Other Worlds Than These (collection)

BEYOND PORCH AND PORTAL ^{E. CATHERINE TOBLER}

When they found my uncle wandering incoherent in the foggy morning streets he wasn’t wearing his own clothes.

A man unknown to me brought word of my uncle’s illness, presenting me with a small folded letter on fine ivory paper. The paper shushed between our bare fingers a moment before he turned away. He traced his way through the general store with its many occupants, back into the bustle of the street.

“Sir!”

Clutching the letter at which I’d only glanced, I followed him through the double doors, grabbing his jacket sleeve before he could be overcome by a claret and gold four-in-hand. The black horses blew past us and onward down the cobblestones with the loud ring of their silver-shod feet overtaking my words.

The man glared down at me as if I had upset his day rather than he mine. There was something in his eyes, half familiar and frightening. He was not an older man; he seemed of a marrying age, but I knew he was not married. How I knew this, I could not say. He disliked my consideration of him and twisted his arm free from my hold.

“You’d best go now. He hasn’t much time.”

“Are you a friend to my uncle?”

He refused me even that much information and hurried down the street after the four-in-hand, October’s breeze lifting the tails of his coat behind him. I blinked once and he was fully gone. If anyone else upon the street noticed something odd about that, they didn’t look sideways. I expected someone to gasp and say, “But here, he walked here a moment ago, and now has vanished like a candle’s flame under a breath!” No one said a word; the people were too wrapped in their own business.

Carefully I smoothed the letter I had crumpled. The ink had smudged upon the page, written in a hand I did not know. My uncle had been found this morning; he now rested at the college hospital and, as the mysterious man had, the letter urged me to hurry to his side before he passed into the next world.

There were things in that next world that my uncle would welcome, I thought as I left off shopping and followed the fingerboards to the hospital. I had never been there in my twenty years. My mother and father died there, so my uncle told me, leaving me in his capable care ever after.

He seemed capable no longer. Doctors led me to my uncle’s side and he did not know me. He clutched at my skirts and muttered, “Reynolds, fonderous Reynolds…”

I untangled his hand and saw that he indeed wore someone else’s clothes. The trousers were butternut, the coat an earthy brown. My uncle always, even on Sundays, wore black. Even his boiled shirts would have been black, but this one was whiter than I’d ever seen, with a smudge of blood against the collar, were blood to be mostly ochre.

“Uncle?”

He startled and reached blindly out. I grabbed his clammy hand and lowered myself to his bedside, to breathe in the scent of him. There was no alcohol on his breath as I’d feared. He groaned and tried to roll away from me. This motion pulled his shirt cuff back, exposing the pink, abraded skin of his wrist.

“What happened to you?” I whispered. I couldn’t fathom it.

Edgar Poe was my only kin; the man who taught me geography and history, the man who could scare a rational-minded young woman like me under my bed with his stories of vengeful madmen; the man who preferred spending rainy days writing poetry or walking Baltimore’s streets in search of such.

“Fonderous R-Reynolds?” he asked. “The s-seam above the floor? Oh, vast sky.” He closed his eyes and turned his head against the pillow, but held firm to my hand.

“Miss Franks?”

Dr. Griffin, an older man with soft hands and hard eyes, had been known to me for years. The first time my uncle was found publicly drunk, it was Dr. Griffin who brought him to the hospital to sober up. I saw pity on his face now, but I shook my head and stood to meet him.

“He’s sober,” I said.

The doctor scrubbed a hand over his unshaven cheeks. “Your assessment agrees with my own. Your uncle is suffering from a malady unknown to me. Did he recognize you?”

“No.” I looked down at my uncle. “I saw him just yesterday and he was well. Have you seen his wrist?”

“Reynolds!” my uncle cried. “Endless lands! Vilest fire.” He shoved the sheets off his body, scrambling backward in an attempt to get out of the bed. When he hit the headboard, he turned to his left, rolled onto the checkerboard floor, and crawled away.

Dr. Griffin called for his colleagues; I could not get near my uncle without him shrieking anew. I backed away, only realizing I was crying when Nurse Templeton shoved a handkerchief into my hand.

“Go home, Miss Franks,” Dr. Griffin said over his struggles with my uncle.

