Elf, Elf, Up Too High
By L. G. Merrick
Illustrated by Steve Morris
1.
In shame Anthony slithers out of bed, and in rising panic he strips the sheets. Sniffling, he wads them into a bunch. A cold clot in his arms, dripping. He shoves them under the bed, far under. He arranges his toys on the bed. With all his toys up there, his mother won’t notice the sheets are missing. That’s his plan—his whole plan. Hide the evidence and hope.
But his soft distressed crying as he piles toys alerts her.
“Anthony. Did you wet the bed again?”
“No. I’m big now. Babies do that. I just want to play. Can I have some privacy.”
He wishes he was not crying but the strain is too much.
His mother takes each toy off the bed as he puts it up.
“Don’t. Damn! Stop it. You are too old for this. You’re six. You’re supposed to be a big boy now. Aren’t you tired of it? I am. I definitely am.”
“I really tried last night. I don’t remember peeing.”
How is he supposed to stop? If he woke up, he wouldn’t do it. But he doesn’t wake up. No one is in charge.
“Did you dream you were peeing?”
“No.”
“Are you sure? Sometimes you do. Christmas is coming. Do you think it’s nice to wet the bed? Or naughty?”
Fear of the naughty list makes him dizzy.
Jessica dances in.
“Tra-la-la!” She twirls happily. “I’m four and I don’t wet the bed.”
“That’s right. You’re a big girl.”
“Tra-la-la!” she sings, skipping in a circle.
The whole world presses on Anthony. He has nowhere to hide.
2.
His mother reads a bedtime story. It’s about an elf sent to watch children and report back to Santa. As she leans to turn out the light, she gasps in exaggerated surprise.
“Oh, Anthony, look over there!”
She points to the bookcase that faces the foot of his bed. Perched on the top shelf is the elf from the book. The elf is six inches tall, with jaunty little smile, under a cheery dunce cap. Knees up, hands folded in front of his ankles—it’s a pose self-consciously meek. Cheeks rosy.
“Whoa!”
Anthony starts to get out of bed.
“No, stay. You’re tucked in. But you get to name him. That’s what the book said.”
Anthony answers immediately, the jauntiest word that pops into his head: “Scurvy!”
His mother laughs and covers her mouth.
“Hello, Scurvy, meet Anthony, and I’m Mom.”
She kisses Anthony’s forehead.
“Remember what else the book said. You can’t do what?”
“Touch him.”
“That’s right. His magic leaves if you touch him. You let him stay up there. So he can see if you’re naughty or nice.”
The elf’s eyes look off to the side, as if he is mischievously pretending he is not here expressly to watch Anthony. She turns off the light.
Anthony stares, waits for his vision to adjust to the shadows layering the elf on the shelf. The elf doesn’t do anything. At least not while Anthony stares. But when—experimentally—he pretends to sleep, then opens his eyes very suddenly—the elf has shifted. Slightly.
“Please tell Santa I’m good,” he whispers.
The elf is looking directly at him. Anthony falls asleep stared at.
3.
In the morning, his bed is dry. It’s a thrill.
He realizes why right away. He wets the bed when no one is looking—when he himself isn’t even looking, because he’s asleep. And last night, Scurvy watched. Scurvy helped him be good.
After lunch, he decides he better get his wish list in while the getting’s good, before Scurvy has a reason to reject him. He kneels as if praying. He tells the elf the things he wants. The Lego sets, videogames, Playmobil, Nerf crossbow, a red kickball.
“And I swear, Scurvy, I won’t wet the bed ever again.”
He knows the promise is a lie though. The wetting is out of his control. What happens the day after Christmas, when the elf is back at the North Pole? He worries Scurvy is magic enough to see the lie. Then he worries that it sounds like he’s only being good to get toys. So he rewords his promise, more vaguely, easier to keep: “And I’ll try to be good even after Christmas, no matter what.”
He feels desperate to be believed.
With a cheery wave of one thin felt arm, the elf says, “Good. But my name is not Scurvy! My true name is Yazathoth.”
4.
Anthony falls asleep looking at Yazathoth. Yazathoth looking at him.
In the morning, Anthony wakes up dry.
The elf is gone, though. Anthony jumps out of bed in a panic.
It’s only a minute later that he finds Yazathoth in Jessica’s room. Atop the cat clock. Knees up, eyes to one side, as if to indicate Who, me? Jessica is sitting straight up in bed, eyes fixed on the elf. Whimpering.
What has Yazathoth said to her? Maybe he told her she’s on the naughty list. For a second, Anthony even hopes so. Everyone always thinks she’s so good.
