What Eli Sees – Chapter 33
“The Pale Woman Goes”
The light, when it came, was different from the warm golden light that had come for Edmund Harwick and Walter Finch and the others. It was cooler — not cold, not the cold that had been in this place for a century and a half, but a light of a different temperature, older, deeper, the light of something very old being properly concluded.
It came from everywhere and nowhere, filling the hallway from the walls outward, and in the light the Pale Woman — the thing the Pale Woman had been, the child at the foundation of everything — began to change. Not to dissolve. To resolve. The smooth blank face shifted, became, briefly and incompletely, something that might once have been a human face, a child’s face, the face of someone who had once had a name and a family and a life that had been interrupted before it was finished.
The hands, still reaching, changed their quality. They were not reaching for Eli. They had never been reaching for Eli specifically. They had been reaching for the thing that had been withheld from them for so long it had become the defining condition of her existence.
She was reaching for the hand that would take her home.
Eli reached out.
He took her hand.
The cold of it was the most cold he had ever felt, a cold that went to the centre of him and stayed there and would stay there, he understood in the moment of contact, for the rest of his life — not as damage but as knowledge, as the permanent physical record of what it felt like to touch something very old and very long in the dark and give it the one thing it had needed all along.
The three remaining dead of the Harwick house moved through the hallway and into the light. He felt them pass — the warm passage of each one, the specific release of each specific held thing. They went in the light and the light was large enough for all of them.
The cold hand in his warmed, fractionally, impossibly.
Then the light was everything — the whole hallway, the whole upper floor, the cold absolutely gone, even the baseline winter cold of an old New England house in October replaced by this sourceless warm-cool light that was not the temperature of any earthly season — and Eli sat in the middle of it with his hand held out and nothing in it, because she was gone, completely and permanently gone, the centuries-long presence of her extinguished as completely as a lamp — not flickered, not reduced, gone — and the silence that followed was the deepest silence he had ever felt in a building, the silence of a place that has been carrying something enormous for a very long time and has finally, completely, been allowed to put it down.
Dr. Hooper was at the top of the stairs.
He had come, despite the instructions, drawn by the light that must have been visible from the parlour through the floorboards. He stood at the top step and looked at the hallway — at Eli sitting on the floor, at the northeast corner that was simply a corner now, two walls meeting at an angle, no cold, no darkness, just old wood and botanical wallpaper and the ordinary dust of an old house.
His eyes were very wide.
“Is it—” he began.
“Yes,” Eli said. “It’s done.”
Dr. Hooper sat down heavily on the top stair. He took off his reading glasses and put his face in his hands for a moment. When he took his hands away his expression was the expression of a man who has dedicated a decade of his life to documenting something and has just been present at its resolution and does not yet know how to hold this.
“The corner,” he said. “It’s not cold.”
“No,” Eli said. “It won’t be.”
“The presence—”
“Gone. All of them.” He paused. “She released them when she went. Every one she collected. Every one she held.” He looked at the hallway. “The house is empty.”
Dr. Hooper took a long, slow breath.
“Ten years,” he said. “I have been in this house for ten years.”
“I know,” Eli said. “Thank you. For maintaining it. For keeping the lines. For writing the letters.” He paused. “She needed the time to be properly grieved. I needed the time to understand how.” He stood up. “Thank you for giving us both the time.”