What Eli Sees – Chapter 15
“The Pale Woman Responds”
When Edmund Harwick passed on, the Pale Woman felt it. Agnes, standing in the hallway with her herbs and her salt and her old words, felt it too — felt the moment the Pale Woman registered her loss, felt the cold in the corner change quality from its usual patient malevolence to something sharper, something that was, for the first time, reactive.
Angry.
The temperature in the second floor hallway dropped fifteen degrees in thirty seconds. Agnes’s breath made clouds. The botanical wallpaper rippled as if caught by a wind that moved only along the wall. The salt line at the edge of the corner held — Agnes could see the line, could feel it holding, the boundary she had drawn with sixty years of inherited knowledge — but the cold pressed against it with a force she had not anticipated.
Ruth was at the top of the stairs.
She had been watching Agnes work, standing at the other end of the hall, when the cold changed. When it changed she felt it in a way that was different from the previous weeks’ cold — different from the background chill of the house that she had been managing with rationality. This was not background. This was directed. This was aimed at her specifically, she understood in the animal part of her mind that lies below reason, aimed at the specific wound she carried, the specific dark place in her that the thing in the corner had been feeding on for six weeks.
The cold reached her.
It reached inside her.
It found Michael.
The name came out of her involuntarily, a sound between a word and a cry, and she pressed her hand to her mouth and the cold was inside her chest now, fingers of it around the grief she had kept wrapped and put away, unwrapping it, exposing it, pulling it open the way you pull open a wound — and standing in the cold hallway she felt her son’s death with the full unmediated force of it for the first time since 1966, felt it the way she hadn’t let herself feel it in eight years of careful management, and it was too large, it was too dark, it was the kind of grief that the Pale Woman grew fat on—
“RUTH.” Agnes’s voice, sharp as a slap. “LOOK AT ME. LOOK AT MY FACE. NOT THE CORNER. MY FACE.” Ruth wrenched her eyes from the corner where the wallpaper figure spread its arms. She looked at Agnes. Agnes was three feet away and her expression was ferociously calm, the calm of someone who had been waiting for this exact moment and was absolutely ready for it. “She is using your grief,” Agnes said. “She cannot use it if you give it somewhere else to go. Think of your son. Think of him as he was. Not the loss. HIM.” Ruth stared at her. “THINK OF HIM,” Agnes said, and from the corner there came a sound — a long, rising shriek, not a human sound, nothing that had ever come from a human throat, the sound of something that has been denied its meal — and the cold pressed so hard the salt line skittered and one small gap opened—
The back door crashed open downstairs.
Eli came up the stairs in four seconds, his flashlight still in his hand, his face pale and his eyes taking in the hallway — the corner, the shrieking cold, his mother pressed against the wall, Agnes at the salt line— and he stepped between his mother and the corner and turned his flashlight on the wallpaper figure and said, in a voice that was not entirely an eight-year-old boy’s voice:
“Not her. You want me. I’m right here. Look at me.“
The shrieking stopped.
The cold turned.
It was looking at him now, all of it, every ounce of its ancient terrible attention, the full weight of what had been sleeping under this land since before anyone living could remember — and Eli stood in it and let it look and thought, carefully, deliberately, about nothing that gave it purchase. He thought about Thomas Birch’s gap-toothed smile. About the smell of Mrs. Pearce’s library. About the colour of the frost on the morning yard. About every bright ordinary living thing he could pull up, a shield of the mundane against something ancient and hungry.
Agnes slammed the gap in the salt line shut.
The cold retracted.
Not gone — the Pale Woman would not be gone from this place until the house was sold and the family was away and the grief was properly grieved, and even then she would only sleep. But contained. Reduced. One of her collected dead freed, her boundary redrawn, and a boy standing in her hall who was not afraid of her and who had, tonight, chosen to look at her with clear eyes and take away her best weapon.
The hallway was just a hallway.
Cold, but naturally cold. Old house cold. November cold.
Ruth slid down the wall to the floor and sat there shaking. Agnes came to her and put a hand on her shoulder and said nothing, which was the right thing. Robert came in through the back door ten seconds later, having held himself outside for the prescribed time and then been unable to hold himself any longer, and he came up the stairs and found his wife on the floor and his son standing in the hallway with a flashlight and an expression on his face that he would remember for the rest of his life.
An expression of complete, exhausted, eight-year-old relief.
“Is it done?” Robert said.
“Contained,” Agnes said. “It is contained.”
“We’re selling the house,” Robert said.
“Yes,” Agnes agreed. “First thing Monday morning.”