Visions, memories, nightmares. Narnia. Forests covered in soft, white snow; a wicked queen with a heart harder than ice; a majestic lion that swept one up with only a few simple words; a life so quickly reversed; a young prince a thousand years too late; a fond farewell to a land of love and pain…
Stop…stop…make it stop…
"Narnia IS real, Susan! You have to believe us! Trust in Aslan!"
"Lucy, you don't be so puerile. You know, as well as I, that these games ended long ago."
"You were there! You saw the same sights we did! You breathed that same Narnian air that ignited a fire in all of us! How can you possibly deny all of that?"
"Edmund, those were games; we played them as children. Our childhood has long since passed. It's over now".
"You make Narnia into nothing! Well I'll tell you once more that Narnia is something. No, it's more than just something—it's magic! And if you want to deny that magic, it is your loss," yells Lucy. She turns and runs out the hall and down the stairs, a suitcase in one hand and a train ticket in the other.
"Lucy," cries Edmund. He quickly glances at his elder sister with empty eyes, before running off to find his little sister. The room remains silent in the absence of the two youngest and most vocal of the siblings. Peter stands next to Susan, who sits on her bed. With a sudden anger, he grabs his sister by her forearms and pulls her up to face him.
"Is this truly what you believe?"
Stop...stop…please make it stop…
His abrupt, yet simple question catches Susan off-guard. She yearns to say 'no,' but she cannot. The immense pain that emanates from within the very core of her soul finds its roots firmly planted in Narnia. She cannot escape Narnia. The place full of so much joy brings her only tears; she doubts Aslan and not even the great lion himself can erase her fears. Yet, she cannot criticize him; he is the supreme ruler. He makes her into who he wants her to be. Without him, she is nothing. And Susan cannot be nothing; she must be something to someone. She must prove that infernal lion wrong.
"Yes," Susan slowly replies, before she heads downstairs to the kitchen. Peter only gazes after her retreating form, all his anger evaporated. Only tears remain.
Stop…stop…why can't it stop?
"Ms. Pevensie, you'll need to come with us."
So horrifying…BLOOD. A family once beloved reduced to bloody pulps of flesh, bone, and tissue, identified only the remnants of clothing and their locations in the still steaming wreckage of the train. Lucy's plaid skirt, Edmund's wristwatch from Mum…Mum… She too lies among the dead, her simple wedding band tinted crimson. Dad lies beside her, his wedding band dyed vermillion. And Peter, her closest sibling, her best friend—all that remains are golden tufts of hair that peak out from an otherwise bludgeoned, unrecognizable skull.
Her beloved family, gone like the soil being washed away in the flood. The once fertile land reduced to dust…
Stop! Stop! STOP!
"Ms. Pevensie! Ms. Pevensie! SUSAN!"
A sudden gasp of air lifts open the weary eyelids of the elderly woman as she gazes up at her nurse.
"Ms. Pevensie, it's only a nightmare; you're bête noir. Everything is fine."
The elderly Susan merely gazes upon the nurse with empty eyes. If only she knew this bête noir was not a simple nightmare; it was the plague of her existence and had been so since 1949, sixty years ago. Sixty years of sleepless nights and glass-eyed days; sixty years of missed chances; sixty years of guilt; sixty years of asking why. Why did they have to die? Why did they not wait to board another train? Why did Narnia, their home—no, our home—ensnare them in a vicious mind control in which the only escape was death? Why?
As the nurse leaves, Susan turns her perpetually mournful eyes towards the window. A great thunderstorm rages outside her nursing home. The flood had finally come to take her home…to her family.
Getting up from her bed slowly, the elderly Susan Pevensie approaches her window. She slowly sings one leg above the sill, then the other, so as to sit within the window itself; in between outdoors and indoors; in between present and future. She turns her face up towards the black abyss of a sky above her, looking for her wave—the wave that will bring her home. Amidst a clap of thunder louder than the explosions she heard when her home was bombed during the war, she screams.
"Why did you do this to me? WHY?"
Only harsh rain drops answer her plea, stinging her eyes like tiny daggers…like Lucy's dagger…though they are nothing compared to the dagger that plunger through her heart on that cursed day in 1949. Pulling out of her nightgown pocket a crumpled old photo of her perished family, Susan lets slip one last tear down her already wet cheek. She holds the photo over her heart as she leans forward, letting the wave envelop her. A bolt of lightning hungry for a target, reaches her heart as she falls. She dies before hitting the ground, although her true self died decades before this turbulent night.
It…Stops…Now…
The newspaper article the following week details that sad demise of Susan Pevensie, the lone survivor of a tragic familial annihilation. The poor old bat had lost her mind decades ago. Consumed by dementia, she fell out the fifth story window of her nursing home, not knowing any better. Such a shame was Susan's tragic tale, given that she showed much promise before the day her family met their maker on the doomed passenger train.
The newspaper never suspects that it was not the demons of dementia attacking the vulnerable mind that led to Susan's downfall. They do not see that it was love, not insanity, that guided her to that window. But she knows. Susan knows the truth, and so do they. They, the long since deceased siblings; the gone-but-not-forgotten siblings. Lucy, the youngest and best of them all. Edmund, the little rebel, who was always the fairest. Peter, the eldest, the greatest, the leader. The three Pevensies were there to witness their elder sister's demise. It was then that they wished they had chosen her over Aslan, just as it was then that Susan wished she had chosen them over "normality".
So, death is final; its promises of Narnia unfulfilled, for Narnia is nothing without their sister Susan. But, Susan has gone—gone off in search of the siblings she could not see—the ones she had kept alive all along. Thus, these four battered souls wander, looking for the missing link to make themselves whole once more. Perhaps this cruel game will go on forever, whilst the living find solace knowing that their shared tomb finally reunites these poor, longing, wandering souls.