Chapter 5 #2
“Got it.” I leaned over and picked up a charm, slinging it around my neck. “All right. Is this where we leave an ominous note to explain where we went, to be found in a year when someone finally comes looking for us?”
“You really think your mom would wait that long?” asked Sam. “She’d be here in three days when you stopped sending her funny things you found on the internet.”
“Hey, my meme game is strong!” I protested.
He rolled his eyes, tail tightening around my ankle. “Sure, sweetie.”
“No,” said Alice. “I have a better idea. Thomas, go call Cynthia to keep an eye on the house, while I let Mary know what’s going on.”
He nodded and ducked out of the room, heading for the kitchen. Alice took a step back from the table, clapping her hands together in front of her as she did. Only once: once was all she needed. “Mary, I need you,” she said.
I scooted my chair closer to Sam’s, leaning over to rest my head on his shoulder and watch the show.
Mary Dunlavy has been our family babysitter since my grandmother was born.
Literally—she took care of Alice before she was out of diapers.
You know how people sometimes ask children “Where did you get that mouth” when they smart off or talk back?
Well, no one in our family has ever needed to be asked.
We got that mouth from our babysitter, who’s managed to keep three full generations of us alive to adulthood, and is now hard at work on a fourth.
Most babysitters get to retire long before they hit the great-grandchildren of their original charges. Not Mary. Mary never gets to retire, because Mary’s dead. Her retirement would involve a trip into the great beyond, and that’s not the sort of thing she’s particularly interested in doing.
With four children under ten currently in the family, Mary isn’t always available when she’s wanted.
Alice waited several seconds, then sighed and tilted her face toward the ceiling.
“Mary, come on. This isn’t something frivolous.
Tell the anima mundi this is a case of genuine need.
The Johrlac have snatched Arthur and Sarah, and we need to go and get them back before something really awful happens. ”
“What the hell are you people doing over here?” asked Mary, from behind me. She sounded harried.
I twisted to look over my shoulder, offering her a sideways smile. “Hey, Mary.”
“Hey, yourself,” she replied, walking forward.
Sam watched her with more wariness than I did, which made sense.
He and Mary didn’t meet under the best of circumstances, what with me being in hiding and her being his only source of information about what was going on.
He liked her well enough now that she wasn’t gatekeeping the details of my life from him.
When she reached the edge of the table, she kept going, walking straight through the wood. There had to be some advantages to being dead, or why would anybody with any common sense even bother?
Besides, sometimes Mary had to do the impressive ghost shit to remind us all that she was the adult in the room, no matter what it looked like.
She died when she was sixteen, and so sixteen she’s stayed, for decades now, and sixteen she’ll keep staying until the day she decides she’s done keeping us alive and moves on to her eventual reward.
Whatever that looks like, I hope it’s awesome. She’s earned it.
She was wearing leggings and a thigh-length gray sweater, belted at the waist like some sort of a dress.
It was perfectly reasonable attire for a modern babysitter, and we had almost certainly called her away from one of her younger charges.
I felt a brief pang of jealousy at the thought.
I’d been the youngest in the family for years, while the other members of my generation grew up enough to start considering kids.
As a caretaker ghost, Mary naturally attached herself to the youngest person she felt any responsibility toward, which meant she’d been my near-constant companion for most of my life, always available if I needed someone to talk to or was having a bad day.
And with the birth of the new generation, that had changed.
I was expected to be a real grownup now, whether I wanted to or not.
I guess most people hit that transition a lot earlier in life, but I was still getting used to it, and I didn’t like it much.
In addition to her babysitter-casual attire, Mary had long, bone-white hair, the only real physical indicator of her phantom state; her eyes used to look like a hundred miles of empty highway, which isn’t actually a color, but again, ghost. She had a lot more leeway in the “What color are my eyes” category than most people get.
Since she’d transferred her employment from the crossroads to the anima mundi, they had turned blue again, the way they’d been when she was alive.
It hadn’t unbleached her hair, but it made her look a lot less faded.
“Getting ready for a cross-dimensional retrieval mission,” said Alice.
“Hey, Mary. Can you let everyone else know that we’re going to Johrlar for a little while?
Or maybe a long while, I don’t exactly know how long this is going to take.
But assume we’re out of calling range until I call and tell you otherwise. ”
“Slow down, Alice,” said Mary. “Why are you going to the cuckoo’s nest?”
“I just told you, they snatched Sarah and Arthur.”
Mary froze. “What?” she asked, after a long, terrible pause.
“Johrlac, dressed in the standard uniforms they use on Johrlar, came here and stole two of my grandchildren,” said Alice, with poisonous patience.