“The seam!” My uncle screamed these words, over and over until I covered my ears to block it—but still, I heard it like a heartbeat. The seam. The seam.

Dr. Griffin and three other men carried my uncle back to the bed and firmly strapped him down. By hand and foot they bound him and when this made his screams worse, they also bound his mouth. He screamed even beyond the gag, muffled and strained.

“You can’t!”

Nurse Templeton led me out of the room and closed the door behind us. I was shaking as she guided me to a chair and pushed me into it. I stared at her heavily lined mouth, unable to understand a word that came from it. She gave me a hard shake and then I heard, “…come again tomorrow; perhaps he will be well.”

I knew as I walked back to our townhouse in the mist, that one evening would not solve my uncle’s problems. What had happened to haunt his eyes so? What part did the stranger from this morning play?

My uncle had employed a housekeeper these last two years, to tidy what he messed while I spent my days as a tailor’s assistant. Though Mrs. Wine would have made me a warm dinner, I sent her home. I wanted only to be alone. I locked the door behind her, discarded my coat and bag, and went to my uncle’s office.

It was the one room Mrs. Wine was asked not to touch, but nothing struck me as unusual as I entered. Papers and books were spread over the sofa and chairs, over desktop and floor. I lifted a pile from one chair and sat, bringing the sheets into my lap. He was working on a new poem.

I fell asleep reading of a city by the sea, where mortals bought fruit from angels carrying baskets. I didn’t dream of this place; I didn’t dream of anything. When I woke, I felt rested and wondered if morning had come, but the thought left my mind when I saw the man who gave me the note perched in a far corner, watching me.

Think of it. You believe yourself alone in your own home, are comfortable enough to sleep wherever you lay down and when you wake, your mind still fuzzy from its rest, you discover yourself not alone, but watched. Your mind races, but it can’t catch your heart. How long has he watched you?

Was he there when I came in? Who is he and how did he gain entry? I pictured broken windows and doors, but felt it was worse than that; this man had come inside another way, a way unknown to me. That frightened me most of all.

“Please do not scream,” he said.

I screamed. I flung my uncle’s poetry and fled the office, feeling this man close on my heels. He yanked the door open when I meant to slam it; he snatched my skirts, slowing my escape. His fingers seemed to catch my hair and pull me backward. Through his fingertips I felt shackles around my uncle’s wrists. Those hands had placed them there, but not in this world, in another.

“Reynolds?” I asked.

His touch vanished. I swung around in the darkness of the hallway and felt a presence, though I could not see him.

“He called me that.” His crumpled velvet voice brushed against my cheek. “Go to your uncle.”

The voice came from all around me now, disembodied. As I turned round, I would have sworn to the stroke of fingers against my skirts. Shush. Shush.

My heart pounded in my throat. “What did you do to my uncle?”

This man admitted nothing. Round and round he circled me. I felt his eyes upon me (half familiar and frightening!) but still I could see nothing of him. Maddening! His cold-kissed fingers brushed over my cheeks and then I was horribly alone.

I did not sleep that night. I checked the doors and windows, but decided it would not matter how securely they were locked. That man had come into our house another way. Taking no chance, I retrieved my uncle’s small pistol from the locked box beneath his bed and sat with my back to the wall the entire night through. Rain drummed upon the roof; in its rhythm, I found words. The seam. The seam.

Come morning, I went to the hospital, the pistol concealed in my brocade reticule. I would not be caught unawares another time by Reynolds, whatever name he took.

My uncle was less coherent that morning, Dr. Griffin reluctant to allow me into his room.

“I have bled him twice to no effect,” Griffin said to me outside my uncle’s door. The doctor paced, slapping the back of one hand into the palm of the other. “I begin to fear, Miss Franks, that he has a blackness within him and if I cannot find and remove it, he shall perish.”

Reynolds’ first words echoed back at me. “You’d best go now. He hasn’t much time.” Would he perish at the doctor’s hands or was my uncle already near death from whatever had befallen him?

I gripped my reticule, feeling through the fabric the line of the pistol. Was it the solidity of the gun that calmed me or the idea of pressing it against Reynolds’ chin?

“I want to speak with my uncle,” I said and made to move past the doctor, to open my uncle’s door.

