Elemental

by Steven Savile

  “What?”

  Should he tell her? She’d forbid him to try to tape the Strangers, he was pretty sure. It might be dangerous—though how it could be, when he had nailed the window shut, he wasn’t sure. She wouldn’t want to take chances even in the name of science and detection. “Just something.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “Leave the bedroom doors open.”

  He went through the house and checked every door and window to make sure they were closed tight and locked. He checked the stove: all the burners were off. Then he slipped into his bedroom, leaving the door ajar and the lights off, grabbed the little tape recorder, and sat on the rug by his bed, a couple feet from the window. He had left the curtains open. Cool, damp, salty air flowed in through the crack.

  Time inched by. The curtains fluttered as a damp breeze played with them. Outside was faintly lit by an orange street light. What if the Strangers didn’t come? What if it was all some big hoax, some weird way to welcome newcomers to town, scare the crap out of them and laugh later? Quite a collaboration, though, with Gracie in on it, and Lizzie, and everybody on the block who had hesitated to answer their knock tonight, then ducked back into their houses a little too quickly for politeness.

  “Michael.”

  The silhouette of a head showed in the window against the copper-edged night. Michael startled, then pressed the Record button on the tape recorder.

  “What?” he said in a low voice.

  “Michael.” It was a whisper. Maybe it was too faint for his recorder to pick up.

  “What?”

  “Come here.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea. People have been telling us about you.”

  “What did they say?”

  Michael wished it would speak with a voice instead of a whisper. He couldn’t tell if it was male or female.

  “They said you’re Strangers and you lure people to their deaths.”

  The shadow laughed. It turned sideways. Its profile was strange. Something spiky lay along the top of its head.

  It turned back. “Sometimes we do,” it said.

  “What do you want with me? I don’t want to go to my death.”

  “We want you to come home.”

  “What?”

  “Come home, Michael. You’ve been so long away.”

  Cold crept through his gut, arrowed up his spine.

  “We lost you long ago. We couldn’t reclaim you until now. Come home, Michael.”

  “What are you saying?” Michael whispered. He crept closer to the window.

  “Come outside and we will show you.” Then it hissed something, louder than its whisper, but not a simple hiss, something that divided into syllables and tones. Galvanized, Michael straightened. A hiss, but words, and he could almost translate—

  Another hiss, a stroke, a caress. His name, but not Michael.

  “Come back to us,” whispered the voice, followed by the hiss Michael almost recognized.

  “Michael!” Mom’s voice was a yell from his doorway.

  Mom switched on the light, and Michael dropped the tape recorder. Something pale, with spots of green glow where eyes should be, stared in through the window at them; then it was gone.

  He rewound the tape recorder at the kitchen table while Mom made cocoa.

  There was a lot of hissing silence on the tape, interrupted by his own voice, saying, “What?” “What?” “I don’t think that’s a good idea … .”

  “How could you?” Mom asked. “What were you thinking?”

  “I wanted to find out what it wants.”

  “Why?” She brought filled mugs to the table, set one in front of him.

  “What are you saying?” Michael’s voice said from the tape recorder. A murmur that he could almost hear, and then a burst of hissing that was definitely loud enough to record—

  “Is that its voice?” Mom asked.

  “Shh!” Michael rewound and listened to the hisses again. Rewound, listened again. Again.

  He pressed the stop button and sat with his hand on the tape recorder.

  “What is it?” Mom asked.

  The time and the chance for change has come again at last. Come back to us, Ssskzz. Come home.

  Michael shook his head.

  “That’s it, isn’t it? That hissing? Gracie was right. When I turned on the light and saw that face, oh my God, Michael, oh, my God, and you were talking to it?” The resurgence of her hysteria swept over them both. She had babbled like this just after she had looked into his room; it had taken him fifteen minutes to calm her. “We can’t stay here. We can’t stay here. No matter how nice the neighbors are, we can’t stay here. It’s a good thing we didn’t finish unpacking. I’ll get a U-Haul tomorrow morning and we’ll head inland. We could go back to Idaho. Things like this never happened there, and our house hasn’t sold yet … .”

