34 Elle To Accept
Elle
To Accept
My first task involves both the top and bottom of the lighthouse.
The spiral’s ebbing power—truly, the power of the souls within the spiral—grants my muscles the strength to climb the stairs until I reach the lightroom. This was once the center of Pratterman’s power. Now it’s mine.
I light the lantern with barely a glance. I can feel the rotation of the lens like another arm. I never knew I could reach out this way. There are no rules anymore. No requirements.
There never were.
But within the rhapsody of power, my body is falling apart.
I’m still only human. This is why Pratterman siphoned through me.
My final sacrifice for the force to finish the wretched work.
I reach a hand up to inspect it. Each finger is burnt at the end and withering.
The pain is there, somewhere under the righteous fury that flows in my veins. What’ll happen when I disconnect?
I peer down on the forest. Men run in circles from an unseen presence. My ghost. I smile, and something in me grows stronger. There’s only one boat at the dock.
They made it.
I nearly fall forward into the glass window in my relief. What was only hours ago my worst fear is now my salvation.
Liney will find her way. She’ll survive me. I forgot what she was capable of. Or never truly knew. I formed her into a precious doll, fragile. Mine. But she’s stronger than I ever was.
I have only one more task. To ensure there’s no one left to follow her.
I imagine ropes of power trailing from my arms, down the spiral staircase, across the wood boards of my home, and down into the basement. I increase the tension of that link between my body and the spiral’s entrance. The resistance carves dents into the creases of my elbows. Good.
I connect to the bottom of the spiral’s oil deposit.
More than enough for what I need. I raise the drowned ocean floor like I pulled the stairs up.
Though I can’t see it, I feel the hot, thick oil rise above the edges of its basin.
Up the final stair, the whole pocket of hell flattens.
Oil gushes out of the entrance into the lighthouse basement.
Time is short. Soon Thomas will cut through the chaos Douglas has made in the forest. I leave the lightroom and take the stairs down two at a time.
With each step, I imagine the force of a wave in the oil beneath.
By the time I reach the bottom and enter the living space, the basement is flooded and the floor is slick with an inch of the stuff.
I grip my knife with one hand and the doorknob with the other.
The oil’s already wormed into a river beneath the door and out to its instructed path.
Soon it’ll cover the lighthouse, the forest, and the entirety of Devils Island.
The final act of the freed souls will light the forest aflame.
This isn’t domination or force. It’s a partnership.
An understanding. Love, in a way. That’s what keeps my muscles intact enough to move despite the rising taste of rot and ruin in the back of my throat. There’s no going back now.
I open the door and exit the lighthouse. The cold air calms my sizzling skin. Above, in the open sky over the mainland, the sun has begun to set. Strips of brilliant reds slash through the sky and bathe me in golden light.
The screaming of the men has subsided. Either Douglas has finished terrorizing them, or they found somewhere safe to hide. Perhaps the cavern or the dock.
I know what comes next.
The oil courses over tree roots and shrubs, saturating everything in its wake. Neither water nor snow will deter it. All it needs is a spark.
I close my eyes. Communing with the light of the lighthouse, I redirect it. For the first time, its spinning beam peers down, directly at the middle of the forest. Within seconds I hear the crackle of burning oil and wood.
There’s nothing left in the spiral now, merely a room of stone and meat. Useless. Eventually the fire, once it trails back to the lighthouse, will consume it. To whoever comes here next, it’ll merely be a roughly hewn basement side room. Nothing special. Nothing worth investigating.
“Eleanor!”
I open my eyes. As smoke rises above the last resilient red maple leaves, my ex-fiancé walks through the tree line.
His clothes are soaked. Did he swim? He walks chest-first, half strut and half trudge. Somewhere between gorilla and peacock. His lips smear up in a sneer as he holds up a revolver at me.
“I’m here for you and Caroline.” There’s a wild glint in his eye. As though he can outrun his own fear, which he gives away with a glance behind him at the forest. “Come, show me to her.”
The fire spreads quickly. It draws on the oil’s power and on what’s left in me. I don’t know if I have enough left to fight Thomas while the fire blazes. One last time, I’ve taken on more than I can handle.