Griffin grabbed me by the arm to forestall me, then dropped it when a nurse passed us. He bowed his head to look at me through narrowed eyes.

“Absolutely not! I don’t believe you grasp the seriousness of the situation, Miss Franks.”

Being accosted by a strange man in one’s own home was quite serious enough for me.

Griffin continued. His tone was low and calm, as though he were trying to calm a spooked horse. “When I remove his gag, he speaks of terrible things. I do not understand the blackness within him. I need to find it, cut it out. We loosened him for a bit this morning as a test and he nearly cut out his own eye—”

I grabbed Dr. Griffin by the arm as he had me in an effort to make him understand that on this matter I would not be budged. “I will speak with my uncle,” I said. “No matter the terrible things he says, I will.”

The doctor let me step into the room and did not follow. I closed the door to blot out his disapproving expression. However, now in the gray room with its scent of antiseptic and rapidly aging old man, I hesitated. I looked across the room at the figure in the bed and did not recognize it for my uncle. This man was thin and dark, lashed to a bed with a thin mattress. A hard rubber gag covered his mouth and now even his eyes were masked. Coarse hair covered his sunken cheeks.

“Uncle?”

He did not move and I wondered if he was sleeping. Or dead. I held my breath as I waited for the rise of his chest. Only when I saw that feeble movement did I step toward the bed.

I set my reticule on the bedside table and reached for the mask which covered Edgar’s eyes. The tie was lost in the bird’s nest of his hair; it took some time to find the end. When at last I loosened the ties, I found myself looking into unfamiliar eyes. Or let me say that upon longer examination, the eyes themselves were painfully familiar—it was the deep wrinkles around them, it was the pale white scar above the left eye, it was the freshly stitched wound below the right—these were the things I could not equate with my uncle.

With some difficulty I loosened and removed the gag from his mouth. Edgar closed his mouth, licked his lips, and swallowed.

“Do you know me?” I asked him.

His eyes rolled back into his head and he turned his cheek against the pillow. “Vilest fire.” His voice cracked the words apart like they were nutshells in his throat. “Hunters stab never sleeping sky—the seam above the floor. The seam—”

He spoke of phenomenon and contraptions I could not understand while his hands moved against his bonds, fingers straining to reach the unseen. His eyes seemed to watch an invisible dance in the air between the bed and ceiling; flit, flit, glide.

I had hoped to make some sense of the “terrible things” Dr. Griffin mentioned, but as my uncle spoke on and on until his voice dried to a whisper, I could find no reason in the words. There was only one word that made sense to me and when he said it at last, his eyes moved to the far corner of the room.

“Reynolds.”

I turned in time to see the man called Reynolds slink out of the room. The tail of his brown coat (how like the coat my uncle had been found in) slithered out the door a second before it closed.

How long has he watched you?

How did he get in?

My heart stammered in my chest. I grabbed my bag and followed Reynolds from the hall, only in time to see his coattails once again slide around a distant corner. I fled past Dr. Griffin and into the blowing rain of the day. Reynolds was a tall man with a long stride and there was no keeping pace with him. By the time I reached the store where I had first met Reynolds, I could see no sign of him.

Then, coming down the cobblestones appeared the same gold and claret four-in-hand I had seen the day before, Reynolds now perched beside the driver. The horses’ hooves didn’t seem to touch the ground, even though I heard them clearly ring against the street stone. I lunged into the street, for the driver would have to stop for fear that he might hit me, but he didn’t. The hot breath of one horse curled over my cheek before the world went black.

I woke, if one can awaken when one does not remember sleeping, atop the auburn horse, harness and tack cutting into my left hand, while my right still clung to my bag with its pistol. The ground sped away beneath me at a dreadful haste and for a moment I buried my face in the horse’s mane. My cheek lay against hot horsehide, silky red-gold mane blinding me, every part of my body jostled as the carriage continued onward.

I chanced a backwards glance at the driver and Reynolds and squeezed my eyes shut a second after. They were not men!

Another look proved this true. The driver sat tall in the seat, a black coat dripping from its narrow body. A tattered blue scarf gave the illusion of a neck, but I feared he truly had none. The octangular head was small and gray, with bulging black eyes that must have taken everything in at once. Surely he saw me staring at his four spindly legs and two arms, all of which seemed employed in driving the carriage. His arms bore spines and hooks, over which he had draped a couple reins, but I felt certain this wasn’t their main usage.

