Afternoon of the Elves by Janet Taylor Lisle Read Free Book Online

you to wear at Thanksgiving,” her mother said, presenting such a happy prospect that Hillary forgot to worry about Sara-Kate for the rest of the day.
    But on Wednesday there was again no sign of her and so, in the afternoon, Hillary approached the Connollys’ back door and bravely knocked. Her fist made such a tiny, hollow noise—it was as if the house were completely empty—that she began to pound with the flat of her hand. There was no door-bell and no knocker.
    â€œSara-Kate!” Clouds of breath exploded from her mouth. Behind her the yard was silent, listening. Or perhaps it didn’t listen. Hillary looked over her shoulder. Perhaps it was as empty as the house. Not a twig moved. Not a bird chirped. In the elf village, many cottages were falling apart. The Ferris wheel stood grandly over the ground, but brush and debris had blown into its wires and the Popsicle-stick seats were tossed and tangled.
    Hillary put her mittened hand on the doorknob and turned. The door came open.
    â€œSara-Kate?” she asked softly of the darkness within. Then, since there was no answer here either, she stepped forward across the threshold.

Seven
    If, by some charm, Hillary had been shrunk to a height of three inches and escorted through the door of one of Sara-Kate’s elf houses, it would have seemed no stranger than the place she entered now. Certainly, whatever peculiarities an elf house might have had—stars adrift near the ceiling, hypnotized moths on the walls?—it would have been more welcoming. This room was cold as ice, and dim. Hillary could distinguish little at first, just a heap of mysteriously shaped objects rising from the floor in front of her.
    Gradually, as her eyes adjusted, she made out a table and then two bulky chairs from the heap. A cardboard box, a floor lamp, a stool, and a low bookcase came into view. They were set in a sort of circle in the middle of the room and, at their center, most incongruous of all, was a large white stove. But what a strange-looking stove. Hillary took a step nearer. The oven had no door, only a cavernous mouth where the door should have been. And the burners on top were gone, leaving behind four empty craters.
    An electric fan was perched on a bureau positioned next to the stove. The bureau’s drawers had been removed, however, to serve other functions. Hillary caught sight of one in the corner being used as a container for tools. Another, turned upside-down over a stool, had become a table top. Meanwhile, the bureau’s drawer slots had become storage holes for cooking pans, jars, utensils, newspapers, and other items unidentifiable in the poor light.
    In fact, everything in the room seemed to have been dismantled, rearranged, and transformed into something else, Hillary noticed during the full minute she stood gazing about just inside the back door. She saw that the room had been an ordinary kitchen once. There was a refrigerator against the far wall, and a sink and faucet were visible beneath a window whose torn shade allowed outside light to enter. For the rest, everything not actually attached to the wall or the floor (the radiator was still in place for instance) had been uprooted and dragged to the room’s center, where it was installed around the stove to make another room. A room within a room.
    But now, even this odd inner room seemed to have fallen into disuse. Hillary walked around it cautiously, examining its different sides. The two shabby armchairs, worn to cotton stuffing in the seats, had been pushed so close to the stove’s open mouth that the people sitting in them must have baked their legs if the oven had been turned on. Hillary drew her mittened hand along a chair back. A fine dust rose.
    Sara-Kate and her mother had gone away, this much was clear. The house was shut down. The heat was turned off. They had gone to visit friends or perhaps they were in Sarasota, Florida, with Sara-Kate’s father. They had left