Five Elements #1

by Dan Jolley

  And that Gabe and his friends had somehow unlocked that power?

  Am I losing my mind?

  The truth was, Gabe had been feeling sort of off ever since he’d touched the “Emerald Tablet.” Every time he even thought about the glimpses of the warped version of San Francisco he’d seen—twice now—a hollow pit formed in his belly. He didn’t know why, but seeing that place felt like . . . what would he call it? An omen? Like a sign of terrible things to come. But seeing the city’s evil twin didn’t have anything to do with the elements, did it?

  Did it?

  Gabe turned back to his friends. “What that Jackson kid said. Have you guys felt anything else weird lately? I mean other than the stuff with the book.”

  Kaz blinked at him. “And being chased out of an old prison by a ghost?”

  “Yes, Kaz, aside from that. I mean, like he said. Stuff with the, uh . . . the elements.”

  Lily said, “Well . . . ,” and stopped. Shook her head.

  Kaz eyeballed her. “‘Well’? Well what?”

  “When we were on the ferry, on the way out to the island, and everything went crazy with the, uh, rogue wave? Well, right before we stopped . . .”

  Gabe flashed back to the sight: Lily, standing as solid as a tree on the deck, her arms thrown up defensively just before the ferry slowed down.

  “I kind of felt like, um, I might have had something to do with that. Like, with that big gust of wind. We were going way too fast, so I imagined running into a wall of air, like something from a hurricane, that would slow us down. I thought about it enough that I could kinda feel it. Then I guess it sort of happened. I don’t know how.”

  “Wind. And air was the element you chose for the friendship ritual.”

  What was the element Gabe had chosen for himself? That’s right, fire. He had a sudden memory of the sensation of the sun beating down on him; the flames searing into his skin.

  Could it be a coincidence?

  Kaz stared at Lily, and at Gabe, and for just a second at Brett. But Brett was still checked out. Jumping to his feet, Kaz waved his hands and bugged his eyes out at them. “Do you guys hear yourselves? Do you know how absolutely insane this sounds?”

  Gabe shrugged. “Then how do you explain it? Mass hysteria?”

  “Yes! Maybe! Who knows, it could have been something with that weird green book! It made us pass out, didn’t it? Maybe it also made us hallucinate!”

  Wearily, Lily said, “Kaz, I want an explanation just as much as you do. But didn’t you say you felt something weird with the ground on the island?”

  Kaz stuck out his chin. “So? You’re talking about . . . what, ‘feeling the air’?”

  Lily spread her hands. “So if the book makes us hallucinate, why isn’t it doing it all the time? Why me one time, and you twenty minutes later, and not Brett at all, especially when he’s the one lugging it around in his backpack?”

  Gabe pursed his lips. He walked over to Brett and felt intense relief that his friend’s eyes had dried. Now Brett just looked exhausted. “Hey. I think we ought to take another look at the Tablet.” Gabe couldn’t help picturing the word with a capital T now. Brett motioned toward the backpack sitting at his feet, not looking at Gabe or anyone else. Gabe took that as permission, opened the backpack, and pulled out the Tablet.

  Whoa. It feels . . . hot? But no. The heat faded, so quickly he couldn’t tell whether he’d imagined it.

  One thing he wasn’t imagining, though, as he moved it around under one of the cabin’s interior lights. The Tablet didn’t cast a shadow. Another layer of weird to go with everything else.

  He sat down next to Brett and beckoned Kaz and Lily over.

  “What are you doing?” Lily asked.

  “Just checking.”

  “Oh yeah, great idea,” Kaz grumbled as he took a seat next to Gabe. “Let’s all get another dose of Mystery Mind Fog.”

  Gabe’s hands trembled a little. He clenched his fists until the shaking stopped. Then he opened the Tablet to one of its thick, yellowed pages covered in the same brilliant red-orange, spiky script he’d seen before. It wasn’t even script, really. More like glyphs and symbols. Even though he couldn’t make heads or tails of them, Gabe thought they looked familiar somehow.

  He flipped back to the very first page of the book—and, letting out a yelp, almost dropped it.

  Fire danced across the page. Actual fire. Not red-orange writing, not glyphs or symbols. Flames licked up from the page, dancing and crackling.

