19 Elle To See
Elle
To See
It’s been over an hour. The perimeter takes minutes to walk, even at the leisurely pace Liney takes. Soon it’ll be time to go upstairs and tend the light. I should check on her. What if Mr. Pratterman shows her another illusion or Mr. Croxton returns? The weather’s cold but clear. Easy crossing.
If I go outside, what if I see someone? Out on the mainland or passing by in one of the last fishing boats of the season? Would I go after them, oar in one hand and knife in the other?
There’s another option I’d rather not consider. Mr. Pratterman specified seeing the next person. I could blindfold myself every time I stepped outside. If I connected to the spiral again, I could feel out my steps with its senses instead of my own. Yet a blindfold can be pulled off.
I’ve been staring at the knife on the counter for half the time Liney’s been gone. Contemplating. How would I explain it to Liney? That I accidentally gouged my eyes out?
I’m still operating within the realm of technicalities. And what if I’ve remembered his words wrong? What if he said sense or find ? Given the whole of the ship’s passengers weren’t killed, is Liney’s soul still invoked?
I need to find Mr. Pratterman. He said I’d have time before his next visit, but nothing about me finding him first. It was my knocking that brought us together. I could search him out again. I won’t be a simpering girl pleading for help this time.
I could try here, where he’s connected with me before. Yet meeting in his domain could prove harder than a neutral territory. But how would I do that while ensuring I didn’t see another person?
I puzzle over this, relieved to have something to consider that isn’t self-mutilation.
Douglas hasn’t reappeared. I didn’t ask him directly about the girl. I only told him my theory. Did he stay silent because I’m right or because he wants me to think I’m right? He sees the world so simply: Do good. He must not have had siblings.
The front door opens. Liney bursts in, pink-faced and breathing high in her chest. “Elle!”
Musings of knives, eyes, and the Devil’s wording disappear. Is she having an attack? I rush to the entry and help her tear off her coat. She’s trying to say something else, but I’m too focused on finding the problem.
“When did it start?” I ask, “Come to the fire. Let’s warm you and get you back to—”
“Get off me!” Liney twists out of my grasp. She puts her arms out, palms up. Fending me off. “I’m fine.”
What? I slow enough to notice that there is no forest beyond the open door behind her. There is a figure, just out of view.
The sole survivor of the shipwreck walks into my lighthouse. Her traveling cloak ripples in the early-evening breeze. Warm enough to keep her from freezing these past few nights.
Could she still be an illusion? The other girl Liney saw was in the room, yet I couldn’t see her.
Is that the limitation? Both of us seeing her at the same time, her boots tracking in snow, tiny details like the scrunch of her nose and shift of her eyes as she takes in the room—none of it appears false.
This is not the delirium of swallowed salt water and frostbite. Nor is it a folie à deux. She casts a shadow and breathes out puffs of cold air. There’s nothing I can sense of the spiral about her either. She’s flesh and blood, as real as the wood planks she stands on.
Liney found her. And I promised safety to anyone she brought back. Because I have become a sentimental fool who doomed each of us in this room. All to make my sister temporarily happy.
How to react? Aggression could surprise her enough to get the deed done quick as possible, but Liney stands mere feet from me. I’ve never killed in front of her. Made a point not to, in fact. I don’t bring her up to the lightroom. I left her behind before I found Douglas.
The girl is thickset, cherry-cheeked, and smiling in the way I used to with strangers at my parents’ parties. But she must remember me throwing her out. What has Liney told her? My right hand twitches for the knife. It’s so close. The same one I contemplated poking my eyes out with.
I should welcome her. Offer her a seat by the fire and a meal.
“See?” Liney approaches with the girl, who thoughtfully closes the door behind her first. Sealing herself in with me. “Her name is Bridget. She saved me, Elle. Got me out of the water to where you found me.”
I told Liney I’d dragged her out. Has she forgotten, or is she giving me the grace to agree to a different story? It’s been too long; I need to say something.
“Welcome.” It’s wooden, like a young actor unsure of their line.
“She needs to stay here for the night,” Liney continues. “She’s happy to take the couch.”
They’ve been talking for a while, then. Where?
How’d she outmaneuver me on my own island?
Unless it hadn’t wanted me to find her. Should I be grateful to Liney for bringing her?
If she isn’t under Mr. Pratterman’s influence, perhaps he doesn’t know her actions.
