Page 10 of The Elementalist
As I watched them go, I took in a lot of air, held it in my lungs, exhaled.
A powerful gust of wind swept through the forest and rattled the trees around me. Yes, I loved the water—water of all types, really: oceans and rivers, streams and the rain. I loved the rain most of all. Hell, I even loved the sound of kitschy zen-type desk fountains.
But the wind held a special place in my heart, too. I’d always loved the sound of it whistling through branches overhead, or thundering over my ears. Others hid from windstorms, but I never did. I enjoyed walking in them, feeling the raw power, observing its dominion over everything. The strongest trees bowed. I once had someone tell me he believed the wind stole his soul. I believe he couldn’t have been more wrong. The wind gave life. Hell, the windwaslife.
The breath of God.
Then again, I always was a little weird.
I stood there upon a side trail not far from where two people had met their maker and listened to this sudden gust of wind that seemed to be blowing everywhere at once, swaying the massive treetops above and rustling pine needles along the forest floor. I closed my eyes and felt it move over me, throughmy hair, thunder over my ears. With the waterfall cascading nearby and the gusting wind blasting everywhere, this place felt like heaven.
When I closed my eyes, the wind seemed to pick up strength. I reveled in the sensation of it on my skin and in my hair, briefly forgetting why I’d come here. I lifted my hands and the wind increased as if in response. It had to be up to gale-force now, easily forty or fifty miles an hour. Dirt and debris pelted me, but I ignored it.
When I lowered my hands, the wind died. I could almost believe I’d become the forest’s maestro, controlling the symphonic orchestra of nature. Ialmostbelieved. I wasn’t delusional, just someone who appreciated nature... perhaps a little too much.
While standing there with my hands down at my sides, I became all too aware that the wind had completely died.
And because I was weird—and because I’d spent far too much time alone with my imagination while waiting for cheating spouses to emerge from seedy hotels—I raised my hands again, imagining that I could control the wind.
The breeze stirred, picking up.
I wasn’t delusional. Obviously, it was a coincidence that the wind had died down when I lowered my hands, and started up again when I raised them. The wind could do that. A fickle friend. And, like the rain, I was always sad to see it go.
Except… well, something happened as I raised my hands higher.
The wind intensified more.
Coincidence? Of course, but it was fun to pretend nonetheless. I was like a kid running around the neighborhood with his arms outstretched, thinking that at any moment now he was going to lift off and fly like Superman.
I lowered my hands and, coincidentally again, the windstopped, too.
Weird, I thought, and almost went back to searching the many trails.
Except something had come over me.
A sense of excitement.
I couldn’t focus on the crime scene. In fact, I’d nearly forgotten about it entirely.
Two people had been killed. Near this spot. Other than a sister listening on a phone, there hadn’t been witnesses, but that wasn’t true, was it?
No. Not true at all.
Nature was here. The trees, animals, the Earth itself as well. The waterfall had towered over everything. They say when someone dies, that the tragic event is forever imprinted at that spot on the land, to replay itself over and over for those sensitive enough to ‘see’ it.
I, of course, wasn’t sensitive enough to see such things. Hell, I’d never even seen a ghost—and never wanted to, either. Plenty of stories of ghosts circulated around Shadow Pines, enough to where even the skeptics among us would never outright say that ghosts didn’t exist. The hard-headed ones would always deflect with something like saying they hadn’t yet seen enough to completely convince them. Often, it was the doubters who would return with their own first-hand accounts of hauntings, real fear and excitement in their eyes, ghost stories of their own. Shadow Pines had that effect on people: turning skeptics into believers.
My family had been lucky... the house I’d grown up in didn’t have any ghosts. If you asked most people around town, that made us the exception. My office, too. Never had anything unexplainable happen there… except a landlord who magically appeared in person whenever the rent was late. Luckily, he worked with me. He kinda had to, which is probably why he didn’t like me much. Not like he had a stack of people lined up torent my space. If he kicked me out, he’d have an empty building for months if not years.Somechance of getting rent beat no chance at all.
But the thought that something beyond the human experience existed, intrigued me, and I couldn’t quite shake it. Maybe that’s why I stayed around this crazy town. But somewhere along the line, I’d become Schrodinger’s skeptic. I simultaneously wanted to believe in that stuff but also didn’t want to. The reality of it would be too unnerving. I much preferred a world I could explain in rational terms, but remained fascinated by the what-ifs of the beyond.
Of course, my old mentor would have been disappointed in me. He didn’t believe in the supernatural. He believed in facts that would hold up in a court of law.
I stood with my hands down by my sides, waiting for the wind to pick up again on its own and prove I’d been pretending. The air remained still. The scent of moist soil, aromatic cedars and pines, and the sweet grass surrounded me. Other than the cascading waterfall, I heard nothing. The wind that had been blowing so powerfully mere seconds earlier had become a memory. Perhaps I had only imagined it.
Perhaps...
Or perhaps not.
