Afternoon of the Elves (8 page)

The night air was frigid. The temperature was going down to ten degrees, and more snow was on the way. Her parents had talked about it during dinner. The storm might come as early as tomorrow morning.

“Welcome to winter,” her mother had said cheerfully. “Maybe they'll have to cancel school,” she'd added, smiling at Hillary.

Her wooly hat was in her pocket but the mittens were missing. Hillary wondered if they had dropped on the closet floor when she'd gone to snatch her coat, ready to leap into the closet herself if her mother appeared. Mrs. Lenox was upstairs reading, but it was too risky to go back now. The clock in the kitchen had showed just past 9:00 p.m., which was Hillary's bedtime, though her parents sometimes forgot and allowed her to stay up later. One thing they would never allow, however, was an unexplained, late-night walk in the cold by herself.

Hillary's unprotected hands were already stinging. She pulled the sleeves of her jacket down over them and gathered the sleeve ends with her fingers to close the openings. Then she walked across the driveway and went downhill into the dark. As she moved, her eyes sought the black bulk of Sara-Kate's house, and when she'd found that, she leveled her gaze at the second floor, to the windows just under the line of the roof. And when those were picked out (for her eyes took several minutes to accustom themselves to the darkness), she looked straight at the one window, the window on the right overlooking the yard, and beamed all her powers of detection there. If Sara-Kate was inside, Hillary was going to find out this very night, this very hour, because no one—not even elves—can stay inside a house at night in total darkness. And if there is a light, even the faintest candlelight, even the smallest flashlight, it will inevitably show up to those looking in from outside.

Hillary knew how ingenious light can be at escaping, because of her own attempts to read under her covers or inside her closet after she'd been put to bed.

“But how did you know!” she would wail when her mother caught her in the act and took the little reading lamp away.

“There was a glow,” her mother would say. Or, “I saw some light coming through the cracks.”

Now Hillary trained her eyes on the window and looked for cracks. She ran her eyes across the whole expanse of Sara-Kate's house and watched for glows. She came to the hedge and squeezed through just far enough for a clear view.

The house was as gray and unrevealing as the face of a cliff. Windows pocked the dark surface at regular intervals, but there was no sense of depth behind them. They were like unimportant chinks in a block of stone. In fact, it was the weight of Sara-Kate's house that Hillary felt more than any other thing at that moment, as if the place really were made of rock so dense that it had tipped the land it stood on. Down, down, it plunged into the black trough of Sara-Kate's yard, while behind Hillary, her own house was lifted up, bright and light as a feather, toward the starry sky.

Hillary shook her head and sighed. Her father must have been wrong. The Connollys' house was as deserted as it had been these past two weeks. In a way, she was relieved. Now she could climb the slope of her own yard, slip back inside her own house, and go to bed without anyone ever guessing she had been away. And tomorrow, perhaps, the snow would come, enough to go sledding this time. Her mother would make hot chocolate, and her father would tinker with the snow blower, which was always breaking down just when it was needed. There was a long-standing family joke about it. And who knew? she might invite Alison and Jane to go to a movie with her tomorrow afternoon, or to build an igloo.

A black figure came out of Sara-Kate's house and sat down on the doorstep.

It came so quickly and unobtrusively that Hillary felt no surprise. The door made a tiny sound and then the figure was seated, slim and shadowy, on the step. Hillary leaned forward and held her breath.

Sitting motionless as it was, the figure was all but invisible. If Hillary hadn't seen it move before, she could never have picked it out now against the house. Was it Sara-Kate? Hillary strained her eyes at the shadow. She thought she detected the shape of a head turned away from her. She thought she saw an arm. Or was it a leg? She could see pieces of this shadowy person but she couldn't put it together into a whole.

She whispered, “Sara-Kate?” but so timidly that the name hardly left her lips. The shadow didn't move. Was something really there? Had she imagined it?

Then the shadow moved. It stood up and sauntered out into the yard. It was small, and thin as wire, and it was not wearing a coat. A dry crunching sound came from under its feet, which seemed heavier and bulkier than the rest. With its hands in its pockets, the shadow ambled across the yard toward the elf village. It made a wispy noise as if expelling breath. It bent over briefly to look at something, then righted itself. It moved on toward the fallen Ferris wheel.

“Sara-Kate!”

Hillary stepped from the bushes as she said the name a second time. But once in the open, she stopped.

“Hillary?” The shadow turned with what seemed to be a hint of eagerness.

“Sara-Kate? I wasn't sure it was you.”

“Of course it's me. Who else would be walking around in my yard in the dark?” Sara-Kate leaned over and picked up the Ferris wheel.

Hillary approached her warily. The figure in front of her looked like Sara-Kate and talked like Sara-Kate, but something made Hillary hang back.

“I thought you were gone,” she said. “I thought you moved away. You were never at school. You were never here.”

“I was gone,” Sara-Kate said. “But now I'm back. For a little while, anyway.” She regarded Hillary through the complicated wires of the Ferris wheel she was holding up for examination. “It's not broken,” she said about the wheel. “It can work again. Maybe you should come over tomorrow and help me clean up this mess.” She waved her hand around the yard, ending up with the battered elf village.

Hillary followed the arc of that wonderful sweep of hand with hungry eyes. She wanted to come more than anything. She wanted to fling her arms around Sara-Kate's thin shoulders and hug her. But still she was suspicious.

“It's supposed to snow tomorrow,” she said. “I don't know if I can come.” She looked Sara-Kate in the eye and added, “The elves are back, too, aren't they?”

