What Eli Sees – Chapter 19
“She Comes for Eli”
The Pale Woman had not remained passive through all of this. Eli had understood, from the beginning, that she would not. Each freed ghost was a provocation as well as a weakening, a declaration of intent that she could not ignore.
She came for him on the twenty-third of November.
He had been prepared for this. Agnes had told him to expect it. He had spent the preceding week doing everything Agnes had prescribed — salt at his bedroom threshold, the herbs in a small bundle under his pillow, the words Agnes had taught him memorised and ready. He had gone to sleep with his defences in place and he had woken at three in the morning with the absolute, skin-prickling certainty of her presence in the room.
The room was completely dark. He had stopped sleeping with the lamp on, needing to prove to himself that he could manage the dark. The darkness pressed against his open eyes.
She was there.
He could feel her the way you feel a large animal very close — by the displacement, by the air pressure, by the specific cold that was not the cold of the room but the cold of her. She was beside the bed. She was bending over him. He could feel the cold of her above his face, close, the inches between them measured in drops in temperature.
He lay perfectly still and said Agnes’s words.
Nothing happened.
The cold increased.
The lamp came on by itself. In the sudden yellow light he saw her — fully, completely, more clearly than he had ever seen her before. She was inches from his face. She was enormous — not in height exactly but in presence, in the sheer mass of accumulated age and collected darkness, a thing that had been what it was since before the first European set foot on this land. Her face was smooth and blank and wrong and her hands — he could see her hands now, he had not seen her hands before — were pressed flat on the mattress on either side of his head, fingers spread, pressing the mattress down with a weight that should not have existed, and he could feel the pressure of her through the springs, could feel her reality in a way that none of the other dead had been real, and she leaned down and the blank face came level with his and from the smooth skin where the mouth should have been came a voice that he felt rather than heard, a voice that went directly into his bones: “YOU BELONG TO ME NOW. YOU SEE FOR ME NOW. THIS IS WHAT YOU WERE BORN FOR. SAY YES.”
Eli looked at the blank face six inches above his own.
He thought of Edmund Harwick. He thought of Walter Finch. He thought of the three teachers he had freed last week and the warm light they had gone into. He thought of his mother on the porch telling him about Michael, and his father on the back step with shaking hands, and Claire’s hand briefly over his at the kitchen table.
He thought of all the things he could see and all the reasons it was a gift rather than a curse and all the people, living and dead, who needed someone with clear eyes and patient attention.
“No,” he said.
The cold slammed into him like a wall of water. The lamp burst — not flickered, burst, the glass shattering across the nightstand — and the darkness was total and the cold was total and the weight of her on the mattress was the weight of something that had been old when Dunmore was trees and it pressed down on him, the weight of it, trying to press the no back into him—
“NO,” he said again, louder. “I AM NOT YOURS. I SEE THEM BUT THEY ARE NOT MINE TO KEEP AND NEITHER AM I YOURS. GO BACK.”
Agnes’s words then. All of them, in sequence, in the old language she had taught him, stumbling through them in the dark with the cold pressing—
His bedroom door burst open.
Robert Crane stood in the doorway with a flashlight and Agnes Birch behind him with her leather pouch and her voice already going, already speaking the old words with the confidence and force of sixty years—
The cold retracted like a wave pulling back from a shore.
She was gone.
The darkness was just the ordinary dark of a November night with a broken lamp.
Eli sat up in bed and shook for a full minute, and his father came in and put an arm around him and said nothing, just held on, and Agnes stood at the threshold completing her working, and eventually the shaking stopped.
“She won’t try that again,” Agnes said. “Not with the salt lines and both of us prepared. She’s nearly spent.” She paused. “But we need to move faster. How many more can you speak to?”
“Three more,” Eli said. “Maybe four.”
“Then tomorrow,” Agnes said. “All of them. Tomorrow.”