Afternoon of the Elves

by Janet Taylor Lisle

  “Elves chew mint like gum,” she told Hillary once.

  Hillary watched Sara-Kate chewing and guessed that her odd tastes were another instance of her being “like an elf.”

  “If you ask me, Sara-Kate is an elf,” Jane said in a nasty voice to Hillary at school. “She’s a mean, dirty little elf who’s put a spell on you and is going to get you in trouble, wait and see.”

  Jane and Alison were angry at Hillary and she was angry at them.

  “You think you’re so great because a big fifth grader is your friend,” Alison hissed. “But nobody in the whole school likes Sara-Kate. Nobody else wants to hang around her horrible old house. There’s not even any furniture in there, did you know? Somebody sneaked up and looked through the window one day. There aren’t any chairs or anything.”

  “Sara-Kate is your friend because she can’t get anybody else,” Jane added. “She got you by telling you a lot of lies about elves. Why are you so stupid, Hillary?”

  “Shut up,” Hillary replied. “Sara-Kate isn’t lying. And she has beautiful furniture. Whoever said she didn’t is the one who’s lying. I’ve been in her house hundreds of times so I should know.”

  Not only had Hillary never seen the inside of Sara-Kate’s house, she had not seen Sara-Kate’s mother since the day she’d stared out the second floor window for that brief moment. Mrs. Connolly never came out of the house. She never came to the door to call Sara-Kate inside. She never made a sound.

  And yet, she was there. Hillary knew it. Besides the way the shades moved at times—as if someone were crouched behind them watching the activity in the yard—there were the errands that Sara-Kate was constantly being sent to do.

  Hillary had even begun to accompany her: to the drugstore to pick up a prescription; to the post office; to the little grocery store two blocks away for a bunch of carrots, a half gallon of milk, a box of Saltines. Hillary went secretly, of course. Her parents would never have allowed her to walk around the town, which was more like a small city in the downtown sections. They would have worried about traffic on the busy streets, about the beckoning finger of a stranger. They would have worried that Hillary would become lost, or get bitten by one of the homeless dogs that roamed the trashy alleys, or fall into a hole and lie there unconscious and ignored.

  Apparently Sara-Kate’s mother worried about none of these possibilities. Hillary wondered if she knew where Sara-Kate was half the time. And naturally Sara-Kate didn’t worry. Perhaps she’d never been told about the terrible things that can happen to a child alone on the streets. She went to the laundromat to wash clothes, to the hardware store to “make a payment,” to the bank to cash a check.

  Hillary watched Sara-Kate’s small figure transact these grown-up pieces of business with increasing amazement. After all, Sara-Kate was no bigger than Hillary, and though she was two years older, she did not look old enough to be so effective in the adult world. But effective she was, although Hillary once heard her questioned by a woman in the business office of the telephone company, where she had gone to restart telephone service that had been shut off at her house.

  “Where is your mother?” the woman inquired sharply. “She should be handling this.”

  “She’s sick, so she had to send me,” Sara-Kate replied quickly. The telephone official regarded her doubtfully, but she accepted the pile of money that Sara-Kate placed on her desk.

  “How do you know what to do?” Hillary asked Sara-Kate later. “Do you do everything for your mother?”

  “Not everything. Just what she tells me.”

  So Sara-Kate’s mother was sick. That scrap of information was among the few that Hillary managed to glean during her month of visiting the Connollys’ backyard. Sara-Kate almost never spoke about herself. She never told stories about her family. If Hillary forgot and questioned her too closely on some personal matter, Sara-Kate snapped at her. Or she was silent, as if she had not heard.

  “What sickness does your mother have?”

  Silence.

  “Are you the only child in your family, like me?”

  Silence.

  “Why was your telephone shut off?”

  Silence.

  Only about the elf village and the elves themselves did Sara-Kate became talkative and open. In fact, as time went on, the mysterious world of the elves became clearer and clearer in Hillary’s mind from Sara-Kate’s telling about it, and Hillary could almost see the pale, quick-as-a-wink faces peer out from the underbrush.