  “Gabe?” Lily sounded alarmed. “Gabe, what is it? What do you see?”

  “Fire,” he croaked. “The page is burning . . . and none of you guys see it, do you?”

  Kaz slowly shook his head. Lily did, too. Brett didn’t even turn around.

  “All right,” Gabe said, staring into the flames. “What do you see?”

  Kaz took several seconds to answer. “It’s made of stone. Granite, I think. And moss is growing in a couple of cracks in the surface.”

  Lily reached forward, her hand turning and curving above the Tablet. She smiled. How long has it been since any of us smiled? It felt like a lifetime. “It’s air. I can see it! There’s a little bit of fog, and it’s spinning and flowing and—” Tears started in her eyes. “Guys, it’s beautiful. Even more than the silver script I saw before. I wish you could see what I’m seeing.”

  That almost settled it. Almost. “Brett?”

  Brett turned and glared at the surface of the book as if it were a venomous snake. “Water,” he spat. “It’s water, okay? It’s like looking into the freaking ocean. Satisfied?”

  Gabe felt a flush of heat rise inside him, his heart beating like crazy. “You guys get it, right? We’re all seeing the same elements we chose last night.” Are we all losing our minds? But Gabe knew that this wasn’t insanity.

  It was magick.

  Magick was real.

  Kaz exploded out of his seat, suddenly furious. “No! No! This is stupid! It’s worse than stupid! It’s impossible! This can’t be happening! It’s like you said to your uncle, Gabe—this stuff is all made up! It has to be! Don’t you understand?” He jabbed an accusing finger at the Tablet. “It’s that thing! That book! It’s, it’s, it’s radioactive or something! Messing with our heads! No wonder we’re all seeing things! You need to get rid of that book, Gabe! Throw it overboard! Do it! Do it now, or we’ll all die of radiation poisoning!”

  Gabe wasn’t about to throw one of Uncle Steve’s priceless books into the bay, but Brett made the decision for him. Stabbing a dangerous glare at Kaz, Brett took the Tablet out of Gabe’s hands and stuck it back into his backpack, which he then held close to his chest. He didn’t say the words “Come and take it, I dare you,” but he didn’t have to.

  Kaz sat back down, trembling.

  Gabe leaned his head back and closed his eyes. Kaz was right. Even the most far-fetched scientific explanation must be more likely than some sort of supernatural nonsense.

  But, much as he would’ve liked to, he couldn’t deny how he felt. This was like something out of one of Uncle Steve’s creepy old books.

  Something has changed.

  As the ferry approached the mainland, Gabe scanned the city’s skyline, remembering gnarled, twisted towers where clean glass skyscrapers now stood.

  They headed straight back to Gabe’s house. It was a somber group. The silence that had fallen after Kaz’s last outburst followed them off the ferry and stayed with them through the cable car ride and the hike up the sidewalk. But they all agreed, or in Brett’s case didn’t disagree, that something was wrong with them, and Uncle Steve seemed the best person to approach about it first. No one wanted to say it, but Gabe was pretty sure they were on the same page: if this was something supernatural, well, a professor of the occult ought to know what to do about it, right?

  Or, if Uncle Steve thought that they’d all been dosed with something, he could drive them to the ER. Either way, Gabe knew his uncle would be furious with them. Skipping sch
ool was just adding insult to injury. But there was no way around that, and Gabe realized that he really did want to apologize now. He would’ve given an awful lot to have had Uncle Steve there when everything happened on Alcatraz . . . and, much as he didn’t want to admit it, he really should have stayed out of his uncle’s office. Glancing up, Gabe saw dark, angry storm clouds gathering overhead and hoped they weren’t a sign of more awfulness to come.

  As they climbed the steps to his house, Gabe tried to rehearse in his mind what he’d say to Uncle Steve, but when he unlocked the door and stepped inside, every shred of thought vanished. He gasped and steadied himself against the doorframe, his knees suddenly weak.

  “Oh my God,” Lily said at his shoulder.

  Gabe had never seen anything like the sight that greeted him when he pushed the door open. The foyer and hallway had been demolished.

