Afternoon of the Elves

by Janet Taylor Lisle

  At last Hillary’s breath steadied and she began to feel her way down the corridor. She moved with agonizing slowness, keeping one hand on the wall for balance. The noises had continued on and off during the time she had rested, but there was no need to listen to discover which room they came from. On the right-hand side, about halfway down the hall, light streamed beneath a closed door. It was not a pale, mysterious light, but a fiery yellow one. It poured through the keyhole as well, and through the cracks at the door’s edges. To Hillary, approaching down the dark hallway, there seemed a great pressure of light upon this door, so that it bulged with the effort of holding the brightness in.

  Or was magic what was being contained? Hillary came forward and stood before the throbbing door as if drawn by a magnet. She stared at the plain brown wood. Her mittened hand rose to encircle the doorknob and turn it slowly. The roly-knocking noises continued while the door came silently open and the room was revealed in a rush of heat and light.

  Hillary did not believe what she saw. She looked again and again and could not understand. Then she understood. The elves had played a trick on her after all. They had sensed her coming at the final moment and vanished through the walls. They had substituted another scene to confuse her.

  Before Hillary’s dazzled eyes sat Sara-Kate Connolly in a black rocking chair holding a long-legged figure in her arms. The figure’s feet were dragging on the floor as Sara-Kate rocked back and forth. The figure’s face was sad and white. Its hands clung to one of Sara-Kate’s hands. Oh those elves! They were so ingenious. They had changed their own roly-knocking noises (the sounds of tiny feet, of mysterious wheels) into the noise a rocking chair makes against a bare wood floor. They had changed themselves into Sara-Kate and—who was it?—her mother? Hillary’s hands flew up to cover her mouth. It was all so ridiculous!

  At the same time, the scene in the room came to life. Sara-Kate’s bullet eyes zipped across the floor. They shot into Hillary with a force that made her gasp. This was no trick. Sara-Kate had no sooner seen Hillary than she began to struggle to her feet. She lifted the thin figure from her lap and laid it in the chair. She whirled and rushed across the room.

  “Out!” Sara-Kate screamed. “Why are you here? Get out!”

  She leapt at Hillary like a wild animal, as if she meant to tear her to pieces.

  “Sara-Kate! It’s me!” Hillary tried to say, but her voice was strangled by surprise.

  “Get away! Go back home!” Sara-Kate screamed. She grabbed Hillary’s coat with both hands and pushed her out the door. Then she dragged her along the hall and tried to shove her down the stairs.

  “Stop it!” Hillary cried. “It’s me. It’s me.”

  Sara-Kate did stop. She stopped long enough to pull Hillary’s face up close to hers and to hiss like a furious snake.

  “You get out and don’t come back,” Sara-Kate hissed in this new, horrible voice. “Forget you ever came here. Erase it from your mind. It didn’t happen. You were never in this house.”

  Hillary stared at her in horror. She turned and began to run down the stairs.

  “If you come back, you can bet you’ll never go home again,” Sara-Kate yelled behind her. “And if you tell anybody anything, even one little thing, that’ll be the end. The end of you, I mean. The awful end. The final end. If you dare say one word to anyone on this earth, I’ll ...”

  Hillary didn’t wait to hear the details of what Sara-Kate was going to do to her. She was on her way out the back door at last. And she was crossing the Connollys’ yard in three strides, and she was crashing through the hedge, back into her own safe garden.

  Eight

  There were times during the next week when Hillary thought she must have dreamed her visit to Sara-Kate’s house. Certainly it was dream-like enough—a shadowy staircase, a secret room, a sense of unreality, of having been in a fantasy. For dreams, like fantasies, take place only in your head. Whatever happens in them, they stay in your head and leave few signs of themselves in real life.

