Chapter 2 When We’re Gone
THE FIRST TIME NANCY had discovered the Door into the Halls of the Dead, it had been in the basement of the small suburban home she shared with her parents, tucked behind the washing machine, in a space that should have held only cobwebs and dust. She had pried it open with shaking fingers, sure that she was going to see nothing but the packed earth beneath the house, or possibly a long-forgotten root cellar—although that wouldn’t explain how the door could appear out of nowhere, would it?
Doors didn’t simply snap into existence where they hadn’t been the day before—and equally sure that if she didn’t look, she would regret it forever.
But that door had opened on a grove of pomegranate trees, the grass lush around them and dotted with the jeweled husks of fallen fruit. Nancy had stepped through at once, and she’d been most of the way to the Halls proper before she heard the sound of a door closing far behind her.
When her conviction had later wavered, when she’d been less sure than her citizenship demanded, she had found herself stumbling through that same door, returned to the basement, returned to the silence beneath a house that had been feeling less like a home with every passing year, where she was expected to be a rainbow when what she wanted was to be elegant, and silent, and still.
She had whirled around immediately, only to find the door was gone: there was only smooth concrete wall where it should have been.
She had started to scream at once, all her years of stillness falling away in the face of such impossible horror, and her parents had come thundering down the stairs, ready to confront the intruder in their basement.
Only to discover their missing daughter in the middle of a meltdown, hysterical at first, then near-catatonic.
From there she had been sent off to what they called a boarding school but she knew was really just a glorified mental hospital for people who swore impossible things and refused to be swayed away from them.
She’d been terrified when that happened, convinced that leaving the basement behind would mean she could never find her way home again.
But the school had turned out to be the best thing that could possibly have happened to her in a world of hot, fast creatures who moved like movement didn’t matter, like it was something to be spent without thinking twice.
At the school she had met other people who’d traveled the way she had, to worlds equally fantastic and impossible, and if none of them had truly appreciated the value of stillness, at least they’d been able to understand that it had mattered to her.
At the school, she had found true friends and companions, and through the contrasts between her stories and theirs, she had been able to find her certainty.
When the Door had opened again, this time in the basement beneath the school itself, she had been truly sure.
She had been confident in her convictions, and she had never expected to come back.
No one else had been expecting her to return either, and her room had been given away with the start of the next term, becoming a comfortable home for a boy named Christopher Flores.
He was stretched out on the bed with an anatomy textbook, idly twirling a bone flute between his fingers as he read.
His eyes skimmed the pages with far more focus and fascination than most people would have expected from a boy of his age, barely able to look away from the illustrations.
He was so focused that he didn’t even seem to notice when a door opened out of a flat stretch of wall and Nancy stepped through. She froze when she saw him, going utterly still. The doorknob slipped through her fingers, allowing the door to slide smoothly closed.
The soft click of the door closing caught his attention enough that he glanced up. Catching sight of Nancy, he yelped and scrambled further upright on the bed, heels digging at the covers in his quest for traction. Both book and flute went flying, leaving him empty-handed and staring at her.
This is what Christopher saw: she was tall, thin, and achingly pale, the kind of pale that skirted the line between “natural” and “spectral.” She was wearing a knee-length white chitoniskos, belted at the waist with a braided cord of white, silver, and pomegranate crimson.
Her hair, which was braided severely back, was white except for five black streaks, like the echo of fingers, and a red ribbon that matched her belt was clasped around her throat.
She looked at him, and she didn’t move, not even enough to look like she was breathing.
His own breath caught in his throat like a stone, Christopher pushed himself fully upright before carefully swinging his feet around to the floor and standing up. He took a step toward her, clearly unsure whether she was really there or just an apparition come to interrupt his reading.
“Nancy?” he said, and his voice was soft and careful, the kind of voice he might have used on a frightened animal.
After a pause so long that he began to question whether or not he had actually spoken, Nancy nodded. It was barely a twitch, but compared to her previous stillness, it was everything.
Christopher took another step forward. “Nancy! I didn’t think— What are you doing— Why are you here?”
Nancy licked her lips—she had forgotten how dry the world could be, when you left the cool, comfortable Halls of the Dead—and answered, in a soft voice, “They were all dying. The Lady told me to run, and so I ran. I need help, Christopher, please.”
Christopher listened with absolute solemnity, only taking another step when she was finished. “Of course we’ll help you, Nancy. You’re always welcome here.”
This is what Nancy saw: a tall, skinny Latino boy with messy black hair and clear brown skin, wearing jeans, a flannel shirt, and socks, having been raised too well to wear shoes in the bed.
His long-fingered hands were empty, which she knew even after her long absence was wrong, making him seem incomplete.
Indeed, as soon as her gaze flicked to his hands, his cheeks reddened and he hurried to retrieve his bone flute from the floor where it had fallen, caressing it in silent fingerings of songs no living soul could hear.
“I … How long has it been for you?”
“Long enough,” said Christopher, demurring slightly. “Hard to say with all the questing we’re not supposed to have been doing all this time. How long’s it been for you?”
“Years.” More than a decade spent standing in frozen contemplation of the universe.
But from her last trip to the Halls of the Dead, Nancy knew that a year in that world would generally correspond to a month or less in this one.
