by J A Campbell
Gentle hands guided her to one of the nurse station benches and she lay down, clutching her backpack as if it were a teddy bear.
“What’s happening?” She’d never felt the pressure build up so badly before. It felt like her head might explode at any moment, and she was afraid the ghosts would come back. Distantly she heard a dog barking, but it wasn’t barking at her, so she ignored it.
The nurse put a blanket over her and the weight and warmth comforted her a little.
“Mrs. Winters, I’m so glad you’re here. She’s very upset.”
“I brought some more of her medication. Let’s give that to her and then I’ll take her home.”
Someone helped Elise up and held a cup to her lips. “Have a drink honey, then take this pill.”
She did as she was told, grateful that the numbing cloud would soon encompass her.
Her mom guided her out of the nurse’s station and through the school. The black splotches still mostly obscured Elise’s vision, so she didn’t remember much of the trip to the car. Desperately she waited for the cloud to descend, and she wondered why it hadn’t.
She sat and her mom shut the car door. Elise, leaned over and laid down on the bench in the back of the sedan.
Her mom didn’t say anything while they drove, and simply helped her out of the car when they were back and parked in the garage.
The pressure built steadily, as if angry it had been denied for so long. The medication didn’t seem to be helping. Elise was about to ask for more when a shadow detached itself from the wall and flew at her.
Screaming, Elise pulled away from her mom and, barely managing to get the door open before she plowed into it, dashed into the kitchen.
The barking dog sounded louder now, but shadows continued to fly at her. Waving her arms around, trying to ward them off, she screamed and stumbled into the kitchen table. A chair fell and the bouquet of flowers her mom usually kept there fell off, trailing stems and water on the floor.
“Elise!”
Ignoring her mom, she ran for the first door she saw. She had to get away. She had to get outside, to keep running until she was safe.
Thinking she’d found the door outside, she twisted the handle and lunged forward. The floor wasn’t where she’d expected and she tumbled down a flight of stairs into the dark.
Sharp pain battered her shoulder, hip, shin, she threw out her arms to catch herself and managed not to slam her head into the concrete floor of their basement. Barely even aware that she’d hurt herself, Elise scrambled to her feet and screamed as pain lanced through her right leg. She collapsed back to the ground, sobbing. The pain helped clear her head for a minute and she looked around. She’d fallen into the basement.
Reaching out, she petted Callie’s head and ruffled her ears. Somehow, she knew, the dog would keep her safe.
“Elise?” Her mom called.
She was about to call out when a shadow wearing a death’s head grin dove at her. Callie barked and leapt at the ghost, driving it away. Elise’s mind caught up to wondering where Callie had come from. She’d been dead for years.
Light from the kitchen was her only illumination, but her mom flipped on the basement lights, revealing all the ghosts, all the skeletons, gathered around, grinning, reaching, trying to claim her for their own.
“No!” Elise screamed. “Go away!” The pressure burst from behind her eyes, flashing out into the amassed ghosts and shattering them until only Callie remained.
The dog licked Elise’s face as if to say it would be all right, and Elise collapsed to the ground, unconscious.
Harmony pulled into Seal Beach a week later. For a kid who’d just passed her driver's license exam, she didn’t think she’d done half bad. She’d kept with the flow of traffic all the way, and hadn’t received any notice from the various local police and highway patrols.
Truth was, she’d driven for years, often with her mom passed out in the passenger seat when she was in the “Willie Way,” which was the euphemistic way her parent described the high she got post-marijuana. It was simple enough to teach herself on the less-driven residential streets near South Congress and Hippie Hollow—and she was certainly a better driver than her mom was when impaired by whatever the substance of the day had been.
Harmony consulted the map for the lieutenant’s home and started negotiating the city streets. He lived in a tiny neighborhood of pastel-painted older homes near the beach. It was a pretty area, lush green with palm trees and various colored flowers blooming everywhere.