  Perhaps she had seen one, or rather part of one. As Sara-Kate explained, the elfin trick of invisibility depended to a great extent on their never appearing whole before humans. Sara-Kate herself saw bits and pieces of elves everywhere in the yard: a flash of arm, a pointed foot, an eye, wheaten hair blowing in the wind like yellow grass.

  “It isn’t where you look for elves so much as how you look,” she advised one day when Hillary had despaired of ever seeing the little people. “You’ve got to train yourself to notice details. You can’t just stomp around the place expecting to be shown things. Go slowly and quietly, and look deep.”

  So Hillary went slowly and quietly. She began to look deep into the bushes of Sara-Kate’s yard, deep into piles of leaves, into hedges. The yard seemed more open now because the trees and bushes had shed their leaves. She saw holes, hollows, and stumps that hadn’t been visible under all the foliage.

  “I think I just saw an elbow!” she would call to Sara-Kate, who would turn toward her skeptically.

  “Are you sure?” she’d ask. “Are you really sure?”

  “Yes!” Hillary would cry, but she wasn’t. She was never sure what she had seen. It was maddening.

  Hillary found herself bringing her new noticing eyes back home with her to her own yard. She noticed, for instance, how the ivy climbing her father’s birdbath turned brittle, then brown, and began to lose its grip on the fluted stem.

  She saw an abandoned nest in the bare branches of the apple tree. She noticed how evening came earlier and earlier, until it was completely dark when her father returned home from his office and there was no time for him to work in his garden. But then again, she saw that frost had killed the flowers and the grass had stopped growing so there was no reason for him to go out there anyway.

  At the dinner table, Mr. Lenox looked tired and talked about people who weren’t doing their jobs at work. When Hillary’s fork dropped on her plate with a crash by mistake, he jumped and scowled at her. Looking deep, Hillary thought she knew why.

  “He misses his garden,” she whispered to herself.

  “You’re so quiet these days I hardly know when you’re in the house or out,” Hillary’s mother said to her. “Would you like to invite Jane or Alison over for the night this weekend? Or how about both!” Mrs. Lenox offered, a little wildly, because Hillary had been worrying her lately.

  “You’re spending far too much time in the Connollys’ yard,” she might have added, but didn’t since the subject was an embarrassing one. Mrs. Lenox disliked the Connollys’ shabbiness. She was nervous about the disorder lurking just beyond the hedge. It nibbled at the edges of her own well-kept yard. But how could she speak to Hillary about the unsuitableness of such a house, such a family? She couldn’t. Hillary looked deep and heard her anyway.

  “I can’t come here every day anymore,” she told Sara-Kate. “My mother is noticing it too much.”

  Sara-Kate shrugged. “Do what you want,” she replied, as if she didn’t care. Then her small eyes scurried to Hillary’s face to see what could be read there.

  “I want to come,” Hillary said, meeting her gaze. “It isn’t me that wants to stay away. It’s my mother.”

  “Sure, I know,” Sara-Kate answered. “You don’t have to say it. I already know.”

  Hillary often wondered about Sara-Kate’s life inside her gloomy house. In early November she finally got a chance to see. Even then, it wasn’t by invitation but because no one would come to answer the door. She’d knocked and knocked. S
he’d stepped back near the elf village and tried calling up to the second floor.

  “Sara-Kate!” she bellowed. “It’s me! What’s wrong?”

  Not one sound came from anywhere inside and an odd little fright had crept into Hillary. The day was icy and dark. She jumped up and down to keep her feet from freezing. The yard lay around her, hunched under the cold. Bushes whose languid shapes she had come to know well in warmer weather now posed in awkward positions, their scrawny limbs angled and bent.

  “Sara-Kate, where are you!”

  Sara-Kate had not come to school for three days. Hillary couldn’t remember her ever missing before. Odder still, she had not been outside working on the elf village when Hillary had come through the hedge to visit on Monday afternoon. That day, Hillary had gone home quietly. And she had gone home again on Tuesday when Sara-Kate had not appeared in the yard, but with uneasy feelings.

