Elemental

by Steven Savile

  “Both.” He hoped she wouldn’t ask him about his favorite bands. He had a very small CD collection, all of them by people most kids his age had never heard of. He was picky about music. He earned the money to buy CDs by babysitting, mowing lawns, whatever work he could drum up from neighbors. He spent hours at the CD store listening to whatever was open, and only bought CDs when he liked all the tracks. He couldn’t pinpoint why he liked the things he liked, which ranged from thirties blues albums to compilations of Celtic music in languages he didn’t speak.

  “What instrument do you play?” Lizzie asked.

  “Just piano. Not very well.”

  Mom sighed. “We had a piano a couple years ago, but when we moved, we couldn’t bring it with us. Michael’s had to make do with singing and pennywhistles. Does the high school have piano practice rooms, Lizzie?”

  “No, all the funds for the arts got cut.” Lizzie sipped tea. “Hey. How about this, though? Mrs. Plank, two houses past mine, has a piano. She never plays, but she might let you practice on it. She’s pretty nice unless you step on her flowers.”

  Michael looked at Mom. It had been so long since he’d played a piano he was afraid his hands had forgotten everything he knew.

  “Okay,” said Mom, “we’ll bake some cookies and go visit. Do you know if she likes cookies, Liz?”

  “It’s never come up in conversation,” said Lizzie. “She’s not the type to invite people over. Mostly she just says, ‘Lizzie, you have a well-behaved dog, not like some people I could name,’ and ‘Has the mailman come by yet?’”

  “We can but try,” Mom said. It was one of the ways they met new neighbors, at least in towns where they planned to stay for a while. Mom baked a big batch of cookies. They made up gift plates and dropped them off at nearby houses in the evening when people were home from work and school. It was a quick way to take the emotional temperature of a neighborhood.

  Dad never came with them on these expeditions. Michael used to think this was because he wasn’t interested, but lately, now that Michael was six feet tall, he noticed that doors didn’t open as easily to him and Mom. Dad was a big man. Maybe Dad thought he would scare the neighbors. When Dad was home, he did all right with the neighbors, once Mom and Michael had made first contact and invited them over for backyard barbecues or card games or shared video rentals.

  Michael had taught himself to slouch.

  “How’d you find out about Mrs. Plank’s piano?” Michael asked Lizzie. His fingers were already twitching.

  “I saw it when I trick-or-treated at her house.”

  “We can but try,” Mom said again. She watched Michael’s fingers play inaudible scales on the couch cushions. “I didn’t realize how much you missed it, hon. If this doesn’t work, we’ll find another way.”

  “Well,” said Lizzie, “aside from not playing the piano, what do you do for fun?”

  “Read,” Michael said. Oh no. Way to brand himself as an utmost geek. He needed a save. “Walk around and look at things.” Jeez, almost as dorky.

  “Do you walk at night?”

  “Sure.”

  “Don’t do that here. Lots of people have big dogs here, and they let them loose at night.”

  “Aren’t there any leash laws?” Mom asked.

  Lizzie frowned. “Well, that’s the thing. People are encouraged to let the dogs loose at night, because there’s other things that come out at night.” She sucked on her lower lip, then said, “Okay, we don’t usually mention this so soon after you get here, but I like you guys, so I’m going to tell you right up front. Things come up through the gorse at night. They make noises. They do nasty things. Stay inside, okay? People disappear at night. If anybody asks, we say the riptides carried them away, but that’s not what happens. We lose people here every year.”

  “Heavens,” said Mom. “You’re not pulling our leg, are you, Liz?”

  “I’m not serious about much, but I’m serious about this. Michael, Mrs. Welty, don’t leave the house after dark, unless it’s to go to your car and drive someplace with lights around it, like the supermarket or a restaurant. Don’t let Mr. Welty wander around after dark either, okay?”

  “You went trick-or-treating,” Michael said.

  “Halloween’s different. All the kids go out in big groups, and we make a lot of noise, and take dogs and grownups with weapons with us. We scare the Strangers off that night.”

  Michael and Mom exchanged glances.

