The Elementals

by Morgan Llywelyn

  “After that, people started comin’ to him reg’lar to learn what the weather was likely to do. They were willing to pay money for it, and he was willing to take their money. But afore he could give a prediction he alluz had to visit this rock, and he alluz had to bring a gift of Indian corn.”

  Annie’s eyes were fixed on his face. They were as bright as two stars. “Well, I never,” she breathed. “And you still do it. You come here and leave the corn, and then … then what? How do you learn about the weather? Do the Indians meet you here and tell you?”

  “Mebbe I ain’t willin’ to say,” he replied. “Man should keep some of his business to himself, if he’s anyway smart.”

  But she had to know. How could she bear it if she didn’t know?

  “I won’t tell anyone,” she promised.

  “What’ll you give me for it?” he countered with heavyhanded playfulness.

  There was no mistaking his intention. Annie stiffened. “My thanks,” she said coolly. “And the gratitude of my husband, who, as you surely remember, is a very large and powerful man.”

  Foster understood well enough. Her sudden icy dignity, combined with the implied threat, meant he had got all he was going to get from her unless he forced her.

  Had she been a different woman in a different setting, he might. But the proximity of the rock restrained him. Its presence, glowering over them, drained his audacity. The thing always had scared him, he thought resentfully. And not because of the wild stories Foster womenfolk circulated about it either.

  The situation called for caution. Liam Murphy would beat any man to a pulp for molesting his wife. Foster did not want Annie carrying a tale back to her husband. He bargained with what he had. “If it’ll make you happy,” he said ruefully, “I’ll tell you about the weather. But remember you promised not to let it go any further.”

  Annie nodded agreement. But she stood up and put a bit of distance between herself and him, just in case.

  Foster observed without comment. “The Injuns held this rock sacred because they said it talked to them,” he related. “It was part of the earth, which in their way of believing things was also part of the sky and the weather, everything all mixed together. I don’t understand it, heathen gibberish. But they believed it for centuries. They came here to touch that rock and have visions. In those visions, they saw what the weather was going to be like, and they arranged their lives accordingly. Bad winter comin’, they went south. Mild winter, they stayed put. That sorta thing.

  “My grandfather discovered by accident that when he touched the stone he had visions too. Sometimes, not all the time. He was afraid to tell anybody, afraid he’d be accused o’ witchcraft. So he passed the secret down only to his eldest son, my pa, and he passed it on to me.”

  Annie asked, “Is it witchcraft?”

  Daniel Foster shook his head. “I’m no witch, Annie. I can’t do no magic. All I can do—sometimes, like I said—is see a vision. Kinda cloudy and far away, hard to see, but when it comes to me it shows me … it’s hard to explain. It just shows me. In return for the corn.”

  “The Indians don’t tell you about the weather?” she asked, unsure what he was saying.

  “Not the Injuns. It’s the rock, their sacred rock. My pa figgered bein’ able to see visions from the rock was something passed on in the blood. Like inheritin’ a good singin’ voice. He figgered mebbe it came easier to Injuns than to whites, but us Fosters had a little bit of it. The visions ain’t clear, but we can see’em. Sometimes.”

  “Did you see a vision the last time you came to the rock?”

  Annie’s question surprised him. “Ah … no. I laid my hand on the rock but I couldn’t feel nothin’. Like it was empty, somehow.”

  “Empty? What did you expect to feel?”

  “What there alluz is afore a vision comes. A sort o’ hum. You can feel it more’n hear it.”

  “Can you feel it now?” Annie wanted to know.

  “I ain’t touched the rock yet. I was just fixin’ to when you come over the hill.”

  Annie gave the man a penetrating look. She would have dismissed his tale as foolishness, had she not received a mighty jolt from that same boulder. “I don’t believe a word of it,” she said emphatically, knowing how he would respond. “You’re storyin’ me, Dan’l Foster.”

  “I am not!”

  “Then show me. Show me now.”

