The Elementals (29 page)

When I set her down she rocked slightly on the shelf as if she were about to fall. Steadying her, I could still feel the tremor in the plastic.
Fuck.
I had to get out of there.

It was as if I were pushing through a crowd of bodies, as if I were in that crowd at the first Halloween party, trying to find air, trying to find something.

The Hello Kitty purse was sitting on a shelf, just sitting there, like a regular thing. I picked it up.

The room was spinning slowly, like a merry-go-round. My cell phone was vibrating against my hip bone, ringing, much too loudly; I had forgotten to turn it off. The screen said
Mom.
I pressed
TALK
.

“Hello,” she said. “Honey? I had this feeling. Are you…?”

Tania was at the door.

“What are you doing, Ariel?” She had rarely called me by my real name.

“I was looking around,” I said. My eyes tried not to flinch from hers. The round green irises floated, unmoored, in a sea of white.

“What were you looking for, Ariel? Who let you down here?”

I moved closer to her although every nerve ending shrieked at me to back away.

“Why do you have Jeni’s purse, Tania?” I said loudly, holding it up, my heart beating in my mouth like a fish.

She shook her head. Sad. “Oh, Sylph, my love.” Her accent was always stronger, I realized, when she was trying to influence me. Glamour me.

“Why do you have it? Her purse.”

Tania smiled. The other element of her up-to-now infallible glamour. She reached out and ran her fingers through my hair, catching the tangled ends so it hurt. I pulled away; it hurt more.

“You ask too much of me,” she said.

“I what?”

“You ask. Too. Much. I’m so sorry.”

“Tell me what is going on here, Tania. Tell me now!”

Her teeth white as the whites of her eyes in her golden face. She shook her head. No.

“Tania!”

“Give me the purse, Ariel.”

“No. Tell me what the fuck is going on.”

“Give me the purse.” She snatched at it but I wouldn’t let her, I wouldn’t let her have it.

“What did you do?” I think I was screaming. Was I screaming?

“It had to be done,” she said. “Just as you have to be.”

“What the fuck!”

Then she reached out, too quick for me, and she grasped my wrist where Jeni’s bracelet had once been. Tania’s grip was strong and I couldn’t get away, my whole body dissolving into the weakness of fear.

“We were only loving her. We thought she was the one. Perry and Burr and I. While John was gone from me. We thought she could help us but she fought.” Tania paused and her eyes looked far away. “And violence ensued.”

“Jeni,” I said, aloud, calling for her as if, even now, she might answer. “Mom.”

“The bone. Burr. This. I’m sorry, Sylph, you know too much, you see too much with your artist’s mind.”

Perry was there now, too, wearing the mask. The goat mask with the clattering jaw.

“Love,” Tania said to him. “We have to do it again.” Her eyes jagged glass. She took a small knife from somewhere inside the large sleeve of her silk kimono.

“Ariel?” My mom was screaming.

John.

Holding a cell phone. Police sirens in the distance, coming up the hill. The Hello Kitty purse clutched in my hand. I noticed it was made of pebbly white vinyl, the cat features cut out and stuck on. The silly pink flower that I knew once graced her ear was missing.

I held on to that purse with one hand, my mom’s voice inside the phone in the other. They were something. They were something real.

There were men in uniforms at the basement door.

“I will cut out your eyes,” Tania said to John, softly as a lullaby, as they took her away from us.

*   *   *

What we learned later is that on the night Jeni disappeared, Tania and Perry went out, as she said, “looking.”

*   *   *

“That was in the days when we still looked, before the parties and the naïve undergrad groupies brought the girls to us.

“The one was on Telegraph wandering, taking pictures with her cell phone. She was very young, too young, but I couldn’t help myself. It might have been the big dark eyes, the lashes, the cute little purse like something someone much younger would carry. I knew this girl was the one.

