Authors: Tim Pratt
I decided to prolong the good feeling with a glass of wine and a hot bath. The bathroom upstairs had the kind of big old-fashioned tub that was palatial for one person and would have fit two pretty easily if they didn’t mind being cozy. “House, I’m going to take a bath. Don’t let any bad guys in.”
The house didn’t answer, which was fine. I still wondered if the ancestral manse was somehow self-aware (like a servant) or just reacting to my wishes (like a machine with controls so responsive I could operate it with my mind). However it worked, it
worked
.
I got a big fluffy towel and my robe and went into the bathroom. There was water splashed on the floor around the toilet, and the sword cane was leaning against the tub. I grunted. Had Hannah come up through the commode? If so…ew. More convenient than coming up through the well in the yard, I supposed, but still…ew. It was a shame she hadn’t stopped to say hello, or least me know how things went with her mom. But then again, if she’d arrived in the recent past she might have peeked over the railing and seen Trey and me, deep in our contemplation of one another’s affections, and decided not to bother us.
I picked up the cane and slid a bit of the blade out. Just as sharp and shiny as ever. I wondered if Hannah had renounced her claim, if the magic belonged to me again, and gently pressed the ball of my thumb against the blade. No blood, and no cut, and if I’d had any physical complaints I suspected they would have been cured promptly.
I felt better having the blade in my possession again. With my broom, my iron fist, and my healing sword, I felt pretty much invincible, ready to take on anything the Firstborn or the world in general could throw at me. Plus, I was going to get laid in a couple of days, and the prospect of sex with someone new and cute is always one that makes me cheerful. I was dancing on top of the world.
Of course the problem with dancing on top of anything is, you’re pretty much certain to fall off at some point.
I drew the bath, making it as hot as I could stand, filling the room with billows of steam, then slid into the water with one of the many books Grace had crammed on his shelves—a paperback mystery by John Dickson Carr set in a big old weird house full of secrets.
I was eating it up.
After a while I happened to glance at the fogged-up mirror above the sink and saw, written in clumsy finger letters that showed up in the steam, the words “THANK YOU MOTHER OK.” Hannah had left me a message after all. That made me smile. I wished I had a way to communicate with her, as she was my favorite half sibling by a score of infinity against zero. Unfortunately I couldn’t send a letter care of “black caves beneath the sea, not entirely in this dimension,” and she probably didn’t have an email address (unless she kept an iPad in a plastic bag under the waves). But she was half-god, so there could be some magical way to get a message to her. Prayer? Or did she only hear the prayers of, I don’t know, fish and cetaceans? Maybe yelling into the well would work. Crouching in the dirt and shouting into a damp hole in the ground seemed like behavior a mentally unwell person might exhibit, but my property was remote enough that no one was likely to notice me doing it. If I needed Hannah, I’d give it a try.
After I was in the tub so long the water turned cool, I got out and padded downstairs, ate some leftover pasta salad Trey had made for us, and then went to work in the studio. I had a couple of small canvases more or less done, and another in progress. The first two were elaborations on a couple of the sketches I’d made: the lawyer with the head of a lion and the man with the head like a sun.
I had vague plans to turn at least a couple of the other sketches into paintings at some point, maybe the fish-headed diver and the jackal-headed Statue of Liberty, but in the past week I’d gotten distracted. I’d started painting without doing any preparatory work first, even though past experience told me that was a recipe for unbalanced and cluttered compositions. I figured, screw it—I had enough money just then to waste a canvas or two on experimentation.
I was painting a house, and it was a weird sort of house: almost photorealistic in the center, an old wooden place with a busted-up porch and a front door hanging askew. But as the painting approached the edges of the canvas on either side, the straight lines softened into curves and the angles twisted slightly out of true, like the sides of the house were being viewed through a distorting lens—as if the house were melting, or turning into mist, or transforming into some organic form.
In the theater of my mind, which has always been a place where I could conjure wonders, I could see walls upon walls holding painting after painting, variations on this same theme. A melting house; a disappearing house; a sublimating house; a shifting house; a witch’s house; a house that isn’t a house at all, but a dream of a house, only someone lives inside it anyway; a beast pretending to be a house; a house of secret spirits; a house where all the windows only open onto night.
Summoning up the images in my imagination was easy. Getting them out of my head and onto the canvas was harder. The hardest thing.
