Eliazar Montgomery - A Short Story

My little sister found this short story tucked away on her computer. I'd written it a few years back when I was bored, and now it's here for your amusement. :)

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   The meadow was bright, green grass and white wild flowers sparkling in the sunlight. Eliazar crouched behind the bush, his heart rattling in his chest. It had been a week since he’d last visited this spot. He’d tried to keep away, tried to forget, tried to bury himself in his work . . . but she’d told him to come back. She had cried . . . and he had promised. What kind of business man would he be if he didn’t keep his word?

  He swatted at a mosquito and wiped his brow. He felt foolish in his brown tweed suit, and loosened the green checked tie that he had so carefully adjusted this morning. After a moment’s thought, he took the tie all the way off and stuffed it into his back pocket, shoving it under his wallet. “Dad butt.” The thought flashed through his mind, and he grimaced in a moment of self-amusement. His dad had always kept too many things in his right back pocket, looking incredibly lop-sided. Like father, like son, right? 

   “Except, dad would still be in his office, taking a normal lunch break, instead of stumbling through the woods like a half-mad stag,” he muttered to himself, scrubbing his nose on his wrist. There was a nice breeze, but he’d been crouching here for over ten minutes, and the humidity and bugs made his skin itch.

  “Come on,” he breathed, “be here.” He frowned. Something about being alone made one prone to talking to themselves. Except, he wasn’t supposed to be alone at this point. Where was she? His face flushed. It was like a meeting between worlds. How poetic.

     Eliazar Montgomery had always been a romantic at heart, much though he tried to hide it from family and associates. He’d been picked on enough as a boy, tormented through highschool, tolerated in college. People were finally taking him seriously! A few more right decisions, a little more good luck, and who knows? Maybe a partnership was on the horizon. And this stupid little side trip could jeopardize all of that.

   He didn’t give a hill of beans. He’d always been the type to tuck forget-me-nots under his pillow, save a lock of hair, make wishes on dandelions. He’d been called a fruit often enough, but he absolutely detested the fact that some inconsiderate buffoons now used the euphamism “fairy” to mean homosexual. He could stand anything else, but that just made his blood boil. He could feel his inner practicality rolling its eyes. He shoved it down. Nothing about this situation called for practicality.

   The wind picked up, and a shiver ran down his back. His eyes scanned the meadow, running over every tuft of grass, every shiver in the clover. He strained his neck forward, peering towards the slightly darker trees on the other side. Then he caught it - a whiff on the breeze, a touch of nothing, and the hair on his neck raised.

   He’d first smelled this about a month or so ago, walking home from work. His car had broken down (and he’d never been good with lug nuts, monkey wrenches or what have you), so he’d called the repair place and struck off on his own two feet. He’d been walking for just a couple of blocks when the street light flickered, dimmed to a dirty yellow, and then clicked off. “Great,” he’d thought, hunching his shoulders in his overcoat. The last place he’d wanted to be in the dark was the edge of downtown. Two more streets and he’d be back in a place the police cruisers frequented. But luck was against him.

  “Hey, man! Lost?” a thick voice had called from a darkened doorway. Eliazar had kept walking, hating himself when he stubbed his toe on a rock and stumbled slightly. Two laughing figures stepped forward, one of them flicking on a lighter.

  “What’s thi-is?” crooned one almost comfortingly as he reached out and jerked Eliazar’s gold watch chain from him pocket. “I think guys who give to charity are some of the best in the world, don’t you Jake?” He grinned and stuffed the chain in his baggy pants.

   “I’ve got a wallet if you’d like,” Eliazar choked out, clearing his throat and still walking slowly as the young men flanked him.

  “Aw, not so fast, mister,” said Jake, flicking the brim of Eliazar Montgomery’s hat so hard that if flew off backwards. “Maybe we just want to have a chat?”

   “Aw, c’mon,” said the other, laughing. “I only talk with my fists.”

   That was when Eliazar acquired his first black eye since eleventh grade. He fumbled around on his hands and knees, grasping for the glasses that had been knocked off from the blow. His fingers touched wire rims and broken glass, and then he cried out as the taller punk stepped on his hand.

   Pain. Someone was kicking his side, his fingers felt broken and cut, and his left eye was throbbing. “Maybe it fell out,” he thought ironically. “That could be why my head hurts so much.”

  And there it was - that smell. It was choking on that dark street, seeping into his nose and mouth, curling along the pavement. He thought someone must’ve been burning leaves in a trashcan nearby. Then, there was yelling above his head. He thought he saw Jake pull out a handgun, but the shrieks that came out of his mouth told Eliazar the punk wasn’t doing any damage with it. A shout, a thud, the revolver went off two more times.