  So it was with this frightening visit. Though Hillary seemed to have been inside Sara-Kate’s house, and though certain shocking events appeared to have happened, now her life went on in the most ordinary way, made up of the most ordinary things. Day after day, she did her homework, shopped at the supermarket with her mother, brushed her teeth, and combed her hair. Night after night, she watched television, was kissed good night by her parents, and fell asleep in her bed. Nothing was changed, and furthermore nothing was changed at Sara-Kate’s house. It continued to look as it had always looked—gray, gloomy, in need of repair. At night, the windows were as dark as ever.

  At school, people said that Sara-Kate had gone away with her mother on a trip. With relief, Hillary believed it must be true. There was no sign of her anywhere. No one came out of her house and no one went in. No one came to look after the elf village, or to fix the Ferris wheel, which had blown off the cinder blocks during a rain storm and lay on its side in the dirt. (Hillary had peeked through the hedge and seen it.)

  No one talked about Sara-Kate, either. Now that she was not on hand to scandalize people with her gas-station boots, or to yell, or to sit by herself eating mush at lunchtime, there was no reason to discuss her. Sara-Kate Connolly was gone. Hillary had had a dream. The school office had received a note from Mrs. Connolly withdrawing her daughter from school, someone said. There was no need to look into the matter more deeply.

  But when Hillary really thought about it, she knew she hadn’t dreamed the empty house. She knew she’d been awake when she climbed the dark stairs. She knew the second-floor room had been real.

  Hillary didn’t want to think about these things. Hadn’t she been told to forget?

  “You were never in this house!” Sara-Kate had screamed. Now Hillary tried to make it so. She closed certain doors in her mind. She turned certain locks. She shut off the lights and walked away. But the memory of Sara-Kate holding her mother in the rocking chair in the upstairs bedroom would not be locked up. It followed her around like a determined dog.

  “Go away! Go away!” Hillary whispered to this dog of a memory.

  “What?” Jane Webster would ask.

  “Did you say something?” Alison Mancini would demand.

  She was back with her friends, and happy to be back. They were wearing their star jackets in school again, and when they walked down the hall, it was always three abreast and shoulders touching. They were the Three Musketeers, they said. Alison’s mother had persuaded her to cut her hair off short as a boy’s around the ears, and now Alison was trying to persuade the other Musketeers to have it done.

  “You just walk in and ask for an Eton cut,” she said. “They know how to do them there.”

  “Where?” Jane inquired.

  “At the place my mother goes. They do everything, nails, eyebrows, skin. My mother had a facial the last time she went. They put these layers of cream on your face and massage it around and then wrap everything up in a hot towel. It makes your skin come out really soft and nice, like a brand new skin. The old, ugly skin just peels right off.”

  Alison glanced at Hillary. “You’re whispering to yourself again,” she informed her coldly, “and it’s driving me crazy.”

  “What is it?” Jane asked with a concerned look. “You can tell us. We can tell each other everything. We’re supposed to. tell each other, in fact. That’s part of being a Musketeer. Listen, Alison, that gives me an idea. How about writing down some rules for ourselves, and then we can sign them and swear to obey, and then...”

  “Go away. Go away,” Hillary told the memory of Sara-Kate under her breath.

  Whenever she thought of Sara-Kate in the second-floor room, Hillary thought immediately of the elves. She had expected the elves to be there. More than that, she had known they were there. She had felt their presence in the house as strongly as she felt the presence of her own mother when she was out of sight in another part of the Lenoxes’ house. Hillary might not be able to see her mother but
she could tell when she was nearby, working at some job, humming, making little tapping and rustling noises that were distinctly hers.

  “Do you think I could have gone up those stairs without knowing what was up there?” she would have protested to Jane and Alison if the subject had been one she could talk about.

  “Do you think I could have sneaked down that dark hall? The elves were there. They were in that room. They were there and then ...”

  Here Hillary came to an impasse. The elves had vanished and Sara-Kate and her mother had appeared. How could such a thing happen?

  Evidence can have several different meanings, she remembered Sara-Kate teaching her. It can add up to different answers depending on how it is looked at. And that seemed the only way the problem could be resolved. For when Hillary added up the evidence on one side, it came to one unmistakable answer: elves! But when she looked at the facts from another point of view, there was no possible explanation but that Sara-Kate and her mother had been in that room all the time. Could both views somehow be true at once?