Sirens stopped her. She rounded the corner to see black and white police cars at the curb of the house where the lieutenant lived. Three police cars, an ambulance, and a fire unit. She paused long enough to see the police escorting a covered stretcher out, and drove in the opposite direction as fast as she could without being noticed.
She found a parking garage within walking distance of the beach. She knew people lived in their cars, had seen it in Austin. She also knew that was a dangerous practice, particularly in a Texas summer’s heat. The parking garage would be good for tonight. It was cheaper than a hotel room and since the garage had cameras, she figured she’d be safe. She’d call Granddaddy later and tell him what had happened—the man who was going to help her was dead. Other than crashing for the moment, she had no clue what else to do.
Had she endangered the lieutenant just by coming there?
Harmony knew several things: she needed sunshine, and to get out of the narrow confines of her car, the lines on the highway, the well-used spaces of the modestly priced and reasonably safe motel rooms she’d found with Granddaddy’s help along the way.
She piled into the backseat, changed into her swimsuit, a shirt, and a pair of flip-flops and headed for the ocean. It took a bit for her to gather the courage to go. She’d been to the ocean since, but her first memories of the Gulf were not good ones.
When she was very small, her mom had taken her to the Gulf Coast to see the ocean. It was pretty by the hotel, just a few minutes away from the pristine white sands, she’d found the coastline covered with black tar that’d wrecked the bottoms of her favorite shoes. She’d returned to their hotel room to find her mom gone—she’d stayed that way for three days while the winds whipped up an impromptu hurricane threatening the need for evacuation. She managed to find her mom and they’d gotten to shelter. It seemed like days in the crowded, stranger-filled space.
Later trips to coastal cities had been better. She’d liked New York City and a sailing expedition to San Francisco they’d made with a group of Mom’s friends. She’d never been to Seal Beach before, though. She liked new places even if part of the thrill felt a bit like fear.
Seal Beach was pretty for most of the space she could walk. Everywhere she found families playing, couples making out by the ocean side, surfers running in and out of the waves. Being naturally fair-skinned, she’d burned by the second hour, but folks just tossed her sunscreen when she passed and she applied it liberally. Harmony promised herself the first thing she would do was buy some vampiric level of protection sunscreen. Last thing she needed was a bad burn. She couldn’t tear herself away from the sound of the waves, the caress of the sunshine on her skin, the fresh air.
She just wished she had someone to share it with.
She pulled out her cell phone thinking to call Granddaddy. For some reason, she hit “home” instead.
“Hello,” a deep male voice answered. Ivin. Out of all the boyfriends her mom brought home, he was the only one who made her uncomfortable to the point of being scared. She learned quickly to lock her bedroom door, the bathroom door, and to watch her back when he was around.
Usually, she never asked much about the guys, but in Ivin’s case, she wanted to know precisely how long her mom had known him—in the frantic hope he wasn’t her dad. Luckily, Ivin had moved to Austin just a couple of years before. She thought her mom had broken up with him for good when he got busted for possession, but he was back.
She hung up, dialed Granddaddy lo
ng enough to tell his voicemail that she was okay, and didn’t leave anything more. She turned off her phone and took the battery out. That should make it untraceable and still usable if she had an emergency.
She had to disappear. The best way she knew was to join the itinerant population on the beach. Nobody looked at the homeless. She crept inside the Beetle, and realized she probably was going to have to do so for the foreseeable future.
Lisa was her first friend. Harmony saw her walking toward the beach with the incoming tide. The older woman came to the beach every day just in time to harvest the tide’s offerings. She gleaned the best of the shells and the sea glass and convinced Harmony to sell them for her to the tourists. It was a great gig. Folks would buy from a kid sooner than they would an adult—and they split the take. If anyone asked—and few did—Harmony told them Lisa was her grandma.