   It was dark. Eliazar lay very still. His head was throbbing to the same beat as his heart, and he wondered if the punch had blinded him. Putting a hand out, however, he realized it wasn’t because he couldn’t see, but because something very dark was standing right over his head, in front of his face. His fingers touched cloth, soft leather suede. It was a small foot.

   The figure moved backwards, and then leaned down. Eliazar should’ve been afraid, but he hurt too much. His fight-or-flight instinct wasn’t kicking in. A small hand reached out in the dark, slender fingers touching his nose, and then pulling at his hand. He groaned and sat up. Everything went white for a moment, but then his vision cleared and he was standing - barely.

   He couldn’t remember much of what happened next. He’d made it home . . . somehow. That had been the first time.

  The second time he’d been following doctor’s orders, getting some exercise on the bike path in the nearby park. Nice of the city to fund something like this, he’d been thinking. He’d been in a good mood that day, smiling at the sky and breathing in the fresh air. Then breathing in not-so-fresh air. He’d stopped, looking around quickly. Was somebody camping in the woods? Had he stumbled upon some homeless guy’s hideout? He’d dumped his bike on a bush and followed the scent until he’d found it. This meadow - and her.

   Now it was the third time. She’d told him to come back, and he had. His hand hurt, and glancing down he realized that he’d been grasping the log in front of him so hard that bark was crumbling in his palm. Maybe she was waiting for him to show himself. He blinked. Of course! That seemed right. Creatures like this didn’t just appear in the middle of sunny meadows and wait for people to come talk to them.

   He sniffed nervously and straightened up, his knees cracking. Pushing off the tree he’d been leaning on, Eliazar crunched through some dead leaves and pushed into the small field, picking briars off his knees as he went.

   BAM! He hadn’t made it three steps before something hit him in the back, sprawling him out like a glass-jawed ring fighter.

   “D-don’t go into the light! Did I tell you to go into the light? Who in his right mind would go stand in the middle of that cursed bright field to wait, you fool?” The voice hissing into his ear was high, melodic, and nervous as all get out.

   Eliazar turned his head and smiled. She was just as he remembered, crouching there in the shadows. Not that there was much to remember - she had been in darker shadows on his two other encounters, hiding her face in her hair and her form in a dark shawl. Now she had crawled off his back and backwards into a bush. The leaves poked out around her, the branches stubbornly refusing to let her in. It was the same bush that had been directly to his right the entire time. Had she been watching him?

   Sitting up carefully, Eliazar scooted back a little and rested his hands on his knees. He gazed at her quietly, trying to sit very still. His heart was beating like a rabbit’s. He hated that. He’d raised cats and birds and a hedghog, once. He was very good at waiting for the small creatures to calm down enough to crawl out from under an armchair towards his peace offering of milk or bread. Today, he was the peace offering. He just had to wait.

   Birds were chirping on the other side of the clearing, and a dragonfly flitted by. It landed on the toe of his shoe for a moment, then reconsidered. The breeze had changed direction, and tendrils of soot and ash blew softly from where she was crouching. Eliazar glanced at her, then away. Animals didn’t like to be stared in the eyes. It made some of them nervous, and others considered it a challenge. He wanted her calm.

   “Why are you here?”

   His head snapped up, and his mouth opened and closed once before he knew what to say.

  “You . . . asked me to come back. I said I would, didn’t I?”

   The dark form remained unmoved. “Aren’t you . . .afraid?”

   “Of what?” Eliazar was confused.

    Suddenly, the figure shuddered, flakes of black lifting from her shoulders, and she fell over sideways into the grass. Eliazar jumped forward onto his knees instinctually, but then caught himself. He wasn’t supposed to scare her!

    “I’m a failure,” he heard her mutter. His eyes widened in consternation as the thin shoulders began to shake. Was she crying again?

   He didn’t know what to do. He was an only child, and his one girlfriend had never cried in front of him. How did you comfort girls? He frowned. His father had always drawn similarities between women and horses. It seemed highly insulting to Eliazar, but . . . he knew how to comfort horses.

   Reaching out a tremulous hand, he crooned softly, “Shh. Shh. It’s okay. Shh. You’re okay - you’re a good girl, right? Shh.” He sounded like a fool, even to himself. His fingers touched her shoulder gently, and he paused. Soot came off on his fingertips. She jerked, whipped her face towards him, and then shrieked suddenly. Surprised, Eliazar was knocked to his heels, and then flat onto his back. She leapt high into the air and landed on his chest in a cloud of smoke and ashes, causing him to cough uncontrollably.

   “What’s wrong with you?” she shrieked, her voice so high and piercing it hurt his ears. “Do you have any idea what I am? What I do with people like you? Why aren’t you afraid? Why hasn’t your heart stopped? Why, why, why?” She punctuated each question with a stomp of her foot. Eliazar’s ribs hurt.

