Chapter 3 Shadows of the Unknown
MUCH LIKE NANCY, ELEANOR WEST was older than she looked.
Unlike Nancy, she looked very old indeed.
Her skin was deeply seamed with wrinkles, and her curly white hair had taken on that baby-fine cottony quality that came only with great age.
She wore it cut short enough that it formed a fluffy corona around her head, seeming to almost glow in the multicolored light from the stained-glass windows in her office.
They were a riot of carnival shades, patterned with chaotic jigsaw collections of shapes, like the webs spun by drunken spiders.
The curtains, which were never drawn, were mere gossamer panels, intensifying the spider comparison.
The light did nothing to dim the screaming rainbow of her sweater, or the clashing paisley pattern of her velvet pants.
She was seated behind her desk, shuffling papers into a pile and staring dreamily off into space.
She did that frequently these days; sometimes hours could pass with the same pile of papers in her hands, getting endlessly more and more out of order as she shuffled them together again and again.
The dreamy expression left her eyes in an instant when someone knocked on her door, replaced by a sharp, canny look that belied her attempts to come across as a kindly but fading grandmother.
“Enter,” she called.
The door creaked open, wide enough to admit the dark-haired head of one of her long-term students. “Do you have a moment?” asked Christopher.
“For you, my boy, I have a minute, which is a monument of moments,” said Eleanor brightly, and grinned at him.
Mariposa was a surprisingly Logical world, far removed from her own travels, but he had been with her for long enough that she had become deeply fond of the boy.
Part of her felt that any world where skeletons could walk and talk and operate an independent government was nonsensical enough to have been put on her side of the Compass, but her nephew insisted that it was a Logic world, and anymore, she trusted him more with the world alignments than she trusted herself.
“It’s not just me,” said Christopher, and pushed the door open wider, stepping into the office.
He kept the door open behind him, and a familiar stranger stepped into the doorway.
Eleanor gasped, putting her hands over her mouth, tears welling in her eyes as she stared at her first true success story, her long-lamented, much-missed impossible girl.
“Nancy?” she whispered.
“Hi, Miss West,” said Nancy. She raised one hand and offered a small, reserved wave.
Eleanor stood so fast that she knocked her desk chair over. It fell with a heavy thud, the impact knocking several small objects off the nearby shelves. Eleanor didn’t appear to notice. She was too busy staring at the girl in the doorway, devouring her with her eyes.
“I thought…” she said. “I thought you were gone. Gone forever and for always, back to the ghosts and the green.”
“I was,” said Nancy, before her face crumpled and she began to cry.
Like almost everything else she did, she wept without moving or making a sound.
Tears ran down her cheeks and dripped from her chin, snot dripped from her nose, and her cheeks grew red with grieving, but her shoulders didn’t shake and she didn’t so much as blink away the tears, only let them fall in their own time, pulled down by gravity.
It was unnerving, to watch such clear, static distress.
Eleanor came around her desk, moving to put her hand on Nancy’s shoulder. When Nancy didn’t shrug her hand off, she gathered the girl into a hug, letting Nancy’s tears soak into the fabric of her sweater.
“It’s all right, my precious girl,” she said, keeping her tone soothing.
“It’s all right. The wind blows west in winter and east in the dawning spring, and both are bright as the other, both are equally desired.
We can mourn the winter when the thaw comes, but without it, the spring will not return.
It’s all right to grieve. It’s all right to mourn what’s missing.
Spill your sorrows on the ground, and let the joy flow home. ”
Nancy cried and cried, her head gradually falling to the side to rest on Eleanor’s shoulder, and Christopher watched awkwardly, clearly feeling like he was intruding, just as clearly unable to move away.
Finally, Nancy’s tears began to taper off. Eleanor looked to Christopher, gesturing for him to come closer. When he hesitantly did, she reached out and touched his arm.
“There’s a box of tissues on my desk,” she said. “Be a love and get them for me, would you? I think Nancy would like to wipe her eyes.”
Nancy would clearly like to do more than that. Snot was running down her upper lip, and the tears on her cheeks were so plentiful that she looked almost like she’d been putting her face into a tub of water. There would have been roughly the same amount of dry skin.
Christopher hurried to get the tissues, bringing them back to Eleanor and stepping back again, shifting his weight from one foot to the other as he looked between the two women. “I think I ought to— I’m going to go get Kade, all right?”
“No,” said Eleanor, with surprising sharpness.
“You’re not. I know you all think me too dazed by the process of living to operate my own school, but my mind’s still as sharp as ever it was, more’s the pity, and I’m done sitting back and letting other people handle my troubles while I’m still here to take responsibility for them.
I might have thought I could invite the loss of my wits like an honored guest if I just tried hard enough, but I can’t, and I’m not willing to wait any longer.
It was my waiting that let Seraphina’s heart fester like a rotted sore, and now I fear she’s too far gone to ever be healed. ”
Nancy sniffled before asking, voice thick from weeping, “Seraphina? The pretty girl? She’s still here?”
“As if there’s anywhere else she could go, when she’s so lovely she could stop the hearts of the unprepared in their chests and leave them downed for dead,” said Eleanor.
“She’ll be here until she finds a way to hide herself away or finds a Door back to the land that cast her out, and I’m not sure which is more likely.
It seems most like she’ll be here forever. Maybe she can join the teaching staff.”
