Eleanor (40 page)

She puts her hands on his. “You have to take me back.”

“I won’t,” he says, snatching his hands away. He presses his palms against his eyes. “I won’t do it.”

“I’ll go by myself,” Eleanor says.
 

“Ellie, please,” Jack says. “Please don’t do this.”

“Then take me,” she says again. “I want you there. I need you to be there.”

He shakes his head. “I can’t. It’s not right, Ellie. You don’t know what it was like. I’ve been fucking terrified for two whole years.”

“Then don’t watch,” she says. Gently, she places a small, soft kiss on his cheek. “Just be my ride. Okay?”

There is no moon. The sky is a frayed gray blanket. The rain has weakened to a mere drizzle.
 

Jack rows in silence. Eleanor reads his fear in every pull of the oars, finds his worry in the hard slope of his tucked shoulders. She cannot see the furrow in his brow, but knows that it is there, so deep it must be almost painful.

“There’s water in the boat,” Eleanor says.
 

Jack doesn’t answer. For the duration of the bicycle ride that brought them back to the beach and the moored rowboat, he has been quiet. Eleanor imagines that he is torn between his fear for her and his fear of the unknown.
 

“Only a little,” she adds, and then she falls silent, too.

She would be lying if she said that she didn’t share Jack’s worries. The memory of the rift has begun to slip away from her already, and more of it fades by the minute. She can feel a pang of urgency, the understanding that if she waits much longer she will forget her journey into the rift entirely. It is too strange and fearsome and wonderful a memory for her to permit such a thing.
 

The sky rumbles, and on the far horizon Eleanor can see a whisper of lightning in the torn clouds, little sparks rattling about in the darkness. In the cold flickering glow she can see that there are other boats bobbing on the rolling waves, and once she spies their silhouettes she can also make out their tiny stuttering lanterns, like little campfires on the sea. The sun hasn’t yet begun to rise, and Eleanor perversely thinks that maybe it won’t rise today at all.
 

It feels like the end of the world, a little.
 

It feels like anything might happen.

This time, Jack walks behind Eleanor. She can feel his downcast eyes on her feet as she climbs the path, waiting for her to stumble. And she does, a little, sliding backward in the gritty mud a few inches with every short step. The brambles that hang over the dark path are sharp and invisible until she’s right upon them, and more than once she staggers through the branches and hears Jack’s grunt as their bristly arms smack him.

But they reach the pinnacle of Huffnagle without much trouble. For a time, Eleanor stands there, Jack at her side, staring at the far edge of the cliff. The sparse grasses on the rocky summit are matted down by mud and rain. The crown of the island is rocky and shimmery in the damp and dark.
 

She imagines what Jack is thinking as he stands beside her, sharing the view. He will worry about the leap, yes, but also about her approach. About the few running steps she must take, barefoot on the slick rock. One bad step and she might fall too close to the cliff wall, maybe even collide with some jagged outcropping on the way down.
 

She looks at him in the pale gray light. She can see these worries and more etched on his face.
 

He looks at her and finally speaks. “I’m actually terrified.”

Eleanor nods. “Me too.”

“This doesn’t feel real,” he says. “It feels like I’m dreaming. I have to be dreaming, right? There just aren’t places like that. Like your rift.”

“I barely believe it myself.”

“Maybe we ate something bad?” he ventures.
 

She shakes her head. “I’ve thought of a thousand possibilities,” she says. “But it’s real.”
 

“Were you really there for two years?” he asks.

She shrugs and looks out at the boats, dipping in the ocean swells. “It felt like a few minutes.”

He coughs, and shivers. “So—what do you want me to do? I don’t know if I can watch again.”

Eleanor puts her hand in Jack’s.
 

“Just hold my hand for now,” she says.

“There are seven boats,” Eleanor says.
 

“What?”

“Shh,” she says. “This will be okay.”

He stares at her. The rain picks up, lashing their faces.
 