“Miss Franks!”

It was Reynolds who spoke, but a Reynolds I did not recognize. Reynolds possessed a squat body, colored brown with slim yellow stripes, and he now spoke through mandibles. His brown coat had pooled around him; why, his thin arms would never support the fabric!

“Hold fast!” he said. “We cannot stop in the endless lands.”

I turned my head around, so that I might see these endless lands for myself; lifted myself on elbows enough to see around the whipping horse mane.

Every bit of Baltimore had vanished and all around us spread a seemingly endless blur of gold shot through with ruby stars. Whirlpools twisted in the sky, churning nausea within me as I watched them. I watched until I felt I would be ill, then bowed and buried my head again. I prayed the ride would soon be over, but perhaps there was no one to answer that prayer, for the ride went on and on.

The motion of the horse beneath me soon became familiar, enjoyable. I had never known such a sensation. Its warm hide was also a comfort as the air grew colder around us. There seemed to be no sun, yet all around us were slanting shafts of light. Colored golden and ivory, they fell from above and the more I watched them, the more my eyes began to adjust and see what truly lay around us.

The land was no longer barren. Perhaps it never had been. My eyes became accustomed to the light and the way it changed the landscape around us. From one angle, the land was empty; from another, I could glimpse strange constructs in the distance. There seemed to be little near the horizon; everything I was able to see hovered in that sunless sky. If I saw other people, it was only briefly; I saw what seemed a woman, but the wind was tearing her apart. She shredded, arms and legs peeling apart like fabric, and then even her clothing lifted up and away. This didn’t seem to bother her. She smiled and went on her way, into the vast sky.

Oh, that vast sky—my uncle’s sky? Had he seen this place and breathed this air? This air, that smelled vaguely of apricots and roasting meat, washed over us in abrupt gusts, forcing my eyes shut. I savored the darkness.

I couldn’t understand this place. What was it and how could it exist? The more I wondered, the more ill I felt. I remembered my Baltimore with its rain-washed streets, hints of sky caught between close buildings, people rushing to and from work. There seemed no such things here.

The carriage never slowed. My nausea deepened. I became aware of hands on my shoulders, an arm under my legs. Reynolds lifted me from the horse and carried me back into the carriage itself. I lay on the padded bench and stared at him sitting opposite me. In this light, he looked like a man and had a beautiful mouth.

The thought should have shocked me, but it didn’t.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said.

“That much is plain.” I had to fight to say the words and my voice didn’t sound right when I finally forced them out. I fought also to sit up, to focus my attention on Reynolds. Even though I knew he wasn’t a man, he appeared as such and it gradually began to calm my mind.

“You’ve placed me in quite a predicament,” he added.

I could hardly believe he was serious, but I recalled the look on his face the day we’d met, when I’d pulled him back from this very carriage. I now understood I had kept him from returning. What had drawn him out in the first place? What else tied us together? My uncle, I thought as my eyes settled on Reynolds’ vest.

“You—You’re wearing my uncle’s vest,” I said. “I sewed it for him—”

“A gift last Christmas,” Reynolds said.

His dark velvet voice was rough again. “How can you know that?” My hands sought the bag at my side, but I no longer carried it; my pistol was lost.

“Edgar told me all about you.” His mouth bent into a smile and I realized this man knew things about me he shouldn’t know. He knew about my first pet (a kitten named Croak) and my first formal dance (how I’d stumbled down the last two stairs and fallen to reveal entirely too much to those gathered); he knew my uncle’s stories could frighten me, and he knew that deep down, I loved the fear.

“I don’t understand.” I blinked back tears and looked out the carriage window. The angle of light allowed me to see to the horizon this time. Against its water-washed color, I saw a wrecked whale bone ship. Closer to the carriage wheels, I saw pallid bloated creatures upon the shifting ground. One of them held a golden key in its mouth.

“How long have you known my uncle?” I asked. I looked back at Reynolds, who watched me and not the world beyond the windows. “How long was he your prisoner?”

“I did not imprison your uncle, though others of my kind did.”

