She remembered thinking that she should do something to cheer him up when he returned. She remembered staying awake late into the night, waiting for him to come back, and then falling asleep wrapped in the same quilt she now clung tightly to herself while she stood vigil through the night, only to be woken too early the next morning by a fierce knock on the front door. She remembered wondering if her dad would get it, then realizing she hadn’t ever heard him come home.
She remembered the look on the officer’s face when she opened the door. When he asked if anyone else was home. When he told her what had happened.
And then she told herself to stop remembering because she couldn’t do any more than that, she couldn’t, she couldn’t.
Only the memories didn’t want to stop. Instead, they seemed to multiply, to expand within her head too far and too fast for her mind to properly keep up with.
The same memories, only . . . warped. Shaded with a distinct hue of other that Everly could neither put a finger on nor name.
Riding her bike, but her dad didn’t laugh. He walked slowly over to her with a stern expression, arms crossed fiercely over his chest as he leered down at her, watching as she stumbled gracelessly to her feet.
Picking strawberries, but quickly, joylessly, aware that she only had so long before he took her away from there and refused to let her continue. Then feeling the cold clasp of a hand wrapping around her arm, yanking her upward when she lingered too long. She remembered thick bruises in the shape of fingers that took weeks to fade from her arm.
Graduating, but with no one there to cheer for her. Coming home with a diploma in hand to receive a cuff to the head in congratulations.
Except that behind each of those false memories, there was yet another buried memory. Another lie.
The lie was a woman. Slender frame, blond hair, blue eyes rimmed in green.
Her mother.
There and then vanished. A phantom lingering on the outskirts of each of the forgotten childhood dreams that Everly both knew and didn’t know anymore.
Blink blink blink.
Everly blinked. She shook her head. She pressed her hands up against the skin of her forehead and tried to calm her breathing, tried to bring herself back to the present. Her present.
This. This was happening more now, too. Whatever this was. And Everly knew—she knew—that it was getting worse because she was spending more time in that building.
But she also knew that it would probably get worse regardless.
She would rather go, and risk whatever this was, for the sake of determining that for herself.
And if no one would tell her the answers she was seeking, well, then she’d just have to dig them up herself.
So, seven days after she’d had her blood tested in her grandfather’s basement laboratory, seven days after she had learned that her DNA held something special, almost magical, Everly left. Without really thinking too much about it, she shoved the collection of journals she’d stolen from Richard back into the waistband of her jeans before walking out the door, irrationally afraid to leave behind her only real evidence, lest something should happen to them while she was gone. So, journals nestled against the small of her back and head held high, Everly walked toward the looming, hidden, nonexistent form of the Eschatorologic.
Arriving at the building, Everly was not sure whether she was surprised to find the lobby distinctly lacking in Richard’s presence. It had been a week, after all, and she’d made no further promises. She waited for ten minutes, sitting on one of the uncomfortable wooden benches that faced the woman at her desk, before she decided it was a lost cause—the waiting, that is—and so perhaps she would be better off searching for him instead.
Or searching for something, at least. There were many floors in the Eschatorologic and she had only visited a handful in the company of Richard. You can find your own answers, Everly reminded herself.
Inside the elevator, Everly assessed her options. Alone, she could not descend toward either of the basement levels—they both required a key that she did not have. And she knew what the first few levels contained—only small apartments housing elderly residents, as far as she could tell. So then, it seemed reasonable to her that if she wished to discover something new, going to the top floors of the Eschatorologic held the most promise. One hundred floors, the buttons on the elevator panel told Everly. She chose the top one.
When the elevator doors slid open a minute later, Everly couldn’t help the twinge of disappointment she felt upon realizing that it looked exactly the same as all of the other residential floors she had visited with Richard. The same single gray hallway, shooting straight back with doors lining the walls on either side.
Deciding that she had nothing to lose, Everly walked up to one of the first doors on the left, pausing for the briefest of seconds before pushing the door open.
(An important detail to note: it was not actually the first door on the left that Everly chose, but rather the second. This was as a result of her grandfather following the same pattern: always selecting the second door along the hallway to guide Everly into, and never the first. If she had chosen the first door at this point in time, many events may have transpired differently thereafter.)
Inside the second door on the left, Everly was initially struck by another wave of disappointment. It was just another apartment. Just as small, just as gray, just as dismal as any of the apartments below.
Sitting on the gray couch in the living room of the disappointingly normal apartment was a woman. Old, frail—no different from any of the other residents Everly had met already. She had a long trail of straight, white hair that cascaded down her back, and skin that was still fair and smooth, despite the wrinkles that were beginning to crease the edges around her eyes.
Her eyes that, Everly could tell, were more ornamental than functional, as the woman gazed blindly across the sparse living room. Nonetheless, at the sound of Everly’s entrance, the woman turned, pivoting her body as she remained seated on the couch so that she was facing Everly, even though she could not see her.
The woman did not say anything. She sat there, facing Everly, as though she were waiting.
And also.
There was something about the woman. Something that nagged at the back corner of Everly’s mind.
It was on the tip of her . . . the edge of her . . . the precipice of her . . .
Everly closed the door back with a snap and found to her surprise that she was shaking. She wrapped her arms uselessly around herself and stared at the gray door she had just closed behind herself.
That woman. She had . . . she had . . .
Everly shook her head. She did not know that woman, and she did not know why she thought that she might, and it was useless to think on it any further, so instead Everly turned to the next door down the hall, braced herself, and pushed it open.
Inside it was the same. Gray walls gray floor gray furniture. Gray scrubs on the sagging gray skin of another woman.
White hair vacant stare eerie stillness. Faster than before, Everly slammed the door back.
It was the same—
It was the same woman.
It wasn’t the same woman. It couldn’t be the same woman.