  “Mom,” Michael said.

  She took three gulps of cocoa and a few deep breaths. “I’m going to call your father.” She went to the phone, stared at the itinerary Dan had printed out and taped on the wall before he left on his trip, and dialed. “Daniel Welty’s room, please … . Hello? Who is this? What? What? Is Dan there? He is? Tell him it’s his wife on the phone, and I don’t care what kind of meeting he’s in, I need to talk to him right now.” She held the phone away from her ear and muttered, “Sales associate, my ass.”

  Michael turned down the volume on the recorder, rewound it, and played it again, holding it up to his ear. There were nuances in the words that a simple translation couldn’t catch, a strain of loss, a thread of opportunity, a breath of hope and longing, a whisper of welcome.

  “Don’t even bother trying to explain, Dan. I don’t care what bimbo you’re with. Michael and I are in a crisis here. We can’t stay in Random. We’re moving tomorrow morning. What? No. Why does everything have to be about you?”

  Michael stood up and eased out of the room. His mother’s back was to him; he was sure she didn’t notice he was gone. He went to the front door and slid the chain sideways, eased it off, then opened the deadbolt. He clicked up the pushbutton lock on the doorknob and stood, his hand wrapped around the doorknob, and waited.

  How could he leave her? Dad had been leaving Mom more and more, in increments, leaving them both for longer trips, with shorter visits in between, moving them around like knights on a chessboard, then leaving them behind. Mom and Michael depended on each other. He couldn’t leave her.

  He had to find out what the Stranger had been talking about. Did it really know who he was, where he came from? Could it tell him? He had to—

  The doorknob turned in his hand. He eased the front door open and stepped out onto the porch.

  But what about Gracie, and Lizzie, and all the new neighbors? What about Mrs. Plank, and permission to play the piano? What about a whole town that knew it had strange neighbors, and worked around them? What if the Strangers really ate people, and everything it said had been designed to lure him out of the house and into the open air, where it could net him, gut him, and take his fillets home for its children to snack on?

  What about Mom?

  It stood to his left before he noticed its approach, a tall, shadowed figure that smelled strongly of fish and brine and dripped on the boards of the porch.

  “Wait,” he said. “I just want to talk.”

  “We want to free you,” it whispered.

  “From what?”

  “From the chains of this limited existence. You’ve suffered enough.”

  “What do you mean? I’m not suffering.”

  “Aren’t you? Trapped in this thin atmosphere that can’t even support you? Glued feet downward to this dirt? Deaf to the feel of sounds? Come home, where every breath is a taste and every movement a touch. Come home. Your family longs for you.”

  “I can’t leave Mom. I don’t even know you. Everyone here says you hurt people. How can I trust you?”

  “Look in your heart. Walk with us, Michael, and we will teach you how to fly.�
��

  “Michael,” said another. He glanced over and saw a second shadow. Three more materialized at the foot of the front porch stairs. They all peered up at him, slender forms with wrong-shaped heads. He felt it, then, the beat of a second heart in his chest, the thud of another system inside. It started slowly, but it accelerated as he stood among them.

  “Michael!” Mom screamed from inside the house. “Michael! Where are you? Michael!” She flung open the door, letting house light fan across the creatures, and then she screamed, a loud, high, mindless shriek, heavy with woe.

  “Come. Come quickly,” said the one beside him, as the others melted into the darkness.

  “No,” Michael said.

  It touched his left hand, and its wet touch burned, seared him like magnified sunlight. The burning spread across the back of his hand, sank down into his flesh all the way to his bones. The pain was excruciating; tears spilled from his eyes to cool on his cheek.

  The creature vanished. The pain faded too.

  “Mom.” Michael turned and pushed his mother back into the house, shut the door behind them.

  “Michael.” She clung to him and sobbed.