“Yes,” Sara-Kate said. Hillary glanced away. She didn't need to be told what she could already feel. All around her, the yard was starting up again. She heard a faint humming noise coming from the overturned washing machine. She heard an infinitesimal clicking in the dead grasses, a rustle among the bushes.

Sara-Kate had leaned over to lift the Ferris wheel back onto its two cinder blocks. She centered the great wheel upon the metal rod and straightened some wires that had bent under the impact of the fall. When they were fixed, she stepped away to admire her work from a distance.

“Watch!” Sara-Kate commanded. Her hand swept the air again. Directly overhead came the sharp cry of a bird. It seemed impossible on this wintry night, with the temperature steadily dropping and a storm on the way, but there it was.

And then, more impossible still, the Ferris wheel began to turn. Slowly, haltingly, as if pushed by invisible hands, it moved around, once, twice. It picked up speed and started a more methodical spin. Though there had seemed to be little light in Sara-Kate's dark yard, the wheel's spokes were illuminated. They flickered past Hillary's eyes, faster and faster, until the wires and spokes were spun together into a silvery tapestry, and the Popsicle-stick seats flew out like golden rockets from the rim.

Then silently, by degrees, the Ferris wheel slowed. The wires became visible again. The Popsicle sticks drew in. The spokes separated themselves, and the big wheel wound down, darkened, and finally stopped.

Up above, wind churned the leafless branches of the trees, then blew past. Hillary blinked.

“Now will you come tomorrow?” Sara-Kate demanded in her ear.

Hillary nodded. She couldn't take her eyes off the wheel.

“Was it the elves who made it spin?” she asked. “It was the elves, wasn't it? But, for a minute, it looked as if ...”

She turned in wonder to the thin figure beside her.

“Sh-sh-sh,” whispered Sara-Kate. She beamed her tiny eyes on Hillary. “It's better not to talk about it. ”

How Hillary, in her excited state, got back inside her house, out of her coat, and upstairs to bed without her parents seeing, she hardly knew. She nearly ran into her father coming up the cellar stairs, muttering to himself. But she dodged into the kitchen and he passed on to the bathroom, which gave her time to race up the front stairway and into her room.

It was ten o'clock exactly and she had just slipped under the covers when her mother looked in sleepily to see if she was still awake.

“What an independent child you are,” Mrs. Lenox said, coming over to give Hillary a hug. “What did you do all evening? I never heard a sound, and now you've even put yourself to bed. You won't need a mother at all by next year. I'd better start interviewing for a new position.”

“Silly,” Hillary said, smiling up at her. “I'll always need a mother.” But she offered not a word of explanation, and after her mother had gone she lay awake thinking wild and dazzling thoughts that made her feel quite separate from her parents and their ordinary lives.

For Hillary had seen an elf that night. She was sure of it. To lie still in bed and think everything through only made it clearer. All those days of peering into bushes, all those afternoons imagining faces in the leaves seemed ridiculous now when the real thing had been walking around in plain view the whole time.

How stupid she had been to suppose that elves must have pointed feet and little caps. How idiotic to think they must always be tiny. These ideas were held by a world that knew nothing about elves, by people who had never really looked, who were afraid to look, maybe, Hillary thought, remembering how she had pushed Sara-Kate's appearance in the upstairs room from her mind because it seemed so strange and frightening. Not that seeing an elf was easy even when you did want to look. Hillary had been looking at Sara-Kate Connolly for two solid months and only tonight had she finally begun to see.

Sara-Kate had thick skin not because she was “like an elf” but because she was one. Sara-Kate wasn't miniature or green but she had the elf's thin body and the elfin quickness. (“I'd never seen a person that small run so fast,” Hillary's father had said.)

Sara-Kate ate elf foods like berries and mint leaves. She hid herself inside the sagging folds of her old clothes in the same way the elves hid within the junk and disorder of the Connollys' backyard. And how had she come to know so much about elves in the first place except by knowing them from the inside, by being one?

The elves in Sara-Kate's yard had not come to live there by chance, Hillary now saw. Sara-Kate hadn't simply found them one day outside her back door as she pretended. The elves were there because Sara-Kate was there. She was their leader and protector. She kept their small community safe from the outside world. When Sara-Kate went away, the elves went with her. And when the weather grew too cold for even the thickness of an elf, she brought the precious magic beings inside to live in her empty house—an elf house, it must be—with her strangely sick mother.

Hillary lay in her bed shivering with the force of these thoughts. It seemed that her mind had become ten times sharper, ten times brighter, and that it could go into dark places that had confounded it before. Such was the energy of her imagination, that she wondered if she were becoming a bit of an elf herself. Was it possible to become an elf by associating with one?

Hillary stayed awake for hours that night. When she slept at last, she entered dreams that were filled with magic and the impossible possibilities of things, dreams that, oddly enough, were not so different from what was happening to her in her real waking life at that moment.

Hillary woke the next morning to a world in silent frenzy outside her window. Armies of snow-flakes swirled before her eyes. The round outline of her father's garden was already erased and the birdbath had collected an odd-looking drift on top. It rose in the basin like a lop-sided white flame, giving the birdbath the unexpected look of an Olympic torch.

“A foot of snow fallen and another foot predicted,” Mrs. Lenox informed Hillary when she arrived in the kitchen for breakfast. School was cancelled and “The snow blower's broken, of course,” her mother said.

“Of course,” Hillary replied.

“See that white mound crawling on its knees out there on what used to be our driveway?” her mother went on, gesturing out the window.