The Elementals

by Morgan Llywelyn

  Daniel Foster stood unmoving. His face was the color of ashes.

  Annie’s mouth opened. But when she spoke, the voice was not hers. She felt incorporeal fingers fumbling through her mind, selecting words that then were spoken by her lips with a ghastly hollow resonance, as if emerging from some deep cavern.

  “We,” said the voice. “We.”

  Annie and Foster both stood rooted, unable to do anything but listen.

  “We are … earth,” the voice went on, gathering strength and certainty. “We are earth. You are only … the eyes and ears of the earth. But … you are think … ing, thinking, the earth’s thoughts.”

  The voice fell silent. The silence swelled, occupying all space, holding Annie and Foster at its center like prisoners in a bubble.

  “You …”—more fumbling with concepts in Annie’s mind—“you presume. You must not presume.”

  The voice ceased. Annie had a sense of vast dark spaces and intense compaction; flickering fires; unbearable compression, unborn explosion. Whatever had spoken seemed to be moving away from her. Before it was gone, its mystery unexplained, she tried to probe its intellect as it had probed hers, seeking some common experience or emotion. She felt resistance. She pressed harder. The fire of her mind burned through the resistance. Something opened to her.

  You are thinking the earth’s thoughts.

  There was no love, no hate. The entity was incapable of either, as neither was required for its survival. Likewise, it had no understanding of birth and death as humans understood those things.

  But it did have a sense of justice. In the vast planetary scale all things must be kept in balance.

  The entity was aware of construction and destruction. Of exhaustion and replenishment.

  Of give and take.

  It took. It gave accordingly, in kind, as it perceived with its nonhuman intellect.

  What it gave might be accepted by humans as a gift or a curse, a bounty or a famine. But on the earth’s scale, it was always a matter of maintaining the balance.

  The earth did not care how humans were affected. They were specks on its surface, apparently unable to make a lasting impression.

  Or could they?

  Annie was dimly aware of some ancient memory, old even by the standards of the entity. Creatures, specks, long ago, striving, achieving, changing things … erecting crystalline forms that were … cities? Then catastrophe.

  No. The idea was too far back, she could not grasp it. The thoughts of the entity were slipping away from her altogether. She made a final effort to hold on. But all her focused curiosity could not prevail against the vast shifting of thought that was like a slipping of giant plates beneath the earth’s unstable crust. The slightest echo of that shifting was enough to throw Annie to her knees, the link broken.

  For a few moments her mind would not work at all. She was a body and nothing more. The heart beat, the lungs worked, but there was no conscious process to direct anything else.

  She came to very slowly. Her eyeballs were painfully dry. She had not blinked for a long time. She was on her hands and knees, her vision fixed on the ground some eighteen inches from her eyes. The earth was beaten flat by generations of feet, but seen so close up it had a variety of textures. Annie was looking at individual grains of soil, minute threads of plant life, a tiny scurrying of black ants emerging from one hole and disappearing into another, a few crushed twigs, a pearly sliver of fossilized shell from some remotely distant past.

  She blinked.

  Her eyes watered profusely.

  She swallowed, forcing saliva down her parched throat. With an effort, she lifted her head and looked around.

  Daniel Foster was still standing in front of her, his own expression slowly clearing.

  “Are you all right?” she said with a rusty voice that was at least her own.

  The feed-store owner looked down at her in astonishment. “What you doin’ here, Miz Murphy?”

  “Don’t you remember?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t remember nothin’ since I got up this mornin’. Nothin’!” he repeated wonderingly.

  He stared at the woman. She didn’t look the same, somehow. He tried to remember how she should look, but his thoughts were cobwebbed.

  Annie stood up. She was as stiff and sore as if she had been on hands and knees for hours. When she glanced at the sky and saw how far the sun had traveled, she gave a gasp of disbelief.

  “I have to get home!” she cried. “I have to collect the baby and start dinner!”