“We think they want to delete Arthur because of the way he was created, and make Sarah stand trial for creating him. We need to get them back before anything permanent happens. So we don’t have time to stand around here and make sure everything’s filed and signed off on. We need to go.”
“And you’re taking Annie?”
“Chances that we could leave her without tranquilizing her are pretty slim, and having two pyrokinetics with us is never a bad thing. She wants to come, she’s coming.”
“And so is Sam,” said Sam, resolutely. “I am not sitting out another field trip that could take my fiancée away for the better part of a year.”
“No one’s asking you to, dear,” said Alice. “Mary, can you please let the rest of the family know? I could call them, but then I’d have to explain what’s happening over and over again. At least four times, if I’m counting locations correctly.”
“Any idea how long you’ll be gone?”
“Time is always strange across dimensions,” said Alice, apologetically. “We’ll be back as soon as we can, but it may take a while.”
Thomas came back into the room. “Cynthia is fine to check on the house until we get back, and has requested we not get trapped in any bottle dimensions or other inconveniences,” he said.
“She says she’s just getting used to us being here full-time, and would rather not adjust herself again.
She’s also agreed to feed Greg until we return.
She’ll keep him supplied in sheep, and bill us when we get back.
I got the distinct feeling that if we stay gone longer than she feels is appropriate, she’ll start buying fancy sheep to run up the bill. ”
“Come back quick to avoid bankruptcy, got it,” said Alice. “Mary?”
“Hello, Mary,” said Thomas, moving to stand next to his wife.
“Hey, Tommy,” said Mary, with a quick smile. They’d been friends since he first came to Buckley, and they were always glad to see each other.
“Yes, Alice, I’ll tell the rest of the family you’ve fucked off to another dimension again,” she said, returning her attention to my grandmother.
“At least this time you’re doing it together, and I don’t have to worry about you running off to find him.
Don’t get separated. Please. I don’t think my nerves can take that again.
You ever seen a ghost have a nervous breakdown?
It’s not pretty. None of us will enjoy it. ”
“We’ll be back, Mary,” I said solemnly. “I give you my word.”
“I’ll hold you to that,” she said, and disappeared, throwing herself back into the ghost version of the world that existed outside the lands of the living. From there, she’d be able to quickly transport herself back to whichever of the children she was currently supposed to be taking care of.
If she could transport living people the way she moved herself around, we’d all be much happier. But alas, everyone has their limitations.
Thomas started for the door on the other side of the room, gesturing for the rest of us to follow.
Sam untwined his tail from around my ankle and rose, offering me his hand.
I took it and let him pull me after him, and Alice came after me, a small procession leaving the empty dining room behind as an almost-funereal silence fell over everything.
Thomas led us all down to the basement, where he bent and rolled back the rug that had been covering most of the floor.
Below it was a complicated circle, the exterior made up of crisp geometric symbols.
They hurt my eyes if I looked at them too hard, and I could almost understand what they said.
I had seen some of those sigils in my fire, dancing inside the structure of the flames.
“Everyone inside the circle,” he said. “I’m driving this one.” He looked to Alice. “I know you still have a few crossing charms tattooed on you, and I’m ordering you to use them if you have to. Just don’t take any unnecessary risks.”
Alice rolled her eyes. “Yes, dear. At least you didn’t tell me to be careful.”
“Believe me, I would, if I thought you would listen.” He glanced to Sam, accurately identifying him as the one sympathetic person in this basement. “I swear those words cause her to become temporarily hard of hearing.”
“Annie, too,” said Sam.
Thomas sighed and opened the book he’d been carrying around since the dining room. He flipped past the page with the costume designs on it—convenient but not currently useful—and stopped, clearing his throat. Then he began to read aloud.
It began as a sequence of numbers, complex but not incomprehensible.
Then it started getting strange. Letters and functions crept in, rapidly escalating to a point where he might as well have been speaking gibberish.
Smooth, fast, fluent gibberish, made eldritch and fascinating by his British accent, but not a damn thing I could understand.
The symbols around the edges of the circle lit up one by one, glowing an unnerving blue-white shade that got brighter and brighter as he continued.
Sam shifted closer to me inside the circle, wrapping his tail around my waist this time, and I leaned into him, grateful for the tether.
At least if we were sucked through some incomprehensible portal into the abyss, we wouldn’t be separated in the process.
Alice stepped up behind me, putting one hand on my shoulder and another hand on Thomas’s shoulder, forming a line between the four of us.
And then, with a snapping sound, the entire circle lit up, bright as a supernova, so bright it made my eyes ache and water, and the basement was gone, and we were somewhere else.