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Authors: Steven Savile

BOOK: Elemental
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“Michael,” a voice whispered at his window.
Michael sat up. Who—
“Michael.”
It was hard to recognize a whisper. Who did he know in Random who wasn't already in the house with him? Only Lizzie, and a few people she had introduced him to. Lizzie said she never went out at night. Was that just a dodge to keep Mom from suspecting that Lizzie wanted to invite Michael out for a midnight walk?
“Lizzie?”
“Michael.”
Michael pulled on his robe and crept to the window. “Lizzie?”
The window slid wide and a face peered at him over the sill.
In the semidarkness, he couldn't really see the face, but he smelled a wet, salt, fish smell, nothing like Lizzie's vanilla scent.
“No,” whispered the face.
“Who are you?” Michael took two steps back, reached for a weapon. He couldn't find a thing. Most of his possessions were still in boxes. The floor was chill under his feet; a worm of cold twisted in his stomach. Something about the person, the face, the whispering voice, something was not right.
“A friend.”
“Come back during the day if you're really my friend,” Michael said. He darted forward and slammed the window shut, then ran out into the hall, slamming his bedroom door behind him.
His mother rushed out of her room. “What's the matter?”
“Something at my window,” he said, his breathing ragged.
“Should we call the police?” She took his arm and tugged him toward the master bedroom.
“I don't know.”
Mom dragged Michael into her room and shut and locked the door, then got the baseball bat from the floor beside her bed. Her breathing was harsh in the darkness. “Tell me,” she said.
“It was a person, Mom. I left my window open a crack, and someone called me. Whispered my name. Mom … .”
He felt her hand tremble on his arm. “All the doors are locked, right?” she asked.
He nodded. When Dad wasn't home, which was most nights, it was Michael's job to check every door and window before he and Mom went to bed, and he had never forgotten since the night they had a break-in, back when they were living in Los Angeles. Everything was so much scarier when Dad wasn't home. Someone had come into their apartment, but Michael had heard him and run to Mom's room, where they locked themselves in the bathroom and screamed until one of the neighbors beat on the wall and another called the police. By the time they came out of the bathroom the intruder had fled. He had taken Mom's jewelry box, but he hadn't taken anything else.
The jewelry box was where Mom had kept the things that reminded her of her life before. Michael remembered playing with her “pretties” when he was a little kid. She had let him take one piece of jewelry out at a time and look at it. She had had a charm bracelet with tiny gold sea creatures on it, some of them as strange as monsters from outer space. His favorite of all the things she had had, gone now.
Ever since, Michael had been compulsive about checking doors and
windows nightly, sometimes checking three or four times to make sure. On nights when he felt particularly restless, he had to get up after a while and check again. Tonight he remembered the particulars; it was always that way in a new house the first few times he made his rounds.
“The doors were all locked. My window was only open an inch,” he said. “There was this voice.”
“The voice of a person who knew your name?”
“Yes. He said ‘Michael, Michael.' I asked if he was Lizzie, and he said no. He said he was a friend.”
“Was it someone you met when you were out with Lizzie today? How did you know it was a man?”
“I'm not sure.” He thought back to the day they had just had. Lizzie had taken him to the library, where they met her least favorite librarian, and then over to Bob's Burger Grill, where she said the high school kids went after school, and sometimes during school. She had introduced him to Bob, a genial bearded man who had welcomed him to the community and shook his hand so hard his fingers felt crushed. After he squished Michael's hand, Bob had introduced Michael to a few of the kids in the restaurant, most of whom had acted completely not interested.
Lizzie told Michael later that most of the kids their age were gone for the summer. Off for obligatory time with noncustodial parents, summer camp, visiting relatives, camping, Disneyland—everybody was trying to get in one last spree before September crashed down on them. Everybody still in town was some kind of loser.
Michael had carefully avoided looking at Lizzie when she said that. They were climbing onto their bikes, anyway, so he had an excuse to focus on something else. They rode half a block before she burst out laughing and nudged his shoulder. “You were supposed to give me this look,” she said, “or make an L on your forehead, you know? You're no fun!”
“Oh, yes I am!” He surprised himself and her with how loudly he spoke. He had lived in too many different places, started over too many times. He knew these early impressions set in cement, locked around his feet; he'd be dragging them around with him the rest of the time he lived
here, especially if they only stayed half a year. He wouldn't have time to change people's minds. “Well, okay, that's no way to prove it,” he said, “so never mind. Give me another shot.”
“Maybe,” Lizzie said in a teasing voice. “Anyway, everybody at Bob's was in the Ick Clique today. I'd introduce you to some of my real friends, but they're all gone this weekend. Let's go to the beach.”
“The beach,” Michael muttered.
Lizzie, ahead of him, had glanced back. “Oh, yeah. Your mom said you don't like the beach, huh? We could just go to the park and
look
at the beach.”
“Okay.”
They rode on a pitted street between looming, dusty hedges of yellow-flowered scotch broom. She took him to a wayside where tourists' cars could pull over and people could look at the beach without going down to it. There were wonderful standing stones on Random Beach, many like giant black teeth sticking up out of the sand and the water, a rock with an arch in it that looked like a
Star Trek
prop for a dimensional portal, another flat rock a little way offshore covered with fat slug-shaped creatures Lizzie told him were sea lions.
Then, of course, there was the water.
He had thought he'd be all right, standing on the cliff above the sea, far out of the reach of waves. The gulls cried as they circled in the air above, or swooped down to search tourist garbage. The waves whooshed, foaming, to the shore, then pulled away again. People walked and ran on the sand below, some tossing things for dogs to chase. Lizzie had pushed past him and taken a path out along the tops of some rocks, but Michael stayed at the viewpoint and just watched the water, wondering why he was afraid of it.
A thud had tripped in his chest, a thump, then another, slow footprints of something walking through him. His sight wavered: the sun-shod surface of the water vanished, and beyond it he saw—curls and currents, abysses and clouds, depths and darkness and flying creatures, a whole hollow world outlined by sound pulses—
He rubbed his eyes furiously until he could open them and not see it. “Lizzie!” he had yelled. “I'm going home!”
She had come back then, and they rode home.
He hadn't spoken to anyone but her at the wayside.
Nobody from their visit to Bob's would consider him a friend yet, right? He doubted anybody he had met there would even remember his name. Well, except maybe Bob. Bob had a great memory for names, Lizzie said. Was Bob the type to cruise around after dark and speak to people through barely open windows? Michael didn't think so, but he didn't even know the guy.
“I don't think it was anyone I met today,” he told his mother.
She picked up her baseball bat. “You get the big flashlight. Let's go check it out.”
He got the four-cell flashlight from her closet. They crept through the house in darkness, Michael going a little ahead of his mother. With her at his back, he wasn't so afraid, even though he knew that didn't make a lot of sense. Well, she had the baseball bat.
They eased open his bedroom door and waited, staring toward the pale square of curtained window beyond his bed. No sounds. No voice. They sneaked up to his window and looked out. Ambient light revealed that there was nothing outside but dark lawn and bushes.
Michael switched on the flashlight, opened the window, leaned out. Footprints patterned the soft dirt of the empty flowerbed below. He swept the beam over the dirt. Something was wrong with the footprints.
Mom leaned out the window beside him. “That's odd,” she said.
“What is?” Michael focused the light on one clear print.
“The toes,” said Mom. “They're—they're too long, and what's that between them?”
They stared at the ground. Michael moved the light, shifting the shadows, and the strangeness in the footprint vanished.
“We'll look at it tomorrow,” Mom said. “For tonight, let's lock the window, and you spend the night in my room.”
He lay on the floor in his parents' bedroom, zipped into his mummy
bag, and stared at the ceiling. Mom had left one light on. She tossed and turned in the bed. They didn't speak. He wasn't sure whether she slept before dawn lightened the windows beyond her curtains, but he knew he didn't.
Morning came. They headed for different bathrooms, then went to his room again together.
When they opened the window to look out, the soil of the flower bed had been swept clean.
 
