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“Well,” Abby said, a halo of golden light emanating from the crown of her head. “You’ve been there long enough. If you let me, I think I can lead you out of there.” The light grew brighter around her until it shone like a gold and soothing aura. This halo. It struck me that this was what coming home looked like.
Abby took a step toward the metallic face, then another. Rather than drawing nearer the manifestation, Abby herself began to change, growing smaller to my eyes, looking as if she were walking down a long straight path into the horizon.
“Abby, no, you don’t know what you’re doing,” Maisie called, a sense of urgency causing her voice to strain.
“Don’t worry, sweetheart,” Abby said and nodded. “I do. I’m going to help your grandma find her way out of there.”
“No. You can’t just reach in and pull her out.” Maisie turned to me. “Gehenna isn’t a place. It isn’t a realm or dimension. It is a machine.”
“Sweetie, we don’t have time to entertain your fancies.” Iris didn’t even look at Maisie as she said the words. Maisie looked at me as if Iris had struck her.
“This has been too much for you.” Ellen wrapped an arm around Maisie’s shoulders. “You shouldn’t be a part of this. Let me help you back to your room.”
“I do not need help finding the room I have lived in my entire life,” Maisie snapped. She threw my aunt’s arm off. “You have to listen to me. I know things y’all don’t,” Maisie said, then turned to me.
The quicksilver face melted away, first returning to its spherical shape then morphing into a bulging disk. It floated out before us as Abby’s form constricted.
“We have to stop her,” Maisie said, shaking Iris’s shoulders.
The convex face of the disk distorted into an absolute flatness, then began pressing backward on itself until it became concave.
“Abby doesn’t understand. We have to bring her back.” Panic had taken control of Maisie’s voice.
I started circling the gateway, only to realize that while it remained perfectly clear when seen head on, the shape appeared distorted from the side. From the side, Abby’s form was stretching out, falling to a dense point at the front, fai
nter and more dispersed at back. An arrowhead of light about to pierce a black hole’s event horizon. Then her luminescence began to unwind, like spun gold, into the darkness. Gehenna began to show its teeth, revealing itself as an insatiable devourer, a perverter, of any goodness. The mouth of Gehenna opened wide, readying itself to feast.
My heart beat like mad. The vision I held of Abby hanging before the gate of Gehenna had remained unchanged for several seconds now. I realized, from our perspective, her image would remain there, frozen forever in this hellish event horizon. From her perspective, she might already be eternally lost. A string of light wrapped around me and tugged. I turned back to Iris just in time to see Maisie fling herself in after Abby.
The light that had lassoed me had also attached itself to my aunts. I realized Maisie had bound us all together, linking us to form a type of throw line. A tug pulsed down the length of the binding. As Maisie’s image flattened and superimposed with Abby’s, I tugged back with all the magic in me, but the gravity of Gehenna had no intention of surrendering prey that had come knocking at its door. The strand of light stretched as thin as one of Maisie’s own golden hairs, and I felt certain it would snap, leaving the two lost at the portal of hell. The room filled with the sound of fearsome shrieks and howls. Maisie appeared, her tether wrapped around herself and Abigail, the mouth of Gehenna stretching, its darkness straining to reach into our world and swallow them whole. But then it fell back in on itself, collapsing under its own weight. Like a shattering hologram, the vision of Gehenna broke into pieces, each piece a smaller, yet exact duplicate of the whole, then faded from sight. Maisie stood before me, with her arms wrapped tightly around Abigail and a look of triumph in her eyes.
SEVEN
“All right,” I said, “we are listening. What do you mean that Gehenna is a machine?”
Ellen crossed to the loveseat and sat down. She patted the seat next to her, and Maisie went to join her. Iris seemed unwilling to entertain Maisie’s ideas. Instead she turned away and began to peruse the tomes that lined the wall. I surmised she expected to find more concrete answers therein than she would get from her niece’s ranting.
“I know things you aren’t going to find in those books, Aunt Iris.”
Iris turned back and acknowledged Maisie with a nod. She signaled her acquiescence by holding her hands up toward us, palms forward, then sitting in one of the wingback chairs. Abby took the other, and I lowered myself onto the ottoman. “We’re all listening,” I assured Maisie.
She took a moment to compose herself. She drew a breath and spoke to us all, although she looked only at me. “You know Ginny taught me things only an anchor, like you, should know. Things about the line and its limitations. She stopped just short of telling me how it was created. You have the right to know everything, but the other anchors, they don’t trust you. They’ve decided to keep you ignorant of these truths.”
“Gehenna, baby,” Ellen prompted. She was not going to sit through the unexpurgated version while her mother suffered through endless torment.
“Gehenna,” Maisie echoed. “I’m getting to that, but you have to know the whole story.”
“Okay.” Ellen acknowledged the need for patience. She reached up and ran her fingers through Maisie’s hair.
Maisie seemed oblivious to this sign of affection. A small line formed between her brows as she concentrated. She tugged at the collar of her T-shirt. “The line has limitations. Witches created it to protect this reality, our mortal world, from the old ones.” She peered deeply into my eyes. “Like I said, I don’t know how they did it, but I think deep down you do. I think the line has been trying to tell you. I know you’ve had the dream.”
As she spoke the words, memory of the dream I’d been having on and off, sometimes remembering I’d had it, sometimes not, reached up to my conscious level. The sight of pyramids and obelisks being struck by lightning, silence giving way to the whirring sound of energy rushing around stone circles, a filament of energy racing along a magnificent stone wall. A faceless man, slithering away. Yes, I’d been having the dream, but I still had no idea what it had to do with the line. These places, these monuments, at least the ones I recognized, were built at different periods in history, epochs separated by millennia. It made no rational sense to me that Giza, Monks Mound, and Teotihuacan could have all played a role in the line’s creation.
“The anchors would be furious I’ve told you about Gehenna,” Maisie said. “I’m sure the only reason I am still breathing is because they believe y’all think I am crazier than a bedbug.” She paused and examined each of our faces. “They will kill me if they learn I’ve shared what I know. They’ll kill you if they realize you have listened. Except Mercy, of course. They won’t kill her. They’ll bind her. Y’all need to decide if you really want to hear this before I go on.”
My heart sank as it acknowledged the truth behind her words. The other anchors should be my allies, not my enemies, but they seemed to have it in for me as much as my declared enemies. Maybe even more so.
Iris and Ellen looked at each other. Ellen placed her hand on Maisie’s knee, and Iris relaxed back in her chair.