Christopher looked horrified at the very idea. “She can’t be trusted around the other students,” he said. “She still pushes people around when she wants to get her way, even after she promised you she was done with that sort of thing.”
“Promises don’t make pearls out of pudding,” said Eleanor almost serenely. “She can swear to anything she wants, won’t change her nature.”
Nancy looked to Christopher. “I’ve missed a lot, haven’t I?”
“You have,” he said. “You remember Sumi’s daughter?”
Nancy nodded very slightly.
“Well, we found Sumi’s heart in Confection, right where we hoped it would be.
Faced her Queen of Cakes, met the Baker—sort of Confection’s god, the person who bakes the whole world and puts it together so it can keep on turning.
She was very sweet. I expect she’ll wind up here someday, but she made us promise not to go looking for her, because time in Confection isn’t exactly like time is here, and by her count she would still be a child in this world, right now.
If we found her, we might cut her off from ever going through her Door, and then she wouldn’t be there to bake Sumi a new body.
I don’t like time travel. It makes my head hurt, and I think we should leave it alone as much as we can manage. ”
Nancy seized on what sounded like the only important part of that story: “Sumi’s alive?”
Christopher nodded with far more vigor than Nancy had managed thus far. “Sumi’s alive and here at the school, and she’s going to be absolutely thrilled to see you. Probably almost as thrilled as Kade is. Oh, he’s going to be beside himself when he finds out you’re back.”
“Really?” asked Nancy, voice soft.
“Really,” said Christopher. “Let’s see …
Sumi’s back. Nadya stayed behind in the Halls of the Dead, so you know that.
A bunch of us went to the Moors to help Jack, and Cora had a little run-in with the Drowned Gods.
It messed her head up pretty bad, and she transferred to another school for a little while, to deal with it.
Then she came back, and we helped a girl named Antsy get home so she could help the magpies who watch over all the Doors.
And Cora found a Door back to the Trenches a couple of months ago. She’s gone now. I hope she’s happy.”
His voice turned wistful at the end, perhaps remembering that his own Door was still waiting, perhaps missing absent friends. It was difficult to say. “I hope they’re all happy,” he said.
Nancy reached out, still moving with that strange stop-motion effect, and put her hand gently on his arm. “If they weren’t happy, they wouldn’t be sure enough to stay,” she said.
He looked up, meeting her eyes. “Does that mean you weren’t sure anymore?”
Nancy sighed, and the sound was a wind blowing through a graveyard, threading its way between the headstones.
“I was happy, until my friends started dying,” she said.
“I know it sounds impossible to people who don’t dream about stillness the way I do, but I was happy.
I learned how to hold so still that even time lost sight of me, and how to dream so hard that hours would pass between blinks, and I was happy.
I’ve never been happier in my entire life.
I could have stayed there forever. I was going to stay there forever.
I was going to stand perfectly still, until the world forgot I had ever existed, and I was going to stay happy. ”
“So what happened?” asked Christopher. Eleanor, perhaps assuming that Nancy would be more inclined to answer someone her own age—or close to it—let go and stepped back, leaving them to face each other with no one else between them.
“I … It wasn’t wanting to be dead that made us hold still.
If anything, it was the opposite,” said Nancy.
“The dead are never still, not in their own halls. They dance and they fly and they flit from place to place like they’re afraid of being pinned down to flesh again, because they are.
Either they’re afraid of rebirth, or they’re afraid of letting go of what they were before they came to us.
To be dead is to be in constant motion.”
Christopher, thinking of the dancing skeletons of Mariposa, nodded.
“We hold still because the dead are hungry,” she continued.
“If they realize that we’re alive, they’ll devour us.
That used to happen in the Halls, before the first statues realized that if they just stopped, they would be spared.
So we learn the traditions of stillness and silence from the ones who have survived thus far, and the doors only seek out the ones who need that chance to pause and think for a little while, and the circle holds. I was going to stay, I was so sure.”
“That’s not an answer to my question,” said Christopher.
“I’m getting there!” said Nancy, sounding frustrated.
“You get out of practice actually answering questions when all you have to do is look at the inside of your own thoughts and stack your words up in beautiful towers that will never see the sun. I’m trying to answer, but you have to let me get there the way I know how to get there.
You have to let me take the path that I can see. ”
“Sorry,” said Christopher, not entirely mollified.
“It’s all right,” said Nancy. “It’s been a while since I actually tried to have a conversation.
I was sure, and then … things changed. Something upset the dead, enough that they tore through the Halls, and they devoured every statue who was anything less than perfect.
They ripped my friends apart in front of me, and I couldn’t react, couldn’t even close my eyes or turn away, or they would have had me too.
The Lady of the Dead came to me after the ghosts passed.
She told me it wasn’t safe anymore. She told me she couldn’t protect me.
And then she told me that if I stayed, I would probably die like all the others. ”
Nancy took a deep breath. “I didn’t want to die.
I don’t want to die. I don’t want my friends to die.
If I can be sure enough to find another door to the Halls of the Dead, please.
Please, I need someone to help me save them before it’s too late.
I know your students aren’t supposed to leave campus during the week, but please, Miss West. Please, let us go and save the Halls of the Dead. ”
Eleanor blinked. Then she sighed, heavy as a woolen blanket, and said, “I suppose you’d best go fetch Kade after all. It sounds like you children are going on another quest.”