The Elementals Read online

  “Hey,” I said. “Could I talk to you sometime?”

  He frowned. “Dude, kind of busy now.”

  “It’s kind of important. Dude.”

  The girl made a face as if she’d eaten something rotten and dragged him away.

  In my notebook I wrote, Tommy Leeds, Hollywood High. Berkeley school trip. With Jeni. As if it meant something. As if it were a sign.

  * * *

  After I left the dorm that night, I went roaming the streets like a little lost cat. I almost wanted to mewl and howl in the cold.

  That was when I saw three people walking together, holding hands. They were in costumes and carnival masks—the men in ratty old tuxedos and the woman in a corseted dress made from bits and pieces of lace and velvets. They paused when I passed and I saw their eyes watching me through the masks that looked as if they had been made from tree bark; I felt a chill run through my body, then a wave of heat. It was the most alive I’d felt in a long time, almost as if they had kissed me as they passed, put their hands beneath my clothes. The kiss, the touch that I’d always wanted and hadn’t even known how much I did. I thought of the Baudelaire poem marked by Jeni’s postcard in my book; it evoked the same kind of indescribable enchantment these three people made me feel.

  I didn’t want to think about Tommy Leeds anymore and how he had been on the trip with Jeni, maybe seen her, maybe spoken to her. I wanted the world where these three lived. I wanted some kind of escape.

  But by this time they were already gone, down the street. I turned back to look at them and one of them, the tallest boy, was looking back, too. Sliding ice lovingly down my shirt with his gaze.

  Someone else was watching me, too; I saw that when I turned back around. The giant I’d seen on the first night with my parents. He swung his head back and forth slowly, like a pendulum, his eyes flickering at me from among the rags that swaddled his head.

  I went to my room and pushed a chair up in front of the door. As I undressed I caught sight of myself in the mirror. The red and white roses my parents had sent watched me uneasily from a vase on the dresser.

  I’d always kind of liked my breasts, since they’d arrived, a little late but with certainty—more than any other part of my body. But my breasts, though smallish, were very round and tilted up nicely, with large areolas. I lifted one arm and pressed two fingers against the soft tissue, feeling for lumps like I’d learned from the pamphlet my mom sent me with a note that read, My doctor thought you should have this—it is only a precaution.

  I heard a key in the lock and the rattling sound of the chair by the door. I dropped my arms to my side and grabbed my shirt, held it to my chest.

  “Don’t let me interrupt you,” Lauren said, sweet as pie.

  Embarrassed as I was, part of me was relieved I’d been interrupted from my search for tumors; I didn’t want to know.

  4. House of Eidolon

  I was eighteen and I’d never had sex with anyone; I’d never even kissed a boy yet. I’d kissed one person, though. When we were fifteen, I kissed Jeni.

  We were in my room, braiding each other’s hair, filling scrapbooks with photographs, 3-D stickers, pressed flowers and birthday party invitations, listening to Tori Amos, “Bells for Her.” We were discussing boys, what our first kiss would be like. We both had a crush on Brandon James. We liked them dark and brooding—indie, emo types—which was one reason we hadn’t found boyfriends yet; our taste was a little too “champagne” for our school, as Jeni said. But, that night we were talking about Brandon and how we were scared we wouldn’t know how to kiss right if we had the chance. We’d stolen wine from my parents’ liquor cabinet and I took a sip from the bottle and handed it to her and said, “Want to practice?”

  It wasn’t the kind of thing I usually did but the music and the wine had gotten to me. And I loved Jeni. There were so many reasons to love her. Her baby dimples, the way she rolled her eyes when I put myself down, slapped my hand, and said, “Oh my god, you shut your face, beautiful!”

  That night in my room she giggled, leaned over and tilted her head to the side. She smelled like bubblegum and wine. I pressed my lips to hers. They were so soft, it was like kissing a peony.

  If I thought of it, even almost three years later, my lips still buzzed gently with memory.