   She shrieked again, wailing high and keen. He didn’t understand a thing she was saying now - not that he really understood before - but he could feel it resonating down through her heels and shivering out the sides of her wing-like cloak. She was afraid. She was petrified. She was shaking.

   Carefully, he reached out and touched her knee. She collapsed on his chest with a bang, both knees driving hard into his ribcage. She was crying, and the dark tears rolled in darker streaks down her face.

   She had flung him farther than she’d meant, he guessed, and they were sprawled well into the sunlight now. It was his first time getting a good look at her, and he could only stare.

   She was small, like a child, but at the same time she seemed tall when she stood above him. Her wrists were impossibly thin, and her skin was dark - chalky. It was as if she was deathly  white, but had taken a bath in soot. She was wearing a black dress with a ragged hem that reached her bare toes, and her dark shawl had been clumsily woven. It blew in the breeze in tatters. Her hair was long and unkempt, straggling around her face.

  It was her face that captured him. Her eyes were huge and luminous, slanted at the corners and rimmed in impossibly long lashes. What color were they? He would’ve said grey, but there was color lurking in their depths. Something green, something blue, something almost violet. They shimmered impossibly. Her nose was thin and pointed, smudged with the same darkness that covered her body. Her mouth was small, her lips thin and pale. Her chin was pointed and her cheeks high. He couldn’t help searching for pointed ears amidst the mess of her hair, but pointed or not, they were hidden.

   The tears streaking down her face made her look absolutely wretched, and her mouth was pulled down into a grimace. She’d taken to beating his shoulder softly with her fist as she cried, her toes dug into his belt and her elbows poking his chest. She was impossibly light - as if she were made of smoke, and not flesh and bone.

   Suddenly, she grabbed his collar and shook him like a dog. His head rattled back and forth.

  “I hate this! I hate myself! And I hate YOU for not hating ME!” she shrieked. Was this hysterics, he wondered absently. His instincts were going back to the horse analogy. Sitting up (an easy task, since she weighed nothing), he wrapped his arms around her and just sat while she wailed and thrashed. She was sobbing now, and her keening was so high he thought his eardrums might burst.

   A wave of unreality washed over him as he gazed over her mess of sooty hair at the sun-bright leaves overhead. What was he doing here? What was Eliazar Sidwell Montgomery, junior associate of Smith & Newell, bachelor, businessman, doing crouched in a field in Thatcher’s Park, holding a tiny crazed woman who was shrieking vile language at the sun next to his sensitive ears? He didn’t know. But he couldn’t help smiling to himself. Maybe he was dreaming. Maybe he was in the middle of someone else’s fairy tale. He didn’t care. He was having fun for the first time since -

   She bit him, and he jumped. His arms flew apart and she fell on the ground between his knees before he knew what was happening. They stared at each other for a moment, and blood rushed to his face. What had he been doing?

   “S-sorry!” They both stammered at the same time. He stared at her, and she raked her hands across her cheeks.

   “Sorry!” she whimpered again, snuffling into her sleeve. “You . . . I thought you were impervious, or - something. I wanted to see if you were real.”

   He glanced at his shoulder, blinking at the sooty mouth mark and the blood welling up from four tiny puncture wounds. “Well . . .” he paused, then leaned forward to stare at her again. “I’m real. Are you?”

  She huffed a puff of smoke out of her little nose. “Simpleton. Of course.” She pulled her knees tight to her chest and huddled there, her smooth brow wrinkled. Eliazar suddenly realized she didn’t know what to make of him. He should’ve said the same thing, but could only smile at her. He was acting like a buffoon, and he knew it. How else was a man to act when all his secret dreams and wishes had come true? Not that he’d ever been one to dream of adventures and hide himself in books - well, sort of. But it was really just that he’d always known the fantastical existed. He believed in fairy rings. He thought he’d seen a mermaid once. He’d bet his life on the Lochness Monster. He talked to trees when he didn’t think anyone around was listening.

   She was twiddling her lower lip with her pinky. “Are you a troll?” she asked suddenly.

  “No,” he laughed, “what makes you say that?”

  She shrugged. “They’re stupid. They aren’t afraid of anything. They don’t feel pain.”

  Eliazar thought he should feel insulted, but didn’t really. She didn’t look like she was trying to insult him, but to solve a particularely aggravating puzzle.

   Her eyes widened as a thought came, and she whispered, “Are you . . . a warlock?”

  He frowned. “Just walking by the Occult section in the library gives me the willies.”

  “You should be dead.” Her voice was barely audible, high as a fly’s song.

   Dead? He didn’t like that. “Why?”

   “I came for you.”