“It was easy. Girls like that, I knew what they liked. Pretty things. Maybe with a little oddness, a little edge. Dolls with too-big heads and eyes that changed colors. Dolls with little sharp teeth and flowered dresses. Porcelain dolls with pointed elf ears that could be exchanged for normal human ones. Not just dolls but vintage gowns and shoes and jewels. And food. And music. Halloween Hotel was always a good one. Oh, and the wine, of course. Made in the basement with such slight traces of cannabis, opium and ephedra that you almost couldn’t detect them, unless you were a really bright chemistry student. Luckily Ian Larsen also had a crush on me, and an addictive personality, so the promise of some free bottles helped, too.”

Tania and Perry went up to Jeni at the pizza place where she was standing alone at the counter. They “chatted,” Tania said. Jeni told them she was from L.A., visiting. Tania said they were having a small party at their house and would she like to come, the food was better than this. Jeni said no, but politely. She asked Tania about her hair and they talked some more. Tania said she could do something cool with Jeni’s hair if she wanted. Jeni laughed and said she wasn’t supposed to be out alone at all. Tania said, “You’re not alone,” and then told her about the dolls and the dresses at home. Jeni and Tania both had an original Blythe.

Tania and Perry took Jeni home and showed her the room of dolls, the closet of dresses. Tania dressed her and Perry did her makeup and hair. It was very late by the time they ate. They were all drunk, listening to the Halloween Hotel singer, and Burr came in.

Jeni didn’t seem to mind him. She seemed mostly curious. They finished their meal and she said she should be going.

“No,” Tania said, “not yet.”

Tania told the cops, “I tried to explain it to her, about the baby, about my other lover, John, who had left after Camille died. How he couldn’t deal with things and left. How hard it was for me. I’d had a hard life to begin with.

“My stepfather was the only one who had ever seemed to understand me. I thought he knew who I really was the first time he took me into his study full of books and showed me the tiny goddess statues, some with many arms, some winged, some resembling cats wearing jewelry. He showed me the magic box with the silver stars painted on the blue background. The pieces slid apart but you couldn’t tell from just looking.

“‘It’s a trick,’ he said. ‘But it’s more than a trick. The magic comes in how you speak to the audience, how you smile at them.’

“He had a very white smile and dark eyes with long eyelashes, as if he wore mascara. His hands smelled of candy.

“Day after day, among the books and small painted deities from different cultures, he taught me magics and trickery. He taught me about goddesses and elemental beings and reincarnation.

“When I turned thirteen I came into his study, excited to learn the new lesson he had promised me. It was darker in there than usual; the drapes were closed. He had lit candles and there was a bottle of wine and two glasses.

“He said, ‘This is how you become a true initiate. This is how you serve the goddess.’

“Goddess? I wanted to serve the goddess, to be powerful and beautiful like she was.

“‘Take off your dress,’ he said. ‘You must expose your full self in order to be accepted by Her.’

“I shook my head, no. Suddenly the room was cold even though it was summer and the sun shone outside.

“‘Take off your dress. It is not even yours. It belongs to me.’

“I told him no. I couldn’t imagine he would do what he did next. He had never hurt me; he had never forced me. He hadn’t even looked at me with anything but fatherly kindness. I had never seen it coming. My instincts were weak. I was weak.

“‘You belong to me,’ he told me as he forced his way inside and all the little goddesses on the shelves wept and shattered into shards. ‘Your soul is mine.’

“No magics could save me.

“My mother didn’t want to know anything. Set me up with an education and some money so I’d be quiet.

“Not until I met John and Perry did it seem as if I could go on living. Until the baby died and everything came apart again.

“‘But you can help us,’ I said to the girl that night.”

Jeni said she needed to go. She was scared.

“I didn’t mean to hurt her, not like that,” Tania told the police later. “But I couldn’t let her go.

“I kept the little purse locked up because I liked it so much and it reminded me of something Camille would have liked, but other things had to be disposed of. Luckily Burr was so devoted and not quite right in the head. He did what he was told. The creek bed. I knew he’d never tell. He was implicated. He was the one who’d done it, really. Plus, after that, he stopped speaking, went mute, was put away for a while. He wasn’t the one for us anyway. It was John, always John. And, eventually, he came back. He never knew what happened.

