Eleanor Read online

  But for the moment, Eleanor has questions of her own.

  Her body feels strange and different. She could swear that she is taller—not just a little taller, but two inches, maybe more. Her hair rattles her—it is longer than she has ever worn it, hanging almost to her bottom. Her hips are different—flared, somehow—and her breasts are larger, and—and there’s an awful lot of unexpected hair beneath her arms, and down there. Her legs are fuzzy.

  She thinks about the rift, and wonders if it has done something to her. What if it was radioactive? What if it mutated her, like the dogs near Chernobyl?

  The bathroom door opens, and Eleanor hears the old man’s voice, low. The toilet lid clanks as the woman gets up and goes to the doorway, and Eleanor leans close to the shower curtain to listen to them talk.

  “Three in the goddamn morning,” the old man says. “What was she doing in our back yard at three in the goddamn morning?”

  “That’s what I asked,” the woman says.

  “Paramedics are here,” he says. “I told them to wait in the living room. She doing okay?”

  “Didn’t want me to help her shower, but I think so.”

  The old man is quiet for a moment. “Three in the goddamn morning,” he says again. “Well, send her out when she’s warmed over. They want to look her over. Oh, and—did you get her name?”

  The woman shuffles over to the shower curtain. “What’s your name, dear?”

  “Uh—Jennifer,” Eleanor says.

  “Jennifer,” the old woman relays to her husband.

  The bathroom door closes, and the woman says, “Almost finished, dear?”

  Eleanor looks down at her legs and then her armpits, and eyes a pink razor hanging from the shower caddy. “Two minutes more,” she says. “Can I have a little privacy?”

  The woman hesitates, then agrees. “I’ve left the clothes on the counter,” she says.

  “Thank you,” Eleanor says. “I’ll be right out.”

  When the door closes, Eleanor steps out of the shower and onto a gray shag rug. She leaves the water running, and dries herself with a rough towel. The old couple’s granddaughter is a little smaller than Eleanor. The jeans are snug and too short, and the T-shirt has a printed image of a unicorn on it. There’s no underwear, or socks, or shoes, but Eleanor decides she will make do, and dresses in the borrowed clothing.

  Then she opens the bathroom window and steps onto the toilet lid and hoists herself up onto the sill. She tucks her knees and pivots, and eyes the dark ground below the window. It looks near enough, and she doesn’t see any unexpected thorn bushes or garden stakes.

  She drops down, her feet squishing in the cold mud, and then breaks into a run across the black lawn and into the night.

  The old couple must own a large lot, because she runs for two or three minutes before she encounters a fence that seems to stretch off into infinity. She dances from one foot to the other, keeping them off the wet ground as long as she can. They’re throbbing from the cold already. The shower’s effects have worn off. She’s freezing.

  She runs to the right, and a moment later comes upon a rickety gate. She fumbles the latch open, runs through, and almost yelps when the lawn gives way to a gravel driveway, the stones sharp beneath her numb feet. She jumps sideways into more grass, then squints into the darkness. The rain blurs her vision, but she can see the faint blue asphalt of a street.

  To the right, she can see the ambulance’s revolving light. It paints the dark trees blue and red. In her neighborhood, she knows, people would be coming out of their houses to investigate. Here she can’t see anybody, which means that the old folks live in one of the mostly dead districts, or the neighbors out here are a long way away from each other.

  She skips the street and cuts left, crossing another lawn. She dodges some decorative bushes that look like little shadowy trolls, and then the ground drops away beneath her, and she thuds into a drainage ditch. The black water soaks her borrowed clothes, and she scrambles up the other side in the mud. She emerges on pavement. Her arms are covered with goose bumps.

  Still she runs, her lungs smoldering, her bare feet scraped raw by the gravel and the hard asphalt. She trips once, stubbing her toe on the road, and goes skidding. The fall knocks her breath out, and she sucks in a dozen deep breaths before she gets up again. She looks down and sees a surprising amount of blood on her left foot, and pavement rash on her right arm, and the too-small jeans are torn at the knee.

  Eleanor runs, limping a little now, looking for any landmark in the cold night. She finds one after fifteen minutes of running and stopping and gasping for breath, fifteen minutes of ignoring the little telegrams of pain that her foot is sending to her brain.

  She pauses for breath at an intersection. It looks familiar—except, she realizes, there should be a tree in the median, and there isn’t. There’s a scoop of missing earth, grown over with grass, and filling with water, which means that the intersection is the one she thinks it is—which means that Jack’s house is just a block north.

  A little dagger of pain in her side slows her down, a stitch that won’t go away, and she walks as quickly as she can in the rain. She glances down at her foot. There’s still a lot of blood, and it looks as if she’s torn open her big toe. Her shirt is dark with mud and water, and her knee is bleeding through the ripped jeans.