  “I cain’t do it with you here,” he muttered.

  “Why not? Are you afraid it won’t work? Are you afraid I’ll know it’s a lie?” she taunted.

  Beads of sweat formed on his forehead. “It ain’t meant for any but the Foster men, it’s our secret.”

  Your profitable secret, Annie thought to herself. Maybe it is witchcraft. A lie is a poor substitute for the truth, but it’s the only one anybody’s found so far. If it is witchcraft, of course you’d lie about it to save your skin.

  Memories of witchcraft lingered in New England, even in enlightened 1855. Annie was not certain she believed in witches—there was too much of her father in her for that—but she was not certain she disbelieved either.

  Her mother would have believed.

  And there was something. That boulder had thrown Annie through the air as if she were a piece of chaff.

  Annie had to know.

  “You’ve told me so much already,” she said to Foster, “you might as well show me the rest. I promised you I wouldn’t tell, and I won’t. My word is as good as my husband’s. What is it you do, Dan’l? Do you put your hand on the stone like this …”

  She reached out as if to touch the boulder, encouraging him. She had no intention of making actual contact, however. The memory of the last time she touched that rock was sharp within her.

  But Foster did not know she was only pretending. The stone was his, his secret, his family heritage though dark and filled with mystery. He would not share. With an inarticulate cry, he grabbed for her hand to stop her from touching the boulder.

  Foster’s sudden move startled Annie, causing her to dodge to one side. She slightly lost her balance, and inadvertently put out a hand to save herself.

  Her hand touched the stone.

  Later, thinking back, she would be able to recall the very peculiar sensation she had felt in that fraction of a second before her skin made contact with the boulder’s surface. This time there was no jolt, no shock. Instead, she had felt her hand being irresistibly drawn as if by a powerful magnetic force.

  Then the world as she knew it disappeared.

  18

  She was in a high cold place.

  Mountains rolled away from her. Peaks seemed to be below her. She had a sense of vast distances, as if she could gaze south to Massachusetts, east to Maine, west to Vermont … yet she could not gaze. She had no eyes.

  She did not need eyes.

  Her entire being was a sensory organ.

  She was aware of weight, mass, heat, fragility, temperature, color—an incredible spectrum of unimaginable colors!—texture, movement, upheaval, solidity, somnolence, energy.

  Her awareness was total and generally unresponsive. She observed. She partook.

  But she could respond; she knew that.

  If there was a threat, she could respond.

  She observed the vast mountain chain sprawled around her. It was rather like lying on a bed, looking down along one’s own body. But she knew it was not Annie Murphy’s body. It was not even female. Gender had become an irrelevant abstraction.

  Many things had become irrelevant. Others had acquired allconsuming importance.

  She partook of the passage of time as if it were the workings of heart and lungs and intestines within the body; building, repairing, altering, tearing down, redesigning, replacing, removing, a constant process of change that was necessary because existence itself was a constant process of change. But change could be a positive, or negative, force.

  With an effort beyond comprehension, the tiny, stubborn seed of Annie Murphy’s individ
ual consciousness resisted absorption and struggled to assert itself; struggled to question and know.

  What is this?

  What am I?

  I am in a high cold place.

  No.

  I am a high cold place.

  Yes.

  Partly.

  She redoubled her efforts. With senses that were not mortal senses, she reached out and explored. She could not see, hear, touch, taste, smell. Yet she saw wind. She heard ice. She touched light. She tasted energy. She smelled time.

  She was the massive patriarch settlers had named Mount Washington, and simultaneously she was the granite boulder, the glacial erratic Indians had worshiped on Pine Hill. She was Mount Katahdin and chunks of amethyst in the hills above Kearsarge and grains of sand in the bed of the Saco River.

  She was earth, she was stone.

  Positive and negative forces coursed through her being, forming a circuit between earth and sky, connecting with clouds, streaking the air with lightning, striking into the silt of eons like the finger of God touching Adam’s clay and bringing forth life.