“Afterward, I vowed never to force things like that. I’d have to be patient. The girl obviously wasn’t the one, either. None of them were. Certainly not the girl known as Coraline Grimm, who wanted to be more than any of us, perhaps, who would have gladly given us her blood if we had asked, though it wasn’t worth the trouble. But then like a miracle the other one came along. The friend. Even wearing the same clothes and the matching bracelet with the first one’s name on it. So that must have been the point of the first girl, to bring this second one looking for her, right into my arms.

“Poor Sylph. I loved her, I really did.

“It’s all so complicated, though.

“This human world.”

*   *   *

Tania went on to say, “What I want you to know is that I didn’t mean to harm anyone. There is, in my opinion, only one reason to be alive. That is to love. The greatest love of all is between a mother and her child; nothing else compares. When the parent betrays the bond or begins to rot from disease, when the child dies, there is no more reason to live. That is when we must seek other worlds, made of our own alchemy, our blood and bones, our elements, our very own.”

*   *   *

I am not fooled by any of it, by Tania’s reasons or her pleas. Sometimes I dream of things that I would have once called terrible, of chiseling out her green-leaf eyes with a sharp knife and replacing them with plugs of wood, just as the queen of fae threatened Tam Lin in the tale.

*   *   *

Sometimes I dream of Jeni, waking me from sleep, using her lashes to kiss my cheek, running beside me as we used to, by the wash near the houses where we grew up. The air smelled of tar and chlorine there. Smog hazed the hills in the distance. That dirty trickle of water in the concrete basin—that was our river. We made believe it was lined with fruit trees and willows, huts built of mud and branches, overgrown with morning glories. At night we’d sneak out there and watch the streetlights make paths of brightness on the water. Mermaid tails. We’d crawl under the chain link, slide on our butts down the concrete bank, gather weeds and wildflowers from the cracks, go home and stir mud brews for our secret ceremonies.

We were witches, we were gypsies. The garden was our otherworld. We had the power; we were girls. We had no fear.

She was supposed to be with me, here. We were going to be roommates and take the same classes and eat every meal together and fall in love at the same time. My mom getting sick wasn’t part of the plan. Neither was what happened to my best friend.

Sometimes I dream of the garden of that house in the Berkeley hills. There are circles burned into the grass by those with hollow backs. Will-o’-the-wisps wheel through the night, phosphorescent lights with no natural explanation. The undying souls of the dead.

Epilogue: nine months later

I have told you a story and perhaps you will believe some of it. Or perhaps not. Perhaps it is a real story or perhaps it is only an escape from life because sometimes, when disease and death come, making you shudder and ache with the sorrow, escape is necessary. Even though death is inevitable, in the end love can conquer it, I believe that, if only in the imagination, if only in the realm of poetry. For that morning in Berkeley, California, the summer of my twentieth year (while, in Los Angeles, my mother languished and my best friend lay buried among stone angels on a green smog-rimmed hillside), I woke in the arms of my lover, our bodies marked with shadow flowers from the lace curtains, and went downstairs into the sunny garden and opened the door of my dream.

The air sparked with the strange newness of morning and the scent in the air was like lilies. A basket woven of willow branches was on the porch and I bent down and drew back the blanket that hung over the top of it.

Inside slept a child, and her big, dark brown eyes with their tender lids and flash of lashes could not more have resembled my beloved’s.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Elizabeth Hand, Denise Hamilton, Jeni McKenna, Michael Homler, Laurie Liss, Lydia Wills, Alyssa Reuben, Karen Clark, Sergeant Reynold Verdugo, Melissa Verdugo, Yxta Maya Murray, Tracey Porter, Carmen Staton, and Patrick Harpur,
author of
The Philosopher’s Secret Fire.

Also by Francesca Lia Block

Dangerous Angels: The Weetzie Bat Books

Love Magick Anthology
(editor)

Pink Smog

Roses and Bones

The Frenzy

Pretty Dead

Wood Nymph Seeks Centaur: A Mythological Dating Guide

Quakeland

Ruby
(with Carmen Staton)

Necklace of Kisses

Guarding the Moon

Nymph

The Waters & the Wild

Blood Roses