The Elysium Estate - Part Two

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Chapter Two: The Elysium Estate - Part Two

Lenten

Lark Lenten—just Lenten to just about everyone now—mentally winced as he heard the door shut. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He hated this part of being hotel manager. But it, like the rewards, came with the job. And someone had to do it. So he straightened his shoulders and stepped forward.

“Rowan,” he began. “May I call you ‘Rowan?’ ” he asked before being interrupted.

“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be rude,” the boy said, “but you don’t understand.” He shook his head and shoved aside the sheets, even as Mei tried to push him back down into the shelter of the large, quilted comforter. “I have to go home. My family, they need me.”

Lenten stared at the frantic and pleading boy, thinking that there was something about Rowan that struck him as odd.

He felt familiar. Like an old acquaintance or a flicker of a dream. He felt like something remembered from another life.

Not that Lenten subscribed to such things as past lives.

He met the boy’s glinting, green eyes with a sudden, sharp intake of breath.

Good God, he knew why he felt as if he knew the strange new guest.

Though they looked nothing alike, Lenten sensed a familiarity—a similarity—in the kid to Ash, his brother. There was a flicker in his eyes that Lenten had never seen in anyone other than Ash.

This boy loved his family, Lenten could see that, more than anything else in his world. And, just like Ash, it lent him this incredible strength and wide-eyed determination that seemed to radiate, strong and sure and pure, out from within him. Rowan had the look of someone who still believed in happy endings and good’s eventual triumph over evil.

It was the same look Ash had always had before a dark pain and deep hopelessness had claimed him without warning or explanation, changing him into someone Lenten hadn’t even recognized until everything about him—and eventually even his brother himself—had gone missing, just another cold case in some forgotten police file.

“I have to save my family,” the boy’s impassioned cry shook Lenten from his wayward thoughts.

The man let out the breath he hadn’t been aware he was holding before he studied Rowan again, looking past the bright hair and the freckles.

No wonder Olive had instantly liked the new guest, even before he’d so much as opened his eyes. The strange recognition—like a shared soul between the boy and his brother—was startling. Undeniable. Would have been refreshing, if it wasn’t so difficult to look at. Difficult to remember.

Lenten took a steadying step back, swallowing hard.

He knew he should go to the boy. Calm him somehow. Talk to him softly or something—like what Mei was doing now.

Instead, he coughed. And then again before sniffing as he folded his hands behind his back and studied the books on the hotel shelves. “I wish I could send you home,” Lenten said, meaning it much more than he appeared to. “But I can’t.

“As I said before, I do thank you for all you’ve done for me, but I have to go home now,” the boy insisted as he resisted Mei and stood. “My family, they’re in danger. My grandfather died. They—someone, I don’t know who—killed him. And I… I couldn’t…” He gripped his head as if it were throbbing painfully. Lenten was willing to bet it was. “There was nothing I could do. He was already dead.” Rowan let go only to fist his hands in the tangled bed sheets. He looked up at Lenten and then Mei, his green eyes desperate and sad.

Lenten, turning stiffly, made a mental note to have hotel services launder and change the sheets this afternoon.

“But the others,” the boy continued, “I can still help them. They don’t even know yet.” A sob broke from the young boy’s throat even though his eyes were still dry—not that they’d stay that way long. “Please, Lenten, my parents. My brothers. My baby sister. I can’t stay here.”

Lenten blinked hard as he met the boy’s gaze. Rowan had such conviction for someone who, while not nearly as young as he appeared—Lenten was sure—was still so very young in so many ways. He would do anything, give anything, to get back to the people who loved him. The people whom he loved. Lenten could see that plainly.

The Elysium manager looked away. He didn’t know what to say to him. After all, nothing he could say would fix anything for the boy. Lenten took a deep breath and stabbed for the words—any words—that could explain the situation the boy now found himself in. “I am sorry, but you don’t have a choice,” the older man stated, inwardly cringing at the flat, rehearsed-sounding words. “None of us do.”

