The House Between Heaven and Earth

Winsmore, set on the southeastern coast of Fala, was a country village whose name was known only in the country round about. A war hero who had raged through the First Three Nations War had been born there, and for a while the newspapers carried the name; but that, too, was a story more than twenty years old. Afterward Winsmore was forgotten utterly by the world, and passed its days in peace.

It was an age that changed with every day. Streets that carriages had traveled for ages were, before anyone quite noticed, claimed by automobiles, and the airships once lavished with praise slipped in a moment onto the road of decline when passenger planes appeared. The long age of several thousand years—in which yesterday became today, and today tomorrow—was drawing, in that fashion, to its close. No one could easily picture the shape of tomorrow anymore.

Yet in all the wide world, Winsmore alone seemed still to linger in the old age. The virtues of slowness and peace, which had vanished from the great cities decades before, still drew breath here. People, from of old, remember a past already gone as lovelier than it was, and Winsmore's quiet landscape, the gentle southern sea tucked against its side, had a way of stirring the perfume of that gilded yesterday.

Of course Winsmore was not preserved forever in the old age. Even here, change came slowly, but it came steadily enough. The train, which most of the villagers had known only from the newspapers, had one day begun to run, and a few years ago they had drawn a telegraph line over from the next village and set a telephone in the village hall. The residents thought it a wonder—the train that passed before the village every few days, and the telephone that was said to reach far away—and yet they adapted to both without much trouble.

Winsmore. For the truth was that the place had never been merely a backward country village.

When the peddler who came once a week, wearing out his shoes on the road to Winsmore, let fall a mocking word—that the village was only now beginning to feel a little like the present day—Mr. Thomas Hill, who kept the butcher's shop, said this:

"What's there to marvel at in a thing like that? I saw the first person ever to fly, with my own two eyes."

Now that factories crowded every corner of the nation, many had forgotten, but the airplane had in fact been invented in Winsmore. It was the place where a dream that everyone, across thousands of years of human history, had thought impossible first stirred to life—and where at last it came to fruit.

And so, whenever the sky was clear, the people of Winsmore would remember that day: the miracle of a rattling machine bearing a girl aloft into the sky. The myth of John Fitzroy, infamous as a cantankerous old man; of Edmond Campbell, his only apprentice; and of his only daughter, Judith Campbell, the Blue Meteor who had saved the lives of thirty thousand soldiers of Fala, still stirred in their hearts.

It was an unusually brilliant day in March.

The day before, Winsmore had kept a small festival late into the night for the eighty-seventh birthday of Grandma Martha, the oldest soul in the village, and now it met a very quiet morning. Even the postmaster, who swept the streets at first light every day, and Mr. Berry, who rattled his cart all over the village, were this morning thoroughly drunk on sleep.

Because of that, no resident saw the two outsiders step down at the little station. The night train, which had set out from distant Solimus for the great southern city of Gellingham, let off two passengers and left Winsmore without delay. Left alone in the silent village, the pair found the sunlight they had not felt in a long while strange, and quietly set foot into the town.

Shuttered shops greeted them in a neat row. Out in the street, traces of the birthday feast that had dyed the village every color the night before still lay abandoned. Whenever a light breeze came in off the far sea, small scraps of cut colored paper tumbled lonely across the dirt.

The village, not yet awake, was quiet past all telling. Only a dog dozing in a patch of sun half-woke at the strangers' presence. The old dog blinked its sleepy eyes and barked out of habit, but the warm stillness covered even that, gently.

Before long they had left the heart of the village. The road ahead was not smooth asphalt; unlike the streets worn fairly flat by the daily passing of carriages, the dirt track wound and buckled. Nameless wildflowers swayed low on either side of a path barely wide enough for the two of them to pass.

A young man, several large bags dangling from both hands, climbed the dirt road with familiar steps, and a girl with only a single small handbag followed him clumsily. From the lips of the girl who had kept up well enough until now, a short breath soon escaped. They rested at the foot of the climb, and once more halfway up the hill. The sun only rose higher. The quiet village was waking, one by one.

On the hill, where the ascent ran sometimes steep and sometimes gentle, a single-story building with a blue roof stood alone. With neither neighbor nor garden tree, keeping the hill by itself, it seemed to sever the Boundary between heaven and earth—as the angelic sentinels do who keep the gates of Paradise.

Long since emptied of people, even the trace of a path there had grown faint. The two walked sometimes on bare earth and sometimes through a floor of thick weeds, and came to a fence whose paint was peeling. The gate was not locked.

The young man, both hands full of luggage, pushed the gate with his shoulder. Between the weeds that had overgrown the garden, the stepping-stones laid toward the front door showed themselves one by one beneath the warm sun.

Only when he reached the entrance did he set the bags down. Then, as if groping after an old memory, he carefully swept beneath an empty flowerpot. At the ends of the fingers that crawled along the ground came a small key, together with black dust.

