Eleanor tilts her head, her tone cooling. “If this river had a name like its sisters in the underworld, it would be Phantasos, or maybe Hypnos, and it would belong to Morpheus.” I’m flipping through threadbare memories of Edith Hamilton and Metamorphoses,trying and failing to understand, when Eleanor says, softy, “It is the river of dreams.”
The word “dreams” strikes me like a thrown stone. It sinks into my mind easily, as if I were expecting it, leaving no ripples behind.
“What does that mean?” I ask, but I already know the answer.
“It means these waters give form to our dreams, however foul. It means the only monsters here are the ones we make.” Eleanor looks at her Beast again, her small hand vanishing between the white blades of its hackles. The look in her eyes is almost tender, as a mother to a child, or as a dreamer to their favorite dream.
Repulsion rises in me, and anger. “You made them? You—why?”
Her head twists on the fragile stalk of her neck, uncannily quick. Her eyes are mean slivers. “You don’t care.” It sounds like a well-worn complaint, whetted by years of use. “No one ever did before, no one does now. None of you know the truth of it, and you prefer it that way.”
The words strike an uncomfortable resonance in my skull. I swallow twice, dry-mouthed, and say, “So tell me.”
“You won’t listen.” Her tone is still low and vicious, but there’s a new emotion rising from the mean depths of her eyes. An old and desperate hunger, a want she tried and failed to bury.
I walk across the floor, which doesn’t creak here, and kneel beside the bed. “Tell me, Eleanor. I’ll listen.”
She fights it, but the hunger wins in the end.
This is my story.
No one listened to it before, and if they listened they did not believe it, and if they believed it they did not care. I am certain you are the same, but I will tell it anyway, because it has been so long since I had anyone to tell.
My story begins with my mother’s story, like everyone’s does. It goes like this: Once upon a time there was a rich young woman who thought she was in love. But as soon as the marriage license was signed—or, more specifically, as soon as all her accounts were placed in her husband’s name—the young man vanished. He left her lonely and laughed-at, further along than she ought to be.
I was born in the spring of 1851. She named me Eleanor, after herself, and never spoke our surname aloud.
My mother died young—a cancer, the doctors said, but I think it was bitterness—and the courts sent me to live with my only living relation. I took the train to Bowling Green and a flatboat to Eden. My father had never seen me before, so he stood on the shore while the passengers stepped off the ramp. Every time a young woman passed by he asked: Eleanor Gravely?It was the first time I heard my own name spoken aloud.
My father lived well off my mother’s money. He and his two younger brothers—my uncles—had started their own company, Gravely Brothers Coal & Power, and now they owned a few hundred acres, a dozen men, five black songbirds imported from Europe, and a big white house on the hill. I thought at first I might make a tolerable life in that house—might spend my days sewing and reading, teaching new songs to the birds—but my uncles and my father were bad, bad men.
（You want to know more. You want every miserable, gruesome, ordinary detail. But surely you can imagine the sorts of sins that hide under the word “bad,” like grubs beneath a stone. Surely the precise shape of the wounds doesn’t matter as much as how much they hurt, and whose hands dealt them.）
They were bad men, and they grew worse as the war worsened and the coal ran dry. They burned through their own profits and dug deep into my mother’s coffers. They drank more and slept less. They came to resent every bite of food I ate at their table, every stale crust I slipped into the birdcage, and they punished me for it.
My father was the worst of them, if only because he was the oldest, and had six more years of practice in cruelty. I took to sleeping as many hours as I could, wrapping myself in dreams of teeth and blood, blades and arsenic. I was sleeping when my uncle came to tell me my father had drowned.
I didn’t do it. Half the town suspected me, and I almost wish they were right—I assure you he deserved it—but the other half of Eden blamed the miners. The mist had risen that night, and when it cleared my father was dead, and there were no more slaves in Eden.
I did not mourn my father, of course. My uncle John stood beside me at the graveside, twisting the flesh at the backs of my arms so viciously it was purple and green the following morning, but I refused to shed a single tear for him. Maybe that’s when the rumors began, about that cold, strange Gravely girl. I heard she killed him, they whispered. I heard she only smiled once, when the first shovel of dirt hit her father’s coffin lid.