Wonders of the Invisible World (34 page)

“She's in the ravine,” I said, gasping for breath back in my bedroom as I swam up and out of the world's shadow. I said the words before I even had a chance to open my eyes.

“The ravine?” Jarrod said. He was still sitting there beside me, holding my hand.

“She's going to walk Eva out of this world,” I told him, “and she paid their way across with her life, to take Eva and the curse with her.”

I sat on my bed and shook my head, recalling what my mom had told me.
You'll be the one to find me,
she'd said,
after I've passed out of this world.

She knew this would happen. She'd been preparing me for this moment more than for any other in my life, even when I hadn't realized it, but she was leaving the choice to do something about it up to me. High school graduation would be just another day on a calendar, but this day? In her estimation, this day would be my first as an adult.

I got up from my bed and left Jarrod behind me. “What are you doing?” he said as he stood to follow.

At the door I turned and said, “Please stay here and look after my brother until I come back.”

“But what are you going to do? Where are you going?”

“I'm going back there,” I said. “To Marrow's Ravine. I'm going to find her.”

It was a long walk. Longer than the walk I'd taken down to Marrow's Ravine to find my father's body that winter, it seemed. Each step was an effort. Each breath I took was a rusty blade cutting me open. The earth was soft beneath my feet, and I left a trail behind me, like the trail of my father's blood in the snow, the trail that had led me to the Living Death Tree in the winter. Eva had somehow been behind his fall. Probably because my mother's story had begun to unravel after Jarrod came home, picked up a loose thread of it, and started pulling. Pulling on me, pulling on my memories. I kept thinking that there was a chance to change things, that she'd be down there when I arrived, still alive, climbing up the side of the ravine, having found a way to return Eva without giving herself up in exchange. But when I made it to the edge of the ravine and looked down the slope to its bottom, all of those thoughts were ruined in an instant.

My mother's body was down there, resting in a bed of early buttercups and daisies, in the same place my father's body had fallen.

And I saw something—or someone—standing near her, casting a large shadow across her outstretched body. The wide brim of his black hat rose before I saw anything else. And when I did see his face, it was the red strings of his scraggly beard I noticed first, and then his eyes, dark as coal, lined with veins of fire.

He smiled when his eyes locked on mine, then put one hand on top of his hat and nodded, like he'd done when I was in the seventh grade, when he'd noticed I could see him.

My heart started to beat faster, and a cold sweat broke out in beads across my skin, making me shiver in the chill morning air. I wanted to run back the way I'd come, back through the woods, beating branches aside, back through the lane and through the pasture, until I was home and could slip inside, where I'd be safe. Or felt I could be safe, though there was nowhere truly safe anymore, and I knew it.

There was no wish I could make that was strong enough to break the reality in front of me. There was no way I could get out of this without regretting it later. This was my only chance.

You can't outrun Death. But sometimes you can make him take off his hat to stay a while and listen.

So I took a big breath and started to pick my way down the slope, to go to him, to meet him where he waited for me.

I went slowly, hesitant to actually see my mom this way, up close, not breathing, her heartbeat flown away from her, and hesitant to be so near to the creature that had come into my classroom on the day he would take my teacher's life. Eventually, though, after stepping into the notches that the Lockwood men's feet had made in the side of Marrow's Ravine over the decades, I reached bottom. And there, in that place that held so much death in its embrace, I finally paused to return Old Black Suit's nod.

I didn't smile, though. I didn't think I needed to be nice to him, just civil.

We didn't say anything at first, and I decided to go to my mother's body, to attend to it however I could. Kneeling next to her, I saw that she was holding the silver pocket watch she'd had when she went into the world's shadow to end a blizzard. The watch her father had given her. The watch Lockwood had given Dobry after his mother had died for him. That watch was in my mother's hand, held against her chest, right where her heart should have been beating. Dawn light filtered through the canopy of trees above me, and when it fell onto the filigree around the watch, the silver gleamed.

Tears sprang to my eyes as I uncurled my mom's fingers to take it from her. I wanted to hold it for just a moment, to feel the last heat of her touch on its surface. And when I slipped it away from her clenched fingers and opened the lid, the first thing I saw was the photo she'd put inside it, a picture of her and my dad on their wedding day—both of them standing beneath an arbor grown over with roses—and under the glass of the watch itself, there was time, still being kept, still ticking and ticking.

But there was something else in there too. Something I hadn't expected.
We had time left,
I remembered her saying when we found my dad down here a few months earlier.
I was saving it up. I had heaps and heaps of time saved for us.
I saw something more in there, not just the gears of a watch moving. A golden flicker of light moved under the watch hands, like a goldfish swimming counterclockwise in a bowl of water. To others it might have seemed an illusion, but I knew it was True time, a way of saving up the seconds to stretch out a person's life by hours or days or years. It was no more than an extra hour, from the looks of it, but I knew my mother had kept this one hour back for me, had hidden it in there like a stash of money.