  She hopes Jack hears her at the door.

  She turns down his street, passes the first few houses, and then pauses at his driveway. She’s been to his house only a couple of times, but never to go inside. She has waited at the curb for him, perched on her bicycle. The house reminds her of Jack’s father—bulky and square and dark and foreboding. There’s no light over the front door, none by the garage door. All the windows are dark. A pickup truck sits in the driveway, facing the street. There’s a large dent in the driver’s door, and the front bumper is bent at an unusual angle.

  Eleanor tries to guess which window might belong to Jack. She slogs across the lawn, its grass high and uncut. She stops at the second window, takes a deep breath and holds it, and then raps on the glass with her knuckles.

  Nothing.

  Please, Jack, she thinks, and knocks again, louder.

  A light goes on, illuminating a dark curtain. A second later the curtain is yanked back, and she lets her breath out in a rush when she sees Jack inside. He peers out into the dark, blinded by the bedroom light. He leans close to the window and cups his hand over the glass. She waves, and Jack’s face turns white, as if he’s seen a ghost. He vanishes from the window and the curtain falls back into place.

  Eleanor stands in the rain, shivering, and then Jack flies across the lawn and throws his arms around her, scaring her half to death. He grips her tightly, and her ribs scream, but she only grunts. He says something in her ear, and she feels her body turn to ice at his words.

  “I thought you were dead,” he says. “I thought you were dead, I thought you were dead.”

  He’s sobbing.

  She has lost track of the days. She has wandered through the valley—perhaps for weeks, perhaps for years—shell-shocked by the audacity of the invasion. The small breaches were unpleasant, but tolerable—a few trees toppled, nothing more—and the airplane had been a serious injustice, tearing a hole not only in her sky, but in the earth itself.

  But the—the… she doesn’t even know what to call the event.

  The meteor? The bomb?

  There were no words for such a violation. It had been both a declaration of war and victory at once, an attack that the keeper had no hope of warding off. How could she? The attack had been so—enormous. The red-haired girl had been only a scout, she now believes. Whoever—whatever—had followed behind the girl had exterminated the keeper’s hope. Her cabin had been obliterated in the battle—

  No. It is wrong to call it a battle.

  It was an ambush.

  She is homeless, and so she wanders, picking her way through the fallen forest. The earth for as far as she can se
e is sooty and black, and as she trudges through the devastation she cannot help but scrape the dark muck from her mouth and compare it to the soil. The scorched ground is not so different. She wonders if the voracious fire in her belly is anything like the fire that she witnessed, the fire that came from the sky and destroyed her valley so completely.

  She walks slowly, heavily, gripping her belly. The pain is blinding now. She feels like a star at its end, collapsing inward.

  “When stars die, they explode,” she says to her shadow.

  It hears, but does not answer. It follows her at a distance, skirting the edges of the ruined forest, moving among the charred stumps of vanquished trees.

  Dead stars explode, she thinks. They destroy everything.

  If she explodes, what will happen to her valley? This worries her more than her own death—the idea that her valley might simply cease to exist when she does.

  For, she is certain, that day is coming.

  The keeper is dying.

  She beds down beneath a slab of rock that was once part of the mountains, but is now the largest piece of rubble in a vast wasteland of boulders and dust. The clouds steamroll overhead, aggressive and horribly black. Strings of lightning flicker within them, stitching them all together. The rain that falls now is acrid and dark as night. It stings her skin, and she is covered all over with burns.

  She lies still and thinks, as she often does, of that day when her valley was murdered before her.

  She had banished the wrecked plane from her valley, and had discovered the darkness inside her mouth and throat. She had struggled into the center of the clearing. Her shawl felt like a noose, and she had stripped it off, and then, in a fit, had torn away her sweater and her boots and her hiking dungarees. The buttons on her blouse would not rip, and her hands had been shaking too powerfully to unfasten them, so she had gripped it by the hem and pulled it over her head and arms. She yanked her long wool socks down and cast them aside.

  She fell to her knees on the damp earth and teetered unsteadily, fighting to catch her breath.

  Her shadow detached itself from her and retreated a few feet.

  She said, “Where are you going?”

  It did not answer. It watched her, circling her slowly, curiously.

  She fell onto her back on the wet ground, naked, the rain cold on her skin. An itch in her throat forced another cough, and she hacked up a stone-sized wet mass of the black dust. She scooped it out with her fingers. It smeared across her skin like damp sand. She rubbed her hands on her bare arms, trying to remove the sludge, but succeeded only in turning her arms black as well.

  She leaned up on her elbows, searching the ground for a piece of bark, a leaf, anything to scrape her hands clean of the black stuff.

  Her shadow saw it before she did, and flew away from her quickly—twenty, forty yards.

  Peculiar.

  Then she looked down and saw it herself, and her breath caught.

  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.