Sometimes, I thought, the impossible thing.
Often, I thought, the only worthwhile thing.
I spent the rest of that night doing my best to do it. You can have your magic glasses revealing the night sky, your magic bells ringing in the truth, your magic brooms sweeping away whatever frightens you. I’ll admit they’re miracles. But taking something that exists only in the mind and turning it into something other people can see, can touch, can take in and be changed by—that’s always felt like the greatest possible magic to me.
The next day, as I kicked back on the couch with my laptop and uploaded a bunch of photos, someone knocked at the door. I put down the computer, slipped on the wristwatch, picked up the broom, and went to the door.
I peered through the window set high up in the door, and saw that nobody was there. The knock came again, and I realized the house was making the noise, somehow. “What the actual fuck?”
Once again, the house didn’t answer.
If someone knocks, I guess you open the door, so I did…and saw a strange car trundling up the driveway toward my house, a dark sedan that was way too shiny for such a dusty track. Was it the same car I’d seen disappearing down the driveway in the night two weeks before? I’d told the house to warn me if that car came back—did that explain the knock? I couldn’t be sure. Oh, for a magical
talking
house.
“I appreciate the early-warning system,” I said anyway. “Keep that up, would you? It’s nice to know when someone’s coming.”
I stepped onto the porch, pulled the door shut behind me, and waited, the broom in my hand.
A thin man unfolded himself from the car, and it was like watching a stork crossed with an extension ladder—he was easily over six feet tall, wearing skinny jeans, thrift-store flannel, and chunky black glasses, but with the kind of expensive haircut that’s meant to look like you just rolled out of bed. If he’d been younger he could have passed for a college radio station DJ, but I figured he was pushing forty at least. He raised a hand and gave me an easy smile as he walked toward the front steps. “Hello, miss. Is Mr. Grace at home?”
“Are you incapable of reading a ‘No Trespassing’ sign?” I called back. “There’s one posted at the start of the driveway. Maybe you should go back and read it again.”
He stopped approaching then, gave a little shrug, and said, “I tried to call first, to remind Mr. Grace about our appointment, but the number I had for the house didn’t ring.”
That was plausible. I hadn’t bothered getting the landline activated, any more than I’d hired a milkman or subscribed to
Buggy Whip Monthly
. “If you had called, what would you have said?”
“I’m sorry if I’m interrupting you.” He spoke in a stiff, “I’m offended” sort of voice. “My name is Ken Tenzil. I’m an appraiser—I deal in antiques, mostly, but I do all right with art, and I know enough about books and stamps and coins to know if you should bother to hire someone better qualified than I am to look things over. Archibald Grace made arrangements with me to assess his collection today.” He shrugged. “Here I am. If you’ll just let him know—”
I wished I had the bell of truth with me—
I should put it on a string and hang it around my neck
—but I didn’t
think
this was the Firstborn in disguise. Hard to be sure, though. “When were these arrangements made?”
He waved his hand like an insect was buzzing around him. “Many months ago. My schedule is quite full. I work out of Providence, Rhode Island, but I knew I’d be in the area for an auction, so I agreed to come here while I was in the neighborhood.”
“Mr. Grace is unavailable.”
“I do wish he’d let me know in advance, it was a long drive—”
I decided to give the guy a break. “Mr. Grace passed away. I’m Rebekah, his daughter. I’m here taking care of things.”
His whole expression changed, from annoyed but smug to apologetic and sympathetic. “Oh, I’m so sorry for your loss, I had no idea. I didn’t know Mr. Grace, we only spoke on the phone, but he struck me as a fine man. Do forgive me for intruding in your time of grief.”
“No problem. Sorry you had to come all the way out here for nothing.”
“Ah, well, as to
that
—it doesn’t have to be for nothing. Mr. Grace already sent me a generous check to cover the appraisal fee. If you’d like me to come in, I can take a look and give you a sense of what you’ve inherited. He told me he had many interesting pieces, but of course it’s impossible to say how much they might be worth until I can look them over in person.”
Maybe the guy was legit, but I wasn’t about to invite a stranger into my house. “No, thanks. If you want to leave a card, I’ll put you on the list if I decide I want anything appraised.”