The front door, shut tight for so long, opened at last. The young man gathered up the bags and went in. The girl followed him over the threshold, and behind her the door closed quietly.

It was a house.

Elliot set the luggage down near the entrance and stood there awkwardly. His gaze, fixed on the dust that rose in soft puffs, slowly traveled the room.

Sunlight falling warm. Walls yellowed with age. For a house left more than ten years, it was not so different from the faint memory he still carried.

What drew him up out of the sorrowful sentiment of childhood was a rather heedless presence. Seeing Anna suddenly walking on ahead, Elliot hurried after her.

It was a small house where two people had lived, and sometimes three. Just around the corner bent like an L, the kitchen and the living room showed on the left. He stared at the dazzling morning light striking through the large window in the living room, then turned his head the other way, and there was a door whose paint had peeled a little.

Anna flung open the nearest door without a moment's hesitation. The first was the bathroom. Before he could so much as look for a leak, she moved on, unimpressed. Elliot, chasing after her under several bags, thought suddenly that he cut a rather ridiculous figure, trailing at the heels of a small girl.

Next was a small room filled with nothing but an iron bed and a desk. He narrowed his eyes at a scene that was somehow familiar, but this time, too, Anna passed the door with a lukewarm air. Elliot hitched up a slipping bag handle and followed her without a word.

The moment he came up behind her, the last door opened. Elliot, lifting his head indifferently, stopped short at the sight that suddenly filled his vision. The last room was a very large one: a wide bed for two, a wardrobe old but still fit to use, a vanity furnished after a fashion. Above all, the window hung with white curtains was quite large.

As he stared blankly at the sunlight wavering over the thin curtains, a hem of black raincoat brushed past his eyes. She had been nothing but listless until now, yet the back of her as she trotted to the window was rather lively. The moment the window opened, the spring wind rushed in, and the white curtains and the black raincoat fluttered together.

Elliot watched for a moment, set Anna's bag down by the door, and quietly stepped out into the hall. The rooms they would each use, it seemed, had been decided.

He flung the rest of the bags into the small room as if discarding them, and the first thing he did was check the water pipes. Next he inspected the lamps that would not light. Only after he had carefully tallied the bulbs that needed replacing could he begin the cleaning in earnest.

The house, abandoned for a full fifteen years, was thick with old dust. After a moment of dismay, he rummaged through the musty basement and barely found an old broom and some rags. They looked rough enough, but once he had beaten the black dust out of them, they were serviceable.

While he spent the whole day alone sweeping and wiping the house, Anna slept as if she were dead.

No answer came no matter how he knocked, so he quietly opened the door of the large room. The girl, buried in the black raincoat, lay on the bed as straight as a corpse laid in a coffin. Seeing her not so much as stir, he went so far as to hold a finger beneath her nose, wondering if she might have died.

She slept the whole way on the train, too.

He had not heard Anna's voice once during a forced journey of more than a full day, and for a moment he sank into worry. If she were ill, the cleaning would have to wait; he would need to seek out a doctor first. But he did not like to wake a child sleeping so deeply, and decided he would ask when she woke.

The cleaning ended in the evening, as the sun went down.

In the house, the dust washed clean away, a polish gleamed. The red sunset, driven deep into the corners, danced lightly across the smooth floor.

Dead tired, Elliot sat on the living-room sofa and looked weakly at the house flushing dark red in the evening. His shadow, stretched over the floor, swayed without rest, drowsy. But as if even the shadow hung from his toes were heavy, his shoulders gave way, and then his head.

Before long he changed out of his dust-covered clothes and bought sandwiches at a shop nearing closing time.

The sunset was driven off to the west, and the curtain of dark night fell over Winsmore. In the house he returned to, taking the frail moonlight for a lamp, Anna was sitting at the table, swinging her slender calves. He did not know when she had woken.

"I thought you'd run off."

As if the words were not quite her own, Anna closed her mouth and looked up at him, blank.

Unable to find anything to say in reply, he turned his head with a studied indifference. In the green eyes that could not quite find their bearings, the silver hair that had hung long between the folds of the raincoat lingered like an afterimage.

When he washed his hands in the kitchen and came back, a sight bizarre even at a glance was waiting for him. Anna was taking her sandwich apart and picking out the olives one by one.

It was so absurd that he only meant to watch, and now she took nothing but the top slice of bread and munched it slowly. He had met soldiers from every corner of the nation, moving from one battlefield to the next, and never in his life had he seen anyone eat a sandwich like that.

"Elliot Olivier."

Licking the sauce from her thumb, Anna began in a languid voice.

"How much do you know about me?"

Elliot, who had briefly given his eyes to the raincoat creased here and there, quietly drew out the chair opposite and sat.

"I was told you are the granddaughter of Marquis Baldwin."

"And?"

"That you were abused. That much."

When nothing more followed, Anna lifted her eyes.

"Is that all?"

He did not answer.

"Really?"