Five Elements #1

by Dan Jolley

  They’d stopped to buy cheap plastic ponchos, but those hadn’t done much good.

  Brett caught up to the others, huddled in a tight cluster at the back of the car. The storm had driven most people inside, and they nearly had the car to themselves. Brett was grateful for the isolation.

  The thought he’d had in the bedroom at Gabe’s house kept coming back to him. This is all my fault. Jackson’s instructions had seemed so simple at the time. But even with Ghost Boy’s warnings, Brett hadn’t pictured anything like this. Gabe’s home destroyed, Dr. Conway missing, and now they had some sort of demonic creatures after them? And those fake cops—would there be more?

  How did the fake cops know about the Emerald Tablet, anyway? The Tablet was right at the center of the deal Brett had made with Jackson. Go with his friends to Alcatraz, deliver the Tablet to Jackson, and then he’d get to see Charlie again; that’s what they’d agreed. Granted, things had gotten a little weird at Alcatraz, and he hadn’t managed to give Jackson the Tablet, but that wasn’t Brett’s fault. So where was his brother?

  It was creepy, too, how Jackson behaved totally differently in real life from the way he had in Brett’s dreams. In the dreams, Jackson was just a normal kid. Well, maybe not normal normal, since he was . . . Brett didn’t want to say “a ghost.” Formerly alive?

  A deceased citizen?

  Life-challenged?

  Brett fought back a giggle but sobered up quickly as he remembered all the weird things Jackson had said to them down in the underbelly of the prison. He was glad to have proof his Friend was real and not a figment of his imagination, but in person Jackson was kind of, well, scary. And angry. Why was he so angry?

  In any case, Brett intended to keep a very close eye on the Tablet until he got what was promised to him.

  He sidled up next to Gabe. His friend seemed to have recovered from the . . . thing that he did back at his house with the fire. Brett didn’t have the words to describe what he’d seen. What he’d felt. But his skin was still stretched a little more tightly than usual from being so close to such intense heat. Kaz might still not want to believe it, but even he was getting to the point where denying what was happening made a lot less sense than accepting it. They’d all seen it: Gabe could control fire.

  And if that was true, did it mean Lily controlled air and Kaz controlled . . . what, rocks? Is that why he thought he heard the ground snoring, back on Alcatraz? Brett stared out at the downpour. Why did I have to choose water? Doing penance for Charlie’s death by choosing the element for the friendship ritual was one thing, but being bound to it? Having it become a part of him? It was like something straight out of his nightmares.

  This had all gotten way out of control. Brett wanted to see Charlie more than anything, but he didn’t think he’d be putting his friends and sister in danger. If he had, he’d never have agreed to any of this.

  As it was, he already had more guilt than he could handle.

  “Dr. Jaeger will have answers,” Lily was telling Gabe. That was the lady Gabe’s uncle had been emailing before whatever happened at the house happened. “She’ll explain what’s going on and tell us what to do.”

  Gabe barely seemed to hear Lily. He aimed some words at no one in particular. “Ghost Boy knew those cops were no good.”

  Brett’s head snapped up. “What? You talked to Jackson again? When? Where?”

  “He showed up at my house. Right before I opened the door to those cops. He told me not to, and I ignored him.” Gabe looked up at the ceiling. “And if you’re listening now, you could’ve told me about the no-face-having monster dogs! That would’ve been okay!”

  Brett squeezed his eyes shut. Jackson had told him he couldn’t appear anywhere but Alcatraz. How many lies did he tell me? Unless there was another explanation. What if his Friend was getting more powerful? Maybe that meant he could do other things Brett didn’t know about. Maybe Jackson was still planning to deliver on Charlie! That had to be it. Their plan had just hit a little snag, that was all.

  Kaz pulled out his phone and tapped at it. “Dr. Jaeger’s hospital’s about half a mile’s walk from the end of the cable car line.”

  “That’s nothing!” Brett grinned. “It’ll take us, like, five minutes to walk there!” This grin was the real deal, now that he realized Jackson was still looking out for him. The deal was on. “Our ponchos will keep us dry. Well, mostly, anyway.”