There wasn't much left. Most likely, she'd been using whatever time she'd saved sitting in front of the fireplace or her candle, trying to find my dad, using it to go back to the moment he died, trying to understand the true nature of his death, trying to see what had been invisible to her: the trail of my father's blood that had led me to the Living Death Tree in Sorrow Acre. This was what was left of the time she'd been using to bring him back to her: one solitary hour.

It might be just enough, I thought, to turn back the clock and let her heartbeat return for a moment. If I wasn't too late.

I wiped away a tear and looked up at the man in the black suit. He was looking down at me where I knelt beside my mother's body with a face full of infinite patience. He had time, after all. He had all the time in the world.

“Well,” he said, and his voice was low. He didn't sound particularly thrilled or excited by his task, as I'd imagined he would be when I was a kid. “The child who saw me.”

“I knew you saw me that day,” I whispered. “I knew it.”

“I see those who see me,” he said, spreading his hands. “Most often, it's the dying. But sometimes it's a little boy who can't help it. You have your mother's eyes, you know.”

“She gave them to me,” I said proudly.

“A great burden,” Death's agent said, shaking his head as though he sympathized with me.

“Or a blessing,” I said. “It can also be a blessing, depending on your view of things.”

“Your brother once told me the same thing.”

“Seth?” I said, and the man in the black suit nodded.

“Yes,” he said. “He was a sage child, that one. He saw far too much for his own good.”

“Like what?” I said, chilled by his words. They were the same ones my mother had said whenever she talked about Seth.

“He saw Eva,” Old Black Suit said. “He heard her voice, like you did. This was before your mother truly understood that her father was right. That Eva would never let go of the curse. This was before your mother decided to tell a story so that Eva couldn't reach you, so that the curse couldn't find you.”

“The curse,” I said, and Old Black Suit nodded once more. Then he waved one of his arms to the side like a showman, and from behind him a small child came to stand beside him.

It was the boy in the photo in my living room. It was Seth. It was my older brother. The brother who had died before I was even born.

He was quiet as he stood there, looking up at me with innocent eyes, wearing what was most likely the little suit he'd been buried in. I blinked and blinked again, and my breathing quickened as Seth reached up with his tiny hand to grasp hold of Old Black Suit's outstretched fingers.

“Go ahead,” Old Black Suit told the boy. “You can show him.”

Seth looked back at me then, his green eyes seeming to glow a little, and a vision appeared between us.

It was a vision of Seth, waking up in the early hours of the morning, after hearing a voice call his name. The voice from the Living Death Tree. The voice of Eva Jablonski.

Seth,
she called to him.
Seth Lockwood.

And Seth had risen from his bed to follow the trail of her voice, until he came to the old tree in the orchard, where she showed him what his great-grandfather had done to her. She showed him the day that she'd picked the orchard clean to save her son. She showed him the day she died in the very tree Seth stood under.

And then she had stepped from behind the tree itself, curling her finger for Seth to come to her. “I have something else to show you,” she told him. The same thing she'd said to me once, before my mother interrupted her.

And Seth, curious, innocent, went to her.

It was then that she crouched beside his small frame and undid the knot in her dress, where the curse throbbed in its folds, hot and white and blinding in its ferocity. Eva spread her dress so that she could show the child the curse, reveal his fate to him. Show him the truth that would consume his life in an instant. It was blindingly bright once placed before him. So bright. So bright. Bursting and popping with hate.

It was then, looking down at it, that Seth fell backward and began to shake, to convulse, to turn blue, to stop breathing.

My parents discovered him an hour later, his face lifeless, after they'd woken and found his room empty and begun to search for him.

The vision faded then, but Seth still stood before me, clutching the hand of Old Black Suit.

“You can go if you want, child,” Old Black Suit said, and Seth nodded. Looking at me for a moment, he waved his small hand in a polite fashion, then retreated to his place behind Old Black Suit's coat and was gone from sight again.

I felt tears, hot and burning, well up in my eyes as Seth retreated from me. A moment later, one rolled down my cheek, and quickly I raised the back of my hand to my eyes to wipe away any others before Old Black Suit could see what he'd done to me by showing me my brother.

“It isn't fair,” I said after he'd left us.

“Life,” said Death's agent, “isn't very fair to anyone, now, is it?”

“No,” I said. “It's not life that's unfair. It's Death. Death is unfair.”

“You are quite mistaken,” the man in the black suit said, looking almost insulted. “I give many chances, over and over, to people whom I could easily take in a moment.”

“You haven't been fair to my family,” I said. “You might have turned away those people I love, those people Eva brought you.”

“Why don't you tell me about all of this?” Old Black Suit replied, as if he knew nothing of what I was speaking about. He looked around and, finding an old fallen tree nearby, sat down with his big hands draped over his knees. “I like a good story,” he said, “and your mother's family have always been good storytellers. Why, your great-grandmother Eva kept herself alive for many years by telling me stories. Your father's family, though? Not so good at this, I'm afraid. How far, I wonder, has the apple fallen, and from which tree?”