I reel away from the window, hand already reaching for the door, but it isn’t there. The walls are all smooth white plaster, as if they were built that way, as if there has never been a way in or out of this room.
Two breaths, ragged, overloud. I turn slowly back to face the narrow iron bed, and the girl still sitting with her legs crossed neatly at the ankle.
“Let me go.” I say it calmly, with authority, as if I’m talking to a child who has locked the bathroom door.
Eleanor’s eyelids lower, heavy with scorn. “Why? So you can go save a little boy still scared of the dark?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t need him.” A vicious flick of her fingers, as if Arthur is a toy or a treat.
“No.” My voice is still calm, so calm. “But I want him.” The two words have lost their distinction in my mind, merging into a single bright hunger.
Eleanor pauses to study me, with the expression of a predator looking for a limp or a scar, some old injury that never quite healed. “He’ll leave you, too, you know,” she says, and I can’t help it: I flinch. She moves her head forward, scenting pain. “Everyone else has, haven’t they? One day he’ll do the same, and then you’ll be all alone again.”
A century swimming in her own nightmares has made her very good at this. Her voice has a prophetic weight, a certainty that sinks straight through my breastbone. Except: I wouldn’t be alone, would I? Even then, I would have Jasper and Bev and Charlotte and the hellcat.
I look back at Eleanor, my head tilting like I’m playing one of those spot-the-difference games in an issue of Highlights. But it no longer seems difficult to tell the two of us apart. Eleanor never had a home, no matter how hard she tried to make one; I had the backseat of Mom’s red Corvette, and then room 12, and then the House itself, a series of homes made out of wishful thinking and love. Eleanor was always alone; I never was.
An uncomfortable emotion moves through me, hot and prickling. It feels a little like pity, but it’s hard to pity someone you see so clearly. “Eleanor. I’m not staying. And neither should you. You’ve been here a long, long time—”
“No.” Her voice is high and shrill, as if I’m waving a knife or a gun at her. “This is my home, and I will stay here until Gravely and his children and his children’s children are dead, until their gravestones are too worn even to be read.” The Beast is growling at her back, its jaw lengthening, its claws tearing into the floorboards; I wonder if it can smell the Gravely blood in my veins, the inheritance I never asked for. “I will scour Eden itself from the earth, every house and every name. They tried to bury me, but I will bury them all in the end.”
It’s a curse, the kind you neither break nor escape, the kind I never quite believed in. “No,” I say. I don’t sound very convincing.
“Yes,” Eleanor says. “The river has been running high and fat for a long time now, did you know that? The mist rises thick now, and often.”
I picture Arthur, surrounded by gravestones. Jasper, telling me the Wardens don’t last as long as they used to. “Why?”
“The Beasts have told me about the black lake they built on the surface, where they keep all their corrupted water.”
“The—are you talking about the ash pond?” I feel my brain twisting, worlds converging. “People say it leaks, but the power company says—”
“Of course it leaks.” Eleanor’s tone is almost amused. “The earth here is porous, full of caves and graves. It leaks all the way down to the river, to me, and we feast on it.” And she actually licks her lips, as if the tailings from a power plant are a special treat. “And now, tonight—with the Warden gone, and the gates unlocked . . .”
She trails away, but I can see it unfolding before me: the Beasts running loose down the streets of Eden. Fires, floods, disasters and deaths out of season. An assault so terrible the town is abandoned, undone, given over to the honeysuckle and kudzu. Soon there will be nothing left but the mist, padding down empty streets on silent feet.
The room darkens around us. The windows blacken, not with night, but with the sleek obsidian bodies of birds, rushing past the panes in an endless flock. Eleanor is watching me, smiling a little.
I feel my chin jutting, my fingers curling into fists. “No,” I say again, but this time I stamp my foot, like a child. The floorboards ripple beneath me. The birds wheel back from the windows.
A small shock moves across Eleanor’s face, there and gone again, replaced quickly by malice. Her Beast rises, filling the room, lips peeling back over long dog’s teeth. And I think: The only monsters here are the ones we make.