  Kaz stared forlornly out the window at the waterlogged city. “We’ll probably catch pneumonia, the way this day is going.”

  Brett sighed.

  It turned out to be slightly more than a half mile from the cable car stop to the visitor’s entrance at the Brookhaven Medical Institute. None of them was happy about that, Kaz least of all, because he’d stepped in what he’d thought was a very shallow puddle and sunk in up to his knee. “I used to like these shoes,” Kaz had moaned. “They were good shoes. Now I’m going to have to take them out behind the woodshed and shoot them.”

  “You don’t have a woodshed,” Lily observed flatly.

  “I don’t have nice shoes anymore, either.”

  Brett had expected to hear nothing but how Kaz was definitely coming down with pneumonia, but when they arrived at Brookhaven, they all forgot about everything else. At first glance it looked like a huge, high-end hotel, with fancy brickwork and a sculpture garden off to one side. But then they got closer and took in the seventeen-foot-high, razor-wire-topped chain-link fence and the bars on the windows. A tasteful sign beside the main entrance sealed the deal: BROOKHAVEN INSTITUTE FOR PSYCHIATRIC REHABILITATION.

  Lily said it first: “This is an insane asylum!”

  “It doesn’t matter what it is,” Gabe said. “Uncle Steve’s email to Dr. Jaeger mentioned warding. Those were the protections around the house. Magickal protections. We’ve got to find out what she knows.”

  The four of them headed in through the main entrance. Brett didn’t like the looks of all the security around the place. What kind of patients did they have that they needed razor wire to keep them in? But they had to talk to Dr. Jaeger. If she knew what happened to Dr. Conway, Brett would be able to fix whatever kind of mess he’d accidentally landed his friends in.

  Kaz looked around, goggle-eyed, as they crossed the lobby. “This is just like the place where they kept Sarah Connor in Terminator 2!”

  Kaz was always referencing old movies Brett had never seen. Brett just kept his mouth shut.

  A tidy little area, sort of like a combination reception desk and nurses’ station, sat beside a very large, imposing, unquestionably locked door. A woman in scrubs looked up from filling out paperwork as they approached. “What can I do for you?” she asked. Brett thought she looked suspicious of them. Like she was thinking, “What the heck are you doing here? Maybe I should call your parents?”

  “We’re here to see one of your employees,” Gabe said. He was the best out of any of them at talking to adults.

  The nurse cocked an eyebrow and reached for a phone. “Oh? Who? I can let them know you’re here.”

  “Greta Jaeger.”

  The cocked eyebrow sank down into a frown. “Excuse me?”

  Gabe’s confidence seemed to take a hit, but he soldiered on: “Greta Jaeger? She’s a friend of my uncle’s.”

  “Oh, I highly doubt that, young man.”

  That stumped Gabe. Lily stepped up beside him and said, “I’m sorry, what do you mean by that? Gabe here, his uncle has been emailing Dr. Jaeger. She has a Brookhaven email address.”

  “Doctor Jaeger?” Now the nurse was the one who looked surprised. “She might well have been a doctor at some point, but I assure you that she’s not a doctor here.”

  “Wait, are you saying that she’s a—” Brett began to ask.

  “Patient. Yes.”

  Brett turned to his friends. They looked every bit as shocked as he felt.

  The nurse continued. “Now, I don’t know if this is supposed to be a joke or if you’re just extremely ill info
rmed, but if you think I’m going to let four children waltz in and talk to a murderer, you could not be more mistaken.”

  Brett felt all the blood drain out of his face and into the pit in his stomach. He looked over at his friends and saw the same reaction there.

  Murderer?

  What?

  Brett knew the name for the thing they all sat under. Porte-cochère. He’d had a huge crush on a girl named Melinda Stockard last year, and since she was taking French, he’d decided to learn a little bit himself. It turned out she liked some guy from her neighborhood who went to a snooty private school, but a few French words had stuck with Brett, anyway. Especially since French wasn’t that different from Spanish. Not that his Spanish was that great, much to his grandmother’s dismay.