He can check on mine through the spiral’s mutual connection.
I approach Bridget to take her coat and hang it along the wall.
She unties the ribbon at the front. I spot something when she hands it to me, so I turn away and pick at it while hanging the hood.
At first it appears to be salt, nothing out of place.
But the speck, tan instead of white, breaks apart between my fingers.
It’s a crumb of bread. Where did she get that from?
Liney shows the girl around the room. They’re chatty, already close and giggling. Liney was always a likable girl, but she didn’t make friends easy given her circumstances. It strikes me that Bridget isn’t asking any questions about the building.
Almost like she’s been in here before. Of course she has. When she came in with me. Yet the bread crumb—has she snuck in? At night, while I’ve been upstairs and Liney’s been sleeping?
Bridget holds something I didn’t expect to fear. Her congenial demeanor walking around the room with my sister could sway Liney away from me. Who would a young woman pick if given the choice? Her controlling sister with too many secrets and rules or a pretty face with excitement in her eyes?
I need to find Mr. Pratterman. He won’t expect me to reach out to him on the mainland.
I’ll ask him…what? To change my target? Isn’t personal exactly what he wanted?
Perhaps there’s something more precious I can offer.
Or a threat I can make. At least he must offer clarification of his terms, exactly as they were spoken.
It benefits him for me to succeed and continue this work.
Colleagues working out terms of service, that’s all.
“We can add some extra blankets to pad it out; it’s pretty saggy” I catch Liney saying when I return to the moment.
They get to work on outfitting Bridget’s makeshift bed.
I can’t find something to do. If I go near the kitchen, I’ll be within arm’s reach of my knife.
No matter how much distance I’m trying to put between myself and the spiral’s power, I can’t trust myself not to fold too close to my weapon of choice.
It’d be so easy. I’d never noticed before how much energy it takes to keep focused on my goals.
How dependent I’ve become on how good it feels to be something greater, no matter how terrifying that greatness becomes.
I owe it to Liney not to kill the girl so close that blood could splatter on her. A shiver runs through me at the idea. Mostly in disgust. A lump forms at the back of my throat.
Liney sends Bridget to the storage room to change into a nightgown I believe was once Douglas’s. The girl returns swimming in it.
“Do you want something to eat first?” Liney asks.
“That’s all right,” Bridget says. “I could really use some sleep.”
She’s not starving? More importantly, what was out there that she ate? Tree bark and snow? Or more bread from our coffers? We can barely support two through the winter, certainly not three.
She won’t last the winter. I can’t forget that. I’m watching a future corpse laugh with my sister. I can’t stand it. Absorbing the final thoughts of sailors before death was one thing. I was so removed from them. But Mr. Pratterman had it right. The intimacy of this changes everything.
“I need to go upstairs,” I say.
“To the lightroom,” Liney elaborates. “She watches all night.”
Bridget nods, already settled into the couch. I’m not used to a third, acknowledged, party in the room who needs explanations.
Douglas’s urge for me to try grates as I linger at the stairs.
“I’m sorry about the ship,” I tell Bridget. I am. To her, it’s a tragedy that will follow her until her death. Just as a bird’s clipped wing will haunt it until it becomes a fox’s meal. “If the light had worked properly, we may have avoided all this.”
Bridget gives me a tight-lipped smile of sympathy. “It’s not all bad, E—Miss… How should I address you?”
“Elle’s fine.” Mary Eleanor Forsyth could’ve been in the news, as much as I’ve been hoping it won’t be. Simpler is better. “Liney will use it; you might as well.”
“Thank you, Elle. If this disaster can give any kind of solace, I’m glad to have met you both because of it.”
I don’t say another word to the two of them. Their giggling follows me up the stairs and into the storage room, where I find an empty box. I retch into it, so violently I’m left gasping for breath after. It’s not porridge. It’s a gray, veined sack surrounded by a salmon-pink casing.
“I believe that’s a gallbladder.”
I whip around to find Douglas behind me, peering over my shoulder. “A—what? An organ?”
“Yours. Unless you’ve been eating them lately. I’ve hope yet that cannibalism is below you, though.”
I peer into the box, labeled for grapes on the outside. I can’t say I’ve seen a gallbladder in person. How does he know? I turn back to the ghost. “You truly believe I retched up an entire interior body part?”
Douglas shrugs. “Or a particularly raw sausage.”