  She saw the solar wind and felt its song.

  The seasons were hers. She knew, intimately, snow and sun, wind and rain. The least flake of snow was important to her because in its minute way the snowflake, frozen child of Water, would have an incalculably small but irreversible impact.

  Every drop of moisture brought change, adding its impetus to the rivers that carved and recarved the face of the planet, swelling the seas that gave birth to the glaciers and gnawed away the land.

  Every wind that blew drifted sand, eroded rock, resculptured the surface. Made a difference. Was felt. Must be endured.

  The entity in which Annie Murphy’s consciousness was suspended was like a flayed giant. It had no layer of toughened skin to protect its raw nerve endings. Those nerve endings were bared afresh by every breeze and raindrop. Earth felt everything done to its body. The shifting of a single particle of soil was measured on the same scale as the shifting of the continental plates. Both affected the being of Earth.

  Earth was aware and vulnerable. Every cell of its being was aware of its vulnerability to the forces that acted upon it.

  Annie, linked with it, was aware.

  The planet knew what winds would blow and what precipitation would fall. In its own self-interest, the massive totality of Earth was continually observing every weather pattern, assessing with the experience of eons what each change would mean for itself. Every change mattered. Every change altered the fabric of its existence.

  Earth contained an instinct for survival proportionate to its mass.

  That which was still Annie Murphy felt a thrill of terror. She realized she was somehow partaking of the consciousness of something infinitely larger than herself. At the same time, she also seemed to be trapped within various separate aspects of that entity. She was a mountain; she was a grain of sand.

  Her terror mounted. In a few moments her identity must surely be stripped from her by sheer force. What had been Annie would be irretrievably fragmented, dispersed among a trillion particles of soil and stone. She would be lost in the ponderous indifference of a planet.

  She knew the fear the dead might feel if their brains continued to function while their bodies disintegrated. The fear of being absorbed into the earth, made one with the darkness. Spinning away into infinity. Lost. Lost to life as she knew it. Lost forever.

  She grew as cold as all the glaciers that had ever glittered beneath a polar sky. She was frozen with a fear no human could imagine, yet her consciousness had expanded enough to imagine it.

  I am a cold high place, she thought with resounding horror. And I shall be here forever.

  Then, bubbling up through her fear like a spring of bright water, came an unexpected wash of sympathy. She felt a huge and tender pity for the flayed giant that was so beautiful, and so vulnerable. The massive peak rearing its head through ice and thunder. The grain of sand, enduring.

  This is my land, she thought.

  My land.

  Oh, my lovely land!

  The nerve endings of her spirit intuitively recognized kinship. Her flesh had been nourished by this soil, ingested with the crops she had eaten. She was not separate from Earth. She was one with Earth.

  Yes.

  As she should be.

  Yes.

  And it was both terrible and good.

  The boulder on Pine Hill had recognized in her the innate devotion to and sympathy for the land that characterized both the Irish and the Indian. The love of place in Annie Murphy had spoken to the stone, and the stone had answered.

  Invisible lightning had flashed and a circuit had closed.

  When she touched the boulder a second time it had welcomed her in.

  Now she was Mount Washington, brooding above the clouds, whipped by gales no human could withstand. Glorying in its strength, grim in its endurance.

  Now she was the boulder on Pine Hill, fearsome and holy …

  19

  “Gawdamighty! Annie? Can you hear me? Gawdamighty! Miz Murphy? Miz Murphy! Talk to me! Gawdamighty!” Daniel Foster feverishly chafed Annie Murphy’s hands. She was aware of him as from a great distance. He was a puny being, less than an ant, a thing of no importance, and he labored frantically over another thing of no importance.

  Annie observed.

  The boulder observed.

  The woman’s body lay prone on the beaten earth in front of the stone, with Daniel Foster crouching over her. His face was pale, his eyes were wild. He kept repeating “Gawdamighty!” like a prayer as he struggled to restore her to consciousness.