  A porte-cochère was a covered area where cars could pull in out of the rain and drop off passengers. Sort of like a glorified carport. The one outside the Brookhaven Institute was particularly big and fancy, and had a fountain in the middle of it. He, Gabe, Lily, and Kaz all sat on the edge of the fountain, watching the rain fall and wondering what to do next. The rain wasn’t coming down quite as hard as it had been, but it was still plenty hard, and as steady as if someone had turned on a giant faucet somewhere in the sky above them. Brett wasn’t looking forward to the walk back to the cable car stop, but none of them had enough money for a taxi.

  “I don’t know,” Gabe was saying in response to some question from Lily that Brett hadn’t heard. “We can’t get in to see her, but we can’t just give up, can we? This is all we’ve got. Maybe we go to the FBI?”

  Kaz let out a bitter little laugh. “Do you even know where the FBI is?”

  Gabe shrugged. “They’ve got field offices, don’t they? There’s got to be one somewhere in San Francisco.”

  “Yeah,” Lily said glumly. “We go there and tell them what?”

  Brett drew a breath to speak—he thought maybe he could try a joke—but something caught his attention. He couldn’t tell what at first. It was like . . . a buzzing? An echo? Something he heard and felt at the same time, somewhere deep in his brain. Not a buzzing, but . . . a flow. Like the rush of a stream over rocks, drawing him to the surface of the fountain’s pool—

  —which was vibrating. Brett turned around to get a better look.

  His stomach went queasy.

  A glyph floated there under the water’s surface, just like it had on the ferry, and a stab of panic shot through his gut. What do I do, what do I do? But even as that thought ran through his mind, Brett’s hand lifted, half by itself. He knew what to do. Brett’s index finger traced the shape of the glyph in the air—and he yelped and jumped up from his seat.

  “What?” Lily demanded. “Brett, what’s wrong?”

  He used the same index finger to point at the water.

  His friends looked where he was pointing, and Kaz yelped even more loudly than he had. Gabe said, “Oh my God.” Lily came over to Brett and took his hand. Hers was trembling.

  A face floated there, just under the water, where the glyph had been. An older woman with long, stringy gray hair. Her cheeks were sunken, and her skin bore thousands of wrinkles, but her eyes gleamed with ferocious intelligence. Intelligence and purpose.

  The woman’s lips moved. Brett expected to hear words, but instead what sounded like whale song floated faintly up to him.

  “Who is that?” Lily whispered.

  “I think,” Gabe leaned closer to the water. “Oh, wow. That’s gotta be Greta Jaeger. Remember the photo in Uncle Steve’s office?”

  “She looks a lot older now.” Kaz peered over Gabe’s shoulder at the water. Brett got the feeling that was as close as Kaz was willing to get. “But I guess spending a few years in an insane asylum would age a person pretty fast, huh?”

  “It looks like she’s trying to talk to us.” Lily turned her head to put an ear nearer to the water’s surface. “That sound could be, like, really distorted words, couldn’t it?”

  Brett let out a low, pained groan as the realization struck him. “Guys . . . I think I’m going to have to put my head in there. In the water.”

  Lily drew back. “What? No! Brett, you don’t have to— I mean— What if she pulls you in?” Lily knew how he felt about the water.

  Brett shook his head. “I don’t get the feeling that she’s dangerous.” He swallowed hard. “I just know this is what I’m supposed to do.”

  Gabe nodded. “Because your element is water.”

  Brett wasn’t exactly pleased that he was the only one who could do this, but he was the one who’d gotten them into this mess. He had to do everything he could to get them out of it. “Wish me luck.” Before Lily could protest any further, Brett took a deep breath, leaned over the fountain, and stuck his head below the surface.

  He blinked a few times, surprised that the water didn’t irritate his eyes. On the contrary, suddenly Brett felt as though he could truly see, for the first time ever. And right in front of him, as if she were there in person, was Greta Jaeger.

  “H-hello?” Brett felt the air bubbles escape his lips and knew all he should have heard was a glub-glub sound, but instead his own voice sounded as clear as if he were on the stage of a concert hall.

  “Hello, Brett.” Greta Jaeger’s voice was low and kind of smoky. “The rain told me your name. The rain tells me many things.” Greta’s eyes slid sideways, as if she were looking at another person in the conversation. “Yes, I understand. We don’t have much time.”