  He held her with his right arm. “Come on, Mom. Come on.” He walked her back to the kitchen, where the phone’s handset hung from the wall, a voice still squawking from it.

  Michael eased his mother into a chair and picked up the phone. “What is it?” cried his father’s voice. “What’s going on? Was that a scream? Caroline, are you all right?”

  “Dad, I’m hanging up now,” Michael said.

  “No, wait! Wait, Michael! What’s going on there? What’s wrong with your mother?”

  Michael cradled the handset and sat down in a chair facing his mother’s. He took her hands. Her breath hitched. Her face was pale, and her hands trembled in his grasp. She stared down at their hands, snatched her right hand out of his grasp. He looked down.

  His left hand had stopped burning, but it had changed. The skin had bleached from tan to shiny gray-blue, and its texture had gone from callused, with hairs on the backs of his biggest knuckles, to smooth, almost rubbery. Worst was what stretched between his fingers: drooping flaps of skin. He spread his fingers and watched the flaps tighten. His hand looked like an abbreviated bat wing; even his fingernails had changed, darkened and hardened into claws.

  He gasped and shook his hand as though he could shed the change like a glove.

  His mother had covered her face with her free hand, but she grasped his normal hand hard in her other hand. She was still crying. She straightened, lowered her concealing hand, caught a deep breath, hiccuped her way through a brief flurry of sobs, then rose from the chair and pulled him to the sink. “Maybe it’ll wash off,” she said. She gripped his altered hand and thrust it under a stream of warm tap water.

  The flow of water across the new skin was strange and exciting. Its touch mesmerized him; he could feel the flutter of current, sense the braided pulses of it. He spread his fingers, and the soft water stroked across the webs between. He knew if he cupped his hand a certain way so that water would push on it, it would carry him—

  Mom turned his hand under the water, scrubbed at it with dish soap and the soft side of a sponge. It didn’t change. Gently he pulled his hand out of her grip and turned off the faucet, went to the cupboard, grabbed a glass, filled it with water, and handed it to her. She blinked tears, then drank half the glass. She offered him the rest. He took it in his good hand and drank, felt his own bumpy breathing grow steady again.

  “Should we go to the hospital?” she asked him.

  He hid his new hand behind his back, then sighed, pulled it forward, and stared down at it. He turned it so he could study the palm, spread his fingers. A few creases defined where it could bend, but the intricate whorls of his identity had been erased. He closed it into a fist. The extra skin made his fist into a new kind of gesture, bulbous, with pale pleats separating the fingers, not a hitting hammer but something else. Mom ran her fingertips over the outside of it, stroked the folds of new skin. He moaned with delight, and she stopped, startled, stared at him.

  He hid the new hand behind his back again.

  “Does it hurt?” she asked.

  “Not anymore. Mom—the hospital—I don’t know. I don’t think it’s that kind of injury.”

  The phone rang.

  They stared at each other.

  She swallowed. “Probably Dan,” she said. “What do we tell him?”

  His stomach churned. Had Dad really been with some woman when Mom called? What did it mean? Maybe it was innocent. It sounded like Dad had said it was. But he was gone so much. Family meant Mom and Michael now.

  “It’s up to us,” he muttered.

  Mom picked up the phone. “Hi,” she said. “Oh! Hi. It’s Rosie, Liz’s mom,” she told Michael, then spoke to the phone. “No, we’re all right.” She listened, covered the phone’s pickup with her hand, spoke to Michael. “They heard me scream, but they couldn’t come over. They tried to call, but the line was busy.” She listened, her gaze on the ground. “Yes,” she said. “They were here.”

  She listened. “Yes. Well, it’s complicated. We don’t understand it ourselves yet.” She touched Michael’s new hand, cupped her hand around it. “Maybe. We don’t know. Yeah, thanks for calling. I appreciate it. Thanks. We’ll talk to you tomorrow.” She let go of Michael’s hand, fetched the shopping list with its pencil on a string, and wrote something down. “Thanks, Rosie. Good night.” She hung up.