  Lizzie set her teacup on the coffee table and stood, dusting off her pants. “Ignore me if you want,” she said in a flattened tone.

  “No, wait, Lizzie,” Michael said. He followed her to the front door. “Give us another chance. We’re new. We don’t know what’s going on around here. Thanks for warning us.”

  Lizzie turned the front doorknob, paused with the door open. She stared at him without expression for what felt like ten minutes, then, finally, smiled. “Hey. I’ll take you to the library. How about that?”

  “That would be great.”

  Lizzie darted back and grabbed another handful of cookies. “Thanks, Mrs. Welty.”

  “You’re welcome. Thank you for the introduction to the neighborhood. I’m going to bake now, kids. Michael, be home before five, okay?”

  “Sure, Mom.”

  Michael left his bedroom window open a crack that night. He lay in the dark and listened to the pulse of the waves beating against the sand. It took him a long time to fall asleep. The waves’ murmur terrified and thrilled him, the same way the smell of the salty air here had affected him when Dad had turned the station wagon off the highway and into town. He had smelled and tasted the sea, and his heart speeded; his skin tingled, hairs rising, bumps goosing. Even now, two blocks from the ocean, sea sound, sea scent kept him awake.

  Was there a voice under the surface of sound, whispering his name?

  Dogs barked in the street outside. He turned over and put the pillow over his head. More barking in the distance, and then the sound of a chase.

  A town where he and Mom couldn’t go out after dark? One of the things they did to learn about new communities was to wander the streets in the dark and study uncurtained windows, talking over the lives they glimpsed. Living rooms with lots of pictures of family on the walls always gave Michael a strange lost feeling; he hadn’t told Mom about that. They had a few pictures of the three of them on the wall at home, mostly taken when Michael was six, seven, eight. Nothing recent. Dad was gone so much, traveling his sales territory, signing up new accounts, servicing the old ones. He was so successful the company kept moving him into territories where other people had failed. In fact, he had already gone on another trip, leaving Michael and Mom to unpack. They were used to that.

  Once while she was talking to Dad on the phone, Mom had said it didn’t matter if they moved with him, since he was never home anyway. Then she had gasped and covered her mouth with her hand, glanced at Michael to see if he had heard. He pretended he was so engrossed in his comic book he hadn’t, but it had haunted his mind ever since.

  Only the three of them, together, more or less, everywhere they went. No pictures of Mom’s or Dad’s parents, siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles. Were Mom and Dad orphans too?

  “Michael,” a voice whispered at his window.

  Michael sat up. Who—

  “Michael.”

  It was hard to recognize a whisper. Who did he know in Random who wasn’t already in the house with him? Only Lizzie, and a few people she had introduced him to. Lizzie said she never went out at night. Was that just a dodge to keep Mom from suspecting that Lizzie wanted to invite Michael out for a midnight walk?

  “Lizzie?”

  “Michael.”

  Michael pulled on his robe and crept to the window. “Lizzie?”

  The window slid wide and a face peered at him over the sill.

  In the semidarkness, he couldn’t really see the face, but he smelled a wet, salt, fish smell, nothing like Lizzie’s vanilla scent.

 
“No,” whispered the face.

  “Who are you?” Michael took two steps back, reached for a weapon. He couldn’t find a thing. Most of his possessions were still in boxes. The floor was chill under his feet; a worm of cold twisted in his stomach. Something about the person, the face, the whispering voice, something was not right.

  “A friend.”

  “Come back during the day if you’re really my friend,” Michael said. He darted forward and slammed the window shut, then ran out into the hall, slamming his bedroom door behind him.

  His mother rushed out of her room. “What’s the matter?”

  “Something at my window,” he said, his breathing ragged.

  “Should we call the police?” She took his arm and tugged him toward the master bedroom.

  “I don’t know.”

  Mom dragged Michael into her room and shut and locked the door, then got the baseball bat from the floor beside her bed. Her breathing was harsh in the darkness. “Tell me,” she said.

  “It was a person, Mom. I left my window open a crack, and someone called me. Whispered my name. Mom … .”