“Come now!” He shouts, stumbling slightly. Is he drunk? Or has his carefully crafted trap not gone his way for once? “You’ve had enough fun here, I daresay.”
I laugh in his face. “You’re too late.”
He slows, like a hunter who’s found his mark gone rabid. Does he realize how trapped he’s become? Red flames lick at the trunks behind him.
“Too late?” he repeats. His eyes narrow. He’s underestimated me before. Will he make the same mistake again?
“She’s gone, Thomas.”
He nods, rolling his eyes. Yet he can’t hide his bobbing Adam’s apple as he gulps down fear.
I grip the knife tighter.
“And you’re alone, still here? I find that hard to believe, given what a shared acquaintance has informed me of your sins.”
I turn away from him, back to the lighthouse. I won’t be spoken down to by him, not now.
“I’m not done with you!” he barks.
He sends a shiver through me, one I haven’t felt for so long that I nearly forgot. For though powerful as I’ve become, that voice still makes me quake.
“Go on, then,” I say, turning back. He’s advanced across the lawn. Despite the fear and shame churning in my gut, I’ve beaten greater monsters than this cruel, cowardly man. “Shoot me. Get it over with.”
His grip tightens on the trigger, and the revolver clicks. Nothing happens. What soaked him also soaked the gunpowder. Now there are no lingering qualms to muddle my resolve.
“Oh bravo, Thomas.”
He scowls at me as he tries in vain to fix the revolver. What does he know of shooting a gun?
My legs strain to keep me standing now, their strength siphoned to the blaze. He sniffs unpleasantly and turns to witness the growing fire still deep in the trees. When he turns back, his expression is stony.
In another world, one where he never abused me or Liney and I had no need to escape him, we would be oddly well matched in countenance. Stern by nature, seeing the world in the absolutes of good and evil and how we could transcend them, always immune to the rules we placed on everyone else.
But I’m not the same young woman who escaped from his threats in the dead of night. There’s no longer room for fear inside me.
“Sir will do,” he says, ever sharp and bitter.
“You really only asked for…this?” he continues, raising his arms to the clearing around us, the lighthouse, sand, and ocean waves that glow red from the sun.
“You bargained your soul for a rock and a lighthouse? One that’s not more than a stone’s throw away from me?
I expected better, Eleanor. A challenge. ”
“Did he promise you this place?” I ask. “Once you all…dealt with me?”
“No.” He laughs at the thought. Mirthless, cruel laughter.
The same laughter that accompanied every bruise, every cutting remark, every promise of more.
“Bigger. South. Much suffering, much temptation to be had. A new frontier. There will still be use for you, though. Always use for a woman who can commune so effectively. It’s a compliment.
The hardest-hearted woman the Devil’s ever seen, that’s what he told me. ”
I want to tell him that his dreams are already ruined.
That Pratterman is dead. The pool of misery he wishes to extend is soaking into the ground under his feet.
Second by second, its fuel is being consumed.
But then what? He could turn tail and run, search for Liney across the continent.
No. While it would feel so damn good to rub this loss in his face, I mustn’t give in.
I do what I’ve always been best at. I endure.
“You thought he’d pick you over me?” Thomas continues.
He’s close enough for me to make out the rough bristles of his mustache, the faint lines across his forehead, and the jawline so many used to tell me was handsome, of good breeding.
“A pathetic bitch. Ol’ Pratterman left you too wild. You must come to heel.”
He flashes the sword in his hand, its dark metal surface familiar. The same as my stiletto was. A cursed weapon.
“Something special, Eleanor. Made for you.”
Pratterman played every angle of our lives. Douglas to me, me to Liney, Liney to Thomas, and Thomas once again to me. All of us trapped in this wicked net. His catch. Wriggling uselessly and hurting one another, over and over again.
But this fish has a knife of her own. And while it may destroy us both, it’ll also set us free.
The fire has spread deep into the forest, from the roots up.
It won’t be tamed. Every new tree consumed is another muscle inside me tearing apart.
I swallow the pain and take a step forward, which he doesn’t expect.
He brandishes the weapon between us. Arrogance mixes with hesitation across his face.
Like he never really thought it would come to this between us.
Like he still doesn’t believe I could ever fight back.
I grasp my knife with one hand and hold the other out, flat-palmed.