Dead Echo

  *

  Elizabeth Tanksley sat in the wooden rocking chair beside her bed, every light in her bedroom on. It had been hours now, and still she could not stop the shaking. Twice she’d spilled hot coffee on herself but she drank on anyway even though she was exhausted, her body, her mind, a solid ache for sleep. Because tonight she’d do anything to keep it at bay. Its call was a siren song of doom, and she knew all she’d have to do was surrender to it and a revelation would come. It’d damn killed her at the neighbor’s house (that poor, lost woman, she now knew) and it’d gotten little better since she’d been home.

  She looked up from her lap to the window, ringed by a frame of light around the curtain. Just over there, she thought and shivered. This close to the Brink, the close of a few steps and the world was no longer the same. She felt an odd nostalgia overcome her then, some protective, ancient logic she’d sensed as a kid. Close your eyes and it’ll go away. Her mother had whispered those words countless times over the years, leaning in close as if the two were in conspiracy. Because she’d known, she’d recognized the absolute relentlessness of little Elizabeth’s visions. But there was nothing to be done, and so…close your eyes. She tried it now and found no solace. And the red of light through her eyelids only served to remind of the pervasiveness of blood. She snapped them open and looked again at the window.

  Something had been at her over there. There was no other way to describe the violation she now remembered. She still recalled the diabolical stream of icy certainty that’d rammed through her spine, rattling her teeth; she could still see the woman (her neighbor, that poor, poor doomed woman) silhouetted against the frame of the entranceway. How the very air had seemed to whirl in a mass around her. And then—

  Only a deep, endless darkness, absent of any color, but possessed of the very stench of doom. Stretching out to infinity, the vacuum rushing in from all sides.

  She’d come to with her neighbor (Patsy, she kept telling herself) squatted down beside the chair, one hand on her knee the other on Elizabeth’s forehead. And the look. Even through the concern Elizabeth had seen the knowledge written on the young woman’s face. She could sense it too, probably had for a long good while.

  But somehow…someway… she’d resigned herself to its horror. Elizabeth shivered again and shook her head. What would it take for someone to do that? This was a thing to crack and grind your bones and here was this woman, bent down, attempting to offer her solace. The thought gripped her heart. And she still did not know what it was.

  But she sat, rocking to and fro, muttering under her breath, repeating endlessly her mantra of consciousness. Because she knew, it was right there breathing below the surface. The vision had not completed itself over there, but it was perfectly willing to bare its truth at the faintest wan of consciousness. And with this thought Elizabeth glanced down quickly at the cup and gripped it tighter in both hands. She couldn’t fight it forever, she knew, but she could fight it for a while.