  * * *

  Now, in the dorm lounge, I took a plastic cup and filled it with punch. Sick, and not the good kind, as in, awesome-sick. The cheap liquor under the sugary taste burned my throat but I downed the whole thing anyway. Then I had another. It seemed like everyone had found their group by this time but I stood alone by the large window, looking out at the town below. The streets formed neat rows, a quiet grid of trees and low buildings. I squinted, trying to imagine a girl walking out of the opposite dorm and into those streets. I filled my cup a third time. I hadn’t eaten much dinner and the alcohol raced through my blood but it didn’t make me any braver. And still no one spoke to me. The dormies were dressed up like vampires, clowns, football players, cheerleaders and ghosts. It was Halloween. I didn’t wear a costume. Only jeans, a hoodie and a T-shirt with the name of Jeni’s and my favorite band—Halloween Hotel.

  Todd Hamlin came over to me in his football jersey with a bloody wound painted on his neck. For one second I was happy to have someone to talk to; then I noticed Jake Glendorf and Will Merrell watching us.

  Todd held out his hand.

  “I don’t think we’ve been properly introduced all this time. Todd.”

  “Ariel,” I said warily.

  “Not dressed up, Ariel?”

  I shrugged.

  “Know what I am?”

  “A football player? Like in real life!” The sarcasm came out in spite of my mom’s lessons in politeness under almost all circumstances.

  “A dead football player. A vampire bit me.” He showed me the sloppy red marks on his neck, probably scrawled with his girlfriend’s lipstick. Vanessa Carlisle stood with Jake and Will, watching us. She wore fangs and a black cape over a black corset and fishnets.

  “Hey, Ariel,” he said. “Jake, Will and I were wondering if you could help us out with something.”

  I saw his friends snickering over their drinks, no longer able to contain themselves.

  I turned away.

  Todd put his hand on my arm. “Because we were wondering if you happened to notice which one of us is the best endowed. Since we like, uh, noticed you checking out our cocks the other day and we figured you were probably kind of an expert on cocks.”

  Only on dicks lately, I thought.

  I saw the neon EXIT sign over the stairwell door flicker. Its message was clear.

  I passed Coraline Grimm on the way down the stairwell. She was dressed like the Corpse Bride. I nodded at her—she looked like an ally after the people at the party—but she only froze on the stairs and watched me descend.

  The night was spinning when I stepped outside into the cold.

  I had to avoid the party and I didn’t want to go back to my dorm room. By this time Lauren had a boyfriend—Dallas Tate—and they were usually there making out—in between classes and all night long. After I’d gone to sleep I’d wake to hear them moaning just a few feet away in the next bed. It made me feel the same way that seeing the naked football players did—nauseous with disgust and a perverse, desperate excitement—and sometimes I slept in the lounge when it was really bad, but I hadn’t gotten up the nerve to say anything about it.

  I walked toward Telegraph with my head down and my hands jammed into the pockets of my sweatshirt. There was a purposefulness to my stride, in spite of how drunk I was, like I knew what I wanted. It was the same thing I always wanted.

  I walked past groups of laughing frat boys in monster masks and sorority girls dressed as sexy cats, sexy witches or sexy fairies in accessorized leotards and tights. The homeless were out in full force as well but the Greek kids were ignoring them in the usual way, as if they were invisible, phantoms. But I saw. The woman with the wings held a ske
leton mask over her face and her small companion was dressed head to toe in clothes that looked as if they had been dipped in blood. The man with dreadlocks had twisted them into horns. He approached me, mumbling and waving his hands. I froze. As he got closer he shouted, “The end is near and the parallel universe is not near complete!” He kept walking past me and I resumed breathing. The air smelled of coffee and chocolate. I stopped at the corner and looked around. People were sitting in the cafe. It seemed so warm and cozy in there. Through the low window I saw a couple dressed as a two-headed monster huddling over one huge mug, their faces close together, warmed by the steam.

  When I turned around again there was a movement in the shadows.

  Loneliness can do weird things. Loneliness and fear together—a sinister concoction.

  It was hard to breathe or even see for a second. It was hard to speak but …

  “Jeni?” I said.