  A thought crossed Brett’s mind: This lady is a patient in a mental hospital who says she talks to the rain. What am I doing?

  Greta Jaeger’s gaze came back to Brett. “I felt you tap into our element earlier today when you called up that wave in the bay.”

  Brett surged up out of the fountain, gasping. I called up that wave? He hadn’t wanted to admit it to himself, but deep down, he’d known all along. I almost crashed the ferry. I almost got us all killed!

  Lily was there at his shoulder, rapid-fire: “Well? Is it working? Can you hear her? What’s she saying?”

  “She knows my name.” Brett coughed. “She says the rain told her.”

  Lily, Gabe, and Kaz all started talking at once, asking question after question; but Brett waved them silent and plunged his head into the fountain again.

  Looking over Brett’s shoulder, Greta said, “Good heavens, you have a full circle! How is that possible?”

  What? Full circle? Brett managed, “Huh?”

  “Your companions. I can see them there. You’ve all been bound to the elements. And that means you’re all in terrible danger.”

  Brett came up, blowing water out of his nose, trying to suck as much air into his lungs as possible. He really, righteously hated the water, but he had to know more. He didn’t wait to hear any more of his friends’ questions before dunking his head again.

  It still wasn’t easy to talk underwater, but Brett persisted. “Why did the nurse say you were a murderer?”

  Greta drew back, hesitant. “Listen to me, Brett.” Her voice grew even lower, more intense. “Now is not the time to get into that.”

  “It’s the perfect time! How can we trust you if we don’t know the truth?”

  Greta looked over to the side again. She nodded curtly before turning back to Brett. “There was a terrible accident. It was tragic, but many different people were to blame.”

  Brett was about to say something else when Gabe’s head plunked down into the fountain next to him. Gabe looked around wildly, at both him and Greta, and tried to talk; but his words actually did come out sounding like glub-glub-glub. Gabe pulled his head back out, and Brett followed him, filling his lungs.

  “What was that about?” Brett demanded.

  “I just wanted to talk to her.” Gabe wrung water out of his hair and sneezed violently. “For all the good it did me. I guess you’re the only one who gets to use the Magic Fountain Phone.”

  Brett shrugged, took another deep breath, and went back in. As soon as he ope
ned his eyes, he saw the shock on Greta Jaeger’s face. “What? What’s wrong?”

  “Your friend. That was the first time I could see his face clearly. He looks just like his father!” She turned away, talking to the rain again. “Yes, yes. That explains everything.”

  “Explains what now?”

  “Brett, I need you to tell me what led up to this moment. When did all these events begin for you? Please, don’t leave anything out.”

  It took a lot of resurfacing and gasping, but Brett laid out an edited version of all the events of the last couple of weeks, from the map in Uncle Steve’s office and the bonding ritual underground all the way through the fake cops and the nightmare beasts. He left out the parts about finding the signet ring, and his Friend, Jackson the ghost boy. Ghost Boy had made it clear from the start that their connection had to be secret, and Brett couldn’t risk telling anyone, not while he still needed his help to find Charlie.

  Greta Jaeger just listened, and as he spoke, Brett realized talking underwater was getting easier. As if the air in his lungs was lasting longer and longer each time.

  When he finished, Greta nodded thoughtfully. “The Emerald Tablet . . .” She trailed off. Brett was about to prompt her to continue when she said, “You must be very careful with it. You have no idea how dangerous it is.”

  Brett noticed his vision getting a little dark around the edges. He ignored it, determined to learn as much as he could. His head had started pounding, but he ignored that, too.

  “But how do you even know about it?”

  “Your friend. Gabriel. His uncle, Steven, is an old friend of mine.” Greta’s eyes got sort of unfocused. Like she was reliving old memories. “I was close with Gabriel’s parents, as well. We all stood together against the Eternal Dawn.”

  “The Eternal Dawn?” Brett remembered the name from Dr. Conway’s email. “What’s that?”

  Her eyes snapped back into focus and narrowed. “A cult,” she spat out. “Catastrophic. Apocalyptic. Left to themselves, they would destroy the world as we know it.”