“I felt you put those shackles on him.”

Reynolds said nothing to that. Maybe it was an action he couldn’t argue; maybe he had been forced. Whichever, he kept his silence, watching me with keen eyes that seemed to see all of me at once. He knew my parents were dead, and he knew— He knew Edgar was my only family.

“Stop watching me,” I whispered.

“I will not,” Reynolds said. “I spent far too many years dreaming of you to look away now.”

I curled my hands into my skirts. “What the devil do you mean by that?” If I thought I could have survived it, I would have jumped from the carriage. I think Reynolds must have known this, for he grasped my hands and held me firm.

“Your uncle should never have come here. I tried to fix that and have failed. The least I could do was see that he didn’t die alone this time. He’s gone now. All you’ve known is gone. You shouldn’t be here, but I can’t help but be happy you are.”

I jumped from the carriage then. Reynolds’ words scared me worse than the idea of death. I wrenched my hands out of his, pushed him backwards, and kicked the door open. I flung myself into the speeding landscape and landed in sandy, loose ground.

There was no sign of the carriage, nor any sound from it. Its wheels had left no tracks. Wherever I was, I needed to get out, but there was nothing to guide me. No sun, no landmarks, nothing on the horizon here. I wiped the grit from my eyes and strained to see through the beams of light.

Reynolds found me first. I caught him from the corner of my eye, running at me as fast as the carriage horses had flown. I turned to run, but the ground seemed to suck me down. Reynolds was on me before I could escape; he dragged me down and pinned my hands, slapping a shackle around one wrist.

“Beast!” I cried, unable to wrench myself free.

“Literally, that is true,” Reynolds said. His nice mouth curled in a sneer. “Edgar called me fonderous.”

I slapped him with my free hand. He felt of flesh and bone and his skin reddened as would any man’s under a strike, but he only laughed and secured the other shackle to my other wrist.

“Come on.”

Reynolds kept hold of the shackles, pulling me alongside him. The ground beneath our feet became increasingly more solid, less sandy, and I walked with a little more assurance. Even if I didn’t have the first notion where we were going, we were certainly making a good pace.

“I want you to understand,” Reynolds said as we crested a slight rise in the land. I could see beasts in the distance, moving high in the sky. Even so, they were still tethered to the ground by long, spindly legs.

“Then speak plainly. I am your captive audience.”

A look of pain crossed Reynolds’ face; I had seen the same thing in my uncle at the hospital just that morning

“We must reach the city, Miss Franks,” he said. “Will you come back into the carriage? We cannot reach it on foot.”

I now saw the carriage awaiting us, a claret-colored shimmer in the strange air. There was no choice, was there? Go with Reynolds to his city, or stay here where I knew no direction and might wander forever. I lifted my hands.

“Unbind me and I will come with you,” I said.

Reynolds did not argue. He unlocked my shackles with a key he kept in his sleeve. We climbed back into the carriage and, without word to the driver, were off. Reynolds watched me the entire ride and I told myself I didn’t care. I didn’t care.

I never witnessed stranger things than I did in the city itself. The light continued to play tricks upon my mind, and the buildings seemed half open to the sky. The people of the city were paper thin; on edge they could not be seen, though when they turned a certain way in the light their monstrous faces became dreadfully apparent. Some looked as our carriage driver did; others I could barely comprehend. I quickly learned how to look in order to see only the slimmest slice of them.

When I learned this manner of looking, I discovered something else. This city was not anchored to the ground. Indeed, the entire place was on the move, buildings and artworks balanced on the backs of immense creatures. A great distance below us, I could see their small feet moving; legs made of thin spire-wire upward to their fabulous bodies—bearing these incredible weights. So too I realized the carriage had come to rest upon its four horses; they carried us without effort through the buildings, the creatures, the people balanced upon a road of memory between.

“This place makes no sense,” I said and Reynolds laughed darkly. He pressed behind me at the carriage window, his hand beneath my ribcage. Did he fear I would jump again? Or did he just find pleasure in touching me?

“Your uncle wanted to understand it. Do you remember his stories? His poems?”

I had forgotten them (and indeed Baltimore, my uncle, the rain, the everything) until Reynolds brought them back to me. I had trouble breathing when I remembered it all. All I had now lost.