  The floor had exploded upward in multiple places, leaving craters that made the place look like a mine field. Big patches of the ceiling were charred black. All of Uncle Steve’s carefully packed cardboard boxes had been shredded, the contents strewn everywhere, so that the few undamaged sections of the floor were covered with ripped clothes and blackened papers. Gabe’s jaw dropped as he walked through, taking in the damage. And that was before he reached the kitchen. Some force had been unleashed there, so immense that it had reduced the whole rear quarter of the building to an impassable mass of rubble. The back door was just . . . gone.

  Why aren’t the police here? And fire trucks? Did none of the neighbors even hear this?

  “Uncle Steve? UNCLE STEVE! ARE YOU HERE?”

  The echoes that came back to him were all wrong. The place was wrecked so thoroughly, it didn’t even feel like his house anymore. A million questions jockeyed for position in Gabe’s reeling mind, but his worries about Uncle Steve trumped them all.

  “Gabe!” Kaz called out from the foyer. “Gabe, c’mere and look at this!”

  “In a minute!” Gabe said, dashing past Kaz and Lily and Brett. He took the stairs two at a time up to the second floor. The damage was just as bad up there, if not worse—as if multiple grenades had gone off under the floorboards—but after checking every room, Gabe came to a conclusion: his uncle wasn’t there.

  Thank God. He wouldn’t have survived if he had been. No one could have survived this.

  Gabe came back down the stairs, trying not to think about what he would’ve done if he’d found his uncle’s body. “What is it?”

  Kaz pointed at one of the craters in the floor. “Look in there.”

  Gabe walked over and peered into the hole. A symbol had been carved onto the subfloor: an odd, curving glyph similar to ones he’d seen in the Tablet, but dabbed in a silvery ink. “How . . . what . . . ? This looks like it’s been here for months.”

  “I know,” Kaz said. “But who would crawl around carving weird symbols under the floor?”

  Gabe had no idea. For the sake of his own sanity, he decided to focus on something else and looked over at Lily. “Is this what you were seeing? In the Tablet? Silver writing, all swirly and whatnot?”

  Lily nodded. “It’s the right color and shape, for sure, but something about it’s off.”

  Gabe frowned and squatted down next to the hole. He knew what Lily meant. He hadn’t seen the Air language in the Tablet, but the blazing script he had seen glowed with life. This symbol carved into the wood was just . . . sitting there. Inert. He wasn’t sure why, but he had the strong feeling that this glyph was dead. Used up. Drained of whatever energy it had once held.

  Gabe went to two other holes in the floor, and to his rapidly diminishing surprise, found similar glyphs beneath them, too. “How did these even get here? Were they here when we moved in?”

  Lily said, “There’s more.” She led Gabe over to a section of wallpaper that had come unglued from the buckled wall. Lily pulled it back even farther, revealing yet another dead, silver symbol, carved into the plaster.

  Gabe grabbed his head with both hands and squeezed his eyes shut. Whoever had done this—whatever had done this—to his house, they were obviously a lot more dangerous than some ordinary burglar, and it all tied back to that stupid Emerald Tablet, and where was Uncle Steve? “We’ve got to find him,” Gabe said in a strangled voice, and he must have looked even more upset than he felt, because Lily immediately took his arm as if he might faint dead away.

  Brett drifted by, his eyes unfocused. In a daze. Gabe couldn’t help it: he felt a flash of irritation that his strongest friend, a friend whose help he could really use right about now, was so . . . absent. “Brett.”

  Brett swung his head around at the sound of Gabe’s voice. “Huh?”

  “Dude, could you, like, at least try to focus here? My house is a war zone, and my uncle’s missing!”

  Brett blinked, and the damage to the floors, walls, and ceilings finally seemed to register on him. He rubbed the back of his neck with one hand and nodded. “Sorry. Yeah. What do you need? What can I do?”

  “We should keep looking around,” Kaz said. “See if we can find something that’ll tell us where Dr. Conway is, or who took him.”

  Gabe nodded. The room swam around him, and he blinked fast, trying to get rid of what he suddenly realized were scalding-hot tears. “Let’s start with the office.”

