I’m ashamed to admit that it took me a couple of hours to muster the courage to enter the passage. I spent much of the intervening time with my head under the arch, calling to Ellie. Apparently, in her panic, Bess had dropped her penlight and it remained on, lighting the end of the passage with a faint glow.
As for Ellie, early on she answered once with a faint “…busy…” and went silent after that.
Finally, I could put it off no longer. I had to find my daughter. I lowered myself to my hands and knees and, fixing my gaze on the glow ahead, began a slow, careful crawl—careful in that I kept my back slightly arched to prevent it from going into spasm. When that happened, it rendered me useless, sometimes for days.
As I moved I noticed a slight incline. Viewed from the arch, the tunnel had seemed level, but from within it definitely tilted upward. The soft, faintly warm airflow persisted and, as I approached, the glow slowly expanded to illuminate the terminal section of tunnel wall surrounding it, leaking into the chamber beyond.
I slowed. I felt winded. I couldn’t see how it could be due to exertion because I walked regularly, so it had to be nerves. After witnessing Bess’s reaction, did I really want to see Ellie—the new Ellie—being herself?
I had no choice. I had to push on.
Ellie’s voice echoed down the passage. “Is that you, Mother?”
“Y-yes.” My mouth had gone dry.
“Don’t come in here.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“But—”
“I upset Bess. I don’t want to upset you.”
Upset? Bess had been horrified. But…
“You’re my daughter. I need to see you. You can’t lock yourself away like this.”
“It’s just for a little while. I’ve got things to do, and then I’ll be out.”
But I needed to see her now, and I’d come this far, so I pushed ahead. Grabbing Bess’s penlight, I crawled into the dark chamber—a round floor about fifteen feet across, with a shadowy domed ceiling maybe ten feet high. I sat back on my haunches and fanned the beam around. A half dozen or so white globes the size of snowballs littered the floor, but no sign of Ellie. Where was she?
“Hello, Mother.”
Her voice came from above and so I angled the penlight in that direction…and froze.
Ellie clung to the arching wall about three-quarters of the way up toward the domed center. She clung by long, spindly spider legs that had sprung from her back, slim, many-jointed legs, dark brown, gleaming like mahogany.
With a cry, I dropped the light and crab-scrambled back to the tunnel opening. At least with the beam aimed along the floor, reflecting off those snowballs, I couldn’t see her.
“Oh, Ellie!” I cried when I found my voice. “Oh, dear God, Ellie!”
“I’m all right, Mother,” she said, her voice unsettlingly calm. “Really, I am. And believe it or not, I’m okay with it.”
“But what is ‘it’? What’s happened to you? Who did this to you?”
“Not so much a ‘who’ as a ‘what.’ As for the rest, I don’t know. I woke from the coma knowing a lot of things I never knew before, but I don’t know why I know them, or why any of this happened. But I sense some sort of purpose.”
“How can there be a…?” I heard hysteria creeping into my voice. With a supreme effort I curbed it. “How can there be a purpose to…this?”
“It originated from a place with a different set of rules, with a different logic, with different geometries.”
I moaned. I felt so bad for her. “I don’t understand, Ellie.”
“Neither do I, Mother. Not completely. I think causing confusion and fear and grief and dismay is part of it, and yet… I know I shouldn’t be okay with it, but somehow I am.” A sharp, bitter sound, a harsh imitation of a laugh. “Maybe you should have named me Charlotte instead of Eleanor.”
“Charlotte…?” I had no idea what she was talking about.
“My favorite story. You used to read it to me at bedtime.”
What was she…? Oh, no.
“Charlotte’s Web? Oh, Ellie, this is no time for…for…”
“Or remember the time I tried out for the soccer team and they passed on me? Man, if Mister Grellson could see me now.”
“Ellie, please!”
How could she joke about this…this horror?
“Just trying to lighten things up, Mother. You know the expression: Sometimes you’ve got to laugh to keep from crying.”
I bit back a sob. Oh, my poor, dear, sweet child.
“Is that what you feel like doing? Crying?”
“A small part of me is crying—and screaming and shrieking as well—but it’s shrinking, and soon it will be gone.”
The old Ellie? Was she talking about the girl she used to be?
Just then another white globe dropped into view and rolled to join the rest. I retrieved the penlight and, drawing a deep, tremulous breath, angled it upward.
Two of Ellie’s spider legs were poised before her with a smaller version of one of those white globes trapped between the tips. They were rotating the ball this way and that, forming it out of the silky substance flowing from the tips. As I watched, horridly fascinated, it grew steadily until it matched the others in size, at which point the legs released it to fall to the floor.
“Wh-what are those?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Then why are you—?”
“The legs seem to have a mind of their own.”
I tried to hold it back, I was trying so hard to be strong for her, but as the legs started spinning another white ball, I couldn’t restrain the sob that burst from me.
“Oh, Ellie, why you? Why you?”
“I don’t know, Mother. Maybe I was the wrong person at the wrong place at the wrong time, but I don’t think so.”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe I was destined for this. After all, I’ve never totally fit in.” A small bitter smile. “And now I really don’t fit in.”
True, she’d never taken anything at face value. Questioned everything—everything. Her mantra was always There’s something else going on here.
“The signal is a perfect example,” she said.
“Signal? What signal?”
“The noise that almost drove me mad that you and Bess couldn’t hear at all.”
“It’s a signal? Of what?”
“I don’t know yet. But I will.”
“That man who carried you from the park…he could hear it too.”
His words had convinced me that Ellie wasn’t having a mental meltdown. In light of what followed, a breakdown would have been far preferable to…this.
“I know,” she said. “We who hear the signals are a rare breed. We’ll be visiting him soon.”
“He told me his name but I don’t know where to find him.”
“He goes by two names and I have his address.”
I shook my head in wonder. “How do you know all this?”
She smiled—a cold grimace. “My coma was very instructive.”
The spider legs dropped another globe to the floor.
Ellie said, “Carry as many as you can back to the room, Mother, and stack them on the window sill.”
Was I being dismissed? I guessed so.
“Why the window sill?
“You’ll like the colors when the sun shines through them.”
“But—”
“Mother, please. It will begin in the heavens—soon—so I must be ready.”
The globes had a slightly sticky feel and I gathered up as many as I could hold in one arm, then crawled back into the tunnel.
“No matter what you think, Mother,” I heard her say behind me, “I’m still Ellie. I know what a good mother you’ve been, and how patient you’ve been with me over the years. And I still want my Blanky—not in here, this isn’t the place for Blanky, but out there, I’ll still need it.”
I was sobbing when I reemerged into Ellie’s old room, but I managed to arrange the half dozen globes on the window sill as she’d said. Their stickiness proved an asset because they stuck to the glass as well as each other. As I was finishing, another globe rolled from the tunnel and stopped outside the arch. And then another and another. I gathered them up as they arrived and added them to the rising pile that was gradually covering all the window panes.
The sun was high and not hitting the glass, but the window faced west; the setting sun would eventually light up the globes.
You’ll like the colors when the sun shines through them…
Would I? I wasn’t so sure. In fact I doubted it very much. What did I care about colors? My Ellie, my baby, had been changed into a monster. By whom? Was it because of something she’d done—or I’d done?
At least she still wanted Blanky. That part of her lived on.
I bunched it up, buried my face in it, and sobbed.