My mind still reeled from all that Ellie had just told me. We’d strolled the Coney Island boardwalk—down past the Parachute Jump and then back—looking like any normal mother and daughter out to breathe the salty air. But as we walked she’d filled my head with tales that were anything but normal.
She spoke of vast, unimaginably huge forces that spanned the multiverse. So vast and so few in number that they needed no names. Lesser beings with their need to classify and codify had concocted tongue-twisting designations, but the entities answered to no one, not even each other. They searched out worlds populated with sentient and sapient beings where they could toy with the inhabitants. Competition for these worlds put certain entities in conflict as one would try to usurp control of a world controlled by another.
Earth was one of those worlds in contention, and the histories of its civilizations had been warped and woofed by the influences and subtle intrusions of these entities.
“Our little corner of reality is about to change hands,” she said. “The people who support the new landlord are delighted that the Change has begun. Those who support the departing landlord are terrified.”
“But where are you in all this?” I said. “You’re just a girl from the Midwest. Why you?”
“I was a girl from the Midwest who could hear the signals and was bathed in the Prime Frequency. Depending on one’s perspective, I was the right girl in the right place at the right time, or wrong girl in the wrong place at the worst time.”
“So if you hadn’t been standing in that spot in the Sheep Meadow at that moment, none of this would have happened?”
“Correct.”
I felt suddenly weak and dropped onto a nearby bench.
“So it’s my fault?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I was determined to find the origin of that awful sound I’d heard.”
“But I could have stopped you, or at last made you put it off till the next day…or delayed you even an hour.”
“I didn’t know it would sound again, or what would happen if it did. And you certainly couldn’t know. So guilt is not an option here.”
“But it’s ruined your life.”
Her expression remained impassive. “It changed the life I had. Now I have a new life.”
Anger flashed through me. Whatever she’d wanted for herself in the future, whatever plans and dreams she might have had were all gone now, ripped from her. And she didn’t seem to care.
“How can you be so…so…so accepting?”
She stared at me with those non-Ellie eyes. “What makes you think I have a choice, Mother? What’s done is done. I can’t change it and neither can you. I have a task to complete and then I am free.”
My heart leaped. “Free? You’ll be back to normal?”
“I will be free to do whatever I wish, but…normal? This is my new normal, Mother.” She held out a hand to help me to my feet. “Come. We are due back in Manhattan.”
“Due?”
“No one there knows I’m coming, but I’m needed.”
We retraced our steps to the elevated D train and rode it to the Grand Street stop where we walked a block or two to Allen Street. From there we passed through an area full of Asians that I assumed was part of the city’s Chinatown.
Eventually we turned down a side street lined with red-brick-fronted former tenements. Ellie stopped before a massive, ancient-looking three-story building of stone block that could have been a bank or a fortress. Its windows were deeply recessed within solid granite walls. Atop a set of wide granite steps, an intricate seal was suspended above a heavy inlaid door.
“What is this place?” I said.
“A lodge of the Ancient Septimus Fraternal Order. I’m needed inside. There’s something I must do.”
“Please don’t tell me all these horrors have happened to you just so you could show up here and do something!”
She shrugged. “It’s possible. Maybe I was pushed toward the Sheep Meadow so the signal would prepare me for this. Or…maybe I brought this on all by myself and am being sent here simply because I happen to be handy.”
I wanted to scream. I couldn’t bear the thought of my Ellie being used…a tool.
She started up the steps and I went to follow but she turned and stopped me. “I must do this alone. You don’t need to see this. You’ve had to see too much already. Wait at that coffee shop we passed on the corner. Have a nice cappuccino and I’ll join you when I’m finished.”
“But—”
“They don’t allow women, Mother.”
“But you’re—”
“They’ll make an exception for me.”
So saying, she turned and ascended the steps. I watched the heavy door close behind her, but I stood fast.
Have a nice cappuccino? I don’t think so. That was my daughter in there. Alone.
I wasn’t going anywhere.