The Elementals (27 page)

He offered me a drink and I took it since no one seemed to care. The alcohol went right to my knees at the first sip. I could feel it turning to sweat, later, as I bounced around in front of the speakers, thrashing my body to the music, my ears ringing with pain. My eyes were closed most of the time and every so often I’d open them and think,
I might see him. I might see John
. But of course he was never there.

After Tommy’s set he brought me another drink and we watched the second band together. His hand snaked to my lower back, slid up my shirt, and I let it stay there. I thought,
I have never fucked anyone else.
Actually, I’d never fucked anyone. What I had done with John wasn’t that.

Maybe I should fuck Tommy Leeds?

But then I thought of how I had turned down the chance to sleep with John and Tania and Perry and nothing made sense to me. Would that have been more meaningful than sleeping with Tommy Leeds? Of course it would. I loved them, didn’t I? I loved John. Would it have given me “experience”? Yes, but that wasn’t really what I wanted, was it? Would it have made me closer to or farther away from John, closer to or farther from Jeni; that was the real question.

Tommy leaned jerkily over to me. His breath smelled of beer and his eyes were bloodred, from speed probably—I thought of the Blythe doll by my bed at Pierre’s; I still hadn’t changed her eye color to blue or green, even though it would have appeared much less strange.

Even this high Tommy looked like a boy whom Jeni and I would have crushed on, like a boy Jeni might get to know on a school trip and agree to meet later, in the night.

“I have to go,” I said.

“Wait, man. I wanted to hear if you found out more about what happened with that chick,” he said.

I turned back and saw a smile like a hand was crawling across Tommy Leeds’s face.

“What the fuck do you know?” I screamed. My palms contracted into fists and I leaped at him, wanting to slam that smile away.

“Back off!” In the laser beams of light that burned the air his expression was distorted, grimacing. “I told you I don’t know shit. You need some serious help, man.”

I felt thick arms gripping. A security guard smelling of cigarettes and menthol dragged me away. I was trying to explain it all to him but the words coming out of my mouth didn’t make any sense. He deposited me on the street in front of the theater. I was too stunned to run off; night had never looked so vast. I leaned against a wall for support, wiping the sweat from my face with my T-shirt, and watched four skinny, decadently dressed kids huddled around a cigarette—two boys, two girls, like a group to which I had once belonged.

I heard some commotion and turned to see a young man being hoisted out in much the same way I had been. He was holding his glasses, which were broken.

“Ian?” I said.

He looked at me curiously and began to laugh in a wheezing way through his nostrils. He had lost a lot of weight and his hair was long and lank with grease.

“What happened?” I asked him.

“Aren’t you the one who wanted to know what they put in that wine?” He stopped laughing and his eyes were suddenly suspicious.

“Ariel,” I said. “From the dorms.”

He put his finger to his lips. “It’s a
secret,
” he said, drawing out the word.

“But not from me,” I said, with as much authority as I could. “I’m their roommate, remember?”

He giggled. “Oh yeah. Whatever.” He blinked at me. “Cannabis, ephedra, opium. It’s intense stuff. She gave me a lot of it and now it’s all I think about.”

Intense stuff was right. Weed, speed, heroin. “Who?” I asked. “Tania?”

“Ms. De la Torre!” He was laughing again. “She’s a fuckin’ hottie. I’d have done anything she said even without all the soma.”

“Soma?”

Ian waved brightly at me, turned and started to stumble away into the darkness. I went after him. “What is soma? Are you talking about Tania’s wine?”

“Ritual wine,” he corrected me. “Drunk as part of the sacrificial ritual! A substitution for the original psychotropic substance.”

“It had weed and ephedra? And opium?”

“Awesome, right?” he said.

I knew then, in that moment, where I needed to go.

30. Other magics

My best friend had vanished into air. My mother had had parts of her body precisely and painfully removed. I had lived for almost a year on flowers, lived with a man I loved, but still didn’t really know, and then I had left him and now I was back, still haunted. Perhaps I was under some kind of spell. Nothing seemed real anyway. So why should I believe what happened that Halloween after I ran into fucked-up Ian at the concert? And why shouldn’t I believe it?