“If it’s about money,” the boy said, his eyes narrowing suspiciously, “my family will pay—”

“It’s not,” Lenten assured him, vaguely insulted even though he understood the sentiment. “Believe me, Rowan, this isn’t a kidnapping. We didn’t bring you here. We found you. Helped you.”

“Then let me go,” the boy reasoned.

“We can’t,” the man said solemnly. “I’m sorry.”

“My family,” Rowan repeated slowly, emphasizing each word carefully. “ is in danger. I have to go. I have to help them.”

“I’m sorry.”

“If you don’t let me leave,” he exclaimed, “they’ll die. I’m the only one they’ve left.”

Lenten sighed, taking off his glasses to peer through the smudged lenses. The Elysium had been a good a home for him and Olive for over thirty years now—for Mei, many more than that—but sometimes it did seem like a very cruel place. He put his glasses back on. “I am truly sorry, Rowan.”

“Stop saying that!” Now the boy held his head between both hands, his eyes squeezed shut as his hands fisted in his hair. Lenten watched as those vibrant red strands flowed between the boy’s fingers. He could feel every quiver of the boy’s voice like a cut. “If you were really sorry, you’d let me go. If you were any kind of human being, you’d let me save my family instead of condemning them all.”

Lenten stood silently, avoiding Mei’s questioning eyes. He was doing this wrong and he knew it. But this boy was different than the others. He had somewhere to go back to. People to go back to. And what was worse, he wanted to go back. What did you say to someone who thought himself trapped? Someone who had trapped himself?

Lenten huffed and locked his jaw a bit. The boy shouldn’t even be here. It just wasn’t right. Why was he here? Why?

“Say something!”

“I know this isn’t what you want to hear,” Lenten continued, stoically, “but you can never go home again.”

“No,” the boy said stubbornly. “No! Shut your mouth.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” the rigid manager said, his gaze locked on the slightly stained carpeted floor. He really needed to have a word with hotel services. This was disgraceful.

“You can’t keep me here,” the boy yelled as he pushed the older man aside and ran for the door. “You can’t.”

The kid was small, slight really, and weakened, and Lenten could have stopped him easily. But he let himself be brushed by. He let the boy turn the doorknob. “You can leave this room,” Lenten said quietly, still staring, engrossed with the stain marring the carpet as Rowan yanked open the door, “but you can’t leave the hotel.”

The boy paused but didn’t turn. “Is that supposed to be some kind of threat?” he asked, confusion and anger warring in his voice.

“No,” Lenten answered with a fatalistic tilt of his head, “but that doesn’t make it any less true.”

The boy’s head swiveled slowly in curiosity as well as in defiance. “I am going home,” the boy stated. “You can’t stop me.” And with that he left, tearing down the hallway and out.

Lenten waited until he could no longer hear the boy’s footfalls. “I would never try.”

Cringing, Lenten heard the door shut slowly and softly—just a muted click. He thought he might have preferred it if the boy had slammed it.

He removed his glasses to rub his suddenly tired eyes with a disgruntled shake of his head. What was wrong with him? He’d done this before—lots of times—and never, not even the first time, had it gone so wrong. He sighed and, since he wasn’t good for much else, piled the still full soup bowl, tea cup, and bread plate onto the silver serving tray before wiping up the spilled mess on the bedside table.

Reluctantly, Lenten turned to Mei, who was making the now abandoned bed. He winced. “Please don’t do that,” he begged. “I’ll call hotel services.”

She continued to do as she pleased. “I don’t mind,” she told him, knowing full well that this was not the conversation they ought to be having. She was waiting on him. And he knew it.

He growled uncharacteristically, running a hand through his meticulously managed hair. “I handled that poorly,” he admitted.

Mei tucked in an impeccable corner, tilting her head in sympathetic acknowledgment. “It could have gone better.” She leaned over and smoothed the sheets with a kind of quiet that expected a response.

“We should go catch him,” he grumbled, irritated with his own ineptitude.