  “Are the Connollys away?” she asked her mother, a ridiculous question since Mrs. Lenox had no more knowledge of the Connollys’ comings and goings than of a family in Outer Mongolia.

  “I thought we might go to the shoe store this afternoon to find something pretty for you to wear at Thanksgiving,” her mother said, presenting such a happy prospect that Hillary forgot to worry about Sara-Kate for the rest of the day.

  But on Wednesday there was again no sign of her and so, in the afternoon, Hillary approached the Connollys’ back door and bravely knocked. Her fist made such a tiny, hollow noise—it was as if the house were completely empty—that she began to pound with the flat of her hand. There was no door-bell and no knocker.

  “Sara-Kate!” Clouds of breath exploded from her mouth. Behind her the yard was silent, listening. Or perhaps it didn’t listen. Hillary looked over her shoulder. Perhaps it was as empty as the house. Not a twig moved. Not a bird chirped. In the elf village, many cottages were falling apart. The Ferris wheel stood grandly over the ground, but brush and debris had blown into its wires and the Popsicle-stick seats were tossed and tangled.

  Hillary put her mittened hand on the doorknob and turned. The door came open.

  “Sara-Kate?” she asked softly of the darkness within. Then, since there was no answer here either, she stepped forward across the threshold.

  Seven

  If, by some charm, Hillary had been shrunk to a height of three inches and escorted through the door of one of Sara-Kate’s elf houses, it would have seemed no stranger than the place she entered now. Certainly, whatever peculiarities an elf house might have had—stars adrift near the ceiling, hypnotized moths on the walls?—it would have been more welcoming. This room was cold as ice, and dim. Hillary could distinguish little at first, just a heap of mysteriously shaped objects rising from the floor in front of her.

  Gradually, as her eyes adjusted, she made out a table and then two bulky chairs from the heap. A cardboard box, a floor lamp, a stool, and a low bookcase came into view. They were set in a sort of circle in the middle of the room and, at their center, most incongruous of all, was a large white stove. But what a strange-looking stove. Hillary took a step nearer. The oven had no door, only a cavernous mouth where the door should have been. And the burners on top were gone, leaving behind four empty craters.

  An electric fan was perched on a bureau positioned next to the stove. The bureau’s drawers had been removed, however, to serve other functions. Hillary caught sight of one in the corner being used as a container for tools. Another, turned upside-down over a stool, had become a table top. Meanwhile, the bureau’s drawer slots had become storage holes for cooking pans, jars, utensils, newspapers, and other items unidentifiable in the poor light.

  In fact, everything in the room seemed to have been dismantled, rearranged, and transformed into something else, Hillary noticed during the full minute she stood gazing about just inside the back door. She saw that the room had been an ordinary kitchen once. There was a refrigerator against the far wall, and a sink and faucet were visible beneath a window whose torn shade allowed outside light to enter. For the rest, everything not actually attached to the wall or the floor (the radiator was still in place for instance) had been uprooted and dragged to the room’s center, where it was installed around the stove to make another room. A room within a room.

  But now, even this odd inner room seemed to have fallen into disuse. Hillary walked around it cautiously, examining its different sides. The two shabby armchairs, worn to cotton stuffing in the seats, had been pushed so close to the stove’s open mouth that the people sitting in them must have baked their legs if the oven had been turned on. Hillary drew her mittened hand along a chair back. A fine dust rose.

  Sara-Kate and her mother had gone away, this much was clear. The house was shut down. The heat was turned off. They had gone to visit friends or perhaps they were in Sarasota, Florida, with Sara-Kate’s father. They had left quickly, without telling anyone, and they had forgotten to lock the back door. Not that there was anything here to steal. Never had Hillary seen a place so stripped of the basic comforts.

  She finished circling the inner room and arrived back near the door. But instead of opening it and going home, she walked across the floor to a doorway on the other side that led to another room. She could understand now why Sara-Kate had never wanted to invite her in.

