Eleanor (16 page)

It happens again.
 

Eleanor feels the surge of static, the not-so-subtle tug of
something
, as if a black hole has opened up in her bedroom and is trying to suck her right through the doorway. She doesn’t have time to say a word, but a terrible thought unfolds in her mind like a vortex of its own—
what if nothing is real, what if everything is just made up and anything can happen—
and she feels a powerful urge to resist the thought, because to give in to it, to even consider it, would swallow her alive, would unhinge her sanity.

Because there is no reason that Eleanor should be doing anything other than stepping into her own bedroom right now, to remove the strange yellow sundress, to put on her coziest, safest flannel pajamas, to tuck herself into her bed. Perhaps she would even find her way into the old boxes in her closet, and find her softest childhood stuffed animals, and bury herself in them, to drown herself into a sleep that is as loved and cared-for as her old blankie, her stuffed turtle.
 

She would give anything at this exact moment to be five years old again, warm and alive inside the snugglebun with Esmerelda.
 

All of this surges through her mind in an instant, and then Eleanor goes through the doorway—is yanked through, almost—and she is no longer in her bedroom, or even in her house, anymore.

The first thing she notices is that this is not Iowa.
 

She isn’t in a lush green meadow. There are no cornfields, no wheat fields, no amber waves and violet skies and carefully crafted footbridges and distant red barns. There is no Jack. There is no childlike Eleanor. She is surrounded by gray trees with gray fronds of gray needles. She looks up, and the trees recede to very tall, very narrow points, as if they are a bed of nails for the sky to rest on. The gray, gray sky. Around her is a large depression, almost a crater of kicked-up mud and rocks, and at its edge, several trees are shattered, their bark torn, the hardwood inside bone white and glistening.
 

Eleanor does not know this place any more than she knew the picturesque, Venusian Iowa in which she spent her entire afternoon. She is again barefoot, but this time she is entirely naked. Her red hair is still long—she can feel it against her back—and she is dirty, as though she has been running through mud. Her legs are flecked with wet earth, and there are gray pine needles fastened to her skin, which is damp. She is sweating.
 

No.

Yes, she is sweating, but she’s wet because it is raining. It’s a very fine rain, a mist that seems to swim around her rather than fall from the sky, but it is rain and it beads on her skin and turns her hair into a dead weight that drags her head back. It would pull her to the ground if she allowed it to, but she grits her teeth and steadies herself, and fights against the hair’s strikingly powerful gravitational pull.
 

Whatever this place is, it’s miserable. Iowa was joyful, radiant with color and light, but this place has had the color sucked out of it until all that is left behind is the color of ash and soot. She looks up at the sky and sees clouds there, clouds whose underbellies are black like automobiles, stained as though they have been driven for years through cinders.
 

She is cold.
 

The rain is cold.
 

There is no wind here, but if there were, she thinks it would probably chill her to death in just a few steps. She looks around, searching for shelter of any kind. The ground slopes away beneath her feet, and she realizes that she is on the side of a hill. The trees are gnarled and battered, and some look as if they have been victimized by fire during their long lives, as if they have burned and yet live on, survivors all. Some leak stone-colored sap that has hardened and turned opaque.
 

Eleanor wraps her arms around her body and clenches her jaw against her teeth and wonders if she can possibly wish herself back to her bedroom. It is insufferable that she has to face this again, that she has been kidnapped from her very home and deposited here. Are there aliens? Has she been abducted? She doesn’t think so, but then, she didn’t believe in magic before this afternoon, and now she thinks that she has to allow for the possibility that there is some sort of
something
present in the world. It seems impossible that she would never have heard of such things, but she probably wouldn’t have believed them if she had.
 

She remembers the static—the strange, almost magnetic field that she encountered before she entered both doorways—and her mind stumbles to a stop on the word.
 

Doorway
.
 

Both times that this has happened, she has been approaching a door. But they are ordinary doors—doors she walks through several times every day. There is nothing special about the cafeteria door or her bedroom door.
 

“Apparently there is,” she says aloud.

She coughs. The land here smells strange, and it leaves her with an odd taste in her mouth. The rain leaves behind little dots of grit on her skin. She touches the grit with her finger, pushes it around. It’s so soft and small that she can’t feel it, but gray streaks follow her fingertip.
 