  Being able to say those words brought a peculiar relief to her, as if she were painting an image of normalcy over a window that opened onto an appalling vista.

  Foster nodded, beginning to shift his weight from one foot to the other, trying to loosen locked joints. “A-yuh. You do that, Miz Murphy. I gotta get back to town myself. Cain’t figger out what I’m doin’ way out here anyway. Was I s’posed to go to Portland today? Where’d I leave my horse and buggy?” He turned and looked vaguely toward the road.

  Annie glimpsed Foster’s chestnut mare tied to a tree in the distance, waiting patiently in the shafts.

  But there would be no buggy ride for her. She must walk across fields, and she would have to hurry if she was to be home before Liam and Johnny returned from the day’s work, their bellies growling.

  Wearing a baffled expression, Foster bade Annie goodbye and started toward the road. The blank in his mind was worrisome. But the more he tried to remember, the more solid his mental fog became. His brain was like a child’s slate, wiped clean with one swipe of the cloth.

  Everything pertaining to the boulder on Pine Hill was gone.

  Annie could feel her own memories fading. She was aware that she had made a giant leap of understanding, but it was going from her as swiftly as the details of a dream fade with the coming of morning.

  If I could tell it to Liam right now, maybe I could remember, she thought.

  But Liam was not there. And Daniel Foster was hurrying away as if the hounds of hell were after him.

  Annie circled around the boulder and began climbing the gentle slope of Pine Hill. Halfway to the top, she turned and looked back at the stone.

  I wonder if it’s lonely, she thought with a strange stir of sympathy.

  No. Stones can’t feel things like that.

  Stones can’t feel.

  But they think. They are aware.

  With an uncontrollable shudder she hurried on up the hill and through the pines, then began running for home.

  I have to get home before it rains, she thought.

  She ran under a blazing blue sky.

  But by the time she was breathlessly mounting the Baldwins’ porch to collect baby Mary, the first fat raindrops were splattering on the dry earth.

  The creak of the porch floorboards brought May Baldwin to the door with Mary in her arms. Her jaw gaped open when she saw Annie.

  “Lordy,” she breathed.

  Annie thought she was astonished by the rain.

  “Much obliged,” Annie said, taking the baby from the other woman’s arms and turning quickly. “Gotta run or we’ll get drenched,” she called over her shoulder. “Much obliged, May!”

  She sprang from the porch and pelted off toward the Murphy homestead.

  May Baldwin stared after her in stunned disbelief.

  Mary screamed and writhed in her mother’s arms, making it hard to run. “Hush up now,” Annie panted. “I know I scared you, grabbin’ you like that, but we gotta hurry.”

  The baby kept on screaming.

  When she reached the cabin, Annie let out a sigh of relief. As soon as she was inside she closed the door against the rising wind, and looked anxiously toward the banked fire. There was still a glow of coals; it would blaze up quickly once she got the bellows after it.

  She set Mary down and the child, still screaming, scuttled away from her.

  “Hush up, now!” Annie repeated. “A person would think you don’t know your own mama
!”

  She busied herself with the fire, keeping one eye on the obviously distraught child. Raindrops were setting up a steady barrage on the roof. “Going to be a good soaking rain,” Annie announced with satisfaction to the room at large. “Last all day and all night, most of tomorrow.”

  She could not say how she knew. It was in her bones, like her sense of direction.

  The baby cried herself into a violent case of hiccups. Only then did she allow her mother to pick her up. Annie paced up and down the cabin floor, holding the child and crooning to her.

  From time to time the child turned wondering eyes on her mother’s face.

  At last Annie put her down in the almost-outgrown cradle. For once Mary did not complain. She snuggled down gratefully as if returning to the security of the womb.

  Annie busied herself preparing a meal. She went into the barn and used Liam’s grindstone to put a fresh edge on her household ax. Then she went out into the yard and caught a hen that had grown too old to lay. She swiftly beheaded the bird, plucked and cleaned it, and had it in the pot in a matter of minutes. She was soon floured to the elbows as she made dumplings to go with the chicken.