  The second room was completely empty and made her remember Alison’s report on the state of the house. The walls were bare, the windows had no curtains, and when Hillary walked in, the sounds her feet made on the hardwood floor were as loud as hammer blows. The smallest sniff or rustle was magnified by the emptiness into an alarming hiss. She examined the room’s yellowed window shades, all drawn but one that had fallen askew. She noticed the dust lying black on the sills, the cobwebs trailing from the ceiling. This was not a room recently cleared of its contents. This room had lain empty for months, maybe years, accumulating mold and rot and insect bodies, of which there were hundreds on the floor, Hillary saw. She stepped to one side with distaste. Had this been a dining room once? An ancient film of flowered wallpaper coated the walls.

  She was near another doorway now, and through it she saw the shadowy lines of a staircase leading to the second floor. She did not want to go there. The cold in Sara-Kate’s house was intense. Hillary pushed her mittened hands into her parka pockets and hunched her shoulders. Her nose and cheeks were icy. She turned back to the kitchen and had already taken several steps in the direction of the back door when she stopped. A faint noise reached her ears. It was just barely audible through her wooly hat. She took her hands from her pockets and pulled the hat off.

  The sound was coming from somewhere above her, a series of little thumps as if something were being knocked or rolled upon the floor. The noises stopped as she listened, then started again a few seconds later. Hillary’s heart jumped.

  Perhaps she had been frightened all along and not noticed. The house had seemed more odd than threatening, more closed up and left behind than eerie. But maybe, all the time, protective antennae in Hillary had been picking up warning signals: a wisp of a smell, a current of air, a sigh, an echo. For suddenly she knew she was not alone in Sara-Kate’s house. Someone was here with her.

  Above, the sounds stopped again. Hillary held her breath and stood absolutely still. She calculated the direction of the noises, and was looking up, toward the back rear corner of the old kitchen, when they began again—a rolling, a knocking—just where she was staring. The sounds were coming through the ceiling from the second floor.

  Hillary knew she should run. She thought of racing for the back door, flinging it open, crossing Sara-Kate’s yard in three strides and without looking back crashing through the hedge into her own safe garden. Sara-Kate’s house was too cold and dark for any usual sort of being to be living in it. But in that case, Hillary reasoned in a rush of thoughts, the source of the noises must be some thing or things unusual. It must be some thing or things with fur coats or hot blood for staying warm. Or perhaps possessing thick skins?

  Hillary
didn’t move. She stared at the ceiling. She remembered how empty the yard had seemed these last three days. She thought of the elf village, whose houses were beginning to collapse, whose leaf roofs were blown away. Their fragile construction had never been intended for winter living. She recalled Sara-Kate’s words: “Elves never go inside until they have to....” Until they have to. And with Sara-Kate and her mother away, the house must have seemed the most logical place to go.

  Over her head, the little roly-knocking noises had stopped again. In the silence, Hillary found herself turning quietly and tiptoeing through the door into the vacant dining room, across its dusty floor, and beyond another door. She came to the foot of the dark staircase in a hall so bitterly cold that it seemed to her the ice heart of the whole frozen house.

  Hillary crept upward, stair by stair. She moved slowly and made little noise. The stair boards are too cold to squeak, she thought. She took shallow breaths to quiet the sound of her breathing and was lightheaded when she reached the top. Here, she paused, holding onto the banister.

  A dark corridor swept past her. Away to the left, she heard the noises begin again, but for a little while she stayed where she was, drawing in gulps of icy black air. She was not frightened now, but filled with anticipation. Her fear was that the elves would hear her coming with their quick, pointed ears. She was sure they would perform some vanishing trick if they suspected her presence. Or they would run or fly away. Her plan was to burst suddenly into the room, to catch them unaware for a moment. And in that moment, Hillary would see an elf whole at last, which even Sara-Kate had never done.

  Hillary leaned on the banister and tried to imagine what the elves would look like. She prepared herself for their small bodies, for their elf-made clothes—little hats and coats, little shoes with curly tips. For some reason, she had imagined them dressed in a bright spring green, but now she realized this might be another case of coming to the wrong conclusions. More likely, elves change color with the seasons, like chameleons, Hillary thought. She smiled. She was ready for anything. Sara-Kate’s elves might have pink hair and purple eyes for all she cared. She was ready.