  Whatever the case, neither Sara-Kate nor the elves had returned to repair the village. Hillary crept back to look again, under cover of evening. The little houses were more broken than before. The big house and the yard were silent, abandoned. She looked up to the window on the second floor and there, for a terrifying moment, she thought she saw something. A shape darker than the dim space of the window materialized before her eyes. Then it dissolved, became a trick of the mind. Sara-Kate was gone. The elves were gone. There was nothing, nothing in that old empty house.

  “Go away. Go away,” Hillary whispered. She flattened her hands against her ears and held them there.

  “What?” her mother said.

  “Were you talking to me?” her father asked.

  “Hillary! What is wrong with you!” shrieked Jane and Alison. “If you have something to tell us, then tell us!”

  Another week went by. A light snow fell. Ice formed on the town pond. In the cellar of the Lenoxes’ house, Mr. Lenox started a building project.

  “I’m making a trellis,” he said to Hillary one night, after she had come down the gritty cellar stairs to see what all the pounding was about. “It’s for the garden. I’m going to plant a trumpet vine near the house next spring and it will need something to climb on. It will need something to throw its long green arms around and pull itself up on inch by inch toward the sun until it has filled every space with leaves and produced the most brilliant orange trumpet flowers you’ve ever seen! Oh, yes, trumpet flowers!” Mr. Lenox crowed, while Hillary looked at him in alarm.

  “I’ve been dreaming about trumpet vines at night,” he added sheepishly. “Last night I dreamed I was one.” He glanced at Hillary. “Do you miss your elf garden as much as I miss my garden?” he asked.

  Hillary shrugged. “It wasn’t really a garden,” she said. “The only flowers were weed flowers, and there was a lot of junk lying around, but ...”

  Her father nodded. “I guess everybody has a private idea of what makes a good garden,” he said. “Now, for me, the Connollys’ backyard doesn’t amount to much, and your mother thinks Sara-Kate isn’t the best of all possible friends you could have...”

  “But she is!” Hillary exclaimed with a sudden burst of warmth. “She is the best possible. I know it’s hard to see, but Sara-Kate is a wonderful person. She’s taught me all kinds of things. And she’s talented, though she doesn’t like to show it. Do you know she can walk on her hands? She walked up and down her driveway one time, and even up the steps of her porch. I couldn’t believe it. But she never would do it again. She gets mad a lot if you say the wrong thing and then...”

  Hillary stopped and glanced suspiciously at her father. It was the first time she’d told anyone about her feelings for Sara-Kate and now, having told this much, she felt a terrible temptation to continue. A flock of words was rising inside her. A hundred small details about Sara-Kate’s habits and their work together, about the long, cool afternoons at the elf village sprang into her mind and she wanted to tell them.

  But on the heels of the hundred details came the hundred questions. They were the questions that Sara-Kate had refused to answer and the ones that Hillary had learned not to ask. They were the questions she must never ask her parents or her friends, because to ask would be to tell and to tell about Sara-Kate was unthinkable.

  Hillary pressed her lips together and stopped talking. She looked down at her father, who was on his knees working over the trellis. She saw Sara-Kate come charging at her out of the upstairs room, yelling, grabbing her, shoving her—almost down the stairs!—and her eyes filled with tears.

  “You didn’t need to do that,” Hillary wanted to tell her. “I wouldn’t have told. You could have said anything and I’d have understood. You didn’t need to go away. You could have trusted me.”

  Mr. Lenox cleared his throat and half-turned toward his daughter.

  “I saw Sara-Kate the other night, out late, coming home from somewhere,” he said. “Running home, I should say. I almost drove into her crossing the Valley Road intersection.”

  Hillary stared at her father. “You saw Sara-Kate?”

  “Probably out on another errand for her mother. It’s a shame how she orders that child around.”