  Annie/boulder observed with a vast indifference. Why would any being wish to spend a few flickers of eternity in a parcel of flesh, isolated from similar fleshly beings by a total lack of communal consciousness, doomed to pain and disease and a swift extinction?

  Boulder/Annie watched and pondered these things.

  Once Foster shot a glance at the stone. Fear frosted his face.

  His efforts were pathetic, but the human impulse behind them touched that which had been Annie Murphy. He had meant her no harm. He was a greedy, penurious man who forced his wife to live above the store when he could have built her a fine frame house with a dozen rooms, if she wanted—but he was not an evil man. Just flawed. As all humans were flawed in their various ways.

  As stone was flawed. Boulder knew about fissures and cracks that would break open under pressure. Boulder knew about fire and heat and crushing weight, bearing down, solidifying.

  Annie’s thoughts were merged with boulder’s thoughts.

  Foster felt her hands growing colder in spite of his rubbing. He sat her unresisting body up, head propped against his shoulder, and began gently slapping her face with is free hand. “Annie! Miz Murphy! Gawdamighty, your husband will skin me alive … Annie!”

  The mention of Liam reached Annie in some far place. With an effort, she reached out. But it was very hard to break free of boulder. Boulder wanted to keep her, incorporate her heat and light into its cold self. Boulder remembered glaciers, and bitter, grinding cold. Boulder remembered being dragged over the earth by the ice until it formed a great gouge in the soil, like the trail left by a huge animal …

  No!

  Annie made a terrible effort and wrenched herself free. It felt as if every cell of her body was being torn from every other cell.

  She screamed with pain and opened her eyes. “Liam!” she gasped.

  Daniel Foster’s pale face hovered over hers. “Thank Gawd,” he breathed. “Are you all right? Talk to me, Miz Murphy.”

  She swallowed, then moistened her lips with her tongue. She tried to remember how to shape lips and tongue. But the only shape they would take was to make the name of Liam.

  “We better get you home, Miz Murphy,” Foster said anxiously. “Gawdamighty, I never meant this to happen. I told you not to touch that rock. Didn’t I say that? You tell your husband I said that. You tell him I never meant you
no harm. But you wouldn’t lissen to me. You wouldn’t lissen.”

  Annie fought with her vocal cords and finally managed to say, brokenly, “Not your … fault.”

  “Thank Gawd you admit that! Well, come on now, let’s see if we can get you on your feet and to home. Can you stand up?”

  “I … think so.” She was beginning to feel a little more at home in her body. But it was a strange sensation. Her body was so small. And so liquid!

  It had the gift of movement, however. Movement was wonderful, miraculous! Just to be able to lift one part of oneself from the earth by the action of bone and muscle …

  Annie gave a delighted laugh. The laugh shocked Foster almost more than anything else. It seemed so out of place.

  Maybe her mind was hurt! Who knows what might have happened to her? One minute she seemed perfectly all right, then the next minute she was lying flat on the ground, not even seeming to breathe, her body as rigid as stone.

  He watched, baffled, as she experimented with walking, taking her first steps with all the uncertainty and joyful discovery of a baby.

  One foot and then the next foot, Annie thought to herself. Lift them, move them! Move forward!

  Her face was split with a grin.

  Foster hovered at her shoulder. When she was sure of her balance she reached out one hand and pushed him away. “I can manage by myself.”

  “Are you sure? That was awful, Miz Murphy.” Thinking fast he added. “Like you had some kinda fit or somethin’. Are you given to fits?”

  With every beat of her heart, her thoughts were growing clearer. “No, Dan’l,” she said firmly. “I don’t have fits. Not ever. No one in my family has ever had fits. This was something else. You know that.”

  He cringed visibly. “I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.”

  “Yes you do.” She frowned at him. “Now you stand aside, Dan’l. I can get home under my own power, thank you very much.” She bit off her words precisely and forcibly.

  “Are you sure? I mean, what’re you gonna say to your husband?”