This is the continuation of my freewritemadness/NaNoWriMo story.
Catch up with the previous chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23part1, 23Part2, 23Part3, 23Part4, 24, 25Part125Part2
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I am using 
Today’s prompts are: the end and a Photo by Collins Lesulie on Unsplash
As usual I started with the freewrite prompt and used themostdangerouswritingapp.com to write the first five minutes:
The many torments of Tiny Earl - Chapter 26 (Part One)
Eleanor wasn't certain she trusted Belmond. At all. She hoped it wasn't just because of the way he looked. The multi-coloured eyes, and him being cross-eyed meant that Eleanor often wasn't entirely sure if he was looking at her or not. Which was a little bit disconcerting, to say the least.
But she was fairly sure that wasn't the real reason.
The real reason was that he reminded her a little bit of Tiny. He didn't really care about anyone, she though, other than his own goals.
"This is the end," Belmond was saying, standing by the glass of the lighthouse, looking out across the ocean. "Things are coming to a head. In a few hours everything will be resolved. Tiny's end will be assured."
Janet was also looking out of the window. But she appeared nervous, and cast glances at Belmond from time to time. Eleanor had a better feeling about Janet than Belmond, that was for sure. But could she really be trusted? After all, she was Tiny’s first and only true love. Okay, not her Tiny. Not the version she knew. But from what she had gleaned she was not entirely sure there was much of a difference between any of the different versions of Tiny in any of the different realities.
Eleanor was worried she didn't have a choice about putting her trust in either Janet, or Belmond. She was stuck here. Trapped. She felt disconnected, suddenly, as if she was looking through the world through a tiny window on one of the airships Tiny had taken her on when they first met. She remembered looking down, on the world below and feeling wonder but also feeling confined too. She felt like that now. The whole world - or in this case worlds - was there for her to see but she couldn’t touch it. She couldn’t get out.
“Why me?” she asked again. Belmond didn’t seem to hear her, or if he did, he ignored her question, just as he did the first three times she had asked it. Janet turned, looked at her and smiled.
“You are special, Eleanor,” Janet said. “You are truly unique.” Eleanor watched Janet as she walked around the top of the lighthouse and then came and sat next to her. Janet put her hand on Eleanor’s and her smile felt warm and genuine, as did the feelings - the sensitivities, as Janet explained she called them - she was picking up from the woman. Eleanor didn’t feel that Janet meant her any harm, she seemed to feel a genuine concern for her. “You don’t have any doppelgangers.”
“I…” Eleanor stopped herself and thought for a second. “There are no other versions of me? In any of the other realities?”
“That is correct. It happens, of course. More often than you might expect. But what makes you truly unique is that despite your lack of connection to the multiverse, you are sensitive to it. Most of us are sensitive because we feel a connection to our other selves, we see echos of the other universes, because of our connection with our doppelgangers. But not you. You don’t have any other versions of yourself. You are special. Unique. Only to be found in one single version of all the different realities. And it happens to be the one that he escaped to: this Tiny, we are hunting. Yet, despite your aloneness, your uniqueness, your lack of connectedness, somehow the multiverse flows through you. And that attracted us to you.”
Despite the feelings that Janet let wash over her (and Eleanor was under no illusion that the woman was skilled enough to be able to control what she let leak out), Eleanor felt used and abused. It had been bad enough thinking she had made serious errors of judgment in forming a relationship with Tiny, becoming his wife and then not divorcing him and running away as fast and as far as she possibly could. But now, it appeared, she had been a pawn in some bizarre game of multiverse chess, where the endgame - in sight apparently - was to place Tiny Montgomery-Smyth in checkmate.
“What are we waiting for?” she said, suddenly. “Why are we here?”
“The others are coming,” Janet said. “We are waiting for them.”
Eleanor could feel the anger rise up from within her. Janet must have felt it too, because she let go of Eleanor’s hand and stood up, stepping back out of reach.
“For fucks sake!” Eleanor shouted, cushions spilling from the sofa as she stood up. The glass of water wobbled as Eleanor knocked her leg against it the table. “Do you think all this mysterious shit is really going to wash with me? You’ve been playing me my whole life - or at least the last ten years of it - and you expect me to sit her calmly and wait for the others? Fuck the others and fuck you too!”
Eleanor stormed off, making her way down the stairs of the lighthouse. Behind her she heard Janet call her name, and the voice of Belmond too, but she couldn’t make out what he was saying.
She didn’t know where she was going, of course. She didn’t know the way back, and - according to Janet, anyway - the only human shelter in this universe was this fucking lighthouse. The door at the bottom of the staircase was shut, and for a dreadful moment Eleanor thought it would be locked, that she would be stuck here. She could hear the stairs above her clang-clang-clang as someone - presumably Janet - followed her down. She turned the handle one way and then the other and the door swung open, and she was hit in the face by the cold salty wind.
She didn’t run, but walked fast away from the lighthouse along the wooden pier back towards the place she had appeared in. Perhaps there was a way to get back. Sometimes, Janet had said, the walls between the different universes were thin. She stepped through them once.
Perhaps she could do so again.
Eleanor heard the door clack against the side of the lighthouse and heard Janet call her name again. She didn’t turn around. She kept walking. Under her feet the sand was cold and wet, from the outgoing tide.
There! There was a spot that was different from the others, on the beach not far from where she had first stepped over. It shimmered. If she had stepped into this EXTRAordinary world, surely she could step out of it too? And if it wasn’t her world - her reality - she landed in, would it really matter? What did she have to go back to?
Eleanor suddenly felt a feeling she had not felt for such a long time: freedom. She could hear Janet calling her, shouting now - sounding desperate, scared maybe - and the thump-thump-thump of her feet as she approached. Eleanor began to run, began to sprint and as she neared the shimmer she closed her eyes and jumped.
...
....