She shrugged noncommittally. “I don’t think he wants to be caught.”

No, and that was the problem, wasn’t it? Most people who came here were running from something. They had lost and were lost. They were alone and hurting. These people were homeless in the most elemental of ways. And the Elysium served as a refuge for them. It was their safe haven. They belonged here because they had nowhere else to go. And for Lenten, that boy’s presence—with his ties to family and to home—seemed profoundly profane.

Rowan had a home. And it wasn’t here.

Even so, they couldn’t very well leave him running around the Elysium all afternoon and they both knew it. So he led Mei outside and down the winding path from the hotel to the wrought iron gates.

The weather was warm and sunny with a slight breeze that carried on it the earthy scent of horses. If he listened carefully, he could hear soft neighing almost out of earshot. If he looked toward the horizon—all green and flat pastures—he thought he could see the ghosts of horses grazing happily in the world beyond the Elysium.

He turned away and gripped Mei’s hand in his.

“You’ve been here a long time now, Lenten,” Mei commented as she sidestepped a rather questionable pile of dirt.

“Yes.”

“Do you miss the world?” she asked.

He thought for a moment, absently rubbing his thumb along the smoothness of her skin much as one would with a favored lucky charm. “I miss the way the world used to be,” he told her, still thinking of Ash, “which was nothing at all like what it’s like now.” His gaze swept the hotel grounds as they moved closer to its edge. “This is my home now. The world holds little for me.”

She nodded as they walked silently.

“What about you?” he asked when she was silent for a long moment.

He regretted asking almost immediately though, when her grip on his hand faltered for a moment. But, before a quick apology could tumble from his lips, her grip resumed its quiet, reassuring strength as they approached the small, white, iron garden table that sat just north of the hotel gates with a full view of the grassy planes that surrounded them.

She was quiet for a while longer, as Lenten pulled out a chair for her to sit. With her back turned to him as she settled in her seat—Mei finally answered. “It’s been so long,” she said haltingly as if she were carefully constructing her answer. “I don’t think I would recognize the world, if I were to go back. This is more than my home,” she said with a shrug. “It’s my world.”

He paused after gently pushing her chair in, wrapping his mind around her answer. With his hands still resting on the warm metal behind her shoulders, he wondered why her words should leave him so cold.

Dismissing his own wayward thoughts, he began a conversation about the topmost eastern wing and how hotel services refused to go up there for some obviously inexplicable reason and asked her advice on what he should do. They discussed it for a while and moved on to a few other topics before they saw Rowan panting and wheezing while he struggled to keep his pace. Lenten sighed as he saw the boy’s face fall as he approached the hotel’s open gates.

“That…can’t…be,” Rowan coughed out, before stumbling back awkwardly. Shaking himself, he turned around and ran again in another direction.

“Poor boy,” tsked Mei.

“He’ll figure it out soon enough,” Lenten assured, wishing he’d thought to bring some tea along with them. He excused himself to get some, while still they had time. Rowan had just left the gates; it would be an hour or more until he would be back. Hmm. Maybe he should whip together some kind of meal, while he was at it.

The boy was bound to be hungry, by then, having run the hotel grounds at least twice. By then, a picnic at the gates wouldn’t seem that bad.

By then, Rowan would know.

He would know what everyone who came to the Elysium eventually learned. You couldn’t escape. The gates were an inevitability. He hadn’t gotten turned around. He hadn’t taken the wrong path. No matter what direction he were to go, no matter how far he were to run, none of it would matter in the end. Soon enough, everyone ended up back at its doors.

After Lenten poked through Flax’s kitchen—much to the other man’s disgruntled irritation—he gathered up a decent spread. Bundling it up in a basket, he made his way through the empty, sun-lit dining room to his office to leave a message for hotel services to clean up Rowan’s room.

Satisfied, he walked out the large, polished glass-paned front doors and into the sun. For a moment, he stopped to stare at the Elysium, remembering what he’d seen when he’d first arrived—exhausted from running—with Olive asleep in his tired arms.

