Extended Stay - Part Two

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Chapter Six: Extended Stay - Part Two

Rowan

What had he done?

Rowan stared at his hands, still seeing — feeling — what it’d felt like to wield that shovel, striking his aunt. He could still hear Gillian Drury screaming. Then, when she was bleeding and broken, the lightning came — the flash and heat of it.

He didn’t even know if she was alive, if somehow she’d miraculously survived. In a way — he supposed — perhaps that was a blessing, the not knowing. At least, he could hope. For as far as hope could go. At least it tempered the trembling horror he still felt at the memories.

“Rowan,” he distantly heard Lenten say, “we need to talk about this.” In the back of his mind, he was aware of the man lowering himself to the floor to sit beside him. Was detachedly aware of how awkward the man felt — shifting and smoothing his suit — while he adjusted to the unfamiliar position. “We—” He stopped with a frown. “I talked to you about this before. I know that you want to go home, but you can’t.”

Rowan pouted, pushing the man’s words — his damned lecture — away. He could. “I did it tonight.”

“What happened here exactly?” the manager asked.

Wanting the man to understand — to accept, even though it had gone wrong — how close he was to an answer, Rowan explained everything. Told him about the books and the spell. About the potion and the potholes in time. He told Lenten about the killer and his aunt. About how he’d been forced to participate in her murder. About how she’d sacrificed herself to save him. “She told me that it was important that I survive, so I can make it back to my family.” He turned pleadingly to Lenten. “I told you, they need me. They’re dying without me. I have to go back.” Rowan shut his eyes and shook his head. “I’ll not let my aunt’s actions be for nothing. She may have... ” He frowned, acknowledging a truth he’d rather not. “In all likelihood, she died.” Opening his eyes again, to stare at the man. “She sacrificed herself for me. For my family. I can’t give up.” He sat up straighter, determination in his voice and pose. “Please, don’t ask me to.”

For a long moment, Lenten just studied him shrewdly. His gaze narrowed, sweeping him from crown to arch. With pursed lips, the man nodded. “I understand that. I respect that,” the stiff-spined manager said. “However, I simply ask that you remember that The Elysium is home to over two-hundred permanent guests, not just you. I can’t have you endangering everyone here — not even to save your family.”

Rowan turned quickly to sit on his knees, imploring the man. “I never meant to—”

“I know,” Lenten interrupted. “I know you didn’t mean any harm, but I think you proved tonight that these types of attempts are dangerous and cannot be done without proper caution and understanding of the consequences.” He sent Rowan a pointed look that made him feel terribly guilty and sorry. “Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir,” Rowan replied.

“No more rips in the delicate fabric of time and space?”

“No, sir.” He’d find another way, but Lenten was right. He had to get out of The Elysium, but he had no right to burn it down behind him.

“Good.” Lenten gave a satisfied nod. “One last thing,” he added before he brushed invisible dust from his pant legs, pausing thoughtfully.

Rowan looked at the man questioningly.

The man frowned again, his brow furrowing. “I don’t want Olive involved in your schemes. Not in any way.” Still staring at the perfection of his suit, he stated in a monotone voice, “She’s been through more than enough; she doesn’t need more nights like tonight to haunt her.” With a decided sniff, the man looked up at him. “Understood?”

Rowan nodded. Of course, he understood that. Remembering the frightened tears trailing sad\ness down her fragile, little, porcelain doll face, Rowan wouldn’t even consider letting her near another spell like that. It positively broke his heart to think of causing that child more pain and he wouldn’t do it anymore. “I’m sorry, Lenten. It won’t happen again, I swear.”

The manager simply nodded before they both settled into silence. They stared out the third floor windows, out into the starry night’s sky.

Rowan tilted his head, turning his attention instead to the reflection of the weary man beside him. Lenten was a good man. An honorable one. Reminding Rowan actually a lot of his father. Proud and protective, both men knew the value of responsibility and family. They both — no matter what they were going through personally — would do what was needed to take care of those around them. They would both put their emotions — their pain — on hold to do what needed to be done.

But Rowan’s father had his mother. Had Rowan and his brothers and sister. Had his own brothers and sisters and a whole houseful of aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, cousins and others, who would do for him in the same way he did for them.

Who did Lenten have?

Staring at the ghostly image of the man in the makeshift mirror, Rowan’s heart — his soul — bled for the lonely, stoic manager. With an awkward cough, Rowan reached out and asked, “Are you all right?”

“Sorry?” the man asked, startled as he turned back to Rowan.