I wore the dress Tania had given me a year before. I told myself it was because I had no other Halloween costumes but that wasn’t really it—I wanted to relive my experience in the house, so I could understand it better. I wore the fragile dress as I walked up into the hills, in the dark, even though it looked as if rain might soon fall.

It always surprised me how few people I saw in front of the houses in the hills—as if wealth implied closed doors; in the flatlands there were always kids playing, students riding their bikes, people sitting on lawn chairs, walking dogs. Here it was much more quiet, even on a night when carved pumpkins leered from porches and bowls of candy were just inside the doors. There were hardly even any trick-or-treaters in sight. You wouldn’t have guessed what went on in the house where I had once lived, so maybe there were other magics going on behind these facades, but somehow I doubted it.

The house with its mess of foliage—the oak trees, the roses, the persimmon and ornamental plum—gave hints of what it held if you looked closely enough.

The curtains were pulled closed and I couldn’t hear the familiar music coming from within. I stood there a long time before I finally gathered the courage to knock, and then I stood there longer still.

But no one came.

Standing there in the rain, I was now sure that it was time for me to visit John. If I could make it to him.

31. Or the Wilding

So this is how we run. We run in our pretty clothes, the ones we put on earlier to attract love. We run with our hair streaming out behind us. We run as quietly as possible, so no one hears us.

But sometimes they hear us.

It is called the Wild Hunt. When they come for us. Or the Wilding.

We are girls and women who were out alone, who were out at night, who were not rewarded for being kind to strangers as the fairy tales once taught us. We are girls and women who were unlucky. Sometimes we are boys, too.

We have no magic powers.

We have no amulets of protection.

No one has cut crosses into the stumps of trees to keep us safe.

Would that even keep us safe?

We no longer believe in fairy tales.

But we will learn to believe in monsters.

*   *   *

I ran that night in the rain, away once more from the house I had loved and toward the man who was the reason I had loved it. I ran for Jeni, too, though I still doubted whether anything I did could help her anymore. As I ran the rainfall grew heavier, drops of water blinded me. Soon it was a storm, roaring in my ears like the voices of giants.

*   *   *

I don’t know if what happened that night really happened to me or how it did, if it did, in spite of the evidence that I would soon hold in my hands. But I could have been feeling so guilty about everything that had gone before—I had let down my mother, then John, and Jeni, always Jeni. Now I was back, maybe stronger, but still running, and perhaps more deranged than ever. Maybe that is why these things happened that night. Or I believed they did.

*   *   *

He was there before I knew as I came down into the flatlands. The car parked blocking my way and the passenger door opened. I slid to a stop. The night was so dark I couldn’t see myself, except the vague glow of my white dress, plastered to my body like the marble folds of a gown on a statue. I was shivering and the car was warm—I remember that. The heater was on in the car and it felt warm compared to the night that shook me.

A hand. It pushed me down so that my face pressed into the cracked, bristling leather. Smell of cigarettes and mold. I thought,
I am going to die.

I didn’t think to scream. He slammed the door closed and I pushed myself up and grabbed for the handle but it wouldn’t open. My fingers crawled madly over the door panel looking for the lock. Knobs. Buttons. Metal. Darkness. Nothing. But he was in the passenger seat now. He grabbed both my hands in one of his. His hands were that huge. There was a rope in his mouth and he used his other hand to wrap it around my wrists and pull it tight so the braiding burned into my flesh; then he pushed me down on the seat again.

“Please don’t,” I said. I pressed my face into the upholstery so I couldn’t see his face. “I’m not going to look at you. I’m not going to scream. Just let me go.”

He was silent. His silence was huge, like his hands. There was something about him that seemed familiar, like a nightmare you’ve had before but can’t remember, like a face on the street you can’t place but that makes your back hollow with fear.

I knew not to look at him.

I knew not to scream.

I knew to keep talking.

I don’t know how I knew. Maybe I had imagined this before, a thousand times, without realizing it, thinking of Jeni in my unconscious mind.