Harmony took Lisa’s idea and went one further. Just off the beach a few blocks, she found a small bead shop, Breck’s Beads. She bought wire, leather rat tail, and other jewelry-making materials and started making amulets from the various findings. Constructing necklaces gave her something creative to do with her hands, which she always loved doing, and it made her and Lisa enough money to feed themselves each day.
One day, a mother showed up with an obviously ill asthmatic child. Harmony wished the kid would get better so they could enjoy their vacation. The next day she saw the family; the little girl was running through the waves and yelling.
So the good wishes worked, too. Part of the darkness lifted. After that, Harmony looked closely at the people who bought her handmade jewelry and offered a tiny positive wish with each one. For the senior lady who was having trouble getting around, she wished an ease in the stiffness of her joints. For the young woman grieving over a soldier lost in war, she wished a modicum of peace and hope for another love someday. She was surprised to gather a small and enthusiastic clientele. Even Breck asked to see her work, and offered to sell her supplies at a reduced price if she’d consign some of the pieces to her shop.
The beach folks were more than willing to make friends. Charlie had served in Desert Storm and couldn’t quite go back home to four walls and a nine-to-five. Sam talked to the birds and many of them responded in impossible ways, doing all kinds of tricks on his request. When he had food, he shared the rewards with them, often giving most of it to his avian friends. Sam was near her age, a gentle soul whose parents didn’t understand he really could communicate with animals.
Many of the regulars would buy an onion or a few potatoes and share the feast. Paul played upbeat blues music for change and he was every bit as good as some of Austin’s best. Others told fortunes.
Harmony snuck back into the garage each night to sleep. Luckily she’d kept her wallet on her, so she had money and her mom’s credit card which had yet to be canceled, but she only used that on food and a change of clothing from the local thrift store.
One day she arrived early enough at the beach to start gleaning, and see Lisa swimming in, shedding her scales and tail at the last moment for legs and a body. Harmony never mentioned the transformation to the older woman, but it helped her to know that there was more than bad magic in the world.
Harmony’s world was full of the turquoise sky and silky golden sand, life, and music. While she’d never been particularly sad before, she had never been truly happy, either. She fit in with the oddlings who called the sea their home.
By the light of the full moon, Charlie shed his clothing, gained hair, and howled with his dog. Others came in human and canine form. The humans cast their clothes off and ran into the waves for the change, dogs with suspiciously human-looking eyes followed along.
He and the folks he called his “pack” kept Harmony safe from others he didn’t consider near as savory. That sometimes included the Seal Beach police, who patrolled the area routinely keeping the vagrants in line. Despite her fond recollections of Granddaddy, she avoided his fellow officers for the first time in her life.
If they caught her, they’d send her home. She didn’t want to go back with Ivin there. She wouldn’t wish him gone—if she was far enough away.
Harmony could just think and turn the ugly gangland tags into mermaids and seascapes. She was careful to do this work only at night. The property owners didn’t paint over what she’d changed. More than one of them had taken to leaving paints at night in the hopes she would further enhance their structures. She was surprised to see that local photographers were following the changes in the graffiti and selling the photographs to tourists. For her, it was a penance, a way of turning the harsh and the unsightly to something beautiful—a means of reclaiming what the rough-and-tumble youths had chosen to take without consideration for the community.
Everyone had the right to see something beautiful every day. If it wasn’t a sunset or the face of a loved one, the least she could do was turn the ugliness into something people might want to see.
Harmony was more content than she’d ever been. She was part of something for the first time in her life and making enough money to help Lisa and Charlie and their various packs to survive.
One morning, Lisa didn’t show up for the tide’s gleanings. The sea hadn’t been quiet the night before; perhaps she had taken shelter elsewhere? This was Lisa’s home ground at least for this time of year.
Harmony hastened to beat the lesser collectors to the pristine shells, the most sparkling bits of sea glass, fossils of behemoths and things best left undescribed. Her mind was on her friend. She gathered her take and sold the jewelry she’d made the prior day to the tourists, carefully saving half of the money for Lisa.