“I mean, I know that I caused all this trouble just when you... ” He paused, shrugging his shoulders, and tripped all over his words. “At the worst time,” he settled on. “I’m sorry, Lenten. For this whole mess.” He pursed his thin lips. “And for Mei.”

Lenten gave a mirthless laugh. He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “It’s not your fault, Rowan. If you had come at a different time, before or long after Mei had... ” He gave another sorrowful laugh before putting back on his glasses with a sigh. “Well, maybe I would know how to deal with all this better.”

“I am sorry.” Rowan regretted — truly did — causing so much added trouble. “I know what it feels like to lose someone you love. How it changes everything.” Rowan winced when he saw the man bend over, his shoulders slumped and his head dipped low against his chest, and shake.

Dear Lord, was he crying?

Rowan crawled closer, putting a hand against the man’s bent back. “I’m so very sorry,” he said before he realized that the man wasn’t crying.

He was laughing.

Laughing?

“Lenten?”

Taking a shuddering breath, the man whipped his glasses off again, wiping wet eyes. “Sorry.” His voice shook with shuddering chuckles. “I apologize. I,” he said with a shake of his head, “don’t know where that came from.”

“Are you okay?” Rowan was more than a little worried and disturbed.

“Yes.” He tucked his glasses into the vee of his buttoned-down shirt. He wiped a hand over his face. “Yes, I’m,” he paused, “fine.” He turned to Rowan, his nearsighted, blue eyes struggling to focus on Rowan’s face. “Too fine.”

Rowan blinked in confusion. “What do you mean?” 

Lenten scratched his forehead idly. “This is going to sound bad,” he warned, looking sheepish before he whispered, “but I envy your grief, the strength, the passion, the fight in it.”

Rowan cocked an eyebrow at the man, not sure he understood. But he said nothing, not knowing what to say.

The man sighed and he propped his elbows on his knees, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes. “My brother, Ash, disappeared on May 18th, 1957. Officially. That was the day I filed a police report and the day Olive was placed in my care.” Lenten sighed. “But he’d been gone long before then. Disappeared into drink or drugs or whatever he did with the slick, slippery men he’d hung around town with for months before he vanished.” He shook his head. “I lost Ash long before he never came home. Then the search happened. When no clues or leads came, the case went cold.” He scoffed. “Then my final appeal to reopen the case was denied. And then came the threats.” He shook his head as if trying to shake the memories. He sniffed and then shrugged. “I don’t know. I just snapped.”

Lenten turned to look out the window again. “I bundled Olive in the car and just kept driving. I drove until the car gave out. When it died, I got out of the car, gathered her in my arms, and ran.” He let out a shaky breath. “I just needed to get away. I don’t even remember how I got to the hotel. One minute, I was running down along some river and, then, I was heading toward The Elysium.” Rowan watched the man frown, lost in his own thoughts while he ran a hand through his neat hair, disrupting the tamed strands. “My life literally stopped in that minute. The difference was there, felt, identifiable.”

Rowan still didn’t know where the man was going with this story. “I’m sorry, Lenten.” 

Lenten nodded. Putting back on his glasses, he looked at him. “With Mei, it was different. I always thought of her as my world. My rock. I thought that without her, my world would shatter.”

Rowan nodded and thought about the tear-soaked sorrow that had followed — still followed — the man. Yes, the man’s world had been rocked. Rowan made a small sympathetic sound.

“I thought that nothing would ever be the same again. That it would all just come to a crashing halt.” A confused look wrinkled Lenten’s face. “But it didn’t. The hotel — the place, the guests, the rhythm of it — stayed exactly the same. Going on without her.”

Suddenly, his words began to piece together, making a loose form of sense.

“How could everything look so normal, when nothing was?” Lenten wondered desperately. “But what did I expect? The world couldn’t break twice.” Letting his head fall again, Lenten asked no one in particular, “Where do you retreat when you’ve already retreated?”

Rowan sighed and studied the man with new eyes, understanding — as much as he thought he could. Poor Lenten. A part of the man — a corner of his heart, a space within his soul — had died and yet the world was making him limp on. Rowan understood that much. He could still remember seeing Paddy Drury dead and butchered on the foyer floor. He could now count Aunt Gilly among the number of people lost to him.

Because of him.

It was something he would have to live with for the rest of his life. And the thought of it — the grim imaginings he’d seen flash before his eyes just before the black had lifted — would haunt him for the rest of his life. It was horrible. Worse than anything anyone should ever have to deal with.