  “Sweet corn would be good with this,” she decided. “And some green tomatoes, sliced thin and fried the way Liam likes them.”

  She whistled softly to herself as she worked. From the depths of the cradle Mary could not see her mother, but she heard the familiar, comforting sound, and relaxed. By the time her father and brother came home she was fast asleep.

  Annie was putting the final touches on the meal. When she heard the thud of familiar footsteps on the porch, she called out, “There’s dry towels there by the door. You men dry yourselves off before you come in my house, hear?”

  The door creaked on its hinges. Annie turned around with a smile to welcome her menfolk.

  There was a gasp of total horror.

  Liam Murphy dropped the armload of firewood he was carrying in from the porch. The split logs fell to the floor with a clatter. At once Mary screamed from her cradle.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Annie demanded of Liam. “Listen to that, you’ve woken the baby when I just got her to sleep a while ago!”

  Then she realized that both her husband and son were staring at her as if they had never seen her before. Johnny shrank back, putting his father’s bulk between himself and his mother.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Annie asked again.

  In a strangled voice, Liam replied, “What’s wrong with you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Come over to the mirror, Annie.” He took hold of her arm and led her across the room to her mother’s oval mahogany-framed mirror, hanging in a place of honor between the two front windows.

  “Look,” Liam said.

  Annie looked.

  The rainy light coming through the windows fell softly on her face. But even its gentleness could not soften the image reflected in the mirror.

  Bright, merry Annie Murphy was gone. In her place was a woman with the seamed and fissured face of a person twice her age. The eyes were ageless, and haunted.

  Instead of sleek dark hair, the face peered from beneath hair as snowy as the peaks for which the White Mountains were named.

  Annie’s mind struggled to reconcile what she had expected to see with what she was actually seeing.

  She raised a trembling hand to her head.

  The figure in the glass did the same.

  “My hair’s gone white,” Annie said in a disbelieving whisper. She turned toward Liam, seeking some sort of reassurance. “What happened?”

  He could only stare at her. “I don’t know! Don’t you know? Good God almighty, woman, don’t you know?”

  Annie swung her incredulous gaze back to the mirror.

  Her eyes locked with the haunted eyes in the glass.

  In one dizzying moment she was sucked out of herself and plunged into a whirling vortex that spun her among a kaleidoscope of images. Incredible heat, the universe exploding, incredible cold, a sense of vast space, spinning, slowing, cooling, an infinity of time passing. A wrenching upheaval. Destruction, reformation. Great sheets of ice, grinding inexorably. Warming, melting. A swarm of motion on the surface. Crystalline shapes rising in clusters to sparkle in the sun.

  Then cataclysm. Change.

  Ice melting, seas rising. More motion, other construction. Volcanoes erupting like giant pustules. Lava flowing, seas boiling. Cataclysm. Change.

  Faces! Faces that seemed to surface from somewhere deep inside Annie herself and imprint themselves over the images spinning past.

  She saw, for one clear moment, a large tawny woman holding a seashell against a misty green background. Then she was gone. Countless other faces sped past, blurring. Hundreds, thousands.

  Then another figure etched itself sharply on Annie’s awareness. She saw a slim bronzed man with an abnormally small waist and almond-shaped, tilted eyes. He stood on the brink of a flaming abyss.

  She wanted to shout a warning to him, but before she could he turned away, only to reappear against the misty green backdrop that had framed the tawny woman. Then he faded and was gone, to be replaced by another succession of figures rushing by in a measureless stream. Men, women. Faces. Faces with features Annie began to recognize. One had a familiar width of browbone. Another had a certain set to the shoulders. A third had, like herself, tilted eyes.

  Family features, developing over the centuries.

  Intuitively Annie understood. She was seeing connections. The people she was glimpsing as they were swept along by the river of time were her people. She was as much a part of them as sand and pebbles and boulders were part of the mountains.

