Part 39: A Beautiful Shade

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Previously in the Vines Inquiry— With Lillian and Thomas Voorhees’ help, Frank was able to unlock the parlor door, finally gaining access to the radio and therefore a ritual. But, in unlocking the manor, he also set free a cougar. A cougar that had its eyes on Harlow.

As Harlow tumbled over the second-floor railing, the cougar’s teeth in her neck, all everyone else could do was watch.

Harlow felt her head hit stone twice.

First, in the foyer. A concentrated pressure. It gave way, collapsed into a sturdy support. She was cradled by midnight glass, back in the buoyant darkness that had calmed her before the pool had kicked off this chain of events.

This chain that had killed her.

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She was laying motionless on her back, but her mind stretched. No, splattered, across the cosmos. Its pathways were dampened, but gaining strength. Things were cut off, but connecting.

Harlow came and went in this time, falling into the back of her eyes. Spinning around again to see more of the work done. When the main thoroughfares returned, she did what inventory she could.

Searching for ailments, wiggling her toes and blinking twice if she could hear herself. 

She remembered her foot that felt like jelly, and tried to reach out for it. Nothing happened, but her heart would not panic. There was a peace to the place. Though her arm might be missing, Harlow could tell it wasn’t anything to worry about. She felt, not infinite, but certainly closer to it than she ever had on Earth. It was then she realized she must not be on Earth any longer. 

Her head, resting on top of the slick stone that formed the whole of her world, was an antenna.

A chord back to whoever was waiting for her. She blinked, working to recall. Again, there was no panic. Her mother. Lillian. Thomas. Stella. And more. Further. The electric connections traveling from where she’d been to where she was branched off into a network of thousands. People she’d known since birth and before, all the way down to those she’d met only in passing. Harlow could see it in totality; a complex but clear web. Some of the electric threads, a rainbow of colors in a system that made sense to her but one she could not define, stopped short. The far ends had gone grey and sent the electric snap back; old mp3s to be reassessed.

Chase Drawson, the ferry boy she’d served chicken tenders to since high school. 

Below her head, where the neck might have been but not necessarily should be, was a constellation so crowded it looked like a foggy nebula. Harlow could see it from all different angles around the oil stone room. She sat against one of the curving walls, like a pipeline wave frozen in onyx, admiring all the tiny pieces of herself that had been laid out on the floor of this hallowed place. She saw a few of her own bright lights dialed down, halted. 

Still no panic. Was that a switch that had been turned off? She knew the room was frigid—the walls were ice cold, chilling the air they touched, but she couldn’t feel it as she laid against the hard stone slope. She just knew. The whole structure, the world. Beyond that? Was frozen. With no chance of a thaw.

The material, slick with sharp edges, looked like it had never been anything but frozen. But no. It must have moved, she realized, even if just for an instant. To get the shapes, the natural curves and organic passageways that comprised this whole place. It felt solid. Eternal. Grounded beneath a ground. As much as Harlow was able to stretch out now, with her body unbuttoned, she could tell there was no bottom to this place. It went on further than what she knew to be Forever. 

There was someone else there now. She hadn’t noticed their arrival. The space filled.