Four stories of gleaming white brick and sparkling glass, the hotel stood tall and impressive, like the modern cross between a fairytale keep and a Southern plantation mansion. The staircase to the front door was flanked by two wide, white columns, impossibly tall, stretching from the ground to the top of the four-floored, rectangular center building. Four huge, romantic balconies crowned the second and third floors perched along the full-length of the slightly angled walls. Almost blinding in the noon-day sun, the Elysium was elegant and stately, warm and welcoming. Beautiful and striking, the Elysium was home.

As he walked the quiet pastures for the second time that day, Lenten straightened his suit and felt peaceful, once again sure of his world and his place within it.

When Lenten returned to the little table beside the gates, Mei nodded. “You just missed him.”

Fast; it usually took an hour—maybe forty-five minutes—to run the whole of the hotel property. Rowan may be slight, but he was quick to round the area in less than forty minutes. “Ah, to be young again,” the thirty-eight-year-old man groaned heartily as he laid out his fare. Mei, polite as ever, smiled at the joke. “At least, Calla should have a decent running partner now.”

“I don’t know,” Mei said. “I’ve never understood why people run recreationally. Always moving but not going anywhere. How people do it every day! As far as I can see, there’s a difference between that and running to—or from—something. I’d think much of Rowan’s speed and stamina come from his desire to leave here and to go home.”

They ate, talking easily as they did. They looked up and greeted Rowan every time he would appear fatigued, frustrated, and frightened, only to nod politely when the boy abruptly turned to begin all over again. And there they stayed, even after both their food and conversation ran out, patiently waiting for the boy to tire himself out.

The sun was setting when Rowan finally collapsed, exhausted, to his knees in front of the looming iron gates. His body was shaking with bone-deep weariness and sobs even though his eyes were now red and far too dry to cry any more tears.

Lenten glanced helplessly at Mei—sure he was not the right person for this job. Understanding—as she always did—she rose to go to Rowan.

She knelt at his side. “Rowan,” she murmured gently without any response. “Rowan.”

He groggily turned his head to look at her. “Why are you doing this?” he asked pleadingly.

“We aren’t doing anything,” Mei assured. “I promise.”

“Then how is this possible?” he cried before his face fell. He let out a shaky breath before whispering, “Am I dead?”

Mei sighed. “I don’t know.”

“Is this heaven?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Hell?”

“I hope not.”

“Then what is this place? Why am I here? Why can’t I leave?” he asked, shaking his head. “I don’t understand any of this.”

Mei took a deep breath, readying herself. “No guest has ever left the hotel to my knowledge. And to my knowledge, there isn’t a way to do so because this place…isn’t a place. Not really.”

The boy looked up questioningly.

Mei sighed. “Have you heard of Carl Jung?” The boy nodded, then shrugged, and then shook his head. Mei nodded sagely and explained. “Carl Jung was a great psychologist and philosopher who believed that the whole of humanity—cross time and space—was connected psychically. He called this connection the collective unconscious.”

“And that’s what this is?” croaked Rowan.

“No,” she answered with a smile as she brushed his tears from his cheeks gently. “No, the collective unconscious isn’t a place. It’s…an imprint that’s passed from generation to generation. It’s why religion and stories and cultures all over the world share certain themes and features. It’s why Osiris rose from the dead to become king long before Jesus did. It’s why Noah’s flood drowned Odin’s people too. It’s why, even before we can read or even speak properly, we all know—uncompromisingly and unhesitatingly—that wolves can trick foolish, little girls and ghosts hide in the shadows. It’s knowledge without knowing. It is a communal truth.” She touched the poor boy’s hair, her elegant fingers sifting through the soft strands. “It’s how I know how important home is even though I can barely remember my own.”

“What does this have to do with me?” the boy asked.

“This is just a theory,” she warned, “one that has been thought up long before I arrived and will probably evolve endlessly. None of us can prove this, so we can’t be sure, but it’s believed that within this communal truth, wrapped in its stories and practices and principles, is a kind of mental map to this place, this small carved out corner of consciousness.”