    They looked at each other. Was that supposed to answer his question? Eliazar didn’t understand. He didn’t understand a lot of things. His head was starting to hurt again. He sighed and leaned back on his elbows. She was still sitting between his knees, and he suddenly realized this should be an awkward situation. He decided to move, and drew his legs under him as he rubbed his neck.

   “Look . . . I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m here, aren’t I? So . . . let’s start over. My name is Eliazar.” He extended his hand towards her, smiling clumsily.

   She stared at his hand, and then extended her own - the wrong one for shaking - and touched his fingers. They left small finger prints on his skin. He turned his hand over, palm up, and she placed hers in his. Pushing up from the ground with his left hand, Eliazar lurched to his feet, pulling her slight figure up as well. Shocked, he let go as she kept rising, her feet leaving the ground. She look unperturbed, as if he’d meant to do that, and it always happened.

  Carefully, he caught her in his left arm, sitting her in the crook of it as if she were a toddler. He blushed suddenly.

  “And, uh - what’s your name?” He thought for sure she could hear his heart hammering away, and she glanced down as if to prove she could, raising a thin eyebrow at the handkerchief in his breast pocket.

   She tilted her head back and wailed something high and short, and then looked back at him, eyes almost mischievous.

  If that was a language, he had not idea what. “Uh - something I can pronounce?”

  She frowned and pulled on a strand of hair. “You might call me something like . . . Gwdeuedd. It sounds so awkward in the lower tongues.”

   Once again, Eliazar wasn’t sure if he should feel insulted or not. “And . . . Gudaid . . . Gudwed . . .” He knew he was slaughtering it, but his mouth couldn’t make the right sounds. “Uh, Dwed, then.” He licked his lips as she stared at him impassively. His curiosity had finally overcome his awe and the sense of unreality. “Why did you call me here again?”

    She stared at him, her huge eyes searing him, as if she could see the depths of his soul. She floated out of his grasp, light as the wind, and as she left his arm her form lengthened. Again she looked tall, almost elegant. Her tattered shawl spread from her shoulders, and the wind picked up her hair and whirled it into the air. Her face suddenly had a sharp quality to it that took his breath away. Every hair on his back stood up, and a sick feeling was churning in his gut. This was not the look of a good fairy. Those were not the eyes of a benevolent wish-giver from a Grimm tale.

   His chest was tight and the world seemed dark as her eyes bored into his. She opened her mouth again, and tiny sharp teeth glistened in the light from the now setting sun. She shrieked again, so high and loud that pain shot through his head and he gasped for air.

   “You, Eliazar Sidwell Montgomery, are supposed to be dead! One month and eleven days ago, you were beaten and shot, and your soul should have headed to the nether regions!”

    An eerie, sick feeling was in the air. The smell, which he had gotten used to and forgotten was now rank, strong, and for the first time he thought of it not as the pleasant smell of burning leaves, but as something foul.

   It smelled of death.

  Gwdeuedd shrieked and whooped up into the air, a crazed sheen in her eyes, and then she dove at his head. Duck, said his instincts, but his body was as a dead man’s - unresponsive. She launched herself onto his head, her sharp nails digging into his shoulders and clutching at his short, normally well-groomed hair. She pulled with all her might, shrieking, tearing, clawing, and the stench and smoke that billowed around him was all encompassing.

   Then, amidst the wails and the terror that had seized his every limb, Eliazar heard her sobs, sounds that were coming to be very familiar.

   “Why can’t I lift you?” she was crying, over and over again. “Why can’t I take you up? Why have I failed?”

   Her tiny, clawlike fingers rasped his back, and Eliazar arched, crying out in pain. “Stop that!” he cried, flinging her down and away before he could think. She crashed onto the soft ground of the meadow and lay still.

   Another first. Eliazar Montgomery felt like a murderer.

   He flung himself next to her still form, hands moving as if to tell him what to do. “Oh no! No, no - please be alright!” he whispered, afraid to touch her, yet afraid to leave her be.

   She lifted an arm weakly, and then flung it over her head like a pouting child. “You’ve killed me,” she said crossly, “killed me by not being dead, and by not running in terror. I’m as good as dead. Leave me alone.” Then she lay there, unmoving, as if unconscious. Maybe she was - her hand had gone limp.

   Carefully, Eliazar inched his fingers under her neck. When she didn’t move, he slid his other hand under her knees and gently lifted, surprised again at her lack of weight. Cradling her like a cat, he straightened and began to move back towards the bike path and his abandoned bicycle. His body hurt - especially his ribs, which had barely healed from the mugging a month ago - but his heart was elated. Maybe he was stupid. She was probably right. He was a moron. But he’d never felt so content in his whole life.

  Grasping the bicycle’s handle bars, he wrenched it upright one-handed and started to walk home.

   And that was how Eliazar Montgomery, junior associate of Smith & Newell, came to possess his own personal banshee.