Elemental (43 page)

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Authors: Steven Savile

BOOK: Elemental
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“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.”
“Where do the Strangers come from, Liz?” asked Mom.
“The sea.”
Mom's shoulders sagged. “Yesterday, you said the gorse.”
“They come out of the water and hide in the gorse. That's what everybody says.”
Mom sighed.
“What were they doing on your front porch last night? I've never seen so many in one place. We heard you scream.”
“Do you want some breakfast, Liz?” Mom asked.
“I want some answers.”
“Ask Michael. I have to go figure out where I packed the camera.” She left.
Lizzie pulled out a chair and sat down beside him. “Hey,” she said. “Come on. Tell me. What happened?”
“Mom's been weird ever since we woke up. I have to find out what's wrong with her.” He pushed his chair back and stood up.
“Michael.” Lizzie grabbed his wrist, then shrieked and released it. Then she grabbed it again, gripped it tight, pulled the new hand toward her, stared wide-eyed at the changes. “Michael!” she cried.
His throat closed. He couldn't breathe. He felt a ghostly fluttering on the sides of his neck, and then his throat unblocked, and he said, “I understand the Strangers. They talked to me, and I understood them. Mom couldn't. She thinks they're my real parents.”
“What?” Lizzie stroked the back of his hand, uncurled his fingers, felt the web between them. “Your hand wasn't like this yesterday, was it? I would have noticed.”
“One of them touched it, and that happened. But maybe that's what happens to anybody they touch.” He wanted to pull away from Lizzie and go after Mom. Mom thought the Strangers were his real family. Mom thought—Mom assumed he was leaving with them. How could she think that? She was the one who had raised him. She was the person he loved best in all the world.
“I found it,” Mom said. She raised the Polaroid. “Smile.”
“Mom.”
She snapped a picture, and the camera's motor raced as it spat it out. “Gotta try again, you weren't smiling. I know you hate having your picture taken, Michael, but won't you let me anyway, this time?”
“Sure.” Heaviness sat in his chest, a hot, sour lump. He summoned up a smile for her. The camera flashed, leaving red ghosts across his vision. She dropped the pictures on the table and came to put her arms around him. He felt the silent sobs jerking through her.
“What makes you so sure I'm leaving with them?” he asked.
She shook her head against his chest. She took a deep breath, straightened, stepped away from him. “Orange juice?”
Lizzie still held his new hand. She stood uncertainly beside him, then put her own hand palm to palm with his. He could taste her skin with his hand, sense the blood flowing beneath its surface. There was a scent he didn't sense with his nose, something that meant Lizzie, everything about her; it came in through his palm, his fingers. How could that be? He felt like he would know her with his eyes closed now, just from a touch. Heat brushed his face. She wasn't running away in horror because
of his deformity. He curled his fingers around her hand, and she clasped his. Then she let him go.

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