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And her hand slippy and hot held on. Rascal raccoon band of blood drying across her eyebrows, hair silvery-pale in that white migrainous daylight. She stumbled through moldy leaves and snapping branches. Neither one spoke or guided - they fled in the way of animals. There was no one alive to pursue them.
Until nightfall - Distant memories said summer, supplied long hollow days that eroded him with the same heavy warmth, and the light dimmed to a blindness. Warmth among trees far away. His head dulled and spun, concussive gunshots, ironsalt wet and itchy across his chin, his collar. They were lying on mulch and damp. In her stained nightshirt she shivered and wept and he pulled her to his warmth and bled on the back of her hair, wading through feverish absences. Held her fuzzy head and rocked her. Shshshsh.
Within white-tile walls it had been given that he could end the world with a blink, so easy. Now that the world stretched outside him, under fingertips, croaking frogs and insistent mosquitoes, mulch-smell and a little girl shivering under his arm it seemed he was lost in an infinite vastness, digging up an endless desert with a tiny crystal glass like Mother used to drink from.
Mother…
In some ways it must have been easier for Eleven. Outside was dreamworld, unreal and new. She might as well have been carried to Fairyland or Hell. She had never seen a mosquito, a wasp, a real wildflower, and they all frightened her equally. But she drank it all in with wide dark eyes, pain and sunlight both, and shivered in her thin nightgown. Henry was a double-exposed film - he was thirty years old, he thought, or something like that, pristine in his orderly costume, and he was twelve and bubbling with quiet hate and fear. Eleven, this is a mosquito - it won’t kill you if it bites, but it’ll feel itchy, try not to get bitten - Eleven, that’s clover flower, isn’t it pretty? look, you can eat it, like this - Eleven, a spider, look, isn’t it beautiful?
Lurchingly his twelve-year-old self reminded him that a human being can only survive so long exposed to the elements in nothing but a no-longer-pressed cotton shirt and pants and a brown leather belt never mind a flower-patterned polyester nothing at all. They were both being eaten alive by the blackflies, Eleven put up a brave face but was filthy and bled under her hair. Something animal kicked in and he dragged himself for the warm light when night fell again only to emerge from the treeline into a neglected suburb of Hawkins, Indiana.
Awfully convenient of Papa to put the lab so close to home, said Henry; come on Eleven, I’ve got a place for us to stay, said One.
Henry had never stolen anything before and so One spent an hour or two wrestling with the idea of getting a job, just so he could pay for necessities until he had taken over the world or whatever it was he was going to do, anyway, until he realized he was magic. He still thought of it this way and it had been eighteen years, yes he knows eighteen years since Papa locked him up now, he saw it on a piece of newspaper blowing by, that would make him twenty-nine, oh, Henry, the age his father had been, old and misery-aged, his whole life stolen away - never mind that - he was magic, who knew why, that made them God-like, him and Eleven.
The old convenience store was gone so he walked until he found something lit up white and red where electricity sang fluorescent. Eleven crept along the edges of the lights in bare feet wild-eyed. One flung the doors open, seized the cashier’s mind - clumsily, it had been an age since he wove a dream - and shoved them so hard into distant memory that his ears rang when he came up for air. He grabbed as much edible-looking candy-color garbage as he could and walked out. Mud and blood in his wake. Let’s go home Eleven. What’s that? It’s dinner.
The rose in the front door made him too much Henry. He took Eleven’s hand hot and small and held her tightly to keep him One in his stained white cotton uniform and took her to Henry’s old bedroom, thick with dust but otherwise untouched, where they ate on the creaking floor. The spiders were all long dead, but he couldn’t bring himself to look at their jars. The food tasted like nothing or dust or ancient violence.
Eleven looked at him for a long time. He felt her looking more than saw, since it was pitch-dark and everything was a smear of blue and black but her mind reached out burning and young, very much by accident.
“What is it, Eleven?” His voice wandered off into the dust and memory.
Instead of speaking, she exhaled and the question glowed at the tips of her mind why didn’t we bring the others with us
Blood in the Rainbow Room, his heart expanded until it was the room, the country, the planet and all the past and futures, warmth blooming, smell of salt and metal, scream, the pressure and clamp of another’s mind tangled in his thoughts, the high of it all, like he could end the universe with a snap of his neck -
“They couldn’t keep up with us,” he said, “we are different from them.”
Did you leave them with papa what if he
Henry’s fingers crept spider-legged over the floor and his mind dragged, weightless fluid across the endless gap from mind to mind. “They will be fine,” he said quietly, and curled himself around her and his palm over her first two knuckles. “Eat your dinner.”
Eleven nodded.