  “It couldn’t have been Sara-Kate you saw,” Hillary said. “She’s not here. She’s on a trip with her mother. Or maybe she’s living somewhere else by now. They went away more than two weeks ago.”

  “It was Sara-Kate all right. She ran directly in front of my headlights. I jammed on the brakes, but she got out of the way in time.”

  Hillary watched her father, who was crouched over, pounding a nail.

  “When was this?”

  “A couple of nights ago.” He took another nail from his pocket and hammered it in. The structure on the floor quivered with each blow.

  “Wait a minute, I know exactly when it was,” Mr. Lenox said, sitting up. “It was three days ago, last Monday about eleven o’clock at night. I was coming home from that town council meeting. I guess she came back without telling you,” he said to Hillary.

  “But she couldn’t have. She’s not there.”

  “How do you know?” Mr. Lenox asked. Hillary felt a stab of fright in her chest. Then a stab of longing.

  “She’s not at school,” she told her father. “If she’d come back, she’d be at school, right?”

  Mr. Lenox took out another nail, lined it up, and hammered it in.

  “Well, all I know is what I saw,” he said. He rose to his feet with a grunt, picked up the half-made trellis, and handed it to Hillary. “Hold this thing up straight so I can measure it,” he said, “and I’ll tell you how Sara-Kate went home that night. She turned down Congdon Street, cut across the Briggs’s yard to Hoover Street, cut through the Smythes’ yard on the corner of Hoover and Willow, and ran into her own yard and around back of the house. I saw her go. I had to go the same way in the car to get home and I kept seeing her ahead, running in the dark. It was impressive, I must say. I’d never seen a person that small run so fast.”

  Nine

  Hillary slipped out the back door of her house like a fugitive, her quilted jacket rolled up and clutched to her chest. Behind her, she heard her father start to hammer again in the cellar. She closed the door quickly, went down the porch steps, and walked to a place away from the house where the porch light did not shine on her. Here she stopped and put on the jacket, zipping it tight around her neck. She groped for her mittens in the pockets.

  The night air was frigid. The temperature was going down to ten degrees, and more snow was on the way. Her parents had talked about it during dinner. The storm might come as early as tomorrow morning.

  “Welcome to winter,” her mother had said cheerfully. “Maybe they’ll have to cancel school,” she’d added, smiling at Hillary.

  Her wooly hat was in her pocket but the mittens were missing. Hillary wondered if they had dropped on the closet floor when she’d
gone to snatch her coat, ready to leap into the closet herself if her mother appeared. Mrs. Lenox was upstairs reading, but it was too risky to go back now. The clock in the kitchen had showed just past 9:00 p.m., which was Hillary’s bedtime, though her parents sometimes forgot and allowed her to stay up later. One thing they would never allow, however, was an unexplained, late-night walk in the cold by herself.

  Hillary’s unprotected hands were already stinging. She pulled the sleeves of her jacket down over them and gathered the sleeve ends with her fingers to close the openings. Then she walked across the driveway and went downhill into the dark. As she moved, her eyes sought the black bulk of Sara-Kate’s house, and when she’d found that, she leveled her gaze at the second floor, to the windows just under the line of the roof. And when those were picked out (for her eyes took several minutes to accustom themselves to the darkness), she looked straight at the one window, the window on the right overlooking the yard, and beamed all her powers of detection there. If Sara-Kate was inside, Hillary was going to find out this very night, this very hour, because no one—not even elves—can stay inside a house at night in total darkness. And if there is a light, even the faintest candlelight, even the smallest flashlight, it will inevitably show up to those looking in from outside.

  Hillary knew how ingenious light can be at escaping, because of her own attempts to read under her covers or inside her closet after she’d been put to bed.

  “But how did you know!” she would wail when her mother caught her in the act and took the little reading lamp away.

  “There was a glow,” her mother would say. Or, “I saw some light coming through the cracks.”

  Now Hillary trained her eyes on the window and looked for cracks. She ran her eyes across the whole expanse of Sara-Kate’s house and watched for glows. She came to the hedge and squeezed through just far enough for a clear view.