“Jessica? Earth to Jessica.”
Her lip quivers as she says, “How did he get in here?”
“He moves around while we’re asleep.”
But now he worries that if she is on the wrong list, he better not be seen with her. He’s only had two dry nights—that is thin ice.
He says, “You better watch out.”
5.
Jessica stays shaken all day. Anthony finds it disturbing because usually she skips and twirls around the house. Happy for no reason. Happy as if happiness is born in her. He remembers, in fragments, when she was a baby, how happy Mommy became too. There was even a fight because Mommy got too happy—Daddy got angry about that. Shaking a bottle of pills. Mommy saying no, she was so happy about Jessica, she didn’t need them this time.
Jessica, listless, stares into space. Anthony begins to see how he can use that to his advantage.
“Mom? Scurvy makes Jessica sad.” Anthony knows not to reveal the elf’s true name. “Maybe you can move him back to my room.”
“No one can touch him. But I bet he goes back on his own, tonight.”
This is a crisis. Anthony needs the elf looking at him as he falls asleep. So he won’t pee. If he pees, and then the elf comes in…
He says, “We don’t have to touch him. We can move him using the barbecue tongs.”
Mom laughs.
“Tongs! Scurvy wouldn’t like to be grabbed with tongs.”
Later, he convinces Jessica.
“All you have to do is push a chair next to the dresser,” he tells her. She can climb up, and then from the top of the dresser, she can stretch an arm out, with the tongs, to nab the elf from the clock.
Anthony watches from the hallway, through the cracked door, so Yazathoth won’t see he is involved.
Jessica leans out from the dresser top. Way out. Nothing to hold onto. She looks terrified of falling.
And she looks terrified as she falls.
She lands on the chair at a hard weird angle. There is a snap. The sound of the chair breaking, Anthony thinks. She flops off the seat slowly, flat onto her face on the carpet.
A quiet ensues.
Good. She has kept her cool. His panic subsides. Although if the chair is damaged—
All at once, she begins to screech. A wild sound. An insane shriek of pain.
He wants to run in and tell her to shut up. She’ll ruin everything. Just shut up! But then Yazathoth, still atop the clock, would see him. So he runs back to his own room and slams the door. Quickly he spreads out his toys, to make it look like he’s been playing in here all along. To make it look like nothing is his fault.
He hears his mother charge down the hall. Cry out in alarm. He hears his sister’s hysterics carried off, to the garage.
From the window, Anthony watches his mother’s car rip out of the driveway, tear down the street.
Suddenly he is alone. He has never been left home alone before.
He didn’t do anything to deserve this, as far as anyone knows. But here he is anyway.
Then he brightens. No one knows he did anything wrong. In fact, for once, Mom and Dad will be mad at Jessica, for breaking the chair.
He stays in his room with the door closed and plays in order to hold back the fright that being alone puts him in terrible danger. Killers could break in. He plays and plays. He is going to get away with it.
Unless she talks.
6.
Dad comes home and makes dinner.
“Did you see your sister get hurt?”
“No. But I heard her break the chair, even through my closed door.”
When Jessica gets home, she looks exhausted. Her right arm is in a cast. Mom cooks special Chef-Boy-Ar-Dee, but Jess only eats two bites and wants to go to bed.
Both parents tuck her in while Anthony watches TV.
He worries that she is talking. That his parents will return from her room knowing all.
Then he realizes that Yazathoth is in there too, listening.
He watches TV burning with shame and dread. His life is ruined. If they all know the truth. He wants them to think he is good. He wants them to love him. They won’t.
When his parents are back in the kitchen he overhears the words “compound fracture.” They say she is very brave. That annoys him. She is only brave if she didn’t talk. Otherwise she is a klutz. She deserves blame. He knows the eyes of a fly are “compound eyes,” he wonders how that is related. His parents come sit on the couch.
“You said you were in your room when your sister fell?”
He nods. “With the door closed.”
“Do you know why she was climbing?”
He is daring: “You’d have to ask her.”
“Do you know why she had the tongs?”
“I guess she stole my idea to move Scurvy. She’s afraid of him. I guess she’s on the wrong list. You always think she’s not, but maybe she is, secretly.”
His mother frowns.
“Okay. Time for bed, Ant.”
The elf is not on his shelf. So he falls asleep distressed.
