Eleanor (53 page)

She is dead.
 

She knows it. She felt it, the certainty of it, as sure as a vise that tightens and tightens. The moment she saw her mother, a frail witch in the gutted wasteland of her dream valley, Eleanor knew that she was going to die. Even from such great heights, she saw her mother’s eyes burning. There was no question why. Her mother was furious with
her
.
 

In the darkness of her death, she has plenty of time to consider this. She has known for years and years that her mother’s grief was toxic. Each morning Eleanor would wake from sleep and stand in front of the mirror with her eyes closed, hoping that when she opened them, she would look like someone else. If she could only do that—if she could only strip Esmerelda’s face from her own reflection—then maybe her mother would…
love
her again.
 

Of course, that never happened. And each day that Eleanor grew older was another day that Esmerelda didn’t. Eleanor at ten was a haunting reminder of a future that Esmerelda would never see.
 

Eleanor understood—had always understood—why her mother hated her so.
 

But she had never realized just how powerful that hate really was.
 

Eleanor is dead, and her mother has killed her.

She knows—just
knows
—that something unusual has happened to her. Each time she has passed into the dream world, she has left the fabric of her own world behind. Mea described it to her as like slipping into bed and hiding beneath a blanket—she exists, in a way,
beneath
the world. Between worlds.
 

Dreams do not occupy any particular reality
, the darkness had explained to Eleanor.
They are a fabricated world, wholly owned by their makers.
 

The rules do not apply.

Eleanor is dead, and she has left no body in her own world. There are no remains for someone to stumble upon, rotting in the brush beside the highway. No bloodstains on the carpet to be investigated. Eleanor walked into her mother’s bedroom, and disappeared.
 

She fell out of the world, never to return.
 

The expression on her mother’s face haunts her. She has never seen anger like Agnes’s anger. She has never seen someone so infuriated that they would crush their child into pulp. But her mother did just that, then threw her into a hole and went about her business.
 

Eleanor has failed in her task.
 

She wonders if Mea even knows that she has failed. Neither Mea nor the darkness can see into the dream worlds—they said as much when Eleanor was in the rift with them. How will they know she has failed, that she has been extinguished?
 

Eleanor considers this, then stops.
 

Where is she?

It has to be the rift.

She is surrounded by warm dark. She is formless, as she once was in the rift. She tests her theory, and waves her hand—her hand which is not a hand at all, which is as shapeless as the dark itself—and gasps when a tendril of pink echoes into the dark.
 

It must be the rift.
 

But if it is the rift, where is Mea? Where is the darkness?
 

Eleanor concentrates and speaks into the great black.
 

“Hello?”
 

She waits for a reply, feeling that same dislocating sensation of thousands and thousands of years passing by while she lingers here, sightless, like a blind shrimp in a sea beneath the earth’s surface.
 

In the quiet, Mea does not reply.
 

The darkness does not reply.
 

A black ocean rises around Eleanor in the rift, warm and dense and alive. It stirs around her, lifting her, bearing her up until she feels like a tiny ship bobbing atop a vast, fathomless sea.
 

“Hello?” Eleanor turns slowly on the invisible waters and says it again. “Who’s there? Mea?”

The ocean answers.

Mea is haunted by memories.
 

She cannot explain why, so she asks the darkness to explain her pain.
 

You feel because she is gone,
the darkness says.
 

This is not a sufficient answer.
 

I am not her sister
, Mea protests.
I was, but now I am new.
 

The darkness leaves her alone to think about this, and in its quiet, Mea settles on an answer—she feels pain because she is one half of two. She feels the way that Eleanor must have felt when Mea—when
Esmerelda
—died. This makes sense, but she wants to be sure, so she presses herself against the membrane between the rift and the world, and commands time to reverse.

And she watches Eleanor, a little girl, for a while.
 

Eleanor does not sleep for weeks after Esmerelda’s death. Mea feels the hollow inside her grow teeth and begin to consume her as she watches her young sister. Eleanor crawls beneath her bed, passes the night in the shadows there, awake except when she drifts into the sleep of an exhausted child. These small measures of rest never last. She starts from sleep with a cry, and realizes again that Esmerelda is gone, and weeps. Each time she wakes, it is as if Esmerelda dies all over again.
 

Mea has never wanted anything as badly as she wants to push through the wall, to swim down into Eleanor’s room, to enfold her sister.

She leans with all her might and substance against the gauzy membrane.

The darkness cups Mea in its vastness.

You feel because she is gone
, the darkness says again.
 

I am not whole,
Mea laments.

Then the rift seems to shimmer and dance, a million points of light glittering over the darkness, as if dawn has come to the void.

Mea says,
What is it?

The darkness is silent.

You don’t know
, Mea says in wonder.
Something is happening. You don’t know what it is.
 

The brightness grows and grows, and the rift is consumed.

“Hello?” Eleanor asks.
 

The silence would be deafening, she thinks, if she had ears.
 

She is certain that this is the rift, or perhaps a part of the rift. The whiteness of it is strange and blinding, but as she watches, it dwindles, calming into eternal night once again. She feels as if she has just witnessed the Big Bang, the birth of a universe.
 

Eleanor feels the hesitant ripple of Mea’s voice cross the dark void.
 

Hello?

Eleanor says, “I’m back,” and then she is swallowed by Mea’s embrace.

Where were you?
Mea demands.

“I died,” Eleanor says.
 

Impossible
, the darkness interrupts.
 

“I did.”

Not impossible that you died
, the darkness says, confusion in its words.
Impossible that you are here.
 

“I’m here,” Eleanor says.
 

What do you mean?
Mea asks.
 

Eleanor can feel Mea’s presence tighten around her, as if Mea is offended by the darkness and its disbelief.
 

The darkness says,
Dream worlds do not permit the passage of the dead. This has never happened.

Eleanor would shrug if she had shoulders. “I’m here,” she says again.
 

Your mother
, the darkness says.
 

“I saw her,” Eleanor says. “She was a skeleton, a witch. Her world was the same as our father’s world. When I arrived in his dream, it changed everything—his world was barren and covered in ice, and I watched it… It was
reborn
. We walked and walked—”

Where? Why?
the darkness demands.

“We were walking home,” Eleanor says. “He wanted to go.”

Mea says,
You healed his wounds.
 

The darkness reluctantly agrees.
He volunteered? He accompanied you willingly?

“Yes,” Eleanor says.
 

Then what happened?
Mea asks.

“We came upon a valley,” Eleanor continues. “It was familiar, and it took some time to figure out why, but I knew that place. I had been there before. But it looked different. My father’s version of the valley was green and rich. It was beautiful. But the valley I had been to before was burning.”

It cannot be
, the darkness says.
 

“When you took me into my mother’s dream, it was that same valley,” Eleanor says. “Except it had been—slaughtered. It was like a bomb had fallen right in the middle of it, and destroyed everything, and she somehow survived it.”

It is impossible
, the darkness says again.
Dream worlds cannot be shared.

Eleanor shares their dream worlds,
Mea argues.
You are wrong.

No. Eleanor does not share their dreams. Eleanor pierces their dreams. She is a guest.