  The man came out from behind the bushes. The giant from the street. He held something out to me and at first I thought it was the flyer I had given to him before. I took it (after all, he had accepted mine), bracing myself to see her smiling face.

  It was a flyer for a party. A picture of a beautiful woman draped across a marble headstone. HALLOWEEN AT HOUSE OF EIDOLON, it said.

  When I looked back up the giant was gone.

  I left the din of the main avenue and crossed more streets, walking through town to the north side, then up into the hills. Families and groups of students lived in these old wooden houses with gardens and broad-pillared porches. There were jack-o’-lanterns on the front steps.

  The house on the flyer was one of the older ones, a three-story wooden Craftsman structure hidden behind tall oak trees and rosebushes. I could hear music coming from inside and warm light pulsed behind the windows.

  On the porch were four of the biggest, most intricately carved pumpkins I had ever seen. The door was open. The wooden floor of the front room was strewn with a mixture of what looked like dried flower petals, feathers and glitter that sparkled in the candlelight. Fresh white paint made the walls glow. Candles were everywhere, dripping thick tears of wax and scenting the place with honey. Silver cobwebs that looked uncannily real draped the doorways and banister. Old, leather-bound books lined the built-in shelves that stretched from floor to ceiling. There was almost no furniture, besides a worn red velvet couch with lion’s feet, but people in carnival masks were reclining on large cushions or standing by the speakers, shuffling their feet and moving their arms above their heads in some kind of drunken trance, while an old Smashing Pumpkins song played. I didn’t recognize anyone and they seemed too high to notice me. A large steaming vat of dark liquid sat in one corner. I pushed my way over, found a cup and filled it.

  I went through the main room into the kitchen, a fairly large one with hand-painted floral tiles, an old-fashioned stove and a long, scarred wooden table. I leaned against a tiled counter and swallowed my drink. It had a viscous texture and a spicy taste and it made my skin tingle. But suddenly everyone seemed to be pressing in too close; the heat intensified. I couldn’t breathe properly. The masked faces of the party guests gave me a strange, anxious feeling in my solar plexus.

  There was a glassed-in porch that ran along the outside wall of the house, overlooking a garden. I angled through the crowd and onto the porch, then opened the door and stepped outside.

  Trees grew close together, twinkling lights strung through their branches. The air smelled of roses and I wondered how they could grow like that this time of year.

  I wrapped my arms around my torso to keep warm; my hands felt like I was holding cubes of ice but it was a relief to be away from the party.

  There was a thick hedge and the garden seemed to dip away into complete darkness. Part of me wanted to explore but I was drawn back to the house. A Death Cab song was playing—“I Will Possess Your Heart.” The voices of the party seemed to have gotten louder but the warmth felt good now. My hands prickled slowly and painfully to life. I walked through the kitchen and back to the front room, then down a short hallway. The other rooms off the hall were closed and when I tried the doors they were locked. I went upstairs.

  All the rooms up there were locked also, except for the bathroom. It had a large claw-foot bathtub and shiny black-and-lavender tile. I looked out the window at the garden and thought I saw a small shadow dart across the lawn.

  Why did I imagine it was Jeni? I had freshmania, that temporary first year away from home insanity. Of course I did, especially under the circumstances.

  When I looked at my reflection in the mirror I saw someone who seemed too young to be away from home, too young to be wandering around in the night alone, chasing a friend from her past who was most likely dead and buried. I shivered again, as cold as I’d been in the garden. Mommy. Daddy. Jeni. There was no one.

  Maybe it was the drinking and staring so hard at myself that called up the monster. My face turned red and my eyes bulged out of my head with tears. I dug my fingers into the sockets around my eyes and sobbed into my hands. My whole body was shaking; I felt skeletal, as if there weren’t any muscle tissue or skin holding me together. Stop it, you freak! I told myself. Stop it and go home!

  Home was far, though, too far.

  There was a tapping on the door and I tried to catch my breath. I splashed cold water on the ghoul-face in the mirror and waited, gulping down the last shudders of my sobs.