  He felt her hand tremble on his arm. “All the doors are locked, right?” she asked.

  He nodded. When Dad wasn’t home, which was most nights, it was Michael’s job to check every door and window before he and Mom went to bed, and he had never forgotten since the night they had a breakin, back when they were living in Los Angeles. Everything was so much scarier when Dad wasn’t home. Someone had come into their apartment, but Michael had heard him and run to Mom’s room, where they locked themselves in the bathroom and screamed until one of the neighbors beat on the wall and another called the police. By the time they came out of the bathroom the intruder had fled. He had taken Mom’s jewelry box, but he hadn’t taken anything else.

  The jewelry box was where Mom had kept the things that reminded her of her life before. Michael remembered playing with her “pretties” when he was a little kid. She had let him take one piece of jewelry out at a time and look at it. She had had a charm bracelet with tiny gold sea creatures on it, some of them as strange as monsters from outer space. His favorite of all the things she had had, gone now.

  Ever since, Michael had been compulsive about checking doors and windows nightly, sometimes checking three or four times to make sure. On nights when he felt particularly restless, he had to get up after a while and check again. Tonight he remembered the particulars; it was always that way in a new house the first few times he made his rounds.

  “The doors were all locked. My window was only open an inch,” he said. “There was this voice.”

  “The voice of a person who knew your name?”

  “Yes. He said ‘Michael, Michael.’ I asked if he was Lizzie, and he said no. He said he was a friend.”

  “Was it someone you met when you were out with Lizzie today? How did you know it was a man?”

  “I’m not sure.” He thought back to the day they had just had. Lizzie had taken him to the library, where they met her least favorite librarian, and then over to Bob’s Burger Grill, where she said the high school kids went after school, and sometimes during school. She had introduced him to Bob, a genial bearded man who had welcomed him to the community and shook his hand so hard his fingers felt crushed. After he squished Michael’s hand, Bob had introduced Michael to a few of the kids in the restaurant, most of whom had acted completely not interested.

  Lizzie told Michael later that most of the kids their age were gone for the summer. Off for obligatory time with noncustodial parents, summer camp, visiting relatives, camping, Disneyland—everybody was trying to get in one last spree before September crashed down on them. Everybody still in town was some kind of loser.

  Michael had carefully avoided looking at Lizzie when she said that. They were climbing onto their bikes, anyway, so he had an excuse to focus on something else. They rode half a block before she burst out laughing and nudged his shoulder. “You were supposed to give me this look,” she said, “or make an L on your forehead, you know? You’re no fun!”

  “Oh, yes I am!” He surprised himself and her with how loudly he spoke. He had lived in too many different places, started over too many times. He knew these early impressions set in cement, locked around his feet; he’d be dragging them around with him the rest of the time he lived here, especially if they only stayed half a year. He wouldn’t have time to change people’s minds. “Well, okay, that’s no way to prove it,” he said, “so never mind. Give me another shot.”

  “Maybe,” Lizzie said in a teasing voice. “Anyway, everybody at Bob’s was in the Ick Clique today. I’d introduce you to some of my real friends, but they’re all gone this weekend. Let’s go to the beach.”

  “The beach,” Michael muttered.

  Lizzie, ahead of him, had glanced back. “Oh, yeah. Your mom said you don’t like the beach, huh? We could just go to the park and look at the beach.”

  “Okay.”

  They rode on a pitted street between looming, dusty hedges of yellow-flowered scotch broom. She took him to a wayside where tourists’ cars could pull over and people could look at the beach without going down to it. There were wonderful standing stones on Random Beach, many like giant black teeth sticking up out of the sand and the water, a rock with an arch in it that looked like a Star Trek prop for a dimensional portal, another flat rock a little way offshore covered with fat slug-shaped creatures Lizzie told him were sea lions.

  Then, of course, there was the water.