“He wrote of this place,” I said. Once the idea was voiced, I saw my uncle everywhere I looked. There, he had written of that strange creature with its shrieking hair; and there, he had written of that building, ever in flame. My uncle’s mind sparked in every shadow of this place; as the creatures made their roads of memory, so too my uncle made the roads, circling ever on, one begetting the beginning of the other.

“He helped create this place,” Reynolds said.

The horses carried us to an enormous throne, so large it took three of the creatures to support it. How they managed I’ll never know. Reynolds bid me to hold his hand, for I’d never walked a street such as this; it was alive beneath my feet, guiding us from the carriage up to the throne where a woman awaited us.

Her boundless hyacinth hair spilled down her body like water, to her feet and beyond, where gardenias and sand dollars scattered. Silver stars gleamed around her head. She wore a comet for a bracelet; endlessly circling, sparking with vilest fire. Near her throne sat dark, hand-woven baskets filled with fruit. She reached down, plucked a green pear, and offered it to me.

I did not take it. I had read my uncle’s stories and knew well enough what happened to young women who ate the fruit of strange lands. The queen, if she were such, took no offense. She smiled down at me, then looked at Reynolds.

“You failed,” she said.

“I did.” He bowed before her. “He has died alone yet again.”

“Speak plain, the both of you.” Granted, my uncle had also written stories of outspoken young women; their end was little better than that of those who ate the fruit. I didn’t care; I was somewhere beyond care.

Neither spoke. Rather, they showed me.

The queen twisted the pear in half and within its gritty flesh I saw my uncle writing. He wrote of this place, of a city near a sea. He slept each night and thought he dreamed, but his dreams were not that at all. He came here, snatched away by these people. Fairy, he named them, but they were not; it was the only word he knew to apply.

They stole him away every night, him and more of his kind, artists all, for these creatures loved their minds. I felt this love equal to my own for Edgar Poe. But this love had a dark side for as they loved these artists, they consumed them.

When my uncle made to escape and leave this place behind, they chained him. They held him, naked and dirty in an unlit cell. How many cells stretched in the darkness? I could not count them all. This placed smelled of your worst imaginings—darker, fouler. There was a seam of light that came through the door to hover above the floor. The seam! Within this light, dust sparked, dreams flicked.

In this place, my uncle wrote stories in his head. Despite their cruelty to him, some part of my uncle still loved the magic of these people, the impossibility. He loved that they made him create better stories, stories that helped create their fantastic reality.

Only one person visited my uncle; Edgar came to name him Reynolds. Reynolds came daily, to take stories for his people, to bring Edgar a measure of food and clean water. Eventually Edgar’s stories turned from madmen to a sorrowful young woman who did not even know she was sorrowful. The thing that pleased her most were the stories, so my uncle kept on spinning them. Reynolds fell in love with this young woman. With me.

My uncle escaped them—I laughed through my tears at the sight of him slipping his bonds like a magician. He stole clothes—no, see there, it is a hand! A hand offering Edgar clothing that was not his own. Reynolds’ hand.

“Death has little meaning here,” the queen said as she squashed half of the pear and tossed it away. “Though it means much in your world.”

“Please speak plain,” I whispered, the scent of pear and despair sharp in the air between us. I glanced at Reynolds. “Please.”

“I helped your uncle escape,” Reynolds said. “The first time, he died alone, unknown. I undid that memory—”

As one undoes a knot, I thought. I had looked into his eyes before; I had kissed that mouth once. I remembered these things though through a wash of water; they were blurred and indistinct. Reynolds had tried once before; I had not listened.

“—and tried again. I brought him to Baltimore, got you the note; you reached him, and yet now you’ve come here and he will die alone; has died alone. You—”

“Can only return to death,” the queen said and threw away the rest of the now-rotted pear.

“Your uncle is dead,” Reynolds said. “The moment he returned, the years he had been here caught up to him.”

“But he wasn’t gone years,” I said. Surely there was a mistake. I felt desperate to make these creatures understand that. “Only overnight. I feared him drunk and sleeping it off.”

“Overnight to you,” Reynolds said and his voice skipped. “He was taken almost every night.”