But, for Lenten, it must be even worse. Rowan had hope. He had a mission. A goal. He knew that he had to get home. That, if he could do that, his life would go back — maybe not to normal, but at least back to something he recognized and longed for.

Lenten was forced to wake up every day, walk through The Elysium, and watch the world move on, leaving him with the memories and the loneliness. Life would force him to go through the motions to act as if nothing had changed, when everything had. How was a person expected to do that day in, day out? “I feel like a shell,” Lenten muttered, shaking his bent head. “Like the walking dead.” Rowan felt chilled by the man’s words, worried that the man’s sadness went far beyond grief. “Sometimes,” the man whispered, his voice low and quiet as a confessional, “I think this is what checking out feels like. I wonder if this is what she felt.”

Rowan knew it was just his imagination, just his jumped-up, jumbled mind, but he thought he saw Lenten’s features begin to blur. The dull, once brilliant blue behind his glasses fading into flesh. Rowan could suddenly see what the man would look like Faceless and forgotten. In the man’s current, sad state, the difference wasn’t as shocking as it should be.

“I should have faded,” Lenten said simply.

“No.” Rowan shook his head. “Lenten, no, that’s not true.”

“Without Mei, what good am I?” he asked. “I don’t even know who I am anymore.”

“What about Olive?” Rowan looked at the man desperately. “She still needs you.”

“What for?” Lenten shrugged. “What can I do for her? What can I give her when I’m,” he said, looking at himself disgustedly, “like this?” He shook his head. “How can I help her deal with this — with the sadness, the loss — when I haven’t a clue how to deal with it myself?”

Rowan stayed silent. Lenten didn’t really expect an answer and Rowan didn’t have one to give. He wished that there was a spell he could cast — some magic words he could say — that could erase the man’s pain, could fix the man’s heart. But there wasn’t. No, magic wouldn’t help with this, wouldn’t work in this situation. If he’d learned anything from tonight, it was that he couldn’t force Fate to do what he wanted by casting a spell. Magic wasn’t a tool to be dusted off and used. It was a force to be taken seriously, to be considered carefully. He wouldn’t shy away from the history — the heritage — that flowed through his veins, but neither would he abuse it. He’d learn how to use it and when to use it and would limit himself to that. And he would admit that Fate — that life, that magic — had led him to this place and to these people.

We don’t work through magic, it works through us.

He would help Lenten. And Olive. And Calla and the others. But he didn’t necessarily need magic to do it.

“What about a funeral?” he wondered aloud.

“What?” Lenten looked confused, edging on offended, at Rowan’s words.

Rowan’s face flushed. He hadn’t actually meant to say the words aloud; he’d only been weighing the options. Trying to explain, he said, “You said that you don’t know how to deal with this.” He shrugged. “I don’t really either but, when a loved one dies, just about every culture — no matter the time or the place — has some kind of grieving ceremony.” Looking at Lenten, he bit his lip. “Some way to say goodbye.” He’d give anything to be able to replace the memories of his grandfather’s and his aunt’s last moments. To have images of blood and pain and fear be erased by those of flowers and family and love. Even with the inevitable tears and morbid pomp that accompanied funerals, Rowan thought that it would give a cleaner sense of closure, a way of making peace with the change.

Lenten took a deep breath, considering. “Do you really think that it will help?” 

Rowan sighed and shrugged. “Milestones and huge shifts in life are hard enough to define and accept. Sometimes it’s nice to give it a name, to allow it and acknowledge its time and space.” He shrugged. “And, anyway, I can’t see how it could make it worse.”

Lenten nodded thoughtfully. “I’ll think about it.”

*

Calla

Libra: Don't dwell on the past. Don't chase the future. Happiness lies in learning to live in the present.

Calla watched the numbers on her digital bedside clock change.

2:23.

Sleep.

Just close your eyes and sleep, she ordered herself, squeezing her eyes shut.

She wanted to just shut it all out.

The images.

The memories.

But she couldn’t get to sleep. Her mind just wouldn’t shut down, wouldn’t shut up, wouldn’t let her be.

She groaned at a knock on her door. Tempted to throw the pillow — or something harder — against the door, Calla rolled over onto her back and growled. “Who is it?” she shouted, unwelcome clear in his voice.