“Promise,” he whispers.
 

She kisses him. “I can’t.”

Their clothes are soaked through, so they leave them on the cliff’s edge. They jump from Huffnagle together, their skin slate-blue in the faint light, their bodies pale, clad only in their underwear. Eleanor thinks of her grandmother, slicing through the waves, sinking to the bottom of the sea. She thinks of her father, of the terrible grief that he must carry like an iron ball around his neck. Of her mother, self-medicated nearly to death’s door.
 

She hears Jack shout her name, and it is the last thing she hears.

Only one of them crashes into the sea.
 

Eleanor is not there to witness Jack surface alone in the gray water, shouting her name against the ocean static.

Eleanor tumbles into the rift.
 

I am pleasantly surprised
, the darkness says to Mea.
You have my blessing.

Mea watches the girl, a distant glob of shadow, and sees a burning red wave sizzle into the blackness. A warning, sung out with confidence, with a hint of aggression.
 

“I’m not afraid of you,” comes Eleanor’s immediate outburst, its song a cacophonous roar.
 

Mea absorbs this, but does not reply right away.
 

Give her time
, the darkness says.
A moment to settle in. And demonstrate patience
.

Mea says nothing, but hears the darkness very clearly.

Her singed lashes are crusted with ash when she wakes. She blinks. The air is dense, particulate, its matter collecting in her nostrils, in the corners of her eyes, in the creases around her fingernails, beneath her nails. The keeper feels as if a shell of black grime is slowly hardening over her skin. Her bones ache, ache powerfully, and she wishes she could simply lie here and fossilize, never to be found, not by anyone.

But she wonders what has wakened her, so she sits up.

The largest beast rests on its haunches, its great forelegs posed mantis-like before its massive torso. Its long, pebbled neck curves down toward the earth in supplication, its jaw nearly perched on the torn soil.
 

It is lowing. The sound rumbles deep inside the beast like a foghorn, and the keeper can feel her own lungs tremble in response. She climbs to her feet and walks to the beast’s side. She has slept in its shadow for—weeks?—and yet she has never touched it. But now she stands in that dark space below the great animal, and she places her hand against its belly. Its hide is tough but porous, and a strong warmth radiates from it. Despite the beast’s cool appearance, it burns like a furnace.

She jumps back as the beast shifts, and she looks up to see its graceful, snakelike neck rush up into the sky, so high that its head vanishes into the low clouds.

And then she sees what has set the beast on edge.
 

The clouds are ferociously red, the color of blood.
 

The beast sings a long, high note into the clouds, and the keeper sees the rupture as it begins, not so far away this time. The clouds twist and tear, and a fork of steam rushes to the earth like a meteor’s trail.
 

And there, deep inside that fuming artery of cloud-steam, she sees the golden beacon again. As before, it falls and falls, picking up tremendous speed, hurtling toward the earth—
her
earth—as if it intends to punch another great hole straight through to the blackness on the other side. Before the keeper can even suck in a fearful breath, the thing spears into the side of a mountain.

The peak shatters and crumbles in a spray of fine, melted rock. The sound echoes through the valley like a thousand bomb blasts. The keeper looks up, watching the glowing hot shrapnel that sails through the red sky and hisses to the earth all around her.
 

“My god,” she whispers.

The mountain collapses like glass, and veins of steaming red magma wind through the ruins. The keeper looks up to the heavens, afraid, but there are no more blinding missiles circling in the clouds, and the one that destroyed her beloved mountain has vanished, shot straight through the rock as before.
 

The largest beast continues to sing above the clouds, but the smaller almost kills the keeper outright. It is suddenly racked with violent spasms, its legs—as big as grain silos—kicking out into the dark, shoveling up geysers of dirt and sand and rock. The keeper darts out into the open, away from the beasts, and her shadow, which has long observed her from a distance now, follows, as if it feels the way the keeper herself does.