again, and she is grateful that she is not completely alone.
 

She searches for the beasts. She hopes that they found a way out of the valley before the end came. She has not seen them in a very long time. She has always considered them to be interlopers, but pleasant, passive ones, and over the years she has become accustomed to them, has even come to welcome their presence.
 

There are only two possibilities, she knows. They escaped, or they lie somewhere in the valley, great heaps of ash, felled by the blast and the fires.
 

As she walks, she looks for bones.