  They sat in silence side by side at the table. At last Mom sighed. “We never knew where you came from.”

  “You always said a coast town.”

  “Yeah. We didn’t go through regular channels to get you. Dan and I had been trying for years to have a baby of our own, but we couldn’t, even with medical help. One night one of Dan’s friends came over. Uncle Mike, remember? He’d just got home from a sales trip. He had you with him. You were so solemn and quiet, and you had such big eyes. You were the most beautiful little boy. Mike said you were his nephew and your parents were dead, but he couldn’t keep you, and he knew how much Dan and I wanted a baby. I just said yes, yes, yes, and you were ours. Dan handled the paperwork.” She looked toward the stove, then shook her head. “Mike said you were born in Seaside. I always figured there was something suspicious in how he got you, but I didn’t want to know. I wanted to keep you. But I was always afraid somebody would come after us and take you back. That’s why I haven’t minded moving so often. Guess our luck ran out this time.”

  She rested her hand on the back of his new hand. “How did this happen?”

  “It touched me. It was wet. It burned.”

  “When they were hissing at you, could you really hear words in it?”

  “Hissing?”

  “Hissing. I was screaming, and I—but one of them made these hissing, clacking sounds before they all—and you answered.”

  “Hissing.” He reached for the tape recorder. He rewound it and played the first thing the Stranger had said that he understood. Come home. “I do understand it.” Had his whole conversation on the porch been in this language?

  “Those are your people,” Mom said, her voice incredulous. She laughed. And then she let out a little sob, and rubbed her eyes.

  “Mom.” He wrapped his right arm around her shoulders, hugged her.

  She struggled, then subsided. “I’m so tired.”

  “Me, too.”

  Michael changed into pajamas in the bathroom. He studied his new hand. The change in his skin had traveled past his wrist, raggedly up his forearm; it was not as though a circle delineated one part of him from another. He ran water into the sink and flapped the new hand around in it. He felt vectors, movement, change, powers. Once both his hands were like this, he would be able to—

  He drained the water quickly, brushed his teeth, slipped under the blankets on the air mattress in Mom’s room. She turned out the light. “Please,” she whispered in the darkness. “Don’t
leave without saying good-bye.”

  He thought about sneaking off to his room to talk to the Strangers, but eventually he slept instead.

  When he opened his eyes, Mom was sitting near the mattress, hugging her knees and watching him. The curtains were open, and morning light slanted across the floor behind her, touched her graying hair and a small patch of her cheek and brow. She smiled when she saw he was awake.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “It’s a mother thing. How’s your hand?”

  He slid his left hand out from under the blankets, and they both studied it. It was still changed. He sat up, using both hands to balance. Together, they supported him. He glanced at Mom. Her face wore a mixture of sad and worried and tired.

  “What do you want for breakfast?” she asked.

  Usually she let him get his own breakfast. She only asked on special occasions, like on the birthday they’d chosen for him.

  “Pancakes.”

  She stood. “Do you even have a swimsuit?”

  He couldn’t follow her mental jumps. “No.” Open water had always terrified him.

  “Guess you won’t need one. I don’t think they were dressed.” She left the bedroom, and he got up, wondering. The new hand worked as well as the other one, with only a few minor awkwardnesses when he snagged his webs on things.

  In the kitchen, she set a plate of pancakes in front of him, and he grabbed his knife and fork, then stared at the new hand. The fork didn’t feel natural in it. He switched the fork to his right hand and used it to cut, abandoning the knife. He tried pouring syrup with his left hand, and managed to get most of it on the plate. Mom watched behind a blank face.

  Lizzie knocked at the kitchen door when they were halfway through their first plates of pancakes. She stared in at them. Michael hid his hand in his lap as Mom got up to let Lizzie in.

  “What happened last night? Are you all right?” Lizzie asked as she came inside. “Mama said you were okay, but I saw the Strangers on your porch. What happened? You’re still here. Oh, God.”