  The knocking continued. A man’s voice said, “You okay?”

  I paused, trying to compose myself, listening: scuffling outside and then silence. I opened the door. No one was there.

  But the door across the hall was softly closing as if someone had just entered.

  I went up to the door and knocked. Inside was the sound of voices, rustling, and then someone spoke: “Yes?”

  “I wanted to ask you something,” I said.

  At first there was an unsettling silence as if a room full of people were holding their breath and then the door opened a crack.

  I only saw a slice of his face and chest. His hand held the door open and where his white shirt was rolled up I could see tattooed letters on his wrist but not what they read. He had a lot of silver rings on his fingers.

  “What’s that?” he asked. His voice was deep. His slanted green eyes were watching me behind a small pair of wire-rim glasses.

  I reached into my pocket and pulled out a rumpled piece of paper and handed it to him. He glanced down at Jeni’s face.

  “Have you seen her?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “No. Who is she?”

  “I’m looking for her.” It was all I could manage. My voice lodged in my throat like a chicken bone.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  He turned to the room behind him and I saw a man and a woman sprawled on a large bed, both wearing masks over their eyes. I smelled smoke and something else—an intoxicating floral, as if I had jammed my nose inside a rose, or maybe a gardenia?

  “What does she want?” asked a woman’s voice with a light accent I didn’t recognize.

  The man turned back to me and moved to block my view of the bed. I saw his face in full now. He was in his early twenties, with sleek black hair and very fine, high cheekbones. There was an indentation in his chin, exactly as if someone had touched him with a fingertip and left an impression. I couldn’t tell what race he was. He wore the white shirt with faded jeans, torn at the knees, and his feet were bare.

  “She’s looking for someone,” he said to the woman behind him. But while he spoke his eyes were studying my face so closely I wanted to back away.

  “They’re not in here,” the woman’s voice said.

  The man shrugged—“Sorry”—and closed the door. I stumbled back down the staircase into the party crowd. Screamin’ Jay Hawkins was screaming, “I Put a Spell on You,” his voice writhing like a snake.

  As I went outside I saw someone watching me from the shadows of the trees. Someone tall, very tall, perhaps seven feet, e
ven stooped.

  I ran all the way back to the dorms as fast as I could, an anvil named fear hammering my chest.

  5. That her bones had been found

  It was evening when I went to see Tommy Leeds in his dorm room. Music thumped through the halls and the air smelled of stale coffee and burned toast. Tommy’s roommate, Ian Larsen, a science geek who must have been matched up with him by the same person who’d matched me with Lauren, said Tommy was in the lounge.

  He was sitting with a group of guys, playing acoustic guitars. At least the girlfriend wasn’t there.

  “Hey,” I said from the doorway. They kept playing.

  I walked in. “Hey. Can I talk to you?”

  Tommy smirked at his friends. “Practicing, man.”

  “I know. Sorry. Can I speak to you about something? It’s important.” I held the picture of Jeni out in front of me. They all looked at it glassily.

  “Whatever.” Tommy shrugged at his friends, got up and came toward me.

  “What’s up?”

  “You were on that trip, right?”

  “Yeah. What’s the deal with that?” He patted his jeans for cigarettes and wrestled a box out of the tight space, tapped the box with his finger.

  “I had a friend on that trip. Jennifer Benson. The one who disappeared.” I held out the flyer again.

  Tommy took a cigarette and jiggled it nervously between his fingers. “Yeah. That was fucked up. You knew her?”

  I nodded. “She was my best friend.”

  “Sucks. Sorry. What do you want from me, though?”

  “Did you see her that night?”

  He frowned. “I didn’t see shit. And I got to practice. Sorry.”

  He popped his head back into the lounge. “Going for a smoke.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Do you know anyone else who was on that trip?”

  He held up his hands. “Nothing more to say.”

  I wanted to shout, To the cops you will, but of course that was bullshit. As usual, I had nothing.

  The rest of the guys shouldered me aside as they went toward the elevator.