There was a pause before another knock sounded. Kicking the covers off her bed, Calla sat up, her auburn, autumn hair flying bed-mussed around her head. She yanked open the door. “What the hell do you want?” She glared at him. She should have known that the man couldn’t just leave her alone. Couldn’t just let her be. No, of course, he just had to meddle. “I’m trying to sleep,” she snarled at him.

Shaking a bottle of honest-to-Oz Bundaberg rum at her, Flax smiled his usual half-smile. Leaning against her door jamb, he drawled, “Now what kind of greeting is that for someone who comes bearing gifts?”

“I’m trying,” she repeated through gritted teeth, “to sleep.”

Flax just continued to grin. “Yeah.” He smirked. “How’s that going?”

Calla rolled her eyes, fighting her own curling lips. “What do you want?”

Flax cocked his head. “C’mon.” He turned around to start down the hallway.

“What?” She leaned out the door. “Flax, no. I’ve got to get some sleep.”

“Hurry up,” he called over his shoulder while he kept walking away. “C’mon.”

Arrogant, insufferable, irritating man!

Screw him.

She was going back to bed.

Turning, Calla gazed at the rumpled blankets and scattered pillows only to sigh. What was the point of going back to bed? She’d just be lying there. Not sleeping. She peeked out the door just in time to see Flax turn the hallway corner and disappear out of sight. She should just go back to bed, whether she slept or not.

Grabbing a blue, terrycloth robe off her door hook, Calla called herself all kinds of senseless and headed down the hallway after the crazy seppo costing her... well, not sleep. By the time she followed him to the kitchen, Flax had set up the island counter into an impromptu table of sorts with a couple of dishes of chocolate bundt cake and tumblers half-full of Bundy. Now this was her kind of tea party. She smirked and stalked forward, taking one of the tumblers. She swallowed the warmed hard liquor.

Flax laid a fork down next to the plate closest to her before pulling out her chair. “Have a seat.” 

With a shrug and another sip, she sat down. “What’s all this?”

This time Flax lifted a shoulder dismissively. “Just some warm rum and cold cake.” He picked up his fork even before nodding toward hers. “Try some. Chocolate. Dark. Universal comfort food.”

She picked up the utensil and took a bite. She gave a small moan; it was so good. She took another bite before she turned to him again. “Thanks.”

“Pleasure.” He watched her eat.

He let her eat her first piece in silence. He seemed to be content to study her while she licked the glazed frosting from her fork before he dished up another serving wordlessly.

She took her time with her second piece, feeling the tension in the room between bites. “You’ve got something to say,” she stated as she sponged up crumbs with her fork, “so say it.”

“Want to talk about what happened tonight?” He set down his fork to give her his full attention.

She’d known that was coming. Had known it when he’d knocked on her door. Had probably known it — somewhere in the back of her brain — when she’d walked through that damned window. She wasn’t any more ready to answer that question now that she’d been then.

She lifted her shoulder in a flippant shrug. “What you said. We cast a spell, it went bad, we got back. End of story.”

“Where’d you go?”

She ran her tongue along the tops of her teeth, more to stall than anything. “Back to Australia.”

“Sydney,” he said, his gaze steady and unwavering, “isn’t that where you said you’d been before you came?”

“Yeah.” She snatched up the tumbler before downing a swig.

“What happened there?”

She winced while the fiery liquid burned down her throat. “Nothing.”

“Something happened.”

She looked away, so he wouldn’t see the annoyance in her eyes. “It was nothing.” Or at least it was nothing to him. Or Rowan. Or Lenten. Or anyone but her. So why should she talk about it? It was pointless.

“No,” she heard him say, so damned sure of himself, “it wasn’t.” He paused so long she thought maybe he’d drop it, let her eat in peace. Instead, he pushed around a piece of cake with his fork, not looking at her. “You smile a lot.” 

Calla snorted. “What of it?”

“Laugh a lot too,” he said as he leisurely licked his fork. “People who do that do so for one of two reasons.” His brows furrowed as he shrugged. “Either they haven’t experienced enough bad to bother guarding themselves.”

Calla rolled her eyes, hating that she was playing his game even as she did. “Or?”

“Or that is their guard.” When she didn’t say anything to that, he sighed and continued on, “You work very hard to seem open, friendly. Almost… frivolous.”

She scoffed. “Well, fuck you too.”

He shook his head. “You do everything you can — created this whole outward face and way of being that flirts and flits through life, dances in a way that feels like an artful dodge — to convince us all that you’re shallow. All so no one even thinks about digging too deep.” He looked up at her, his eyes dark and sympathetic, like he knew what he was talking about. He pursed his lips and sighed. “Nothing doesn’t do that.”

