Chapter 75 Mallory Plantation—Elliott #2
Elliott pressed his fingers against his forehead, retracing the path of the woman’s fingers. “My mother is there. She’s arguing with this woman.”
“What did you hear? What did you see? Let me see what’s happening, Elliott. Let me see the woman.” Sophia’s pencil moved rapidly across the page.
“I heard them arguing.”
“Do you remember what they argued about?”
“The stranger wanted her to stay. My mother refused.”
He could see it now—the straw, the smell of horses, his mother’s breath fogging in the air. His chest squeezed as if the child he’d been was still looking up at them. “The woman tore the brooch from her hand.”
Sophia drew faster. “Then?”
“She begged for it back,” Elliott said, voice cracking upward. He startled at the sound of it—his own voice sounding ten years old again. His hand went to his throat.
“I can see her,” Sophia murmured. “What did the woman say?”
“That my mother knew the rules. She’d broken them, and she’d forfeited her rights.” His breath hitched sharply. “My mother fell to her knees, sobbing. Roger helped her up, put her in the car. She turned once.” His eyes burned. “I knew she’d never come back.”
“And you blamed yourself.”
He nodded, unable to speak, staring down at the reflection of his trembling hands on the polished table.
Sophia’s voice softened again. “Did that woman say anything else to you?”
“She said my mother’s brooch would find its way back. That’s all I remember.” He forced a shaky laugh.
“Let’s keep going. It might reveal itself. Unless you have something else to add to the barn memory.”
He paused and mentally searched the barn, full of animal feed, tools, and farm equipment, and the saddle on a sawhorse that his mother had given him for Christmas. “Nothing else to add,” he said in his normal voice.
“Why don’t you go back to Oz, the Magic Kingdom, Nirvana, or the Garden of Eden, and we’ll figure it out. Tell us what you saw and heard there. What’s the first thing you remember?”
He crossed to the credenza, more for the act of moving than for the water bottle he uncapped. The cold poured down his throat in jolting gulps. Get a grip. He returned to his seat. His hand trembled when he set the bottle down, so he tucked it out of sight.
Straightening his back until it cracked, he rasped, “All right. Let’s go.”
“David, Braham, Meredith, and I went to the cave beneath Fraser Castle, hoping to talk to the Elders, but the light wasn’t on.
We waited for hours, then gave up. We walked out of the cave, and I was the last one in line.
Before I crossed the threshold, the door slammed shut.
” Elliott didn’t dare glance at David. His friend’s eyes would cut a ragged scar in Elliott’s heart for deceiving him.
Sophia sketched the people involved and the heavy oak door with the twelve notches.
Elliott returned to his seat. “When the door closed, the light came on, and a female voice asked me what I wanted. I demanded a face-to-face meeting. She told me to walk toward the light. I stepped into it just as Violet and Erik had done in the video. The light whisked me away much like the fog when we travel with a brooch, but the light was more controlled.”
“How so?” Sophia asked, drawing Elliott standing in the light.
“More like an elevator than a roller coaster.” Elliott flicked on the overhead projector, and a picture appeared on the wall monitor. “This is Son Doong Cave in Vietnam—so you can picture the scale of the cavern I entered when I came out of the light.”
“What’d you see immediately, Elliott?” Sophia asked.
Elliott’s fingers curled against the table.
Suddenly, everything changed.
The darkness behind Elliott’s eyelids was instant, brutal. Color drained from the world. He stifled a sound but couldn’t stop the tremor that ran through his shoulders. Then, he slammed his fists down. The noise cracked through the room. Sophia’s pencil tore the paper.
“I saw the fucking end of the world,” he gasped, eyes flying open. “Total… devastation.” His voice fractured. He pressed a palm over his mouth. “There was nothing left.”
Shock rippled through the group.
Sophia kept her composure. “What happened to Nirvana?”
Her calmness steadied him enough to draw breath. His heartbeat thudded in his ears, drowning her pencil strokes. “I—don’t know,” he said.
Every time Sophia finished a sketch, she lined up the pieces of paper in order on the table in front of her, making it easy to return to one if she needed to add an element. Elliott rarely took his eyes off the sketch she was working on.
Sophia started drawing on another sheet of paper. “Did the devastation resemble a desert, or a bombed-out city like those in World War II?”
He described it: “Bombs had reduced entire neighborhoods and infrastructure to rubble. Mountains of cement obscured streets and roads.” As he spoke, his hands painted shapes in the air, tracing invisible wreckage.