Then, clothes, then, cleaning up the old house, Mother’s voice lingering in his head a little while - God loveth the clean! that’s Francis Bacon, love, go wash up - God, he hated that woman, ultimate betrayal, her tight lipstick smile and biweekly hair appointments, head full of cobwebs - but after so many years in Papa’s basement sterile like a lab rat in a maze the mold made him sick, and Eleven, too. He would tell her his plans eventually when she was old enough to understand. Then they would go together. Kill everyone, or something along those lines, wipe this world clean, dishrag along dusty glassware, swoosh! just like so, and shiny new - just once they had clean clothing, a meal for tomorrow, just as soon as they chased out those bats living in the attic. It had been, in the lab, a comforting picture of simplicity, all these buzzing cluttery minds washed away in a searing wave of his power, when it had been Papa or the nurses making his face hurt, when he had been cold and naked in polyester nothings. Now he was tumbling along the rapids, Paddle-to-the-Sea, worn and lost and strayed somewhere between him and his dream of final quiet. The quiet hatred bubbled on with nowhere to put it. He was Created for extinction. God, but let him use this hatred! Burn it all! But dinner first; Eggos, broccoli, orange juice.
He and Eleven washed in the lake. She was only a white slip shivering in the brackish water, rail-straight surgical scar up the front that made Henry run the pads of his fingers along Soteria’s exit. Her hair grew straight outwards; Henry’s grew long and draped soaking over his face in ways that made Eleven giggle and reach out spindly eight-year-old hands to brush it off his forehead. Henry smiled, a brittle thing, and splashed her; she yelped and, with a wave of her hand, threw a glittering of water into the air to pelt him until he checked her and they went rough-and-tumble into the water with bubbles roiling around them, getting lakewater up their noses until it hurt.
They walked home hand in hand wearing clothes stolen from an old consignment store - Hawkins Middle said Eleven’s, and Henry wore an ill-fitting green plaid that made him look like a fashion-failure ghost. Dinner was gas station sushi, bedtime story, musty copy of Beatrix Potter from Ally’s room. The Tale of Two Bad Mice. Henry wondered if Eleven would be happier with her mother, that strange woman who called her Jane, Jane. But selfishly he rubbed his mind against hers, soft like a friendly stray cat might, and brushed his knuckles against her temple. “Eleven,” he whispered, but she was already asleep.
Open eyes, Father’s nightmare, baby’s weeping - shhshhshh, sleep - stars fading but I linger on, dear - screaming, screaming! Alice, I am saving you, don’t struggle, Alice, you empty thing, free you from this world, wipe you like a stain, oh, Mummy, frightens me so, I’m afraid of that man, Mummy, look at me, I’m still your boy - Henry, Henry - shhshhshh - all curled around and warm all blood and bone all muddled and mangled so, oh, silver-black and red and a living monument, empty lakebed, clock strike a yellow midday, Indiana dreaming - sleep, sleep - oh, Eleven’s tiny hands, burning young mind brushing his and clumsily soothing the fever - it’s alright you’re safe warmth flower field what’s your happiest time I show you Mommy rainbow room smile warm hand Papa love sweet rest sleep Eight sister she loves me oh - sleep -
After confused nights One left Eleven to watch ants march back and forth out on the patio, locked that rotting door to Father’s rotting study and endeavored to become that family-killing coldthing Father was in The War. Paperweight and folders all glued together by insect vomit, portraits on the wall so dusty that Alice was only a smear, Mother a suggestion, Henry staring down miserably for all those decades on the mundanity of the slow death of things, while One rotted in the lab chained like a pitbull, while Father rotted away - Henry knew now - in that nuthouse out of town.
But it was like trying to climb an icewall - no matter how he looked at it there were billions of people and if he just started anywhere the military would come and even Henry could not make ten tanks go flying at once, something would give. Besides there had to be some people left after he wiped humanity out - to make Eleven’s waffles and the shiny crinkly plastic that held them and the cardboard boxes to set on fire during colder nights and roast marshmallows on the family silverware.
He had never made a plan in the first place. It had never been the nitty-gritty, the martial detail, only the crucial moments of bone crunching and the screams of the vapid world, a place to put the hardness and sharpness as Papa sank needles into him or did whatever else. It was starting to seem utterly childish - but there was nothing else, else he might not have removed that Soteria in the first place and still been in the same place. Only instead of watching ants march back and forth in the backyard Eleven would have been a smear on the bottom of the lab incinerator and that little snot Two would have been walking around sneering about it instead of rotting underground. And that gave Henry a hollow wink of satisfaction, but it was gone just as quick and he felt unfathomably small.