And every day returned to his world, to my world. To live years over the course of a night; to wake each morning in his bed, thinking it all a dream. How I had once laughed at my uncle and his small circle of friends, all of them old, bent men. How young might they have honestly been?

“Miss Franks—” He clasped my hands within his own. “Agnes. I never intended for you to come here. You are dead to your world; time has gone on without you and made what it will of Baltimore.”

Though I wished to believe that all of this was some terrible dream, I knew within my heart that it was not. Edgar’s stories of this place should have prepared me. He had seen this place; its people had loved him and in the end destroyed him.

“Only overnight,” I said. “I can go back.” I had to know, what had become of my world? Was my uncle truly gone? Had the thing I feared most come to pass? It could not be. What if he still lived?

“What are you not telling me?”

Reynolds grabbed my arm. “Is isn’t just overnight—not for you.”

It was then that Reynolds’ trespass became clear to me. I had misunderstood what the queen showed me. Every day my uncle woke in my world, it was Reynolds who brought him to that moment. Reynolds unstitched the decades that had passed within this strange world to bring my uncle back into my time, so that I might have a living relation at my side.

How many times should my uncle have died? It was no wonder he tried to cut out his own eyes when at last he seemed firmly rooted here.

“It remains her choice,” the queen said to Reynolds. “You asked us to allow that, to never take another of her kind without their permission. This is no different because you love her.”

I looked beyond the queen’s star-wreathed head, to the vast sky where golden birds stretched their wings. No, not birds; angels. When I looked the right direction, I saw their slim bodies. But where was the sea my uncle wrote of, I wondered, and watched the slow ebb and flow of the entire city itself and realized the city is the sea and wanted to weep with the joy of it.

“You would live a full life here,” Reynolds said.

My eyes met Reynolds’. When I looked at him a certain way, I saw the truth of him, his true body, and if I looked deeper, I saw to the heart of him. Darker, fouler; a seam of brightness. He could take me back as he did my uncle, I thought, but he doesn’t want to. He wanted to keep me. “I want to go back.” I had to go. To look—to see whatever had become of whatever I loved.

The queen seized my chin in her pear-wet hand and my world went black.

When light returned, it fell in hazy curtains around me. The air was ashen, bits of burnt paper falling as snow would. Walls like skeletal fingers rose around me. Scattered bricks, the stench of burnt wood. I saw hunched figures in the street and ran for them, but as I neared they became only heaps of more debris. I saw no people.

Though my legs were tired and ached with each step, and my lungs burned, I walked on. I walked up streets once familiar to me; dead, burnt things crunched underfoot. I searched for anything I might recognize and while there were ruined shops aplenty, I knew none of them.

I walked through all the wreckage of this city, until the sun touched and began to fall below the horizon. Exhaustion dragged me to sit on a curb and I couldn’t find the energy to mind the rubbish I settled in.

How many years had passed Baltimore by? How long had the city lain in ruin? Was it God who decided to destroy this place, or man? Did it matter at all?

In the remains at my feet, I found a scrap of poetry, about a woman with hyacinth hair. It could not be my uncle’s handwriting—though perhaps it was, for as I stood to continue my journey, I could not remember his handwriting. I could barely remember his face.

It was his voice I remembered best of all, and the beat of those words in my head. The seam. It rested inside of me, unable to escape. He’d wept for it in the end, shouting for Reynolds to snatch him back to that world.

I folded the page into my hand and walked on. As far as I walked, the whole city through, there was only gray ruin. I yelled, but no one answered. Perhaps there was no one to answer.

“Anyone!” I cried as loud as I could from the middle of the street. I looked to the sky, the veiled sun now set in the gray west.

My world was dead. I had nothing. I looked at my filthy hands and saw them old and wrinkled. I was but twenty and felt the universe retreating from me.

“Reynolds! Fonderous Reynolds!”

The ring of hooves on cobblestones answered me. Sharp and distinct down the ruined street they came, pulling a claret and gold four-in-hand.

There was one thing left to me. Hope in the brightness in the seam above the floor. Hope that there existed in that place a life worth living, with beings I might one day love. My uncle was dead in both worlds, but I was only dead in one.

I stepped in the path of the carriage and my world went black—

But only for a moment.