Elias's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

Elias turned back toward the arch. It still hummed behind him, a square of blue static framing his bedroom, his green blanket, the empty slippers on the rug. He lunged for it. His fingers stretched, and the dark pulled sideways instead of down. Gravity here did not want his weight. It wanted him. He felt something thin in his chest stretch toward the doorway and snap loose, and then he was falling away from the only light he could see. Through the shrinking square, he watched his own body on the floorboards. Eyes open. Mouth slack. A black shape climbed in through his ribs and settled there. The body twitched once, then sat up. It smiled with his mouth. It stood and walked out of the frame, and the frame kept shrinking. Elias screamed. No sound came. His throat worked and gave him nothing. He fell through a dark with no floor and no top. Far off, taller than anything had a right to be, a black tower stood in the nothing. Its outline was sharper than the dark around it. He could feel it noticing him. He could feel it had noticed many before him and would notice many after. The attention did not feel cruel. It felt patient, the way a stone is patient with rain. Something inky uncurled below his feet. A path, smoke-edged, drawn in wet black across the dark. He hit it shoulder first. It held. He lay there breathing air that tasted like nothing and felt his hands shake against the surface. A hand touched his shoulder. Small. Steady. He had not heard anyone approach. "Shhh, child," a woman said. "It gets easier." She crouched beside him with a lantern in her free hand. Her face was only an outline, like a shape cut from paper. The lantern's flame was warm and yellow and wrong for this place. Through the lantern's small light he could still see the arch, far above now, the size of a coin. Inside it, the thing wearing his body sat at his mother's kitchen counter. It lifted a cinnamon bun to his mouth and bit. He watched his mother's hand brush its hair back. She smiled at it. She did not look for him. "I have to go back," Elias said. His voice came back here. That was something. "No," the woman said. She did not soften it. "Not that way. The door closes from your side now." She stood and held the lantern higher. "Get up. The smoke things come for ones who lie still." Elias pushed himself up onto the black path. His knees held. The arch above him shrank to a pinprick and went out. He had footing. He had a stranger with a light. He had lost the way he came in. He took his first step along the path, away from where his life had been, toward the watching tower.