What did she do when it happened? What would a little girl with no fear do when this happened? What could she have done if she had thought about it beforehand?

Maybe Jeni was telling me what to do—the spirit of Jeni. Because as I lay there breathing the smell of my own death, a voice said:

Keep talking. Keep talking. Ariel.

So I did.

“My mom has cancer. Do you know anyone with cancer?” I didn’t wait for him to respond because I knew that he wouldn’t anyway. “I love her so much. She’s a really good mom. I’m so lucky. Not everyone has that. It must be so hard if you don’t.” I hesitated then, for just a moment. I could hear him breathing. I didn’t want to hear the sound of his breath. “I go to school here, that’s why I’m here, but it’s really bad sometimes. It’s not like I have the worst problems but I want to go home and be with my mom.” I could feel tears in my throat and I tried to grit them back. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to cry. I don’t want to freak you out. You must already be pretty upset.” I turned my head so that my eye wasn’t pressed into the upholstery. My neck clenched with pain. Streetlights flickered over me like shiny fish. “My name’s Ariel,” I said. “I’m twenty. Just turned twenty. In October. Now it’s November, almost, isn’t it? I had a boyfriend but we broke up. I think there’s something wrong with him, or at least I know there is something wrong with the world he belongs to. Have you ever felt that way? Like there’s something wrong with the people you care about, with the whole world? And then you think, maybe it’s me?” I heard a soft groaning sound coming from him. I peeked up and saw the huge form at the wheel. His head touched the roof of the car, even bent over, a hump on his back.

I had seen him before. Many times on the street. The giant. I buried my face down again.

“I don’t want you to hurt me,” I said. “I know you could hurt me if you want to. You must be so angry to want to hurt someone you don’t know. You must have had people hurt you…”

Maybe it was worse. Maybe I’d gone too far. The car veered and I slid off the seat onto the floor. The rain was still pouring down. It seemed to be darker now, no streetlights. I could smell the earth outside, wet and thick with worms.

“Please,” I said. “Please don’t hurt me. Just let me go. I won’t look at you. I won’t report you. Just let me go. I want to go back to my mom. I should never have come back here again.”

The car screeched to a halt. He was breathing heavily now. I was covered in a cold film of sweat. He was going to rape me and then he was going to murder my body, and then I would be with Jeni and on All Hallows’ Eve I would return and dance with John Graves.

I should have called him as soon as I got back to Berkeley. I should have trusted him this time.

I should have told my mom more often how much I loved her.

I shouldn’t have given up on Jeni. I should have done anything I could to find her.

These are the things you feel at death—the regrets more than anything else.

The giant bent down and grabbed me by my bound wrists, hauled me up to the seat again.

“They believe they can bring back the souls of the dead,” I said. Tears were pouring down my face now and I was speaking faster and faster, not trying to calm him anymore. “Do you believe anyone can do that? They must be crazy. Or maybe it’s true? They want to bring back their baby. They had a baby who died. I can’t imagine that. How awful that must be. A baby. But he apologized, he said he was wrong. I shouldn’t have left him.”

There was a rushing sound, like a windstorm in the trees, and what sounded like cries. The giant cocked his head and his eyes darted to the car window.

“Please don’t hurt me,” I whispered. “Please. I’m sorry for whatever has happened to you.”

He smelled like the wet earth and excrement. I held my breath and my heart clenched. The rushing sound grew louder—branches cracking under stampeding feet, wind tearing through the leaves, those strange voices. It seemed as if the storm had circled the car. Everything turned black and in the black lake of the window I thought, for a moment, I saw the reflection of Jeni’s face. I tried to scream but a huge, grimy hand slammed over my mouth.

Then my captor reached over and I felt raw, dry lips brushing my cheek.

A kiss.

A kiss?

He unlocked the door, grunting something I didn’t understand, and pushed it open and pushed me out into the rain.

And I rolled down the muddy slope away from everything that had ever gone before. Toward nothing.

32. The dead bride of nothing

Mud was in my mouth, nostrils and eyes and the only sounds were the voices of the rushing water.
I am dead. The dead bride of nothing.
But there was cold, gold light through the trees; it was morning.