“What happened to Lisa?” Harmony stopped on her daily route to ask the mermaid’s friends if they knew anything.
“She comes and goes,” one said.
“Perhaps she’s going to cooler waters?” One of Charlie’s people said. “She often said she wanted to do that.”
But wouldn’t she tell me? Harmony wondered. Still, she kept half of her sales in a tattered envelope to give to Lisa should she see her. She made enough each day to feed herself and donate a bit to Charlie’s community pot.
But when she went to the usual location, Charlie wasn’t there. That night would be a full moon, so she opted to stay outside instead of the safety of the parking garage. The moon came out and peeked over the ocean, but there was no sound of animals—just the occasional radio or siren from the city.
Had the pack moved on without telling her? She eventually opted to go inside, wrapping her arms around herself despite the warm air. She didn’t feel safe alone at the beach—and for the first time since she got there, she was by herself.
She woke early the next morning and set out to find gleanings for her jewelry business. She found sea glass in several shades and several nice-sized shells she could wrap up in wire and sell as amulets. She gathered small sea-smoothed pebbles knowing some liked having them as worry stones or decorations at the bottom of glass vases to hold flowers in place.
“Hey, weirdo.” Harmony automatically turned when she heard the taunt. Fear knifed through her belly. There wasn’t any place safe to go and the pack wasn’t there any more to protect her.
But it wasn’t her the handful of teenage boys were taunting. It was poor odd Sam, who was nattering to the persistent flock of gulls which always surrounded him even when he didn’t have food.
“Leave him alone!” Harmony yelled. She could have walked away, but she couldn’t have done otherwise after being in Sam’s place so often herself.
“Hey, girl,” a sunburned blond who was big enough to star on the football team sneered at her. In just a Speedo and a tan, he wore his privilege like a business suit and Rolex. “Why don’t you play with real men?”
Sam whimpered.
Harmony wasn’t sure what to do. She hadn’t gotten this kind of attention in school. Truth, she mostly wore long Victorian style granny dresses with her hair up and the very opposite of a come-hither look, but she’d le
t her long wavy blonde hair down her back and wore cut-off jeans and a t-shirt with bare feet most of the time. It surprised her that her fair skin had turned a soft tan and a mix of near-white highlights appeared in her hair.
If someone tries to do you harm, don’t be afraid to ill wish them.
Harmony recalled Granddaddy’s warning as the boys surrounded her, leering. Frightened, the gulls hovered at a safe distance watching.
“Come on with us, sweetheart,” one of the leader’s emboldened friends added, tossing down a longneck with practiced ease. “We’ll show you a lot more fun…”
I wish they’d poop all over them. It was the most benign thought she could come up with.
The lead gull let out a squawk and dove for the leader’s head, dropping a semi-liquid bomb on his forehead. Others followed. Pretty quickly, the scene resembled Hitchcock’s Birds on the beach.
“Let’s go!” The boys yelled to each other and ran. The gulls followed, raining their waste down in sickening streams.
Harmony turned to look at Sam. There wasn’t a drop on him. Or her, for that matter.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s get out of here before they come back. I’ll get you something to eat. We’ll find seed for your friends, too.” Anything to leave herself and get him away from there.
The local sandwich shop was cool as long as she came in with money and had showered at least the day before. Despite her situation, Harmony was careful to keep her hair combed and neatly braided and her clothing and person clean. Shelley, the cheerful blonde-haired owner, offered whatever help she could including clothing and shoes her teenage girls “had grown out of.” She’d tried to talk Harmony into going to the shelter, but Harmony was afraid she’d just end up back in Austin if she showed her ID and was on some kind of runaway list—with Ivin living in her mom’s house, that wasn’t an option.
“Hi, Harmony,” Shelley greeted her from behind the counter with a smile. She did that every single time, alerting the better-off customers not to complain about her. “I see you brought a friend for lunch.”