He sighed. “Miss Grace, I’m already
here
, and I’m unlikely to be in this part of the country again for a while. I have a hotel room booked for three days, which I hope will be sufficient to do a thorough inventory—”
“I’m not asking for the money back. Take it with my blessing. Consider it an inconvenience fee.”
Tenzil shifted from foot to foot. “Money is always welcome, but I’m more interested in the collection. Mr. Grace said he had antiquities from all over the world, and if half of what he suggested is true, I’d pay
you
for a chance to look over some of those items.”
I shook my head. “Listen. I have no idea who you are. I’ve never heard of you before this moment. You’re probably exactly who you claim to be—or, alternately, you’re not, and you’ve got a trunk full of body parts and a bone saw in your glove compartment. You’re not coming into my house. I get that you went to some trouble to come out here, and it’s not your fault—but it’s not my fault, either. People die and things get messed up. I’m sorry about that.”
He took a step closer, and there was something wolfish and hungry in his face—the look of a collector of rare old shit who sensed a vulnerable inheritance he might be able to snap up on the cheap?
Or something more sinister?
Having your sorcerer half sister try to murder your friend in your house tends to instill a certain amount of caution, but the line between caution and paranoid hypervigilance is a fuzzy one. Either way, I kept a grip on the broom, prepared to flip him ass-over-hipster-haircut if he came much closer.
I don’t know if he saw something scary in my expression or what, but he slumped, shrugged, and turned back to the car, climbing in and driving off without another word.
I went back inside and honestly didn’t think much more about the guy for the rest of the afternoon, which shows how finely tuned my sense of intuition isn’t.
Trey called that night before his family dinner to find out what time I wanted him over on Monday, and whether he should bring anything. (I said wine. Because wine.)
Of course, that was his excuse for calling, but I knew he just wanted to talk to me. He was smitten, and I liked it, because I was, too. We chitchatted for a while and I mentioned the appraiser who’d come to the door.
“Huh,” Trey said. “Mr. Grace usually arranged stuff like that through our office—he didn’t much like dealing with people directly, when he could avoid it. I can ask around, see if this guy is on the up-and-up.”
“If you want to, sure. He didn’t attempt to kill me, though, so I’m not that worried.”
“He tried to talk his way into the house, though, which is an approach we’ve seen before. Better safe. If he comes back…”
“If he comes back, I’ll sweep him off the mountain. But, sure, find out what you can.”
“What’s his name?”
“Let me see it, it was Ken…something. Tenzil?”
“That’s almost Matter-Eater Lad’s name,” Trey said.
I took a moment to try and parse that, then gave up. “I recognize all the words you just said, but they make no sense to me in the order presented.”
“Right, you don’t do comic books. Uh, Matter-Eater Lad, real name Tenzil Kem, is a member of the Legion of Super-Heroes. His power is…eating stuff. Any stuff.”
“As far as superpowers go, I don’t think I’d choose it over flight or super speed.”
“Oh, I don’t know. He can bite through anything. Castle walls, diamonds, Superman. Comes in handy sometimes.”
“‘Human Garbage Disposal’ is a snappier name than ‘Matter-Eater Lad.’ Or maybe ‘Man-Goat.’ See? I should write comics.”
“I’m sure you’d be great at anything you put your mind to.”
I chuckled. “You’re such a
lawyer
.”
“I thought that was more diplomat than lawyer—and more cute and flirty than either—but I’ll accept your ruling. Let me do some googling, maybe make a couple of calls, and I’ll let you know if I find out anything worrisome about Mr. Tenzil. And, more importantly, I’ll see you tomorrow night.”
The next morning I had an email from Trey. He said no one at his firm had recommended Ken Tenzil to Mr. Grace. Some digging around on the Internet turned up some information about the guy, though: Tenzil ran an antique business in Providence, and there were a few bad reviews suggesting he was unscrupulous in the expected ways: swooping in on the recently widowed, offering to help them “sort through the mess” of a dead husband’s stamp or book or coin collection, and paying way less than the stuff was worth to “take if off their hands.” Still, there was indeed a big auction in nearby Banner Elk that Tenzil could plausibly be in the area attending. Trey concluded by saying, “Seems like a garden-variety sleazy asshole. Either Mr. Grace hired him for some reason—like not knowing how to use the Internet—or Tenzil saw an obituary that mentioned Grace was a collector and he was just snooping around the house hoping for an easy score.”