Eleanor looks around again. There is no shelter, but there is a hollow beneath a broken old tree that looks just large enough for her. Under ordinary circumstances she would never scramble into such a hole—she imagines snakes or badgers or, worse, millions of squirming bugs occupying such a prize space—but she is cold and it is raining and she doesn’t know where she is, so she climbs into the hole backward, scooting her bare bottom into the shadows, and tucks herself into a ball against the moist soil. It isn’t warm, but she feels less cold. Her feet press into the damp earth, and she discovers that the soil can be a form of insulation, so she abandons any sense of decorum she might have been clinging to and unearths handfuls of mud and dirt, packing them around her body for warmth. There are no bugs in the earth that she can see, but the light is draining from the sky, and she would rather not think about whether there are or aren’t any bugs snuggling up to her in the dark.
 

Rain gathers in small puddles at the mouth of the hole. Eleanor watches it grow fat and trickle down the slope toward her, but there’s only a little of it. It’s good that the rain is so faint, but she worries that if it begins to rain harder, the hole will fill with water.
 

While she thinks about this, she feels herself growing sleepy. Her damp hair is heavy, and her head sags against the mud, and the exhaustion of dealing with her father and her mother and of her unexpected trip to Iowa overcomes her, and she falls into a deep slumber inside a hole in the side of a hill in a wasteland, far, far from home.

The woman trudges through the bleak meadow. She has grown accustomed to the perpetual chill in the air, but wraps herself in shawls and scarves and hats that she knits from scratchy, dense fiber, until she is sealed almost completely from the cold. A cowl beneath her coat is itchy against her neck, and she drags one long fingernail across her skin until the itch fades.
 

The meadow belongs to her, with its damp earth and tall grasses bent flat from the rain. A creek weaves through it like a strand of bulky yarn, twisting and turning. The creek winds past the woman’s home, a rough-hewn, single-room cabin that keeps her warm. She can see it from here, just a small speck on the horizon, a thread of smoke curling up from the chimney.
 

Each morning she walks the meadow. Sometimes her excursions are short, and take only part of the day, but often they take several days, as she decides to walk the perimeter of the land, where the meadow butts up against the hills. Beyond the hills, mountains rise like broken teeth into the sullen, ponderous sky.
 

She pauses and looks up at the peaks and ridges, then at the scrawl of forest below. The trees swarm like barnacles over the hills, stretching partway up the mountainsides themselves, before scattering, overtaken by rock and shale. The mountains themselves flank the meadow for miles, towering high above the flatland, cinching together at either end. To her knowledge there is no way into or out of the valley. This land is protected from the world beyond.

She considers the valley to be hers, though there is no deed. The mountains belong to her as well, and the creek, and the forests. The clouds, even. All that she sees is hers, and she is the keeper of this valley. Her sole purpose is to protect it, and in doing so, to protect herself.
 

This morning she awakened with a sense of unease in her belly. She tossed back the quilts on her small bed, made some coffee, stoked the fire, and then stood on the wooden porch under the eaves, smoking a black cigarette and surveying the gray land. She knows that it is sick, that it has in fact been sick since the day that she discovered it, and sometimes she thinks that its sickness has infected her as well.
 

But this morning she was sure of it for the first time.
 

She walks the meadow now, heading for the mountains to the south, the source of her unease. She can feel a change in the air, a sort of vibration that wasn’t there the day before. She’s felt such a thing only once before, when the beasts first appeared in the valley. But that was long, very long ago, and the keeper is not keen to share her valley with more interlopers.
 

She is certain that this is what she will find to the south.
 

An intruder.

The keeper’s shadow trembles with curiosity.
 

It huddles in the natural shadows at the entrance to the great forest. It is shapeless without the keeper, which makes it perfectly suited for such tasks as this one, for reconnaissance. It isn’t often that the keeper frees her to swarm through the valley in such ways, and for a moment before it came to the forest’s edge, the shadow skimmed the long grasses along the creek, joyful in its temporary freedom.

But now it must get to work.
 

It slides into the forest, moving quickly through patches of pale light, confidently sliding through the deep shadows cast by the trees themselves. It does not know what it is hunting for, only that the keeper believes there is a thing here worthy of investigation.
 

Not a welcome thing. An evil thing.
 

The keeper has always been careful to keep evil out of the valley. The beasts who arrived long ago were not interfered with because they were not evil, and the keeper sensed that, and permitted them to roam.
 

Whatever the shadow is searching for must not be as benevolent or gentle.
 

It searches for hours and hours through the forest, sweeping over hundreds of acres, finding nothing. When it approaches the boundaries that the keeper has established, the shadow turns and repeats the search. It does this again and again—and many hours later, it finds what it has been looking for.