Time didn’t always run smoothly between realities, and that was before accounting for the way becoming a statue slowed and stopped a person’s rate of aging.
“Years,” he echoed. “And yet you came right back here. Were you that sure we’d all be waiting?” There was a challenge in his tone, a regretful twist that told her how hurt he was that she’d assumed none of them would find their Doors back to their own far-flung homes.
“No,” said Nancy. “I wasn’t sure at all, only sure the school would still be here.
That Miss West would still be teaching—or if she wasn’t, that she would have found a successor.
Someone who could keep the fires burning.
A place like this … it feels like forever.
And besides, I didn’t have a choice. This was where the door I took to get back to the Halls of the Dead opened, so this is where the door that let me leave would be.
If I get to go home again after this, then that would change where any future doors back to this world open.
It’s in and out at the same place, no matter where I am in the Halls when I step through. ”
“Huh,” he said. “Efficient, I guess, although—didn’t you tell me some of the statues stay there for hundreds of years? What would happen if you came back, and the Door was underground, or in the foundations of a building, or underwater?”
“I guess I’d be crushed, or I’d drown,” said Nancy.
“Brutal,” said Christopher approvingly.
Nancy didn’t say anything, just waited for his next question.
It was strange, being back in a world where people said what they thought as soon as they thought it.
In the Halls of the Dead, a thought had to linger for weeks or even months before it would be judged worthy of sharing, in hushed tones after the evening bell had rung and they had all sunk into their night poses to sleep and refresh themselves for the day to come.
People thought it must be lonely, to be a statue, but it wasn’t, oh, it was so far from loneliness.
There was connection when the lights were out and the silence broke into a hundred whispered conversations, everyone exchanging ideas that had matured enough to be worth loosing on the world.
Nancy had found true friends in those nighttime whispers, people she would sorely miss if she never made it home again.
People she was no longer sure would survive long enough for her to return.
It was fear for their well-being that put fire in her blood, that made it possible for her to move quickly enough for Christopher to see as she turned her head toward the stairs, looking to the door at their top, and asked, “Is Miss West still in charge?”
“Eleanor?” asked Christopher—needlessly, because they both knew who she meant. “She still pays the bills, yeah, but Kade manages most of the day-to-day operations anymore. She’s been stepping back a lot the last year or so, and he’s been stepping up.”
Nancy blinked, eyes flicking over Christopher. “I thought Kade was your age?”
“He is,” said Christopher. “I think he’s like eight months older, but that doesn’t really matter.
No, we’re the same age, and he shouldn’t be doing any of this.
He should be thinking about his future, what he wants to do, where he wants to go from here, but all his focus is on the school.
It’s like he can’t let himself imagine anything else. ”
“That’s not right.”
Nancy turned to face the stairs, the most she had moved since arriving in the basement.
Christopher blinked, resisting the urge to rub his eyes.
Watching her move was like watching some strange stop-motion film: there was something wrong about it.
She wasn’t fluid or jerky, she was just …
staccato, like she was made up of a million snapshots of motion rather than one smooth, continuous action.
It would fade with time. All the gifts of the Doors faded with time, although some would always remain.
Christopher’s flute was a gift of the Doors, and he knew that if it ever lost its power, he would die in short order.
Maybe Nancy’s new way of moving was the same way.
He didn’t think so, though. Something about it felt more temporary than that, more like the afterimage left by a bright light shining in your eyes than an actual, material change.
“I should let her know what’s happened,” said Nancy. “I’m sorry to have interrupted you.”
“Don’t be,” said Christopher. “I’m glad to see you, Nancy. I always liked you.”
Not as much as Kade had liked her, and he wanted to be there to watch when the mild, often-taciturn older boy got his first look at the returned Nancy.
It was fairly common knowledge among the older students that Kade had had a massive crush on Nancy by the time she’d vanished from the school—a crush that had been at least somewhat reciprocated.
He’d gotten over it, something that had to be easier to do when you knew that the girl of your dreams was off in another world with no intention of coming back.
Christopher wouldn’t know. The girl of his dreams was in another world, waiting for him to come home and join her forever.
There had never been a moment’s doubt in his mind that his Skeleton Girl would stay as faithful as he had, that she would know he’d find his way back to her.
What was the point of crushes when you had perfection just on the other side of a Door?
The fact that once he went back to Mariposa, returning to this world would no longer be an option didn’t really matter much to him.
It was mostly other people who were bothered by the fact that once he found his Door, he intended to shed his skin as quickly as possible before he could be banished again.
To them, cutting his flesh away in order to exist as a living skeleton was a strange sort of suicide.
To him, the word “living” was all that mattered.
Still, for the moment, he followed Nancy up the stairs to the hallway, watching her strangely disjointed motions with a critical air.
How long would it take for this world to sand her rough edges away?
Had she moved like this the first time she’d returned, or was this a function of how much longer she’d been gone this time, how much more practice she’d had at holding herself so still that even age couldn’t catch her?
And would having the answers change anything?
Nancy reached the door at the top of the stairs, opened it, and stepped through, pausing to wait for Christopher to catch up with her. He did, smiling reassuringly as he eased the door to what was now his bedroom closed again.
He had a feeling the rule against quests was about to be broken once again.