  Gabe led his friends up the stairs and into his uncle’s office. The whole room looked like a set from one of the horror movies the four of them loved to stay up late and watch together. Just like downstairs, the carefully packed moving boxes had been torn to shreds, and the empty bookcases were little more than piles of kindling. Picking through the debris, Gabe noticed something: every single one of the “artifacts” Uncle Steve had collected was missing. His computer was still there, knocked off the desk onto the floor, for what little that was worth.

  From a far corner Kaz made a tiny gagging noise.

  “Kaz?” Gabe went over to him. “You okay?”

  “I’m okay, yeah. But I can’t say the same for whatever that used to belong to.” Kaz pointed, and when Gabe saw what he was pointing at, he almost gagged himself.

  Lying in a pool of golden liquid was . . . a leg? That was the best Gabe could do to describe it: it looked like a large dog’s hind leg that had been ripped off the body. And more than that, he was pretty sure it had been skinned. Its muscle tissue and veins and tendons were all visible, running down to a set of wickedly sharp claws. Gabe leaned over to take a closer look, got a nose full of ripped-off-skinless-dog-leg funk, and jerked backward.

  Kaz said, “Yeah, I should’ve warned you about the smell. Do you think this came off whatever tore the house up?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t even . . . I don’t know how to make sense of this.”

  Oh yes you do. You’re going to have to admit your uncle was right all along. This is supernatural.

  Gabe couldn’t deny it any longer. Nothing from the real, normal world could have done this to his house.

  Lily said, “Gabe, let’s not think the worst, all right? Your uncle’s not here. He might not have been here when this happened. Let’s not assume something bad happened to him when we don’t know for sure, okay?”

  Gabe tried to latch on to what she was saying. Deep down, he knew his uncle loved him and that Steve was only so infuriatingly overprotective because of that. And even though Gabe never told him so, he loved his uncle, too. Uncle Steve was the only family Gabe had ever known.

  And Lily was right. Uncle Steve might not have been there at all when this happened. He might have gone back to the university. Or to get groceries. Or . . . or anywhere. He could come stomping through the front door any second now and demand to know what Gabe had done to his house while he was gone.

  From the desk, Brett cleared his throat. “Guys? I’ve got some bad news.”

  Gabe stumbled over to Brett, his legs working on autopilot, dread heavy in his gut. There on the floor under the desk lay Uncle Steve’s prosthetic leg, charred and bent and ruined. Gabe clappe
d a hand over his mouth to keep himself from crying out. There was no question, then: Uncle Steve had been here when the attack happened, and whoever did it had taken him. It wasn’t as if Uncle Steve would go somewhere without his leg!

  They took him . . . or . . . . Gabe thought about that other leg, lying severed and skinless in the corner.

  They took him . . . or they ate him.

  Gabe’s knees went weak. While he steadied himself on the edge of the desk, Lily knelt and picked up something partially hidden underneath more ruined papers. It was an old framed photograph, one Gabe had never seen before, of four people in out-of-date clothes and hairstyles. A crack in the glass ran directly across Uncle Steve’s face.

  “Who are they?” Lily asked.

  Gabe pointed at each person in turn. “That’s my dad. That’s my mom. And that’s Uncle Steve, except with a better haircut, and that’s . . . I don’t know who that is.” The person he didn’t know was a middle-aged woman with long, graying hair and very light-blue eyes.

  Kaz said, “Here, Brett, give me a hand with this, would you?” Gabe watched absently as Brett and Kaz gathered up the components of Uncle Steve’s computer, his mind on a desperate loop: Don’t think the worst. Don’t think the worst. Don’t think the worst.

  Please don’t be dead.

  The computer booted up, despite being sort of battered. Kaz peered at the monitor. “Holy crap.”

  Gabe blinked. “What?”

  “Look! Your uncle was in the middle of writing an email!”

  Kaz moved out of the way and let Gabe peer at the screen.

  FROM: dconway@supermail.com

  TO: greta.jaeger@brookhavenmed.org

  RE: Moving again

  Doc,

  It’s not safe to keep Gabe in SF anymore. I’ve got the house warded to a fare-thee-well, but the Dawn’s getting closer and closer. I can feel it in the air—you know what I’m talking about.

  I can’t begin to tell you how frustrating this is, either. I am SO CLOSE to getting answers about Aria’s location. But as always, safety is the most important thing. I