Ghostlands

SIXTY

Dawn came with tumbled clouds and spitting rain.

Melissa Wade awoke from a troubling dream in which she was changed into a thing of wisps and luminance.

Then, looking at her hands gleaming in the darkness of the room, she knew it was true.

She began to weep softly, and rocked herself as she floated in the air above tumbled covers.

She looked about her and did not recognize where she was. The bedroom was mostly bookcases crammed with paperbacks, a few pieces of IKEA furniture, a computer. The room was dim, the blinds closed against the dawn, but she could see clearly enough in the light that sheened off her own body. Atop the desk beside the computer, she discerned a framed photograph of herself; of the way she had been.

The door opened and Melissa turned away, wiped her eyes quickly.

“I heard you moving around,” Theo said behind her, and his voice had an odd roughness.

“Where am I?” Melissa asked vaguely, still coming out of sleep.

“My place,” Theo said apologetically. “I hope you don’t mind.”

She turned to him then, and was surprised to see how dazed he looked. Not to mention scratched, cut, beaten, disheveled and shell-shocked.

And that didn’t even take into account that he was no longer human.

She saw that he had moved to block her from seeing the photo by the computer; embarrassed, he turned it facedown behind him. Melissa smiled to herself, feeling warmed for the first time. It was still Theo, after all.

“Do you remember what happened?” he asked tentatively.

She searched her memory, found painful shards there.

“Jeff…?” she asked.

He nodded, neither of them wanting to say the word. Tears welled in his luminous big eyes. “I’m sorry, Melissa. I’m so sorry.”

“What about the others?” she said when she could, and her voice was high and thin as birdsong.

“Made it back,” Theo said. His mouth twisted into a melancholy smile. “Guess the good guys won….”

The good guys. Melissa didn’t even know who the good guys were anymore.

But no, she realized, thinking back on the evening before, that wasn’t true.

Theo was a good guy.

Theo, who had followed her and found her, who had held tight to her against the worst ravages of the Storm…

Who had killed Jeff to save her.

Theo loved her, had always loved her.

Had Jeff loved her?

She thought he had when he’d sewn that dead stone into her flesh, when he’d delayed her becoming what she truly was.

But was that to save her…or merely to save what he needed her to do?

She knew the answer. And what she had held within to warm herself for so very long turned dead as that stone.

Theo spoke then of incidental things, of the town’s power being down, the gems lifeless and possessed of no miracles now. Their cozy enclosed universe of electric lights and gasoline engines had collapsed like a spent balloon.

Eventually, he said, they might be able to turn it around. But only time would tell.

She was studying him closely now in the glow of her own being; his sensitive features despite the change, his delicacy.

“Do you know what you’ll be doing next?” she asked him.

He shook his head. “Maybe an extended sabbatical. Head out in some direction, see where I fit in.”

Melissa nodded at that, and felt something born in her different from what she had felt for Jeff, for every man of a certain kind since her father.

It was a change beyond what had turned her into a flare, far deeper, and it opened up something new in her, a world of possibility.

That might in turn grow into…what?

Only time would tell.

Rain beat against the room’s single window. She found her way to a chair beside him and settled into it, although it took her more effort than to hover above it.

“I’d like it if you could stay awhile,” she said.

Theo said nothing, but his eyes were all the answer she needed.

“The rain’s coming down harder,” Melissa observed after a moment. The window rattled as she spoke.

“I always did like that sound,” Theo said, and the two of them sat quietly and listened to it for a time.