His knuckles whitened again. “No buildings were standing. The world was gray and dark, and thick dust covered every surface. The earth rumbled, as if it was screaming at us—Why’d you do this to me? ”
“What did you believe happened?”
“They destroyed the world.”
Sophia sketched a world with smoke rising from it. “Who are they? A country? An organization? A hot-tempered person with the nuclear codes?”
“All those and more. Us!”
“Is that what you thought, or is that what you think now?”
“Then. Now. Both. I’m not sure,” Elliott said, his tone stiff and surly.
“Besides the rumble, did you hear anything else? Storms, bird songs, and human-made sounds, like music and machines. Soft, loud, pleasant, unpleasant. Anything?”
“Music and beauty died in that world. At first, I heard only silence, and then a crunch as if feet pressed down on pieces of debris like pebbles, splinters of wood, broken plaster—a sharp, muffled crunch.”
“If you heard feet pressing down on pieces of debris, did you see any people?”
“I didn’t see one living creature in that hellhole.” His words, and what they represented to him, felt like Mother Earth slapping his face. First the right and then the left and the right, on and on, all the while asking, Why’d you do this to me? And he wanted to cry out, I don’t know!
“Tell me about the landscape. Did you see hills, mountains, lakes, rivers?”
“Nothing! It was flat in all directions. Nothing moved.” Cold chills rippled from Elliott’s nape to his fingertips.
“Did it look like the moon?”
His imaginary wheels screeched to a halt. “Almost everything had turned into dust. In a way, maybe.”
“What happened next?”
“I tried to turn around. I’d seen enough, but the light had disappeared. There was more to see.”
“What about the air? Could you breathe?”
“I pulled my sweater up and covered my mouth.”
“Think back, Elliott. You said the landscape was flat. Did you recognize any landmarks, either geological or man-made? Like in the movie Planet of the Apes. They saw the Statue of Liberty buried in the sand in the post-apocalyptic landscape.”
He shook his head as his mind searched his memory bank of what he’d seen, and then he said, “I saw a half-buried sign, burned and broken.”
“Could you read the sign? Were any letters visible?”
“R A V E O C K.”
“Does that mean anything to you?” Sophia asked.
Elliott shook his head. “Nothing.”
Kenzie jotted down a note and slipped it to Sophia.
“Were there any spaces between the letters? Were the words cut off, or did the sign have R A V E O C K all as one word?”
“The sign was cracked between the E and O.”
Everyone at the table started jotting down letters on their scratchpads.
“It should spell Raven Rock,” Kenzie said. “It’s an underground fortress in Pennsylvania for the Pentagon to use during a national emergency. It’s called Raven Rock Mountain Complex.”
“Raven Rock?” Elliott let out a short, humorless breath. “If that fortress fell, there was no safe place left.”
The room erupted with muttered curses. The muscles at the base of Elliott’s neck had gone rigid. Tiny spasms flickered under the skin.
“What happened next?”
Sophia asked the question calmly, but Elliott didn’t answer right away.
He blinked, once… then again, as if the room had tilted without warning. His hand tightened on the arm of the chair. For a moment, he looked not at Sophia but past her, eyes unfocused, breath shallow—as though he were still caught between worlds.
“I’d seen enough,” he said finally, his voice uneven, scraped raw by the effort of speaking.
“And then the light—” He stopped, swallowed, and tried again.
“The light took me back.” His shoulders sagged, and he dragged in a breath.
“I walked out of a monochromatic world and into the multicolored land of—”
“Oz,” they whispered together.
Elliott lifted a hand, palm up, fingers trembling slightly. “It was… blinding. Overwhelming.” He exhaled slowly, grounding himself again. “I was dazed,” he admitted quietly. “Stunned. As if part of me hadn’t caught up yet.”
He rubbed his palms, grounding himself before continuing, “It was beautiful,” he whispered.
“A world reborn over the bones of the last one.
I wandered along a brick path, as if it had been laid there long before I arrived—waiting.
I brushed my fingers over leaves heavy with dew, crushed herbs between my palms just to breathe them in.
The air was alive with scent—green, floral, fertile.
Nothing felt broken. He paused, swallowing.
“I followed the sound of water until I found a stream spilling out from between the rocks, clear and steady, as though it had always flowed there. I knelt and scooped it into my hand.”
“Did you notice anything about the water’s aroma or flavor before you drank it?”
“It smelled sweet—not like sugar, but like rain after a long drought. Clean. Familiar. And somehow… I knew it was safe. Not logically. Just—certainly.”
“How was that possible after witnessing such destruction?” Sophia pressed gently.