The boy looked up and stared at the empty fields that echoed heavily with the ghosts of life just beyond the Elysium’s edges. The boy shivered slightly before stiffening his shoulders. “I don’t believe you,” the boy protested insistently, vigorously shaking his head.

“That’s okay,” Mei said with a shrug, brushing his hair back off his face. “You will. In time.”

The boy’s eyes narrowed. Lenten could see hope scheming within the green. “If this place is just some imprint,” he began, “then it’s just imaginary, right? Just in my head.” He shook his head, causing the fiery, still bed-mangled mass to fly in every direction. “This is nothing more than a bad dream or a hallucination or something.”

“No,” Mei said, “this isn’t imaginary; it’s just not quite real either.”

“What does that mean?”

Mei smoothed the delicate patterned silk of her skirt before folding her hands across her lap. “The hotel exists outside time, place, or indeed anything you would recognize as reality.”

The boy pouted, his thin, almost too pretty lips pressing together in thought. “That still doesn’t mean anything to me.”

Mei sighed. “No, I suppose not.” She tilted her chin and looked off into the distance. “When I left China to quite mysteriously arrive here, it was still under the Ming Dynasty, over five-hundred and fifty years before Lenten here was even born. Thirty years ago—relatively speaking, of course, as time passes much differently within the walls of the hotel—he and Olive arrived here from 1950s America. We’ve guests from 1830s France, 1970s Russia, Constantinople, Byzantium, and places your time has not even dreamed of yet.”

Rowan frowned, his brow furrowed deeply. “This all sounds impossible.”

Mei smiled softly, reaching up to stroke the boy’s hair back. “I know.” She tucked a stray strand behind his ear. “Yet since man was first capable of higher thought, he’s dreamt of places, worlds, planes beyond his own. Somehow humanity has always known of this place. It’s had several names, some in languages long dead now, and many appearances, some that would surely be wholly unfamiliar to you. But it has always existed and will always exist for those that need it.”

“But I don’t need it,” Rowan cried. “I don’t even want it.”

“Wanting and needing are rarely ever the same, don’t you think?” Mei said with a sly yet sad smile. “We call this place the Elysium now,” she said, gesturing to the tall, gleaming structure still visible just beyond the horizon behind them, “because it offers peace and safety to those who find it. Elysium means lightning struck. Handpicked by the gods.”

“Yeah,” the boy scoffed, knowing just what it meant to be chosen, “I’ve heard what happens to those favored by fate.” He shook his head. “It rarely turns out well for the mortal,” Rowan reminded.

Mei smiled slightly. “Too true,” she conceded. “And I’m certain that your stay here will be much harder than most of the others’ have been. But this is your home now. You belong here.”

“Don't say that,” he begged. “Please, don’t say that.”

“You belong here,” she began again, “because this place is a part of you. You can’t leave because how do you leave yourself?”

“But my home,” Rowan wept, staring longingly out at the space beyond the gates, “my family.”

“Can’t reach you here,” Mei told him sympathetically and unequivocally, “and can’t be reached from here.” The boy curled in on himself and cried more, his eyes somehow finding more tears. “I am sorry.”

Mei looked to Lenten as she held the boy’s shuddering body in her arms.

Lenten couldn’t take his eyes from the woman and the boy. He couldn’t move or speak or even hardly breathe. It had been thirty years since Mei had given him that speech. Between then and now, he’d given that speech many times to many different guests yet, listening to Mei now, he felt just like he did that first time. The loss. The desolate loss of the world was hitting him again in thirty years worth of waves.

He stared at Rowan’s tears falling in uncontrolled abandon down ruddy, puffing cheeks and felt his own sorrow burning behind his eyes.

Lenten blinked back tears and, embarrassed, he nervously straightened his glasses. “I am sorry, Rowan,” he muttered, knowing just how inadequate the stiffly spoken words were. “We’ll take you back to your room now.”

 

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