  The mountains! Suddenly they rose triumphant in her vision, brushing all else aside. Mount Washington, Mount Katahdin, Chocurua’s mountain; vast and massive ranges whose names she did not know. The mighty mountains, enduring. Witnesses to the antediluvian past and the unimaginable future. Time viewed from the mountaintops. Eternity in stone.

  “Some people worship mountains,” Annie heard herself murmur in a faraway voice. “Some people see no difference between mountains and God.”

  Then she fainted in Liam’s arms.

  It was the first and only time in her life that Annie Murphy fainted.

  Eight months later, when the Murphys’ second son was born, people attributed the startling change in her to her pregnancy.

  “Takes some women like that,” Nellie Smith confided at the church’s box supper. Nellie’s husband was the local doctor. “My Zebediah says being in the family way changes a woman’s whole system.”

  May Baldwin disagreed. “Not like that, it don’t. It don’t turn a woman’s hair pure white between sunup and sundown.”

  “I don’t think this is a proper conversation for a church social,” Felicity Osgood said primly, pretending she was not listening avidly.

  Ignoring her, Nellie went on, “Miz Murphy’s doing fine now, my husband says. She’s back on her feet and taking up her chores. Her hair’s still white, but when he was out there the other day he said her wrinkles were softening. Nursing a baby softens a woman, you know. It was just such a big strong baby that having it was a shock to her body.”

  “I should think so!” Agatha Dalrymple exclaimed. “Having a sixteen-pound baby would be a shock to any woman!”

  The Widow Mason giggled. “I alluz knew that Liam Murphy was a strappin’ big man.”

  The others, except for Felicity Osgood, laughed outright.

  Tabitha Foster commented, “The Murphys are gonna need a lot o’ strong sons, the way things are goin’ out to their place. That farm used to be piss poor, you know. Then last autumn Liam Murphy brought in the biggest harvest in these parts, and he’s doubled his order for spring seed. Seems like he cain’t put a foot wrong.”

  May Baldwin agreed. “That’s true. He’s alluz ahead o’ the weather these days. How you reckon’ he does that, Tabitha, when your husband ain’t sellin’ weather p
redictions no more?”

  The question was asked with gleeful malice, as all present understood. Tabitha Foster kept her burning face lowered to her sewing as she replied in a low voice, “Don’t know. Just lucky, I guess.”

  The others resumed their gossip. According to Elizabeth Wheeler, whose husband Matt owned the hardware store, “Liam Murphy’s ordered a special new indoor pump all the way from Concord, to put by Annie’s sink. Reckon there’s gonna be more celebratin’ when that comes.”

  “take more than a new pump or a new baby to make a woman get over havin’ her hair go white,” Susan Mason said.

  May Baldwin gathered spittle in her mouth and licked the ends of the thread she was trying to push through the eye of her needle. “I’d be right happy to see Annie perk up a mite,” she told the others, when the thread was safely through. “She alluz used to be whistlin’ or singin’. Sometimes when the wind was right we could even hear her over to our place. But ever since last summer—long afore she got big with that baby—she’s gone quiet. Turned in on herself, like.”

  The other women continued sewing without comment.

  Tabitha Foster did not think to remark that her husband’s demeanor had changed at about the same time, as if some burden had been lifted from his shoulders.

  The two had no connection in her mind.

  Everything that is, is alive.

  Life did not come into this world. The life forms of the earth are a natural product of the earth, as the living planet is a natural product of the living universe.

  Life in any form is part of life in every form. One, indivisible. The terrestrial spark is connected to the most distant star, just as the collective consciousness of the earth is one cell in the infinitely greater creative intelligence of the universe.

  It is said, no one can know the mind of God.

  Yet we are the mind of God.

  And so we dance for joy.

  We dance to the music of life, which ripples and shimmers across the universe. Even in the coldest depths of space, something is dancing the dance. Something is part of the music.