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The door, he realized, was no longer a door. It was back to being a badly painted prop. Part of the black around the golden door handle had begun to blister and peel away from the wood where his hand had rested on it.
He didn't understand what had happened here, or what that place was, but his mind was alive with the possibilities the Reel presented. Maybe, just maybe, it was the answer to finding Damiola? Could he unleash it like some preternatural bloodhound?
It might have even worked if Eleanor hadn't found the fissure and slipped through into London. That changed everything. January 12, 1994. A Wednesday that was unremarkable in every other way. He followed her into an alleyway off Spitalfields--which had changed so much in the time he had been gone. It was at once familiar and utterly different. Kids in plaid shirts and torn jeans walked hand in hand, the men with longer hair than the women. Eleanor was easy to follow as she pushed her way through the people coming and going from the market; her red dress was a beacon. Seth stopped dead in his tracks. Less than half a dozen paces away from him, out of the mouth of the alleyway and across the narrow, cobbled street, an old man stared at Eleanor like he'd just seen a ghost.
He crossed himself.
He couldn't look away.
Seth watched him from the shadows, all the resentments he thought he'd outgrown bubbling up again. The years hadn't been kind to Isaiah. Death walked a step behind him, just waiting to introduce himself to the old man. His brother had transformed into a statue in the midst of all of the shoppers. He was absolutely still for the longest time, then he began to shake.
Seth needed to get her out of there.
He cursed the stupid, stupid woman as he ghosted up behind her and whispered into her ear, "Just keep walking. Don't turn around. Don't look back." He felt her stiffen as he placed his hand on the small of her back and steered Eleanor away from the safety of people.
"You might as well kill me," she told him as he pushed her into a passageway so narrow both of her shoulders scraped against the walls on either side when she stumbled forward. "I'm not going back there."
"Then you die," he told her. There was no anger in his voice, only resignation. It was easier to let her see the effects of remaining where they didn't belong than it was trying to drag her back by the hair, kicking and screaming. He had to trust that despite her defiant words, when she was confronted by the reality of watching herself age, her self-preservation instinct would kick in.
He pushed her forward, her heel catching on the uneven cobbles, but he didn't let her fall. He kept on pushing her until she stood outside the blacked-out window of an old cinema on Latimer Road, and saw her reflection. For a moment it was obvious she didn't know what she was supposed to be looking at, but when he wouldn't let her walk away she had no choice but to study her reflection and slowly recognize the changes creeping in between memory and the reality standing in front of the cinema.
She looked down at her hands then back up at him through the backward landscape of their reflections.
"What's happening to me?"
"Time," he said. "Look around you. This isn't the city we left. This isn't 1924. It's not even 1941 or 1965. Everything's different now. We don't belong here. Time is doing what it's supposed to do. It's catching up with you. Stay here and you'll be an old woman before long."
She looked like she wanted to argue with him, but the truth of his words was writing itself on her skin.
"How . . . ? Why?"
"I wanted you to myself."
"You're a monster."
"Probably," Seth agreed. "And if not now, soon enough, given the things I'm going to have to do if we ever want a normal life. So if you really want to die, all you have to do is stay here a little while longer. The years will catch up with you and you will save my soul in the process. Or you can return with me to that place and give me time to try and work out how to undo the mess that damned magician made. Right now I don't care either way. I'm done with considering you a prize. If I could I'd take you back to where you came from and dump you on my brother's doorstep and be done with you. But I can't."
She looked at him then, realizing something. "Is this where you took my baby?"
He nodded. "Yes. Although he's old enough to be your father now."
There was a moment as the pain registered and the loss settled in, then Eleanor shook her head, not in disagreement so much as in denial.
And because of her one moment of stupidity, they couldn't come back here again, not safely. Isaiah had seen her. He knew she was still alive, even if he couldn't explain how she could have lived so many years without aging a day. He had seen her. He wouldn't let that go now. Even if no one believed him, and dismissed his claims as the ravings of a senile mind lost too long in grief, it didn't matter. It would stir it all up again: the beautiful young actress who had disappeared, the jealous brother who was anything but an ordinary criminal, and the magician who had disappeared off the face of the earth. It might feel like a lifetime ago, but bringing that shit back into the public consciousness after all this time was just going to make any hope of living here more problematic than simply undoing Damiola's curse.
There were options, of course. The most obvious one was that it was time for the Reel to claim its first victim. The creature had made no secret of its hunger. It needed to feed to sustain itself, and the longer it burned the fiercer its appetite became. He was still learning how his monster functioned, but he was beginning to think that if it didn't feed, it would burn forever, unquenched, unsatisfied. It would feed. It would have to. So it was only fitting that the first blood it tasted should be the blood of his blood.
"So?"
He knew he'd never be able to trust her again, no matter what she said now. There would come a time when she'd slip through the fissure again, stepping back into this world, unable to resist the draw of the place and the life she'd lost--without understanding it wasn't here to be found. That unforgettable need would eventually be their undoing. There was no getting around that. It was that, or cast her out now and let time unravel her. "Take me back," she said, becoming a willing prisoner this time.
"Wise choice."
When he next returned to the city he'd lost, his brother was dead.
Minutes had passed for Seth, months for the others. He'd intended to put the frighteners on Isaiah, lean on him, maybe crack a few bones to be sure he forgot what he'd seen at the market, but instead he had been the uninvited ghost at the family funeral. Seth watched the relatives who'd long since forgotten he existed pay their respects to his brother. The whole charade left a sour taste in his mouth. They had no idea who Isaiah really was. His boy, Boone, delivered the eulogy with customary tears and trembling. As they lowered the coffin into the ground he talked about hoping his father could finally find the woman he had spent his entire life looking for, and if not her, then at least peace. He gave the dead man his own promise that he'd never stop trying to work out what had happened that night in 1924. It would become his obsession, handed down from generation to generation like some twisted heirloom. Seth hawked and spat in the direction of the open grave. Boone's own son was next to pay his respects, kneeling at the graveside to place what looked like a wooden rattle on the top of the coffin. Some sort of memento that no doubt meant something deeply significant, even if it looked cheap and childish.
Seth watched them mourn, the Reel kid beside him fidgeting like a real boy might