He has a nightmare. He is lost in a maze. Except instead of passageways, he keeps turning through a wide-open field. Too wide open. It has hardly any features because it is covered in snow, and at every turn the ends of the world fall back farther and farther from him, until there is nothing close by. At last he sees a pine tree, twinkling with lights, and tries to head for it—but it too only stretches farther away. When he sees a gingerbread house, then an enormous candy cane jutting from the snow, he tries to get to them—but everything he might grab onto to anchor himself recedes from his hand. Anything that might ground him becomes remote and untouchable. He leaves no footprints. He turns again and again in the snow, in mounting anguish. He is a shrinking pin-dot in an expanding silvery field. He turns again, again, and—this time, into a brick wall.
The wall is solid. Right there. He puts his hands on it. Feels its rough texture. Its warmth. Finally he is safe! He feels all the tension run out of him. He presses his cheek to the wall, and he lets his fear go, he feels so relieved now. It is an ecstatic release, it makes him once again the right size, makes the too-gigantic world drain down to the size it is supposed to be—and he wakes up, partway. He becomes lucid enough to realize he is in bed, on his stomach, and pissing. But it feels so good, he doesn’t stop. He must be almost done. A little more won’t matter. He will finish the piss. And he does. But it is not a little more, it is glorious how much is running out of him, flooding his pajamas, puddling the sheets—he is a Niagara of piss, the sound of it a hum in the mattress, he lies serene in a warm lake, and when he’s done he rolls over in it, onto his back, with a squelch, a splash—already serenity recedes, he suffers the hum of guilt, the prick of shame, the onset of total humiliation that he is not a big boy and worse, much worse, it is all his fault. It always is.
He sees Yazathoth. Back on the bookcase.
Tears spring to Anthony’s eyes.
“I’m sorry.”
The elf looks to the side.
“It’s okay,” Yazathoth says. “You don’t have to worry what I think.”
“But I did a bad thing.”
“Santa will never know. I can lie.”
“You’d do that for me?”
“I can. But look at those sheets. Mom will know. Then what happens?”
“She’ll be mad.”
“Worse than mad.”
“What’s worse?”
“You know.”
He does know. He does. He remembers when he was little. Real little. Before he was in a big-boy bed. When he slept in the crib. He remembers seeing his mother through the wooden bars. In the night. Remembers her sitting motionless, like a pile in a chair in the corner of the room. Staring at him. He remembers her eyes. Remembers them as wide, dark pools of utter indifference. In a cold face. He remembers that her stare had him too frightened to cry, but those eyes kept boring into him, on and on, until he had to cry. And he remembers how motionless she remained while he did, how with infinitely uncaring eyes she continued to stare across the wide distance of the nighttime room, through the dark that danced like gray needles, like more and more gray dancing between them.
She isn’t like that anymore. But she could go back. If he gives her a reason.
“Think about what else is even worse,” Yazathoth says.
He tries to. At first he has only a churn in his head, like the washing machine when the lid is lifted just enough so that the spinner doesn’t stop and you see the sheets getting mashed around by the big spindle in the center of the foaming water.
Then—he sees what is worse than peeing. If Jessica tells. Mommy loves Jessica. If Mommy blames him for Jessica’s fall...
“Did Jessica talk?”
“You know it’s only a matter of time. And then I can’t keep it secret. Everyone will know.”
The possibility turns Anthony to jelly. Everyone looking at him and knowing. He feels like nothing. A void. He might cry.
“You know what has to be done,” Yazathoth says. “But in the morning? I’ll make sure I’m in her room. It will look like I did it.”
Anthony hardly believes anyone could be so kind to him.
“You’d do that for me?”
“I’m magic. They can’t punish me. In two weeks, I’ll be safe at the North Pole. You’ll get all the presents you asked for. And they won’t even notice tonight’s pee, because they’ll be so happy I didn’t kill you too.”
Anthony acts quickly, while the offer is still open. It feels too good to be true. He creeps to the kitchen. His soaked pajamas cling to his legs, his tummy, his weenis. He gets a knife from the block of big knives. He worries Jessica will wake up.
Silently he stabs her. Repeatedly. He cuts her throat to ribbons. She does wake up, but only for a second. Her sheets end up as wet as his. Wetter. He feels good about that. He feels nervous, he feels unreal, he feels small, but that her sheets are so wet is a victory. He leaves the knife sticking out of her chest.
He gets back in bed and looks up at the elf on the shelf. He imagines how in the morning, that elf will be found smiling atop Jessica. How those thin felt arms will be wrapped around the knife handle, with those smiling eyes looking aside, and it will seem to everyone that the elf is the naughty one.
“Thank you, Yazathoth,” Anthony says. “For being so nice.”
The end