Calla closed her eyes. She wasn’t a person who opened up often. Or well. And, the few times she did… Well, life was always quick to remind her exactly why she shouldn’t. Hadn’t Benji been the latest lesson in that. She blinked back tears, hating the idea of someone seeing something like that — something vulnerable and weak — within her. She squeezed her lids tighter and shook her head, her breathing rough and determined. With her guards down and her thoughts raw, she’d felt stripped of everything. She scrambled to build back up her walls. 

“I’ve seen it in your eyes even before tonight — the effort it takes to look so effortless — but never said anything,” he told her. “I figured you didn’t seem too keen on talking about it. Thought maybe that had changed.” He waited a while, thinking she might fill the gap.

Calla just sat back, fixing a smile on her face. “I have no idea what you mean.”

“Guess not.” He slapped his thighs decidedly before standing to put his glass and plate in the sink. “Well,” he said, his tone instantly lighter, easier, “if you ever do, I’m here. If it’s not me, you should find someone. Bottling and burying that kind of thing doesn’t make it go away; it just leaves you alone with it.”

“I have a question,” Calla blurted before she could stop herself. He paused and turned around. She kind of wished he hadn’t. It’d been a little easier with his back turned, when she couldn’t see his face, couldn’t read his expression. But she had to know. She had to understand. “When I went back, I went back to—” She swallowed hard. “I went back in time. Back to the last memory I had.” She frowned. “But Rowan didn’t.” Time had passed in his world. It hadn’t in hers. “Why would it do that?” 

Flax quirked a confused eyebrow at her. “What do you mean?”

“We did the same spell,” she said, frustrated and confused. “Used the same elements. Same procedures. Exact same conditions. But ended up with different results.” It shouldn’t have happened. But it did. And Calla had a theory. “The spell supposedly caused a mirroring effect between our worlds.” As far as she understood weird, woo-woo logic. “So a way to explain the difference in results could be,” she said, trying to science her way through the spell, “the spell delivered Rowan to that point because it found a concurrent place and time where his soul exists.” 

“And with you?”

“I don’t think she’s surviving the ride to the hospital.” She could hear the echoes of the paramedics’ voices in her head. “Pretty sure, given the state of her, even if she does, it’d be better if she didn’t.” Calla winced at the memory. “Doesn’t matter; we save every life. Until we can’t.”

What if they couldn’t?

“I don’t think there’s a world left for me to return to past that point.”

When Flax didn’t say anything, she looked up at him. He gazed at her with sad sympathy, but not surprise. “The Elysium offers sanctuary to those that need it.”

She wouldn’t have come here, if she had anywhere else to go.

She grabbed her glass and drained it, sitting with the burn in her throat. Despite the warning and the lectures — despite the detailed notes she’d taken on Mei and the hotel and fading — she’d always assumed that her stay at The Elysium would be temporary. A vacation of sorts. Eventually, she would go back and live her life.

Now she didn’t know.

“I don’t know.” Flax leaned against the shined steel edge of the huge, double-basin sink. “Honestly, I don’t think any of use truly know why it would do that.”

“If I try to go back again,” she asked, her voice small and quivering, “what if there’s nothing to get back to?” 

Flax’s lips thinned. “I don’t know.” He shook his head. “Time, at least the way we think of it, isn’t really real — not even in the best of circumstances. The question of whether time can move in more directions than one has plagued mankind since the start. And that’s just in the real world, that’s not even adding in the mess of flux running rampant in The Elysium.”

“It didn’t feel real,” she said, taking another bite of cake, chewing miserably. And yet somehow also all too real.

“Who knows what’s really real?” Flax turned around to rinse out his dishes. “Maybe the world you visited tonight was the real world or maybe it was just a facsimile of it. Maybe the hotel is what’s real and our other lives were the dream.”

“More of those -physices?” she asked, thinking the topic — while feeling safer, less personal — had gotten very heavy all of a sudden.

He gave a short laugh. “Something like that.”

He put the glass and plate in the dishwasher before grabbing her plate, but leaving her glass. “Fact is, none of us can know what waits for us out beyond The Elysium.” Pouring her another drink, he cocked his head a bit. “Never much gave it a thought before. Figure life here — for all its faults and flaws — still beats what I had back home.”

Calla frowned and clasped her glass in both hands. She studied the man with his back turned to her now while he washed her plate with clean, efficient movement. She sipped quietly, weighing the worth of his words.

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