What Eli Sees – Chapter 1
“The Boy Who Counts the Dead”
Elijah Crane was eight years old the first time he understood that the woman sitting at the end of his bed was not his mother. His mother was asleep down the hall. This woman had no eyes.
The autumn of 1974 came to Dunmore, Connecticut the way it always did — fast and cold, stripping the elms on Cemetery Road down to their bones in a single violent week of wind, leaving the town looking skeletal and exposed, all its summer softness gone. The children of Dunmore went back to school. The men went back to the mill. The women put up preserves and pulled wool sweaters from cedar chests and pretended not to notice when the days shortened past the point of comfort.
Elijah — Eli, everyone called him Eli — noticed everything.
He had always been this way. His mother, Ruth Crane, told people her son was sensitive. His father, Robert, said the boy was too much in his own head. His teacher, Mrs. Albright, wrote in her report: Elijah is an attentive student who sometimes appears distracted by things the other children cannot see. She had not meant this literally. She had been more right than she knew.
Eli saw dead people.
He had not always had the words for this. When he was four, he had simply accepted the extra presences the way children accept most things — as facts of the world, as unremarkable as furniture. The old man who sat in the rocking chair by the fireplace and never spoke. The girl in the yellow dress who stood at the edge of the schoolyard and watched the other children play, never joining, never leaving. The soldier on the ridge above the creek who stood at attention in a uniform that Eli would later, when he was older and had access to history books, identify as Civil War-era Union infantry.
They did not frighten him, at first.
The first one to frighten him was the woman with no eyes.
She appeared on a Tuesday night in October 1974, when Eli was eight years old and had just moved with his family to the old Harwick house on Cemetery Road — a large, creaking Colonial that his father had bought cheap because the previous owners had left suddenly and the bank was eager to sell. Eli had gone to bed at eight-thirty. He had read two chapters of The Hobbit. He had said his prayers, as his mother required, though the prayers had recently become complicated by the fact that some of the presences he saw were in the church during Sunday service and they did not look peaceful.
He had fallen asleep with the lamp on.
He woke because the lamp flickered.
Not turned off — flickered. Once, twice, the light shuddering in the glass like something had passed between the bulb and the air around it. Eli opened his eyes. The room was yellow and warm. The window was black with night. The curtains hung still.
She was at the end of the bed.
She was tall — taller than any woman Eli had seen, bent slightly at the waist because the ceiling was low and she was brushing it with the top of her head. She was dressed in something dark, something old, the fabric hanging from her in folds that did not move with any air current because there was no air current, because she was not displacing any air, because she was not — his mind reached for the word and found it and he wished it hadn’t — because she was not alive.
Her face was wrong.
Where her eyes should have been, there was nothing. Not closed eyes. Not damaged eyes. Nothing. Smooth skin stretched over the orbital bones as if the eyes had been painted over, as if someone had decided, in whatever place she had come from, that this woman had seen enough and need not see anymore.
But she was looking at him.
He knew this. Even without eyes, he knew she was looking directly at him. He could feel the attention of her, the specific weight of being watched by something that had no visible means of watching.
The lamp went out. Complete darkness. And in the darkness, very close — so close he felt the cold of it on his face — he heard her breathe. A long, slow, rattling inhalation, like someone drawing air through a throat full of water. Then, in a voice that sounded like it was coming from the bottom of a well: “You can see me.”
Eli did not scream. He would later be unable to explain why. Some children in his position would have screamed, would have thrashed, would have run. He lay completely still, his hands gripping the blanket, his eyes wide and useless in the dark, and he said — his voice barely a whisper — “Yes.”
The lamp came back on.
She was gone.
The room was exactly as it had been. The window black. The curtains still. The Hobbit on the nightstand. Everything normal, everything ordinary, except that Eli Crane was now sitting bolt upright in bed with his heart hammering and the certain knowledge that something had changed.
Not the room. Not the house.
Something had changed in the understanding between himself and the dead.
Before tonight, they had looked through him, around him, past him — he was a witness to their presence but not a participant in it. They went about whatever business the dead went about and he observed, and they were unaware of his observation. It had been, he now understood, a kind of mercy.
The woman with no eyes had ended it.
Now they knew he could see them.
And knowing that, they would come.