“What time is it?” she rasped at her sister. Then, suddenly terrified: “What day is it?”
Where’s Petty? Where’s Micah? Why weren’t they here?
Sherri gripped her right arm and shoulder; Nate gripped her left. As gently as they could, they sat her up and rested her against the headboard. The pain was monstrous. Her muscles were atrophied, her body horribly shrunken. She became aware of a fungal, unwashed smell; it took a few moments before she recognized it as her own. She boggled at the wrecked canvas of her body, the lower half of it mercifully hidden under the sheets.
Propped up, she could see out the window. The front yard with its barren flower beds. The sun glinted off the mailbox at the base of the long graveled drive. Squinting, she watched a car approach. A big bastard. Cadillac. Her chest jogged as she tried to laugh again. Had Micah bought himself a Caddy? That wasn’t like him at all. Next he’d be stepping out in rhinestone cowboy boots.
The car pulled into the driveway. Her heart took a funny hop as a vision flashed through her mind, impossible to grip—a premonition, the tarot card readers would call it.
Oh please, she thought as the car doors swung open. Oh please please…
MINERVA THREW THE TRANSMISSION into park. Petty remained asleep in the backseat. Her face was wrenched in a troubled expression, as if the girl was suffering through a night terror.
“Hey,” Minerva said, reaching back to give her a gentle shake. “Thanks for giving us directions. We’re home now, honey.”
The girl woke up. Her face smoothed out, serene. She rubbed her eyes and sat up.
“I was dreaming.”
“Oh yes?” Ebenezer said. “Not a pleasant dream?”
She stared at him in confusion. “I don’t remember.”
“Could be that’s your good fortune, my dear.”
The three of them sat in the car with the engine ticking down.
“Thank you,” Petty said finally. “For coming to get me.”
They opened the doors and stepped out. The day was warm, considering the season. Petty walked toward the house in bare feet, the hem of her nightgown swishing around her ankles.
“Are you coming?”
Ebenezer said, “In a minute, dear. You go on in. You have been missed.”
Petty turned back to the house. “Hey,” Minerva called to her. “You know how much your father loves you, don’t you?”
The girl turned again, and nodded. “Where is he?”
Minerva wondered if she was already forgetting, the same way Minerva had heard the survivors of Little Heaven had forgotten. Could be so. Maybe that was the best and only way of soldiering on.
“He’s coming, I’m sure,” Minerva said, meeting Petty’s questioning gaze directly. Was it a lie or a hopeful truth? She had no idea.
Minerva and Ebenezer walked toward the house in tandem.
She said, “You figure that was his intention all along?”
“Micah, you mean?” said Eb. “To have it just be him?”
She nodded. Ebenezer kicked a pebble.
“I have no idea. His aims weren’t always easy to assess.”
“He did save us.”
“Yes.”
“You figure we’re worth saving?”
Eb smiled. “Not really. But maybe he thought so. And his daughter was at stake, too.”
He was limping badly. Minerva slowed down to let him keep pace. “Do you think he’s dead?” she asked.
“After all that? I can’t see how it could be otherwise.” Ebenezer went silent a moment. “I hope so. I… I’ll pray it was so.”
Minerva nodded. “I don’t know if I can just leave him back there, though, Eb. Not without knowing for sure.”
Now it was Eb’s turn to nod. “Yes. We may have to go back. I cannot believe I’m saying that, but… Ellen might force the issue.”
“If she ever wakes up.”
“Yes. If.”
“I think I can die now,” Minerva said suddenly. “I feel it, you know? Of any old thing. A bloody nose. A bee sting.”
“So does that mean you want to die, milady?”
She turned her face up to the sky. The sun was uncommonly bright today.
“I’m gonna have to think about it.”
He clapped her on the back. “Think long and hard, my dear.”
PETTY STEPPED INTO the bedroom.
Oh, my little girl was all Ellen could think. Oh, my baby, where have you gone?
Petty threw herself on the bed. She grabbed Ellen fiercely around her threadbare waist.
Gentle, baby girl. Your old mom’s not the woman she once was.
“Where have you been, Mom?” Petty asked.
“Where have I been?” Ellen croaked, noticing the dirtied hem of her daughter’s nightgown “Where have you been?”
They shared a look, one that said, I don’t know where I’ve been. But I’m so happy to be back.
Sherri and Nate stood with gobsmacked grins on their faces. Ellen’s gaze carried over to the window. Two figures were walking up the drive. She recognized them dimly—she had the sense of knowing them from long ago, as friends perhaps… although soldiers was the word that skated across her mind. These were people she had been in some terrible battle with, the exact nature of which she could no longer recall. The woman turned her face up to the sky to drink in the sunlight. She smiled and said something to the man, who patted her on the back hard enough to raise a plume of dust off her clothing.
“Put my arm around you, Pet,” she said. “I can’t lift it at the moment.”
Petty took her mother’s arm and draped it over her shoulder. It lay there like a bit of driftwood. It was okay. The feeling would come back eventually. Only one thing was missing.
Come back to me, Micah. For Christ’s sake, you come back.
It came to her then. A second premonition, but much worse this time. A hellish snapshot from her buried past, walled off behind an impenetrable barrier her mind had constructed to keep it from doing any further harm.
A black rock. A monolithic buzzing. The spiteful laughter of children. And a presence deep within that rock, cold and vile and relentless—
She recoiled. Then she began to cry. The sobs wracked her frame in painful waves, but she was unable to stop. She hadn’t cried with such ardency since she was a girl.
“What’s the matter, Mom?” she heard Pet say.
“I don’t know, baby. I don’t know.”
2
HELL IS A BOX.
Micah hung in emptiness. No top or bottom. All darkness.
He had surrendered all memory of his body. Eventually he would surrender everything else, too. His sanity, his humanity, even his name. This certainty rested easily within him.
Dypaloh. There was a house made of dawn. It was made of pollen and of rain, and the land was very old and everlasting. There were many colors on the hills, and the plain was bright with different-colored clays and sands.
He tried to hang on to this, among a few other things. That image—a house made of dawn—and the shape of his wife’s mouth and the warmth of his daughter’s body pressed to his. But it was so goddamn hard. It was all fading, all failing, taking him with it.
What do we truly know of hell?
The thing nested contently within him. It… pulled. A slow, remorseless withdrawal. Sometimes he tried to fight back. Not physically, as he had irrevocably lost that control. But he would wall off his mind and think at it. Think good thoughts, affirming ones. The thing seemed to enjoy Micah’s feistiness. Time alone will split the strongest rock.