  He had thought he’d be all right, standing on the cliff above the sea, far out of the reach of waves. The gulls cried as they circled in the air above, or swooped down to search tourist garbage. The waves whooshed, foaming, to the shore, then pulled away again. People walked and ran on the sand below, some tossing things for dogs to chase. Lizzie had pushed past him and taken a path out along the tops of some rocks, but Michael stayed at the viewpoint and just watched the water, wondering why he was afraid of it.

  A thud had tripped in his chest, a thump, then another, slow footprints of something walking through him. His sight wavered: the sun-shod surface of the water vanished, and beyond it he saw—curls and currents, abysses and clouds, depths and darkness and flying creatures, a whole hollow world outlined by sound pulses—

  He rubbed his eyes furiously until he could open them and not see it. “Lizzie!” he had yelled. “I’m going home!”

  She had come back then, and they rode home.

  He hadn’t spoken to anyone but her at the wayside.

  Nobody from their visit to Bob’s would consider him a friend yet, right? He doubted anybody he had met there would even remember his name. Well, except maybe Bob. Bob had a great memory for names, Lizzie said. Was Bob the type to cruise around after dark and speak to people through barely open windows? Michael didn’t think so, but he didn’t even know the guy.

  “I don’t think it was anyone I met today,” he told his mother.

  She picked up her baseball bat. “You get the big flashlight. Let’s go check it out.”

  He got the four-cell flashlight from her closet. They crept through the house in darkness, Michael going a little ahead of his mother. With her at his back, he wasn’t so afraid, even though he knew that didn’t make a lot of sense. Well, she had the baseball bat.

  They eased open his bedroom door and waited, staring toward the pale square of curtained window beyond his bed. No sounds. No voice. They sneaked up to his window and looked out. Ambient light revealed that there was nothing outside but dark lawn and bushes.

  Michael switched on the flashlight, opened the window, leaned out. Footprints patterned the soft dirt of the empty flowerbed below. He swept the beam over the dirt. Something was wrong with the footprints.

  Mom leaned out the window beside him. “That’s odd,” she said.

  “What is?” Michael focused the light on one clear print.

  “The toes,” said Mom. “They’re—they’re too long, and what’s that between them?�
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  They stared at the ground. Michael moved the light, shifting the shadows, and the strangeness in the footprint vanished.

  “We’ll look at it tomorrow,” Mom said. “For tonight, let’s lock the window, and you spend the night in my room.”

  He lay on the floor in his parents’ bedroom, zipped into his mummy bag, and stared at the ceiling. Mom had left one light on. She tossed and turned in the bed. They didn’t speak. He wasn’t sure whether she slept before dawn lightened the windows beyond her curtains, but he knew he didn’t.

  Morning came. They headed for different bathrooms, then went to his room again together.

  When they opened the window to look out, the soil of the flower bed had been swept clean.

  “We could board up your window,” Mom said as she buttered toast.

  “I couldn’t live in a room with boarded-up windows.” He always felt restless and panicky in enclosed spaces.

  “Well, okay, put shutters on them. You could open those during the day.”

  “We could do what Lizzie says everybody else here does. Get a dog.”

  Mom sat at the table across from him. Michael ate a big bite of cereal. He knew he should have kept his mouth shut on that particular topic. Mom was giving him the thousand-yard stare she always unleashed when he mentioned something unforgivable. He had asked for a dog many times over the years. She had gotten tired of telling him that they moved too much.

  Finally, Michael said, “Okay. How about a burglar alarm?”

  “Stronger locks. Let’s go to the hardware store and get stronger locks. I’ll get you a baseball bat of your own, too. I guess the other thing would be that for now, you sleep in my room.”

  “Ouch,” he said. His back hurt this morning. A hot shower had helped, but not enough.

  “We could pick up an air mattress for you.”

  “What about talking to the police?”

  “There’s no evidence that anyone was ever here.”

  “We could ask them if there’s peeping Toms.”

  Mom turned away, munched meditatively on a corner of toast. She never liked to talk to police. “How about we go to the Chowder House for lunch and talk to Gracie?” she said. Gracie was the restaurant manager. Mom had met Gracie when she and Dad drove over from Idaho to buy the house. “Gracie knows everything.”