He went to the window, wiped the dust away with the heel of his hand and watched her for a while. She lay on her stomach in the dead grass, kicking her legs in the air. Mismatched socks blue and pink, pajama pants with ducks on them. Occasionally she used one finger to guide herself and Henry watched her mind squirm as she redirected the ants’ paths back and forth to marshal endlessly marching lines into the shape of a flower, or to spell 011. A rabbit approached and she reached out a hand to brush its soft fur and her mouth made gentle shapes Henry couldn’t figure out. When she got bored she kicked herself back over onto the grass and stared at the sky for a while, her face a little white dot haloed by a brownish mane. Then she got up and wandered a ways into the forest, where, far off, Henry could feel the echoes of other children’s minds whooping and imagining this and that. The sun went away and came back out again dimly beyond the summer haze.
Henry stepped back and ran his fingers along the length of Father’s bookshelf. Little crescents of dust gathered on his fingertips. None of the books had been read by anything but the blank eyes of an insect or two looking for mulch dinner. Father was that kind of vapid murderer, a vague blank figure too stupid to understand the depth of his sin, he never would have read something like - Henry checked the faded lettering on the spine - Walt Whitman. Maybe he’d have read it by now, though. There can’t be that much to do in a nuthouse except read and gnaw on your own limbs, surely.
Henry pulled the book out, ran his fingers along the leathery spine, and flipped through it.
A noiseless patient spider, / I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated, / Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding, / It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself, / Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.
He thought about the black widows and their sticklike little legs dry and curled, alone in the bottom of the jars in the vents in the bathroom, and his family and their empty minds. Ally, Alice, I’m saving you, your little apple cheeks from this life, your little brother wiser, I’ve seen things die, Alice, don’t be afraid, it’s all empty after this. Mother, he had no sympathy for, the stupid cow; Father probably deserved the nuthouse, murderer of the innocent; well, not that the stupid French family probably had anything in their brains either - given the opportunity Henry would probably have killed them too, or planned to in the first place either way, wiped them like a stain, vapid creatures - he had been searching their minds, searching the world desperately for something, maybe searching Eleven too -
- but he was getting all muddled. Far in the woods, Eleven’s mind mingled with a breath of coming rain, sunshowers, the other children. Henry, his throat tight, opened the next book and began to read.
“I want to go to school,” Eleven said that night as Henry tucked her in.
“School? Wherever did you hear that?”
“I met friends in the forest,” Eleven said after a frightened pause. She waited and then offered names hopefully: “Mike. Will.”
Henry thought of Two’s young bones snapping, brittle and wet. He realized now and perhaps had known for a while that Eleven probably would not understand even if he told her when she was older. He did not think she would like to know what became of the other children and maybe would not like Henry very much either if she knew. How was he supposed to carry out his plan like this? In secret? Kill her? no - it all seemed so distant now, and he was spinning in space, lost again, nothing and no one, it was all gone, he felt so old and alien and alone. Maybe he hadn’t found anything in Eleven after all. Father’s unread copy of Emily Dickinson poems flashed across his mind - In this short Life that only lasts an hour / How much - how little - is within our power - He rubbed his face slowly and with a low, gentle growl of frustration, an indulgence he usually did not permit around Eleven.
Eleven traced small hands over his knuckles, a habit of Henry’s that she had picked up somewhere along the line. “I don’t have to go to school,” she said in a small voice, trying to be Good and Helpful. Henry knew it frightened her when he got upset.
The problem was - it would be endless migraines, ‘convincing’ the proper parties that he had purchased the deed to the house, that he and Eleven had legitimate ID and that he was her guardian, that he was a responsible single father, not some Monster/Alien that had wandered into life already killing and/or the legally dead Henry Creel, not to mention perpetually convincing the teachers they were normal - it would all be near-impossible. He shifted in his skin trying to feel thirty and not like a twelve-year-old Thing in a thirty-year-old human’s ill-fitting skin who had not seen the light of the sun in eighteen years. He cringed at the eternity of adult life spreading before him. But God, what else could he do? It seemed, to put it simply, logistically simpler than burning it all down. And it was what Eleven wanted after all.
He leaned forward, took her head in both hands and pressed his forehead to hers, a little sticky with summer sweat. Her breath tickled his ear - dark eyes, enormous and lidded in delicate purple, stared up at him, waiting. He felt the immense power of her buzzing and singing under her skin. She was very small.
“I’ll see what I can do about that, Eleven,” he said quietly, and watched her smile - a sticky little eight-year-old smile, like Alice used to make a long time ago.
After great pain, a formal feeling comes –
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –
The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’
And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’
The Feet, mechanical, go round –
A Wooden way
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought –
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone –
This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –
Emily Dickinson