 
“We could board up your window,” Mom said as she buttered toast.
“I couldn't live in a room with boarded-up windows.” He always felt restless and panicky in enclosed spaces.
“Well, okay, put shutters on them. You could open those during the day.”
“We could do what Lizzie says everybody else here does. Get a dog.”
Mom sat at the table across from him. Michael ate a big bite of cereal. He knew he should have kept his mouth shut on that particular topic. Mom was giving him the thousand-yard stare she always unleashed when he mentioned something unforgivable. He had asked for a dog many times over the years. She had gotten tired of telling him that they moved too much.
Finally, Michael said, “Okay. How about a burglar alarm?”
“Stronger locks. Let's go to the hardware store and get stronger locks. I'll get you a baseball bat of your own, too. I guess the other thing would be that for now, you sleep in my room.”
“Ouch,” he said. His back hurt this morning. A hot shower had helped, but not enough.
“We could pick up an air mattress for you.”
“What about talking to the police?”
“There's no evidence that anyone was ever here.”
“We could ask them if there's peeping Toms.”
Mom turned away, munched meditatively on a corner of toast. She
never liked to talk to police. “How about we go to the Chowder House for lunch and talk to Gracie?” she said. Gracie was the restaurant manager. Mom had met Gracie when she and Dad drove over from Idaho to buy the house. “Gracie knows everything.”
“Okay,” Michael said.
 
 
Lizzie went with them to lunch. She said she was a chowder hound. Michael was glad she was still speaking to him after spending an afternoon with him.
“Gotta have the slumgullion,” Lizzie said when a waitress named Dani had seated them at a picnic table by the window. All the tables at the Chowder House were picnic tables, with benches. They could seat at least twelve people. Often in the height of summer, strangers sat together, Lizzie said. She liked that part. She'd met people from Pittsburgh and Montreal and Florida. Maybe one of her hobbies was collecting out-of-towners, Michael thought.
“What's slumgullion?” Mom asked.
“Chowder with a bunch of shrimp thrown in.”
Michael ordered a cheeseburger and fries when Dani came back. Mom and Lizzie ordered slumgullion and garlic toast.
“Come on, Michael, gotta taste it,” Lizzie said, holding out a spoonful of her chowder to him.
“Michael doesn't care for seafood,” said Mom.
“Sure, has he ever tried it? Are you one of those guys who looks at something and says, ‘Never had it, don't like it'?”
He grinned at her because he knew he had said that.
“Open your mouth.”
His insides squirmed at the thought of sharing a spoon with her. On the other hand, she was a girl he liked, and maybe her willingness to share her spoon was a sign she liked him back. He opened his mouth and accepted the spoon.

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